Jörg Widmer is one of the most important contemporary camera operators and cinematographers. Specialized in the use of the Steadicam, as camera operator or 2nd unit dop he was involved in movies such as Beyond the Clouds by Wim Wenders and Michelangelo Antonioni, Roman Polanski’s Oscar winner The Pianist, Wolfgang Becker’s cult Good Bye Lenin, Alejandro Iñárritu’s Babel, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, The Piano Teacher, The White Ribbon and Amour, all three directed by Michael Haneke and the latter two awarded by Cannes’ Palme d’Or, as well as the first season of acclaimed German Netflix series Dark. Among the movies he personally cinematographed, Wim Wenders’ two documentaries Buena Vista Social Club and Pina stand out; in the latter he shared credits with Helen Louvart, who had started the film. He started collaborating with Terrence Malick in 2004, serving as a Steadicam operator and 2nd unit director of photography first for The New World (2005), later for the Palme d’Or-winner The Tree of Life (2011) and the triptych To the Wonder (2012), Knight of Cups (2015), a metacinematographic work in which Malick made him also appear as an actor in the role of a photographer, and Song to Song (2017); whereas in these first five movies Emmanuel Lubezki was the main author of cinematography. In Malick’s actual latest movie A Hidden Life, presented in the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, Widmer was the main cinematographer. Widmer has cinematographed also The Book of Vision, produced by Malick and directed by his disciple Carlo S. Hintermann, which opened 2020 Venice Film Festival’s International Critics’ Week, and has continued his collaboration with Malick also for The Way of the Wind, an upcoming project from the Austin based director centered upon Jesus Christ’s life and parables.
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The New World, shot in 2004 and theatrically released in 2006, marked your first collaboration with both Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. How were you attached to the project? How and when did you meet for the first time Lubezki and how and when did you meet Malick?
I was supposed to shoot a different project with Malick, but when I met him in Los Angeles he proposed to shoot a different movie with him, which eventually was The New World. By that time Emmanuel Lubezki was in L.A. as well, since he was shooting Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events at Paramount Studios. He offered to meet me there. We somehow liked each other and decided to collaborate. This was very exciting because The New World was also Lubezki’s first collaboration with Malick. Lemony Snicket was a movie shot entirely on a soundstage. It was storyboarded, precisely lit, every single shot planned with elaborate make-up, rehearsals with position marks for the actors and so on. Therefore Emmanuel was really looking forward to shooting The New World, which we both thought would be completely different from what we were used to finding situations which are unexpected, ready to shoot and use them at the moment when they happened. We were open to discover while filming like a documentary crew instead of planning each shot before the clapboard goes. By that time on Malick’s artistic path, there was still a kind of script, there was a plan for the movie, however, embracing the unexpected and the unprovided was already a key rule on set.
The New World, Terrence Malick 2005. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki
The New World pushed further the most innovative directorial style already seen in The Thin Red Line, with fluid camera movements and room for improvisation for both actors and crew. What preliminary discussions did you and Lubezki have with Malick, in order to set the cinematography and the camera work? Once on the set, how did the relationship between you, the camera and the actors work?
Well, it was just a discovery for everybody. We tried to stick to the principles of avoiding lateral or oblique movements, the actors were supposed to move only forward, towards or away from the camera. Another part of the concept was to always follow the light. Brightness and light determined the space of the actors, basically co-directed the shots and the scenes. Another core concept of shooting The New World concerned the lenses: instead of having a lot of lenses we ended up using only a set of three short focal lengths for the entire film, so not to change the perspective of the audience. The actors embraced this way of shooting because they could be free, they could try out many ideas. When we failed, the scene would most likely not end up in the final cut of the movie. Part of the cast was composed by actual native Americans but they obviously were not used to the lifestyle of the early XVIth century, so they had to discover and learn how their ancestors lived. The actors in the role of English settlers had to adapt to the life and the tools of the real-life colonizers. In the beginning, Canada was considered to provide the ideal landscapes to shoot The New World. It turned out that the region of Jamestown, along the Chickahominy River, close to Williamsburg, was the right place to build the sets, in parts close to where the original events depicted in the film really had happened. It was exciting to be in these locations marked by American history. The fort was built by Jack Fisk, the production designer, who did a great job in making it very close to real, also for the size of it. We used the construction of the fort and let the English settlers build it by themselves, which is part of the narration. Malick and Fisk were very always aware of the passage of time and they planned wisely to shoot according to the flow of nature. They prepared to be able to shoot spring, summer, autumn and winter scenes.
