Director of Photography Ed Lachman worked with Director Pablo Larraín to produce a unique black and white look for Netflix's film 'El Conde.' Lachman had Arri built a custom Alexa, had old Baltar lenses rehoused and strapped the camera man to a 50-foot crane to capture the acrobatic sequence.
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00:00 I'm Ed Lachman. I'm the cinematographer of Pablo Lorraine's film "El Conde."
00:05 [music]
00:17 The original conversations I had with Pablo was that he had gotten approval from Netflix,
00:23 South America, to shoot the film in actual black and white. And that made me to start to think
00:30 about where do we go with what camera. I started to look into the options for the black and white
00:38 sensor. And he also had made a decision that he wanted to work primarily on a 15-foot technocrane.
00:46 On the Ronin head that we had, we had limitations of the weight. Arri only had the XT and the 65
00:55 millimeter sensor available in black and white, a monochromatic sensor. The problem was that the XT
01:03 wouldn't meet the restrictions or the requirements of 4K. The LF would, but they hadn't produced an
01:13 LF monochromatic camera. And I reached out to a dear friend in Germany who's a cinematographer
01:21 himself. He had a very close relationship to Aeroflex in Germany. He discussed with them
01:26 the possibility if they could build a monochromatic camera in the LF format. I didn't think that they
01:34 would have the time to put any energy into building a LF monochromatic sensor. But they
01:42 were really interested in doing it, I found out anyway. And I guess I was the impetus for them to
01:49 do it. I had also been working on rehousing Baltar lenses. The actual glass that was made for,
01:58 they were called rack-over cameras. They were non-reflex cameras in the silent days. And I
02:05 think the first Baltar lenses were made in 1938. And they were primarily lenses used in
02:12 Magnificent Amber. Some of the lenses were used in Touch of Evil. Even one of the lenses was used
02:19 in Citizen Kane. I then reached out to Alex Nelson, who runs Zero Optics in LA. And he put together
02:29 glass with the Baltar glass that matched. And so I created a set of lenses called the Ultra Baltars.
02:38 I now had a monochromatic sensor. I had lenses that were used in black and white days. I could
02:47 now use my black and white filters, you know, Harrison and Harrison and Tiffin filters that
02:53 I'd used years ago in black and white. And that changes the contrast level. And it changes the
03:02 density in certain areas of color that you're playing with, yellows, reds, oranges for against
03:09 blue in the sky. I could then control the look of the film, which you see in the exterior shots with
03:17 black and white filters. The most important factor for me was I had created something for
03:22 the last 10 years called the EL Zone System. And it's the exposure latitude system. If you put a
03:28 light meter and it reads at four, I'd go to the DIT and say, "It's four. What exposure should I
03:35 put out?" And he would go, "Five, six, or six, three." I'd go, "What? Why is there a discrepancy
03:41 between what my analog meter reads and what the digital world's interpretation of exposure?"
03:48 If you could figure out what 18% gray was in a sensor, be it Sony, be it Airy, be it RED,
03:55 then you could track exposure the way we do in the photochemical world. Then I came up with
04:03 a version of false color, but it's not false color, where 18% gray is 18% gray, not green,
04:10 you know, like some manufacturers have done. That was a godsend. I felt like I was Ensel Adams
04:17 in cinema. I could always hold detail in the highlights and detail in the shadow.
04:23 And by doing that, I created an extended mid-range. And when people talk to me about
04:31 the photographic quality of this film, that's what people, I think, respond to is that the
04:39 mid-range of the film has this extended range that you see the information.
04:46 [Music]
04:53 This was after she had made love and she was bitten by Pinochet, which is also kind of a
05:01 statement between what the relationship was between the church and the state at that time.
05:09 Ultimately, she was corrupted by it. We're experiencing her exaltation
05:16 and freedom in learning how to fly.
05:20 Pablo Lorraine had seen a group out of Colombia. They were aerial and circus performers,
05:32 and they had done some commercials on wire. His idea was if we could actually do it on location
05:40 where we were in Patagonia with wire, which primarily with a wider focal length of 24,
05:46 or 28, even a 21, because we wanted the spatial relationship of where she was.
05:53 She's not just against the sky. Let's show where the ranch is. So you believe you're
06:01 seeing something for real and not manufactured in a post situation. Paula, who plays the nun,
06:10 studied ballet, and she was very much into doing the stunts herself on wire.
06:16 And the way we actually did that was off a 90-foot crane, and she was hung with wire,
06:28 and then we had a grip in a seat near her, in front of her, on other wires, and he was holding
06:36 a Ronin, and it was a remote head, and then the operator was operating from the ground.
06:42 So this gave this incredible freedom, but also metaphorically it was about her freedom
06:50 visually, and this was really Pablo's idea of how we could actually shoot it live.
06:57 I think it creates an authenticity that people believe
07:04 what's happening, and it emotionally connects you to her spirit.
07:10 Pablo likes to be in the moment with finding the shot. He definitely has it in his head
07:20 what he wants to do, but then on the set he's very free to just let it happen and discover it
07:27 in the image, and that's the way I like to work best with a director, is that you go in with a
07:33 plan, but then you're open to what's happening in front of you. All the exteriors in the ranch
07:41 were with natural light. The interiors were shot two months before we actually were on location
07:49 in Patagonia to shoot the exteriors. I was very concerned because I've seen it numbers of times
07:56 that the exterior light doesn't match the interior light, and all that everybody could tell me is the
08:03 light could change in 10 minutes, you know, from clouds to sunlight. I made a decision primarily
08:10 out of necessity that they didn't give me enough room to place lights out the windows where you
08:18 paper the window and then you hit the window with the light and you have the soft light,
08:23 but I didn't want to make it totally soft light. I didn't want it to end up looking like a
08:29 commercial, so what I realized and never thought of doing is I would tear holes in the paper. It
08:37 was 1008 tracing paper I still like, and I would change that from day to day, and then obviously
08:43 overhead I had a muslin and lit the muslin from up above whatever lights I could find there,
08:51 so there was an ambient level to just raise the exposure level in the room.
09:03 Pinochet in the film as not a traditional romantic idea of a vampire, but literally how he
09:11 took the blood out of every institution, out of the political, the social, the economic institutions
09:19 for his own greed. What Pablo was saying is that justice is a collective desire, and that the
09:26 people of Chile never had the chance for any retribution. Pinochet lived to the ripe old age
09:36 of 91 free of his crimes, and so in a way he lives on in the memory of Chileans as a vampire,
09:47 because it's forever. Their pain and suffering is forever.