Earning his first ASC award for “Maria” last month, it seems cinematographer Ed Lachman now feels emboldened to bemoan current trends in film imagery. Though most movies no longer shoot on traditional film stock, many still seek out the grainy appeal in the final edit, a fact Lachman has come to detest. Still prone to work with film, as he did on Pablo Larraín’s “Maria,” he also knows the challenges of processing that film by digital means.
Speaking with fellow DP Roger Deakins during a recent episode of the “Team Deakins” podcast, Lachman explained how he prefers to use “color temperature and gels” in-camera to replicate film when working with digital, but most others only manipulate the image in post.
“This whole idea of shooting wide open, with no depth of field, so everything’s mush in the front or the back, they think that gives them the film look,” said Lachman. “I don’t, I think it looks more digital when they do that. It drives me crazy.”
While Lachman believes many recent films fall into this category, there was one in particular from last year that particularly irked him.
“I don’t want to mention other films, but I will. ‘Babygirl, right?’ You see the wide shot, you see everything, and then every time they go into the medium shots or the close-ups, the background is totally knocked out,” Lachman told Deakins. “So every scene looks the same. It’s like the environment, the architecture is part of the image.”
Deakins went on to echo Lachman’s sentiments and really put the blame on how anamorphic lenses tend to wash out certain elements of an image.
“You want the character to feel they’re in a space, and you want that space to register,” he said. “And I think, yeah, what you’re saying, anamorphic, you’re often isolating the character in a kind of sea of mist.”
Lachman previously spoke to IndieWire’s Jim Hemphill back in November upon the release of “Maria,” where he talked about color in the film and how it was used for both depth and to communicate how the environment reflects the mood of the central character.
“I’ve always used color not purely as a decorative means, but as a psychological means,” Lachman said. “I always think of warm and cool colors, and how they interact. So her apartment has the warmth of a nest, like she’s hiding from the world outside, but then it’s invaded by cooler colors like green. Generally, people don’t like green — they don’t think it looks good on flesh tones.”
Lachman’s work on “Maria” was nominated for Best Cinematography at the 97th Academy Awards, but lost to “The Brutalist,” which shot partially in VistaVision.
