ON LOCATION
“All Is Lost” relied on two directors of photography.
“All Is Lost” certainly has its views of lonely ocean expanses and underwater images of majesty and menace.
But perhaps the most important directives for the cinematographers were “up close” and “personal” — in essence, keep it human.
J.C. Chandor’s $10-million film starring Robert Redford, 77, as a man trying to survive the destruction of his sailboat while navigating the Indian Ocean required two directors of photography: For the above-water work, indie stalwart Frank G. DeMarco (“Hedwig and the Angry Inch”), and for the submerged, underwater specialist Peter Zuccarini (“Life of Pi”).
“J.C. wanted the camera to always be close to Our Man,” says DeMarco of the unnamed Redford character, the only role in the film. “If you’re an arm’s length away from him the whole movie, it really informs how you light and shoot every scene. The viewer could see his body language, hear his breathing and get a sense of what Bob’s character was thinking and experiencing
from moment to moment.
“I have my own handheld technique I call ‘the curious eye.’ I’d have the camera on Bob, and he’d look at something in the boat, and I’d pan onto what Bob is looking at and then pan back to Bob. So we see what he’s seeing; it puts you there in the moment.”
Thus, the viewer only learns when Our Man does that a storm is approaching or a mast has broken.
Among Zuccarini’s jobs was to express the character’s predicament in unusual ways.
“You might expect to see a shot from the clouds, looking down on this tiny little boat on the giant ocean,” Zuccarini says, “but J.C. had a great idea to invert that: ‘All those shots that usually convey isolation, I’d like to do them from underwater.’ We did this one shot where you see the raft creep across the sun, it’s one of the few times you feel something calming and beautiful — while the sun was setting. ... It was the passing of time with that lonely man on the raft.
“The character’s under tremendous
[See ‘Lost,’ S22]