Back to selection
“Film No Longer Has the Texture I Was Looking For…”: DP Phedon Papamichael on Shooting A Complete Unknown
A Complete Unknown The five years between Bob Dylan’s arrival in New York and his performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival marked a huge shift in popular culture. It wasn’t just the songs Dylan wrote and performed. The politics he espoused, relationships he formed, causes he endorsed, even the clothes he wore were critiqued and copied by a growing number of acolytes and fans. Dylan helped shape the culture in ways few other artists could match.
Based in part on Elijah Wood’s book Dylan Goes Electric!, director James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown follows Dylan as he finds and develops a voice and persona. The movie recreates a period when youth tried to wrest control from an alarmed and disbelieving establishment.
The script (by Mangold and Jay Cocks) focuses on key players in Dylan’s orbit: folk music stalwart Pete Seeger (played by Edward Norton); Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), whose looks and singing voice captivated audiences; Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), a fictionalized version of Dylan’s girlfriend Suze Rotolo; and Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook), portrayed here as a satanic angel tempting Dylan to break with convention. Dylan himself is played by Timothée Chalamet, who sings the artist’s classic songs live.
Director of photography Phedon Papamichael has collaborated with Mangold on several films, including Walk the Line and Ford vs. Ferrari. For A Complete Unknown, he worked for the first time with the Sony Venice 2 digital camera. It’s been a busy stretch for Papamichael, who shot Daddio for director Christy Hall, and directed and co-shot his own feature, the thriller Light Falls. He spoke with Filmmaker at this year’s EnergaCAMERIMAGE.
Filmmaker: Bob Dylan is one of the most-documented artists of his time. How did you research this project?
Papamichael: We started with a lot of reference photos. There are a ton of Dylan in his apartment, for example, but mostly black-and-white. For color references, William Eggleston and photographers from the ’60s. That Kodachrome look with high contrast and saturated colors, we used that as a reference to dial in our LUT.
Filmmaker: If you’re emulating the look of New York in the early 1960s, why not go with a film package?
Papamichael: Film no longer has the texture I was looking for because the stock is too clean and too slow. You’re working with 400 ASA, which you could push photochemically to 800 ASA. But with the Venice 2, I’m able to shoot at 6400 ASA, or 12800 ASA. That means I can shoot at a much deeper stop, get a greater depth of field, with minimal lighting.
On location at night, I could use practical streetlights and ambient light from cars and storefronts, lighting the actors with very small, handheld LED units. Keep it live and loose. At the same time, shoot at f8 or 11 to get the deeper f-stop that Mangold and I wanted.
Filmmaker: So how would that work? Say, in the scene where Chalamet is walking down a street in Greenwich Village?
Papamichael: The LED units are the size of a brick, with a soft diffuser dome on them. I have two electricians walking along with Timothée in the center. I’m on the radio controlling the units with a wireless DMX dimmer that has mechanical sliders. When he passes a storefront, I bring up the camera left unit to give a little more fill. Or if he’s approaching a streetlight, I’ll bring up the red. I can augment a little with an eye light, control colors. It’s quite amazing.
It feels very much like a live mix, like a sound mixer playing with levels. They’re tiny lights, without cables, so an electrician can hold them and walk forever. I can either walk with them and do it by eye. Or I can sit next to the director in the video village. It gets fed to me off the main dimmer board.
Filmmaker: Do you get to rehearse, or is it done live?
Papamichael: You have to wing it, which is a good thing. You have people standing by with lights that you only activate if you feel somebody needs some eye light or a bit of color in his face. It’s great for actors, because now they can go anywhere.
I used it for party scenes, like the charity event Dylan goes to in A Complete Unknown. It’s hard to light an entire party. Instead, I have two electricians holding Astera tubes which I use as needed as actors walk through the crowd. You don’t need to pre-light as much, you can be flexible. After the blocking is determined, you can map a path of how the light carriers will maneuver.
I love the way traditional lights worked in the past, but we can make this new technology work for us too. We can speed up the production, give more performance time to the actors. Directors appreciate it because you’re not spending so much time lighting.
Filmmaker: You recreate the lighting for concerts at festivals in Monterey and Newport.
Papamichael: For those, we worked with production designer François Audouy to rebuild the stages the way they were, using period stage lighting units based on the photos and footage from the time.
I embraced the harshness of those concerts. When Timothée and I looked at archival footage, it was quite dark. Film stocks weren’t that sensitive back then. The band behind Dylan would really fall off. Timothée wanted this movie to look like that. I told him it was probably because the stock was 100 ASA, but I appreciated his instincts.
