With such a full resumé, it's only natural that Sivan would try to up the ante. "When I decided to direct The Terrorist, I thought that also being its cinematographer would be a great advantage, just as if I had been its writer," says Sivan, a founding/executive member of the recently established Indian Society of Cinematographers. "[During the shoot,] there were times when I was very much in sync with my instincts as a director, as when I was incorporating elements of nature and going ahead with particular moments when it was raining."
One of Sivan's favorite cinematographers is fellow countryman Subroto Deb, who photographed a number of pictures for esteemed Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray. Sivan particularly appreciates the timeless beauty of Deb's work in Charulata (The Lonely Wife), a 1964 period piece about Victorian-era India. On The Terrorist, Sivan took some cues from the paintings of Anjolie Ela Menon, but he also strove for sense of realism. Despite the fact that he shot the film on slow stocks (Kodak's 100 ASA EXR 5248 and Vision 200T 5274), he tried to work in natural light as much as possible, and employed "very simple lighting equipment — only a 2.5K HMI and about four small tungsten fixtures. I wanted The Terrorist to work in multiple layers, so I decided to make the film as if I were painting a picture."
Given Sivan's desire to delve into Malli's submerged psyche, he shot The Terrorist primarily in character-studying close-ups, using an Arri 35-III outfitted with a Zeiss 60mm T3 macro lens. "I thought that we should concentrate the camera primarily on her — like a mind probe — rather than trying to capture the grandeur of the place. I was very interested in understanding her face and treating it like a landscape. Most faces are very beautiful, if you try to see their inner beauty. I also like to use close-up lenses to enhance perspectives and give sound a different meaning — if you are [focusing] on a face, for example, you can really accentuate a person's breathing.
"I also wanted to explore water in close-ups," he continues. "I've always thought of a protagonist's mind as if it were water. [Depending on the individual's psychological state,] sometimes it is like a waterfall, at other times it's like the static surface of a pond, and sometimes it is merely a drop of liquid." Water images figure prominently throughout The Terrorist: Malli and her menacing comrades tote machine guns during a drenching downpour filmed from a dutch angle; in a tranquil moment, Malli cuts an enticing figure while disrobing before a cascading waterfall; and the young revolutionary is sometimes seen crossing a reflective river in colorful panoramas.
Maintaining this aquatic motif, many scenes boast a rich aquamarine ambiance. In one sequence, while resting at a compound, Malli hears the faint echoes of a baby crying. In search of the sound's source, she makes her way into an open courtyard surrounded by balustrades. The space is done up in an aquamarine tones, while hints of warm gold peep out from the surrounding room's windows. "We shot that sequence just after sunset, during 'magic hour,' with the natural light," Sivan notes. "In India, there are many such houses with open courtyards at the center which are lit by direct sunlight. For the interiors, we used [uncorrected] tungsten lamps."
Despite its emphasis on character, however, The Terrorist is as much a territorial journey as it is a personal one. While training to become a hardened assassin, Malli traverses the sumptuous countryside in and around Madras. At one point, she is accompanied by Lotus, a naive young boy who happens to be an expert tracker. In one particularly picturesque sequence, the pair sleep in an open patch of forest. The surrounding thicket is bathed in a greenish-blue hue, and the two travelers are lit from above by a glowing white beam of moonlight. "That was totally done day-for-night," Sivan reveals. "We shot it at a time when the sunlight would hit only the characters, leaving the rest [of the area] in shadow. We underexposed it by one and a half stops — photographing it without an 85 filter — and filled up [the surrounding area] with huge white scrims [to sculpt the light]."
Given the film's frugal $25,000 (U.S.) budget, Sivan and his crew of film students from Chennai's Loyola College Visual Communications Department had to be extremely creative in designing shots. The most trying was part of the film's final sequence, in which Malli wraps a garland of flowers around her target's neck — before a crowd of hundreds — and then kneels respectfully and detonates her belt of plastic explosives. The scene is suggestive by design, so it did not require an elaborate pyrotechnics display; surprisingly, the real difficulty was in implying the herds of followers encircling the doomed politician. "Due to our low budget, we had to shoot the final shot — in which this supposedly huge crowd had gathered — with a mere 20 people. We had to portray the victim as larger than life, and also try to create the ambiance of a 'huge crowd.' We ended up making the scene look somewhat convincing by adjusting the macro lens to blur the minister's image."
Contemplating his work, the director/cameraman says that his greatest motivation comes from the mercurial moods of mother India herself. "The best inspiration a cinematographer can get is through the self-discovery that comes with one's travels," he maintains. "While filming, I experience nature to a great extent, whether I'm working during the rainy season, in the desert, or in snowfall. You have the opportunity to witness the seasonal changes, and to constantly predict the [position of] sun. Much like painters, we cinematographers are also inspired through our experiences with nature."
