American Cinematographer - The Mill and the Cross

JUNE 2011

M E M B E R P O R T R A I T
Crescenzo Notarile, ASC
“G
rowing up in Brooklyn, I was
always surrounded by art.
My father was an awardwinning
art director for an A-list
ad agency, and one of his
photographers was Richard
Avedon. I would often stuff my
pockets with Polaroids from his
shoots and entertain myself for
days, remembering the work it
took to create those images. I knew
I wanted to be a photographer
when I was 5!
“It was Gregg Toland,
ASC’s stylishly designed, blackand-white
cinematography in
Citizen Kane that demonstrated to
me that photography could be used
to tell a moving story. I wanted to
be part of that collaborative band
of artistic gypsies.
“American
Cinematographer has become my
bible for learning my craft, both
artistically and technically.
Reading AC’s comprehensive
articles about my luminous
colleagues keeps me sharp and upto-date
with the perpetually
changing elements of our craft. To
shoot is a spiritual and creative
release, and to be doing it amongst
my peers is a privilege.”
©photo by Owen Roizman, ASC
— Crescenzo Notarile, ASC
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Production Slate
Pieter Bruegel
(Rutger Hauer)
explains his
famous painting
The Way to
Calvary in the
film The Mill &
The Cross, which
had its U.S.
premiere at this
year’s Sundance
Film Festival.
Director/cocinematographer
Lech Majewski
wanted to
achieve clarity of
detail in the
hand-stitched
costumes that
would be on par
with the
aesthetic of
Early
Netherlandish
painting.
I
Entering Bruegel’s World
By Patricia Thomson
When art critic Michael Francis Gibson approached Lech
Majewski about making a film from his book The Mill & The Cross ,
the idea was simple: create a scholarly art documentary, with Gibson
standing before Pieter Bruegel’s 1564 masterpiece The Way to
Calvary and explaining its hidden meaning.
Gibson would talk about how the Flemish artist transposed
Christ’s journey to contemporary Flanders and depicted Roman
soldiers as red-coated Spanish mercenaries. He would explain the religious
symbolism of the mill perched high on a rock, and note how
the windmill’s sails are in the shape of a cross. He’d explain how the
entire landscape is a metaphor of life and death; on the left is a sunlit
village with verdant woods, and on the right is Calvary, a barren hill
featuring a forest of crucifixes and Catherine wheels. (Bruegel painted
some 500 Flemish people walking toward the field of execution, with
Christ at center but ignored by the throngs — and virtually hidden
from our view as well.)
Majewski told Gibson he wasn’t interested in a standard documentary.
“But I had a vision,” says the Polish director. “I wanted to
enter Bruegel’s world.”
Thus began a three-year project that took them to the Jura
Mountains of Poland, the Czech Republic and New Zealand for 48
days of filming, followed by 28 months of postproduction at Odeon
Film Studio in Warsaw. Production and post immersed them in digital
technologies that included the first Red One to arrive in Poland,
2-D compositing in Flame and After Effects, 3-D compositing in Nuke
and Fusion, and 3-D graphics in LightWave.
The resultant film, which made its U.S. debut at this year’s
Sundance Film Festival and will be released in select markets this fall,
shows Majewski to be a man of his word: it’s a unique vision, one
that embraces the aesthetic of Bruegel, the exegesis of Gibson and
cutting-edge technology.
Majewski’s imaginative approach to Gibson’s book is in keeping
with his diverse body of work, which includes films, video installations,
music compositions, painting and stage productions. Several
of his movies relate to painters, including The Garden of Earthly
Delights, which Majewski directed and shot, and Julian Schnabel’s
Basquiat, which he co-wrote and co-produced.
On The Mill & The Cross, Majewski acted as director, producer,
co-writer and co-cinematographer. Sharing the latter credit was
Polish cinematographer Adam Sikora, who had previously collaborated
with Majewski on Angelus, Wojaczek and The Roe’s Room .
Sikora was responsible for lighting, while Majewski handled camerawork
and post.
The Mill & The Cross photos courtesy of the filmmakers.
