Woody Allen's Cinematographer Has 6 Life-Saving Tips for Low-Budget DPs

“If you like a location for its architecture or mood, for the feel of it, but you don’t actually like the color, you need to have a location where you’re allowed to change the color,” he said. “It’s all always aiming at who the character is that lives in this location. For instance, when we were doing ‘To Rome With Love’ with Woody in Rome, we were looking for a location for young architects (Jesse Eisenberg, Greta Gerwig). We looked in many locations. Woody had a problem finding a location that really fit what he had in mind. So with the art director and production designer, we sketched how we could transform one into what Woody had in mind, because we found one that we really liked in the Trastevere area. There was an artist living in this kind of loft in an old house. Then we transformed it, we made it to what Woody had in mind. And the artist’s daughter was actually a location manager on another movie!”

Woody Allen's "To Rome With Love"

“Then you do your technical scout with your crew,” he said. “Working in Rome on this movie was a wonderful experience, and very easy thanks to the excellent Italian crew we had – the production and all camera, lighting and grip crew were a dream to work with. But when you shoot on location, you have to be incredibly prepared because you can’t move the wall around like when you’re in a studio. You really need to know that the camera is going to fit there, that with the focal lens you’re going to be able to go back far enough to get a wide shot without putting on a ridiculously wide lens that would be very vulgar or warping. In order not to do that, you need to have a location where the wall or the side of a room allows you to go back enough to get the wide shot that the director wants. This sounds obvious, but sometimes let’s say you shoot CinemaScope anamorphic with 2.35:1, you have to go much further back to go to a wide shot, in terms of height. Otherwise, you shoot medium and close-up all the time. If you don’t scout out your location, it can be really bad.”

Learn how to use natural light on interiors.

“Unfortunately, a lot of these low-budget movies have to shoot small-format digital,” Khondji said. “You have to calculate. If you shoot daylight, what would be a great thing to do is have a Plan A and Plan B with the Sun. If you don’t have the money to put up lights, you have to think about how the building is in front of your location and bounce the light into the apartment. Or try to schedule your shooting around the sunlight. I light mostly from outside the windows for daylight, but if you had to light from inside the windows or on top of the windows to reproduce the light, then you have to make sure you have high enough ceilings.”

Norah Jones in Wong Kar-Wai's "My Blueberry Nights." Photo by Macall Polay, courtesy The Weinstein Company

“I’ve learned one general thing in filmmaking: to work with one strong idea,” says Khondji. “One strong concept that pushes you to work in a certain way artistically. Then you can bring it into a family of ideas. Then it’s like a tree: You have an idea for each scene, but one main idea in the film. The more you have concepts and ideas like this before you plan the film, the better it is. I’ve found that the great directors I work with, usually for the movie they have one strong idea visually that makes the film what it is. I realized that usually they don’t have multiple ideas, because you always get clogged when you have so many ideas to tell a story visually. I don’t think it’s great to come with a bag full of ideas. It’s better to be behind one strong statement or one strong idea for a film. For ‘To Rome With Love’ it was the saturation of the colors, the fact that the Italian scenes were more like the old Italian cinema of the ’60s and ’70s, and the modern scenes, when the Americans are in Rome, are more wide angle, a little bit colder, sharper, less saturated. It’s thematically brilliant.”