Entertainment
Hoyte van Hoytema is ready for his close-ups with 'Oppenheimer'
Hoyte van Hoytema hurt his back. No, it wasn’t with one of the 54-pound Imax cameras the cinematographer maneuvers for the films he’s made with director Christopher Nolan: “Interstellar,” “Dunkirk,” “Tenet” and, most recently, “Oppenheimer.”
“It literally happens when I pick up tiny objects from the floor or something,” the bed-resting Dutch director of photography says, in good spirits at the start of a Zoom audio interview.
One could make the leap that that reflects what he and Nolan did with big, 65-millimeter technology for their film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, “the father of the atomic bomb.” Much of the movie’s three-hour running time is spent close-in on the faces of star Cillian Murphy and others. It was, to say the least, a novel approach to a cerebral epic about the device that ended World War II.
Van Hoytema, who was born in Switzerland, educated at Poland’s legendary Lodz Film School (Krzysztof Kieslowski supervised one of his student projects) and started his career in Sweden with Tomas Alfredson’s “Let the Right One In,” among others, knew that “Oppenheimer” would be simpler yet perhaps more daunting than previous space- and time-spanning Nolan productions.
“I understood early that this was going to be a film about faces,” Van Hoytema recalls. “There it was, a very new challenge for us. In the older films, we could resort to wide shots, spectacle. This film was really turning inwards; it was all about expressions and faces and intimacy, subjectivity.”
Long enamored of the 18K resolution that Imax 65 film achieves, Nolan and Van Hoytema never considered shooting “Oppenheimer” with lightweight digital cameras. Panavision’s System 65 film cameras were also employed for shots in which sound and dialogue were crucial. Some takes were done, though, with the wider-gauge, much noisier Imax for love of its image, with hopes that prerecorded soundtracks could be looped-in later.
“We love Imax,” the cinematographer affirms. “Its visceral nature, its immersiveness. Traditionally, Imax has been applied for wideness and bigness and ‘overwhelmingness,’ you can say. Here, the faces became our landscapes. The eyes become the places where we filmmakers project our thoughts. We knew we wanted to get closer with those cameras, be really in there.”
Like many a Nolan production, “Oppenheimer” unfolds along multiple timelines. In general, the narrative before and through World War II is presented in color, whereas the physicist’s postwar conflicts — when anti-communist forces spearheaded by an aggrieved bureaucrat, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance — play in monochrome.
The color coding works as more than a time stamp, perspective-wise.
“Oppenheimer’s point of view is our color material, Strauss’ point of view is our black and white material,” Van Hoytema notes. “As Oppenheimer is clearly our protagonist, his view is more visceral. Also, the physics experiments we see and everything, is all stuff he envisions in his head. Strauss’ are in black and white, and these two ways of shooting are very much an aid to the audience to separate those two narratives from each other. It’s still simple, but it’s much more an emotional separation than a time/date separation.”
The flash assault on the test explosion’s observers, including Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) iconically peering through a bunker’s porthole, had to be lit just so.
(Universal Pictures)
Though much of “Oppenheimer” is close-up and intimate, the film’s central event is a big bang: The first atomic bomb test at Trinity, N.M. The metastasizing mushroom cloud was achieved through practical effects. The flash assault on the explosion’s observers, including Oppenheimer iconically peering through a bunker’s porthole, had to be lit just so.
“We did set off explosions,” albeit not nuclear ones, Van Hoytema confirms with a laugh. “There is a lot of practical light that’s being emitted. You cannot be very consistent with that; every time that you want a close-up you cannot just set off a gigantic explosion. So I had to replicate it with lighting, and I took advantage of how deep we are right now into LED technology. All my light sources on set nowadays are DMX-controlled; we run it through dimmer boards and can change colors and intensity.”
The magnitude of what he’s created hits Oppenheimer at a rally to celebrate the U.S. victory in WWII.
