BEAST OF BURDEN

By Darek Kuźma

Polish cinematographer Michał Dymek PSC shares his thoughts on shooting EO, Jerzy Skolimowski’s madly-ambitious, Cannesawarded donkey-driven drama, and Poland’s official for Best International Feature at the 2023 Oscars. It’s a movie that will live with you, long after you have seen it.

We reckoned that 4:3 is slightly overused these days, so we shot the entire film in 3:2 still photography ratio

Eo is a donkey, named after the ‘eee-ooo’ sound donkeys make, whom we accompany on a taxing journey, which the eponymous beast of burden is forced to go on after the circus he was working for gets repossessed by a bailiff. Transported in various vehicles, regularly captured and liberated, bought and sold, by people with different agendas, as well as being beaten by football hooligans, Eo bears silent witness to his owners’ internal and external struggles and their corrupted humanity. There is not much of a plot to Skolimowski’s film, EO is rather a series of episodes that are connected through an ambiguous donkey upon whom everyone, including you the viewer, projects their attitudes, expectations, fears, personalities and worldviews.

An impressive experiment from the director with over half a century worth of bold endeavours, EO was obviously not an easy project to make, especially during the onset of the Covid pandemic. As the shooting was pushed back several times, the original cinematographer, Michał Englert PSC, had to pull out, suggesting Michał Dymek PSC as his successor.

“It was surreal. There I was, sitting in front of one of the most daring directors, discussing a donkey film which was – as Jerzy often repeated – all about the visual side of things,” marvels Dymek. “It took us a while to get in tune with each other, but we were both very clear we didn’t want it to be safe, and that we had to do everything in our power to make it alive, dynamic and unpredictable.”

Though EO is in many ways a tribute to Robert Bresson’s revered Au Hasard Balthazar (1966, DP Ghislain Cloquet), what differs Skolimowski’s film from that B&A classic is precisely how it is presented.

“It combines realistic scenes with music video shots, abstract poetic framing with naturalistic light, offbeat donkey POVs with heavily stylised sequences,” shares Dymek. “I mostly shot handheld. As a camera operator I believe it’s the best tool to convey emotions via images, but we also had Steadicam, dollies, drones, gimbals, cranes, tracks, or quads. Even a sort of DIY remote control car made from aluminium pipes that helped us to enhance the dynamic of a football match scene. We mounted the camera on a donkey, a car, a shredder. It all creates this beautiful energy that powers the film.”

This approach was dictated both by their aspirations and the fact that working with animals on a set is never easy.

“The donkey quickly verified a lot of our ideas and assumptions about how we should, or could, shoot it. It was a huge lesson of humility,” he explains. “Nothing was certain. There were times our lead donkey wasn’t even up for walking from A-to-B. Luckily, we had a few tricks up our sleeves to encourage him to cooperate. We had a female donkey whose scent was often enough to bring him to where we wanted. If this didn’t work, there were carrots, apples or snacks he liked. As a last resort, his trainer had a special leash that had to be erased in post. Still, there was a line we didn’t want to cross, and oftentimes we couldn’t do anything but wait.”

Naturally, the filmmakers went out of their way to make EO animal-friendly, working with six donkeys throughout the production period that lasted 40 shooting days, stretching from March 2021 to March 2022.

“Eo’s journey spans different seasons and even though we couldn’t shoot chronologically and had to shoot autumn in spring, we wanted to capture the nature across several months. There’s no way we’d strain donkeys that much,” says Dymek. “Still, there were times when we had them physically on-set, yet they didn’t respond to what we wanted. We then shot Eo’s POVs, like in a scene in which he escapes from a farm enclosure he is being kept in.” They wrapped in Poland in December, yet the Italian part was pushed back a couple of months.

Anticipating some of the challenges, Dymek decided to put his trust in ARRI Alexa Mini LF equipped with Canon K35 Lens kit. “I wanted to utilise a Large Format sensor, but also to be flexible with where and when I could go with the camera. I love working instinctively and operating on-the-fly. Oftentimes we stripped the Mini LF to its barebones version, which enabled me to get closer to the animals without alarming them,” he reveals.

