Sam and Greta had done so much tactile visualization of what they wanted the movie to feel like, this whole Xerox idea and wanting a different organic texture – it was visceral and led to developing a different technical processes altogether. Adding Alexa Gain/GrainĪ raw image from the camera compared to the final color graded image that appears in the movie.īickel: So many people come to you and say, “we’re going to shoot digital, how do we not make it look digital?” That’s a baseline starting point as colorist in 2017, everybody ends up adding some form of film grain. While Greta would go out casting, I’d start doing tests and working with him to figure out how could do it. Levy: Over time, we started to see there was a connection here between this idea of memory and these somewhat hand-distressed images. Gerwig: It looked like a memory and it looked like to me… I would go to Kinkos and make copies of things and decorate my room and my friends would make zines. One day Greta said, “you know what’s great about these? It’s so early 2000s and the period of Kinko’s.” You take theses finely grain images and you color copy it and print it back out and it’s lost a generation.
And what happened right way was the color copies were distressed in this great way. We had this inexpensive color copier in the production office and I wanted to put all these images up so we could be inspired and dream, see if any patterns emerged so we could get at the aesthetic of memory thing. Levy: When we were in the production office, I took some of photos and some of Greta herself from her own yearbook – we had all these high school yearbooks – and started color copying them to put them up on the wall. Gerwig: We wanted it to look like a memory, but we didn’t want it ever to look self-conscience. Greta was always challenging me, “We have to come up with something unique, that’s our own.” Not that the movie had to look like something you’ve never seen, but the methodology and approach should be our own. We didn’t want to use some out-of-the-box, pre-packaged film grain, or the things people just throw at something like a “memory” feeling. Levy: We were very concerned that we not use any common place methodology in motion pictures. I asked him to do this a year before we were in prep, so we had time to shot list, talk, and go to the movies and look at photography and look at paintings and talk about the philosophy of shooting. We had all this time, because Sam and I both live in New York and we’re friends. Gerwig: I didn’t want to be intravenous, I wanted to sense the proscenium, to sense the frame, that it was this magic lightbox.
You aren’t overly removed or too inside, we aren’t handheld, the camera isn’t another person in the room. I knew exactly what she meant: She’s the viewer, the hand is the screen and she’s totally connected to it, but you are little removed from it also. Levy: Greta extended her hand and made that gesture. The thing I kept saying – I don’t know if this will make sense – I want the film to be over there. Gerwig: I wanted the film to look like a memory. Sam Levy and Greta Gerwig on the set of “Lady Bird”