American Cinematographer - April 2000 - 120

Sundance 2000:
tional ideas from the work of

DeCarava,
was
a

a

still

Variety Is the Spice

Roy

photographer who

the first African-American to get

Guggenheim grant [in 1952]."
For much of the film,

used the

camera as

Chediak

Seth's alter ego,

a lot of handheld footage
Moviecam Compact equipped

shooting
with

a

with

Zeiss Superspeed lenses, set
mostly at T2. "We made a deal that I
was
going to operate on all of the

handheld scenes," the

cinematogra¬

pher reveals. "I love to operate when
is handheld, because you
also become a character."
the

camera

As Seth's

telephone pitches
become more sophisticated and
cruelly convincing, the lenses go
wider on him, placing the character
in the center of a larger territory. His
first sell to Harry (a Midwestern
father whose savings Seth wipes out)
was shot with a 135mm lens, setting
the foreground hustle of the boiler
room against cutaways to Harry's

tranquil office cubicle. "We were
looking to build Seth's character with
the camerawork," says Younger. "On
his second sell [to Harry], we knew
Seth had

to

had

be the

man,

and that the

be

really kinetic. We
used a 12mm lens, and we were really
close to him. [Camera operator]
Michael Green used high sticks [for
the camera] as Giovanni paced right
in front of it; the camera panned
with him, causing the whole back of
the office to spin."
As
the
film
begins, a
Technocrane shot searches through
the windows of a moving bus packed
scene

to

sure

of the salesmen's side of the tele¬

phone conversations, while shaky,
are employed to
depict the nervous clients on the

handheld shots

other end of the line. "The handheld

definitely gets a lot shakier as
along in Harry's world,"
Younger comments. "When he finally
attempts and fails to sell his stock and
hangs up the phone, there's a jump
camera

move

we

cut

in

there, too."
The

cinematographer created

the Arctic-blue wasteland of the trad¬

ing floor by shooting Kodak's EXR
5293 tungsten stock in daylight. (He

on

Seth's

used the stock for most of the film,

row.

Later

supplementing it with Vision 500T
5279 for some night footage.)

with stockbrokers and lands

bewildered face in the last

the tale to underline the slick compo¬

in the story, the camera
when he is disowned by

deserts him
his father in
a park outside the judge's chambers;
the shot stays far outside Seth as it
silently circles the two characters on a
dolly. A Steadicam (operated by
William Arnot) is used throughout

Chediak recalls, "When we were

talk¬

ing about the cold look, the produc¬
designer had an architectural
book of office spaces shot in daylight
with tungsten film, and Ben liked the
tones very much. We worked with
tion

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American Cinematographer - April 2000

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