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So I was reading about the cinematography of a complete unknown, shot by Phedon Papamichael and he discussed using higher ISO levels to get deep depth of field while shooting at night with custom panavision anamorphics and while hearing about that I remembered another film shot on anamorphic taking place in New York. Manhattan, shot by Gordon Willis. In an interview he talked about how depending on what you were shooting, you’d still have a shallow depth of field no matter what (and this was on 35mm film, let alone the full frame that a complete unknown was shot in). I know you’re not a big anamorphic guy anyways but what are your thoughts on the idea of shooting for deep depth in the anamorphic format?
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I didn’t listen to this podcast, but don’t you think he just meant that he had to up the ISO in order to get to a t8 or t11? Depending on how close you are focusing that still will render things in the far background out of focus, just not a complete blur. Other aspects like distortion, flares and the shape of the bokeh will also stay typical anamorphic.
Kurosawa shot deep focus with longer anamorphic lenses in the 1960s — it’s just a matter of stopping down the lens. The depth of field with anamorphic is just lower because the focal lengths are longer, but jumping up from Super-35 to FF35 is not a big difference — in terms of anamorphic, if the 35mm sensor area was 18mm tall and the FF35 area was 24mm tall, that’s a 1.33X difference so that is also how much you’d have to stop down to match depth of field once you matched field of view and distance. So getting more depth of field in anamorphic is not insurmountable either by using more light or a higher ISO.
With 35mm film, the advantage of anamorphic over cropping spherical was the larger negative area for less grain, better resolution (though at wide apertures, often spherical lenses are sharper) but that’s less of an issue with digital where the main reason to shoot anamorphic is the anamorphic look (flares, stretched bokeh, some barrel distortion.) If you want a shallow focus or deep focus look, then you can shoot either spherical or anamorphic.
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