Long Lens

Cinematographer:Harris Savides (2003's "Elephant")

Breakdown: 10-year-old Sean (Cameron Bright) calmly tells the widowed Anna (Nicole Kidman) that he is the reincarnation of her dead husband.

Creative Intent: A seminal inspiration for the film's look was a photo of New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel lobby that director Jonathan Glazer spotted on production designer Kevin Thompson's office wall. "It had a nice atmosphere … an old three-strip color process look to it," Savides says. "Based on what I saw from that picture, I started doing some tests and came up with a look for the movie. We used very soft lighting from overhead whenever we could — and very soft nondirectional lighting — and underexposed the film and also slightly underdeveloped it."

Key Scene: Sean mysteriously appears at a family gathering and watches Anna carry a birthday cake through a darkened apartment. "It's the little boy's point of view," Savides says. "We weren't getting enough illumination from the cake itself, so we took a light and bounced it onto the ceiling and moved it with Nicole as she walked. That gave us enough illumination, and it looked very natural … like the light was coming from the cake."

"Look-at-Me" Camera Moves Verboten: "I hate that," Savides says. "If that happens, we do a disservice to the story. Nothing was overcomplicated or showy; it was always serving a simple purpose: to deliver information to the audience."



Cinematographer: Eduardo Serra (2003's "Girl With a Pearl Earring")

Breakdown: A nonlinear biopic of the late actor-singer Bobby Darin

Creative Intent: Director and star Kevin Spacey "had very specific ideas about the character, the locations and the meaning of everything and the way he wanted it shot," Serra says. "So my work was mainly to try to accommodate and organize visually all those periods, emotions and situations."

Key Scene: The film opens with a Steadicam shot following Darin down a corridor and onto the stage of the Cocoanut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where he cuts short his rendition of "Mack the Knife" and reveals that he is actually on a soundstage making a film about his life. "It's a nightclub-lighting mood, and when it stops, it moves to a different kind of lighting in the same place," Serra says. "The film is a puzzle, a box in a box; it goes from cold to warm and from soft to contrast-y. It has to go back and forth and give some identity to each piece of the puzzle and, at the same time, still be able to interact with the other pieces of the puzzle."

Story Trumps Style: Scenes of Darin at work as a film actor during the early 1960s required Serra to use Old Hollywood lighting techniques (including blasting key, fill and back lights), allowing the DP to work in new ways. "I'm more a follower of natural light," Serra says. "I don't work with spots of light; I work with big bounces and big soft lights, always trying to do contrast."





Cinematographer: Stephen Goldblatt (HBO's "Angels in America")

Breakdown: Director Mike Nichols adapts Patrick Marber's hit play about a pair of unsympathetic couples (Julia Roberts and Clive Owen/Natalie Portman and Jude Law) involved in a transatlantic game of musical beds.

Creative Intent: "I felt that in a piece like 'Closer,' which is so much about inner life, the close-ups would be crucial, and I wanted those close-ups not to be beautiful but to have real meaning," Goldblatt says. "I'd worked with Julia before, and I was quite certain that she wouldn't expect me to just make her look like a star because she wouldn't have been doing that film if that's what she wanted. That went for the whole cast."

Key Scene: "By far the most difficult scene for me was the confrontation and the breakup between Julia and Clive's characters," Goldblatt says. "When she tells him she's having an affair, that long, continuous shot through the studio and up the stairs and back down again ends in a big close-up of Julia. It was so important to catch that because it was deeply felt, and I was terrified that for any technical reason we might miss (it) — and I don't think we did."

Taking a Pass on Digital Intermediate: "The last four films I did were with a DI, and on this one I didn't use it at all," Goldblatt says. "Basically the money wasn't available, and I didn't feel that it was crucial to the film. I've made, I don't know … 25 films without a DI, so I thought I could manage it just once more."

Cinematographer:Ellen Kuras (2002's "Personal Velocity")

Breakdown: Sad-sack everyman Joel (Jim Carrey) signs up to erase the memory of his angst-ridden ex-girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) and quickly comes to regret it.

Creative Intent: Director Michel Gondry wanted Kuras to keep it real — and that meant shooting nearly the entire film hand-held, making extensive use of practical New York locations and doing as many in-camera effects as possible. "We were using mirrors and dimmers … we were doing double passes of the shots," Kuras says. "For me as a cinematographer, it was really challenging because it was giving me a chance to really examine the mechanics of filmmaking again."

Key Scenes: Joel and Clementine scurry across streets, snow and sand in his mindscape, trying to outrun efforts to erase her. For many shots Kuras used what she calls a "memory light," a battery-powered lamp mounted atop a camera that illuminates objects directly in front of it but leaves everything else in the dark. "I was really interested in blowing out certain parts of the frame because it's almost like using the light as a metaphor," Kuras says. "Certain parts of your memory are not clear; not everything is fully in focus."

Downside of Realism: Shooting outdoors during the coldest New York winter in 15 years. "We froze our asses off," Kuras says. "If it was 12 degrees, we felt like it was warm."





Cinematographer: Frederick Elmes (2003's "Coffee and Cigarettes")

Breakdown: A biopic about sex researcher Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson)

Creative Intent: Writer-director Bill Condon aimed to avoid the clichés of standard-issue biopics. "We wanted to make the camera style, and the lighting in particular, grow out of what was happening to the characters," Elmes says. "Every scene has a little different character depending on what's happening."

Key Scene: At the end of the film, an aging Kinsey is lecturing to a sparse audience in a large rotunda. "We see that no one's really listening to what he's saying anymore," Elmes says. "I chose to put him in a shaft of sunlight (actually an HMI light) as if it was a spotlight, which was hitting the top of his head and his shoulders and not much lighting his face — so it was this very harsh light on him. I let the rest of the room fall away so that you weren't quite sure what was happening out there — it had kind of a lonely feeling to it. We also kept the camera moving. You get a sense of disorientation, which is what he feels — then, finally, he collapses."

Painting the Picture: Elmes shaped the visual arc with a time-honored array of lighting, filters and laboratory processes. "We kept the film on the warm side during the earlier scenes and cooled it off in the later scenes," he says. "As (Kinsey's) life progresses, the feeling is often harsher; when he's in that lecture hall or after his collapse in the hospital, there's almost a blue quality to it."





Cinematographer: Jim Denault (HBO's "Carnivale")

Breakdown: Desperate and pregnant, a 17-year-old Colombian girl (Catalina Sandino Moreno) agrees to swallow balloons of heroin and smuggle them to New York.

Creative Intent: "The intention was that it was going to be a neorealist or documentary-style narrative," says Denault, also the indie film's sole camera operator. "We planned that anytime the camera was going to move, it would be hand-held; the rest of the time, it would be on sticks. I think it was Day 4 when we were running a little short on time; I said, 'Instead of setting up shots like this, I'll cover this sequence hand-held.' Josh (Marston, the film's writer-director) liked that so much that he said, 'I think we should just get rid of the tripod.' Basically, from that point on in the movie, there's no tripod — it kind of became the aesthetic."

Key Scene: The opening sequences in Maria's cramped house. "We had a very small lighting package," Denault says. "The scenes inside Maria's house we lit with 100-watt light bulbs taped to the ceiling; it looks like we were shooting with available light. That sort of look emotionally resonates with all the scenes (in her house) in a way that really helps the story without saying, 'Look at this slick photography.'"

On-Set Epiphany: "Beyond a certain point, it's not about the tools; it's about what you do with them and what your individual taste is," Denault says. "I felt like, hey, I can do this with even-more-limited resources than I thought."