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BRUNO DELBONNEL AFC ASC
“I ALWAYS TRY TO CHALLENGE MYSELF WHICH IS WHY
I DON’T DO MANY MOVIES. IF I JUST WANTED TO BE RICH, I WOULD HAVE DONE THE NEXT HARRY POTTER.”
bit tricky because, for me, Deakins is unique with such a special vision.
“Having all those considerations in mind, I decided to just let go and do what I felt right for the project and do my own look. The Coen Brothers were great and let me do things my way; it was a great pleasure working with them.”
It’s also unlikely that the Coens ever once asked Nancy-born Delbonnel, 57, which film school he went to, a question that constantly plagued him at the start of his career more than 30 years earlier.
“When I started out, the Louis Lumiere School was the only school for cinematographers; you had to have gone there if you wanted to be a DP; perhaps 95% of all cameramen were from Lumiere. I went to ESEC [Ecole Superieure Libre d’Etudes Cinematographiques].
With aspirations first to be a director, he had managed, at 20, to get Government backing for a short called Réalistes Rares and even persuaded the veteran Henri Alekan to light it for him. “Watching Alekan, who, after all, had shot Cocteau’s Beauty And The Beast, made me realise what I really wanted to do – which was lighting, composition and framing. Anyway, being a director is the hardest job: you have to deal with producers, bankers, insurance companies and, of course, actors who are usually bastards.”
So after he completed his short film and determined on his new path, he’d call about jobs as assistant cameraman only to be asked the question: “Have you been to Lumiere?” When he replied ‘no” it would then be, “so forget about it, we don’t need you.” Delbonnel reckons he probably had about 20 turndowns just because Lumiere hadn’t been his alma mater.
That was also the initial response when, after an urgent call asking if he could take over from the second assistant cameraman who was leaving, he arrived on the set of Parking, Jacques Demy’s 1985 fantasy musical remake of Orphée.
“Had I been to Lumiere, DP Jean- Francois Robin asked me. When I said no, I was told I could leave. However, I asked if I could stay anyway and just watch Demy work. No problem. During the day, they suddenly encountered a problem with a reverse shot and I explained how they could solve it. Just a trick I knew. After that, Robin said I could stay: officially. My next movie was Betty Blue, again with Robin.”
At the turn of the Eighties, in- creasingly disillusioned with French cinema, Delbonnel, a fan of American directors like Jerry Schatzberg and
Bob Rafelson, decided to try his
luck instead Stateside but after a fruitless few months in New York, and on the suggestion of the great Nestor Almendros was persuaded to return to Europe and enter the commercials world, the best of being then dominated by British directors and cinematographers.
“Fortunately for me, not many assistant cameramen in France spoke English and I had returned from New York with a very strong Bronx accent. There I was suddenly working with people like Douglas Slocombe and Gerry Fisher, learning all the time from the best of the best.”
Internationally, Delbonnel’s breakthrough was undoubtedly Amélie, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s irresistible romantic fantasy. He and Jeunet were oldest friends and had worked together years earlier on short films together. But by the time of Amélie, Jeunet had become artistically wedded to Darius Khondji and it was only Khondji’s unavailability that gifted the dream assignment to the director’s longtime pal.
Internationally recognised, with Oscar, BAFTA and Cesar nominations for Delbonnel as well as a European Film Award, Amélie was also voted by American Cinematographer magazine, ‘Best Shot Film of the Decade 1998-2008’ beating off contenders like Children Of Men, Road To Perdition, Saving Private Ryan, No Country For Old Men and City of God, lit by some of his heroes such as Conrad Hall, Cesar Charlone and, of course, Roger Deakins.
“I don’t think it is,” notes Delbonnel, modestly, “and it doesn’t really make any sense. But it was fantastic, though, especially when you see the list and all those DPs who are explorers, guys looking for something, trying to do things differently all the time.”
He actually prefers his follow up with Jeunet, A Very Long Engagement, a Great War epic – “for us, it was Lawrence Of Arabia” –, based on the much loved French novel by Sebastien Japrisot and, like Amélie,
also starring Audrey Tautou, “but much better in terms of lighting.” Since then, he has worked on
features only sporadically – among them, Infamous, Across The Universe, Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince, and, most recently, Aleksandr Sokurov’s Faust, filmed in the Czech Republic, Iceland and Austria.
Citing architecture, especially the work of Frank Gehry, as an influence – “as with light, there’s a rhythm about architecture and, say, music which you don’t just get with painting, for me a weak and superficial reference.” Delbonnel claims to be mostly “disappointed” with contemporary cinema: “There are maybe 16 to 20 good directors in the world; the rest are crap.”
He sighs: “I always try to challenge myself which is why I don’t do many movies. If I just wanted to be rich, I would have done the next Harry Potter. Sometimes I meet with a director and after five hours I have to tell him I’m just not interested, and that he’d told me nothing that’d push me to do his movie.
“It’s not about which crane we should use but finding the best way to tell the story. Some of the new technology is fantastic, and with it we can surely find a way also involving the screenwriter to tell stories in new and different ways.” QUENTIN FALK
The LFF trailer was originated on 35mm Fujicolor ETERNA Vivid 500T 8547 The trailer can be viewed at: www.facebook.com/ fujifilmmotionpicture
The nine films referenced were, in order: Badlands (1973), Apocalypse Now (1979), The Last King Of Scotland (2006), American Beauty (1999), Casino (1995), Blade Runner (1982), Boogie Nights (1997), No Country For Old Men (2007) and Napoleon Dynamite (2004)
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