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Shooting on Kodak 16mm film, Australian cinematographer Ari Wegner ACS conjured-up a hellishly colourful confection for director Janicza Bravo’s salacious dark-comedy Zola.

Shooting on Kodak 16mm film, Australian cinematographer Ari Wegner ACS conjured-up a hellishly colourful confection for director Janicza Bravo’s salacious dark-comedy Zola.

The A24 film is based on an infamous 148-tweet thread, posted by Detroit waitress and avid poledancer, A’Ziah ‘Zola’ King, on October 27, 2015, in which she related a wild, 48-hour road-trip to Tampa, Florida, involving partying, stripping, prostitution, gangsters and an attempted suicide.

In the movie, adapted for the screen by Bravo and co-writer Jeremy O. Harris, Zola (Taylour Paige) meets Stefani (Riley Keough) while serving her at a restaurant. The two immediately bond over their love of pole dancing and the extra money this earns them. Just a day after they exchange phone numbers, Stefani invites Zola on a cross-country escapade down South, where she promises they can make thousands of dollars for just a few hours of dancing in strip clubs. Zola agrees, but suddenly finds herself partaking in a tense and chaotic odyssey that is actually a ruse for Stefani’s sinister pimp, called X (Colman Domingo), to cash-in on them both.

Wegner’s painterly, docudrama-style of 16mm cinematography on Zola has been described as fittingly gritty and visually enticing, with a confident sense of composition and place. Static camera shots reveal ominous depths to the story line, close-up lips are painted deep cherry red, a regular liquor store is reframed with an otherworldly alignment of bottles in rows, and shabby motel suites are lit to become all the more lurid-looking.

Bravo’s previous credits include the awardwinning short Gregory Go Boom (2013) and Lemon (2017). Wegner is known for her stark work on Lady Macbeth (2016), hyper-real lighting for In Fabric (2018), punk-style lensing on True History Of The Kelly Gang (2019), and the sense of unease that pervades the pictures on TV series The Kettering Incident (2016).

“Janicza is such an exciting and talented director. I saw her film Lemon at Sundance 2017, and thought this is someone I would love to work with,” says Wegner. “We initially met on Skype, and her energy and passion for Zola were electric. The original Tweet thread is an amazing piece of literature, and I loved how Janicza and Jeremy’s script captured the essence of A’Ziah’s super-dark humour – her observations and her voice, and as well as the world of the Internet in 2015, which doesn’t seem like that long ago, but in Internet years that’s forever. Only someone as detail-passionate as Janicza would pick-up on the fact that this was going to be a period film, set just a few years ago.”

Of course, the visual aesthetic of any production does not exist until the director discusses their vision with the cinematographer.

Wegner reveals, “Janicza wanted a look that was playful and knowing, but also uncomfortably real. A look where we could highlight the strength and athleticism of this character, follow her sliding from a dream into a nightmare, with humour her only protective armour.

“Janicza already had a huge library of ideas and images – including the vivid colours in William Eggleston’s photographic work and the portraiture by Deana Lawson. However, one reference that stood out as key was Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden Of Earthly Delights, this became the central touchstone for the visual arc of the film.” Painted between 1490 and 1510, and housed in the Museo Del Prado, Madrid, since 1939, Bosch’s famous work is comprised of three panels separately depicting Heaven, Earth and Hell, each with its own distinct colour palette. “The Garden Of Earthly Delights seemed to sum-up Zola’s journey in three acts, and served as a reminder as we shot,” explains Wegner, “At the start of the film, when we are in Heaven, our palette was calm, with pastel colours, a marshmallow softness to the contrast. When we enter Earth – moving from Detroit to Tampa – things get busier, vivid primary colours start coming in with a bit more contrast, until we enter Hell, where we meet blackness, and the highcontrast imagery becomes swampy and stressful.”

Production on Zola took place at locations around Tampa over the course of 26 shooting days, during October, November and December 2018.

