IN THE MIND’S EYE

By Darek Kuźma

DP Paweł Pogorzelski PSC was delighted to turn Ari Aster’s lusciously-black, existential dramedy horror, Beau Is Afraid, into a visually evocative nightmare that you simply can’t take your eyes off.

It is not that Beau Wassermann (Joaquin Phoenix) is afraid of talking to people, leaving his flat or breaking his daily routine. He is afraid of everything. Additionally, Beau’s lovehate relationship with his controlling mother, Mona, makes him live in perpetual shame. So it certainly helps that his troubled mind colours the outside world as a dystopia of kaleidoscopic lunacy.

When Mona dies in a freak chandelier accident, Beau is forced to embark on a surreal Homeric odyssey of eerie encounters with grieving parents, traumatised soldiers, naked knifemen, placid forest dwellers and dozens of larger-than-life characters to make it to her funeral. And, because we have no idea what exactly is real and what is enhanced by Beau’s angst-ridden imagination, this cinematic adventure becomes depressing, entertaining and frightening all at the same time.

Pogorzelski met Aster during the late 2000’s at the AFI Conservatory in Los Angeles, and has stood by his side for over a decade, first shooting shorts and then lensing Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019), which gave the director a reputation as one of the most peculiar film auteurs of the 21st century. Thus, the DP has earned a unique insight into Aster’s crowded mind, and Beau Is Afraid is their most visually-suggestive work to date – a three-hour, off-the-wall fable of dark humour, horror, Greek tragedy, plus cringeworthy and deeply-affecting paranoia about the layers of human psyche.

It required a lot of planning, as Pogorzelski remembers. “We had 12 weeks of prep, but because Ari always wants to shoot as much onset as possible, VFX-less, and the fact that the script was so dense, with dozens of locations and characters to cover, we had to be very specific about how we intended to shoot it.

“Ari brings a full shot-list to the table, a vision to which all of the departments try to adhere, but he is open about the details of how to bring his

DP Robert Burks ASC) for its colours, and Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter Of Life And Death (1946, Jack Cardiff BSC) for its creativity, but Ari’s vision was the only true reference.”

Pogorzelski was adamant about painting Beau’s journey on a large format canvas and chose the Sony Venice camera combined with Panavision H-series lenses.

“I love shooting with Panavision gear and the H-series have a softened look with a very saturated rendition that clicked with my other decisions. We considered the ARRI Alexa LF but decided on the Sony Venice because of its Rialto mode, which enabled us not to have to move walls and windows and thus save time,” he reveals.

“Ari always wants to stay close to the actors with wider lenses, so our workhorses were the 27, 35, 40, 50mm focal lengths. We also had a Sony 70-400mm zoom. I was really impressed how my 1st AC Dany Racine was able to keep the zooming image pin-sharp all the way through to Joaquin’s eyes, even at 400mm.” ideas to life. In Beau Is Afraid, we strived to create a series of idiosyncratic worlds the character goes through, and the prep was a period of creative fervour, and a colossal team-effort to get ready for this epic journey.”

Panavision in Montreal provided the whole package and detuned the lenses according to Pogorzelski’s needs.

We meet Beau in a psychiatrist’s office, examine his shabby flat in an ultra-violent neighbourhood, follow him into weird manors and forests, and even watch him explore his future in a stunning animated sequence, hoping that the feeble guy will emerge victorious when the credits roll.

“We love taking cues from other films,” says Pogorzelski about creative inspirations for the production. “We watched Tati’s Playtime (1967, DPs Jean Badal/Andréas Winding) for its expressiveness, Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954,

Apart from scouting the locations, Pogorzelski says the most time-consuming part of the prep was designing the LUT with colourist Roman Hankewycz at Harbor Picture Company in New York.

“I’ve recently started doing portrait photography with a Hasselblad, shooting at 160 ISO, and have found that it gives a nice control over light. For Beau Is Afraid, I decided to test ISOs going down – from 1200, 800, 500, 320, 200 to 160. I sent them to Roman and he came back amazed with how the 250 ISO was so rich with blacks, dense but clean, and creamy,” he recalls.

“I knew that 250 ISO would be too low for me as we had planned a lot of night stuff, so I decided to shoot at 320 ISO. Then, because we wanted one LUT to encompass all the different worlds, it was a matter of finding the right amount of saturation in each colour so that the forest greens would look vivid, and the yellowish walls of Beau’s flat would not look too red, etc.”

“It took us a month of intense tests and over 20 versions of the LUT, some of which really pushed too far into this kitschy Bollywood movie area, to find the sweet spot where all the colours felt into the right spaces. I couldn’t have shot this film with a broken or unfinished LUT. Kudos to Roman and the guys at Harbor for being with us the whole way. We had colour scientists on-call and everybody was always there to make it right.”

Pogorzelski marvels and emphasises that the collaboration was just as rewarding in post production.

