All the World's A Stage | Effecting Alien Automatons
All the World's A Stage
by Mark Dillon
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| Nicolo Bussotti (Carlo Cecchi) puts the finishing touches on an accursed instrument in The Red Violin, a film set in five nations over a period of 400 years. |
The Red Violin traces the 400-year-long journey of a consummate fiddle crafted in the 17th-century Italian workshop of Nicolo Bussotti (Carlo Cecchi). Over the course of several generations, the violin changes numerous hands: from an orphaned Austrian prodigy to a lustful English virtuoso to a Chinese party official with a traitorous affection for Western music. The bewitched instrument casts a strange spell over all who possess it, ultimately wreaking misfortune on their lives.
Directed by French-Canadian François Girard and photographed by Alain Dostie, The Red Violin earned Genie Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Direction, and Best Cinematography. And with a budget of $9 million, the film is an epic by Canadian production standards — a joint venture of Canada's Rhombus Media and Italy's Mikado Productions, with New Line International and England's Channel 4 pitching in a substantial funding.
To help ensure visual authenticity (and global marketability), The Red Violin was shot on location in the five respective countries where the story takes place — England, Italy, Austria, China and Canada — and combines English subtitles with native tongues. The film's episodic structure is nothing new to Girard and Dostie, who shared an international success with the 1993 biographical feature Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.
The director describes his association with Dostie, which includes TV and commercial work, as a valuable educational experience. Their relationship keeps the director away from "the temptation of useless considerations and discussions, because [Alain] doesn't go there. His first interest is the film experience and what it means emotionally and intellectually. Alain is not just composing nice shots, he's making a film, and that's the greatest influence he's had on me. He and I would rarely discuss 'look' or 'aesthetic' but rather script, characters, and dialogue."
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| Musical prodigy Kasper Weiss (Christoph Koncz) demonstrates his bravura talents in an Austrian orphanage. |
Dostie's career began in 1963, when he was hired as a camera assistant by the National Film Board of Canada. He quickly graduated to director of photography, shooting mostly French-language shorts and documentaries. Since leaving the NFB, he has collaborated with some of the most esteemed Québecois directors, including Denys Arcand, with whom he has made several socially-themed documentaries, and Robert Lepage, for whom he shot the 1995 feature Le Confessional, earning a previous Genie Best Cinematography nomination.
In preproduction on The Red Violin, the filmmakers were essentially prepping five movies at once. According to Dostie, the trick was not so much to give each episode its own distinct look, but rather to maintain a consistent style throughout. That would not have been such a tall order if the five episodes were presented in succession, but the film jumps back and forth across time frames. The opening scene, for instance, occurs in 17th-century Cremona, Italy, which then cuts to modern Montréal as expert appraiser Charles Morritz (Samuel L. Jackson) enters an auction hall. "Those scenes are 400 years apart, so my main concern was finding a 'period' look that would match that of today," says the cameraman.
Dostie accomplished this uniformity by keeping his techniques simple and regularly consulting with production designer François Séguin (Jesus of Montreal, Love and Human Remains, Afterglow) and costume designer Rénee April (The Moderns, Black Robe, Map of the Human Heart) on the colors for props, sets, and clothing. Throughout the five segments, the hues remain as homogeneous as possible, with a spare sense of color experimentation. The cinematographer's lighting followed suit: "There are a few moonlight effects that are colder, but otherwise, our color temperatures were either normal or on the warm side, with candles used for some of the period scenes. We tried to go more with yellowish or gold tones than red, but not too much so. And there was no lens filtration at all."
Even in one of the most recently set sequences — China during the Cultural Revolution, circa 1965 — Dostie avoided combining color temperatures, and primarily utilized natural light coming through windows as motivation for his interior illumination. Fixtures visible in the frame — such as floor lamps — were deliberately left off. This strategy, coupled with the monochromatic tones of the Chinese sets and costumes, lends the episode a cold look.
To create this mood, Dostie drew upon personal experience: he visited China in 1973 — right after the Cultural Revolution — to shoot a documentary. He recalls, "All the clothes were blue-gray. There were red flags, banners, and signs, but everything else was gray. People had no colors on them except the red Mao [Tse-Tung] arm band, and that's what we see on the screen in The Red Violin. But China has changed a lot in 25 years, and it's nothing like that today. I was shocked when I arrived there for preproduction."
The Chinese episode relates the story of party official Xiang Pei (Sylvia Chang), who finds herself in a precarious position. While she publicly denounces "decadent" forms of Western music, she secretly hides records of these same tunes in her home, along with another symbol of the capitalist culture — the red violin.
