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The way Lumet worked has always interested me because apparently he would do blocking in pre-production without using the actual location, putting marks down to indicate the space and set dressing, and then have the actors recreate that on the day, like a stage play. You’d think a lot of film actors would find these working methods frustrating but he had a reputation as ‘an actor’s director’.
Did the way you worked on ‘The Hurricane’ split the difference at all, was it any worse than blocking on the day?
You mentioned before that your preference was for blocking rehearsal on the day. I’m curious, do you ‘feel’ the restrictions of extensive pre-visualization when you do it? Do you notice that the actors do? I remember you once talked about how the Coen brothers were willing adapt their boards to what was going on the day of the shoot whereas on ‘The Village’ you stuck pretty assiduously to what was already boarded.
Mr. Deakins, have you ever worked with a director who went the Sidney Lumet route and did extensive blocking rehearsal with the cast in pre-production and then committed to that blocking for the shoot?
Mr. Deakins, could you talk a bit more on why you and Denis Villeneuve chose to board much of Blade Runner 2049 but only select scenes for Sicario?
Additionally, this is the most recent web capture for the pre-September 2013 version of the forum, before it was hacked and many posts got deleted https://web.archive.org/web/20130804072010/http://www.deakinsonline.com/forum2/
A web archive of the old forum can be found here https://web.archive.org/web/20151122001709/http://www.deakinsonline.com/forum2/
What I would submit is that filmmaking is a technical medium and being able to answers these questions by definition implies a base of practical knowledge and skill. Somebody like Pier Pasolini would have very strong opinions about what makes an image resonate, but on his first film his cinematographer, Tonino Delli Colli, claimed that he still had to explain to Pasolini what a ‘lens’ even was. If Pasolini had remained ignorant of something as basic as focal lengths ‘Accattone’ would not have the same expressive power.
Roger, I remember in one of the podcast episodes you and James expressed surprise that a lot of the film students you talk to now don’t seem to know much about exposure. Surely something as essential to cinematography as knowing how to get the exposure you want is a ‘fundamental’.
I know what you mean and the thing I would compare it to is anamorphic lenses, which seemed to lose some of the ‘character’ that differentiated them from spherical as more and more of their artefacts got ironed out. To me the resolution of the Kodak EXR and Vision stocks from the mid-1990s looks radically different from the movies released even a few years prior to their introduction, to the point where for instance 1992 and 1997 can feel like two completely different eras of filmmaking.