(Melinda Sue Gordon / Universal Pictures)
Perhaps a more devastating sequence zeroes in on Murphy. After Japan surrenders following the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer delivers a victory speech to his cheering scientists in a gym at Los Alamos, the community he built for creating the bomb. While at the lectern, the horrendous implications of what he’s unleashed finally hit the mission-focused physicist while Van Hoytema’s cameras close in for atomic-level impact.
“At a point we started to really encroach on [Murphy],” the cinematographer says. “I mean, the camera is really up his nose; there is no escaping,” the cinematographer says. “As an audience you become part of his private thought bubble, as it were. We took advantage of this very short depth of field, moving in and out of focus, adding tiny little steps shot at slightly higher frame rates — it definitely adds this unbalanced, doubtful feeling to it all.
“Another trick that we developed with [visual effects supervisor] Andrew Jackson was projecting on the backgrounds. You see a stone wall that starts scintillating and vibrating a bit behind Oppenheimer, the world blown up and falling apart. We used on-set projectors, we’d then add little shakes and jiggles to get that scintillating effect. We did that several times in the film, just to understand the fabric of the world around him from Oppenheimer’s point of view.”
Movie Reviews
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Entertainment
Security guard at the center of Chappell Roan controversy breaks silence: ‘I take full responsibility’
Security guard Pascal Duvier, most recently infamous for allegedly scolding 11-year-old Ada Law at a hotel in São Paulo, is clearing the air.
Duvier issued a statement on Instagram on Wednesday night following four days of back-and-forth social media claims from soccer star Jorginho, his wife, Catherine Harding (singer-songwriter Cat Cavelli), and pop star Chappell Roan, who denied involvement in an incident that left Ada (the biological daughter of Jude Law and Harding) in tears ahead of her birthday celebration.
As a result of the controversy, speculation around Roan’s treatment of her fans has flooded social media for days. The “Hot to Go!” hitmaker has been vocal in the past about setting boundaries with fans and paparazzi, as well as her complicated relationship with fame.
Duvier, who insists he was not working for Roan at the time of the incident, began his statement saying that he does not normally address online rumors, “but the accusations currently circulating are false and constitute defamation.”
“I take full responsibility for the interactions on March 21st,” he wrote. “I was at the hotel on behalf of another individual, and I was not part of the personal security team of Chappell Roan.
“The actions I took were not on behalf of Chappell Roan, her personal security team, her management, or any other individuals. I made a judgment call based on information we obtained from the hotel, events I had witnessed in the days prior and the heightened overall security risk of our location. My sole interaction with the mother was calm and with good intentions, and the outcome of the encounter is regretful.”
Roan headlined Lollapalooza Brazil over the weekend, and Jorginho was in attendance along with his wife and stepchild. While there, the footballer said the 11-year-old (whom he did not name) thought she spotted the pop star at their São Paulo hotel.
The girl passed by Roan’s table “to confirm it was her, smiled, and went back to sit with her mum. She didn’t say anything, didn’t ask for anything,” he wrote.
Jorginho alleged that, after the girl sat down, a “large security guard” interrupted their breakfast to scold them. The guard allegedly told Harding “she shouldn’t allow [her] daughter to ‘disrespect’ or ‘harass’ other people.”
The girl was “extremely shaken and cried a lot,” said Jorginho, a player for the Brazilian club Flamengo whose legal name is Jorge Luiz Frello Filho.
On Sunday, Roan responded on Instagram, seemingly baffled by the swirling controversy. She insisted the guard was not her personal security and that no one had approached her.
“I did not ask the security guard to go up and talk to this mother and child. … They did not come up to me. They weren’t doing anything.
“I do not hate people who are fans of my music. I do not hate children.”
Three days ago Harding also responded to the brouhaha, posting her own video on Instagram in an attempt to bring some clarity following Roan’s statement. “So 100% this security guard was not a security guard of the hotel, that’s what I can say,” she said. “He looks after artists.
“So I don’t know if it was her personal security guard, but he was with her. So that is all I know. Did she send him to do it? Again, I don’t know.”