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| The cursed violin leads a civilian (Liu Zi Feng) to an uncertain fate during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Québecois cameraman Alain Dostie photographed this rally sequence in Shanghai on the day prior to the 1997 Hong Kong handover. |
The sequence's blue-gray hues depict a bleak and repressive era, even though The Red Violin's script underwent careful scrutiny by present-day Chinese authorities. "We had discussions about the script with them," Girard recalls. "It was an intense diplomatic experience. We were almost ready to shoot, and then they refused access. While I was shooting in Montréal and Europe, [Rhombus producer] Niv Fichman went to China five times to fix things, and we ended up shooting in Shanghai."
Once the Chinese granted clearance to the production, the local officials were more than helpful. Tensions did run high, however, because the shooting schedule overlapped with the July 1, 1997 handover of Hong Kong. The film's massive Cultural Revolution rally sequence was shot just one day before the anxious occasion. "There were tons of journalists everywhere to report on the Chinese mainland side of the event," Girard recollects. "The authorities were scared that they would see what we were doing and report it, and that a photo of a 'Cultural Revolution'-style event would end up in an American newspaper." As a safeguard against this possible misrepresentation, the entire neighborhood where this scene's filming took place was blocked off by 300 Chinese police officers.
Since Dostie utilized practicals only in the Montréal sequence, much of the film was shot in very low light levels, especially the Cremona episode with its numerous night shots and candlelit scenes. As a result, the cinematographer primarily employed Kodak's Vision 500T 5279 stock, along with Eastman's 200 ASA EXR 5293 and 100 ASA EXR 5248. "We used the Vision for a lot of the interiors," Dostie concedes. "It's so good compared to what was available in the past. I remember when we used to use the fast stock only when there was no other possibility, but now I don't think you can see a difference in the grain or contrast like you could before."
Perhaps the greatest challenge facing The Red Violin's nomadic, 15-member main unit was adjusting to each new nation and the various technicians who would be hired. Details Dostie, "We'd finish [shooting] in Italy one evening and then catch a flight to England. It was almost like doing different films, and we had to adapt [to each nation's working methods]. You don't ask the crew to change; they are as they are, and it's up to you to reach them."
After completing principle photography in Montréal, the production stopped in Austria for the 18th-century episode, in which musical prodigy Kasper Weiss (Christoph Koncz) forms an unusual attachment to the red violin at his monasterial orphanage. Here, Dostie found that the Old World aesthetics of Austrian architecture were not as film-friendly as he'd hoped. "We tend to think that it's easier to do period pieces in Europe, if only because it's old," he opines. "You can easily shoot in the open country, but when you get into a city, you have to redo everything. Nothing is period [in design]. You have constantly to hide, remove and replace — and it's very expensive because Canadian money is worth nothing over there."
The initial excitement generated by Dostie's first location scout in Vienna gave way to the financial realities of filmmaking. "We were seeing wonderful streets and huge squares," he recalls, "but when François Séguin came and we started to look at things more closely, we found that it would be too expensive to bring in all the lights and lamp posts that we wanted to use."
However, the historic Austrian capital offered an embarrassment of riches in terms of interiors. For required locations such as a library and a prince's palace, Vienna offered several options. But for those exteriors that could not be achieved practically, the filmmakers called upon the CGI artistry of Montréal-based BUZZ Image Group. The most spectacular example is a synthetic vista of Vienna circa 1792, seen as a carriage approaches the city. While shooting, "we had this little hill in the country outside of Vienna — its was green, with one tree and the carriage going up the side," says Dostie. "The camera also craned up about three or four feet."
To create the temporal illusion, a photo of present-day Vienna was taken from the window of the Hilton Hotel. The modern buildings were erased and replaced with a matte painting of an 18th century cityscape, which was then composited with the original carriage footage.
Dostie utilized Arriflex 535 cameras throughout the production, and per Girard's preference, more than half the film was shot with 20mm and 65mm lenses. "They create much less distortion," he explains. "The 20mm is a beautiful lens, and the 65mm is great for close-ups — it has nice separation. When we went outside of those lenses there was a reason for it, although I tend to get away from the 35mm or the 28mm." The director always deploys prime lenses, claiming that in his entire 15-year career he has "used zooms maybe twice, and that was to avoid lens changes. I don't think I've ever used a zoom in a shot." He prefers camera motion to lens adjustment, and a dolly was employed on virtually every setup. "We always have track," the director says. "I really think the way you read space is by moving. It's the prerogative of cinema to move. A still shot drives me crazy." Most shots in the film employ a creeping dolly. "I'm a 'creep' fanatic," he continues. "I like to get closer without noticing we're moving, or where you feel that it's moving a bit. You create a tension there." Dostie offers jokingly, "I don't think François knows what the tripod is. He doesn't want to know."
Kidding aside, the mutual admiration shared by these two filmmakers is quite evident, and Girard had nothing but high praise for Dostie: "No matter what, he and his gaffer, Daniel Chretien, who is a real master, were rock-steady. Alain is a very intense artist."
© 1999 ASC