AmericanCinematographer201201

Editor’s Note
Hollywood remakes of successful European films may vary
in quality, but The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is more
intriguing than most. Director David Fincher has already
proven his affinity for crime dramas with Seven, The Game
and Zodiac, and his previous collaborations with Jeff
Cronenweth, ASC produced the equally compelling
dramas Fight Club and The Social Network.
On Dragon Tattoo, Cronenweth was a late replacement
for the project’s original cinematographer, and he
quickly found himself confronting extreme weather while
shooting on location in Sweden. “Overall, the weather in
Northern Europe made for the biggest challenge,”
Cronenweth tells Jay Holben (“Cold Case,” page 32).
“We experienced severe winter storms as well as a very hot summer in Sweden. The cold was
the hardest, though.”
Janusz Kaminski and Steven Spielberg also faced challenges on the World War I drama
War Horse,which features battle sequences staged on an abandoned airfield in Surrey,
England. Further complicating the filmmakers’ mission was the fact that the movie’s hero is
a horse. As Kaminski tells Patricia Thomson (“Animal Instincts,” page 48), a big part of his
job was to convey the animal’s feelings and make him seem larger than life. “Truly, when you
look at a horse, there are no emotions in its eyes,” he observes. “We were glorifying Joey a
little through lighting and composition. We were always trying to place the light so that his
coat would reflect it, and so it would create glints in his eyes.”
Barry Ackroyd, BSC lends a Shakespearean dimension to war with Coriolanus, which
placed its director and star, Ralph Fiennes, squarely in the line of fire. “I like to have the confidence
of the director, and I knew that with Ralph directing and acting in the film, he had to
be able to trust that I’d give him what he wanted,” Ackroyd tells Iain Stasukevich (“Lord of
War,” page 62).
For those of you trying to keep pace with evolving digital workflows, AC technical
editor Christopher Probst surveys some of the current systems and solutions (“Go with the
Flow,” page 74). “In today’s industry, which finds digital-imaging tools introduced and
supplanted with head-spinning frequency, workflows are evolving in new ways and at breakneck
speeds,” Probst notes. “Each step on this path is slippery enough to cause stumbles,
either through human error or through the loss of information as image data is transferred
and/or translated…. For cinematographers, trying to stay abreast of current technologies
requires a much broader understanding of workflows than ever before.”
Stephen Pizzello
Executive Editor
Photo by Owen Roizman, ASC.
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