Cinematography behind GUILLOTINE the movie.

Press release Interview by Producer Sara Vahabi*

What drew you to this project?

There were honestly two things that drew me to this project. The script and the Director’s vibe.

The script, without a doubt, was something that caught my eye since I saw the title and I couldn’t stop reading. Not knowing that I was going to work on the project, I immediately wrote to Ray with my first thoughts on his script. The film has 5 time periods from 1700 to 2003, simulating various nations, so I found it a very interesting challenge.

I find that Ray has a great sensitivity, as well as modesty as a person and as a filmmaker, and I appreciated that. He doesn’t necessarily want to impress his style onto a film; he wants to try to discover a grammar and an approach to each and every project, and he has the discipline and follow through to express that through the story in a way that’s subtle but impactful.

What was your approach to the material?

In pre-production I was working hand in hand with the one who was going to be the cinematographer of the project and we were planning shot by shot, scene by scene what was going to happen in a shooting list with angles, frames, equipment to operate, visual references that we felt appropriate for the different periods of the film.

The first chapter of this story is the one that contains most art, color, decoration, locations, and lighting challenges, it focuses on 1700 when electricity did not exist, it was necessary to film with candles and apparent artificial light without making it noticeable, we work most from the ceilings and the art, the King’s castle, Dr. Schmit’s office, the jails, the dungeons, Dr. Guillotine’s bathroom, everything has candles with a touch of color from the artificial lights that we installed.

In chapter two, the challenge was to do everything in different studios and make it look both real and vintage, using mainly the color till in combination with the pink of the windows and the predominant green of the main room. The limited space for depth of field also created a real challenge for slight camera movement and framing.

The underwater pool scene created a different challenge since we had to do it several times and in different locations until we found the absolute darkness that the director needed to make the story believable and the viewer immersed in his dream.

Chapter three required a lot of choreography and coordination between the actor and the camera movements, the director wanted this to simulate an inexperienced documentarian who records everything he sees, therefore the movements should be abrupt at times and pan quickly to reflect the despair of feeling how they were going to kill certain characters in the Nazi era of old Germany by guillotine.

Guillotine also features black and white with a 4:3 aspect ratio, with spherical and anamorphic lenses which detracts from the frame and requires a lot of planning to see what the viewer should see in the frame. Lighting characters in corridors with long dialogues and following characters with camera in handheld throughout the entire chapter, I didn’t want the movie to have a shaky, faux-documentary style, I would put the camera on my shoulder, just to make my job as simple as I could, and try to keep it still.

Coordinating with actors represented a challenge for the director so that they appeared in the frame at the exact moment, since most of the time it involved doing the scene in a single take and it had to be done perfectly. The key to moving the camera was how Ray moved the actors.

Episode four is one of my favorites, it takes place in Algeria in 1972 for which LA locations had to give that sensation, the production did a really original job finding the right locations for each era and this one represented a real challenge to coordinate the cars (for sound and visuals) on certain roads for 70% of the episode that takes place in a car with an important dialogue, the fact that the actors had a lot of rehearsal time in their dialogues, they were always at the right point to express themselves without hesitation in each repetition, for which we had to do tests and prepare the car by placing three cameras with different sensors and focal lengths, trying to expose inside of the car and fight with the outside sun so that it doesn’t get overexposed, in addition to the constant movement in a vintage car that didn’t work very well and at times the crew had to collaborate by pushing it to start properly or make it turn to repeat the sequence, without a doubt it was a lot of fun, the experience and the learning process.

The night scenes were consciously planned by the direction so that the cut was ideal to work in post-production, the dialogues are beautiful and the set itself worked to simulate that we are in Algeria at that time, here we work with an Arri Master prime lens 40mm anamorphic, for which it was necessary to be very exact in the frames.

The fifth episode has a lot of blood, color, great art direction and great actors too, it takes place on a set that was carefully crafted by production designer and the lights were placed to highlight the art in such a studio, it takes place in Baghdad 2003 when the sons of Saddam Hussein were killing people in a dungeon called the red room.

Each scene represents tension and is loaded with intensity to the maximum, it is interesting to see how at the moment of shooting the actors intensify their character and get into the role, as everything, in each chapter of the film takes a lot of VFX and you had to be aware of working each special effect very carefully, which takes time and repetition after repetition, photographically I am very familiar with this era to make it look more real and it worked very well, resulting in a great image under great direction.

What was the biggest challenge?

Ray spent time discussing camera moves, which walls would have to fly away, blocking with actors, choreographic movements for each chapter, establishing a visual language for Guillotine, things like that. This approach allowed us to take a smart, economical approach to making a low-budget movie with limited days, and it took our process back to the very basics of filmmaking, which are: lighting, camera placement and performance. Our big breakthrough came when production designers (Jhon ?) and Vika Teplisnkaya put everything together for décor and art on set and that allowed us block the actors around that, which provided us with more opportunities for character development.

Our many locations also implied a real challenge since some of them were very limited in space, others only in studio and some castles that had to be taken special care to simulate the time period. Many logistical factors were daunting, if you are experienced enough, you would know that it’s difficult to do this work on a set and make it feel real. From a cinematographic standpoint, I wanted to give the actors a place that felt real. Ray wanted to let them move and push the camera blocking into different angles so that it wouldn’t get static.

