American Cinematographer - March 2007 - 20

The Lives of Others

was

shot

mainly at practical locations in Berlin;
the production built one set, the interior
of Wiesler's high-rise apartment, in an
empty warehouse. "Berlin has changed
so much in the last 10 years that finding
the right locations took almost two
months," says Bogdanski. "At one point
we thought we might have to go to
Bucharest, but we really wanted to be
true to the story and shoot in Germany."
The most challenging location to
light was Dreyman's apartment, where
much of the film's action is set. "It
on

the third floor of

an

was

apartment build¬

ing on a narrow street in a very crowded
neighborhood," recalls Bogdanski.
"Because of the schedule, we had to
shoot

day for day, day for night, and
night for day there; it was a wintertime
shoot, so the days were short, and
Florian began each day with a thorough
rehearsal of the
the

scenes

scene

at hand. Some of

in the apartment are quite

long, and we had to be ready to re¬
daylight very quickly. We had to

create

treat the location like a

Top: The writer,
Georg Dreyman
(Sebastian Koch),

Henckel

Donnersmarck describes

von

comforts his

as "slightly stylized reality" was the
filmmakers' decision to shoot in the

girlfriend,

anamorphic format. "What makes film

Christa-Maria

(Martina
Gedeck), after
she has

a

particularly
upsetting
evening. Bottom:
In a nearby bar,
an incognito
Wiesler sets his

sights

on

Christa-Maria.

so

much better than video is that film

seems

red

on

slightly surreal
film is

a

for example,
reproduction of

-

chemical

red, and therefore has its

own

strange

beauty," says the director. "If you go
anamorphic, it's almost like taking that
effect to the power of 2.
"Super 35mm is a process I'd
never use, because there's something
almost karmically wrong with throwing
away such a large part of the negative,"
he continues. "I actually did my thesis
[at the University of Television and FilmMunich] about the differences between
Super 35 and CinemaScope, because it
left me no peace that James Cameron
always uses Super 35. I found out, of
course, that in purely mathematical
terms, Super 35 is a lot better than
'Scope, but that's the great thing -
video might at some point be mathe¬
matically much better than film, but film
will still be

more

beautiful. It's not about

objectivity, it's about art, and with
18 March 2007

anamorphic, you're really using the
magic of cinema."
The Lives of Others was Bogdanski's third anamorphic project, following
The Crusader and Angst, and he tapped
Vantage Film in Berlin for his camera
package: an Arri 535B and Flawk VSeries and C-Series anamorphic lenses.
"Going anamorphic on a low-budget
film

create concerns in terms of

can

lighting and camera movement," he
notes, "but we knew we weren't going
to do handheld or Steadicam work. This
was

a

one-camera

show, and every

setup, every shot, was quite concen¬
trated. In

Germany we call this a
Kammerspiel: very concentrated on the
acting."
Bogdanski does his own operat¬
ing, and he notes that 1st AC Nicolay
Gutscher
the

was an

camera

invaluable member of

team on The Lives of Others.

"Nicolay has worked with me on all my
anamorphic shows, and he's very good
at working nearly wide open [at T2.5],
When you need to work that way, you
have to have the best focus puller, and
we

did."

was

studio, which

quite an issue on the third floor. The

street was so narrow that Condors

weren't

possible, so it ended up being a
big scaffolding job. We rigged scaffold¬
ing from the floor above and placed
12Ks as far from the windows as possi¬
ble. It looked like a giant bird's nest was
hanging outside the windows! Inside, I
tried to make it look as natural as possi¬
ble, filling in with small Kino Flos and a
little Chimera, and with practicals for
night scenes.
"The loft space where Wiesler's
surveillance gear is set up was also
tricky, because it was on the sixth floor,
the top floor, of that building," he contin¬
ues. "We set up scaffolding from the
roof and filled in with two 18Ks set up
the roof of the building across the

on

street."

During the 35-day shoot,
Bogdanski was able to print select
scenes

from each location

monitor the effects of the

on

35mm to

pull-process¬
ing. "We didn't have the money to print
many dailies, but I needed to see how
the process changed [in each setting],"
he says. "Geyer did a very good job, so I
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