Duvier, a “protection specialist” and martial artist, according to his Instagram bio, worked for Kim Kardashian in 2016.
Times Deputy Editor Amy Hubbard contributed to this report.
Movie Reviews
Movie Review: In ‘Miroirs No. 3,’ a slender and elegant tale of mutual rehabilitation
Christian Petzold’s beguiling and restorative new drama “Miroirs No. 3” begins with a glance and a car crash.
Wreckage and its long-term aftermath have long marked the movies of Petzold, arguably Germany’s foremost filmmaker. In his finest and most exquisitely haunting film, 2014’s “Phoenix,” an Auschwitz survivor and cabaret singer (Nina Hoss, colossally good) returns unrecognized to her German hometown with a reconstructed face, to a husband who’s said to have betrayed her to the Nazis.
“Miroirs No. 3” doesn’t have that film’s grandiosity of melodrama; it’s more of a lightly enigmatic chamber piece. But it’s likewise preoccupied with piecing life together again after tragedy, and maybe finding some catharsis in music. (The title comes from a Ravel piano piece.) And its startling power will, like “Phoenix,” sneak up on you.
Laura (Paula Beer, the star of Petzold’s “Undine” and “Transit”), a piano student from Berlin, is reluctantly riding in the backseat of a car. Our first glimpse of her, before this road trip, was staring blankly, maybe suicidally, into a river. With Laura is her musician boyfriend, Jakob (Philip Froissant) and a producer that Jakob is hoping to impress. As they drive through the countryside, Laura locks eyes with a solitary middle-aged woman standing outside her home. For a fleeting moment they share a mysterious connection, maybe of some shared strain of depression.
Soon after, Laura says she wants to return to Berlin and Jakob, annoyed, drives her to the nearest train station. But just after again passing the same woman’s house, they skid off the road in a wreck that kills Jakob and throws Laura from the car. The woman runs to help. After the paramedics arrive and treat a still dazed Laura, they’re surprised at her request. She asks if she can stay at the woman’s house, rather than go to the hospital.
What follows is a sweetly oblique, even dreamlike interlude of recuperation. But it’s not just Laura’s. It’s also healing for the woman who happily takes her in. Betty is her name, and Barbara Auer’s performance is as deft and delicate as any you’re likely to see this year. Their time together is spent not discussing their own traumas, but with soft, unspoken kindnesses and daily routine.
Petzold, who also wrote the script, is masterful at meting out backstory. He does it in a way that never feels like withholding to the audience or girding for a big twist, but remains tied to the psychology of his characters. As much as his films might ebb and flow with grief and recovery, their backbone is that of a thriller. Petzold, a great admirer of Hitchcock and “Vertigo,” in particular, makes movies where identity, rather than people, can go missing.
The source of Betty’s pain isn’t revealed until well into “Miroirs,” but it’s not hard to guess at. We learn that her husband Richard (Matthias Brandt) and their adult son Max (Enno Trebs) — auto mechanics who look skeptically on Laura’s arrival — live separate of Betty. Meanwhile, Betty gives Laura her daughter’s clothes to wear, and encourages her to play the piano her daughter used to. Together, they paint a fence and restore a herb garden.
Strange as their domestic life might seem, something warm and good is taking place. We have the feeling Richard and Max haven’t been around much, even though their shop is just a bike ride away. But the four soon begin to almost resemble a family unit. In a movie about two women who intuitively understand each other, Brandt and Trebs are charmingly oafish as men who are eager to fix a dishwasher but less keen on how to repair trauma.
That this idyll is bound to expire, sooner or later, goes without saying. But while another filmmaker might steer such a story toward either disaster or, more likely, schmaltz, Petzold ends “Miroirs” without sacrificing the ambiguous grace that came before. And he turns “Miroirs,” a slender and sweet 86-minute puzzle, into one of the more lovely and profound little movies about how hearts can be mended by just opening a door.
“Miroirs No. 3,” a 1-2 Special release in theaters, is not rated by the Motion Picture Association. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 86 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.
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