One veteran cinematographer has a track record of working with accomplished commercial directors while on the flip side lensing feature films that mark directorial debuts–the latest being Scott Cooper on the acclaimed Crazy Heart.
Another cinematographer also shows his penchant for working in multiple disciplines ranging from features–including the recently released The Ghost Writer, directed by Roman Polanski–to assorted commercials and a short film, The New Tenants, which just won the Oscar for best live-action short and had him collaborating with a long-time spot director colleague, Joachim Back of Park Pictures.
Also spanning short and long form is a cinematographer whose filmography includes: a lauded feature-length documentary which recently made its U.S. debut at the South By Southwest Film Conference and Festival in Austin; a wide range of commercials and music videos; and select short-take fare such as mini-segments of HBO’s Funny or Die Presents.
Here’s a close-up look at cinematographers Barry Markowitz, ASC, Pawel Edelman, and Giles Dunning.
Barry Markowitz, ASC
In accepting this year’s best leading actor Academy Award for his tour de force performance in Crazy Heart, Jeff Bridges thanked a number of professional colleagues on the film, including Barry Markowitz whom he described as “our wonderful DP. He did such a brilliant job.”
The acknowledgement was gratifying to Markowitz who started out in commercials and still considers advertising to be his bread-and-butter discipline. Markowitz believes his spot experience has informed his select feature cinematography endeavors, honing an attention to detail that dates back to his early days in the ad arena, serving as assistant cameraman to such notable directors as Bob Giraldi, and tabletop gurus Santiago Suarez and the legendary Elbert Budin.
Still, Markowitz sees a great similarity between working in feature films and commercials. “Each job has its own set of rules but ultimately you have to be true to the situation, shooting to advance the story. This means you work to do justice to the concept, the story and the performances. Sometimes that means you pull things back as a cinematographer. Other times you have to do more visually. It all comes back to bringing integrity and authenticity to each project.”
Yet there has been a dichotomy between spots and features for Markowitz in terms of directors. “There’s a joke that I’m the king of the first timers,” smiled Markowitz, noting that Crazy Heart marked the directorial debut of Scott Cooper. Markowitz’s cinematography credits also include Sling Blade, which was the feature helming debut of Billy Bob Thornton. Markowitz and Thornton later teamed as DP and director on the lauded All The Pretty Horses. The cinematographer’s body of work also includes Sonny, marking actor Nicholas Cage’s first time in the feature director’s chair. Earlier Markowitz served as an assistant cameraman on Angelo My Love, the narrative feature directing debut of Robert Duvall. Markowitz and Duvall would go on to form a strong collaborative bond, with the DP lensing the critically acclaimed Apostle, directed by Duvall and earning him an Academy Award nomination as best leading actor.
It was Duvall who recommended Markowitz to Cooper for Crazy Heart. Duvall was a producer on the film and served as a supporting actor. Cooper both wrote and directed Crazy Heart.
In contrast to his feature tour of duty spanning notable directorial debuts, Markowitz finds himself working consistently with already well established commercial directors, having longstanding working relationships with varied spotmakers and production companies. For Station Film, for example, Markowitz recently shot a package of commercials for the Tribeca Film Festival directed by David Gray, and at press time Markowitz was about to lens a Gushers’ job directed by Station’s Harold Einstein.
Markowitz also comes off of shooting Healthnet for director Rick Knief at Untitled, Slimfast with director David Steinberg of Dark Light Pictures, and Maxfli/DSG for director William Maher of Sleeping Tree.
For production house Hungry Man, Markowitz has shot for the likes of directors Brian Billow and Scott Vincent. For the former, Markowitz lensed an NHL job in which star hockey players morph from one to the next. And Markowitz recently collaborated with Vincent on Nike Golf.
“I love working in the commercial world,” affirmed Markowitz, who is repped by The Jacob & Kole Agency, Hollywood, Calif. “I’ve got two kids who’ve been playing travel hockey for ten years since they were little ones. I play hockey as well. My family life involves me trying to be in the rink with my family–it’s Jews on skates. I want to be close to home and commercials allow me to do that. I look at features as helping me to get commercials. I’m very selective about features and very much focused on commercials as my career priority.”
