Brecht Goyvaerts on recreating Monsieur Aznavour
Monsieur Aznavour follows the life of French-Armenian singer, songwriter and actor, Charles Aznavour from the beginnings of his career to the height of his fame. Captured by DOP Brecht Goyvaerts Monsieur Aznavour is released in cinemas 23rd October.
When it came to Monsieur Aznavour, Goyvaerts was contacted by the producers. “One of the producers had tried to work with me several times already on different projects, but I was always busy. He got me for this one once he’d discussed it with directors Mehdi Idir and Grand Corps Malade,” begins Goyvaerts. “They already had me on their list, so they decided to meet me. I had this chat with them and I think at that point there were four or five DPs in mind, but we clicked, so that’s how I got involved. It went pretty fast.”
The directors initially wanted an international and American look for the film. “They didn’t want it to be small or too European, so I had to figure out exactly what they meant because with American you have so many different styles,” explains Goyvaerts. “They wanted to have this rich image and to open it up and show the grandeur of everything. In France they still have this cinema that is quite flat sometimes and it has been like that for years. They have this really well-lit look, but a lot of people are starting to get bored of this and because they see cinema in the US and the rest of Europe, where they are starting to do things a lot more pushed towards contrast and all that stuff. So, more and more people in France are trying to emulate that to get away from this flat, colourful and bright look. They wanted to avoid that typical French look and that’s what they were aiming for. I never wanted to do any of that and so it was natural anyway.”
Goyvaerts looked at several references for the overall look of the film. “I looked at one or two movies,” he adds. “We looked at lots of references for contrast and colours. We had a lot of concerts in the movie and lots of family archive footage shot by the family which had never been made public. So, that was private stuff that we had to look at to see how it really was and that included lots of backstage stuff. We also had some recordings of the concerts, so I used those to recreate the concerts to have a direction. We also had our own stuff to give it our own touch, but we used this as a base to keep it as real as possible. It was mainly random images we looked at for atmosphere for the concerts.”
Recreating Charles Aznavour’s stage performances proved to be particularly challenging. “We also had lots of smaller gigs as well as concerts,” says Goyvaerts. “For the smaller gigs we did our own thing, but the big ones were all recorded and had moving images. So, for those we tried to recreate as much as we could, but it wasn’t always possible. Towards the end of the movie and later on his career, Aznavour had a show at Carnegie Hall. Carnegie Hall is huge and we had difficulty finding a stage as big, so we had to find our own way of recreating it. For me, the main difficulty was really showing this evolution because when he started out, he started in small cafes and also sometimes in theatres, but it was all very basic. We just had some spotlights and we tried to really follow this. The problem we had was that there weren’t many technological changes in the time between WW2 and the late 1970s, If you had done a period going further, perhaps up to the late 90s, then you could really make big changes in your concerts, lots of advancements in technology for example. LED walls weren’t added in his concerts, so they all have a similar vibe and atmosphere, but I wanted to avoid them all having the same look, so I tried to add and change stuff and to keep it fresh in some way. You don’t want the impression that you are looking at the same concert over and over again, so that was not easy. We tried to find ways to change them around.”
The film is set across several different time periods throughout Aznavour’s life. “We had different chapters. Already in terms of look we had a lot of different looks because everything changes such as costume, hair, aesthetics, make-up and the sets. The production design also changes. What I really wanted to avoid was having a look for each period and really starting to change things such as lenses and light. I wanted to keep this uniform look that didn’t change too much as everything else was changing a lot. We did follow the lead of the colours and the looks we had, so that obviously changed. I used lots of tungsten and warm light for the earlier period because it made more sense as you had warm light during that time and not lots of fluorescent tubes, so it came naturally. For the later periods we used more hard HMIs and more backlight and contrast to have this slight change in atmosphere. Other than that, I tried to truly follow this line throughout the movie to avoid having all kinds of different looks in one movie.”
Goyvaerts captured the film with the Alexa Mini LF and Cooke S7s. “For some scenes we used anamorphics S35 because I wanted to keep it smaller for some sequences. Initially, I wanted to do it a lot more, but I couldn’t sell it to the directors. They sometimes needed to see things before realising if it was good or not. We didn’t have much time, so we had to go very fast and we didn’t always get time to test things, so I wasn’t always able to show my ideas to them. The idea was to have everything backstage, everything right before or after a concert and during the concert to switch to handheld and anamorphic S35 to make it more from Charles’ point of view. We did that a few times, but not as much as I would have liked.”
Although working with a relatively large budget, Goyvaerts wanted to avoid doing technically difficult things for no reason. “Mehdi wanted to go a bit nuts with all kinds of tools, but I had to calm him down a bit. In the movie there are a few moments that he really wanted to keep and ideas he didn’t want to change. There is one big oner in the film. There are a few, but there was one in particular which was very technically challenging. We start inside a tiny Parisian apartment during the liberation of Paris. We hear someone calling Charles’ name outside, so we go to the window with him and discover his girlfriend on the street, shouting: “we are free.” Then we go down with the camera and then Charles joins his girlfriend, and we follow them a bit further down the road to a bridge, where we discover all the soldiers and tanks and people shouting. We invented a system with cables for this, with a technocrane waiting for us to go flying over the tanks and the people shouting. That was a very challenging shot to do.”
There were 63 shooting days, with nearly 80 locations required for the film. “In the end, we tried to reduce it to 65 sets. It was still more sets than days,” details Goyvaerts. “The main challenge was going fast and quickly setting up shots. The big concerts were already a challenge and sometimes there was no light, so we had to rig everything and only shoot for a few hours before moving to another venue or location. We shot in Bulgaria and exteriors in a backlot for Broadway in New York in the 60s and that was completely cut out of the movie, but that was the hardest shot and one of the biggest sets I’ve worked on. We installed 150 lights for that set-up, to create this whole lively Broadway street. That was the biggest and most fun one, despite being cut.”
While he enjoyed working on the project, Goyvaerts had the most joy watching Tahar Rahim bring this character to life. “Even the really small things, I remember him recreating one of Charles Aznavour’s television performances and it wasn’t a really important scene, it was just him singing, but it was insane seeing him perform as him. So, there were little moments like this that were really impressive. My gaffer, Nico Lagae, and of course the whole crew, did an amazing job in organising this whole thing because it was pretty complex and not easy to manage.”
By Oliver Webb