One of the most striking cinematographic elements of the film is the variety of visual materials incorporated into the final anamorphic print. Most was straightforward Super 35mm; some was rephotographed Super 35; and some was Beta, rephotographed onto Super 35.
The video elements consisted of authentic news footage shot by Bosnian and British news crews during the war, which was seamlessly mixed with new Beta material which had been restaged by Winterbottom.
"We used ten minutes of real newsreel footage," explains the director. "We didn't want to restage events like the bread queue massacre (in which Sarajevans waiting quietly in line to buy bread were mowed down by Serbian snipers and shells). The powerful, shocking images of injured people seen on the screen are the real images. When you don't see any journalists in the scene i.e. the actors portraying the journalists it's actual newsreel footage."
But because Winterbottom also wanted to show the actors at the massacre surveying the horror and talking to victims he restaged small bits of the scene. The effect is amazing; so flawlessly shot and edited is the sequence that it's impossible to tell what is real and what has been restaged. As a side note, and adding an eerie verisimilitude to the event, the Bosnian TV crew who covered the actual massacre was hired to play a camera crew in the movie.
After the video material was edited, it was played back on a high quality monitor and Hobson filmed it on Super 35. "We shot well within the TV frame so that we were exaggerating the feeling of the scan lines you get on television," says Hobson.
The cameraman also rephotographed some of the Super 35mm footage. "We set up a film projector (back in London) and we pointed a 35mm camera at the screen. We shot the projected image with the camera running out of synch with the projector." The intent was to produce a flicker and a further degrading of the image.
For example, the last shot in the film shows a cellist giving a concert on a hill as a group of Sarajevans gather to hear the music. The cellist is sitting there, a target for, yet also defying, Serb snipers. The image flickers and fades up and down. "It's a very struggling and broken image, like the musician who is emotionally broken but struggling," says Hobson. "That, of course, is one of the metaphors about Sarajevo."
When grading the picture at Rank Laboratories, Denham, England, Hobson tried a couple of different options before telling the color timer to go with a middle line position of "sandy." "That's the best way I could describe it," he says. "It's neither too blue, which is a cliché for being miserable, nor is it too warm because Sarajevo, which is quite high in the mountains, isn't."
The filmmakers wanted the widescreen format, as they felt it suited the subject matter; but partly because Hobson dislikes the smearing of the anamorphic look and partly because the range of lenses available in spherical format is so much greater and faster, he chose Super 35.
This allowed him to use his favorite lenses, "the Zeiss Ultra Speeds give quite a hard, sharp and contrasty look, whether you are going for a cold look or a warm one," he notes. "By shooting in Super 35 for an anamorphic print I ended up with lenses which I knew and trusted at T1.3 and T1.4. And I had a focus puller, John Conroy from Dublin, who could hack that. Furthermore, because the lenses are spherical, they are much faster and I am able to shoot in much darker conditions."
That proved an important consideration since, during the siege, Sarajevo was without electricity at night and most of the day which influenced the lighting of both exterior and interior scenes.
Street lamps could not be used as a source at night and Hobson felt moonlit skies were clichéd. However, due to almost constant Serb shelling, there were always fires burning around the city and these provided the lighting motivation for the few exterior nocturnal scenes. Hobson relied on 2k blondes and 2.5k Zaps, sometimes through butterfly frames with light silk, to generate a low level ambiance.
Most night scenes in the orphanage relied exclusively on candles and oil lamps. "I just risked it," says Hobson, who didn't get film dailies and refused to look at VHS rushes because he finds them misleading. He was allowed two days of film dailies the first week; and after that relied on editor Trevor Waite, back in London, to tell him how things looked.
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