“Ari wanted to do as much with the light and costume and production design as possible during the shoot. I didn’t use many gels, mostly balancing everything with CTO or CTB. Still, even with such a great LUT, the sheer scope of the story made the DI quite extensive, even if it was mostly massaging the work to get into a nice place where it wasn’t too contrasty or too dark.”

It certainly helped that Beau Is Afraid was blessed with the biggest budget in the history of be extremely challenging for Pogorzelski and his gaffer Marco Venditto, namely the street in front of Beau’s flat (built on stage) at night, and the forest.

“We pre-planned it all, the track placement and the lighting, but shooting at 320 ISO made it difficult to get the right exposure on night temperature was great. We also had DMG SL1s and DMG Maxi Mixes and a few others. I had mostly the same gear for interiors, using Fresnel lights together with the T24s and China balls as well as lightweight LEDs to have a nice fill.” sequences. Thankfully, we shot the street first and learned from that. When we went into the forest I knew I would need more light, as we shot in the middle of the summer and the canopy was so full that I couldn’t use any condors,” he confesses. “So I had to bring-in all the lights low and far away. We had a camping site around with 5Ks and

One other elaborate set-up that proved quite tricky was the aforementioned animated sequence during which traumatised Beau, growing older and increasingly restless before our eyes, travels through a world that seems both real and surreal.

“I’m proud to say that we used a greenscreen for only about 20-30% of the time, the rest was a pre-built magical world that was animated on top of the physical things by the Chilean animators who did the marvellous The Wolf House, (2018, dirs/ DPs Joaquín Cociña/Cristóbal León),” he recounts.

“We also had a stage divided into six sections with trees painted on three different sides. We could shoot from one side and then just change the set-up and the angles and have yet another look to work with. We even had this giant circle built with the T24 going through that had different diffusions. It would spin to simulate direct sun or

A24, but Pogorzelski mentions they were constantly fighting against time.

“As much as I’m grateful for having 60 shooting days, more than most projects have these days, we needed at least ten more to shoot as we would have wanted. It may seem Beau Is Afraid is just one guy wandering from one place to another, but all of these beautiful and weird and terrifying places were created from scratch, mostly on-location. Even the camera movement was complicated. We had dollies, cable cams, motorcycle rigs, Technocrane and Steadicam, plus scenes that required grips carry the camera on a remote head.”

The principal photography lasted from June to September 2021 in and around Montreal, as well as on the stages of Grandé Studios, which also provided the full lighting package.

Lighting-wise, two of Beau’s ‘worlds’ proved to

12Ks and turned-on only the ones that weren’t in a shot. One of the scenes had around 45 Parcans rigged-up high in the trees, bouncing into 2x2 bounce boards to give this little ambience from below the canopy of leaves.”

Pogorzelski is not necessarily a fan of LED light, which made Beau Is Afraid even more visually-distinct.

“I used a lot of Fresnels, 5Ks, 12Ks, 18Ks, even T12s and T24s, because I think they look pretty when you use them as harsh light. Rather than having ARRIMAXs, M90s or other modern sources, I went with older lights. We had seven weeks of night location shooting and they were my lifesaviours,” he explains.

“Although I was against using LED lights as I wanted to have this charismatic, harsh Fresnel feel, they actually came in very handy. As in a quick fill from behind the camera, a Chimera at the right heavier clouds coming in.”

For most of the time Beau Is Afraid was shot using two Sony Venice cameras, with Geoffroy St. Hillaire operating the A-camera and Pogorzelski on B-camera.

“On Ari’s films the A-camera is very technical and focussed on going through the shot-list, with the B-camera improvising a bit more, trying different things and finding extra angles that could help in the edit.”

This approach was helpful as, even though the film had been meticulously pre-planned, Aster’s work with Phoenix had a certain improvisational aspect to it.

“Joaquin is a very honest actor, he has to understand the reasons for everything the character does,” Pogorzelski explains. “When he had a hard time playing a beat or knowing why he was doing something, Ari would take a short break and talk the shot over with him. Sometimes they changed blocking, sometimes added these little nuances, but they always made what we were doing so much better.”

Needless to say, Pogorzelski had a great time shooting Beau Is Afraid and says he is eager to get on-board for every new Ari Aster project.

“Ari is a genius, both as a screenwriter and as a director. There aren’t many similar to him, nowadays. He creates these beautiful and unique worlds for the viewers to immerse themselves in. Even if it’s sometimes difficult to wrap your head around what Ari tries to say, I believe the underlying messages of Beau Is Afraid are worth the mental digging.”

He concludes “I admit, I had a hard time understanding what the film is exactly about, even though I read the script a number of times, but when it all clicked, when I understood the way different scenes work together, I was just amazed. I know it may be asking a lot in this day and age, but I hope people will have the patience to listen to what Ari has to say. For me, this is art.”