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“Claustrophobic Framing Became the Photographic Heart”: DP Ben Fordesman on The Thing with Feathers

A white man is making sketches.Still from The Thing with Feathers. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

A young father (Benedict Cumberbatch) of two boys suspects he is being stalked by a malevolent creature after the sudden death of his wife in The Thing with Feathers. The Premieres section film is the fiction feature debut of Dylan Southern, best known for a slew of music documentaries (Shut Up and the Play the HitsMeet Me in the Bathroom).

Ben Fordesman (Love Lies Bleeding, Saint Maud) served as DP on the film after working with Southern on commercials and music videos. Below, he details at length how he made the crow stalking the young father feel real and how he pulled from films ranging from The Cranes are Flying to Jurassic Park.

See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here.

Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job?

Fordesman: Dylan and I have been working together for a number of years on commercials and music videos, I was fortunate enough to start the conversation with Dylan’s debut film years ago when he acquired the rights to Max Porter’s The Thing with Feathers. It was clear that Dylan was always compelled towards making a feature film; he devours an unthinkable amount of books and films per year. All of our short form projects had a photographic heart referring to movies. I guess by the time we got around to making Feathers we had a pretty good shorthand.

Filmmaker: What were your artistic goals on this film, and how did you realize them? How did you want your cinematography to enhance the film’s storytelling and treatment of its characters?

Fordesman: The book is a poetic devastatingly accurate account of grief. It’s a real masterpiece; many of my friends had read the book, plus there was already a successful stage play adaptation, and now on to us to bring this to the screen, so the pressure was on to do a good job. Dylan did an incredible job adapting it for a screenplay; luckily, we had a few years to discuss and contribute meaningful images into the cinematographic approach.

The story has a very intimate and firsthand style. We wanted the audience to be constantly aware of their loss and despair simultaneously as their imagination distorts reality; finding a visual style to best experience this was key. Since the insanity of despair is so overwhelming, we would often frame our central characters much tighter and alone in their respective frames without much space to breathe. Claustrophobic framing became the photographic heart of this film, tense and close to the landscape of their emotion, hoping this would narrow the conduit between our audience and characters.

While Crow was in the room (or their minds), he would often be squeezed into the corners of our framing, or his looming shadows projected towering above them as a framing device. This film has a triptych narrative, mostly balanced towards the internal experience of Dad and the Boys, then Crow. There’s an escalation to the psychological terrors as Dad becomes more helpless, while the Boys grow increasingly wild and into the depths of their own imagination.

Crow is mocking but also caring. Practically, we needed to see him, but the real goal was to feel him. Crow was an actor in a suit (the incredible Eric Lampaert) propped up on stilts with an animatronic head, towering more than seven feet high. He cut a great profile (“Crowfile,” we later called it), but like any of these things, the slightest wobble can give away the whole act. Shadows and darkness were our friend, Crow playfully wandering from one shadow to the next, or sometimes we would just feature him as a shadow, particularly in our fight sequences. Crow worked better as an extension of Dad and the Boys’ imagination. So, featuring him with a slither of moonlight sat well in the story and helped build our overall mood of the film. There were a couple of shots where Crow is explicitly seen, but by then I feel we had cemented Crow as a creation of the mind rather than real.

Throughout the film we are constantly oscillating between the distorted past and the insanity of the present. Ultimately, it’s a subjective journey, with very few wide shots. We liked to keep the camera claustrophobic to our actors. Therefore, we also felt it was appropriateto shoot with a 4:3 aspect ratio.

Filmmaker: Were there any specific influences on your cinematography, whether they be other films, or visual art, or photography, or something else?

Fordesman: At one point we discussed black and white, looking at films such as The Night of the Hunter and The Cranes are Flying to reference for their use of dramatic lighting and framing. We later decided to shoot with color, but I strangely still felt these references were relevant. With so many nighttime scenes in our film, the palette became muted, with lighting motivated from single sources. The way I’d usually light monochromatically poured into my subconscious. I love the shadow work on The Night of the Hunter and the perspective of the children was very helpful; there is an incredible scene with billowing curtains and lightning flashes from The Cranes are Flying, which was heavily referenced in one of our trippy fight sequences with Crow.