Terrence Malick's The New World (with Emmanuel Lubezki and Jörg Widmer)
For The Tree of Life you also served a second-unit dop for the shootings in Italy. How long did these shootings last and what locations have you crossed in our country? How did you coordinate with Malick and Lubezki about these brief, second-unit scenes?
The style of the movie was laid out by the main unit cinematography. It was not different from the 2nd unit work, which I had delivered in Virginia earlier. I didn’t get directions from Malick which would tell me exactly what to do. It was more about the idea behind the scenes, about what he wanted to achieve and where to go but without any precise shot description. Since I already knew in depth the style of the movie and its rules, it was easy to handle these 2nd unit shootings. In Italy we went to several places north from Rome, including Bomarzo for example, where we shot in the Giardino dei Mostri with its beautiful sculptures. The producer Nicolas Gonda came with us and helped us to find the locations in the area, which Malick had scouted earlier. Then we just moved in and shot everything that we thought was right for the movie. We had Carlo Hintermann and Gerardo Panichi being our line producers for Italy, and this is why we started to know each other.
Knight of Cups and Song to Song, as well as some scenes of To the Wonder, were shot with a mixture of film and digital, with Knight of Cups containing even brief glimpses in GoPro. What were the technical and artistical advantages of alternating the two formats? How was it possible to merge film and digital in the editing and color correction phases?
It’s easy to mix different formats. Most of the audiences wouldn’t notice. Even in The New World some 65mm shots were mixed with anamorphic 35mm footage and nobody would be able to distinguish the two unless you look really carefully with a keen eye. To the Wonder was completely shot on film, only a couple scenes in Paris at night were shot digitally (RED ONE). In Knight of Cups and Song to Song the amount of digital footage increased: at dawn, we always switched to the digital camera, which provided a fantastic definition in the blacks and therefore conveyed more night atmosphere. If we would have been in rural areas it might not have been the case, but in the cities, with a lot of street lights, the ALEXA looked amazing.
Malick’s directorial style, as you yourself have remarked, strives to capture the unexpected and the spontaneous on the set, filming often very close to the actors, with long takes often full of improvisation. What indications does Malick give the crew before the shooting day actually starts? Once the clapper board goes, how do you cooperate with Lubezki and the focus puller, also banally to avoid that the image goes out of focus?
Always in the morning, Malick came with a couple of thoughts he had had at night and started to discuss them with Lubezki and the actors before the shooting began. While we shot, he always watched the camera image, threw in lines and ideas even during takes and helped the actors and the camera to try different versions. His approach was not so much about direction than letting go and observe, until something great was happening. It was a very complex but joyful and creative process. The focus puller was the person with the least information. In Malick’s movies it is not only about keeping the focus on something but anticipating where the camera might move next and the AC literally has to put the focus on another person or another object. In all the movies I shot with Malick, we were always exploring, it was always a discovery tour. With or without a script, there was a concept of how to move the camera, how to move with the actors, to stay ready for new ideas and try out. We collected the material which was the raw material for the film. By editing Malick found out which scenes were strong enough and which scenes would be essential for the movie. Malick is always very sure about where he wants to shoot. For To the Wonder France was very important for him. He chose wisely the areas where he wanted to be and then we shot there like a documentary crew, fast and with a lot of freedom. Very often, we did not know where the actors would go and what they had in mind by using the momentum, we achieved some terrific scenes. In the first movies I shot with Malick, I was the operator. Nevertheless, sometimes Lubezki operated as well. One of us was always prepared to change the stop since we were on the move all the time without stopping the camera. We came from dark areas to brighter spots, which required changing the exposure almost permanently.
