A Slipping-Down Life
Director: Emiko Omori
Cinematographer: Michael BarrowSubtlety was the primary goal in the visual design of A Slipping-Down Life. The look of the film was devised by writer/director Toni Kalem and veteran cinematographer Michael Barrow, a New York-based industry veteran whose credits include the TV series The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd and HBO's Sex and the City, as well as the features Me and Veronica, Heavy, Caught, Whatever and Sunday (see Production Slate, AC Sept. '97). Even though it was made with a mandate eschewing fancy camera moves, eye-catching compositions and attention-grabbing colors, the film remains downright beautiful, with a gentleness that deftly underscores its moving theme of self-definition and discovery.
Drawn from Ann Tyler's novel of the same name, A Slipping-Down Life contemplates the world of Evie Decker (Lili Taylor), a young woman who cheers up children at a local amusement park by wearing a theme park-type animal costume. Evie's mundane life takes an upswing one night when she hears the radio rantings of Drumstring Casey (Guy Pearce), a brooding, poet/guitarist who fancies himself a modern day Jim Morrison. Magnetized by Casey's mysterious charm, Evie tracks him down to a local dive bar where he gigs with his band. In a deranged moment of self-direction designed to get the guitarist's attention, Evie carves his name into her forehead. Their paths cross again when Casey's manager/drummer, David Elliot (John Hawks), finesses a photo shoot between the two as a publicity stunt, which results in a volatile love affair.
Director Kalem is an accomplished actress who always focuses on actors and narrative while working behind the camera; all decisions regarding the movie's look stem from how the camera can further the storytelling. A Slipping-Down Life deals with the way in which Evie sees herself, and how that perception evolves over the course of the story. Thus, it seems only fitting that some of the director's initial inspirations were drawn from photographer Nan Goldin's book I'll Be Your Mirror. "There are many mirror shots in the film," says Kalem. "I was very interested in what Nan Goldin did with reflections, and the idea of looking at yourself. Evie sees herself backwards, or in a distorted way, but at the end of the story, she sees herself in the right way."
Cameraman Barrow, who wielded an Arriflex 535 with an Aaton 35-III for backup, followed the action with the camera rather than having the actors follow the camera. "Because I've worked as a gaffer for so many years, I'm the type of cinematographer who goes into a set watching the director and actors to see where they want to be," he explains. "I don't try to steer people to the perfect frame — my frames take on a naturalistic look, almost like a snapshot. There's a place that seems best for the camera to tell the story, and I try to work with the director to find that place."
After seeing Barrow's work in Robert Young's critically acclaimed Caught, Kalem knew that she had found a cinematographer with talent. The director also advocated a following-the-action aesthetic, and while observing Barrow at work in this manner, she began to admire his sensitivity. "He knows where the emotional life of a scene is," observes Kalem. "Besides being terrifically talented, he's a very sensitive person. I've seen women directors — especially first-timers — get onto sets with male cinematographers and be run roughshod over. I was wary of that happening, but Michael likes women, and he was wonderful to work with."
One of the movie's most striking features is the kaleidoscopic palette of colors dotting its rural landscape. "At the beginning of the film, I wanted a much more desaturated look in terms of the colors," the director says. "When Evie cuts her forehead and sees that brilliant red blood, I saw it as the moment when color literally comes into her life — she goes from black-and-white to color."
While Barrow and Kalem didn't adhere precisely to this notion, they did use a progression of color shades to reflect the arc of the story. Many of the film's loveliest shots take place in the evening, when soft pools of colored light accent the darkened ambiance, especially on the porch at the home of Evie's father. The interiors are similarly striking and often feature deep hues in the background. "Almost every location was painted or wallpapered," says Barrow, who utilized Kodak EXR 5298 for interiors and EXR 5245 for exteriors. "I would sometimes use a coral or tobacco filter outside to play with the colors a bit, but I had to be careful not to over-filter so I'd have the latitude to pull back if I needed to. I tended to use Mitchell filters for close-ups, usually an A or B with an 1/8 ProMist for softening, as well as grads for different times of day."
