While they are distinctly different, three accomplishments have drawn SHOOT to a trio of cinematographers to kick off the new year: Xavier Pérez Grobet who shot the feature I Love You Phillip Morris, which debuted to rave reviews at the recently concluded Sundance Film Festival; Bryan Newman who shot two of the four spots that last month earned Tom Kuntz of MJZ a Directors Guild of America (DGA) Award nomination as best commercial director of 2008; and Donald McAlpine, ASC, ACS who received the 2009 American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) International Achievement Award earlier this week..
Here are some reflections from Grobet, Newman and McAlpine on their diverse careers, filmmaking and digital cinematography:
Xavier Pérez Grobet Commercials have been an important part of Grobet’s career as a cinematographer dating back to his days in Mexico. Ten years ago he moved stateside and continued to be involved in spots but in recent years has been immersed in feature films. His next feature project, Mother And Child for director and screenwriter Rodrigo Garcia, is most ambitious yet at the same time Grobet said he wants to commit to getting more active in spots via his agent Dattner Dispoto and Associates, Los Angeles.
Over the years, Grobet has lensed ads for such clients as Sprint, FedEx, T-Mobile, Best Buy, McDonald’s, Burger King and the Ad Council, collaborating with directors Harold Einstein, Phil Morrison, Matt Smuckler and Harry Cocciolo, among others.
Of commercialmaking, Grobet observed, “It gives you the chance to set your mind on something specific and come up with quick solutions. Everything happens so fast and it keeps you creatively nimble, to be on top of things visually, to experiment and learn. In a way it’s like a lab. In a movie you have to come up with a style and maintain it throughout a whole shoot for two or three months. Commercials, though, allow you to deploy a different style or styles within a short time frame. The tools you work with, the experimentation have helped me in my feature work.”
Mother and Child itself will present Grobet with experience on a new front as he will shoot the feature with the Panavision Genesis digital camera. He is no stranger to digital cinematography, having lensed the CBS primetime series pilot Swingtown with Thomson’s Grass Valley Viper. “The Viper was an easy camera to use and the results were really good,” assessed Grobet.
Yet in the case of that series pilot, the final product was in HD. For the upcoming Mother and Child, Grobet is shooting on Genesis and then transferring to film for the first time. “It should be an interesting experience. I very much like what I know about the camera and had considered it for my last feature, I Love You Phillip Morris, but we wound up shooting on film instead.”
Mother and Child stars Naomi Watts, Kerry Washington and Annette Bening. The film centers on a 50-year-old woman, the daughter she gave up for adoption 35 years ago, and a woman looking to adopt a child. Produced by Alfonso Cuaron, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Guillermo del Toro, Mother and Child is scheduled for release in December 2010.
Mother and Child reunites Grobet and director/writer Garcia. They previously worked on the feature Nine Lives. “We decided to shoot Nine Lives in real time with no cuts. The whole film is only nine shots, that was our challenge,” recalled Grobet. “Let’s tell the story without cutting the camera out. The experience was challenging and the result was beautiful. Now this time around with Mother and Child we’ve come full circle. I asked Rodrigo [Garcia] if we could shoot this film without moving the camera, letting actors play the frame. We will try to get the frame to be as strong as possible, to make a statement, and let the actors do what they do within that framework. This is very much a performance piece and doesn’t require us moving around all that much.
“I’m looking forward to shooting this digitally,” he continued. “I love film. I know film. At the same time I want to access and use new tools. It’s time to get into digital for sure. My very first experience was almost ten years ago on a little film called Tortilla Soup. I shot on a 480P Panasonic camera and we outputted to film but optically–not electronically. It was a good experience, a good looking movie and people couldn’t tell that it was shot on video.”
Whatever the project and the means of shooting, Grobet simply wants to do good work. That’s what attracted him to I Love You Phillip Morris, directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa. “It was a great script, very funny, emotional and just a terrific story,” said Grobet. “It’s all about telling a story.”
