Léo Lefèvre on shooting Else
During the 7th edition of the Chefs Op’ en Lumière festival (in Chalon-sur-Saône), we attended a screening of Thibault Emin’s feature film Else, photographed by SBC member Léo Lefèvre. The film takes place within the confines of the characters home, sheltered from an apocalypse raging outside. The epidemic responsible for the chaos eventually reaches them, gradually transforming their entire world and condemning them to merge with objects and the entire apartment. The pronounced images bear witness to a fertile collaboration (not to say fusion) between cinematography, art decoration and production. The texture and color of the images, which eventually become black and white, are an integral part of the cinematic experience. Léo Lefèvre looks back on the challenges of this singular project.
You arrived 3 weeks before shooting began, which is impressive given the importance and strength of the visual universe. How did the prep work go?
The prep went very well, despite the tight schedule. Thibault had been planning this film for a very long time. His ideas were very clear in his head, and each one of them was surprising and unexpected for me , like going from color to strong desaturation images, to black and white for example. It was all part of a journey that I wanted to make my own. We did a lot of work on this, sharing references for each stage and having reference images. Our ambitions were very high and we didn’t really have the means. So we had to be clever enough to find solutions to craft those images.
You also had to have a good dialogue with the art department .
When I arrived, the set was already being built. Which wasn’t ideal, because for some shots, I would have needed a false ceiling as we were going to have a lot of low angle shots, often on short focal lengths. And as the apartment is supposed to be on the third floor, in order to be able to shoot at windows the apartment would have had to be raised. At this stage of the project, such things weren’t feasible given the art departments budget. So we decided not to raise the ceiling, and the decorators were able to make us a removable stretched fabric ceiling that we could staple and unstaple, and through which I could shine my lights. To sum up, the big job in prep was to understand Thibault’s world and work with the decor team to make his ideas work. Honestly, I didn’t feel any lack of prep work. We followed Thibault’s every step of the way. He was clearly the one who carried everyone along. He was the orchestra conductor, and when we were in doubt on the set, we’d look at Thibault and he’d get us going again. It all happened very intuitively.
What references did you share, both cinematic and more general?
There were a lot of them. Thibault’s particularity is that for each sequence in the film, he did a pre-edit using only found footage from the TV news, films he had as references, cartoons, scientific images… He played with these images to tell the story of the film. He added a soundtrack and sound effects. And that already gave an idea of what the sequence was going to look like. None of the shots really corresponded to what we shot, of course, but we could feel the atmosphere, the rhythm, the kind of shots. It was the first time a director had shown me this kind of thing, and it was really useful for getting a feel for his project. We talked about David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), which is his main reference. We also talked about Mad Max (Georges Miller, 1979), Asian films such as The Taste of Watermelon (Tsai Ming-Liang, 2005), The Sand Woman (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1971), Planet A (Momoko Seto, 2008) for the end sequence, or the images from Tetsuo (Shin’ya Tsukamoto, 1989) which had left a deep impression on him when he was writing, and which he wanted to recreate somewhere in the film. His references also include a lot of constructed films, with modular walls for example. His film would have been impossible to make on a real set. It’s fascinating to immerse oneself in the world of these constructed films, where the craftsmanship is great and everything becomes possible because everything has to be removable. We only had 28 shooting days. Which was very little compared to the quantity and complexity of the shots.
The fact that you’d worked in advertising before that may also have helped you in your knowledge of particular optics that aren’t usually used for cinema, to get macro shots that go into pipes and so on.
As the film takes place through pipes and building vents, I first thought of the Ciné Magic Revolution optical system, with small lenses at the end that allowed us to fit into different pipe sizes and change the scale ratio at a stroke. We also used endoscopic lenses for macro shots. In prep, we also compared two cameras. At first, we thought we’d use the Sony Venice with the Rialto, but in the end, when we did side-by-side tests with the Alexa Mini, I quickly realized that the organic side of the Alexa Mini was much closer to what we wanted. Whatever the area of the image – the blurred background or the foreground on the actors – we preferred the texture of the Alexa. As for the lenses, we opted for a fairly standard series, the Arri/Zeiss Ultra Primes. The series is very complete in terms of focal length, and quite sharp. I knew I was going to be doing a lot of filtering, with FOG, PROMIST, SOFT FX and sometimes several filters at the same time. So I needed lenses that could cope with such strong filters.
Did you try the opposite, using less sharp optics or cropping the sensor to obtain less definition ?
Yes, we asked ourselves these questions. I showed Thibault a few different things, but he quickly told me that it wasn’t enough for him, and that we couldn’t stop at using vintage lenses with aberrations. We had to go even further. The cursor with Thibault is always five times higher than with the majority of directors! I preferred to stay with standard optics and work on the image with filters and color grading; the grain we were going to add.
