The picture was shot principally with 21mm, 25mm and 27mm lenses to give it a strong visual coherence. Delbonnel stresses, however, that it’s more difficult to light for wide lenses than long ones. “With short focal lengths, there’s a feeling of depth, but the background is a little soft. It’s not a beautiful softness, though, so you have to rework the background lighting. You can’t just add fill light, because the image quickly becomes flat. Because you can’t create depth with soft focus — for example, to isolate a face from the background — you have to do it with lighting.

“Jean-Pierre wants everything to be pretty sharp. I’m therefore obliged to work at a closed-down stop, at least a T4/5.6 in interiors; otherwise, it’s too hard for the assistant. But even with a 21mm, if you’re doing a close-up of an actress who’s 50 centimeters away from the camera, you’re going to get some softness in the background no matter what the stop. You need to close down the aperture just to keep both the nose and ears in focus!”

Wide lenses are traditionally avoided for close-ups, because the heightened perspective can make faces bulge in an unflattering way, especially when the actor is close to the camera. Yet A Very Long Engagement is rife with beautiful wide-angle close-ups of Tautou. Delbonnel explains that each face is rendered differently by a given lens, and before shooting Amélie, the filmmakers sought the ideal lens for the actress. “We did tests to find out the focal lengths and the camera height that suited her best. Jean-Pierre doesn’t like to have a camera at eye height, so there’s always a slight tilt up or down. With a short focal length, a tilted camera quickly becomes significant in terms of perspective. We found the slight tilt angle, usually a tilt up, which was the limit that Audrey’s face can take. We saw that her face worked well with the 25mm and 27 mm. The 21mm still works for her, but you have to be careful; the 18mm doesn’t work, nor does the 35mm.”

The close-ups in A Very Long Engagement have a peculiar intimacy, with the actors’ gaze often almost head-on into the lens. Delbonnel describes Jeunet’s camera positions as “inquisitive, almost peering into the actors’ soul.” The director likes eyelines very close to camera. During dialogue scenes, the crew sometimes taped a foam cushion on the camera side, so that the offscreen actor could press his face against the camera to help direct the eyes of his on-camera counterpart. On modern sets, cameras are festooned with wires and accessories, but Delbonnel says that Jeunet wants a “naked camera” to allow himself and his actors access, and to avoid distracting the players. This often meant stripping the camera of its mattebox, a highly unusual configuration.

Much of the film’s poetry is created through fluid camera movements. The camera is often on the move, whether creeping around a dialogue scene or swooping above a battlefield. Jeunet designs the shots with extensive storyboards, and he avoids traditional master shots and over-the-shoulders. As is often the case on European films, Delbonnel did all of the A-camera operating, and he also operated the frequent crane shots, which were accomplished with a Technocrane and SuperTechnocrane. Valentin Monge operated the numerous Steadicam shots.

Delbonnel prefers soft lighting, noting that “it’s essentially a question of sensibility. I really love soft light, but I have a lot of problems with hard shadows; it must be my way of seeing the world. But while my lighting is very soft, I want it to be contrasty.” He adds that he has a propensity for side sources, and he avoids frontal lighting, even for fill. “I’ve seen other cinematographers make sublime images with frontlight, but I just can’t do it. Every time I try it, it doesn’t look good to my eye. So it comes back to a matter of taste.”

The most daunting part of the shoot was the six weeks set in the trenches. Delbonnel offers, “We wanted an oppressive sky, with the feeling that the sky was pushing down on the soldiers below. We also started out with the rule that there would be no sunshine in the trenches, and that there would always be sunshine at Mathilde’s house in Brittany.” The filmmakers were able to hew to their rules with a few notable exceptions, including a sunlit battle that could not be rescheduled. Although the resultant scene is beautifully backlit, the cinematographer didn’t want any sequences to be “too beautiful to depict the horror of war.”

The trenches were roughly 220 yards long, and Delbonnel made a daring proposal: to build a 460-square-foot frame and suspend it above the trenches to block out the sun. The weighty frame would be suspended from a 70-ton crane and equipped with a hydraulic system to tilt its orientation. “Everyone looked at me as though I were crazy, but I told them that it was the only way to shoot when it was sunny and ensure continuity. That sunk in pretty quickly.” With a laugh, he adds, “I actually asked for two frames to begin with, but that didn’t go down.”

Delbonnel had the giant frame tinted a slight gray-green to lend an overall cast to the trenches below. The frame served alternatively as a light filter or light source. From Transpalux, the production rented “La Grue,” a huge crane outfitted with six 18K HMIs that would provide light through the frame when there wasn’t enough exposure in the trenches. When the production added cranes to provide rain, the vast location began to look like a giant construction site. For night exteriors, “La Grue” provided a slight backlight, with top fill light generated by three 8K helium balloons and, sometimes military flares.

Down in the trenches, Delbonnel further colored the daytime image by adding an 81EF filter on the lens. The resulting images had a bluish tint that combined with the soft greenish fill from the frame above. When needed, he had his electricians carry an 800-watt HMI on a pole in front of the actors “to bring out their eyes.”