Since the two protagonists of “Civil War” are war photographers, the script of the A24 film writes a check that director Alex Garland and especially cinematographer Rob Hardy must cash. It features in-world photos taken by Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and Jessie (Caliee Spaeny) at key moments in the film. Therefore, it was important to create compositions that would reflect how each of them saw America disintegrating around them.
When we first meet him, Lee is already as legendary as World War II photographer Lee Miller, and there seems to be a sense of distance and environment in the photographs he takes. One of the first things we watch him do is walk into the carnage of a suicide attack. He puts himself in the middle of the corpses, but constructs images where the story and the pain extend far beyond the frame. Meanwhile, Jessie is completely new to the world of wartime reporting and finds herself caught up in the action. Her photographs center on emotional details and get as close as she can without losing the broader context of the shot.
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Hardy’s work balances the impulses of both characters while giving the audience a visceral sense of danger. This required creating an environment and choosing camera systems that were as flexible as possible. Hardy found that having six Ronin 4Ds (five Ronin 4Ds, one of which was a casualty in the shot) allowed the camera crew to get as close as possible to the perspective of the journalist characters in the action scenes without needing to cut or cut away from the action. . He then used Sony Venice 2 for moments of silence and breathing where we see how war has distorted the landscape of the Atlantic seaboard.
“Since ‘Ex Machina,’ we’ve set a precedent to create these immersive environments and cameras have almost become secondary; players and anyone can enter that environment and make it as authentic as possible. Isn’t this the standard thing to do in all aspects of filmmaking? But surprisingly it isn’t,” Hardy told IndieWire.
The smaller Ronins allowed Hardy and his team to switch between handheld shooting and the feel of Steadicam, as well as capture more elegantly composed shots. Therefore, they speak both the visual language of a road movie and the visual language of a fight movie.
“I can sit on the wheels if I need to and have another operator in the middle of the action and see things a little more globally from afar and make decisions about framing,” Hardy said. “We were working with the idea that if you go through each frame and pick that one moment, every shot could be a still image, and so framing had to be very important.”
All of Hardy and Garland’s work together involves an incredibly evocative, active framing, where details lurking in the background can betray the calm or cold geometry of the foreground. But for “Civil War,” in particular, the duo is adept at creating frames that, as Hardy puts it, tell the story behind the image. We can catch the specter of intoxicating violence when the film lingers on an overpass that features both “Go Steelers” graffiti and a body hanging off to the side. We know exactly how scary Jesse Plemons’ character will be when the glare of his red plastic sunglasses lines up in a diagonal line with a dead body stuck in the backseat of a truck behind him.
Hardy wanted the look of “Civil War” to be “visually abrasive, and I mean that in the best way possible. But we also like to sit back and have our own kind of surrealist moments, because who doesn’t love surrealism?”
But the process of creating Jessie and Lee’s photographs was a precision in itself. “We ended up using a high-speed camera, in this case a RED Raptor, to work on the image. [Lee or Jessie] “We would create the scenario, then attack it with our high-speed camera, frame it as if we were heading towards the thing, and then rest.”
In an echo of what photojournalists always do at risk to their own safety, the camera approach and subsequent rest gave “Civil War” maximum flexibility in finding the right still image from the high-speed camera in a single millisecond. . This was a collaboration between the camera crew and the post crew, whose main task was to isolate photos of Lee and Jessie and place them within the film where they would make the most impact. “It was the script, but it was also something we really developed from start to finish,” Hardy said.
It also spills over into the rest of “Civil War” and provides context for Dunst and Spaeny’s performances. How close the camera is to the characters, giving them space and almost drowning out the world around them, is a big part of how the audience knows how safe, in control, and connected Lee and Jessie feel.
“After all, you have two photographers and we need to tell their story,” Hardy said. “And we need to make the connection with what kind of eyes they have. We had to develop their style and that was completely [Dunst and Spaeny] was doing.”
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