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Though he used some of the latest stocks for the color portions of I’m Not There, Lachman found himself using older lighting techniques to give these sections the desired feel. “I started this shoot in black-and-white, and I got into a rhythm of lighting for that with Fresnel and harder light. You tend to edgelight black-and-white for separation and contrast. You have to use harder and more directional light. Also, I used a bit of light for fill because of the narrower latitude of Plus-X and Double-X negative.“It took some time for me to make the transition back to lighting for color. Our approach became emblematic of the way color was shot in the period we were trying capture. With today’s emulsions, like 5218, I might just use a bounce card or no fill card at all; I can just let light fall off and still retain information in the shadow areas. But I was getting used to bouncing a bit of fill light in, and that subtly gives those scenes a look that’s similar to a lot of what was being done in color cinematography in the late Sixties and early Seventies with slower and more contrasty stocks.”We first meet Woody, the 11-year-old African-American boy, as he is riding boxcars like a Depression-era vagabond, although his story is set in the 1950s. Actually, Woody sounds more like someone living through the Depression — such as folk singer Woody Guthrie — than a child of the Fifties.Woody is briefly cared for by a rural southern black family. “We wanted that story to have a traditional pastoral style,” says Lachman, who adds that Bound for Glory, Hal Ashby’s film about Guthrie (shot by Haskell Wexler, ASC), was a reference. This time he put Cooke S4 prime lenses on his Moviecam and used three Kodak emulsions: 5205 and Vision 200T 5274 and 500T 5279. “I wanted a warm look against the green vegetation, so I was looking for filters that would bring out the verdant quality of the landscape. I settled on Tiffen Straw in Half and Full gradations. That warmed up flesh tones and gave the yellows and greens the look I was going for.”Another home Woody is taken into looks like something out of a Look magazine spread. There, he relays his hopes and dreams to the family in their living room, a scene that gave Haynes and Lachman a chance to revisit the pristine domesticity of Far From Heaven. “We didn’t have to do much set dressing at all,” notes Lachman. “We shot the house almost as we found it. You can find locations outside of Montreal that look as though they haven’t been touched since the Fifties!”He enhanced the color-temperature difference between the cool exterior light and the warm interior practicals by lighting through the windows with 12K HMI Pars gelled with Lee HT063 Pale Blue. The exterior units were aimed through real tree branches outside the windows to create sharp patterns on the wall. The warm interior lighting was provided by 150- and 300-watt mushroom bulbs on dimmers.The story of Robbie (Ledger) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) tracks their relationship from their early-1960s courtship, when Robbie is a rising young actor, to the dissolution of their marriage a decade later, after he has become a movie star. The excitement of their early romance in the streets and cafés of New York is presented as something of an homage to the French New Wave, specifically Godard. The filmmakers made use of real locations and available light and used unmotivated camera movement and unbalanced framing to create a feeling of randomness that Godard explored in films such as Masculine-Feminine (shot by Willy Kurant, ASC, AFC). “Godard’s compositions in that film are not always motivated by the characters’ actions,” notes Lachman. “The compositions create a logic of their own, based on Godard’s ideology and storytelling.”Lachman shot Robbie’s story on Kodak’s older Vision stocks (5279 and 5274), mixing tungsten light, fluorescent light and daylight to create a naturalistic feel. He used Canon K4 lenses, still-photography lenses Canon adapted for cine use in the 1980s. “They have a special quality,” says the cinematographer, who recalls using them on Desperately Seeking Susan. “They aren’t as multi-coated as modern lenses and tend to flare in strong highlights, and the glass is colder in feeling.” This, he adds, gives the scenes a look reminiscent of many French color films from the ’60s, which often have a cooler visual tone.For a scene showing young Robbie and Claire in a New York diner, Lachman framed the two so that they didn’t always seem to be the subject of their own shots; he accomplished this effect by using a mirror behind the actors, deliberately disorienting the viewer and introducing shifts in screen direction that would create an awkwardness that reflected the characters’ emotions.The character of Jack (Bale), the popular musician who abandons the limelight to become the born-again preacher Rev. John, captures the Dylan who essentially did just that in the mid-1970s. Shot on Super 16mm in a documentary style, this storyline allowed Lachman to revisit some of the environments he saw while working on Say Amen, Somebody, George Nierenberg’s acclaimed documentary about the origins of gospel music. He shot Rev. John’s singing and preaching to a small congregation inside an assembly hall and lit the performance with the same type of makeshift theatrical lighting you would find in such a location — theatrical mushroom bulbs and Par 36 cans over the stage — mixed with overhead daylight fluorescents in the hall.Lachman filmed this sequence on Kodak Vision 500T 7279 using a vintage Aaton LTR with older Cooke 10.4-52mm and Angenieux 11.5-138mm zoom lenses. He composed for the 2.40:1 aspect ratio so the footage would match the Super 35mm portions of the film. “We created our new markings on the ground glass off our video tap,” he explains. “It was rudimentary, but it worked.”The DI was carried out at Cinebyte in Toronto with colorist Drake Conrad. “We had stock footage, color, black-and-white, Super 8, 16mm and 35mm, and in the end, due to time limitations, we had to merge it all with a DI,” says Lachman. “Cinebyte scanned the negative at 2K using a Northlight scanner without any kind of grain suppression — Todd and I wanted the grain to be an element of the texture of each story.“Cinebyte was very committed to the project and did great work,” he continues. “It took about two weeks to do the grading and two weeks to do the filmout, which was done on an Arrilaser. I was worried about the black-and-white getting a kind of tinted look in the prints, because everything was being printed onto color stock. But I was very pleased that the look didn’t shift in the original negative. It shifted very slightly in the dupe neg, but even there it was closer to black-and-white than I ever thought it could be.”The grade was carried out using Filmlight’s Baselight color-correction system. “Todd didn’t really want to use any Power Windows,” says Lachman. “There are a few, but we really didn’t use the DI to make many big changes to what was already on the negative.”The cinematographer notes that the unusual production was made possible by “the very creative, supportive and hard-working I.A. crew we had in Montreal, where we shot the film.” He mentions 2nd-unit cinematographer Sylvaine Dufaux, 1st AC Nico Marion and key grip Périard, and singles out DeBlau, a longtime collaborator who retired after wrapping the project. “I was honored to work with John one last time; he has always helped me create solutions out of problems, and has the rare ability to help everyone else as well. I always feel that the crew I work with is as important as I am in creating the images on the screen.”
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