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LEVI’S -‘DANGEROUS LIAISON’
A young couple meet in a sun kissed hotel room, in the late afternoon of an American summer. From the staid 19th century, through the more decadent decades that followed, to the present day, DP Alwin Küchler BSC tells Anwar Brett how he helped create a scenario as timeless as the product he was promoting.
commercial break
I shot the whole commercial on the Eterna 250T, because I liked the steadiness of the stock. It has a pastel quality yet it still feels kind of oily,
and was absolutely perfect for this Levi’s spot. Stylistically, the commer- cial feels quite classic rather than
“revolutionary, as it tells a recurring love story.
It starts in something like the 1870s and goes right the way up to the present. You always see the same cou- ple, as if they are travelling through time. The girl waits in the hotel room, the boy comes up the stairs, she opens the door and they kiss. And as they kiss suddenly it’s 1940, they flirt and it’s 1960, and in another moment it’s 1980. It’s like a journey through the Levi’s ages.
The thing Ringan showed me as a mood reference was Bertolucci’s Last Tango In Paris, which has a couple in this one room. It was all about that feeling of being together there and for- getting about the outside world. Our room was very sparsely decorated, which helps you to concentrate on the couple rather than on anything else.
During the course of the story we subtly changed the filters; I used white Promist, and in the 70s we increased it ever so slightly. We want-
ed it to have these strong colours that you get in the late afternoon, with dra- matic sunbeams coming into the room. I tried to make it feel quite sun drenched and warm.
We shot on a set over two days, and because of the limited time, our production designer did some very clever things. He constructed the set in such a way that we didn’t have to change the wallpaper; we could simply unclip sections of the wall, so the turnaround was very fast.
For the lighting we wanted to get warm but very natural tones so we used a lot of very thick, unbleached muslin over the lights. All our light, apart from the hard light, we put through this cloth, and that gave us very beige, warm, natural looking tones.
The cloth has a very diffusing effect, without it becoming muzzy; it’s a very beautiful look, and it has a very nice effect on skin tone too. That com- bination of the way Fujifilm ren-
ders contrast and the way we
used this cloth gave us a very
natural, beautiful, warm glow. It worked really well. ■
Dangerous Liaison was originated on 35mm Fu”jicolor
Eterna 250T 8553
Agency: BBH Production Company: Rattling Stick Director: Ringan Ledwidge Producers: Sally Humphries & Filip Hejduk
Fujifilm Motion Picture • The Magazine • Exposure • 7