La nuit se traîne by Sylvestre Vannoorenberghe

After responding to an emergency call from a mysterious woman, Mady, a young locksmith gets entangled in a bizarre case and must fight to prove his innocence. La nuit se traîne was brilliantly captured by DOP Sylvestre Vannoorenberghe SBC. 

“The director, Michiel Blanchart is a friend of mine, and we’ve been shooting short films for a few years now,” begins Vannoorenberghe. “From the time I was able to work with him, I did a short film which he financed himself, called Ass (cul). It was well received in some short film circles in Belgium. Then he got the funding for the short film, You’re Dead Hélène and we did that together. We are close friends and he was kind enough to ask me to shoot this feature, though production were not convinced at first. I had done some features, but not some action stuff before, but he wanted to work with me, so I was lucky enough to do the movie with him.” 

When it came to initial conversations about the look of thefilm Vannoorenberghe and Blanchart discussed common aesthetics. “Michiel and I have lots of common grounds in terms of the movies we grew up with and the movies that we like,” says Vannoorenberghe. “He likes CinemaScope formats and anamorphic format, but he also likes the versatility of lenses and anamorphic doesn’t always offer that. He was ok with the fact that if we were going to shoot on anamorphic that we could have those details and accidents we can have with those lenses. That was a plus for our movie as it would bring texture and roughness to it. He was okay with having lens that weren’t perfect in terms of focus.” 

One of the films mentioned during prep was David Fincher’s Seven. “We also spoke about Tony Scott’s 80s and 90s movies. We both love backlights and for the film we did before this one, Michiel told me that he wanted more backlights. The more the anamorphic, flares, backlight, the more extreme the backlights and dramatic the light, the more he likes it. On top of that we wanted more movement. Lens-wise we had the KOWA anamorphics from Eye-Lite Belgium and the KOWA’s are very light, which was great for us. Still, we wanted to be able to do a dramatic focus rack from further away to close focus. We kept the 65mm macro Cook anamorphic, which helped a lot for car interiors and close-ups for being fast.” 

“In terms of the look, it was quite straightforward,” explains Vannoorenberghe. “We had some discussions in post about the amount of green we wanted to put in the blacks because we wanted to dirty it up a little more and we didn’t want the orange of the street to be too red. We had a LUT that faded out a lot of the red. We still wanted to have some reds, but not to be monochromatic. The movie is a greenish yellow with white blues. I also didn’t want it to be too multicoloured as lots of modern movies with LED lighting. I feel it is easy to have something beautiful in multicolour, but I feel it’s sometimes better not to go that way. We didn’t want to emulate that lighting space and aimed to be less rich in colours.” 

The lighting proved to be challenging due to most of the action taking place at night. “We didn’t have the budget to be able to afford lots of cranes or lifts in night exteriors,” adds Vannoorenberghe. “We wanted to have something else other than sodium lighting and to achieve some kind of 80s bicolour look. It ultimately isn’t that as we changed some stuff, but that influenced the look.”

While the lighting proved to be difficult, the main challenge for Vannoorenberghe were the car chases. “I couldn’t always be in the car for the shots, so I would see the shotsafterwards and I had to guess with the gaffer. Michiel, in his head had the car flipping scene as one shot, but we still covered it for the aftermath in case there was any problem. For the main shot with the car coming towards us, we used an aerogrip car from a French company called Auto Travelling Cascades. They were just driving towards the car coming towards them with the camera on the crane. Then we had another fixed camera which was very wide with the bridge and the train to do plates afterwards of trains passing and the sky because we shot all that before the sun came out. So, we had another camera to see the flip and afterwards the police cars arriving, so it was locked there. We also had another camera hidden between two trash bags in shot of the first camera, doing a pan but it wasn’t used in the edit. We had another camera in the car behind the car flipping, which was set up in a car following it. It’s a big set-up, but we only had one opportunity to flip the car, so we had to cover ourselves. We had three similar cars. One for acting, one for the flip and one modified to be driven by the stunt driver with the actor next to him and even that was tricky, so we had to cover ourselves on this particular scene. We were trying to seem higher budget than what we had. It was thanks to Michiel and his ability to tweak some shots that we pulled it off.” 

