American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 64

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Strife and Justice

Top: Gardner sits down with his son, Nicky (Noah Jupe), after tragedy strikes. Bottom: Gardner
and his sister-in-law (Julianne Moore) view a lineup of suspects at the police station.

just something intriguing about the
human condition and you can find
comic moments there.
To make the film his own,
Clooney needed something that would
provide a realistic base. He and Grant
Heslov, his producer and writing partner, [incorporated] a true story. There
really was a black family that moved
into Levittown, Pennsylvania, and there
was an extensive race riot. Their idea
was to contrast what happens to the
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December 2017

Lodge family to this true story. He
thought leavening this insane story with
the [Lodges' friendly] interaction with
the black family would show some
hope.
What were Clooney's directives
when you first sat down to discuss the
look?
Elswit: He wanted it very
vibrant. He was influenced by the
movies of the period, which were
Technicolor. So - widescreen, satuAmerican Cinematographer

rated primary colors, vivid backgrounds.
We had what we think of as that Fifties
palette: oranges, browns, bright blues,
and yellows.
We're in a world of naturalistic or
somewhat naturalistic lighting, but
George wanted to push it further. He
wanted sequences where you'd see characters casting shadows on the wall, like
Julianne Moore's [character's] murder
and a couple of other scenes. To do that,
we had a more theatrical lighting style
in places. I wish I'd been a little braver
on that.
Unlike Good Night, and Good
Luck, which was Super 35 spherical,
you shot with Arri's Alexa XT in
anamorphic format. Why that choice?
Elswit: Given the time we had
and all the night work, I felt I ultimately
had more control if I could light [for]
the Alexa. The anamorphic lens was
kind of a throwback, an homage to
those wonderful social dramas in the
1950s. Today we imagine anamorphic
movies as being big outdoor spectacles,
but there were lots that were family
dramas shot in small spaces. We looked
at a few. George loves the way you have
to stage in anamorphic and the way it
isolates characters - when you do
close-ups, the more limited depth of
field. He was very intrigued by that kind
of stuff.
What was your lens package?
Elswit: It was [Panavision's]
anamorphic C Series. We mostly shot
with wide lenses. The whole movie was
probably 40, 50 and 75mm. I like the
oval [anamorphic artifacts] a lot. The
coatings are new, but the optical qualities are the same as they were. Actually,
a lot of those lenses were designed 40,
50, 60 years ago. Today's newer lenses
tend to be somewhat antiseptic and
clinical, perfect from edge to edge in a
way that has almost no character. With
the C Series, there's lots of optical
vignetting, color fringing, and all these
other things you almost never get with
[modern] lenses. The most difficult
thing about shooting digital is that you
just don't get anything automatically.
You have to spend the time in post to do

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - December 2017