“It was important to us to shoot in the place where A’Ziah’s story happened.” remarks Wegner, “Plus there is something visually distinctive about the light, atmosphere and colours of Tampa – blinding sun-bleached days and these vivid, humid nights. The road surfaces, the buildings and signage, the types of trees, were all seemingly small details individually, but collectively those details created a sense of place that bind a film together.”

Of course, with Zola being a contemporary tale with garish colouring, it could have been considered a dead-cert for digital-origination. However, Wegner reveals that Bravo was dead-set on using analogue film from the get-go.

“There was never any doubt that Zola was going to be shot on film, and for me it was a treat to come back to shooting 16mm,” says Wegner who last shot analogue 16mm film on Winter (2013, dir. Amie Siegel). “What I love about shooting on celluloid,

especially 16mm, is that it is incredibly real and at the same time heightened - which actually describes quite well our approach to the film in general. Also, Janicza and I both love how film records skin tones, and this is a film that in many ways is about skin and bodies.”

Wegner worked with Panavision in New York and Atlanta to supply a shooting package comprising of an ARRI 416 16mm camera plus Ultra Prime lenses. She went with a combination of KODAK VISION3 7219 500T and KODAK VISION3 7207 250D. Kodak Film Lab New York was responsible for the film processing.

“The ARRI 416 is a beautiful workhorse of a camera – compact, rock solid, intuitive, everything you need and nothing more. I love that camera,” she says. “The Ultra Primes are traditionally a very sharp lens, but when paired with the softness of the 16mm the result is really gorgeous.

“500T was the natural choice for our lowlight situations, such as night scenes and many of our interiors, and we shot mostly 250D outside. Whenever I come back to film after not having shot it for a while I’m always so impressed with how robust film stock is, it really does excel when pushed to its limits – in ways that I don’t think digital can match just yet.”

“For example, the intense sun of a day exterior can strike the fear of god into any DP shooting digital. But having an emulsion like the 250D, the highlight roll-off is always going to look beautiful. I also like 250D because it has a nice amount of grain and a wonderful pastel quality to it.”

“Above all, I was blessed to have such a beautiful cast to shoot, and I love how they all look in this film. We often had light and dark skin tones in same frame, and celluloid handles that so well.”

Wegner’s crew, who she describes as “wonderful collaborators”, were all Florida-based, namely: 1st AC, Stéphane Renard; key grip, Mike L. Germaine; and gaffer, Chris Hill.

“Our day interiors were generally lit with HMIs, to bounce-in natural-looking light,” Wegner recalls, “but for any coloured light we used LED fixtures, such as SkyPanels and Astera tubes, for the many different motel, hotel and club locations.

“This was actually the first time I had lit using an iPad to control the colours and dimmers on DMX, and it was amazing to have a gaffer like Chris who was so passionate about that. The Astera tubes were super-useful for things like our night-time car travelling scenes, where we could rig them up on the outside of the vehicle and design a chase sequence to perfectly match and enhance the existing street lights. As the film progresses we used increasingly discordant colour combinations – intensely saturated tones that don’t sit well together. I wanted that feeling of discomfort to be inescapable for the characters

and the viewer.”

Apart from scenes requiring Steadicam, Wegner operated throughout the production. “It was very important to us that we centered Zola as the storyteller, so we spoke a lot about how to do that visually. We constantly asked ourselves what the best shots were to see the scene from where she was at – not just geographically in the room but as a character – what details she was noticing, what she was feeling. It was essential that a viewer would know what her thoughts and opinions were, regardless of whether or not she choose to voice them.

“Sometimes that required a special shot on Zola, treating her differently to how we covered the other characters in a scene. At other times we did matching shot-sizes on everyone and knew that Taylour’s performance in combination with the editing and score would do that job better.”

