March 8, 2006
Audiences watching Lars von Trier's Manderlay may, at first, wonder if they've wandered into a playhouse instead of a movie theater. The sets are sparse--in fact, for the most part, they're missing entirely. Within a few minutes, however, they will likely have forgotten that minor technicality.
USA--Land of Opportunities is the name Lars von Trier has given to his anticipated trilogy of feature films that began with Dogville (2003) and continues with Manderlay. (The third film in the trilogy will be called Washington.) As well as delivering an interpretation of the United States (Manderlayfocuses on race relations), the films represent a developmental trilogy centered on the character of Grace, who will most likely be played by three different actresses by the time production is complete. Also significant are the films' stark, minimal, theatrical production design.
Dogville presented Nicole Kidman as Grace, a fugitive who arrives in the isolated community of Dogville. Although Dogville's residents initially agree to hide her--she agrees to work for them in exchange for her safety--their attitudes shift as the search for her intensifies.
Manderlay's Grace is portrayed by actress Bryce Dallas Howard. Although Kidman and Howard do not resemble each other (and their versions of Grace are not made to resemble each other), von Trier maintains, "It's the same Grace. Her Gestalt is just different. It is another Gestalting of the same Grace. I can see the development from the Grace of the first film to this Grace." He adds, "I like to do a couple of films with the same character."
Manderlay is set in the 1930s. Grace leaves her gangster father (Willem Dafoe) after happening upon a Southern plantation where somebody forgot to tell the owners (and their African-American "staff") that slavery ended a few decades earlier. Grace frees them from their formal bondage and attempts to help them learn to survive for themselves...though not necessarily successfully. "It becomes a story of slaves who wanted to be slaves--or do they?" von Trier says.
von Trier explains, "The plot is based on two things. On a preface written by a French writer for The Story of O about some liberated slaves who were starving and wanted their master back, because at least then they had something to eat. And when he refused, they killed him. This cheerful little tale fascinated me. The film was also inspired by Jacob Holdt's photos and lectures about the USA."
The director shot Manderlay like its predecessor, on an almost barren soundstage. Manderlay took place in a former fighter plane assembly plant in Sweden; Dogville was also shot at a Swedish factory. The majority of the "set" consists of lines painted on a white floor to outline buildings and other features, with, at best, minimal set pieces for miscellaneous items. The actors--an impressive cast that includes Lauren Bacall and Danny Glover--creatively utilize their acting skills to put life into the missing set, much as they would in a stage play.
"In this world, Lars really bridges [the distance] between theater and film," says Director of Photography Anthony Dod Mantle, DFF, BSC.
"It is much like a stage play, the only difference being that we have close-ups and some editing," says von Trier. Audiences tend to forget the absence of sets because of their natural ability to suspend reality when watching a movie. "An audience does that even when you make a normal film--it's not logical that something is happening on a wall in a cinema. And in a play, it's not logical that you could look into a dining room."
Von Trier and Mantle (who also shot Dogville) applied a good many "lessons learned" from the prior film, which was shot on a much smaller stage. "Dogville was very much the learning curve," recalls Mantle. "Lars had a vision of this closed world that he wanted me to help him transform. He wanted to apply theatrical principles: theatrical lighting and a theater base. The idea is like a rostrum, with people moving around, with no seeming horizon. It really defies the pseudo-reality principles of classical cinema."
The set consists of a white floor with black lines painted to mark the outlines of the plantation's buildings and black drapes at the perimeter of von Trier's world--the exact opposite of a Dogville, which had a dark floor and often white backgrounds. "That was one of the key issues that Lars and I came out of Dogville believing we had to think about: to change the dark floor," Mantle says. "Having the white floor this time, I could use the ambience coming from the lights shining down from the ceiling."
While Dogville switched between black and white wraparounds, Mantle stuck with the black drapes through Manderlay, varying apparent time of day through lighting changes. "It's horrendously difficult shooting flesh tones against a blasting white background. Also, it was much easier to model the dark skin tones [against black]."
