Production Diary & Inspirations

Director Jeffrey Zablotny

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Lying to relatives in ‘The White Sheik’ (1952) Dir. Federico Fellini

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Elliptical editing obscures the truth so it’s always just slightly out of view in ‘Cure’ (1997). Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa

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If you’re somebody who works for a streaming platform and feel that theatrical is dead or is dying I would say to you, oh, really? Why don’t you tell that to the makers of ‘Get Out,’ who in a typical streaming deal would have gotten somewhere in the teens for that movie. And that would be it, for the rest of their lives. Don’t tell me that there isn’t a business out there.

Steven Soderbergh

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Fear, fantasy and memory in ‘Only Yesterday’ (1991) Dir. Isao Takahata

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Birth (2004) Dir. Jonathan Glazer

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One of my favorite shots when I was younger was this shot in Barton Fink, when there’s this slow push in on the wallpaper. I remember feeling so tense and thinking, why am I so tense? It’s just wallpaper. But then I realized it’s the shot that is creating that tension — it was a lightbulb moment for me. We were shooting a scene in 2049 when the camera starts to push in on me. I remember when it was over I said to Bruce [Hamme], who is Roger’s dolly grip, ‘Bruce, did you work on Barton Fink?’ He said yes. I said, ‘Did you do that slow push in on the wallpaper?’ He said, yeah. I said, ‘Am I the wallpaper right now?’ He said, yes. I told him I’ve never been so honored.

Ryan Gosling, EW

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Twin Peaks (2017) Dir. David Lynch

Ruth De Jong, having gotten her start with Lynch collaborator Jack Fisk, is the production designer for the new season of ‘Twin Peaks’, where Lynch’s interest in sculpture and painting are especially apparent.

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Photogrammetry transforms the mundane in Andrew Dominik’s ‘One More Time With Feeling’. Visual effects by Sam Brady.

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Concept designer Ash Thorp’s reel of work for ‘Ghost in the Shell’, with music by James Ferraro (an absolutely bizarre riff on 90′s ‘stock’ music and text-to-speech voices).

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‘Punch-Drunk Love’ comes to Criterion with a surprisingly simple, almost pedestrian cover made from a framegrab. Along with the packaging, it’s a far more sober, humanized entry point into the film than the playfully abstract Jeremy Blake artwork that accompanied the initial theatrical and video release, which makes me think about the job of reframing contemporary films as they age.

Peter Becker on Criterion covers:

“The producer in charge of the project fills us in on the story of the release – what is significant about the film and filmmaker, where it fits in the director’s filmography, what its key cinematic gestures are, what its impact has been, and what we are trying to communicate about the social, political, and historical context of the film.”

“The design needs to serve as an invitation, an introduction for the uninitiated, subtly setting expectations for the film they’re about to watch without giving too much away. Unlike a theatrical poster, out of sight as soon as you leave the theater, our editions are intended to be kept as part of a library, so their designs need to remain relevant and compelling after the films are over. Ideally, a design is even more resonant for someone who already knows the film.

“Frame grabs (taken directly from the film) can help, and for certain filmmakers […] a simple, unadorned image-and-type composition often feels right.”

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“It’s nighttime. Ship’s moved by some terrible power at a terrific speed. And although it’s imperceptible in the darkness, I have an intuition that we’re headed towards a shore. No one else seems to be aboard the vessel. I’m very keenly aware of my aloneness.”

Tremendous work from Framestore on a bespoke dream sequence in ‘Lincoln’, which shimmers and shifts as time passes rapidly, accompanied by DDL’s VO and a haunting drone.

“Framestore contributed several concepts to Lincoln's dream sequence, the origins of which were the President's actual diary entries. "Lincoln was very clear about what he saw," says Ben Morris. "He described being on the deck of an ironclad boat - the USS Monitor - moving at incredible speed heading towards a coastline that he can never reach - it keeps eluding him. It's a metaphor ultimately for the Thirteenth Amendment and his second term.””

