8 minute read
LARRY SMITH BSC•THE FORGIVEN
NOCTURNAL SINS
By Darek Kuźma
Cinematographer Larry Smith BSC ASC captured a clash of worlds and worldviews in John Michael McDonagh’s The Forgiven.
At first, all appears perfectly Instagrammable, but a storm is brewing. Heavy seasickness hits the passen Cinematographer Larry Smith BSC ASC captured a clash of worlds and worldviews in John Michael McDonagh’s The Forgiven.
A fossil-selling Arab teenager dies on a desolate road somewhere between Tangier and Azna, in the Moroccan Atlas Mountains. Hit by the speeding car of a jaded white couple, David and Jo Henninger, he becomes a thorn in the side of a group of filthy rich Westerners partying hard in a lavishly renovated ksour to which the Henningers were recklessly heading. The police are bribed, and consciences are silenced with alcohol, yet when the boy’s Berber father arrives to collect the body, he demands the culprit to go with him to atone during a burial rite. Grudgingly, David agrees and gets a glimpse of the world behind the toxic stereotypes that had been determining the confines of his perception.
Part excruciatingly poignant morality play, part cinematic vivisection of the West’s inebriation with crooked value systems, The Forgiven is not an easy film to digest. Especially as there are no moustache-twirling villains, just a bunch of dismal people who were led to believe they are special by their own kind. Yet it is a truly captivating one to watch due to Smith’s evocative lensing and lighting. This is the cinematographer’s third collaboration with McDonagh, after The Guard’s delicious blend of dark comedy and grim drama and Calvary’s sombre exploration of guilt, yet undeniably the broadest in terms of both moral and visual scope.
As McDonagh was adamant about shooting in the same area as featured in the Lawrence Osborne novel he was adapting for the screenplay, and Smith had to make the best of what he was presented with.
“It was challenging,” he explains. “These days Morocco is often visited by film crews, but the area we shot at had inferior infrastructure. The nearest studio was
probably 5-6 hours away, so we had to piece the villa-partying scenes together in two hotels, one of which was where the cast and the director were staying. We had to travel long distances to reach some locations, up to 50 kilometres through the desert. Adding in a tight shooting schedule, there was a lot of pressure on the technical crew to deliver.”
Still, he found a lot to be thankful for in visual terms.
“I have shot in Egypt and the Middle East, but there’s something distinctive about Morocco. The landscape is biblical. Once you get off the roads, you’re in the desert, no sand dunes – just millions of little stones and sharp rocks. Sure, it gets bumpy and risky when you travel too fast, but it served this story perfectly,” says Smith.
“We had a lot of high mountain scenes, where you look over an endless desert, and that’s a humbling experience. Not that different from what David feels on his way to the burial, I guess. We also shot in a quarry and in a very cinematic oasis. There were definitely some interesting locations.”
As much as he admired the arid vastness, Smith preferred shooting at night.
“There are areas that, whichever way you look, all you can see is this sandstone yellow-ness, mostly without any contours to the land, and the desert looks more sublime and hypnotic in low light. We didn’t have the luxury to shoot that early, so I was grateful for night scenes where I could recreate the right light,” he recalls.
“We had logistical problems with getting Condors on location, but I knew that shooting with Sony Venice’s 2500ISO, I could really manage with minimal lighting to an amazing effect. I mostly used 18Ks for exposure and lit the rest with small sources and practicals.”
One of the story’s most emblematic scenes comes when David loses control of his car when the boy jumps on the nocturnal road to sell them a fossil, which affluent Westerners love to collect.
“We were in a mountainous area, I could only get one Condor with 18K just around the bend and one 600 metres further down the road to give a bit of shape to the peaks in the dark. The rest was illuminated by the car’s headlights, always a beautiful visual tool at night,” he marvels.
“When David stops, I had some local lights around the vehicle and a bit of fill to keep that isolation of the brightness of the car and the mountains in the background. As with many other scenes, I wanted it to feel authentic.”
