American Cinematographer - April 2008 - 12

Neuenfels discusses his intention with dolly grip Dieter Bähr (left). Berlin nightclub in 1939, the camera becomes quite active, and a palette of deep oranges, rich blacks and magenta suggest the dark, smoky decadence of the Weimar Republic. Sorowitsch is riding high, a master swindler indulging in the hedonism of the times. The threeminute sequence is one continuous shot up until the last few seconds, and the focus is on faces as seen from Sorowitsch’s perspective. The club scene was shot in a 40'x20' bar in Vienna. Neuenfels’ longtime gaffer, Rainer Stonus, pre-lit the location, rigging gelled 1K tungsten lights on the ceiling and placing others behind the extras. The lights were dimmed up and down throughout the sequence. “We started with a single of the entire scene,” recounts Neuenfels. “We did about 12 takes, then broke for lunch, planning to shoot coverage in the afternoon. We assumed there would be some rhythmical discrepancies or technical failures in what we’d shot, so we wanted to make sure [the editor] had options. But at lunch, Stefan and I looked at each other, and we both just knew we had it. So we shot a couple of detail shots and cutaways and one close-up after lunch and finished the scene in less than eight hours. It was a great start to the production!” In contrast to the warm tones of 1939 Berlin, Mauthausen is stripped of color and filled with harsh contrast. Color returns slightly at Sachsenhausen, where, as an inducement to work, the prisoners are given special privileges. In the Sachsenhausen camp, “I lit with open-faced 2Ks and used no diffusion for the first time in my life,” reports Neuenfels. “It was scary, but it fulfilled our need for harsh light, high contrast and brutal shadows. Aside from a couple of [Kino Flo] Flatheads used for general fill, I was able to dim almost every lamp.” The workshop windows were coated with different densities of CTB and CTS for color-balance purposes, and huge color-correction frames covered the open-air courtyard. A few HMIs were positioned outside the windows to extend daylight inside and give shape and structure to the overall environment. Neuenfels notes that achieving the right balance of roughness, emotion and visibility on the actors’ faces was his greatest concern. In one scene, the prisoners are roused from their beds in the middle of the night and forced to stand in the courtyard. “We hid 800-watt bulbs behind hanging fixtures over the courtyard, added some backlight, and strategically placed a few small tungsten Fresnels to subtly focus attention on the important characters,” recalls Neuenfels. “I shot without a mattebox to provoke all kinds of flares, and I taped a Double Fog 2 coated with Vaseline to the lens. I exposed [the Fuji stock] with the bleach-bypass process in mind. We compensated for any harshness in the digital grade.” Keen to use different grain structures to help tell the story, Neuenfels shot most of the picture on Kodak Vision2 200T 7217 and Vision2 500T 7218 and treated it three different ways, depending on the sequence at hand: standard development, force-developed 1 stop, and overexposed by 11⁄2 stops. “For harsh contrast and incredible blacks, I switched to Fuji F-125 [8632], but I only used that for about 10 percent of the film. We used it, for example, when Sorowitsch arrives at Mauthausen; it [immediately presents] a contrast to his former life. I found that Agfa print stock shows this contrast the best.” (At press time, the print stock for the U.S. release had not been determined.) Neuenfels also used filters to affect grain. “I love using filters, and Andreas Erben [BVK], who has been my first camera assistant for 20 years, and I own a whole range of specially made, soft filters. Some of them are less translucent at the edges; others create a vignette effect that blends to the edges; and there are some we even use in post, colored filters that affect the printer lights. During the digital intermediate [DI], I sometimes pulled out some of the diffusion effect but kept the glows around the whites; in the case of the night courtyard scene, I kept the glow of the practicals and the white pajamas the men wore.” From the start, the filmmakers intended to do a full bleach bypass on the negative and finish with a DI, and Neuenfels shot many tests to synchronize the photochemical and digital processes and get a feel for the workflow that would be used at the lab, Listo Film in Vienna. “I received great support from technical director Herbert Fischer and found a very open and highly skilled colorist in Willy Willinger,” says the cinematographer. “We scanned in 2K on an Arrilaser and graded on a Baselight.” When the flashback portion of the story ends, the film returns to Monte Carlo, and we realize Sorowitsch has been gambling with counterfeit money. A more aggressive color palette — yellow-tinged reds poisoned with hints of greens in the shadows — is meant to suggest a combination of hostility and shame, according to Neuenfels. The cinematographer, a four-time winner of the German Camera Award, confesses that his first reaction upon reading the script for The Counterfeiters was fear. The story takes place in a world where “nice images” would be an obscenity. “To light rough and brutal is challenging,” he muses. “You must [be willing to compromise] yourself aesthetically.” There was a psychological toll as well. “Going to work in a concentration camp is something I don’t want to do again.” I 12 April 2008

American Cinematographer - April 2008

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - April 2008