Spotmaking also enables Markowitz to stay contemporary, delving into the digital realm. A long-time film guy, he still has made it a point to extend his technological reach, having shot Ford with the RED camera (directed by freelancer Mitchell Goldstein). And for the aforementioned Gushers job, Markowitz is shooting with the Canon 5D Mark II camera, a hybrid HDSLR that shoots still work and HD video. “There are so many new avenues to explore,” he related. “It’s part of what keeps commercials so energizing for me creatively.”
Pawel Edelman
An accomplished cinematographer whose filmography includes best cinematography Oscar, ASC Award and BAFTA Award nominations for The Pianist in 2003, as well as an ASC Award nom for Ray two years later, Pawel Edelman paradoxically felt like he was back in film school last year for a project which turned out to be an Academy Award winner.
That project was The New Tenants, a short film directed by Joachim Back, with whom Edelman has worked fairly regularly on commercials for the past 10 years, dating back to a Coca-Cola spot lensed in Brazil for the South American market. The pair has since collaborated on numerous ads entailing shoots throughout the U.S. and internationally from France to Brussels, Slovenia and Brussels.
Shooting The New Tenants, recalled Edelman, was “like coming back to my time as a film school student. We were a group of friends trying to make a film without any big support. We shot with a minimal crew for four days at the Chelsea Hotel in New York.”
Indeed The New Tenants was Edelman’s first short since he was a film school student. It also marked Back’s first diversification into longer form fare. A dark, twisted mistaken identity caper, The New Tenants went on to win this year’s Oscar for best live-action short.
Edelman’s alluded to film school training came at the acclaimed High Film School in his native Lodz, Poland. Right out of school, he teamed with a director/classmate and shot movies, which went on to become popular criminal storyline/suspense/thriller films. Edelman’s career started to blossom as did his artistry, resulting in his getting the chance to collaborate on several feature films with director Andrzej Wajda, regarded as Poland’s most prominent and prestigious filmmaker. The cinematographer’s work with Wajda may in part have prompted a call from another acclaimed director, Roman Polanski, resulting in Edelman taking on his first major international film, The Pianist. Since then, Edelman has shot two more Polanski films, Oliver Twist and this year’s release, The Ghost Writer.
“I’ve been very lucky in life, being able to work with masters like Wajda and Polanski,” related Edelman, who credits commercials with allowing him to be selective in his feature work. “I’m not working like a crazy man, shooting multiple movies year after year. I want to pick good scripts and have found it wise to wait for a good project. Doing commercials–and also being selective about them–has helped me creatively take on projects I feel strongly about.”
Edelman also feels strongly about celluloid. “I still think that traditional film negative is better than electronic cameras,” he assessed. Still, he has made room to experiment, deploying the Genesis camera to shoot a portion of the Wajda-directed Sweet Rush (the Polish title being Tatarak). Originally the script called for half the film being a 1950s period piece, with the other half set in the present day. The thought was to shoot the 1950s sequences on film, the contemporary portions digitally. However, the script changed, with the film becoming mostly a ’50s period piece, and the current-day scenes being extended monologues featuring the lead actress. Edelman wound up using the Genesis on the monologues and had a positive experience. “It’s a good camera. It doesn’t have quite the quality of film yet but it’s a professional camera. The picture quality was great and frankly no one knows that a part of the movie was shot with a digital camera.”
While Edelman–who is handled by ICM–has his longest running spotmaking relationship with Park Pictures‘ Back, the cinematographer has worked with numerous other directors over the years. Among notable examples is David Fincher of Anonymous Content for whom Edelman shot the first iPhone commercial.
Giles Dunning Making its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival and its U.S. debut this past March at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Conference and Festival, the Emmett Malloy-directed feature-length documentary The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights has gotten stellar reviews, many of which cited the hand-held, natural, docu-style realism of its cinematography as captured by DP Giles Dunning.