Dylan and I watched a 35mm print of Jurassic Park at the Prince Charles one afternoon; the raptor scene in the kitchen was very influential to our supermarket scene. ET and the way Spielberg shoots from a child’s POV was very helpful. I couldn’t help but reference The Son of Saul in terms of framing: I love the way that film is basically all close-ups, yet you can feel the horror outside of the frame. We looked at a lot of photographic medium format portraiture for framing with our 4:3 framing.

Filmmaker: What were the biggest challenges posed by production to those goals?

Fordesman: This was my first feature mostly shot in a studio set build. All of the house interiors were on a stage with windows looking out to a London street. Although this made perfect sense practically, it makes lighting much more difficult, particularly because I love working alongside natural lighting, and making this from scratch is incredibly difficult to make indistinguishable. Without the help of a large cloud outside in a very modest sized studio, we needed room to bounce big light sources through tiny windows into our dark interior. The light would bounce everywhere, and our trans-light background of a London street required a perfect level of light, so it was a balancing act pumping big lights around while shaping it carefully into the right places. I feel very happy with what Jonathan Yates my gaffer and I achieved, but it did leave my focus puller with very a minimal amount of focus to work with since I was mostly wide open on the lens aperture on this film. Thankfully, Phil Heron, my focus puller, nailed every shot.

I’d say the other biggest challenge was Crow, a towering seven foot (and a bit) in height with a very light-absorbing material who often looked amazing, but sometimes we noticed the suit and it took us out of the character. Lots of prep and testing went into types of wall color vs Crow and lighting, particularly because Crow would need a style of lighting which would differ from a human actor, and sometimes they were inches apart. It was all very fun to work out.

Filmmaker: What camera did you shoot on? Why did you choose the camera that you did? What lenses did you use?

Fordesman: We shot on the Arri Alexa 35 and Canon K35 rehoused lenses from Panavision. There were a few other Panavision speciality lenses; their SP 16mm was incredible, and the 6mm fisheye we used once for the impossibly long hallway shot of Crow’s initial approach. I love the Canon K35s: traced back to the ’70s, they began as awkward-to-use portrait lenses for stills. They are incredible for capturing the human face against the sting of modern digital sensors.

Filmmaker: Describe your approach to lighting. What was the most difficult scene to realize and why? And how did you do it?

Fordesman: Mostly motivated by single natural source shaped in a Gothic realism sort of way, which seems to be my strength, so in daylit scenes we always had huge soft sources filtering in through small Victorian sash windows. This light would fall off very quickly since the interior dressing was mostly dark and there was nothing for the light to bounce back from. This created a lovely natural contrast to our images and freedom for our actors to move within. For night scenes, weather had a kind of moonlight or oaky warm practical light sources. Moonlight is something I think all cinematographers agonize about the most; it’s not exactly real, but if you have scenes set with artificial light sources switched off, you need some kind of dramatic, motivated light source. It’s very easy for this type of lighting to look a bit naff, but I’m pleased with what we produced.

Filmmaker: Finally, describe the finishing of the film. How much of your look was “baked in” versus realized in the DI?

Fordesman: The colorr grade was great fun. We had colorist Simone Grattarola at Time Based Arts, who is a long-time collaborator of Dylan and I from commercials and music videos. I love Simone’s style, and we embraced his signature look. I wish I could explain how he does it, but it’s far too magical to be understood. We mostly spent a brutal amount of time agonizing over moonlight color and how dark the film should generally feel in terms of exposure. A lot of the scenes were shot at the toe of the exposure so not much could change there, but we did pivot towards making our more normal scenes where our characters might come up for air. Daytime exteriors, for example, were made to feel a little more pleasant than our nightmarish interiors. Also, we did our best to push for a more filmic look. A lot of meticulous levels of film grain were added shot per shot.

TECH BOX

Film Title: The Thing with Feathers
Camera: Arri Alexa Mini
Lenses: Canon K35s / Panavision Super speeds
Lighting: HMI / Tungsten supplied by Panalux
Color Grading: Simone Grattarola at Time Based Arts

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