16 June 2011 American Cinematographer

Majewski imagined that the lynchpin
of The Mill & The Cross would be a tableau
vivant involving hundreds of extras. “My
vision was to assemble this crowd of people
who are motionless in the painting and then
sail with the camera through the crowd,
seeing their faces, hearing their thoughts,”
he says. “Everybody is motionless,
suspended in this magical time. The Greeks
have a word for it: kairos, the holy time. In
the most important moments, time seems
to be suspended, whether it’s a moment of
grief or ecstasy.”
This initial idea is intact in the final
film. The camera tracks alongside the
tableau, finally arriving at Bruegel (Rutger
Hauer), who is explaining the scene to his
patron (Michael York). The camera then tilts
up to reveal Bruegel’s mountain, the windmill
and the miller himself, who pauses from
grinding wheat to impassively watch the
proceedings below. The camera tilts back
down, and the action resumes. It’s a 4 1 ⁄2-
minute sequence presented as one continuous
shot.
“This is the centerpiece of the triptych,”
Majewski says. Before and after this
frozen moment, life goes on. The film
follows half a dozen characters from the
painting, fleshing out their stories, and
includes snippets from the Passion of Christ.
Bruegel, the ringmaster, explains all as he
prepares sketches and stage-manages the
extras, his own painted landscapes a ubiquitous
backdrop.
Situating living actors within a
Bruegel painting took much trial-and-error.
“The biggest challenge came from my
misunderstanding of how we were going to
treat this main image,” says Majewski. “I
imagined I’d find a landscape similar to
Bruegel’s, put 500 characters dressed in
period costumes in that landscape, and then
photograph it with a Steadicam or some
form of traveling shot.”
He managed to find a landscape in
the Jura Mountains that resembled
Bruegel’s eerie rock formations. But during
tests, Majewski hit two snags. “First, the
light changed so fast that I knew we could
never capture the entire scene with so many
characters in one go and later match those
things. Second, if I used a wide lens, the
rock that’s so impressive in Bruegel’s painting
would be tiny, like a finger; and if I used
The film, which involved 48 days of filming and 28 months of post, culminates in the procession
toward Calvary, where Jesus is largely obscured by the throngs (as in Bruegel’s masterpiece).
Creating an organic-looking unity between multiple elements while emulating Bruegel’s colors and
atmospherics was the greatest challenge during the color correction.
a longer lens, it would just become a blob in
the background. The tests proved to me that
my concept was completely, entirely wrong.”
Majewski realized he would have to
piece Bruegel’s world together from the
ground up. His first stop was Vienna’s
Kunsthistorisches Museum, which provided
a 120-MB photo of the 49"x67" painting.
“We could blow it up on a huge screen,
zoom in and get fantastic details,” Majewski
says.
He and a team of visual-effects artists
then set about removing all 500 figures from
the digital reproduction. Museums in
London and Darmstadt supplied other
photos of Bruegel’s work, which allowed
the filmmakers to build a sizable library of
landscape elements that could extend or
alternate with The Way to Calvary ’s background.
Working so closely with the painting,
Majewski realized that it contains not one
cohesive perspective, but seven different
ones. “Some are from high above, some
from below, some from left or right —
Bruegel tricks you!” he notes. “I presume
www.theasc.com June 2011 17

Left: Bruegel’s metaphorical mill sits atop a rock that was inspired by the artist’s journey through the Alps to Italy. Right: Majewski works with
the actors on a bluescreen set in Katowice, Poland. “There are so many green details in Bruegel’s painting that we had to use b luescreen
instead of greenscreen,” notes the director.
that this broken perspective allowed him to
select from sketches, choosing what was
most useful for building this theatrum and
packing more clarity in the distribution of
characters.”
Accordingly, the filmmakers categorized
their landscape components into seven
sections, and Majewski photographed
corresponding landscapes in the Jura.
“When we were compositing the landscape
later on, we were using a little bit of Bruegel
and a little bit of reality, and finding the invisible
point at which one goes into the other.”
Cloud formations were a trickier
matter. Bruegel’s static clouds would not do,
but when shooting on location, the filmmakers
encountered blue skies, which were
useless, or clouds of the wrong size. “Also,
it sounds strange, but the real clouds didn’t
look real,” adds Majewski.
The solution was found halfway
around the world. After principal photography,
Majewski happened to go to New
Zealand, and while traveling on the southern
island, he noticed some remarkable
cloud formations. “In Maori, they call this
‘the island of the long clouds,’” he says.