To the Wonder, Terrence Malick, 2012
The typical look of Terrence Malick movies is obtained also through an atypical choice of the camera lenses. In ASC magazine I read several reports about the technical specifics of some of the movies that Lubezki cinematographed, but they did not cover all the 7 movies you shoot with Malick. Can you please briefly tell us which lenses, which film stocks and which cameras were used for every Malick movie from The New World to A Hidden Life?
It was always Arri cams, except for The New World which was shot with Anamorphic lenses from Panavision, and a 65 hand-held studio camera from Panavision as well; from The Tree of Life on we always used Arricams and Zeiss Master Primes, with no filtres. The film stock was Kodak 50 and 200 ISO Daylight and 500 ISO Tungsten. For To the Wonder, as mentioned earlier, for very few scenes in Paris, we used the RED ONE. For Knight of Cups and Song to Song, Alexa M which had just come out, was great because it had a separate power and separate recording unit. It was only the camera head which you had to carry for the operator, therefore it was pretty comfortable and lightweight. The downside was that a grip or the 1.AC had to follow with the recorder and the battery, which was tricky in particular since the optical fiber cable was very fragile.
A Hidden Life is your first credit as the main cinematographer in a Malick movie. How and why did Malick propose to you to take over this role too? How did you prepare for the filming in terms of reading the script and taking part in location scouting? Once the set, you also served as main camera operator?
We chose to do so because the story was based in Austria and Germany. We were shooting in Europe, all of the actors more or less German or Austrian, therefore the communication much easier. Having already shot with him six movies before, we knew each other quite well and I was familiar with his methods: I knew we wouldn’t be much about artificially lighting scenes, rather use the sun and natural brightness as much as we could. Especially for this movie in such remote areas, where nature played an important role, the smart handling of natural light makes the images so beautiful, which otherwise could only be achieved with a huge amount of lighting effort. There was still a lot of work to do for the electricians. Especially at the interiors, where the task was to create contrast and darkness, it was quite challenging for them to react fast with shiny boards and black butterflies stay out of frame. Even more, since we used such wide lenses. We had the DIT who was always in control of the stop, so he would take care of precise exposure when we moved from interiors to exteriors without cutting the camera. For the first time in a Malick movie, besides a lot of hand-held and Steadicam, we used extensively sliders. Never a dolly though. In the old days of using film footage, the scenes we shot ended with the rollout of the mag after 6 minutes. With digital cameras, we tried to keep the time per shot to a maximum of 15 min to save the energy of the actors and me, but sometimes it happened that we shot up to 40 min uninterruptedly in a single take. It was an amazing experience to see how the action started to feel real and natural and the actors transformed from acting to just being the characters. They started to feel as if they were the real persons and for them it was quite intense to keep the momentum and stay playful. The longest take lasted 43 minutes and was in the village, Franz and Fani playing with the kids after coming home.
A Hidden Life was Malick’s first movie to be shot entirely in digital. What digital camera did you eventually choose and why?
A Hidden Life, Terrence Malick, 2019. Cinematographer Jörg Widmer
Lubezki had chosen the ARRI ALEXA as a digital camera for the previous Malick movies. I had already shot some films with the RED Dragon. Therefore, we showed some tests to Malick and we decided to use the RED Dragon for A Hidden Life. I was convinced this camera would give us more options in post-production, we could shoot in 6K and still had a lightweight camera, which was a relief considering the length of the takes. I am very happy with the result. Especially with the low-light conditions, which we were facing. We changed from hand-held to Steadicam very quickly, according to the scenes we were filming: especially when we were shooting with the kids, we had to react instantly. They started to play and we had to use these moments. I was very happy to change from Steadicam to handheld in 15 seconds. Or from slider to Steadicam, when the sun came out and it was the right light to follow Fani through the village. Also to shoot with the animals sometimes, we had to be fast and ready like on a documentary to catch the moment, feeling the nature and using the right light. We also had a two day-shoot in the winter, where we used the Helium, the new model of RED, which was an improvement by then. RED also introduced the IPP2 Imagines Processing Pipeline which helped us to better control the highlights and of the lowlight. That improvement came out while we were shooting and it further helped us in the post-production.
