Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/994862
DGA QUARTERLY 31 This is Perry's perspective. I like to shoot handheld because you don't have tracks, dollies or cranes. I can do five shots in one setup without cutting and 25 peo- ple jumping in front of the camera to do touch- ups. This way I can just shoot, the actors are just doing and redoing and redoing, and they love it. They help each other, it evolves, we find some- thing and then, whoops, I go back to the first shot because I realize it was better from another angle, and we just do it. The handheld allows for that, and it feels real because of its imperfection. We are on an 85mm lens now, using the close-up as Jane's starting to sense who Perry is, but we don't yet know why. I cover this scene from all the women's and Perry's perspectives, but Jane has more close-ups than the others because I'm going to go into her head and I want to see her eyes. We get what she thinks, what she fears and what she fantasizes. You need to keep track of where everybody is and it's complicated to set up the right geog- raphy, so we're very strict with eyelines and the language of the 35mm lens and the distance. But of course, we get out of it sometimes to get a shot like this. But if you start changing lenses all the time, the distance gets confusing. As Jane realizes, we cut to this fantasy of her following her rapist on the beach with the gun in her hand. The Presley song from the party, "How Is the World Treating You," is distorted. We're in her head and what's important is the visual, so we just keep this ghost of a song. No sounds of the past. Sound is always diegetic and source for me, so the char- acters hear any music. Sometimes I cheat and I keep the music longer, so it becomes score in a way, but the story tells me what music is needed and from whose perspective it will come. Who is this man? He turns, it's Perry, and Jane raises the gun but can't shoot him. We shot this twice in Monterey on Steadicam, once with strong daylight and then when we were losing light. The Alexa camera helps us a lot. Sometimes shooting [with] avail- able light, we start at 7 p.m. and by 7:50 p.m., Yves is telling me he's been pushing the Alexa for 20 minutes and this has to be it, the sun is going down. It still looks great, but in 10 minutes we're fucked. Then we don't stop to light, we just go, go, just capture. And if it doesn't happen, well, we come back the next day. 3 4 5 6 3 4 5 6