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➤ Delhommecontinues:“Theidea was to make the online set more vibrant, more beautiful in every way, so when you come back to their bedrooms, life looks sad. Contrast was everything. Online shouldn’t look like a real space; we needed to invent everything from scratch: the design, the lighting and the colours.”
To bring this online world to life visually, Delhomme says his own
Hisfirstinputwastocoverall the ceilings with small bulbs, “small lighting as a kind of metaphor for electricity, a kind of infinity of bulbs. After that I then worked with the designer to create the look of the actual chatrooms.
“You’ve never really meant to know whether it’s night or day there, a 24-hour world; all the light is artificial. These chatrooms are like
his career and then again more recently for an experimental 35mm documentary called Salomaybe on which he’s been working intermittently with actor-director Al Pacino whom he first met on The Merchant Of Venice.
“By the time I arrived on Chatroom, the director, the producer and the designer had already figured out the idea that the online world
would be more saturated, that the sets would have strong, vibrant colours. What did I think? I decided to go with the flow then suggested perhaps trying to increase the effect even further, to make the colours even stronger still.
“I was also keen to try and use new stocks for this film and found that Fujifilm had just produced this new ETERNA Vivid 500T film stock. The first test was so special, so interesting and didn’t look like something I’d pushed at all. It looked really organic, very natural, very sharp and I liked the texture immediately.”
As a result of further tests shooting on the set at Shepper- ton with Vivid 500T and outside with
the other Fujifilm stocks – ETERNA 500T and ETERNA 250D - he felt the contrasting ‘looks’ would work perfectly to represent the on and off-line worlds in the film, and “maybe with a bit of help from the D/I we will end up with something very special. I began to feel the Vivid
500T was designed especially for me!” he laughs heartily.
Born in Paris but raised in Cherbourg, Delhomme, now in his late forties, studied at the prestigious Ecole Louis Lumiere – “where Nestor Almendros was God” – before graduating to camera assist on films like Jean De Florette and Manon Des Sources. His subsequent work on, in particular, Cyclo earned him international recognition and for the last few years, all his assignments have been deliberately away from home.
“Although I probably thought when I started out that I’d most likely work in France all my life, I now feel much more freedom that way. In fact, I think maybe I’m doing a better job when I’m travelling.
“It’s physically such a pleasure to discover a new country and then try to convey that feeling on screen. I like to play with the texture of a country in the same way I like to do with the texture of the film itself. There’s nothing better than trying to create new ‘looks’.” QUENTIN FALK
Chatroom, now in post- production, was originated on 35mm Fujicolor ETERNA Vivid 500T 8547, ETERNA 500T 8573 and ETERNA 250D 8563.
imagination was initially ignited by the drawings of the production de- signer Jon Henson. “These started basically with very long corridors with a lot of doors off them – the idea being that every door leads to a different website or different chatroom. I thought, “My God, what an exciting idea – how can I make it even more exciting?’”
four walls with no windows, the ‘windows’ being the ceilings and the floors, which have a view out on to other chatrooms. All the light coming in I’d have to create. That was quite a challenge.”
Delhomme’s main ally proved to be Fujifilm. He says he first used Fujifilm some years earlier in France on a film towards the beginning of
BENÔIT DELHOMME AFC
“THE ETERNA VIVID 500T LOOKED REALLY ORGANIC, ABSOLUTELY NATURAL, VERY SHARP AND I LIKED THE TEXTURE IMMEDIATELY.”
       Photo main overleaf: Benôit Delhomme; inset above: on the set of Chatroom with (behind the camera) Delhomme, star Aaron Johnson and, right, director Hideo Nakata; above l-r: scenes from The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, 1408, Breaking And Entering and The Proposition
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