“It had to have a sense of dreaminess, but also convey speed in the relative darkness of night."

A further aspect of the dream sequence was that it had to appear photographic, as if recorded using technology from the time. That manifested itself in vignetting, differing frame rates and camera weave - something Framestore looked to practical reference to achieve. "We went so far as to investigate what vaseline would look like when smeared on a lens," says Morris. "We went into one of our theaters and made an huge rostrum camera - we got a Canon 5D with a clear UV filter on the lens, smeared vaseline all over it, and photographed our cinema screen as we manually advanced the shot frame-by-frame. The resultant footage informed the look of the final comps of the entire sequence."

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Kristen Stewart on director Kelly Reichart:

She’s painting, man. She’s very composed. She’s not the kind of filmmaker that goes, “Ok, we’re going to take it off six, we’re going to throw it on a shoulder and find it. Let’s just play around and dance.” Kelly’s like, “No. We’re going to compose a shot and then we are going to shoot a scene.” It’s cool. Especially because with most indie directors nowadays, it really is the Sundance look. It’s like, American independent film: throw it on someone’s shoulder and find it. She’s not that. She’s really composed, but somehow still makes it not look like that. It still feels so absolutely natural.

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I still find myself thinking about David Hoffos’ ‘Scenes From The House Dream’, an installation of miniature nighttime suburban dioramas. Each scene is augmented with hidden CRT televisions that precisely reflect in moving elements (people, billowing curtains, boats, fireworks) into an otherwise perfectly static scale model. It’s a haunting, affecting tour to take in person. Hoffos describes his work here:

“In principle, the work was to make a sort of narrative about this recurring dream that many people have, about a familiar place that’s warm and comforting, but also has these wonderful, undiscovered places,” he says. “But living with the project for as long as I have, so much comes up from underneath — my own lifelong struggle with anxiety, depression, addiction tendencies. When I see these lonely figures pacing around at night, I see the modern condition — this state of mild mental illness that most of us have experienced, I think.”

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A quick look at some of the VFX for Brian De Palma’s ‘Mission Impossible’ entry, supervised by John Knoll at ILM. I still think visual effects from the 90’s have an ineffable, ideal quality – the tools weren’t perfect (colour correction hacks, guesswork with on-set video taps), but many of those flaws either made it through to the final shots in a pleasing way, or were disguised in the messiness of printing back to film, combined with a much greater reliance on practical elements. Even the most computer-y stuff that ILM pumped out in those days had a handmade quality to it.

Given a limited set of options for time-warping 35mm film, John Knoll discusses using a super old-school technique with the bluescreen plate of Cruise propelled away from the explosion:

To impart the proper effect, [Cruise] flayed his arms at half-speed to correlate with the final speed Knoll would attain by skip-printing the shots. “I wanted to make it look plausible that he’s being blown through the air by the explosion,” Knoll explained, “to make it look fast, but not comically fast. At the point of impact on the train, we stop the skip-print and go back to real time.” Skip-printing required Knoll to take into account the interactive lighting on the bluescreen element of Cruise. “The overhead lights in the soundstage ceiling fired off in sync with the camera shutter being opened on particular frames. I had to program different sequence patterns to simulate different speeds of travel. There was one pattern at 24 frames per second and another for the skip-printing portion. That way, the lights would appear to be going at the same rate, instead of looking as if everything had slowed down.”

Some of the film’s most exciting moments are played with a completely static camera (see: both times Cruise barrels towards the camera – up the CIA vault on wires, and away from the exploding helicopter onto the train). The result is a coy, deadpan style that leaves a lot of heavy lifting and geography to the edit.

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Letter Never Sent (1959) Dir. Mikhail Kalatozov

Exceptional cinematography from Sergey Urusevsky. Time of day becomes ambiguous and impressionistic as characters move deeper into a Siberian hellscape. Not pictured: the incredible way the film finds ways to throw its four leads together in 1.33:1 frames like it’s no big deal, cramming them all into a demented closeup at the same time.