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A lit desk lamp in the library first draws Briony’s attention to the room, and as the young girl enters, the lamp obscures her vision, preventing her from immediately seeing the lovers. McGarvey explains, “We were able to tilt the shade on the table lamp enough so that at the top of the shot the lamp created a flare, and then, as we approach the table, the shade reduces the flare and provides some resolution of sight as Briony sees [Cecilia and Robbie]. To enhance that, I had a 2K Zip light on a dimmer through a 4-by-4 frame of 216 keying Robbie and Cecilia. They were initially in semi-darkness, and as the camera approached and the flare diminished, I brought this soft key on the side up on the dimmer.” The flare from the lamp also revealed another characteristic of the Dior stockings: “The point of light from the table lamp created a sort of chromatic circle around the hot spot.” Looking a bit like a rainbow around the light source, the effect is also present in a night exterior when everyone takes up flashlights to go searching for a pair of boys who have run away from the Tallis home, where they are visiting along with their sister, Lola (Juno Temple). For shots of family members carrying flashlights, period torches were outfitted with higher-powered bulbs by Evans’ crew, though McGarvey reveals that when the actors were “far off in the background, we actually used modern lights, like large Maglites, to get more punch.” The sequence focuses primarily on Briony as she searches the grounds and, in a dark turn, finds Lola being raped by an attacker Briony misidentifies as Robbie. A number of the shots in the sequence simulate Briony’s point of view, and McGarvey “led the camera with a Source Four [Leko] with a spot lens on it. Focused in at full spot, it gave a softer edge like a flashlight, but it also gave me the exposure I needed. So instead of attaching the flashlight to the camera, I’d point it one direction and then Pete [Robertson] would follow with the camera, as the eye normally would.” To create night ambience in this scene (and most other night exteriors), McGarvey tried something he had shied away from in the past: “We used smoke, which is quite difficult to deal with. We had a great special-effects department that created wonderful layers of haze. You have to be careful when you’re working with a big source that you don’t get a hotspot on the edge of frame, but smoke is really wonderful to work with, and you don’t have to use as much light.” The smoke was lit with Wendy Lights gelled with 1⁄4 CTB and 1⁄4 Plus Green. McGarvey shot Atonement on three Kodak Vision2 film stocks, 100T 5212, 200T 5217, and 500T 5218. He underexposed all daytime scenes in the 1935 section by about 1⁄3 of a stop to decrease contrast. When he abandoned the Dior stockings for the next section of the story, which is set in 1940 and split between Briony working in a London hospital and Robbie at war in France, McGarvey began to “overexpose to increase the levels of the black and make a slightly more solid negative with a little more contrast. But I also knew I would eventually decrease the saturation [for this section] in the DI.” McGarvey did not do away with filtration for this middle section, using 1⁄8, 1⁄4 and 1⁄2 Tiffen Black Pro-Mist filters to keep a level of diffusion while maintaining contrast. “I also tended to filter the skies a little bit more with ND and make them more portentous and stormy,” he adds. “This section of the film has a very austere, ascetic feel.” Robbie and two fellow soldiers in his unit hide away in the French countryside and make their way toward Dunkirk, where the British forces are gathering after failing to quell the German push into France. Redcar, on England’s northeast shore, stood in for Dunkirk, and it was here that the filmmakers staged the long Steadicam shot that travels with the three soldiers as they uncover the scope of the scene before them. Aware that the schedule would allow them roughly two days to shoot the sequence, Wright and McGarvey storyboarded the details they wanted the scene to convey. It very quickly became apparent that two days would not be enough, especially after a location scout raised concerns about the quality of light at the beach — McGarvey found it was only suitable at the end of the day. Mulling over this predicament, Wright began to reason that the best approach would be to cover the beach in one complex move; this would allow them to shoot when the light was at its best, and he also believed it would be an effective contrast to the quick cutting that characterizes many war films. “Our concern became how to choreograph the move and make it evolve in a way that would be interesting for the audience while communicating the chaos and waste of war,” says McGarvey. “At the same time, we wanted to stay with Robbie and maintain the sort of subjectivity and dreamscape atmosphere this section of the story had so far had.” The art department created a detailed scale model of the beach that McGarvey and Wright could look at with “a little periscope finder,” says the cinematographer. “It allowed us to work out what we’d see at each point, how best to use our action vehicles, where to place fires, and where we would get the most out of the extras.” The beach had to be populated with more than 1,000 extras in period uniforms, and the first of the two shooting days was dedicated completely to rehearsal, which continued on the second day until the sun hit its mark in the late afternoon. Flanked by McGarvey (who carried a remote iris-and-zoom control, plus a small monitor so he could see the shot), De Carvalho (pulling focus remotely), and two grips, Robertson began the shot riding on a small tracking vehicle that kept pace with the three soldiers as they entered the beach. After the soldiers passed a group of horses and rounded a beached boat, Robertson stepped off the vehicle and walked on the sand up to a bandstand. As the camera moved around the bandstand, McGarvey opened the stop from a T5.6 ½ to a T2.8 ½, stopping down again when the camera was clear of the stand. Meanwhile, Robertson reached the other side of the stand and moved down a ramp. Soon thereafter, actor McAvoy stepped into a close-up and Robertson stepped onto a rickshaw that was moved past a brief scrap Robbie’s compatriots have with another soldier and to the beach end of a pier. Then, Robertson dismounted the rickshaw and moved down the pier and past a bar, into which Robbie’s two companions have disappeared. The shot ends when “Robbie stays outside [the bar] and looks out over the scene he’s just walked through,” says McGarvey. “His gaze led the camera into a pan, and for the first time, in a big wide shot, we reveal the entire scene. “In the end, we did three good takes, and on the fourth the light had become really bad, so we just abandoned it mid-flow. Take three was the one we went with, and there was a strange phenomenon that happened in it: cloud diffusion appeared in the atmosphere, creating a little rainbow band on the edge of the sun. It was a beautiful, delicate color, and the light was just exquisite.”
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