“The clouds were endless, like a piece of
polished marble with rivulets and tiny
streams going through it. It’s an endless
metamorphosis, a real show. You could basically
pull out a chair, sit down and watch it.”
Majewski asked a local cinematographer,
John Chrisstoffels, to film these cloud
formations in various light conditions. “With
those images, we almost had it, but there
was a little too much reality,” says the director.
So the team went back to the Bruegel
digital library and extracted some skyscapes.
In the final, about 80 percent of the clouds
moving across the frame are New Zealand
clouds. “But in order to combine those with
[the CG clouds] in the right way, we had to
extend the cloud formation in the Bruegel
painting,” says Majewski. “That’s where my
painting background came into play!”
The village and mill interior were
filmed mainly at historic sites in Poland and
the Czech Republic. These included two
windmills and a 600-year-old salt mine,
whose cavernous rock walls helped create
the mill interior. The mine’s huge, wood
wheels and cogs were set in motion for the
first time in centuries “after a lot of negotiation,”
says Majewski.
The final piece of the jigsaw was the
actors, who were filmed in a bluescreen
environment onstage in Katowice. “All the
technicians were very unhappy that we
couldn’t use greenscreen, because it’s easier
to extract images from greenscreen than
bluescreen,” notes the director. “But there
are so many green details in Bruegel’s painting
that we had to use blue.”
Principal photography was accomplished
with a Red One, which recorded
onto 8GB Compact Flash cards. 24Media in
Katowice supplied the camera package,
which included a 24mm Zeiss Super Speed
lens and an Angenieux Optimo 24-290mm
zoom lens. “The Red was a saving grace in
terms of playing with various layers because
of the amount of pixels it provides,” notes
Majewski.
To evoke the atmospheric haze of
Bruegel’s landscapes, he considered filtration,
but he eventually decided to use only
ND filters on the lens. “I rejected other filtration
because I felt it removed me from the
human beings,” he explains. “I knew we
had to get inside the aesthetics of Bruegel
another way.”
In post, most of the Red’s RAW data
was converted to DPX files, “but for big
shots involving many people, like the one in
which Bruegel walks around the characters
in the painting, we didn’t convert the Red
data at all because we didn’t want to lose
any information captured by the camera’s
sensor,” says visual-effects supervisor Pawel
Tybora of Odeon. After receiving the shots,
the effects artists would decide whether to
use 2-D or 3-D compositing, and then pick
the best platform for specific shots. “It’s easy
to shoot all the elements but hard to assemble
them as one, to create a unity that has a
significant and recognizable aesthetic,”
observes Majewski.
Tybora notes, “It took us many hours
to find the right atmosphere for each shot
because we had about a hundred different
shots of clouds, Bruegel paintings, actors on
bluescreen and shots of fields, hills and rocks
to choose from. It was trial-and-error to find
the right elements that would fit together,
18 June 2011 American Cinematographer

and then we would experiment some more
with colors, different kinds of fog, dirt and
smoked glass. Creating an organic unity for
each scene was indeed very hard work, and
many, many scenes involved this process.”
The finished DPX 10-bit logarithmic
files went to the Warsaw Film Studio lab for
final color correction, which was handled by
colorist Ewa Chudzik. The festival print was
made on Kodak Vision Premier 2393.
As for that living tableau at the heart
of the film, “the most challenging part was
dealing with the length of the sequence,”
say Tybora. Running about 4 1 ⁄2 minutes, it
comprised 147 elements. At its foundation
were three Red shots: one with the tableau
vivant in the Jura, a second with Hauer and
York in bluebox, and a third with the crowd
moving. These were combined with a CG
rock, mill and miller. It took Tybora nine
months to build and texturize the rock,
using images of rock surfaces, cracks, and
slabs he’d gathered with his Canon EOS
450D. He and Majewski also struggled to
find the right speed for the CG camera
movement.
Astute observers will notice that this
sequence contains two conflicting light
sources. The crowd walks through a raking,
golden light, but the virtual camera move
tilts up to a mill backlit by the sun, with CG
rays of light slicing past the windmill’s
blades. “That was to ‘spiritify’ the light,”
Majewski explains. “It might seem like a
mistake, but in painting at those times, there
was often a different usage of sunlight [in
the same image]. There’s real sunlight and
holy sunlight. When Van Eyck painted the
angel visiting Mary, Gabriel is lit from the left,
or north, wall. Anybody who sees that
knows this is not the real sun; this is the light
of the Creator.”
