To illustrate his point, Khondji points to the cluttered coffee table in the West Hollywood hotel suite where he’s being interviewed. “To Roman, the position of every magazine on this table would be important,” he asserts. “You couldn’t just throw the magazines anywhere. There would be a reason why that particular magazine is over there in that particular place. Everything has not only a visual reason, but a narrative reason.”
The cinematographer also singles out gaffer Jean Claude Lebras, grip Bernard Bregier and first assistant director Michka Cheyko for doing “incredible” jobs and helping him a great deal on The Ninth Gate. Khondji adds, “Working with [production designer] Dean Tavoularis made me think that the words ëgenius’ and ëhumble’ can go well together.”
A subtle but extremely important factor in the primal grip Polanski’s thrillers exercise on audiences is the director’s insistence on visual consistency throughout a film. Rosemary’s Baby, shot entirely with 18mm and 25mm lenses, puts the audience right on top of Mia Farrow’s character from beginning to end, making her paranoia palpable. “When you prepare a film with Roman, he always talks about the distance between the camera and the actors,” Khondji adds. “This is very important to him. Even if you change lenses and go from a wide shot to a tight shot, he wants to keep the same distance between the camera lens and the actor.”
Polanski opted for a similar intimacy with the actors on The Ninth Gate. “Roman favored wide angles, but never to the point of becoming grotesque,” Khondji says. “Not that Roman is afraid of grotesque distortion — he sometimes will use it for a certain effect. But we used the 32 and 25mm lenses for almost the whole show, except for some close-ups that we shot with a 75.”
Khondji admits that attempting to change the mind of a director as confident as Polanski sometimes requires a Mephistophelian feat of persuasion. “It’s difficult to make him alter his ideas completely, because he has such a measured way of seeing things,” he explains. “Of course, he also gets inspiration during the day on location or on the set. When you work with him closely, you can tell that his methods always have a narrative [underpinning]; he doesn’t film things just for aesthetic purposes. You can sometimes get him to change shots a little bit, but never drastically, or else you’ll make him unhappy! Roman is also very inspirational when it comes to lighting, because he really feels the movie. He’s instinctive about the sets and the way a scene should be lit. We rarely had discussions about lighting — I just lit the movie the way I thought would be right, and I’d only talk to him if I had some doubt about some aspect of the story.”
The Ninth Gate was filmed entirely at European locations, like all of Polanski’s movies since The Tenant (1976). This created an interesting challenge during the filming of the picture’s first act, which takes place in New York but was actually shot in Paris. To achieve the proper Manhattan flavor, the filmmakers relied upon background slides provided by Tavoularis’s team. In one particularly convincing sequence, Corso is led to Balkan’s eerie, secret library, where a nocturnal New York skyline glistens behind a huge window. “That scene had an interesting mix of the very modern glass buildings in the background with the antique books of the past,” Khondji describes. “I loved that [dichotomy]. The books were almost like animals hidden in a nest. In the middle of the city at night, we see this man with his books; I really saw it as a scary thing, so we used a lot of underkeyed toplight provided entirely by Kino Flos. For the New York skyline behind the actors, Dean’s team provided a very good-quality slide from America [from which a TransLite was fashioned]. Most of our work was already accomplished by the high quality of the slide, but we also lit the TransLite very carefully and used a little net [diffusion]. In postproduction, some movement was also added to the lights.”
Corso and his partner, Bernie (James Russo), share a cluttered mid-Manhattan bookstore which, interestingly, is set below street level. Khondji lent the space a powerfully musty atmosphere, as if this haven of old literature was somehow disengaged from the modern world represented by the hustling pairs of legs darting past the store’s windows. “The look of the books was already pretty much taken care of through Dean Tavoularis’s sets,” Khondji says. “We used a mixture of Kino Flos around the bookstore. I used very, very little smoke and combined that with the Arriflex VariCon on-camera flashing device during the shooting.
“[The French lab] Eclair has the European equivalent of Technicolor’s ENR printing process, which they call NEC [Noir en Colour] which translates to ëBlack-and-White in Color,’” the cinematographer adds. “It’s a beautifully subtle process with exactly the same principle as ENR, and we applied it throughout this film. We photographed the picture with the new Cooke S4 Series lenses, beautiful English lenses that have a slightly soft, sensual look — they’re very good with color and skin tone. They also have all of the modern lens qualities, such as anti-flare. The Ninth Gate was one of the first movies photographed entirely with these lenses. The look of the scenes is therefore due to the combination of these lenses with the NEC process.”
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