EXHIBITING FORGIVENESS DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY LACHLAN MILNE, ASC, ACS, NZCS (RIGHT) SETTING UP A SHOT WITH DIRECTOR TITUS KAPHAR. PHOTO BY SARAH SHATZ / HOMEGROWN PICTURES
Everyone on the crew – some thirty people in the room – stopped to watch Titus paint. To see someone so good at their craft, on a film set, but not acting, was special. Harking back to the look from Minari, Lachlan, did you try to apply some of the same lensing for this film? LM: I like to treat each project on its own value, so the short answer is no. I did use a similar focal-length set. But for [Exhibiting Forgiveness] I used Leica Summilux primes, partly because the set had at least six lenses between 18 and 50 millimeters, where I knew most of the film would sit. There was also a lot of interior work where I knew I’d need to go as wide as possible, without any distortion at the edges, so the actors could use the whole frame. Titus did not know what a 25 millimeter would look like on a 35-millimeter sensor, but I certainly did, so I led him down that road. The Summilux lenses go down to a 1.4, but I lit everything to a 2.8/4 split to help out our wonderful focus puller, Adriana [Lipman-Brunetto], as well as to make sure we could see the beautiful locations our production designer, Olivia Peebles, gave us. Had you used the ALEXA 35 before this movie? LM: I’d done a few commercials. But this was the first feature, and it was primarily single camera, except for the heavy dialogue
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scenes where we had two cameras crossshooting to give the actors as much freedom as possible. I’m a big believer in “if you don’t shoot it, you can’t use it,” so just because we had two cameras didn’t mean we’d use them. There’s always a temptation to put in that second camera, but making a creative choice on the day that best serves the story was what Titus was all about, and me as well. How did your workflow go? LM: I’d show Titus photographs, cropped to the aspect ratio we were shooting in, and done with a quick color grade, as a possible way to go for each location. Sometimes, I’d do that with Artemis on my iPhone. But mostly I used a Canon R5, with a 24-105 as a variable prime, and then worked out what the equivalent lens was for the ALEXA 35 sensor. Those stills were also helpful to the art department and actors. I’d create a photo library for each location and then put them in Dropbox for all the HOD’s to use if they wanted. Costume designers, for example, never come to the scouts. For me, knowledge is always power, especially on these kinds of fast, low-budget films. This started as a documentary, which you said wasn’t the right format to visualize the father and son’s past. Was it hard making changes or compromises on the day given how close you were to the material? TK: If
you look at my paintings, you’ll see that I’m very comfortable making something and then unmaking it. I’m used to that editing process in my painting, so I did not feel super sensitive to using everything we shot for this film. If something had to go for the sake of the story, then that’s how it is. LM: I can confirm that Titus was definitely open to surprises and happy accidents on the day. And he was much better about letting go of material than many directors I’ve worked with, especially for a first-time project that’s so personal. Normally the first assembly has every single setup in every scene we did and is 17 hours long [laughs]. And they’re like: “It’s perfect! I can’t change a thing.” TK: What was more challenging were the super-charged emotional scenes. There’s one upstairs in the gallery, towards the end of the film, where André and John [Earl Jelks, playing Terrell’s father, La’Ron] are going at each other. That’s pretty much verbatim of what happened in real life when my father showed up at my studio. Now, I’m not a guy who typically can’t control his emotions. But watching André in that scene, I had to leave the set for, like, half an hour because I could not stop crying. LM: I was in the room for that one and I think everyone felt that same level of intensity. We all