The dance scenes, like any dance scene, required some careful planning. “Pole-dancing is incredibly athletic. Taylour trained so hard for that, which allowed us the great freedom to shoot any angle we wanted, angles that wouldn’t have been possible if we’d needed a body double. We wanted to shoot her in a way that captured the athleticism as well as the elegance of what she was doing – to say ‘this is work’, and that it’s also incredible and beautiful. Early-on Janicza mentioned Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia – Festival Of Nations-and Festival Of Beauty (1938) and that was a turning point for me in understanding what those scenes could be.” Wegner concludes, ”Janicza is an incredibly energetic and vibrant director, who creates an energy onset which is simultaneously playful and serious, risk-taking as well as meticulous. She is very detailoriented across all departments – from props and performance, to the lighting, framing and locations. She has a holistic vision, in that there’s no part of the frame has not been rigorously considered by her. That attention to detail, when all the elements come together is magical.”

Photos: Film stills and BTS shots from director Janicza Bravo’s Zola.

Photo credit: Anna Kooris / A24 Films

SENSORY CINEMA

By Ron Prince

Based on the book by Naoki Higashida, director Jerry Rothwell’s immersive and highly-acclaimed documentary, The Reason I Jump, explores the experiences of non-speaking autistic people around the world.

Shot by DP Ruben Woodin Dechamps, and described as “ravishing to behold”, the cinematography evokes the sensory distortion, intense focus and literally different way of seeing for people on the autistic spectrum. What attracted you to this project?

I had been keen to work with Jerry for a while, and this was one of those rare projects that attracted me, not only on a cinematic level, but also as an you could feel comfortable looking but without judgement. We wanted to allow moments to playout with held frames, keeping it stripped-back where possible, without the temptation to look for too much coverage.

It felt really important that, although the sensory perception of reality by the film’s contributors may differ from a neuro-typical person, it shouldn’t be depicted as hallucinatory. We could dip into moments of overstimulation in the subjective parts,

advocacy for autism awareness. Naoki Higashida’s book provided the blueprint for the film and a really exciting springboard for developing our approach to the film. What were your first discussions with Jerry about the film?

We wanted to invite the viewers into the complex, subjective experience of non-speaking autistic people through our contributors, their sensory worlds and preoccupations, using the words from Naoki’s book.

I wanted to create an observational approach, which was an honest and quiet visual cinematic experience, an invitation into intimate spaces, where but the objective should stay honest. When shooting subjectively and focussing on the contributors’ preoccupations we shot a lot of macro, as during our research the sense of scale and the seduction of detail kept coming up.

Naoki’s words, visualised through the journey of a young boy through landscapes, act like our spirit guide between the non-verbal and verbal worlds. We wanted to highlight the feeling of peace and relaxation that came from movement. So our camera journeys through abstract visual landscapes with the boy, always moving, always drawn by this need for movement. How much prep time did you have?

We had maybe a week’s worth of meetings and discussions about the visual approach before starting to shoot. We developed the look-and-feel on the job, starting out in the UK with some initial days with Joss, and then coming back to watch it together and decide how to develop the look and approach further. Where did you shoot?

The shoot took us all over, from Broadstairs in the UK, to Washington in the US, Freetown in Sierra Leone, and New Delhi in India. The range of locations and contributors was key to showing different attitudes and approaches towards non-verbal autism.

How long was the shoot? The shoot took place across a year, with around seven weeks total shooting time.

What research did you do? I spent a couple of days together with Jerry and DP Richard Stewart to talk about how to tackle the look. Initially, Richard was going to do the observational photography, and myself the heightened subjective moments. But it ended-up working-out that I shot the film. We discussed the layers we wanted – objective, subjective and the layer with Shun, played by Jim Fujiwara, to the narration of Jordan O’Donegan. Autistic writers, Naoki Higashida, Donna Williams and Tito Mukhopadhyay, were very influential when exploring how to visually approach the film.

Films such as Leviathan (2014, DP Mikhail Krichman), The Possibilities Are Endless (2014, DP Richard Stewart) and Hukkle (2002, DP Gergely Pohárnok), were influences in terms of their tone and journeys into sensory cinema. The Wonders (2014, DP Hélène Louvart AFC) was an influence in terms of its operating and the balance between a documentary-like camera in a narrative setting. Which cameras and lenses did you choose?

With the nature of the project it was decided to shoot digital from the outset. We shot most of the film on ARRI Alexa Mini and Zeiss Standard Speeds, with some pick-ups on Sony FS5. We opted to shoot spherical in 2:35:1 format to play with the layers of scale within our contributors’ sensory experiences.

