Photo Credit © A.Nitecka

We have this great new still of Robert Pattinson as Charles Marker thanks to a brilliant interview for Kodak done by Tomris Laffly with Brady Corbet and Lol Crawley.  I loved reading about the thought process and reasoning on why Brady used film.  Personally I love the texture – I’m not a huge fan of digital – sometimes I find it too crisp especially when filmed in a studio, but that’s my personal opinion.  Here’s an extract from the interview, but do yourselves a favour and head on over to read it (click on link above). Wonderful insights:

Working closely together, Corbet and Crawley found the look of the film, which has a glorious, painterly quality to it. “On the set, we were talking about Anselm Keifer for texture. We decided very early on in the design that we do this post-modern Victorian thing,” says Corbet. “We were talking about painterly textures. I think when you’re shooting celluloid, especially [with this film] which was quite underexposed; you’re drawing a lot of the grain out. I think that as soon as you are working with those textures, you get that oil vibe.” Crawley says in addition to Anselm Keifer, which thematically inspired the child’s dream sequences, the paintings of Vilhelm Hammershoi were a strong reference point. He and the film’s production designer John-Vincent Puzos draw from Hammershoi in terms of the color and lighting of family home interiors during daytime. The paintings of Rembrandt were also looked at for inspiration, especially for creating shadow areas. “Harris Savides’ work in Birth exemplifies this approach and his bold use of underexposure inspired me underexpose the day exteriors by 1 1/2 – 2 stops,” Crawley concludes.

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Corbet adds that a shot of Bérénice Bejo cutting flowers is his favorite shot in the movie, and talks about the lensing of it specifically. “We shot a handful of things with these very special portrait lenses that have an incredible swirl. We kept looking for a lens that had this feel like a portal, something that lets you access a task in a way. I was trying to think about ways of evoking a notion of memory without being extremely literal about it. I didn’t want the film to be from this boy’s perspective. I wanted it to dip in and out of it.