American Cinematographer 4/14 AGWHAAN Article

5 Park City Standouts
then, he says, “If we had five scenes in
the room, we’d shoot out in one direction and keep changing the actors’
wardrobe and background players.”
The canteen, a second-floor location, was lit entirely with natural light
through the windows. In locations that
required supplemental light through
windows, including Ila’s apartment, the
crew positioned 4Ks on tall stands
instead of Condors or scissor lifts, which
are costly to rent in India. “The stands
go incredibly high — much higher than
would be allowed in the West!” says
Simmonds.
On most domestic interiors, he
used fluorescent fixtures. “In reality, a
room in someone’s home might be lit
with a single fluorescent tube, but I used
more than that on any one angle,” he
says.
By contrast, Saajan’s home
features tungsten practicals. Batra notes
that for Indians, this is meaningful:
Only Catholics use tungsten, whereas
upwardly mobile Hindus, like Ila, use
fluorescents. Simmonds strove to tease
out such cultural nuances. “There is a lot
of subtle subtext in Ritesh’s script, and I
encouraged him to make some of that
more obvious to a Western audience,”
he says.
Apart from giving feedback on
some screen shots that were emailed to
him, Simmonds was not involved in the
final grade, which took place at
Laboratoire Arane Gulliver in Paris.
“Being present at the color correction on
an independent film means that you
happen to live in the city where it’s
being timed, and this was an international project, with a lot of elements
happening in different places,” he notes.
By the time The Lunchbox was
released in the United States, in late
February, it was already a big hit in India
and abroad. Simmonds became aware of
this when he arrived at an Indian restaurant in Atlanta, Ga., to shoot a scene for
his next feature. “I mentioned I’d shot
The Lunchbox, and I was an instant
celebrity!”
— Patricia Thomson
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April 2014
A young vampire on the streets in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Director: Ana Lily Amirpour
Cinematographer: Lyle Vincent
Imagine hearing this elevator
pitch: “It’s an Iranian vampire Western,
shot in black-and-white, with a bomb
soundtrack.” That was writer/director
Ana Lily Amirpour’s one-liner for A
Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and
cinematographer Lyle Vincent recalls,
“When I heard that, of course I wanted
to sign up!”
He is glad he did. Collaborating
with Amirpour on her debut feature
allowed him to create a unique world,
one that channels a little David Lynch,
some film noir and the wide, empty
spaces of a Spaghetti Western. When
conjuring the Iranian ghost town Bad
City, home to a host of sordid souls and
one vampire, Vincent found himself
reveling in the distortions of vintage
Xtal Express anamorphic lenses, which
he paired with an Arri Alexa Studio.
Vincent and Amirpour are birds
of a feather, both coming from art backgrounds. Vincent, who won the 2006
ASC John A. Alonzo Heritage Award
for student cinematography, dabbled in
painting and fine-art photography
before heading to New York University,
where he earned an M.F.A. in film. His
feature credits include another 2014
Sundance Film Festival entry, Cooties.
American Cinematographer
Born in England to Iranian
immigrants, Amirpour was raised in the
United States. She attended art school
in San Francisco and eventually found
her way into UCLA’s screenwriting
program. By the time she made A Girl
Walks Home, she had written 10 feature
scripts and created a graphic novel
based on her vampire film.
Amirpour’s film is a mash-up:
The actors are Iranian, the dialogue is
Farsi, and Bad City is a desolate Texas
oil town with Farsi street signs. (The
movie was shot in Southern California.)
The archetypical characters include a
Persian James Dean; his father, the
Gambler; a tattooed Pimp; a Prostitute,
and, of course, the Vampire. This
bloodsucker is a young pixie in full
chador, but underneath she wears a
striped sailor shirt, and she rides a
skateboard and grooves to British rock.
Of her inspirations, Amirpour writes,
“It’s like Sergio Leone and David
Lynch had an Iranian rock ’n’ roll baby,
and then Nosferatu came and babysat.”
Specific inspirations included Once
Upon a Time in the West, Rumble Fish,
Blade Runner and all of Lynch’s films.
The idea was to mold these
disparate parts into something timeless.
“Black-and-white gave us a lot,” notes
the director. So, too, does the gliding
camerawork, which was accomplished
chiefly with a Steadicam. “We owe a lot
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night frame grabs courtesy of the Sundance Film Festival.