I knew this was going to be a challenge, to be emotionally true to our contributors, and wanted a camera where the technical side of things would be

minimal. The familiarity, simplicity and ability to break the build right down, with all the power in that sensor, made the Alexa Mini the obvious choice. We shot with Zeiss lenses as they have such a great small form factor and texture when combined with the Alexa Mini, and shot most of the film on 20mm, 32mm and 100mm Macro.

Feral Equipment in London provided all camera and lens equipment, and we travelled with this package, plus basic grip. We hired-in locally when we needed any additional equipment. What was your approach to motivating the camera?

The observational parts of the film were all shot handheld and for the sections with the young boy we used a Mōvi Pro.

For the heightened subjective moments each of our contributors would have an obsession or fascination with an action or object, which would either be a compulsion or form of comfort.

For example, with Joss it was electricity and the hum of 3-phase power, and with Jestina it was a small piece of red string. These gave us our key to each character and were often inherently visual capture.

For our objective coverage we just wanted to keep it dead simple, sitting with them and just holding a frame and waiting for the right moment. For the moments with Shun, we wanted to show his unending appetite to be in motion. Working with non-verbal actor Jim, playing Shun, was an amazing experience, as we were able to direct and guide him slightly

without him feeling as anxious about the relationship to the camera.

Whilst operating the Mōvi he kept on coming up and holding it as we tracked him, which ended-up becoming quite magical moments within the film. And what was your approach to the lighting for storytelling purposes?

We shot predominantly with available and practical light, supplementing some of the interviews with LED fixtures. With Shun’s visual thread we planned shooting in the mornings and afternoons for a moodier palette. With our autistic contributors, where their existing daily routines provide such reassurance, we worked with what came our way, avoiding the midday light. Who were your camera and key lighting crew? For all the UK shoots I worked with Rich Savage who focus pulled and was the Mōvi tech. His ability to work out of a rucksack and understand the sensitivity around the contributors was a great asset. For the shoots abroad we hired local camera assistants who would data wrangle. How did you blend-in during the shoot with the participants and their families?

One of the biggest challenges on this shoot was learning how to work with our contributors – to shoot with sensitivity, yet without being able to rely on the bedrock of language to understand and predict where the scenes may head. Here is someone whose neurological processing isn’t linear, with dissonant inner and outer realities. They may be super-anxious, not because you have a camera in your hand, which has just edged closer, but because of an experience years ago that they can’t help but revisit. It differed between each of the contributors, but generally we had a day to get to know them and then would slowly develop a relationship with the camera being around. Were there any happy accidents, unexpected things that worked out well?

Working with Jim, the non-verbal actor playing Shun, was full of happy accidents, from holding on to the ring on the Mōvi as I

operated, to how he interacted with the objects around him. It was quite a challenge keeping up with him, but it provided an authenticity and spontaneity, which would have been impossible if it had been a neuro-typical actor. Where did you do the DI grade?

We finished the film at Dirty Looks in London. I created some looks in Lightroom from frame grabs which we discussed with Jerry, and then we worked from the Log-C in the DI to finish the film. Is there a sequence or shot that you feel shows off your work to its best?

I think my favourite scene in the film is where Ben is communicating via the letter-board at home. Although it’s not the most showy photographically, we were lucky with the location and light, and I like the simplicity of it. Ultimately it shows in real-time how this form of communication is possible. There are opinions that this is open to influence, yet for Ben it was clearly genuine. If there’s one thing I hope people can take

away from the film, it’s allowing tools like the letterboard to be used to unlock verbal communication. How did this film challenge you/push your skills?

My biggest takeaway on this project was trying to keep it relatively simple, not to hunt too much for coverage, pick a frame and allow them to develop. What’s up next for you?

At the moment I am prepping for a drama based on the Isle Of Lewis about surfing and hellfire, due to shoot in the early autumn.

I wanted to create an observational approach, which was an honest and quiet visual cinematic