Cinematographer Benoit Delhomme’s first collaboration with director James Marsh (a Best Feature Documentary Oscar winner in 2009 for Man On Wire) has yielded The Theory of Everything (Focus Features), a major contender this awards season as reflected in widespread recognition that includes a Critics’ Choice Award nomination for Best Picture and a Golden Globe nom for Best Motion Picture-Drama. While The Theory of Everything sheds light on renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking who has excelled in the face of being stricken by ALS, the story goes even deeper than that, delving into his marriage to Jane Wilde Hawking who provided him with tireless support. The couple’s relationship comes to life in this film, driven by the remarkable performances of Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones. Redmayne and Jones have earned nominations from such competitions as the Golden Globes, the Critics Choice Awards, the SAG Awards, and the London Critics Circle Film Awards.
The Theory of Everything translated into some very real challenges for Delhomme as a cinematographer. “My personal challenge was first to make an exciting film, visually speaking. The producers were worried that the film could look like a depressing ‘kitchen sink’ drama as English people call them because of so many intimate interior scenes between Jane and Stephen. So I decided to make it a very sunny movie. I thought that the energy of the light should be visible, touchable. I wanted the sun to be strong on Stephen’s face like if it was its best friend.
“Showing the progression of the disease was of course one of the main subjects and I wanted the camera moves to be in sync with Eddie Redmayne’s recreation of the ALS symptoms. The idea was also to make a film with no equations on a blackboard but instead trying to give a sense of the math calculations and physics with visual metaphors, like creating a black hole in a cup of coffee.”
In terms of what drew him to the project, Delhomme related, “When I heard about the project from my agent, I got immediately attracted to it. My instinct was telling me that Stephen Hawking would be an incredibly inspiring subject for a film. Then I read the script one early morning in my bed and I cried several times during the reading. My agent sent me the script of The Imitation Game and The Theory Of Everything the same week. They were both terrific stories but I could relate more to the Hawking script on an intimate level. I could project myself and my imagination so easily into it. I’ve always been fascinated by how Stephen Hawking could visualize the conception of the Universe, the Big Bang, the Black Holes…His brain is going at the speed of the light but his body is unable to move at all. One line of dialogue of the doctor who is delivering the ALS diagnosis will always stay with me: ‘your brain will stay intact….but unfortunately no one will know about it.’ I thought all the elements for a very poignant melodrama were in place: the love triangle, the ineluctable progression of the disease, the conception of the Universe.”
Also falling into place was Delhomme’s collaborative relationship with director Marsh. “During the first interview with James, I think we realized at the same time that we were talking the same cinema language. We had the same movie’s culture, a similar sensitivity, a common hate for certain ways of making films too. We could have been talking forever. I think he was surprised that I was so passionate about making that film.
“We very quickly agreed on a visual style that we could resume by this manifesto: Douglas Sirk meets Krzysztof Kieslowski. James is one of the most generous directors I have worked with. He trusted my creative instinct from day one. When rehearsing the scenes with the actors, he would always ask me if the blocking will permit the most powerful visuals. He made it clear to the actors that my input was crucial. A dream for a DP.”
For The Theory of Everything, Delhomme deployed the ARRI Alexa which he described as “my favorite camera since I gave up shooting on film a few years ago. I shot Lawless and A Most Wanted Man with Alexa too. HD was a big unknown territory for me until I shot a successful Calvin Klein commercial with Fabien Baron a few years ago…I did suggest to James that we should try to use two very different types of lenses on Theory. Spherical lenses (Leica Summilux) for the beginning of the movie and all this 1960s’ Cambridge campus recreation and the start of the love story between Stephen and Jane. And then abruptly switch to anamorphic lenses from the moment Stephen gets diagnosed with ALS. I wanted to show that his spatial perception of the world is changing suddenly when he gets this terrible news.”
As for lessons learned from his experience on Theory, Delhomme observed that the most important was “trusting my personal ‘detector of emotions.’ Choices of lights and framings are such powerful enhances of actors’ performances. I feel more and more responsible to put the camera at the right place at the right moment. I also learnt not to be shy to be too symbolic in my use of colors and not always try to explain and sell all my choices. Instinct cannot be explained in a rational way.”
Yet while lessons like these are valuable, they cannot be applied formulaically to the next project, cautioned Delhomme, “because every film is unique and needs a special treatment. Of course your technical knowledge is growing each time and protecting you more and more from failures and mistakes but on a pure artistic level I feel the need to refresh and reset my ideas each time. I can’t apply formulas again and again. This is why I like to work with new directors as much as possible and try things I have never done before. I did use strong colors on Theory and now I want to make desaturated and monochromatic images on the next one.
Specifically regarding what’s next after Theory, Delhomme shared, “I am just finishing shooting a campaign for Booking.com directed by Dante Ariola and produced by MJZ and will start shooting a feature film at the beginning of next year–a Civil War movie directed by Gary Ross with Matthew McConaughey starring in it. It always takes me a long time to find the right project. The story has to speak to me on a very personal level. I was moved to tears by Gary’s script so I felt I had to jump in the fire again.”