Photos by Sina Sayyah and Todd Kappelt, courtesy of the filmmakers.
◗
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5 Park City Standouts
Top:
Cinematographer
Lyle Vincent
(right) and
director Ana Lily
Amirpour assess
a shot. Bottom:
Preparing the
scene are
(clockwise from
foreground left)
1st AC Joey
Alvarado,
Vincent,
Amirpour, actress
Sheila Vand and
best boy electric
Jake Magee.
to our Steadicam operator, Scott
Dropkin,” says Vincent. “He came in for
a week and gave us everything we
needed.”
Equally important to the look and
feel are the hard, noir-style lighting and
the 2.40:1 anamorphic image. Of the
latter, Vincent observes, “Lily and I love
all the weird flaws of the lenses — the
flares, the streaking, the breathing, the
distortions.” The cinematographer originally hoped to use Panavision C Series
88
April 2014
anamorphics, but they were not available when it came time to shoot. (Some
test shots that he captured with them
made it into the film, however.)
So, he dug out some of his old
Zeiss Xtal Express lenses. “They were
not in good shape,” he says, but they
proved ideal for the part. Spherical
lenses adapted with a Shiga anamorphic
element, they had a fast aperture and a
vintage coating that gave a very expressive look. “They were pretty close to the
American Cinematographer
Panavision Cs, but even funkier,” says
Vincent.
His well-worn lenses were rebuilt by Panavision optical engineer
Dan Sasaki and Guy McVicker, the
camera service manager at Panavision
Hollywood. Panavision then supplemented Vincent’s lenses with some
Cooke and Zeiss Xtal Express anamorphics and added an Angenieux Optimo
25-250mm HR zoom and a 100mm
macro lens. Fortunately, color matching
wasn’t an issue because the final image
would be monochrome. “The lenses are
all over the place, and the contrast is
really low, so they don’t look great in
color, but in black-and-white they really
shine,” says Vincent. “They gave us
more latitude, and the blacks came up a
little. Lily and I loved them.”
Vincent’s go-to lenses were a
Cooke Xtal Express 25mm T.3 and a
Zeiss Xtal Express 35mm T1.3. “The
25mm is a beautiful lens, and we used it
for POV shots and when the father is
sick and tripping out,” he says. “We
usually stopped that down.” The 35mm
“was a really funky lens. The edges are
very distorted, and that’s particularly
noticeable in shots where the highlights
are really stretched, like right before the
Persian James Dean and the vampire
meet on the street. On the Alexa with a
full 4:3 frame, those distortions become
even more apparent. It was perfect for
the painterly, expressionistic tone we
wanted.
“My lighting was basically all hard,
single-source light,” he continues. “We
only used tungsten lights that were available in the 1940s because we wanted the
noir look of that era; we had one 5K,
some 2Ks and smaller units.” On the
haunted streets, he tended to use available light from the streetlights and then
position a 5K for backlight. In general, he
says, his approach “was about keeping
deep, rich shadows. We always wanted a
black reference and a white reference to
make true black-and-white photography.
I don’t like when black-and-white is all
gray tones. I like to see the full range of
tones.”
The images were recorded in
ProRes 4:4:4:4 to SxS cards. “We were
shooting available light in a little town at
night, and I pushed it to the max: 3,200
ISO and a 270-degree shutter,” Vincent
recalls. “In color, you’d see more of the
noise and grain, but in black-and-white
it just blended in. There is some stoppeddown, deep-field focus on some exteriors
because we wanted more of that
Spaghetti Western feel. So on day exteriors we’d get down to a T8 or T5.6. But
we were always at T2 or T2.8 at night.”
Vincent used Arri’s Look Creator
to devise a black-and-white viewing
LUT, which he applied on set to a Sony
OLED monitor. “It was a very deep
contrast,” he says. In post, “we transformed the color images into monochrome using the color channels in the
DaVinci Resolve, and then fine-tuned
from there.” The color correction was
done at Los Angeles facility Runway
with colorist Zak Meadows.
While excited about the film’s
enthusiastic reception at Sundance,
Amirpour was especially thrilled by her
uncle’s reaction back in Iran. “He loved
it,” she says. “He said, ‘The kids are definitely going to get this on the black
market.’”
— Patricia Thomson
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