The film stars Jim Carey and Ewan McGregor. The former plays Steven Russell, a married father whose exploits land him in the Texas criminal justice system. Russell falls in love with his cellmate [McGregor] who is eventually set free, which leads Russell to escape four times from Texas prisons. Shooting was done in Louisiana and Florida on Kodak film stock.
“This isn’t the broad kind of comedy you associate with Jim Carey,” related Grobet. “It goes into other levels of performance and it was great to see the film make the grade at Sundance, a tremendous honor.”
Grobet has worked his way up to Sundance. He knew from the age of 12 when he started experimenting with a Super 8 camera in his native Mexico that he wanted a career in filmmaking. He went to film school in Mexico, and began assisting in camera capacities on movies. He was a focus puller on the feature Total Recall, and did support work on other features before graduating to cinematographer with La Mujer de Benjamin (Benjamin’s Woman) written and directed by his former film school colleague Carlos Carrera. The feature won assorted awards worldwide and was nominated for a best cinematography honor by the Mexican Academy of Motion Pictures.
The picture that put Grobet on the U.S. industry map was director Julian Schnabel’s Before Night Falls, which featured Johnny Depp and Sean Penn. The film garnered a best actor Oscar nomination for Javier Bardem and a best cinematography nod at the Independent Spirit Awards.
Bryan Newman A cinematographer whose work spans arresting visuals and that genre that DPs don’t get much credit for, comedy, Bryan Newman has gained some recent recognition in the latter based on work with director Tom Kuntz. Last month Kuntz earned a coveted DGA Award nomination as best spot helmer of ’08 on the strength of four spots, two of which were lensed by Newman: the uproarious Skittles’ “Pinata” out of TBWAChiatDay, New York; and the offbeat comedic California Milk Processor Board spot “White Gold Is” for Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco.
Furthermore, Newman shot the Kuntz-directed “Tips” for CareerBuilder.com (Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, Ore.), a funny spot which was one of the best received in this year’s crop of Super Bowl advertising.
Indeed Newman is known to some as a good humor man in that he regularly works with comedy directors Kuntz as well as Tim Godsall of Biscuit Filmworks and Randy Krallman of Smuggler. Newman also shot a Nike comedy spot with Lance Armstrong directed by Christopher Guest (Waiting For Guffman, Best in Show) of Go Film.
“In some respects comedy is harder than the kind of work that I and almost any cinematographer loves to do–beautiful pictures, amazing shots and visually driven pieces,” related Newman. “In comedy you have to exercise a lot of restraint. That’s what makes Tom [Kuntz] and other great comedy directors so successful. Tom pulls everything back just a tiny bit. Others with the same kinds of concepts go a little too far so that when you’re watching their work, you don’t believe it. You have to let the humor naturally come out and that’s the challenge for the director and the DP. You cannot have photography distract from the comedy and be the center of attention. You have to use a lot of restraint.”
Yet as alluded to, all of Newman’s lensing eggs aren’t in the comedy basket. At press time, the DP–who is repped by Endeavor, Beverly Hills–was about to embark on a visually driven Shell job for JWT London that will entail his shooting with the Sony F35 digital camera for the first time. “I’m excited to see what I can do with the camera,” said Newman who is experienced in both film and digital lensing. Again on the pretty picture front, he has shot with the Genesis quite a bit, including a Verizon job and Wal-Mart commercials. And Newman has RED digital camera savvy and expertise, having collaborated with Albert Watson of cYclops.
“Albert is one of the most amazing photographers around and he chose the RED camera,” said Newman. “If Albert is exploring digital cinematography, there’s something to it creatively. For me it’s another tool. I like HD for the right projects. I try to find some basis of reality for what I shoot. I feel like people can connect to things if there’s some grounding reality in the photography. And these HD formats add to the artist’s palette. You can take reality and put a little twist on it, introduce some new artifice, stylize it a little. It’s great to experiment with.”
