deep fried movies

“I’m not into embracing the digital look.”

After setting her directorial debut Saint Maud in a fading English seaside town, London-born filmmaker Rose Glass turns her gaze toward the American southwest for the neo-noir follow-up Love Lies Bleeding. Set in 1989 and shot in New Mexico by Maud cinematographer Ben Fordesman, the film follows the violent repercussions when a nomadic bodybuilder (Katy O’Brian) falls for a small-town gym manager (Kristen Stewart) with a family full of criminals (including gun-running dad Ed Harris).

Check out my full interview with Fordesman over at Filmmaker Magazine, where he touches on emulating film on digital, pick-ups as the final pieces to a puzzle and the best way to roll a corpse wrapped in carpet down a metal staircase.

Shot on the Alexa Mini with Panavision PVintage, Super Speed and Ultra Speed lenses. Here are a few excerpts from the story.

Fordesman on his thwarted attempts to shoot on film…

Filmmaker: For the second straight movie with Rose, you were foiled in your hopes of shooting on film. On Saint Maud, you wanted to shoot 16mm. For Love Lies Bleeding, you wanted to shoot on 35mm. For both of those projects, was film seriously considered or was that a dream that was dashed pretty early in the process?

Fordesman: Yeah, we love celluloid, particularly for a film set in the 1980s, and for many it feels like the only format, right up until the point when you’re told otherwise. We tried our best, but budget wasn’t in our favor.

Filmmaker: How did you try to approximate that film look?

Fordesman: Whenever I shoot digital, I’m constantly thinking about how to make it look like film, which really asks the question, “Why didn’t you just shoot on film?” I’m not into embracing the digital look. It’s no secret that people like to shoot on higher ISOs to add some digital noise. For the regular Alexa Mini [which Love Lies Bleeding was shot on] that would mean 1280 or 1600 ISO, but to be honest lately I’ve just been relying mostly on adding this in the grade. I shot with the Panavision PVintage Primes, Super Speeds and Ultra Speeds, some of my favorite lenses out there. I think their filmic look can really come together in the grade. Vanessa Taylor, our colorist, and I spent a long time adjusting saturation in shadows, emulating how film reacts to skin tones, halation in highlights or high contrast situations, but there is only so far you can go, plus you have a limited amount of time. 

On the film’s red-tinged pickups…

Filmmaker: I was surprised to learn when I listened to the Saint Maud commentary track that several of the key scenes—including the opening one and the entire thread of the cockroach as a physical manifestation of Maud’s delusions—were pick-ups done once Rose was in the middle of editing the film. The red-tinged inserts in Love Lies Bleeding that show Ed Harris’ character disposing of people in the desert crevice followed that same trajectory and were added via pick-ups once Rose was editing the film. 

Fordesman: I actually really enjoy pick-ups. It’s like adding final pieces to a puzzle. We shot all our pick-ups in the big gym location in Albuquerque, with small corners of sets here and there. The red light was something Rose was keen on. It’s my favorite color on film to work with, so I wasn’t going to question it. That said, getting the right quality of red on digital is really, really tricky and we spent a lot of time adjusting luminosity, saturation and hue in the grade.

On lighting the Las Vegas bodybuilding competition scene…

Fordesman: That location was great for its chandeliers. Each was controllable individually and on separate dimmers, an absolute dream for gaffer Jon McGinty and I. The rest [of our lighting] was built into the stage truss—lots of Par cans, a big Juliat 2.5K HMI follow spot and lots of smoke. We had a couple of moving lights in there too, which added a bit of dynamic movement to the lighting for the in-between scenes, which I guess may have been slightly too modern for this time, but it felt like we could get away with it.