Regarding how he entered the fire to begin with many years ago, Delhomme recalled, “When I was a teenager I was spending all my time when not at school taking stills. I was processing the B&W negs myself and spending hours printing in my homemade darkroom. My heroes were guys like Robert Frank, Edward Weston, Kertesz. I thought the life of a photographer would suit my personality. I had a very romantic idea of it. I was quite happy to discover the world through the lens of my Canon FTB. I was also watching a lot of great classic movies on the French TV CineClub. I was living in Cherbourg in Normandy so we did not get to see all the movies in theaters but I was going nearly every Saturday night to a small cinema called the Studio 70. This is where I discovered American independent cinema. Films like Johnny Got His Gun, Badlands, and also the world cinema, films by the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa…I thought these were far more exciting than the French movies. For me cinema was very early on connected with travel experience, discovery of new countries and new territories. When I finished school my parents thought I already knew how to be a photographer so they did not see the interest for me to study still photography and they pushed me to enter a film school in Paris called Louis Lumière to learn how to become a director of photography. They did not see me as a director. They thought the technical side of a DP would fit me better, I guess. It was already a victory for me to have parents accepting me not pursuing a medical career like my father. The two years of film school were a total revelation for me. I discovered I had such a physical pleasure operating a camera, observing and following actors through the lens. I completely neglected the lighting side of the DP’s job the first year of film school but the second year I was asked to light a B&W short movie in a total expressionist style for a student director who was a Fritz Lang fanatic and this is how I really started to think seriously to become a DP.”
Next came a few years as a camera assistant for some French DPs like Bruno Nuytten on French epic movies Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources. “I was suffering so much from ‘focus pulling anxiety’ that I decided to start working on short movies as a DP even if I was not paid at all,” related Delhomme. “My first feature film breakthrough as a DP was Scent Of Green Papaya, a Vietnamese film I shot entirely on stage in Paris. That film got many awards including Camera d’Or in Cannes Festival and an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film. It was such a lucky and unconventional start for a French DP. Then I shot another Vietnamese movie called Cyclo with the same director [Tran Anh Hung] and he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. I always wanted to make films outside France and these movies helped me immensely to reach international productions. This is what I have done mainly since in 15 years. I worked with Anthony Minghella, David Mamet, Mike Figgis. I collaborated twice with John Hillcoat on two movies I especially love , The Proposition and Lawless. Just before The Theory Of Everything I shot A Most Wanted Man for the legendary photographer Anton Corbijn and starring Philip Seymour Hoffman.
The International Press Academy has bestowed five Satellite Award nominations upon The Theory of Everything–for Best Motion Picture, Best Actor (Redmayne), Actress (Jones), Best Adapted Screenplay (Anthony McCarten) and Best Cinematography (Delhomme).
Yves Belanger
For his work on Wild, cinematographer Yves Belanger earned a prestigious Golden Frog nomination this year from Camerimage. Wild is the second feature he has shot for director Jean-Marc Vallee–the first being Dallas Buyers Club which garnered Best Leading Actor and Best Supporting Actor Oscars for Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto, respectively, in 2014.
In Wild, Reese Witherspoon portrays Cheryl Strayed while Laura Dern plays her mother. Based on Strayed’s best-selling memoir (“Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail”), the movie tells us of the author’s struggles after her mother’s death and a failed marriage. She decides to hike solo the Pacific Crest Trail, a journey of some 1,100 miles, as a sort of personal catharsis, helping her to come to grips with her problems and perhaps gain a measure of accomplishment and redemption. The movie adaptation was penned by Nick Hornby, nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2010 for An Education.
While their feature collaborations are relatively recent, Vallee and Belanger actually go back some 22 years. Vallee recollected, “I met him on a commercial in Montreal and he later went on to shoot commercials for me for the past 15 years here and there. We talked about doing a feature together but that didn’t happen–until Dallas Buyers Club.
Vallee said of Belanger, “I love his courage and humility. He works off of available light with no electric crew. He shoots handheld in a different way and is willing to get out of his comfort zone to capture reality so that the images he gets aren’t forced or staged. Again, it’s an approach that captures actor performances in the best way possible. He’s never trying to create images for his demo reel. With his work, he’s never saying ‘look how clever and creative I am.’ His focus is on the storytelling.”
It’s a focus that dovetails perfectly with that of Vallee. “People don’t fully realize that Jean-Marc is bringing back the approach of classic American directors like Ford and Eastwood–simply put, the camera is never more important than the story or its characters. You move the camera because the actor is moving. You show something because the actor is looking at it. The character is what drives the camerawork.”
In this vein, Belanger related, “Our approach to rehearsals is very organic. In the beginning, Jean-Marc uses a viewfinder and looks at scenes with the actors, very basic, without they’re even saying all the lines, sometimes. He has to see the depth of field and everything. I take the camera and he uses me as a viewfinder. He looks at the little monitor beside the camera and he moves me with the actors and when we see more or less the angles we are going to use, he typically says, ‘Oh, let’s just shoot the rehearsal.’ It’s either really good or we realize we are off the mark and we do something else completely.”
As for the alluded to lighting philosophy, Belanger said he and Vallee created their natural light approach on Dallas Buyers Club. “We shoot with a very minimum crew and without a grip and electric truck.” Belanger deployed the ARRI Alexa on Wild. “It’s a great camera that fits our lighting approach. You can get a lot of details in the dark part and in the overexposed part of the image. Plus we love how it reacts to existing light.”
Belanger said that Vallee is “very aware of everything, and he very much admires the skills of those he works with. Still, you have to read his mind at the same time. During a take when the actor is speaking, there might be another element that comes into play–a plane goes by or a horse runs by. He believes in accidents and you have to be able to read his mind, to perhaps rack focus on the horse. He wants perfect imperfection.”
This is the ninth in a multi-part series with future installments of The Road To Oscar slated to run in the weekly SHOOT>e.dition, The SHOOT Dailies, SHOOT’s January print issue (and PDF version) and on SHOOTonline.com. The series will appear weekly through the Academy Awards. The 87th Academy Awards nominations will be announced on Thursday, January 15, 2015. The Oscars will be held on Sunday, February 22, 2015 at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood and will be televised live by the ABC Television Network.
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