Vannoorenberghe captured the film with the Sony VENICE 1. “We used the VENICE because some of our interiors were very compact and this camera was ideal for some handheld shots, especially for the scenes in the brothel,” he explains. “It was easier not to have a big camera and also budget-wise I couldn’t afford a big light source because it meant a big power supply and big teams, so the most powerful light we had was M40. The Venice helped as it’s very sensitive. The Rialto was ideal for handheld, car interiors and car rigging.” 

The film takes places across Brussels and some of the locations are quite public. “Michiel had to rewrite some scenes and throw away some scenes and places he wanted to film, especially for some of the car chase locations,” he notes. “I know production had a very hard time getting authorisation for some of the more important sets, such as Gare de Bruxelles-Nord and our interior for that was another station. The locations team was quite overwhelmed with all they had to. In the first scene we discover the bad guy and we were high up in a building that was under construction. We were supposed to have windows lit up through the glass and we were supposed to see the city. They were so busy trying to get permission to shoot in some locations, but Bruxelles-Nord was the biggest location, as well as the scene with the car flipping. Also, Place Poelaert in the Black Lives Matter protest was the other big location.” 

In one chase sequence, Mady escapes on a bike and heads towards the metro. This particular shot required meticulous planning. “That was a shot that Michiel already had in mind before making this movie,” Vannoorenberghe recalls. “We started prepping it almost one year in advance and we were having meetings during my lunch breaks, discussing how we could achieve it. I had met a drone operator on another project. He was modifying cameras to be more lightweight and was doing some very pretty stuff for commercial use. We presumed we wouldn’t have much time to do the shot, so I wanted to do it so the viewer couldn’t tell that it was drone right away. We were trying to develop a drone and we built it so that we could put a RED KOMODO on it with ultra prime lens, which was quite lightweight. We tried this movement with it and there was a bit of back and forth with the tone testing.”

“We did this shot on the very last day of the shoot as we didn’t know if we would be able to do it,” he continues. “We weren’t allowed to shoot there for more than three and a half hours, so that meant only one or two rehearsals and then the shoot itself. We had to follow the bike and then jump onto the train to do the shots that are inside the subway. The stunt biker did some testing on similar staircases far from the subway, with his drone that he was developing. We then did one rehearsal with his modified drone. At the end of the staircase there is an advertising video wall passing on the foreground witch purpose is to stitch the drone shot to the Steadicam shot on the platform. The stunt guy has his hood on for obvious purposes, and then after the panel it’s the actor on the platform. We had to remove one glass for the drone to be able to fly next to the stairs and had to wait three months for permission to do that, so that the drone could go down the platform. There is the advertising panel and then we cut there and switch to the Steadicam and then the actor does the last few stairs and then goes onto the train.” 


The wall where the bike crashes was replaced with another advertising panel. “Lighting-wise we were able to switch a few lights off in the station and add the carpet lights here and there, mostly to add bright spots,” explains Vannoorenberghe. “The whole movie was filled with bright spots and flare and things that make you squint a little bit. We still wanted to have that in the subway and not change it so that the viewer doesn’t know we are obviously using another tool or something. I’m a bit regretful because the whole purpose of that scene was to not be able to see the switch and when I see it, I can notice it, but I don’t know if the viewer sees it. We are really proud of it though.” 

La nuit se traîne was shot across a period of 36.5 days. “It was quite exhausting,” Vannoorenberghe admits. “It was mostly cold nights and lots of stuff happening simultaneously and lots of ground to cover and not being able to see everything. It helped that we trusted everybody that we worked with. It was mostly the same team that had worked on Michiel’s short films, which was comforting for us because we had friends across the team who believed in the movie and were people we trusted before, even before we started working on the project. I enjoyed everything on this film, but I haven’t done lots of movies before and I’m still young. I was enjoying it because Michiel is very precise and he knows what he wants. We never disagree and I never doubted the choices. Everything is transparent and that’s a real pleasure because it’s nice to always understand everything. It was my best friend’s movie, so I was always happy on set.” 

By Oliver Webb

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