The use of drapes as background requires specific skill, a lesson the filmmakers learned from Dogville. "On Dogville, there were a few scenes--especially wide shots--where you could see the lights falling down the side of the curtain, which is disappointing because it destroys the illusion of the timeless world. In this film, I found I could use the drapes to hide lights in the ceiling. Failing that, they could be painted out in post, but we tried to limit doing that because of cost." The team also avoided shooting toward the drapes, instead allowing depth of field to capture the set backgrounds behind the actors.
Mantle shot the film using a single Sony CineAlta F900/3 with a Canon HJ9x5.5 wide-angle zoom lens. The cinematographer employed an HD consultant, Stefan Ciupek, to make gamma curve adjustments to flesh out nuances in dark skin tones. ("I tend to stay away from poking those buttons--I can cause an awful lot of damage," he laughs.) "We'd change things according to the harshness or softness of the lighting of the scene."
Also onboard was lighting designer Åsa Frankenberg, who worked closely with the DP. "Lars brought in this lighting designer from theater who knew nothing about film but brought a kind of subjective color palette. In film, we tend to go with the 85s, the CTO and the straw. Åsa tended to use a color scheme much more from theater, which really breaks out of the mold. It was a deliberate mix of theater and film."
Frankenberg also utilized some 20 or 30 movable theater lights, Vari-Lite Series 300s, which allowed rotation, pan, tilt and lens adjustments--something Mantle called "a major improvement" over the lighting for Dogville. The hundreds of lighting instruments were operated from dimmer panels, Mantle raising and lowering their levels sometimes within a shot. That effect often appealed to von Trier.
Lighting flexibility was key on the film. "Åsa and I work very closely in planning scenes, going through them, talking about what might happen," Mantle says. "It's very much speculation because you don't know with Lars in which direction the camera is going to point in relation to the action."
Von Trier and Mantle shared operating duties, as they did on Dogville. "Lars arrives in the morning and goes into the scene, before it's even rehearsed, and he'll shoot. He'll want to have the camera so he can see how the scene unfolds, directing at the same time. I'd work with the postproduction supervisor and shoot all the effects shots; Lars goes away then--he gets bored." The two stayed in constant communication via a one-to-one talkback system that allowed the pair to talk freely without other crew members hearing.
The film was essentially shot handheld, though the camera was most often suspended from a device nicknamed the "Lars Rig," developed by grip Jacob Bonfils for Dogville. "The rig basically allows for handheld shooting, moving around all the time," says Mantle. "Lars wants a moving camera. He wants to have 18 or 30 actors moving around on the stage, with very little direction, finding their own way and losing their way. So there's no point in putting a camera on a dolly. His idea is to point and chase, provoke and block, and see what happens. It's a kind of a dance between the camera and the actors."
Bonfils built another important rig that was carried over from Dogville to Manderlay. Manderlay features about a dozen shots that appear to have been captured from the heavens. These sequences, some of which begin as close-ups of items on the stage and pull back to reveal nearly the entire stage floor, are actually a combination of a number of different fields and plates woven together by Visual Effects Supervisor Peter Hjorth and his team.
One shot, for instance, shows Grace reading a book. The camera slowly pulls back to show the bed she is lying on, the room she is in, the building in which the room is located and eventually the entire plantation. Hjorth explains, "You've got a still shot, then maybe three or four frames of the same action, of her lying there reading the book." The shots might continue with the HDCAM mounted on a Technocrane, ending with the ceiling shot. That final image is the key to the success of the shot.
The rig responsible for this increasing perspective contains a dozen Sony DSR-PD100 Handycam-style DVCAMs placed in a grid. The stage was itself divided into a grid of 12 fields of activity. The group of cameras would capture images from one field, then relocate and capture images in the same way from the next field, and so on until the entire stage floor was captured. The data was then woven together in post to produce a single image. (Even though the PD100s did not capture the image in HD, the combined images produce a field offering the required higher resolution image.)
Says Mantle, "This is something that would have been impossible with normal cinematography. It's just an example of Lars' vision. He has a vision, and he has the courage to know that if you don't know how to make something happen yourself, you can certainly find people who can."
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