“There is a beauty in life and I’m trying to capture that,” said Dunning. “People often feel uncomfortable in front of the camera, so as a cinematographer I try not to force things down people’s throats. If it fits the project, I try to almost be invisible. Sometimes when I’m watching a feature that looks fantastic, I find that I’m watching the cinematography too much and missing the story. You don’t want the cinematography to override the story. You want your shooting to do justice to the story and subject matter.”
The subject matter of Under Great White Northern Lights is The White Stripes on tour all over Canada–from bowling alleys, to city buses and other local venues, and onward to the legendary Savoy Theater for the band’s 10th anniversary show, which turned out to be the group’s longest performance ever on stage. The documentary also delves into the relationship between The White Stripes duo of Jack and Meg White.
Dunning has a history with director Malloy and The White Stripes, including shooting The White Stripes’ “Icky Thump” music video which won the 2008 MVPA Award for best cinematography. The clip was directed by The Malloys, a helming team consisting of brothers Brendan and Emmett Malloy. (The Malloys’ commercialmaking home is HSI Productions.) Dunning has lensed assorted videos and commercials directed by The Malloys over the years.
SHOOT caught up via phone with Dunning who was in Hawaii at press time, shooting a Samsung commercial featuring Alicia Keys in concert. The spot was being directed by the Guard Brothers of production house Smuggler. From there, Dunning was slated to again collaborate with The Malloys on a Chex Mix cereal commercial shooting in Argentina.
“Knowing Emmett to the point where we can communicate in short hand, knowing that Jack White does not want anything run of the mill meant a lot in making the documentary [The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights] something worthwhile creatively,” observed Dunning. “When you shoot a documentary, you shoot in uncontrolled conditions. Yet The Malloys and Jack were still willing to take risks–enabling me to take risks as a DP. For example, we experimented. We used reversal film stocks in black-and-white and in color for the documentary. Just knowing that they will back your risk taking makes all the difference.”
The lion’s share of the documentary–somewhere between 80 to 90 percent–was shot on film, the primary cameras being handheld 16mm Aatons. Dunning also deployed a pair of Bolex cameras, and on the digital side went with two Panasonic HVX cameras with built-in microphones.
Dunning, who is represented by Sheldon Prosnit Agency, Los Angeles, loves being able to go back and forth between film and digital technologies. “Film is a medium that’s been perfected over a hundred years and as a result is the most production-friendly format. I’ve been touching film on set and location for 23 years. I love it.”
At the same time, though, Dunning has made a conscious effort to embrace the digital world. “You find yourself bidding on jobs involving all these new technologies so you better stay on top of it.”
Dunning has done just that, having recently shot a Titan Insurance spot (directed by Little Minx‘s Josh Miller) with the newest model of the RED camera. Dunning also lensed his first commercial using the Canon 5D Mark II–for the Britax children’s car seat. “The Canon images look really good, you can get into a lot of tight places with the camera. On that alone, the camera is revolutionary. It’s not a hundred percent production friendly yet. The potential, though, is great.”
On the horizon, Dunning is scheduled to embark on a RED camera anamorphic shoot for a mini-segment of The Funny or Die Presents series on HBO. The project will see him pairing RED with Panavision anamorphic lenses to shoot miniatures in anamorphic format. The segment is being directed by Matt Piedmont, a former writer/producer on Saturday Night Live, who earlier was with DDB Chicago as executive producer of the short-lived yet ambitious bud.TV initiative. Piedmont directed several series for bud.tv and Dunning shot some work for the online entertainment channel.
Being busy shooting, though, can have its drawbacks. Because of his workload, Dunning didn’t get the chance to go to the recently concluded National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Las Vegas. He wanted to hit the NAB exhibit floor to see first hand Arriflex’s new Alexa digital camera. “My understanding is that there are three models of the camera and given Arriflex’s knowledge and film sensibilities, I’m looking forward to what they’ve developed on the digital side.”