— A. Thompson
Treasure Island (U.S.)
Director/Cinematographer: Scott King
In making his stunning black-and-white feature film debut with Treasure Island, writer/director/cinematographer Scott King turned toward the past — both in his script, which ponders the slippery boundaries dividing narrative and history, and in his choice of equipment and production methods.
Set in San Francisco during World War II, Treasure Island shadows two American naval intelligence agents as they fashion a fictitious persona for a dead body that's going to be left off the Japanese coast prior to a military incursion. The process of creating this fake history entails the writing of well-crafted correspondence to the "man" from his loved ones. While penning these letters, however, both protagonists indulge in some soul-searching that sparks a resurgence of their own repressed psyches. Memories soon lead to madness as the officers slowly scrutinize their own inner lives, as well as the macabre circumstances of this self-examination.
To re-create life during wartime, King — whose previous filmmaking experience includes stints as an executive producer on the indie flicks Star Maps, Shotgun Freeway and Olympia — taught himself how to reconstruct a 1940s pictorial aesthetic from a top-notch source. "I purchased all of the American Cinematographer magazines from 1933 to 1945," he says. King also perused back issues of International Photographer, as well as John Alton's black-and-white lighting primer Painting With Light. Using these publications as guides, King was able to glean pertinent information about the period's lenses, lighting styles, and processing methods.
King's choice of camera was certainly esoteric; he employed a vintage Mitchell BNCR, a 175-pound camera owned by Paramount and now utilized mainly for television. "It's a fine camera," King says. "It was built in 1932 and then refitted in the 1950s by Karl Freund [ASC] when he was shooting I Love Lucy. I initially wanted to use the Mitchell because I thought I could get the old Cooke lenses, which are uncoated and make a softer image. The Cooke lenses are also not very contrasty, and since we were trying to re-create a Forties look, that was important." King could not get his hands on any Cooke lenses, however, and wound up opting for Zeiss primes instead.
While the camera's enormous weight might have discouraged many filmmakers, King turned into an advantage. "I knew that we wouldn't be moving the camera very much, and we didn't; there are 222 shots in the film, and I think we moved the camera six times. In modern movies, people move the camera a lot, and I don't know if it's always a good idea. The nice thing about the Mitchell is that if you're going to move the camera, you have to know why."
In addition to keeping the camera still, King hewed to a few other rules with what he describes as "fascistic" intransigence. "We shot the entire film at an aperture of T2, without exception," he says. "We only adjusted the light. I wanted [the look] to be as soft as possible, not only in terms of the contrast, but also in terms of the depth of field. When you look at old movies, it's surprising how little depth of field there is, and how much attention the filmmakers are paying to focus." King's use of extremely short depth of field allowed him to fully explore the creative possibilities of focus. "One of the neat things about the film is that you're not always sure what the hell is going on," he explains. "There's always a part of the story itself that's out of focus, a part that you just can't make out. To my mind, it was really fun to have the ability to focus on people where I wanted."
In his aim to approximate the past, King photographed Treasure Island on Kodak's 5222 black-and-white stock. "In the old days, they were shooting at 8 ASA, and had these giant arc lights everywhere," he notes. The director/cameraman tried to simulate that lighting approach with plenty of hardened ambiance.
To maintain a full tonal range in his palette, King banished shades of black and white from his sets. "The images are all grayish," he details. "Back then, cinematographers felt that if you were shooting black-and-white, it had to match the colors tonally. They were thinking in terms of pure color, so as a result, their version of black-and-white is much different than what we see today."
King also deployed colored filters and fixtures to accentuate the tonalities of his monochrome emulsion. "If you put someone in green light [when shooting in black-and-white], the person looks really old and tired," he explains. "But if you put a person in pink light, all of the tones even out — the skin becomes lighter than everything else [in the frame], and you can do some amazing things. While this technique is still practiced in still photography, I think that really being aware of what color can do is a lost art." In terms of filters, King employed a coral 2 indoors and a red 1 outdoors; he also endowed his imagery with a slight tint and texture by shooting through a nude silk stocking, which he special-ordered from Paris.
The result of King's adherence to classic methods is quite impressive. Treasure Island sparks an uncanny connection with another era and aesthetic, reminding us why indie moviemaking is crucial to cinema history. In discussing the film's gamut of inspirations, King states, "There are always going to be [mainstream] movies starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks — you can't compete with that, and you should not try to. But I think the role of independent film is to make something so different that people really want to see it. Why bother making it unless it's different?"
— H. Willis