Of the film's several night scenes, one of the most visually interesting is an argument between Casey and Evie that occurs outside a roadhouse. Camera operator David McGill caught the scene with his Steadicam, nicely emphasizing the instability and distance between the two lovers. (McGill executed all of the Steadicam work, while Barrow captured the handheld scenes.) Barrow also had a 160' Condor at his disposal for night scenes.
Barrow was also able to cut loose with the camera during concert footage of Casey's group jamming out their hard tunes in a Southern-style roadhouse shack. "I was wary of how badly that type of scene is usually done," says Kalem. "Musical sequences always end up looking like MTV videos or fake clubs, but I wanted ours to as realistic as possible. We looked at a lot of concert documentaries, and talked a lot about telling the story largely from Evie's point of view. Then I just let Michael go. He had two cameras, sometimes three, and shot with cranes, handheld, or with the Steadicam, and the footage turned out great."
Despite the extreme Texas-summer temperatures (never under 103¡F), a tight budget, and an ambitious shooting schedule spread out over 30 days, A Slipping-Down Life offers an aesthetic that gently accents its story, while still permitting the pleasure of pretty pictures.
— H. WillisOn the Ropes
Directors: Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgan
Cinematographer: Brett MorganWhile shooting the boxing documentary On the Ropes, Brett Morgan had to learn how to roll with the punches — literally. "During sparring, I would bring the camera into the ring," he recalls. "I got punched on a number of occasions, which I didn't mind. They'd stop and say 'Sorry,' but I wanted to get that intimate feeling during the fights. Otherwise, we'd have just been outsiders looking in."
As trainees in the New Bedford-Stuyvesant Boxing Center, Morgan and co-director/co-producer Nanette Burstein were anything but outsiders. A 103-pound "flyweight," Burstein had trained for a year with coach Harry Keitt before deciding to film inside the Brooklyn neighborhood gym. On the Ropes focuses on Morgan and three fellow boxers, as each member of the latter trio face personal turning points: one is heading towards the professional leagues; another faces a jail sentence; and the third weighs the importance of school versus the street. Warmly received, the film picked up a special jury prize — quite a feat for a New York University film school project. (Morgan and Burstein are not novices, however; both have worked with noted documentarian Barbara Kopple, among other pros.)
Like many documentaries presented at Sundance, Morgan shot on video. For most of the film, he employed a Sony 537A BetaSP camera outfitted with a Fujinon 10-120mm zoom lens; a few early scenes were captured on a Sony Hi-8 VX3 3-chip consumer camcorder. Morgan managed to work with just one light — a 1K Lowel Rifa-Light LC88 — bouncing its spread off a wall for a handful of interviews. "Early on, Nanette and I made an aesthetic decision to always to try to use natural light, because as a cinematographer I feel that lighting for video looks very glossy and stagy, and we really wanted that natural ambiance," Morgan explains. "I'd never point [the light] directly at the subjects. I never backlit them, either, because I thought that would create too much artifice. We really wanted all of the interviews — and the entire film — to have a very natural feel, which we felt would give it a filmic sort of look."
Morgan notes that it was especially challenging to shoot close-ups of fighters in perpetual motion, amid flurries of punches — easily 850 per fight. "The fighters don't stay in the same place for more than two or three seconds, and you have to rack-focus and zoom at the same time," he notes.
Such fast and fluttering movement is also a problem in most tape-to-film transfers, but the filmmakers brought their work to Swiss Effects, a small company based in Zurich, Switzerland, that pulled off the job with minimal grain and without a trace of motion blur. Run by a group of cinematographers, the filmmaker-friendly company is constantly testing improvements in transfer techniques. In the end, On the Ropes was output onto Kodak's 50 ASA EXR 5245 daylight stock, creating a film negative from which prints were struck. "Certain scenes were shot at night, and if I had shot them on film, [Swiss Effects] would have had to use EXR 5298, adding a lot of grain. You can shoot on video, keep your blacks black, blow up on 45, and have no grain whatsoever."
