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GALLIC SYMBOL
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An interview with Thierry Arbogast AFC
Thierry Arbogast is one of France’s most prolific cine- matographers. Don’t be fooled by his boyish looks and boundless energy, he has shot over 30 feature films, most recently, Brian De Palma’s Femme Fatale, with Antonio Banderas and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos.
Before that, he was known
for his work on Kiss Of The
Dragon, Crimson Rivers, Messenger: The Story Of Joan of Arc, The Fifth Element, Ridicule, The Horseman On The Roof, Leon, and Nikita, among the highest profile and most memorable movies France has produced in the last decade.
Arbogast, now 45, grew up in Nancy, in North Eastern France, in the 1960s before moving to Paris on his own at the age of sixteen. His father worked as an engineer in a factory, but his weekend hobby was taking photographs and the son remembers that there were cameras haphazardly lying around the house, cluttering up the corridors.
His mother worked as an inspector at the post office, but devoted Sundays to her love of
painting. As a little boy, he remem- bers getting a Spiro comic book with a circular disc inside.
He would spend hours in his room drawing 24 human figures or animals in step by step motion that he would paste to the outer edges of the wheel. His favourite was a man throwing a javelin, or a running horse. When you turned the circle in the mirror, it recre- ated the movement of a shutter and the figures became animated.
Arbogast moved to Paris with the intention of getting work in the film business. While working as an extra on the Steve McQueen movie, Le Mans, his brother met a young cam- eraman who was just starting out.
Arbogast contacted him and spent the following eight years working with him as his camera assistant, learning
how to use 16mm Éclairs, Cameflexes, and Arri BLs. He says he never worked on any big movies as an assistant, but he does remember learning a lot about lighting from working on commercials with Peter Suschitzsky.
Arbogast says he did everything he could to minimise his time as an assistant and only wanted to concen- trate on lighting, so he offered to pho- tograph student films at Paris’ presti- gious IDHEC film school.
In 1978, at the age of 22, he pho- tographed his first feature, Flammes, which still remains an important film to him, but it was 12 years later when he lit Nikita for Luc Besson that his career properly took off and propelled him into the limelight.
“Nikita was important for me because it was technically difficult in
terms of lighting which was very diverse from scene to scene, and I was working with a director who is not easy to work with.
“Today, I have a very good professional relationship with Luc Besson, and it gets better all the time, but it is always stress- ful working with him. He is some- one who knows exactly what he wants. He prepares an enormous amount with each department, but we don’t have a lot of prepa- ration together.
“Sometimes he describes a shot and says exactly how he wants the light to be. He has visualised it before- hand and he also operates the camera himself on his movies. He is someone who speaks very little, but is very clear about what he wants.
“Only on The Fifth Element did we use storyboards, because of the spe- cial effects. That was a big film and 90% of the crew was English. There were less than ten French crew mem- bers. I had an English gaffer who was used to working on these big produc- tions, and on this film a lot of the light- ing was built into the sets.”
Arbogast admits to being very “hands on” and doing things himself so that they look just right. “I like to decide absolutely everything even
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Photos main: Thierry Arbogast; above: Juliette Binoche in The Horseman On The Roof (courtesy Moviestore Collection)