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Lucky Breaks
Q & A with Cinematographer Jim Denault
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Since lensing his first feature, Michael Almereyda's Another Girl, Another Planet, in 1992, cinematographer Jim Denault has become the DP of choice for some of the independent film world's most recognized talents. In addition to Almereyda-with whom he also shot the arthouse vampire hit Nadja-Denault has collaborated with Hal Hartley on The Book of Life, Kimberley Peirce on Boys Don't Cry and Jill Sprecher on Clockwatchers, just to name a few. Now, he's teamed up with director Jim McKay (Girls Town) to help create the realistically gritty world of three young women growing up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in Our Song. Here, Denault talks with MM about his road to success, the importance of being happy and the series of "lucky breaks" that have put him at the top of his craft.
Jennifer Wood (MM): How did you first get started as a cinematographer?
Jim Denault (JD): I was always interested in photography; I was one of those kids that figured that out early. It didn't occur to me until my last year in college that I was going to have to figure out a way to make a living; I had always just thought that I would take pictures and somehow the money would come. After I got out of college, I got a job shooting TV news for a cable station in Rochester (NY), where I went to school. Then one thing lead to another. I see it as a huge series of lucky breaks. I look at where I am now and I think how lucky I am to have even gotten to the point where I am. My friend says it's like they give you this big expensive car and you get to drive it.
MM: What was the first film you saw that-visually-amazed you?
JD: My father took me to see 2001 when I was nine years old and it was the first movie where I realized that movies are photographs. They're not just a window you're looking through where you see the world, they're actually a creation of the world. That was an eye-opening thing for me.
MM: Your work has been almost exclusively in independent film. Is there a certain freedom that working in these smaller films allows you?
JD: It's definitely one of those 'the grass is always greener' things. The budget is never big enough. That's sort of the conclusion I've come to. But really the size of the budget doesn't have as much to do with your freedom as who the director and producer are, and what their relationship is. You could be as restrained and limited in a $1 million film as in a $100,000 movie if the director and producer don't have the vision or are too nervous.
MM: What would your ideal collaboration be like?
JD: The ideal creative collaboration with a director and producer is that the producer and director are a team already-there's a vision they share between them. You have the producer pulling strings and juggling the budget in order to make the director's ideas work rather than trying to figure out how to manage the director and to keep them in control. The same relationship works between me and the director-the idea that they can tell you what crazy schemes they have in mind and you can figure out what kinds of things you can do with the budget and schedule and time to be able to execute those ideas. You should be able to bounce ideas around and be able to bring some part of yourself into it.
MM: Our Song has a very documentary-like feel to it. Was that the intention?
JD: We didn't want it to be strictly a documentary. Jim [McKay] wanted it to be a kind of low-impact shoot; he didn't want us to come in and take over the neighborhood, but have the neighborhood take us over. The feeling of the shoot was not so much like a documentary, but like some of the first 16mm movies that I was shooting, where it was a small crew and we had very limited resources. The roughness of it, in my intention, is not an attempt to mimic how a documentary would do it, it's an attempt to make something that's visually interesting and unique but not overly flashy and pretentious.
MM: Was the decision to use just a handheld camera and a tripod an obvious one?
JD: We were talking about where to use the dolly almost up until the time we started shooting, when I said 'You know what, let's just skip the dolly and we'll do everything handheld. It will make us that much smaller and lighter.'
MM: But the shakiness of the camera certainly adds to the context of the film. The one scene that stands out is when Maria (Melissa Martinez) is on the train with Terell (D'Monroe) and tells him she is pregnant. There's not a moment of calm in that scene-visually or emotionally.
JD: What's interesting about that scene is that we shot coverage of it. There was another angle, a close-up on Terell-that [Jim] never decided to cut to. It's not that it didn't work, it just feels so much more real, holding with that one shot on Maria's face.
MM: There's an obvious difference between that scene and the scenes where we see Lanisha (Kerry Washington) with her family-visiting her father at work, or home for her birthday party. In these much more emotionally stable scenes, the camera is stable. And these scenes are all well lit, almost making you forget where the people are. It's amazing how much these seemingly small details can lend to the story.
JD: It's interesting because you kind of make those decisions based on gut feeling. Sometimes you'll have one idea about how you're going to shoot a scene and then you see a rehearsal and you think it's totally wrong and 'I can't believe I was thinking that.' A lot of those decisions wind up being unconscious.
MM: One of the film's main characters is the Jackie Robinson Steppers Marching Band. How difficult was it to keep those shots manageable? Was everything storyboarded?
JD: That was great-that was some of my favorite stuff. In terms of the process of the shooting, I think that Jim might have been a little bit frustrated [laughs]. We had done rough sketches, sort of storyboards, for the entire movie. But when it came to the band, we had a series of shots that we wanted. Basically, we'd just have them run through their song a bunch of times and, while it was happening, I just ran around and grabbed stuff.
MM: Was it easy to then synchronize those shots with the constant music?
JD: Those are the things-those little inserts-that can go in anywhere. A foot comes down and you cut it on the beat. The important thing, if you want to be able to do those quick cuts, is to get a bunch of different angles. So I would just go as crazy as I could before they started yelling at me for shooting too much film. There's nothing very fancy about what we did-it's very classic film structure.
MM: What is the main difference in you between those first 16mm films you were shooting and Our Song?
JD: I think the difference for me was that, when I was doing those first films, I felt like I had a lot to prove, which in some ways was true, but it's a mistake to be like that. If you can't relax into a situation, it makes it that much harder. With Our Song, whatever I had to prove I had done a long time ago, so it was much easier. It was kind of like the back-to-basics rock and roll thing after you've done the progressive rock orchestra thing to just get back to the do-it-yourself punk rock. I don't know how else to describe it. And that was the appeal of it for me-to be able to get rid of the string section and just concentrate on the simple melodies.
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