I love the way we used light to help telling the story and to support its themes. We spent a lot of time talking about lighting process for each chapter because that would affect us in different ways. We planned to light the film at extremely low levels, which led us to explore working with the cameras at its High and native ISO setting. It just seemed like the right tool for working at more realistic light lev­els. I was a bit reckless with my exposures, but I would light as naturalistically as I could, I had an impressionistic mindset. I did use hard light a bit more than I might normally, but I tried to light with windows and practicals and keep it natural; if the window was overexposed, I let it be and didn’t add any fill. I embraced those problems rather than correcting them. I used a lot of tungsten’s and aperture lights for late-afternoon sun. I augmented natural light a bit with skypanels. Lighting the different prisons presented and age-old challenge. It’s a contradiction because you want to show the actors’ faces yet keep the darkness of the prison sets. You need to light to a certain height on the digital characteristic curve. It’s mostly dark, but you light some interesting spots in the frame. It’s not so different from shooting inside a room with practical lights. You create an ambient light and work within it. We took a big gamble with the concept that the film would move from time period to other period so the audience con relate with the general idea of what happened in a narrow space of time with the invention of the Guillotine and if you’re going to take a risk, you’d better pull it off.

We concentrated more on our framing than any technical aspect of the camera, shooting in three different aspect ratio 1.33:1, 1.85:1 and 2.39:1 with different sensor cameras by episode and optics was an early decision. Optically, I was after soft falloff, I prefer to work at a pretty wide-open stop, between T1.8 and T2.5. The result is a portrait-like depth of field for the close-ups, most of which were shot close to the actor at a focal length of 40mm. I also used at times some filters like 1/8 warm black pro-mist I used it in combination with a ⅛ Tiffen Glimmerglass, which es­sentially flashed the image. The color of the skypanels would change slightly based on the base color temperature of the scene. One of the things Ray loves about shooting is film grain. (even if is digital film). Hi success­fully pitched the idea to the colorist of using LiveGrain, a real-time texturing tool that replicates the three-dimensional texture of motion-picture film by map­ping the complete range of a film stock’s exposures and colors to a digi­tal image. LiveGrain was incorporated into a shooting LUT for one episode in Guillotine.

What was your most satisfying moment?

One of the really interesting things we did was to mount our three cameras on a 1900’s car. Griping that car with me operating from the front, my excellent focus puller Colin McNair operating from the right and our best boy operating from the left, everything on wheels. Nothing replaces having an operator on the camera right next to the actors, because a great operator can feel what an actor is going to do and adjust to it. While production trying to stop cars passing through our scene. The director follows the vintage car, keeping a prudent distance and observing the cameras remotely, the drone flying at the marked distances and trying not to enter the frame, the whole thing was a very interesting challenge with unrepeatable experiences.

Our approach made the sets a bit more intimate, because at times on the castles or dungeons with limited space to work, the only people on set besides the actors were the boom op, someone on the jib arm, someone on the dolly, and me on the camera. It made the room very quiet, and I think that helped the performances. It also helped me get extremely close eyelines. The eyelines in a lot of this film are really, really tight. I think it brings you deeper into an actor’s eyes if you can see both of them at the same time. It’s almost as if they’re looking at you.

Ray and I had the chance to work remotely but very closely with color correction Jeffrey Waroski from ARRI in Germany. It was an amazing experience and a lot of fun revisiting the energy and the excitement we had back then, as we’re establishing the look in the dailies and doing most of the work on set, and then just finessing in the final grade. Jeffrey works primarily from printer lights and primaries, and he sends us stills I can review on my calibrated monitor. When we’re happy, that’s the look, we don’t change it. Ray is truly one of the great collaborations has only gotten better over the years, as we both have become more experienced filmmakers and closer friends.

What do you hope people will take away from this experience?

The film is a period piece, a work based on true story, a fiction centered on the infamous tool created by mankind, to pull off a period setting on a frugal budget and a tight shooting schedule, we leaned on existing locations whose décor had been practically preserved in amber for the last half-century. We also turned to a boundless affection I have for vintage lenses; it was an extremely conscious choice to make this film look different than the film of today. Everything from the camera and lenses that we chose, to the framing and the way we moved the camera, was designed so that we would feel more immersed in the time period. Ray give me a great opportunity to play in a way that I don’t usually get to play and to show of my own artistic influences.

My only hope is that people become aware of the apparatus designed for efficiently carrying out executions by beheading, and its use from French Revolution to this time, it is impossible for me to agree that the Guillotine is used to this day, when there are “more rational” elements to end human life.

What in your background was an asset for this production?

As cinematographer, a mutual respect and support helped ease the grind of production, a Unified Vision carefully pacing the mystery while not giving too much away visually was important to tell the story. The good thing about this film is that Ray and his team wrote everything, Ray directed everything, and I was involved in all the episodes. We really had the piece completely mapped out, that was effusive about my contributions to the project. The thing about the director that is really unique is that he really is inside the story, Ray is watching the performances. He’s laughing. He’s the greatest audience for these actors. I was most impressed, and I’m very grateful that production made the picture look as good as we did with the contributions that we made.