AmericanCinematographer201201

Unit photography by Baldur Bragason, Patricia Castellanos and Merrick Morton, SMPSP. Photos and frame grabs courtesy of Columbia Pictures.
matographer weren’t seeing eye-to-eye,
and he asked if I was available to take
over.
“I gave it a lot of thought because
it was a tough situation,” continues the
cinematographer. “One doesn’t want to
replace someone else. It’s always unfortunate.
I hadn’t been involved in the
prep, and I was worried about communication
with the crew, thinking they
might resent me because I was replacing
one of their own. But David and I go
way back, we’ve worked together many
times, and, luckily, we had discussed the
movie before he embarked on it.
Ultimately, the decision was not that
hard, and it was really smooth sailing.
The crew welcomed me with open
arms.”
“It’s a difficult thing to walk onto
someone else’s film, and Jeff didn’t agree
to it overnight,” says Fincher. “In retrospect,
I would have done it a different
way and not been so committed to the
idea of an entirely Swedish production;
I would have started with Jeff from the
beginning. I was really lucky he was able
to bail us out and that we got a chance
to work together again.”
The production was using the Pix
system, an online project-management
platform that facilitates instant access to
reports, script changes and dailies, and
with it Cronenweth was able to view all
of the footage that had been shot before
Opposite page: After agreeing to help a journalist investigate a decades-old disappearance,
computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) is drawn into a much deeper mystery.
This page, top: The journalist, Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), meets with retired business executive
Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer). Bottom: Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, ASC surveys a
snowy setting on location.
[AC July ’92] with my dad [Jordan
he arrived in Europe. He met with the
had worked with him back on Alien 3 Cronenweth was with the
key production team in Zurich on a
Saturday morning, and by the following
Tuesday he was shooting in Stockholm.
He recalls, “I had just come off a
commercial in Miami, and suddenly I
was out on the water in Stockholm,
trying desperately to stay warm! It was
quite a shock to the system. Fortunately,
[A-camera operator] David Worley was
there, and he was a very familiar face. I
Cronenweth, ASC].
“We had a British grip and
camera crew and a Swedish electrical
department, and we all got on fantastically,”
he adds. “The first week was
really just day-to-day, shooting based on
what had already been decided and
rescouting at night, but by the time we
got to the second week, I was up and
running.”
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