Morgan also had to deal with the flickering fluorescent lighting characteristic of boxing venues. "The gym was really difficult, because we had a mixture of tungsten, fluorescents, and daylight coming in." He performed extensive camera tests to figure out the space's proper white balance. Utilizing normal balancing techniques using a white card, Morgan would end up with a troubling greenish hue. "A camera guy once told me this secret trick, where you can actually white-balance off the light itself," he offers. "You point the camera into the light, stop down to the bottom, and get the white balance off the fluorescents. That would turn the green into white light."
While planning their approach to the boxing tournaments, the filmmakers turned to such classics as Rocky and Raging Bull. These films, however, only served to frustrate the pair. With its striking POV shots inside the ring, Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (shot by Michael Chapman, ASC) has tremendous power, but the film's action was carefully choreographed on a soundstage; having a fist fly at the lens in an uncontrolled setting is an entirely different matter. Says Morgan. "You can never create that look [in real life]. However, we could create the same type of sound." The filmmakers therefore devoted a good deal of their postproduction budget to meticulous sound design: they did foley effects of every punch and grunt, of feet skimming across the ring's surface, and of bodies hitting the ropes.
The ideas provided by Rocky (shot by James Crabe, ASC) proved to be a total disaster, however. Having watched the film the night before a big fight, the low-budget documentary crew was psyched up — and overly ambitious. "We were thinking, 'We need 10 cameras on this shoot!'" Burstein recalls with a laugh. "But we didn't have any money, so we said, 'Okay, we'll borrow all of these Hi-8 cameras and ask our friends to shoot." They ended up with five cameras and a load of problems: unmatched white balance, stylistic inconsistencies, and glaring differences in resolution and grain between the Hi-8 and BetaSP footage. "It was almost impossible to cut within the scene with the BetaSP," says Morgan. "We realized that whatever advantage we had gained by using multiple cameras was defeated by the fact this [discrepancy] would jump out at you." In the end, all of the Hi-8 fight footage had to be scrapped.
As anyone who's ever been in the ring knows, you can't win them all. But ultimately, as their Sundance award for On the Ropes proves, Morgan and Burstein finished their fight with arms aloft.
— P. ThomsonThe Terrorist (India)
Director/Cinematographer: Santosh Sivan, ISCThe 1991 assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by a suicide bomber motivated director/ cameraman Santosh Sivan, ISC, to explore the mindset of an individual whose political beliefs would lead to such a ruthless and brutal act of self-sacrifice. In The Terrorist, Sivan tracks the training of Malli (Ayesh Dharkar), a 19-year-old woman on a one-way journey to obliterate a visiting dignitary. Ever since her brother's death at the hands of an opposing political faction, Malli has maintained an unwavering commitment to her cause, to the point where she's denied herself any sort of emotional existence. While en route to her destructive destiny, however, the purposeful yet pensive Malli begins to wonder what's more important: her duty to her political group, or to herself. A favorite of the international festival circuit, this 95-minute, Tamil-language movie has been touring the global film beat, where it has earned various honors, including Best Film, Best Direction and Best Actress honors, as well as with a Jury Prize at last year's Cairo International Film Festival.
A native of Chennai, India, Sivan was born into the film business: his father ran Sivan Studios and made short documentaries on video. The younger Sivan went on to study cinematography at the renowned Film and Television Institute of India. Now an accomplished cameraman, Sivan has spent much of his career shooting the highly stylized, musical melodramas that comprise much of India's cinematic output. His expert imagery has made the cameraman a four-time winner of India's National Award (for the features Perumthachan, Kaalapani and Iruvar, and the documentary Mohiniyattam). Sivan has also had success as a director: his 1988 short The Story of Tiblu earned a National Award, while his first feature Halo, a Hindi-language movie for children, also captured one of the coveted prizes and earned other honors at Egyptian and Canadian film festivals.
[ continued on page 4 ] © 1999 ASC