We could have lit the backgrounds more, but I embraced that feel. I’m not creating any kind of additional beauty, soft light or fill light. We used a hard light on Timothée in the concerts. In fact, for Barbara and Elle too, we didn’t use “Hollywood” lighting on them. I didn’t use back lights just to make people look good. Also, because the other person then has to be front lit, right? With Timmy and Barbara and Elle we were blessed with an incredibly photogenic cast. It was liberating not to have to worry about lighting them.
Filmmaker: You’re achieving some incredibly precise shots in the concerts, like the crane in and out for “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” How do you plan them?
Papamichael: We didn’t have very much time. In fact, we didn’t really rehearse once the actors got on stage because they’re in performance mode. Take one for us was always the rehearsal.
That particular shot you’re talking about was on a 50-foot Technocrane. For the concerts, we start with the wide angles, which also incorporates our crowd shots because we have a limited number of extras for a limited time. Using the crane allowed us to get to a closeup from a wide shot. Then we go to the stage camera.
We had a great operator, Scott Sakamoto, on a Steadicam on stage. We shot very much like how we worked on Walk the Line. For these songs, you don’t quite know what the performer is going to do, whether he will turn right or step away from the mike. It has to stay very freeform and reactive.
Scott, who also did A Star Is Born and Maestro, is very much in tune to reacting and finding great angles with a performer on stage. We can’t really do a lot of takes. Timmy’s singing live, and they’re pretty high-energy songs that last three or four minutes. There are no cuts or resets.
Filmmaker: Especially in the early scenes with Dylan, Seeger, and Woody Guthrie [Scoot McNairy], I noticed a lot of rack focus.
Papamichael: This is the seventh movie Jim and I have made together, so we definitely have a language. He loves foreground closeups that transition or evolve into another setup. So rack focus becomes a storytelling tool for us.
We often have an over-the-shoulder shot where the second character gives us a three-quarter profile that we’ll rack to. Or we create an intimate closeup, then he’ll walk out of the frame and re-enter deeper, so the shot becomes a master.
It’s like we hand off the setups, or combine setups so they’re not traditional closeup or over-the-shoulders. We love for shots to evolve. Our favorite closeup is when someone walks into the closeup.
We did that on Indy [Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny]. We really like the way Spielberg covers. If you watch something like Catch Me If You Can, just look at the way the actors and the camera moves. There is a lot of camera movement in A Complete Unknown, but it’s hidden within the dynamics of the blocking.
When we do move the camera to emphasize a point, it’s usually a very slow push. I think that’s one of our signature shots. We’re always on a four-foot slider, always ready to push in. If for some reason the camera crew didn’t put a slider on, or it’s oriented the wrong way, Jim’ll say, “Don’t they know me? Don’t they know we’re going to push in at some point?”
Filmmaker: You’re mostly using one camera, but you needed more to cover Pete Seeger’s public TV show, where Dylan and Jesse Moffette [Big Bill Morganfield] perform with him.
Papamichael: Typically, we’re very oriented to a single camera, but that scene was an exception because they were going to interact and jam together. We definitely needed three cameras in there.
The beauty of having performers like this is that they were really jamming, riffing together. You can’t predict it, you can’t block it or rehearse it. You do a take and then you go, oh, okay, I see what’s happening. Let’s get this camera over here and create an axis. So I had axes with Bob and Pete, Pete and Jesse. You have to be very reactive.
Filmmaker: You were talking earlier about getting new lenses for the Venice 2.
Papamichael: The look I was trying to achieve was those Gordon Willis movies, The Godfather and Klute. It’s a look that doesn’t feel like large format digital cameras.
Dan Sasaki created new Panavision lenses for A Complete Unknown. I told him I wanted something with stronger flare characteristics, more specular. I wanted a little more bending, a little more fall off, a little more vignetting. He built hybrid lenses using old glass from the B- and C-series with the rear elements from the T-series.
But Dan also knows that we like to be very close focused, which the older Panavisions didn’t do. The lenses he built have the close focus range that newer lenses have, although honestly nobody really knows what Dan Sasaki does.
Filmmaker: What steps did you take in post?
Papamichael: We did some early testing at FotoKem with supervising creative colorist David Cole. They have what they call a SHIFT AI, an analog intermediate. You do your color grading, windows, all DI, in a conventional digital space. Then you scan out to Kodak 5203 / 50D negative stock with an Arri Laser. It takes on all the qualities of actual film. We scan that back to a digital intermediate to create the DCP.
Filmmaker: So that adds grain to your images?
Papamichael: Yes, but it’s not just grain. Film has other characteristics, like a slight flicker. It reacts to colors slightly differently. I feel it’s the optimal way to achieve a film look, but still take advantage of digital technology, like shooting with a camera at 12800 ASA at f8 or 11.
Long story short, I’m very happy with the combination of tools we used for this. I try with every movie to have it look like film. This is the most satisfied I’ve been with the results. I feel that A Complete Unknown is one of the highlights of my career, along with Walk the Line.
