American Cinematographer - September 2004 - 71

A World

Apart

Maria's

gleaming,
monochrome
work

environment

(near right)
contrasts with

that of her

apartment (far
right), where
Alwin Kiichler,
BSC gelled a

network of
interior windows
and doors with

a

mix of colors to

slightly soften
the industrial¬

looking space.

Shanghai. "It's amazing how the city
is lit up at night," marvels Zyskind.
"Much of work was about choosing
the right place to shoot." As an
example, the cinematographer cites
the city's sleek expressway tunnels,
which emit

a

soft, blue fluorescent

filmmakers didn't
look that

really nice people!"

their

In

India, because of difficul¬
the small native

ties with insurance,
crew

guarded the equipment with

their lives. "There

Commissioner!"

Michael likes

During location scouts on the
mainland, the filmmakers met with

trucks, putting the sticks and the

handful of the

region's many
independent production compa¬
nies, but Winterbottom eventually
opted for the governmentcontrolled Shanghai Film Studios.
The director reports that "although
Code 46 was more complicated than
In This World in a lot of ways, the
bureaucracy, the official side of it,
was easy. We had a great location
manager, Lin Chuxiong, who orga¬
nized everything. The studio
submitted the script for us six or
eight weeks before the shoot, and
because the film doesn't have any

political content, there weren't
censorship issues."
In Shanghai, as in each inter¬

overt

any

national location, the Code 46 team

nical'

but she couldn't speak 'tech¬

English."

hundreds

of

Nonetheless,

makeshift

hand

film off the backs of

a

But because rural India's roads

were

often

prohibitively bumpy, the
indigenous assistants worried that
the camera's internal mechanism

might jump a perf and eat into the
film. Ultimately, Zyskind got them
to relent by offering to use his body
to

absorb the shocks.
The crew's small size often

made the

journey less complicated,
liberating the explorers. To create
Maria's recurring birthday dream,
for example, Morton, Zyskind and
focus puller Simon Tindall, who had
stashed a couple of extra mags in his
bag, grabbed a camera, hopped an
outbound Shanghai subway, trav¬
eled a couple of stops, jumped over
inbound train and then

to

course,

to

in the bed of

headed back

speak English, and I didn't
speak Chinese. I had a translator, of

shots

pickup and
driving off to shoot the landscape."
camera

a

up a local crew. Zyskind had
native gaffer, Song Guozhen, "but

were some

they almost wouldn't let us do,"
recalls Zyskind. "For example,

picked

he didn't

September 2004

At the

"We got through it," Zyskind testifies
with a laugh, "because they were

glow. He quips, "I'd like to say it was
I who selected those lights, but it
was
actually the Shanghai City

a

58

gestures later, the film was in the can.

an

the

original station,
Connatty was
ready with more mags. They would
then reload and repeat the process,
working exclusively with available
light.
to

where loader Chris

same

time, however, the
want to create

a

gritty or rough;
goal was to give the picture the
indeterminate quality of a dream or
was

too

memory.

Digital effects contributed to
Shanghai look
eerily desolate, post house Smoke
and Mirrors painted out daytime
traffic on the city's tangle of freeways;
to enhance the subway footage, The
Moving Picture Company's digital
grader, Max Horton, subtly adjusted
that feel. To make

contrast

and color

workstation.

on a

The

Quantel iQ

latter

tactic

produced low-contrast images with
soft highlights, some of which are
greenish and cool, others of which
are orange and warm. The quick-cut
color contrasts are both dynamic and
unsettling. "Dreams, I think, feel that
way," offers Winterbottom. "The
elements in dreams often feel incred¬

ibly realistic, but there are strange
disjunctions and inconsistencies."
Zyskind and Kiichler used a
variety of techniques to enhance that
feeling. For example, night-exterior
tests revealed that Shanghai's neon
street signs were distinctly Asian, so
Zyskind shot through Vs Tiffen
White Pro-Mist filters, creating a
slight sense of air pollution that blew
out the highlights and softened back¬
grounds. In fact, both Zyskind and
Kiichler wound up using the filter
throughout the shoot, indoors and
outdoors, to maintain textural conti-
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