WHEN THE DESPOT IS AN ACTUAL VAMPIRE

Oscar-nominated DP Edward Lachman sheds light on his approach to director Pablo Larraín’s latest anti-biopic El Conde, which depicts former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a bloodsucking monster

In early 2022, Pablo Larraín asked esteemed cinematographer Edward Lachman whether he’d be interested in shooting a movie about Augusto Pinochet, the 20th century dictator responsible for torturing, abducting or executing thousands of Chileans during his 17-year rule. Larraín is the master of the anti-biopic, having directed unorthodox films about Princess Diana (2021’s Spencer), Jacqueline Kennedy (2016’s Jackie) and Pablo Neruda (2016’s Neruda), and El Conde — cowritten with fellow Chilean Guillermo Calderón — would be his most offbeat yet: a black-and-white satire portraying Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) as a 250-year-old vampire who faked his death and now drinks blood smoothies on a secluded farm while his children attempt to off him so they can obtain their inheritance.

Lachman quickly deduced that Larraín’s far-out fusion of Gothic horror, dark comedy and political import needed a heightened aesthetic unlike anything the cinematographer has made throughout the past five decades. So, with only two months until production began, he rigged together equipment that innovated the movie’s look and tone.

Lachman asked the manufacturer ARRI to build a lightweight monochrome camera that would look fluid when attached to a 15-foot crane so he and Larraín could shoot in grayscale instead of converting color footage in postproduction. Lachman sought out the lenses Orson Welles used in blackand-white movies from the ’40s, like The Magnificent Ambersons and Citizen Kane.

He then ran everything through an exposure system he had constructed to manipulate gradations in real time, not unlike what Ansel Adams did when photographing shadows and fog.

What results is a palette that’s at once gloomy and glossy, evoking the early vampire classics Lachman studied in preparation — German expressionist exemplars like 1922’s Nosferatu and 1932’s Vampyr, as well as Universal Pictures’ original Dracula from 1931. (“El conde” means “count” in Spanish.) “It’s not the traditional romantic perception of a vampire but one that looked at Pinochet metaphorically, how he took the blood politically, socially and economically from the people,” Lachman tells THR. “It’s how a society can comply and be seduced by fascism, which isn’t just unique to Chile in the last 50 years.”

Lachman is speaking to THR the day after the annual Oscar nominees luncheon, where he dined next to Robert Downey Jr., his colleague from Less Than Zero. El Conde marks the 75-yearold cameraman’s third Academy Award nomination. The first two came for his work on Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven and Carol, the latter of which he shot on Super 16mm. His other illustrious credits include Desperately Seeking Susan, The Virgin Suicides, Erin Brockovich and A Prairie Home Companion. Lachman also operated in black-and-white on sections of Haynes’ impressionistic Bob Dylan drama I’m Not There, but he says that film was meant to be far more naturalistic than El Conde.

“The Dylan film was trying to show the way they saw themselves in the ’70s,” he says of the folk legend and his associates. “There’s an artifice created in El Conde. The thing with expressionism is that it’s trying to create a psychological state for the viewer.”

Lachman and Larraín, who were friendly before this collaboration, enjoyed the experience enough to reteam for Larraín’s next film, starring Angelina Jolie as Greek soprano

Maria Callas. When asked whether Maria, which they shot in the fall, will look anything like Larraín's other anti-biopics about famous women, Lachman says, “Visually, it’s an opera. The images have an operatic quality.”

Because Larraín sought to use as many practical effects as possible on El Conde, Lachman’s goal was to perfect everything within the camera’s frame. For scenes set inside Pinochet’s dusty Patagonian mansion, he papered the windows so the encroaching light would be muted. When he needed to add pools of sunshine

— in scenes with Paula Luchsinger, for example, who plays a seemingly angelic nun dispatched to uncover Pinochet’s fortune — he cut slits into the paper. When Luchsinger’s character is corrupted by Pinochet, she soars through the sky in a spiritual reverie. The sequence was captured using a 90-foot crane. Everything is designed to foster an otherworldly aura befitting a thug whose tyranny continues to haunt his country’s history nearly two decades after his death. The film’s whites, including the fur coat Pinochet’s wife (Gloria Münchmeyer) wears around the house, look radiant against its stark blacks.

“Justice is a collective desire and not a reality — and it was certainly not a reality for Chile,” Lachman says. “For the people who suffered, they never got retribution because Pinochet died a multimillionaire free of his crimes. He lives on as a vampire in the truest sense — his cape hovers over Chile. It will always be eternal, the suffering and pain that they lived under for those 17 years.”

Clockwise from top: Jaime Vadell as Augusto Pinochet in Netflix’s El Conde; the children of Pinochet (played by, from left, Antonia Zegers, Diego Muñóz, Catalina Guerra, Amparo Noguera and Marcial Tagle); Paula Luchsinger as Carmen, a nun hired by Pinochet’s children to exorcise and kill the undead dictator.