American Cinematographer - April 2008 - 80

Sundance 2008: Mining for Movies On location in Albuquerque for Hamlet 2, cinematographer Alexander Gruszynski, ASC (wearing white hat), 2nd AC Matt Guiza (wearing blue), and 1st AC Rick Lamb (lower right) prepare to film as 1st AD Nick Mastandrea (foreground) looks on. Sleep Dealer Cinematographer: Lisa Rinzler Director: Alex Rivera When director Alex Rivera met with cinematographer Lisa Rinzler to discuss his science-fiction film Sleep Dealer, he showed her a teaser he’d prepared, and one image really stayed with her: a robot standing in an orange grove, harvesting fruit. “It was such an outsider image — the saturated color, the orange sky, and the idea of advanced robotics taking over [menial] jobs,” says Rinzler. Science-fiction films are not often seen at Sundance, and Sleep Dealer was one of this year’s most talked-about offerings. Winner of the festival’s Alfred P. Sloan Prize (given to a film focusing on science or technology) and Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, the picture marks Rivera’s feature-directing debut. A Brooklyn-born media artist who was among Variety’s “10 Directors to Watch” this year, Rivera calls Sleep Dealer “docu-science fiction. It’s directly inspired by things that are actually happening or about to happen.” The film’s themes include illegal immigration, the outsourcing of labor, the future of technology-enabled communication and the world’s looming water shortage. Although Rinzler has a diverse track record in independent films — her credits include Pollock (AC Feb. ’01), Menace II Society and Three Seasons(AC Feb. ’99) — the opportunity to shoot sci-fi came as “a happy surprise, out of the blue,” she says. “The subject matter just spoke to me. Plus, Alex seemed interested in pushing the boundaries of conventional narrative with imagery, trying to go inside the mind. I felt very intrigued.” Sleep Dealer begins in a remote village in Mexico where a U.S. firm has dammed the river and taken over the local water supply, selling it back to locals at grossly inflated prices. around and shoot the audience — this wasn’t the Universal Amphitheatre, where you can rig all your lights to facilitate that. The theatrical lights were zeroed in on the stage when we were filming the play, and to shoot matching shots of the audience, we had to reposition those lights to zero in on the crowd. We had to shoot in blocks to make sure it all matched. Also, we didn’t have all the extras every day, so we had to sort out when to shoot the tighter angles. The audience gets excited by the performance, so we knew we needed some angles that tied them to the show.” Gruszynski shot Hamlet 2 in standard 1.85:1 using the Arricam system, Cooke S4 primes, a Cooke 4:1 zoom and an Angenieux 12:1 zoom. “We shot most of the stage show with three cameras, and we didn’t have enough lenses to use primes on all three and bypass zooms entirely,” he says. “When we zoomed, we usually buried it in a track so it wouldn’t be visible.” The production mandated Fuji film stocks, and Gruszynski chose four emulsions, F-64D 8522, Eterna 250D 8563, Vivid 160 8543 and Eterna 500T 8573; the stage production was shot on the latter. 80 April 2008 “We had very little time for testing, and I hadn’t used Fuji in years, so it was a bit like sailing without a compass, which isn’t ideal,” says the cinematographer. “I actually haven’t seen any of the movie on film yet. Our dailies were on DVD, we did the digital intermediate [DI] at Post Logic in five days without any film-outs because we were trying to make the Sundance deadline, and the movie was projected digitally at the festival. With a DI, you normally calibrate your work to your release-print stock and do film-outs as you go, but since we didn’t have a distributor at the time, we didn’t know what we’d be printing on. Now that Focus [Features] has picked the film up, we’re hoping we’ll get a chance at another pass.” Hamlet 2 “is slightly different from what Andy and I have done in recent years,” he concludes. “It’s not a studio picture, and it’s an odd duck — a spoof with slapstick comedy and a musical finale. I’ve shot music videos and movies with stage elements, particularly 54 [set at New York’s famous Studio 54], but I’d never designed lighting for a stage show. It’s a different animal, but I loved doing it.” — Rachael K. Bosley

American Cinematographer - April 2008

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