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The cinematographer also used vintage Cooke Panchro lenses, whose aged, warmer coatings acted as a slight filter, improving the contrast in the blacks. “I find that Panchros have less of the flat field properties of newer optics, and that adds to the movie’s period feel,” he says. “They concentrate more resolution in the center of the image than the corners. When those lenses were originally designed, they were intended to be more like portrait-style still lenses, which created a more pleasing, contoured look for faces.”Black-and-white footage was processed at Alpha Cine Labs in Seattle, and Lachman credits the lab’s liaison, former color timer Bill Scott, as a great asset for his enthusiasm for the project and experience with black-and-white processing and printing. The cinematographer had the lab put random shots up on the analyzer, not for printing, but just to get a sense of where his exposure numbers were falling. The color negative for I’m Not There was processed at Deluxe Toronto, where Lachman had developed a relationship during production of The Virgin Suicides. He received reports of the timing lights for both color and black-and-white work, but an accurate assessment of the latter was especially critical, he notes. “You have to be right on with your exposure in [black-and-white] because under- or overexposure can add significant grain,” says Lachman. “I’m used to overexposing color negative for color saturation, but I couldn’t do that in the black-and-white sections.”Lachman and his gaffer, John DeBlau, lit locations such as Jude’s hotel room by augmenting practicals with small instruments. “It was very much ‘black-and-white lighting,’” says Lachman. “We isolated people in the light more than I would have if I were shooting color.” Club Silver, the mod London nightclub where Jude escapes the stresses of touring at a chic and trendy party, presented one of the production’s most significant lighting challenges. This sequence was inspired by a highly influential Volkswagen print campaign of the early 1960s. Lachman recalls, “That campaign was minimalistic — just the car against a white seamless background lit from one side. A lot of other ad campaigns picked that up at the time. Fashion and commercial photographers like Jerry Schatzberg were also lighting Dylan that way, using a single source against lit or unlit backgrounds to create a dramatic, stylized image.”Haynes imagined a large, white-on-white space in the shape of a cube. “I wanted Club Silver to reflect a visual sensibility that I find unique to the Sixties — the stark minimalism of these clean, austere, backlit screens,” says the director. “Then there are the synchronized rear-projection screens interacting as subtext to the scene itself. These are a virtual homage to Schatzberg’s iconographic portraits of Dylan and the projections used in Warhol’s piece Exploding Plastic Inevitable.”The minimalist set was built in a 40'x40' area inside a Montreal industrial warehouse. For scenes that did not require the projection of imagery onto the walls, the crew built set walls with a Spandex-type material obtained from a clothing factory; sheets of this material could be attached to thin-tube, lightweight frames and then connected to create a seamless-looking background, even in the corners. “We wanted to light the scene from behind these Spandex walls to make them look like one continuous surface, but the problem was that the material wasn’t opaque enough to obscure our lighting sources,” says Lachman. To solve this dilemma, key grip Michel Périard obtained sheets of a canvas-like material that’s normally used to line gardens, driveways and swimming pools. “We placed this material in 40-by-60-foot frames positioned about 10 feet behind the Spandex walls,” Lachman continues. “We could then illuminate these frames with dimmer-controlled Nine-lights and Cyc strips placed above and below each wall. The reflected light from our canvas frames would bounce back out through the Spandex walls to illuminate the club setting.” Lachman wanted to have some control over this light, so he would only illuminate two “walls” at any given time — the wall behind the characters and one to the side.Visual-effects supervisor Louis Morin put together the rear-screen portions of the scene. Morin offers, “I got in touch with Luc Desilets, who has worked for Cirque du Soleil and helped with the screen design of Love, the Las Vegas Beatles show.” Desilets set up similar screens designed for rear-screen projection and lined up three Christie Roadster DS+25 projectors. Dataton Watchout software was used to “stitch” the three images together to prevent gaps and seams between them.“The most stunning effect to me,” says Morin, “was when we used one single image projected by the three projectors.” This shot shows a tarantula moving from one side of the background to the other — a nod to Dylan’s book of poetry, Tarantula. “We projected it as a single image the size of the three screens combined,” adds Morin. “In order to get the 4:1 aspect ratio of the triptych of screens, we shot the macro photography of the spider on Double X negative in full-gate 35mm, scanned it as a 4K DPX file and then split that into three separate files, later using Watchout software to stitch them together. ”As with all of the Jude sequences, Lachman shot Club Silver on Double-X negative. He let the white walls go about a stop and a half over, which was enough illumination to make them glow white while still maintaining some texture. He used Cooke Panchros for most of these shots, but switched to Zeiss Superspeeds for the rear-projection shots when the Panchros’ maximum aperture of T2.3 wasn’t wide enough. “I didn’t want to push the Double-X,” Lachman says. “It’s already grainy enough, but I needed the extra stop with the high-speed lenses at T1.3 for the film to read the projection.”Perhaps the most abstract iteration of the Dylan story in I’m Not There concerns the famous outlaw Billy the Kid (Gere). This storyline, shot in color on Kodak Vision2 500T 5218 and 250D 5205, shows the outlaw living in quiet exile in a small rural town. Soon he discovers that a corrupt politician is intent on exploiting the locals, and in his attempt to confront this injustice, Billy jeopardizes his carefully guarded reclusion.The visual inspiration for this story came from the aforementioned revisionist, anti-hero Westerns of the late Sixties and early Seventies: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (in which Dylan played a supporting role). “Many of the cinematographers and directors working at that time were well-versed in commercial techniques,” says Lachman. “They used longer lenses and made creative use of flares, backlighting and foregrounds with chocolate or coral filters.”For this section of the film, he used his Moviecam in conjunction with several-decades-old zooms from Angenieux and Cooke, as well as 300mm and 600mm Canon lenses. “Those cinematographers also experimented with a lot of zooms in their shots, and we really wanted to go for that visual grammar,” Lachman adds.
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