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HOYTE VAN HOYTEMA NSC FSF
“I REALLY LIKE THE STOCKS... TO THE POINT THAT YOU CAN RELY ON DOING STUFF WITHOUT EVER TO WORRY ABOUT IT: THEY’RE LIKE A SAFETY NET.”
➤ VanHoytemarecallshe’dmet Swedish director Tomas Alfredson, who’d been making his own way in TV, at various parties and galas before being asked to come on board Let The Right One In, adapted into a screenplay from his own bestselling novel by John
Ajvide Lindqvist.
For the pair it turned out to be a
working partnership clearly made in heaven. According to Alfredson: “Hoyte is true poet and I’m so grateful to have met up with this Dutch painter. It’s really easy, especially in this kind of genre, to end up having endless technical discussions with the DP.
“But with Hoyte, the conversation was also on a philosophical and humanistic level as well as on the visual aspects. We explored a lot of renaissance paintings trying to capture the delicate lighting.
“Hoyte’s a true purist when it comes to analogue shooting and, though there are benefits with the digital stuff, I’m prepared to join his celluloid monastery. The film would definitely not have the look it has [“using snow white and blood red as leitmotifs” noted one critic of the “exquisitely detailed lensing”] if it was made digitally.”
For van Hoytema: “It’s a DP’s dream to work with someone who has ambitions to use the camera not only as a sort of vacuum cleaner but also to create a language of its own. He has become extremely inventive about what a camera should do and how it should move.
“I’ve worked with some directors who probably know what good acting is but end up simply filming that not realising what the camera is capable of. Tomas really knows how to use his tools, which makes it a very exciting collaboration.
“He especially knows about the business of when you are in, say, a dark room, hanging to tension, when you can release it or how you should distribute it. In Sweden, they talk about ‘trying to suck a little longer on the caramel.’ Don’t bite it, or swallow, just let it linger. That’s very exciting for a cinematographer –
and, of course, we’ve become good friends as well.”
Van Hoytema used, inventively, Fujifilm stocks on Let The Right One In – the ETERNA 250D and ETERNA 250T as well as ETERNA 500T, “depending how much light was available.
“I had used it before on some of my work and I really like the stocks. For, it’s about learning how stock will react when you do certain things, to the point that you can rely on doing stuff without ever having to worry about it: they’re like a safety net.”
When the call finally came from America after he’d gone back for a while to working in Sweden, he was naturally excited not so much because he always had a dream to work in Hollywood but rather because it would further his chances to work on “good projects wherever they might be set”.
Says van Hoytema: “Getting to do The Fighter was great because it was for a director I respected, someone who’d done a lot of interesting work.” The director in question was David O Russell, who’d made Three Kings, I Heart Huckabees and Flirting With Disaster.
It also wasn’t very Hollywood either; by Tinseltown standards, low-budget - “big-budget, of course, where I come from” - and in terms of location, shot far from the fleshpots of LA in Lowell, Massachussetts, the actual hometown of Ward (Wahlberg) and his half brother Dickie Eklund (Bale), whose tangled relationship the film also traces.
“He said he loved Let The Right One In and the fact we did things a bit differently to what you normally see in Hollywood. At the same time, he wasn’t interested in making pretty pictures. With this film, he didn’t want to have a specific ‘language’. He wanted it to be very free, for the camera to float around more with the actors dictating the pace.
“We talked about European films, in particular Lars von Trier’s way of working for which much of the energy comes from the actors you’ve hired. We also discussed the digital route so we could just shoot and
shoot. In the end, we settled for 2 perf’ 35mm and the same Fujifilm stocks I’d used on Let The Right One In.”
In fact, says van Hoytema “it’s not a very visual film; I don’t think it’s going to win any awards for imagery, but I think the approach was absolutely right for the film. For instance, for the boxing sequences, we shot everything on digibeta with operators using the cameras on which they would have shot the original contest footage for HBO. That way added a lot of authenticity.
“You’ve had all those boxing films like Raging Bull, Rocky and Ali, it’s a genre in itself. Our approach was not to try and compete with those films. They shot very close to the fighters, in the ring, often with slo-mo. We decided to keep the camera outside the ring like you’d see watching a boxing match on TV the way HBO did it. Instead of making a dramatised version of it, we wanted to keep things truthful and realistic.”
The Fighter is set principally in the Nineties. For Tinker, Tailor,
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