American Cinematographer - April 2006 - 18

Right: The boys

enough to wedge into nooks in the
apartment. "Our big luxury was a

find other ways
to entertain

Century Optics snorkel lens from the
Eighties," he adds. "That helped us get
the camera parallel to the wall, as close
as possible, and shoot facing out from
it. This was especially necessary in the
kitchen, which was a very hard location.
It looks much bigger onscreen!" He

themselves.
Below: Director
of

photography
Alexis Zabe

hunkers down
to find an

angle
in the

apartment's tiny
kitchen

as

his

young stars
ham it up. In the

used unfiltered Zeiss Ultra Primes rang¬

ing from 12mm to 35mm for most
setups, shooting wide open to make the
most of the location's natural light.

background is
set decorator

Luisa Gualas.

As the visuals began to come
together, the filmmakers, inspired by
the work of Jim Jarmusch and Yasujiro
Ozu, started to compose scenes in long
takes without close-ups or camera
movement, relying on deep-focus fram¬
ing and mise en scene to set the tone.
"We'd sometimes shoot

an

insert to

help with transitions, but after a week
and a half we quit that altogether and
just concentrated on the master shots,"
lot of distraction. Black-and-white lets

all the chroma out of their video-assist

recalls Zabe. "The editor

you focus on composition; color
elements lose importance in favor of

monitors and had dailies transferred to

worried about not

lines and

shapes."

Monochrome film stock is very

expensive to process in Mexico, so
much so that it proved cheaper for Zabe
color stocks, Kodak
Vision 500T 5279 and Vision 250D 5246,
to shoot on two

and

use a

digital intermediate (Dl) to

take the color out. Nevertheless, Zabe
and Eimbcke strove to maintain consis¬

tency throughout the shoot; they dialed

VHS in black-and-white. "We

never

this film in color at any

point in the
process," notes Zabe. "Many people
argued against this, and the producer
saw

was

a

little shocked. He trusted

us

was probably sleep¬
less for about two weeks after we told

completely, but he
him

plan."
The cinematographer lowered
costs further by filming with an Aaton
35-111 3-perf camera, which was small
our

was

very

having anything to
cut, but we stuck to it, and it worked out

fine.
"We also felt [this strategy] was
important because the film doesn't have
a

main character," he continues. "There

are

four

points of view, and we didn't

want to direct the

viewer's attention to

character with close-ups. We
thought it would be more interesting to
any one

let the viewers decide for themselves."
The film does break from this

framing style in

a

few flashbacks to

formative moments in each character's

past. In one such sequence, Ulises
begins by telling a story about working
in an animal shelter where stray dogs
were regularly put down. The camera

slowly pushes in toward Ulises, who is
seated on the floor. (Zabe executed this
shot by locking the camera down on a
simple skateboard dolly.) Then the
scene

cuts to Ulises'

flashback, filmed

from his

point of view with a handheld
Aaton A-Minima; this footage was
push-processed 2 stops for added grain.
"This was looking into the character's
mind, so we wanted a very different
look with lots of texture," says Zabe.
"We also wanted it to have

16

April 2006

a

very
American Cinematographer - April 2006

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