Ever since 1978 Days of Heaven Terrence Malick’s filmography has been distinguished by ia search for the most natural lighting possible for the scenes. Was A Hidden Life shot entirely with natural light or did you and Malick sometimes choose to use a lighting prop?
A Hidden Life, Terrence Malick, 2019. Cinematographer Jörg Widmer
With Malick, the use of natural light has priority. It looks beautiful and you can shoot so much faster if you don’t have to rearrange the position of equipment all the time. This is especially important, when you use wide angle lenses and when you want to be ready to shoot everything immediately. However for A Hidden Life we had some props we used in the evenings. Furthermore, in the prison scenes it was simply too dark to shoot without using strong light sources, but we strived to make it look natural. In the scenes set inside the cells we tried to shoot it in the right moment, when the sunlight kicked in but we extended our shooting time by using mirrors. In general the concept was to use the best moment and finish when the natural light wasn’t good anymore. The difference between A Hidden Life and the previous movies was the fact that the other movies were in areas with predictable weather conditions. In Texas you were able to plan where you might possibly shoot in the morning and then at the different hours of the day. Shooting in Europe instead meant that we had no predictable weather conditions. Sometimes there were clouds for days, therefore using natural light was challenging. The good thing about Malick is that he knows everything about cinematography and lighting. He was happy to follow the restrictions we had given ourselves. Some days we had to change the schedule because it was simply too dark in some sets or we intended to have a different light situation for a specific scene. Since the light was also supposed to be a character in the film.
A Hidden Life, Terrence Malick, 2019. Cinematographer Jörg Widmer
Talking more specifically about some scenes of A Hidden Life, about the beginning of the movie there is a magnificent frame with Franz and Fani, glimpsed also in the trailer. How did you get such intense lighting?
The light bulb is the main source, which is in the frame, so there is not so much more. In post-production you can always add some little windows to make it less strong, but basically it is only the light bulb.
A Hidden Life, Terrence Malick, 2019. Cinematographer Jörg Widmer
One of the most meaningful scenes of A Hidden Life is the monologue of a church painter, heard only by Franz. Johan Leysen’s aged face is continuously immersed in a shimmering chiaroscuro, as he walks around the church retouching old frescos. How do you get such contrasts? It was only natural light properly handled or did you need the help of some lighting props?
Again, it’s just about finding the right time to shoot it and using the light wisely; as soon as the light is gone you choose the right place and move to a different position to keep the continuity. In the prison instead we had some lighting scenes. There was one scene where we had 100m of dark prison hallway and we only looked towards a window which we lit from outside with strong, artificial lighting props. Due to the shiny walls it gave an incredible, powerful, very dark image.
A Hidden Life, Terrence Malick, 2019. Cinematographer Jörg Widmer
Another visually stunning scene is the one who precedes the execution of Franz, which happens off-screen. First, Franz waits with other prisoners outside the building of the decapitation, then enters and, as he moves closer to the guillotine, seems already immersed in a metaphysical space, while the scene cuts before his death. How did you get the lighting for that set?
Again, this is just natural light. The spaces were well chosen, and we used the right time of the day to shoot the scene. What we always did was to darken the space behind the camera, the space which was not in frame, just to make the depth of going from the dark to the bright and keep the light in a way that the scene is not directly frontlit. But the magic of the scene comes from the fact that you don’t see the execution, because already the preceding, exterior scene where you see Franz talking to the other prisoner makes you emotionally so driven that you can hardly stand the imagination that Franz gets executed afterwards. The impact of the scene is so strong because you don’t see the execution, you have to imagine it yourself.
On one side, Terrence Malick stresses out the uniqueness of cinematic language, on the other side his fragmentary, free-camera style may be linked both to the Modernist tradition and to the style of several painters between XIXth and XXth century, perhaps from Monet to Picasso. In fact it is not rare in a Malick movie to find an explicit or implicit tableaux vivant, i.e. Van Gogh’s Prisoners’ Round inside A Hidden Life: what pictorial and cinematic references have you two shared over the course of the years?
