American Cinematographer - September 2004 - 28

stills with 800-ASA film to

what I'd

see

get on the negative without using any
film lights at all. I shot at around 1/so of a
second at T2.8, and I got a lot of detail.
The lab

processed the shots for me and
printed them in the middle of the scale;

that allowed

me to see

where the expo¬

and it gave me an idea of the
levels I could work to with 5289."

sure was,

Garfath estimates that he shot 80

percent of I'll Sleep When I'm Dead on
the

high-speed stock; for the rare
daytime scenes, he switched to Kodak
Vision 200T 5274.
The film's

color and

straightforward use of
light is matched by its camera¬

work. "We shot with Panaflex

cameras

and used Primo lenses," says

try to capture that quality onscreen

to

who had

place after dark, so the movie has an
unusually strong nighttime feel. But
while scouting locations in seedy areas

up

of south London, Garfath discovered

the fall of 2002, and Garfath didn't want

something unexpected: "One thinks of
night as being black and very cold, but I
was quite surprised by how many rich
colors there are at night in London. The
streetlights are all very orange, which
gives the streets a very warm feel. It's
strange, because these areas are really
quite inhospitable. I found it interesting

to cut into

Davey's brother,
Will (Clive

Owen, above),

given
his criminal

ways, returns to
his old haunts to

investigate the
of Davey's
death, a journey
that ultimately

cause

leads him to
Boad (Malcolm

MacDowell,

below).

without

making it look too attractive."
was shot over 29 days in

The film

Hodges' time with the actors,
so he kept extra lighting to a minimum in

these

scenes.

"I wanted to

use as

little

light as possible and as much of the
practical street lighting as I could," he
says. "In doing that, I was amazed by
the kind of production value we could
get. The one luxury I did afford myself
was

to wet the streets

down, which

a wonderful look and
doubles the value of any streetlights. In

gives them

terms of the

lights

we

did

use, we

camera.

There

and I don't think

was no

Steadicam,

had any

handheld;
always just laying track. That's
the way Mike likes to work, and he has a
wonderful relationship with [camera
operator] Gordon Hayman. Gordon really
we

we were

knows what Mike wants, and he's great

and making
help tell the
story." He adds that the mobile camera
also had a time-saving benefit: "Because
we were on a tight schedule, we tried to
at

breaking down

the

camera moves

much

a scene

work to

could in

take

shoot

as

so we

could get the maximum from every
with as few shots as possible.

as we

one

scene

could to the streetlights
and then took out any unwanted color
bias in the grading."
Helping to compensate for the
low light levels was the film stock
Garfath chose for the night scenes:

Also, Mike doesn't like to do a lot of
takes; he has a real relationship with the
actors he uses, and he feels that he prob¬

as we

Kodak Vision 800T 5289. He didn't worry
too much about the

purported downside
using such a fast film. "I thought, 'If I
get some grain, that's great,"' he recalls.
of

"I wanted the film to have

a

very raw,

gritty look, which I felt reflected the stop/
and the area where it takes place." He
generally kept his stop at T2 or T2.8,
values he determined through tests shot
with
we

a

stills

started

of the
September 2004

the

balanced the color temperature as

closely

24

the cine¬
matographer. "I think we only used a
zoom on two shots. We always tried for
a traditional style of shooting, where one
uses a fixed focal-length lens and moves

camera.

"The week before

production, I went to as many
locations as possible and shot

ably gets a good performance in the first
few takes, anyway."
The picture was shot in the stan¬
dard 1.85:1 format. In discussing the
range of the lenses used, Garfath says
that "there was nothing very extreme -
nothing very wide and nothing very tight.
We were usually between a 25mm and a
75mm." One of the few times
lens

was

used in the movie had

a zoom
as

much

to do with economy as

anything else.
The shot in question begins by panning
around a park across the street from
Helen's house, and eventually zooms into
her bedroom window. "That's

a

kind of
American Cinematographer - September 2004

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - September 2004