Newman has also done a large body of stylized film spots for Target out of Petersen Milla Hooks, Minneapolis, working with such directors as Mikon Van Gastel of A Very Small Office, and Josh & Xander of @radical.media.
Additionally there’s a noteworthy U.S. Army campaign Newman shot for director Henry Alex Rubin of Smuggler for agency MRM Partners Worldwide.
Newman’s endeavors also include visual filmmaking for MAC Cosmetics directed by Floria Sigismondi of Believe Media, and Fidelity directed by filmmaker Todd Field (In The Bedroom) via Uber Content.
About a year and a half ago, Newman shot a series of clips for Sean Lennon directed by Michele Civetta. Newman actually has some video roots dating back to his days as a student at NYU Film School. He shot clips for local N.Y. bands, as well as some spec commercials during his third year at NYU. Upon graduating in ’99, Newman got his first break, landing a shooting gig for a spot promoting a dot-com client. The production house was HKM where Newman got to know director Michael Karbelnikoff.
“Michael took me under his wing, hired me on a bunch of jobs. The first one I ever did with him was 18 days for Time Warner. I learned a lot from Michael and owe him a great deal for helping to launch my career.”
Donald McAlpine The ASC International Achievement Award is presented annually to a cinematographer who has made significant and enduring contributions to the global art of filmmaking. If that isn’t honor enough, Donald McAlpine, ASC, ACS, who received the award on Feb. 15, also earned the distinction of becoming the first Australian to garner the ASC kudo. He follows in the footsteps of such honorees over the years as Freddie Young, BSC; Jack Cardiff, BSC; Gabriel Figueroa, AMC; Henri Alkekan; Raoul Coutard; Freddie Francis, BSC; Witold Sobocinski, PSC; Miroslav Ondricek, ASC, ACK; Tonino Delli Colli, AIC; Gilbert Taylor, BSC; Michael Ballhaus, ASC; and Walter Lassally, BSC.
“To be named to receive this honor is an amazing shock. It came straight out of the blue,” said McAlpine who’s represented by The Gersh Agency, Beverly Hills. “I had no concept that it would happen but I’m exceedingly pleased it did. It reinforces my absolute and total acceptance here in what’s fundamentally for me a foreign country. Going way back from my earliest times in the U.S., I never sensed resentment at any level from anyone based on my nationality. And I was among the first of this new Australian wave that dug into the American market.”
McAlpine’s initial industry involvement came as an assistant TV newscameraman Down Under. He also directed some spots early on before transitioning into short dramas when he hooked up with Film Australia, a government entity that produced 35mm color film documentaries.
A few of his short dramas caught the eye of director Bruce Beresford who recruited him in 1972 to collaborate on the feature film The Adventures of Barry McKenzie. McAlpine recalled of the experience, “I felt like I had come home.”
McAlpine made another major career stride in ’82 with a phone call from director Paul Mazursky who was taken by three Aussie films, My Brilliant Career, The Getting of Wisdom and Breaker Morant, which had opened on cinema screens in Manhattan during a two-week stretch. Mazursky noticed that McAlpine had shot all three films.
This in turn led to McAlpine shooting Tempest for Mazursky. The cinematographer then lensed Harry & Son, which was directed by and featured Paul Newman. In ’85, McAlpine got his first chance to shoot a film on Hollywood soundstages when he worked on the Mazursky-helmed Down and Out in Beverly Hills for Disney.
McAlpine’s filmography encompasses seemingly all genres as reflected in such credits as Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, Predator, Mrs. Doubtfire, The Time Machine, Moulin Rouge and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Slated for release in May is yet another feature he lensed, X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
Though he has yet to shoot a feature with a digital camera, he has tested most of the models out there currently. “I cannot convince my producers to use them–not yet,” said McAlpine. “I’m very much digitally inclined to be honest. Sure there are advantages and disadvantages to the digital cameras but the progression forward is exploding.”
As for what digital camera he might gravitate towards initially, McAlpine said, “I’ve shot 50 films on Panavision. I’d probably go with their Genesis system when I step into new waters.”
