Working on the shoot also reminded Clark of the free-form filmmaking style that director Jean-Luc Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard brought to Breathless, one of Clark’s favorite films. "Godard was notorious for not scripting scenes, and people used to think, ’How the heck can he make such great films with no script?’ In a way, this project was a very dramatic reminder that such things are possible if everything is orchestrated by people with an understanding of the process, which in this case was very fluid and very interactive. Breathless is structured from juxtaposed jump-cut moments of observation which take you out of the story but into other, very special moments that are almost transcendental. I’m not trying to make too strong a parallel between Breathless and this commercial, but it was exciting to echo that style."
On the second day of the Ralph Lauren shoot, the filmmakers set up at the same locations, with the same model and the same clothes. However, the demands of the session now revolved more around Clark’s needs than Metzner’s, and this time the images were recorded entirely on 35mm color stock. "We flip-flopped our priorities," Clark explains. "On day one, the agenda was achieving a certain number of stills for the tie-in magazine campaign. The second day was all about doing the commercial, so any stills that were taken were incidental."
Clark utilized a Platinum Panaflex camera and Kodak’s 5246 Vision 250D color stock on the second day, and opted not to alter Metzner’s lighting. "It seemed inappropriate to deviate from what we’d found very successful and effective on day one," he submits. "The 5246 daylight-balanced color neg, which I use quite frequently, has a 250 ASA versus the 80 ASA of Plus-X, so I actually had far more stop to deal with in color than I did in black-and-white. I actually had several HMI film lights to supplement Sheila’s lighting if I wanted, and in some cases I did add a couple of film lights for a marginal kind of punctuation. The nature of the subject matter we were dealing with in the color footage required it."
Because both the setting and the clothes were virtually monochromatic, the first thing that leapt out from the juxtaposition of these two elements was Tanga’s Caucasian skin coloring. "The clothes themselves are interestingly rendered both in color and black-and-white," Clark observes. "The clothing was very monochromatic in tone, with hints of umber or beige and a lot of grays and blacks as well. That made things very interesting when we used color versus black-and-white."
Another difference between the black-and-white and color shoots was the visual style employed on each segment. "The 16mm shoot was all done handheld, while the 35mm color session was a bit more formalized," Clark remarks. "The black-and-white shoot was not designed to appear handheld; it was done handheld because that was the most efficient and effective way to get the images. The black-and-white footage had this observational, freewheeling, ’found moments’ feel, but we were a little more structured in terms of how we approached the same elements in color. On the second day, we were in a much more conventional mode; we used dollies to do some tracking shots, and we had a more conventional setup with the usual paraphernalia. We designed those shots with Sheila to interrelate and build on what we had done on the first day. Any noticeable difference in the type of equipment we used doesn’t come across that way hopefully, no one watching the spot will be able to discern what’s handheld and what isn’t. It would have been a resounding failure if you could look at the shots and tell which is which."
This topic prompts Clark to make a final Godardian observation: use the tools that are available to make the best shots you can. He notes, "In Breathless, they used a wheelchair to get one shot not because they wanted to make some fetishistic virtue of it, but because it was what they had available. Nobody thinks, ’Gosh, they used a wheelchair.’ The lesson for me on this project has been that we should not get hung up on any assumptions of how to achieve a shot. There might be more interesting ways of achieving the shot if you’re open to it. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with using a wheelchair after all."