As the film is very dependent on its changing look, how did you collaborate with your colorist on this ?
We worked with Fabien Pascal, with whom I’d already done two projects. He’s all about artistic research. He was immediately enthusiastic about the idea of setting different looks for the show. As soon as the comparative tests of cameras, lenses and filters had been carried out, he and Thibault met in the color-grading room to choose the camera together, and to ask each other questions about our tastes, contrast and color tests. Finally, the week before shooting, we filmed test shots on the set with a bit of light to get a real feel for what we were going to have on set, and to create the different states and evolution of the set, make-up and costumes. We went through the whole film to have a reference image at each stage, with the right saturation levels, the different black and white levels. Also to get our eyes accustomed to the image with the added grain because we knew we wouldn’t be able view with it on set. I used the Alexa at 800 ASA, with grain applied in post.
Isn’t there a sequence in the film for which you a different camera ?
Yes, for this sequence Thibault wanted to shoot some footage himself using an amateur camera, to get the look of all those videos we saw during the lockdown. At first, this posed a problem because the production hadn’t included it in the schedule , thinking that there would be no make-up, no crew, except for renting a camera and lenses. In the end, I suggested to Thibault that could he take the amateur camera to the studio on a Sunday and light the set myself with a few basic lights, just so as to have a minimum light level. He shot with the actors for half a day allowing them to have as much freedom as possible. So I was involved in creating these images indirectly, because I wasn’t there when they were shot, but it was important that Thibault operated the camera himself at that point. During color grading, we spent a lot of time thinking about how we should treat these images: should we bring them closer to the rest of the film, or really set them apart ? The images this camera produced were quite digital looking. In the end, we opted for a fairly strong grade with a sort of effect (a recipe from the colorist) to transform this amateur camera into something even more bizarre.
How involved was Thibault in the grade ?
We started by doing two days of color-grading without Thibault to lay the foundations. We started by looking at the edit with the show LUTs and to see how far we should move away from that. Then we worked on the transitions between the scenes. We realized that the moment when the film transitions from color to black and white as it was planned this caused a jump and that we needed to make the transition somewhere else in the film. So the three of us set about finding a solution. Thibault’s presence was therefore important during color grading. And he further enhanced the look.
At this moment in the process , it was more of an editing decision than a color-grading decision, in the sense that it profoundly affects the shape of the film.
Yes, it does. It was also when we saw it on a large screen that we realized it wasn’t working any more, and that we had to move the transition moment. It’s very much a matter of intuition.
Did you have the feeling that creating this outspoken look, the right dosage was important to create the right rapport with the actors ?
Our barometer was very well thought out from the start of the project. I knew it was going to be pretty strong, and when we got the feeling we were going beyond that limit, it was immediately pretty clear to Thibault, the colorist and me. We were pretty much in sync. Thibault’s intentions were quite extreme and radical, and we tried to follow them without adding a layer of purely aesthetic effect. Because the optics were already highly filtered, we were able to accept a lot of things in that direction. We could only have done this during color grading.
What was your approach together with gaffer for the film ?
The film begins in a rather classic way, it was supposed to be very bright with the sun coming through the window. We used M40s, M18s and LiteMates. By the end of the film, we were in a more enclosed atmosphere, with light coming only from inside. For the second part of the film, Thomas Bojan, the gaffer, and I relied on a ceiling with PARs, which produced pools of light that we could adjust and control to illuminate specific areas through this cream colored fabric ceiling . This allowed us to create variations in light, such as when the character walks down the corridor, either through the diffused ceiling or directly with a very harsh light. In the black and white part, we favored hard sources, often PAR 64s, to create backlighting and lateral hotspots to create very sharp shadows. Of course, it’s quite rare to light a film with PARs, but it lent itself very well. The other big challenge was to be able to switch from day to night at the touch of a button on a tablet. So we had a kind of studio in which we could do day, night, soft black and white or high contrast, changing very few things in very little time. Not least because the schedule wasn’t at all chronological either.
Had Thibault plan for how he wanted to do the blocking before you started working on the film?
He already had a very precise shot list, which we redid together. He had trouble lightening it to help the tight schedule. So I tried to stick as closely as possible to this plan and tried to group shots together sometimes by traveling a little longer so we covered different shots in one go. Not only did he have a precise idea of the blocking, but also of the editing, of how the shots would follow one another. That made it difficult to shoot at times, but it also lifted a lot of things up to a higher level. All in all, it was a very special project, and I have very fond memories of it.
