Peter Marsden

Bruno Delbonnel AFC ASC on Darkest Hour

Bruno Delbonnel AFC ASC may have lost out to Roger Deakins for the BAFTA, ASC and Oscar trophies this awards season, but his work on Darkest Hour – featuring an Oscar winning role from Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill – garnered much praise and critical acclaim.

Get the story of his use of themes within light and dark, how he kept the camera moving, and his relationship with colourist Peter Doyle.

Director Mike Leigh’s Peterloo, screening in-competition at the 2018 EnergaCamerimage Festival Of Cinematography, with DP Dick Pope BSC in the running for the Golden Frog, depicts a bloody and brutal episode in British history.

The end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, and the introduction of the first of the Corn Laws, had resulted in periods of chronic famine and unemployment, felt with particular hardship in the industrial north of England. By 1819, the pressure generated by poor economic conditions, coupled with the relative lack of suffrage in Northern England, had enhanced the appeal of political radicalism, causing alarm amongst the government of insurrection.

On 16th August 1819, a crowd of some 80,000 people from Manchester and its surrounding towns gathered in St Peter’s Fields to demand Parliamentary reform and an extension of voting rights. The meeting had been peaceful, but in the attempt to arrest Henry Hunt, one of the leaders of the meeting, a cavalry charge by local yeomen and the 15th Hussars into the huge crowd resulted in at least 15 people being killed, with an estimated 700 others injured. The massacre was quickly given the name ‘Peterloo’ in mocking comparison to the Battle Of Waterloo, which had taken place just four years before.

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Who were your crew?

BY: They were a company of amazing visual storytellers. Whilst I like to operate, there was no way I could light and operate at the same time. So it was all about building an eco-system to which people could offer different skills and talents. My good friend Sylvaine Dufaux was my main camera operator. She is a warrior. When things got crazy, and we needed more help, my best friend Jeffrey Kim came over and eventually headed a fully-fledged unit that brought a lot to the table.

Oliver Loncraine on B-camera was massive, and a great discovery. Philip Smith, first AC on B-camera, helped to prep 90% of the film and is a very special human being. My main DIT Dan Carling was wonderfully on-point with exposure advice. When he had to leave for another production, Peter Marsden came in and I inherited all of the masterful things he does with Dick Pope BSC.

My second unit DP, Tim Wooster BSC was a great asset, who, with second unit director Bradley Allan, understood the vision and stuck to it and was guardian of the image. Perry Evans, my main unit gaffer, and Rocky Evans, my second unit gaffer, helped me and our camera crews immensely, as did key grip Gary Hymns, and his team. The crew were all as invested in the look of the film as me. They were never shy in coming forwards if they felt anything was not our look.

You treated the footage with a LUT on-set. Tell us more.

BY: Yes, during prep I worked with Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) to find an interesting LUT. I went for a Kodak 5230 beach-bypass emulation LUT – the same one that was initiated by Greig Fraser on Rogue One, which the colour scientists at ILM had mimicked from that exact film stock. My colourist, Joe Gawler (from Harbor Post, NY) worked with ILM to modify that LUT slightly to fit our organic, naturalistic look. By the way, Greig is a good friend and was also one of my advisors on the film. He was extremely generous in his advice and helped me keep my head level.
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"... This post supplements my article in the January issue of American Cinematographer about the beautiful film Mr. Turner. The movie's dazzling images have earned cinematographer Dick Pope, BSC, nominations from the ASC, BAFTA and the Academy.
Obviously the sophisticated look of Mr. Turner is the result of many choices by Dick and his team. In this post, I describe an aesthetic approach to researching and defining a palette that acted as one of the references for the look of the film, and also its on-set LUTs (Look-Up Tables).
There have been many scholarly studies of Turner’s palette, including an interesting study by the Tate that follows his use of color in different locations.
Although there is one sequence in Mr Turner which does reproduce a painting (The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838), Dick Pope’s approach in the film was primarily to evoke, not reproduce the artist's works. To do this he sought to find a way to use the same kind of palette and coloring as Turner's paintings for the film.
When asked about LUTs, Dick Pope sent me the following email:
Well before prep began, myself, 1st AC Gordon Segrove and DIT Peter Marsden who both in their own rights are very talented photographers, absorbed Turner, seeing the exhibitions, reading books and revisiting Tate Britain, home to a magnificent permanent collection and a wealth of research material. ...."

"Turner was progressive,” says cinematographer Dick Pope. “He was not a Luddite. He was very forward-looking. And if he was making the decision today, whether to shoot on film or digital, with all the tools and control of the palette [digital] offers, Mike and I felt that he would choose digital.”

“Mike,” of course, is Mike Leigh, and “Turner” is J.M.W. Turner, the 19th-century painter of roiling seas and fiery vistas containing a near-religious quality of apocalypse. Together, Leigh and Pope have made Mr. Turner, a rare artist biopic that imbues within its visual strategies a sense of its subject’s own ways of seeing. Opening with a glorious wide shot of peasant women traipsing past a windmill, the sun throwing down a haunting magic-hour glow, Mr. Turner contains not just the quality of light fans of the painter will recognize from works like “Norham Castle Sunrise,” but a sense of how the artist’s visual consciousness was shaped by both geography and the historical currents of the Industrial Revolution.

As Pope reveals, Mr. Turner’s look has been the result of careful preproduction planning and research. “Right from the outset, I studied his palette,” Pope says. “I did this as a collaboration with my digital imaging technician, Peter Marsden, and first a.c., Gordon Segrove, who are both accomplished stills photographers. We researched and devised a palette based on his colors and pigments. We took this coloration, this look Turner gave his paintings, and gave it to our film, testing and refining it. The Look Up Tables we had on set were the result of that look, and nothing really changed when we went into the DI. That look is baked in right from preproduction. The colorist worked with me from the initial tests right through to the end.”

For his 10th movie with British filmmaker Mike Leigh, cinematographer Dick Pope BSC, was given a subject that most could only dream about: a biopic about English Romantic artist JMW Turner, known as "the painter of light".
Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling the Renaissance, through his prodigious talent and prolific production of oil and watercolour landscapes.Whilst the film, simply titled Mr Turner, includes visual influences rooted in the romantic paintings of the 19th century, it is chiefly a character study of the mercurial artist – an eccentric, reclusive character, bedevilled by depressive bouts and tangled familial and amorous relationships.
Mr Turner, produced for around $15m, was lauded by critics after it screened at the 67th Cannes Film Festival. Indeed, Timothy Spall won the gong for Best Male Actor and Pope was honoured with the Vulcain Technical Artist prize by the CST (Commission Supérieure Technique de l’Image et du Son) for “bringing to light the works of Turner” via his deft cinematography. Here, Ron Prince discovers more about how Mr Turner was conceived and shot.