Jörg Widmer on the set of A Hidden Life, Terrence Malick, 2019
Malick and I went to a couple of museums together, we had never watched movies together but we often spoke about other films. Every director and every cinematographer have their own background which originates in their education and personal interests. To be able to find a way of talking about how to make the movie it is very useful to talk about other movies, paintings, work of arts, novels. You may not replicate what you saw but often just you refer to some details of it. Perhaps you studied the works of Caspar David Friedrich and you are fascinated by the way he caught the dusk and the dawns: this is something you keep in mind, but once on the set you go for something else. Another painter who many cinematographers keep as a reference is Johannes Vermeer: how the light hits the faces of his objects and characters is just amazing, he was a really great observer and he could trace soft lights as well as sometimes harsh lights in a unique way. All of this is part of the cultural and visual background of a cinematographer. When lighting sets or faces, you keep this in mind but you may not be aware of it at the moment.
During the post-production of the movie, what were your main interventions in terms of conforming and color correction? Have you had developed a LUT before the shootings?
A Hidden Life, Terrence Malick, 2019
As we had Christian Kuss as DIT on the set, we were able to time the dailies every evening after wrap and thanks to him we were already pretty close to what we wanted to achieve on screen later. This was also very helpful during the editing process, since the editors could sense the atmosphere of the movie already while they put the scenes together. The good thing was that Kuss was already set to be also the colorist, so he used his own settings in DaVinci for the color correction process. We needed only 12 days for the final grading. Thanks to the latitude of these cameras, we were able to retrieve definition in windows or could create a more beautiful lighting situation by increasing the darkness in the foreground. Apart from that, we had to match the scenes according to the editing and increase a little bit the impact of the image edited footage. We hadn’t used a LUT on set, we only exposed properly. It wouldn’t have been necessary, since we had this fantastic chance to correct our dailies on set!
After A Hidden Life you also shot The Book of Vision, directed by Carlo S. Hintermann, who collaborated for the Italian shootings of A Tree of Life, with Malick credited as executive producer. How were you involved in this project? What was similar and what was different for you, in terms of cinematography, from the sets of previous Malick movies?
Carlo Hintermann had written a book about Malick. He knows everything about his work and loves the idea of embracing nature and following events that happen accidentally. He offered me to shoot his film since we had met in Italy for The Tree of Life. He gave me his script, and he was pretty clear, how he wanted to shoot. It wouldn’t be the way A Hidden Life was shot. He had scripted scenes in mind and wanted to use dialog, not voice overs. Even we were fascinated by the use of short lenses, we soon understood that this movie required the whole range of focal lengths. It was clear that we needed elaborate production design, rehearsals, positions for the actors, a dolly and cranes, huge lighting equipment and a lot of other gear. But there was still a lot of freedom for the actors. The Book of Vision for me was surely different from the cinematography from Malick’s style. I think the way, we finally shot the film, was adequate and very poetic. For each movie you are shooting you have to find a particular way. What might be good for one is not necessarily good for the other. It is always necessary to talk to the director to find the right way to shoot. To go into technical details: we shot some parts of The Book of Vision with the RED Helium, some of it later on the Monstro, another innovative model of RED which was released while we shot the film.
The set of The Book of Vision, Carlo Hintermann, 2020. Cinematographer Jörg Widmer
You have also shot as cinematographer the new Terrence Malick movie, whose title was recently announced as The Way of the Wind. Compared to A Hidden Life, the cinematography of this new movie features some technical changes? Has the editing been delayed by Coronavirus?
Yes, there was a partial change in terms of camera, because we used RED Helium and RED Monstro too, therefore able to shoot in 7K, sometimes also in 8K. The general artistic idea was still the same: to do everything according to the light of the day, to minimize the use of artificial lighting, the use of short lenses, Steadicam, hand-held camera. For the actors: try and risk to fail, stay playful, come forward with ideas. As usual, everything was related to nature, weather, water, fire, wind and whatever happened, we captured. I do not know how much the Covid 19 crisis will delay the editing process. Anyway Malick surely will take his time to get the best out of a lot of footage and make the best movie possible out of it in respect of his original intentions.
Images from A Hidden Life
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