A Conversation with Dion Beebe, ASC/ACS by Bob Fisher Dion Beebe, ASC, ACS was born in Australia. He was mainly raised in Cape Town, South Africa, where his father was a dentist and his mother was a makeup artist who worked with still photographers specializing in fashion advertising. Beebe explored the possibilities of still photography in high school, but his interest shifted to cinema. He studied FIRST at Pretoria Technical College for a year and then moved back to Australia to study at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in Sydney, Australia, where he won an Australian Film Australian Award and an Australian Cinematographers Society Golden Tripod Award for two of his student films. After graduation, Beebe worked for a small production company in Sydney that specialized in music videos.
He earned his first narrative feature credit in 1992 for Crush, only a year after graduating from college. Beebe compiled around a half a dozen documentary and feature film credits during the following five to six years. He won a Golden Tripod Award in the annual Australian Cinematographers Society competition for Down Rusty Down in 1997.
Beebe moved to Los Angeles the following year when his wife enrolled at the American Film Institute. He earned his first U.S. film credit for My Own Country, a Showtime movie that aired in 1998. Beebe compiled a half a dozen feature film credits during the next three to four years, including Praise, Holy Smoke, Forever Lulu and Charlotte Gray.
He earned a 2002 Oscar nomination for Chicago. The following year Beebe received another Golden Tripod Award from the Australian Cinematographers Society for In the Cut. He and Paul Cameron shared Outstanding Achievement Award nominations from the American Society of Cinematographers and top honors from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts for Collateral in 2005. His current film, Memoirs of a Geisha, has earned favorable nods from critics for his artful cinematography, and Miami Vice is slated for release later this year. Following are excerpts of a conversation: QUESTION: Where were you born and raised? BEEBE: I was born in Australia. When I was five years old, my parents immigrated to South Africa after living in Zimbabwe. We moved to Cape Town in South Africa after about a year. I did most of my schooling there until I was 18 years old . QUESTION: Why did your family move to South Africa?BEEBE: My mother was South African, and she had family there. QUESTION: Was anyone in your family working in the motion picture industry? BEEBE: My father was a dentist, but he had a passion for still photography. I think if circumstances had been different, he probably would have pursued a career in the arts. When I was a kid, I’d go with him when he was taking pictures. I had my own camera.
QUESTION: Did you do any thinking that early in your life about a future career? BEEBE: My dad ran a practice in town and also out in the townships. I used to go out to the townships and assist him when I was in high school. He tried to talk me into taking over his practice in dentistry, but I dodged that bullet. QUESTION: Did you have any formal training in still photography? BEEBE: I started taking photography courses in high school. They also had a little dark room. I took a lot of still life pictures. I also got interested in fashion photography. That happened because my mother was one of Cape Town’s leading makeup artists for fashion photographers. When I was in my teens, I got to hang out with different fashion photographers on their shoots. When I finished high school, I did a sort of internship with one of Cape Town’s leading photographers. He was doing a lot of large format, 8-by-10, advertising work for everything from big trucks and cars to margarine. I assisted him one day when he was shooting a margarine ad. About 10 hours into the day, he was still trying to smear the margarine onto the knife properly. I remember watching him and having this very clear thought that this isn’t going to work out. QUESTION: Did you have something else in mind? BEEBE: My brother was in film school in Australia, and I had grown up with film in our house. They didn’t have television in Cape Town until the 1970s, so we rented 16 mm films and watched them every Sunday night. We’d set up the projector, and one of the kids would spool the film. I treasured those Sunday screenings. They were something special. My transition from still photography to cinematography was sort of natural. QUESTION: What about movie theaters? BEEBE: There was a little art house cinema that showed French and other foreign movies. I saw my first Ingmar Bergman film at that theater and my head almost exploded. It was Cries and Whispers. It was like stepping inside a strange nightmare. I’d never experienced anything like it. It was really moving. It changed my whole perspective about what was possible. Sven Nykvist is someone whom I greatly admire. QUESTION: How did you make a transition from still photography to movies? BEEBE: I went to a film school in Pretoria, South Africa, for a year. It was a very