American Cinematographer - July 2007 - 24

24 July 2007 Evening photos by Gene Page, courtesy of Focus Features. happy I did. We got some really great dappled light.” Inspired by scenes in Gone With the Wind and Night of the Hunter, Currie decided to shoot some of Fido’s sequences in silhouette. During storyboarding, he determined which scenes they would be. In one example, Timmy dispatches Mrs. Henderson with a shovel, and the two figures are silhouetted on a knoll under a craggy tree and very large moon. “[The silhouette] was an interesting way of depicting what’s happening — the chopping up of a human body — in a low-definition way that viewers actually laugh at,” notes Kiesser. “It worked really, really well.” In that shot, the tree was real, and the moon was a hand-drawn matte painting. “Because we were going to be adding the moon, we shot the action against a 20-by-20-foot greenscreen placed slightly behind an elevated knoll in the park. Everything just barely fit in front of the greenscreen!” Greenscreen was also used for scenes involving rear-screen projection. “Andrew was fascinated by the process photography used in driving shots in the Fifties,” says Kiesser. “He found a certain level of humor in it.” The background plates were shot conventionally, and Kiesser desaturated them and gave them a cool, bluish tint in the DI. “We couldn’t film a lot of plates because of limited time and money, so we went for specific angles. We lined up shots with finders and got specific heights, distances and focal lengths, so we knew where we were going when we got onstage. If [rear-screen] isn’t done right, it looks artificial, and I was trying to hold onto a certain level of reality so it wouldn’t take viewers completely out of the story. But we also wanted it to look a little quirky. I hope we found that compromise.” Overall, Kiesser believes the Fido team achieved the right tone. He recalls that after a festival screening of the film, a 70-something woman remarked, “I don’t like gory things, but this was really funny.” Kiesser laughs at the memory: “When you get it, you get it.” Close friends Ann (Claire Danes, left) and Lila (Mamie Gummer) celebrate Lila’s imminent wedding in a scene from Evening. Lasting Love by Jean Oppenheimer Director of photography Gyula Pados, HSC pays the director of his latest film, Evening, the ultimate compliment: “He has the eye of a cinematographer.” In this instance, the declaration happens to be true, because until he turned to directing two years ago, Lajos Koltai, ASC, HSC was an award-winning cinematographer in his own right. When it came time to choose a cinematographer for his directing debut, the Holocaust drama Fateless (see AC Jan. ’06), Koltai turned to Pados, a fellow Hungarian who had transformed Budapest’s labyrinthine underground subway system into a lyrical purgatory in the award-winning picture Kontroll (AC April ’05). The collaboration proved so fruitful that Koltai asked Pados to shoot his second feature, Evening, based on the novel by Susan Minot. A romantic drama about memory and regret, Evening concerns an elderly woman who, on her deathbed, recalls a summer that shaped her future. The story jumps back and forth between the present and the past, with Vanessa Redgrave portraying the central character, Ann, as an old woman and Claire Danes portraying her younger self. “We wanted a muted, desaturated look for the present, with as little color as possible in both the lighting and production design,” says Pados, speaking by phone from his home in Budapest. “The elderly Ann’s bedroom, where much of the present-day action takes place, is all whites and [pale] browns and grays. We didn’t want a huge difference between the key and fill lights; HMIs, heavily diffused with Frost, came through the bedroom windows, providing a soft, white ambient light for day scenes. I used the Varicon system on these sequences to further soften the blacks.” By contrast, the flashbacks, which constitute most of the story, are colorful and vibrant. These scenes are set at a Newport, Rhode Island, mansion where Ann’s college friend, Lila (Mamie Gummer), is getting married over the weekend. Livening things up is Lila’s eccentric brother, Buddy (Hugh Dancy), also a close friend of Ann’s. It is here that Ann meets and falls in love with Harris (Patrick Wilson), a lifelong friend of the family. The Newport mansion is perched on a high bluff; almost every window opens onto magnificent, manicured lawns and a brilliant, azure sea and sky. Interior colors are soft blues and greens, and sunlight streams

American Cinematographer - July 2007

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