by Stephanie Argy

The Interpreter is the first movie on which Darius Khondji, ASC, AFC was able to supervise a digital intermediate (DI). The work was carried out at EFilm, where Khondji collaborated with digital colorist Steve Scott. The footage, scanned at 4K on an Imagica XE scanner, was proxied down to 1K for work in the color-correction room and projected on a Barco 2K projector. Scott used EFilm’s proprietary software-based system to do the color correction. After color and dust-busting data were applied, the files were recorded out to negative at 2K using an Arrilaser and then printed at Technicolor.

Khondji’s goal with the DI was to keep all of the adjustments as subtle as possible. “Mostly, we aimed to translate the natural look of the film,” he says. “It’s not an ‘effectsy’ DI, where we’re changing everything.” The cinematographer says he has perceived many movies that were finished digitally to be “over-DI’d,” with too much saturation, contrast and painting.

Khondji and Scott’s goal was to use the DI to supplement the cinematography in unobtrusive ways, such as adding slight vignettes or gradients, or enhancing the contrast between very dark locations and very light ones. “In the old days, you had to do absolutely everything in camera, which is a great thing to do,” says Khondji. “But in the mix of modern production, you don’t have the time to add all of those things when you shoot.” In the DI suite, “you can emphasize one color that no filters can produce. You can touch up one color or one thing. You can manipulate or push the audience to see something or not see something.”

For Khondji, the biggest disadvantage of the DI process on The Interpreter was the schedule — the work had to be completed in 11 days. “The film is long and complex, and I feel we needed two more weeks to do the DI,” says the cinematographer. “I was lucky to work with Steve Scott, considering the time challenge we had.”

Khondji says Scott constantly protected him from clipping the whites or going too inky in the blacks. It is in these extremes of the exposure curve, he explains, where a DI can begin to look overly processed. “When I met Steve, I said, ‘Please don’t let me go into video effects on anything. I don’t want to see any artifacts from over-contrast, or any whites becoming video-like. Keep us in the film world! Keep us in the film world!’ And right from the beginning, Steve understood what I meant.”

Initially, Khondji and director Sydney Pollack didn’t think they would be able to finish The Interpreter with a DI. “Sydney was very interested in this process, and we both wanted to do it, but we thought we wouldn’t have the time because the [original] release date was [early spring]. When the release date was pushed back, the producers and the studio agreed to give us the DI, which was an exciting thing.”

During the shoot, of course, Khondji didn’t know he would have access to the tools available in the DI suite. However, he always planned on doing a silver-retention process, such as ENR, to finesse his blacks. He therefore shot the picture in a way that would preserve detail. “I always prepare the blacks — I fill a little bit more, or I add smoke, or I flash. On this film, I used Kodak [Vision2 Expression 500T] 5229, a softer negative stock that has a very flat curve of contrast, of gamma. That gave me the quality I wanted in post.”

     Khondji acknowledges that maintaining so much detail in the blacks marks a shift for him. “When I was shooting Delicatessen, City of Lost Children and even Seven, I loved to make the blacks look like china ink, but recently I stepped back from that, and I love having a little flashing effect in the blacks. It’s just my taste. I’ve noticed that everybody seems to be shooting a very contrasty negative, saturating the black. I’m just in a different world now.”

Khondji notes that he wanted The Interpreter to resemble films from the 1970s in some respects. “The blacks were not as rich as they became in the ’90s, and I like that. I love American thrillers from the ’70s; every filmmaker in Europe is more or less in love with the look of the ‘70s American thriller. I’ve tried to re-create that classic style in this film, and I think Sydney was on the same track.”

With his first DI behind him, Khondji says he wouldn’t shoot any differently even if knows a DI is a sure thing. “If you need to do masks or things like that, you need a bit of time to track, so you cannot just say ‘We’ll fix it in the DI’ while you’re in production, unless you have five weeks for the DI and a director who’s familiar with the process. In the limited time we had at EFilm, it was good that we were aiming for a naturalistic image quality.”