American Cinematographer - Best of 2006 - 36

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Last Hope Right: Over dinner in the “Picasso Hall’ at the Ministry of
Arts, Theo asks his old friend Nigel Danny Huston to provide him with
transit papers. Below: Actors Owen, Huston far right and Ed Westwick head
of table absorb some guidance from director Alfonso Cuarón standing and
gesturing , while Lubezki at camera awaits his cue. happen naturally. It
would take you hours to re-create that with lighting.” Lubezki’s
minimalist approach even extended to wardrobe choices. “I learned on Tu
Mamá and The New World that you get a more natural image if you let the
wardrobe department do their work without trying to control it, like
having everybody dress darker. I didn’t want to impose the
cinematographer’s concept of what’s right and wrong, and this really
surprised them. They would say, ‘Are you sure, Chivo? Because a lot of
cinematographers …’ and I would say, ‘If it’s right for the
character, I’m not going to tell you if I like it or not.’ The only
mistake I made in this regard was in a car scene, where the midwife is
wearing a very bright, tan outfit and is sitting where there is the most
light. But you have to let these mistakes go in the interest of realism.
It’s like putting on an 85 filter — everything looks better but the
image isn’t as complex.” Lubezki notes that not relying on lighting
units encourages prob36 Special Digital Edition: February 2007 lem-solving
on location. He gives the example of the encounter between Faron and the
midwife in an abandoned, run-down classroom with bay windows. Despite the
bright sunlight outdoors, the day interior did not have enough fill light.
Lubezki’s solution was to cover one of the big windows with transparent
tape and shatter its glass; the fractured pane provides a bright source of
diffuse light. The vagaries of natural lighting mandated a constant
attention to exposure. “One of the reasons I couldn’t operate is that
I was constantly changing the f-stop,” says the cinematographer. “That
was the scariest part about the shoot. As Clive enters the classroom,
he’s at f2. As we reveal the room, we’re almost at f4, and as he walks
in toward the window, we go to f11. When we go to her, it’s f5.6.”
Lubezki’s desire for naturalism sometimes necessitated modifying the
story. For example, the scene in which Faron and his crew escape from a
rebel farm was originally written as a night scene. “Once they left the
farm and went down a country road, it was going to be really awful — I
would have had to put up some horrible, fake-looking lights,” says the
cameraman. “When I read a script that says two lovers are holding hands
on a beach at night, as a cinematographer I know it’s going to look
fake. For some movies, that fake, over-stylized look is beautiful, but in
this movie it would have betrayed everything we had done before. So I
pleaded for another approach to the scene.” It is a testimony to
Lubezki’s relationship with Cuarón that the director agreed to change
the script, and set the action at dawn. The cinematographer worked with
1st AD Terry Needham to change the shooting schedule so that the scene
could be shot dusk for dawn over three evenings. The result is a sequence
that starts in the dark farm, which is lit with fluorescents and
sodiumvapor lights, and ends, after a series of dawn-like transitions,
with a daytime shot. The gradation from dawn to daybreak is masterful and,
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American Cinematographer - Best of 2006

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - Best of 2006