In addition to the feature’s upcoming
theatrical release, a video installation called
The Bruegel Suite, which incorporates extensive
footage and drawings from the film, will
be featured in the Venice Biennale this
month.
TECHNICAL SPECS
1.85:1
Digital Capture
Red One
Zeiss Super Speed, Angenieux Optimo
In Last Man Standing, Catherine Bell (right) stars as Abby, a soccer mom and former black-ops
soldier who uses her military training to rescue her kidnapped husband.
I
Last Man Standing Brings
Alexa to Detroit
By Jean Oppenheimer
The first obstacle Steven Bernstein,
ASC faced on Lifetime Movie Network’s Last
ManStanding was convincing the powersthat-be
at Sony Television to let him use an
Arri Alexa instead of Sony’s F35, Panavision’s
Genesis or Red’s One. “I pushed hard for the
Alexa,” says the cinematographer. “I was
able to show that the camera would probably
end up saving us money and a whole lot
of time, if used correctly.”
The second obstacle proved to be
finding an Alexa, which has been extremely
popular since its introduction in April 2010.
“Fletcher Camera came to our rescue,” says
Bernstein. “[ASC associate] Thomas Fletcher
had one [brought to us] from the company’s
headquarters in Chicago, and he actually
purchased a second one from Arri so we’d
have two.”
Last Man Standing , Bernstein’s third
collaboration with director and fellow ASC
member Ernest Dickerson (following the
feature Bulletproof and the telefilm Big Shot:
Confessions of a Campus Bookie ), stars
Catherine Bell as Abby, a soccer mom with a
black-ops background who uses her military
training to rescue her kidnapped husband
(Anthony Michael Hall).
The cinematographer had tested the
Alexa shortly after it hit the market but had
not yet used it on a project. “It’s incredible in
its simplicity,” he observes. “It has dials on
the side for shutter angle, frame rate, ASA
and color temperature, which makes it
incredibly easy to operate. It’s small, handles
like a film camera and has an enormous
dynamic range.”
Although Dickerson hadn’t used the
Alexa, either, he had been following its
development. Faced with an 18-day shooting
schedule on Last Man Standing , he
knew “the only way we could pull it off was
with a digital camera that had the flexibility
of a 16mm film camera. That’s the Alexa.”
More than half of the movie’s action
takes place at night, and the Alexa’s latitude
enabled the filmmakers to shoot in downtown
Detroit with just available light. When
Bernstein needed additional illumination, he
used small sources such as LED ribbon lights.
He chose T1.3 Arri Master Primes
because “they can be used in very low light
without any reduction in quality,” and for
their ability to combine sharpness with softness.
“I know that sounds like a contradiction,
but one has to do with contrast and the
other has to do with acutance; it’s a lovely
combination that makes the image look
three-dimensional.” (He also used two
Angenieux Optimo zooms, a 24-290mm
and a 17-80mm.)
The Alexa’s ability to record to solidstate
cards was also very appealing. “You
don’t have that bulky cable going to the
back of the camera, so it’s faster to use, and
we could also eliminate the traditional DIT
Last Man Standing photos by Wallace M. Chrouch and Adam Beason, courtesy of Lifetime Entertainment.
20 June 2011 American Cinematographer

Always thinking “outside the box” has kept me with
Clairmont since 1989; when I first
arrived in Vancouver to operate on the series “Booker.” I immediately
noticed a couple of things. Denny and his
staff are as passionate
about cinematography as I am
and they treat all people equally.
The camera trainee or the indie filmmaker
gets the samecare and attention to
detail as the seasoned DP. I have always
shared this philosophy. This is
a collaborative business and
everyone does his or her part. If ever I
am looking for a creative
solution to a problem, I can
always count on the Clairmont staff to
research, acquire or even manufacture
the solution. I get the feeling that it’s
not all about profit margin but
about a sense of pride in supplying the
newest, best and most well maintained equipment. Achieving and assisting
creative vision comes first and foremost. This is what I mean about
thinking “outside the box”. There are a lot of rental houses out there,
but there is only one Clairmont Camera.
Attila Szalay HSC, CSC
www.clairmont.com