The Hollywood Reporter (Weekly) - The Hollywood Reporter Awards Special
BRUNO DELBONNEL, THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH
This collaboration with director Joel Coen delivered French cinematographer Delbonnel his sixth Oscar nomination, following Amélie, A Very Long Engagement, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Inside Llewyn Davis and Darkest Hour.
“It’s about Shakespeare,” says Delbonnel of planning the black-and-white images used for Apple TV+’s Macbeth, which was filmed onstage at Warner Bros. “Joel called me about three years ago. He said, ‘I want to do this little movie, everything onstage. It’s Macbeth.’ We shot everything onstage because [Joel and his team] didn’t want to go to Scotland, and he didn’t want to go to a castle. It was about theatricality,” the cinematographer explains, adding that the approach was “just to get rid of any ornamentation. A wall is a wall, a staircase is a staircase. It wasn’t about a Corinthian column or Gothic or whatever. And then it was really about the language of Shakespeare.” Delbonnel also took some inspiration from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc, which the DP described as “so pure and so dictatorial in many ways.”