Page 33 - FOYER_Cannes 2001

DIARY BERLIN • LOSANGELES • MILAN • FOYER • CANNES • TOKYO • LONDON PAGE31
VIVELECINEMAFRANCAIS
continued from page 29
“The past year has been
a very good year for film-
making in France, but its
been a great year for me! ”
said Laurent Dailland who
has been working for over nine months on what might be France’s biggest-ever production - Asterix And Obelix: Mission Cleopatra, re-uniting Christian Clavier and Gerard Depardieu, as the wily hero and his hefty sidekick.
Dailland’s last film, Agnes Jaoui’s Le Gout Des Autres, competed in this year’s Cesars for Best Film and in the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Picture. His previous films East-West and Place Vendôme also received Oscar and Cesar nominations. “It seems that the public has returned to watching French films. We never imagined that Gout Des Autres would be that successful at the box-office, especially when it was released at the same time as American Beauty and Magnolia - and they were all compet- ing for the same audience.
“We shot Asterix And Obelix at the studios in Ouarzazate, Morocco and in the surrounding desert. Then we returned to Paris to shoot five months in the studios. I had to use two completely different film stocks in order to cope with such extremely different lighting conditions.
“I shot an enormous amount of exteriors in the desert, in that vio-
lent, blistering August sun. I had strong back light all the time, but we had to see the blue sky, which is the opposite of what I do, normally. We knew from the start that the film would be digitally graded, so I did some experimenting with colour fil- ters to create different times of day - early sunrise, high noon, evening sunset. I was very concerned with colour saturation.
“For the interior studio work involving the actors, their close ups, costumes, and the sets, we had softer, low-
light condi-
tions and I
used Fuji 500
ASA, rated as
400 for all of it.
I use the
Varicon pre-
flashing filter a
lot, especially
on the close ups
of our beautiful
actress, Monica
Bellucci (as
Cleopatra).
“I tend to over- expose a bit
because I like the
contrast. I like to get a
more brilliant, saturated colour and I don’t like to see the
grain. Even though in pre-production I actually do shoot a lot of tests to compare the different film stocks, I am not particularly technical.
“I don’t have a particular tech- nique, method or formula. I use a meter to calculate my levels, then I throw it away and just pay atten- tion to the look... for me, its more like a feeling,” added Dailland. ■
Photos (above l-r): Agnes Jaoui’s Le Gout Des Autres; John Berry’s Boesman And Lena; on the set of Laurent Dailland’s East-West
HÇó§ a Bê≠ F§îïäó†L