“Matched with K35s, which are rehoused, full frame stills lenses that have an interesting little blur on the edges of the frame, it provided us with parameters that drew the images closer to what a donkey perspective might look like. The film anthropomorphises Eo to an extent, but the truth is, we’ve no idea how a donkey perceives the world. He just is, and he lets each viewer fill in the blanks.”

The protagonist also inspired the film’s aspect ratio.

“Michał Englert planned to shoot in 2.39:1 but during camera tests I realised that donkey proportions, especially their heads, would lend beautifully to 4:3 format. I proposed this to Jerzy, who not only liked the idea but pushed it even further. We reckoned that 4:3 is slightly overused these days, so we shot EO entirely in 3:2 stills photography ratio, with most of POVs shot 90% on 35mm lens.”

The remaining 10% were shot using Leica Elmarit-R 19mm and Leica Macro-Elmarit-R 60mm lenses, plus a Panavision Primo Zoom 135-420mm, which supported Dymek’s efforts to make the images an extension of Eo. However, the Italian part was shot on ARRI Signature Primes with Signature Zoom lenses as they were not able to find a K35 kit in Italy and could not afford transporting their Polish one. Dymek chuckles that lighting was akin to every other aspect of the project: he had to be ready and prepared to get creative.

“It was an art of adapting to what the day gave us. Oftentimes we had no space to hide lamps and had to use natural light. Then there were scenes, like the one in a dark forest, when, together with my brilliant gaffer Przemek Sosnowski, we lit approximately 100sq/m with three 18Ks. Some intimate scenes were an exercise in restraint, but there were also big night exteriors with hours of pre-light!” Still, the general idea was to light spaces, not characters or situations. “I had a basic set of ARRI SkyPanels and Astera Titan Tubes along with 9Ks and 4Ks, but because we had scenes in a circus tent or other specific interiors, I also used quite a lot of incandescent stage lights as well as LED Moving Heads.”

Dymek admits that Skolimowski’s risk-taking attitude emboldened him to experiment with colours. “Jerzy imagined EO as an impressionistic film and, whenever he could, he followed his director’s hunch, based on decades of experience. If you had a good idea on how to vamp-up the visuals, he was more than up for it,” offers Dymek.

“There’s this sequence when Eo escapes from an onotherapy farm at night and reaches a hilltop at sunrise. We shot a beautiful reddish sunrise, but when I worked on it with my long-term colourist, Wiktor Sasim, we just weren’t happy with the colours. Suddenly, it crossed my mind to erase all channels except red. We liked this bloody red result enough to show it to Jerzy. He loved it and asked to spill more red to other scenes!”

Needless to say, EO’s look evolved in post. And then there was the fact they wrapped the Italian part in March and had to rush to meet the Cannes Film Festival entry deadline.

“The DI grade was probably the most difficult aspect of the project. Wiktor and I were working on the grade whilst the editor, Agnieszka Glińska, was still putting the final touches to a number of scenes,” claims Dymek.

“We had to match some interior and exterior shots in terms of light and colours of the season they’re set in. Some sequences demanded a lot of work, like the one on a football field, which we shot during a day with the weather conditions changing at least four or five times, while others required fine-tuning of various donkeys so they look the same throughout the film.”

Though Dymek admits the stress of this situation took a toll on him, he is very proud of EO’s visual eclecticism.

“Sure, it’s often outright bizarre but every decision we made is imbued with what we wanted the film to be about. For me, the greatest lesson of this project is that we were able to make the story work through images despite all the compromises we had to endure. Pure film magic if you ask me.”

What is EO, then? A visually eccentric donkeydriven drama reflecting humanity in all its ugly glory? A noble attempt to make people aware these beasts of burden are more than just free labour or food? A celebration of one animal’s impenetrable nature? It is each of those and all of those, and whatever each and every viewer is ready to project onto it.