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by Jay Holben
Unit photography by Jürgen Olczyk
Photos courtesy of Paramount Pictures
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“He was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages,” writes German novelist Patrick Süskind of his main character, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, in the 1985 novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. In the 18th-century tale, Grenouille is born to his fishmonger mother amid the stinking fish heads and food scraps in one of Paris’ filthiest marketplaces. Mysteriously, this remarkable circumstance leaves him with no personal scent of his own, but an extraordinary sense of smell. As a child, he is enraptured with all the smells of the world and possesses an infallible memory for aromas. The eerily silent, observant Grenouille is soon enslaved in the noxious world of a tannery on the outskirts of Paris. After years of backbreaking labor, he accompanies the tanner on a trip into Paris, where he discovers a world of new fragrances and the astonishing concept of captured aroma: perfume. As he wanders the city streets, he discovers a scent so wonderful he is compelled to follow it to its source — with deadly results. Soon, the challenge of re-creating that scent becomes his life’s work. Süskind’s novel became a smash success, and over the years, attempts to bring it to the silver screen involved Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese and Ridley Scott. Finally, producer Bernd Eichinger offered the project to German director/writer Tom Tykwer, who, with co-writer Andrew Birkin, spent another two years adapting the seemingly unadaptable book to the screen. Once a script was in place, Tykwer turned to cinematographer Frank Griebe, a longtime friend who had shot all of the director’s films. “I’d read the novel Perfume about 15 years earlier, but I never imagined I’d be making a film about it,” says Griebe. The cinematographer recalls that his collaboration with Tykwer dates to 1985, when they made the short film Because. “I met Tom through my girlfriend, who was working at a cinema where Tom was a projectionist,” says Griebe. “Whenever I was there, Tom and I would always talk about movies. I had gone to film school in Berlin to be a camera assistant, but I did a little bit of everything before I met Tom. After about a year of constantly talking movies with me, Tom finally said we should make one together. He wanted to be a director, and I wanted to be a cinematographer so we went off to make a short, and then went on to make [the features] Deadly Maria; Winter Sleeper; Run, Lola, Run; The Princess and the Warrior and Heaven.” (Griebe earned Camerimage Golden Frog nominations for Run, Lola, Run and The Princess and the Warrior, and last year he and Tykwer were honored with the festival’s Golden Frog for Director-Cinematographer Duo.) One of the challenges of bringing Perfume to the screen was finding a way to convey the world of scents that obsesses Grenouille (played by Ben Whishaw). Reviving Smell-O-Vision was out of the question. “Tom’s approach was very simple,” says Griebe. “He said, ‘The book doesn’t smell, so the movie shouldn’t, either!’ We suggest it all visually in a very simple way: people see the fish market full of raw, bloody fish, and they know it stinks; they see a field of lavender and know it smells wonderful. We show Grenouille taking in smells by cupping his nose, and by doing close shots of his nose, and that’s it!” Finding locations to suggest 18th-century France was another challenge. “Paris is completely different today, so we had to start looking in places like Croatia,” says Griebe. “The price was right in Croatia, but the locations we were finding were extremely far from one another — each was at least two hours from the next, and we would have spent far too much time traveling. We then turned to Barcelona, which was more expensive but offered locations that were much closer together. We used Girona, which is just an hour from Barcelona, to shoot all the scruff of the city, and used Figueres, about 30 minutes from there, as our backlot for the tannery, the dungeon and anything else we needed. Of course, we shot the lavender fields in southern France, which is the only place in Europe to find such fields.” Defining the film’s look involved a great deal of visual research. “We started by watching period movies, including Sleepy Hollow, Vidocq, Revolution, Les Misérables, Amadeus, the original Oliver Twist, Barry Lyndon, From Hell, The Elephant Man, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Brotherhood of the Wolf,” recalls Griebe. “We found that every period movie that had been shot on location didn’t really get the dirt and grit of the city that we wanted for Perfume. We needed a filthy city to get the real feel for the smells of it. “We also went through the works of Caravaggio and Rembrandt, and I found a great German book called The Night, which features paintings of cities, rooms and all different locations in a very dark palette, done by all the ‘dark’ painters,” he continues. “There was another great book called Masters of Candlelight, which features works by Georges de la Tour, Godfried Schalcken and Joseph Wright. Both of those books formed a major influence on the look of our film.” Perfume begins with a very cool, monochromatic color palette, and as Grenouille discovers more scents, the palette warms and opens up. “When Grenouille goes to Paris for the first time and experiences all kinds of new smells, we start to add more powerful colors to represent those wonderful scents,” says the cinematographer. “These colors appear in the sets, costumes, props and lighting. We tried to keep it subtle; we never worked literally, suggesting that yellow represented this particular smell or red that smell. Our goal was a subtle visual enhancement of Grenouille’s discoveries and passion.” During prep, Tykwer and Griebe spent two weeks storyboarding the film in Barcelona. Tykwer made the drawings himself, and Griebe notes that Süskind’s novel provided some visual cues. “Many parts of the book are very descriptive about light, especially the key scene where Grenouille meets the young woman with the yellow plums whose scent intrigues him,” he says. “As it is described in the book, she only has a single candle to light her work, and he hides in the shadows behind her so he can get close and smell her.” Although the director’s drawings formed the basis for much of the film’s look, Griebe says Tykwer “is very trusting with me. We’ll talk about the look and what we both have in mind, but he lets me go from there, which is a very freeing way to work.” Tykwer and Griebe originally discussed shooting Perfume in the traditional Academy 1.33:1 aspect ratio, but they decided against it because of the difficulty of theatrical exhibition. “We felt 1.33:1 was perfect for many aspects of this story, but today you can’t release a 1.33 film in theaters,” notes Griebe. “You really just have two [exhibition] choices, 1.85 and 2.40. Although it might seem odd, our plan went from 1.33 to widescreen. If we couldn’t do 1.33, we had to go to the opposite extreme, an aspect ratio that would allow us to really show the epic journey Grenouille goes on. In my gut, 1.85 just wasn’t right for that.” For financial reasons — and because they knew they would finish the picture with a digital intermediate (DI) — the filmmakers decided to shoot 3-perf Super 35mm. Working without any filtration on the lens, Griebe shot Perfume on three Kodak Vision2 negatives: 500T 5218, 200T 5217 and 100T 5212. “I used 5218 for all of the night scenes, and the rest of the [film-stock choices] were determined by weather conditions,” he says. “I used 5212 when it was very sunny, especially for the scenes in the lavender fields, and I used 5217 whenever it was overcast.” The cinematographer rated the stocks at their recommended ISO.
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