Linus Sandgren | ‘Battle of the Sexes’
The scene:
Emma Stone and Steve Carell face off on the tennis court in the 1973-set biographical drama’s climactic, winner-take-all exhibition match-cum-nationally televised media circus.
Shot significance:
Respectively portraying women’s champion Billie Jean King and self-proclaimed male chauvinist pig Bobby Riggs, the two players battle for bragging rights despite their gender difference and 26-year age gap. But what’s really at stake is a demand for respect by female tennis players, who earned significantly less than their male counterparts on the pro circuit at the time — as well as for women in society in general.
Birth of the shot:
Sandgren, winner of this year’s cinematography Oscar for “La La Land,” along with co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris ( 2006’s “Little Miss Sunshine”), strenuously avoided ’70s nostalgia, opting instead to operate “like contemporary filmmakers from the ’70s,” the director of photography said. That involved shooting on 35mm film and processing the stock to maximize color contrast, saturation and grain. “I also really liked to capture the image in camera as much as possible,” Sandgren said. “Inspiration came from the look of films of the ’70s, like ‘The Parallax View.’ ”
Making it work:
Lookalike professional tennis players served as stand-ins for Carell and Stone, re-enacting crucial moments in exacting detail (before undergoing “face replacement” during post-production). “It was very important for Jon and Valerie to have the ‘Battle of the Sexes’ match be as authentic as possible to the real match,” noted Sandgren. “Therefore, they choreographed every point.”
Also important: filming the tennis like an actual sporting event rather than an action movie. “There’s a reason why tennis matches are shot the way they’re shot. You have to understand what’s going on,” the cinematographer said. “We watched other tennis movies from 10, 15 years ago. They just looked stupid — if you follow the tennis ball with a cable cam or something. Steve and Emma were also playing the points. But we’d only go to close-up for everything that went on in between. It was much more about the emotion and tension in the game.”