Authenticity was a crucial factor in choosing Sony Venice, especially that McDonagh likes to storyboard and Smith had to work within the given parameters. It was also the reasoning behind picking Cooke Anamorphic/i Prime Lenses.
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“I usually work with Panavision E-series Anamorphics, but the focal lengths I wanted weren’t readily available then. I had never shot with Cooke Anamorphics before, but I had worked a lot with Cooke Sphericals and knew they help the digital format immensely with their softness, taking the kind of TV harshness out of the picture. It was precisely what they gave me during the shoot.” Smith’s lens package was rounded out with two Angénieux Optimo Zooms, namely the 15-40mm and 24-290mm.
David’s journey into the unknown is interspersed with scenes from the ksour where the jaded expats and their guests indulge themselves with luxurious hedonism and Jo Henniger is tempted to commit adultery with a charming hustler. Smith had to find a way to depict the extravagance and excess without losing the authenticity.
“Again, I tried to keep it as simple as possible,” he says. “With most of the interiors, both day and night, I shot mostly with practicals because the sets already offered a wide range of visual opportunities. In all honesty, I think these enabled me to get the real colours of Morocco more than the desert scenes did. I was grateful for that.”
That was also the case with exteriors, even though piecing the ksour together from two optically divergent hotels proved a challenge.
“One thing I can’t deny is that they both had a personality, thus the only heavy lifting was bringing a load of paper lanterns up. The rest was mostly lit with practicals. There’s a lot of going on at these parties, there are candles, underwater pool lights, guys spurting petrol out of their mouths. The Sony Venice is amazing in lowlight conditions, and its colour reproduction is basically unparalleled.”
During the fancy dinners Smith augmented the practicals with a pair of 18Ks on Condors to hint at the desert looming behind the characters and lend some romanticism to the dialogue-heavy scenes.
“The rest of the lighting were candles and Dedos, as the only other sources I used in those scenes,” says Smith. “I had SkyPanels at my disposal too, but used them only a couple of times in really dark interior areas when I couldn’t get an 18K in to penetrate. No more than two at a time, just a complimentary source. The rest I covered with practicals, a range of Dedo lights and a little bit of warm fill here and there. It was all carefully planned to create a specific atmosphere that mixes well with camera movement.”
Which was yet another essential aspect of infusing The Forgiven’s high-moral drama with just the right amount of substance.
“I’m not a fan of handheld and I used it only for some travelling shots in car. I think handheld is overused because many directors believe it adds more dynamic if you keep moving the shaky camera all the time. Here, we used everything, we had Steadicam, Ronin, cranes, drone work, dolly and track, whatever the given scene needed to make it the best it could be,” he evokes. “I have to say I particularly liked the drone shots and I think they should be considered as cost-effective alternatives to some crane work. It’s a brilliant new tool.”
Smith went to Morocco in January 2020 and, after finalising prep work, he shot for less than five weeks before the on-set of the pandemic halted the production in mid-March.
“After the hiatus, we went back for five days in September to shoot various scenes, including the mourning father bringing his son back home, but we had to work in different places. And our hotel had Covid problems, so we had to relocate and thus travel even longer. We lost a day because of that, which translated to even more pressure on the technical crew. We delivered what was expected of us, and I was happy with the result, yet I can’t help but wonder what we could’ve done if we’d been given a week more to shoot?”
Unfortunately, Smith was not able to put the final touches in the grade as the subsequent Covid waves distorted the post-production schedule, and when the DI eventually came about he was contracted to shoot a new film. It was a disappointing end to an interesting adventure, yet Smith is fond of The Forgiven and awaits new challenges that will send him on personal and professional journeys all over the world.
He is currently shooting in Japan. “I can’t say I thoroughly enjoyed working on The Forgiven, because we had tough times to do everything on time and had to work in risky locations. But my job is to find solutions, create compelling worlds, leave the viewers with something more than just pure entertainment. And I strongly believe we achieved that with this film.”