technical school. We studied things like waveforms and how to disassemble cameras. After a year, I decided to apply to the national film school in Sydney. I was accepted and spent the next three years there. I was the only full-time cinematography student, so I probably shot about 30 short films for other students. It was the best education I could have gotten. John Seale, Dean Semler, Russell Boyd and other Australian cinematographers visited and spoke with us. They were great guys with terrific attitudes. QUESTION: What did you do after graduation? BEEBE: I got out of school in 1990 and joined a production house as a director/cinematographer. We mainly shot music videos. The budgets were always small, and the artists were all Australian. We had some very talented people. Most of them were film school graduates who were trying to get into feature films. It was a means of making a little bit of money while you were trying to get into features. It was mostly 16 mm film, and occasionally 35 mm. I’ve shot between 40 and 50 videos. It was a way to experiment. QUESTION: How long did it take for you to get that first feature? BEEBE: I got my first feature (Crush) after about a year (in 1992). QUESTION: How did you get that opportunity? BEEBE: Billy McKinnon was a producer and one of the partners in the music video company. He had worked with Jane Campion on the script for The Piano. Billy introduced me to Alison Maclean who was preparing to direct Crush. I showed her some of my work, which was primarily short films that I’d shot at school. She took a gamble and asked me to shoot her film. I was a 24-year-old Australian shooting my first film in New Zealand. Of course, everyone there was thinking, who the hell is this guy, and why is he shooting one of our movies? It was a little tense on the set at times.
QUESTION: Please share a bit of that experience with us. BEEBE: I was just a year out of film school, and very inexperienced in the industry. Suddenly, I was thrust into a situation where I was working with an experienced crew. It was also Alison’s first feature, so there was a lot of resistance at first to having a first-time cinematographer. It was a Catch-22 situation. You don’t want to bluff, but at the same time you have to be a little bold, because you want people have confidence in you. There are usually a lot of variables making a movie, but no one wants one of them to be the cinematographer. Alison was a great collaborator and very supportive, and the producers stood behind us. We were both learning as we went along. The film was in the competition at Cannes where it was nominated for a Golden Palm Award. QUESTION: What lessons did you learn from that experience? BEEBE: It was a six or seven week shoot. I had never worked that long on any film before. I had to present a confident exterior every day, even if I was nervous on the inside. That was an important lesson that has stayed with me. When you walk onto a set you have to be able to think on your feet and find a way to make it work.
QUESTION: You mentioned some of the cinematographers who mentored you at school, and how you were inspired by Sven Nykvist’s work. Have you been influenced and inspired by other cinematographers? BEEBE: Robby Müller’s work on Paris, Texas was a big influence when I was still at film school. He took the camera out on the streets and shot beautiful, poignant imagery in natural light with mixed color temperatures and also at dusk. I also remember seeing Conrad Hall’s work on In Cold Blood while I was in school. It was staggering. I’ve done some commercials with Sam Mendes, who talks a lot about his experiences as a director with Conrad on American Beauty and Road to Perdition. Everyone I’ve met who knew Conrad, talks so fondly about him. I’m so sorry that I never met him. QUESTION: Is it accurate to say you were never an assistant or camera operator? BEEBE: I was a focus puller on a movie while I was still at film school. I was terrible at it. I figured I’d never make it in the industry as a focus puller.
QUESTION: Did Crush lead to other opportunities? BEEBE: I worked on a couple of documentary projects, including one with (Mad Max director) George Miller and four or five movies during the late 1990s.
QUESTION: One of those projects was Down Rusty Down, which won a Golden Tripod award from the Australian Cinematographers Society (ACS). You were on a roll, shooting one film after another. Why did you move to the Los Angeles? BEEBE: My wife was running a commercial production company in Australia. We moved to Los Angeles because she enrolled in the directing program at the American Film Institute. My first project in the United States was My Own Country, a Showtime movie that I did with Mira Nair. She is an inspiring director. I went back to Australia to shoot Praise (in 1998) and Holy Smoke (in 1999). Holy Smoke was directed and written by Jane Campion and it starred Kate Winslet. We actually shot it in India.
QUESTION: It sounds like you have gotten around. Will you tell us about Charlotte Gray? BEEBE: Charlotte Gray was a movie I zZA\Qs)=Bm7 M=]l+ H7OWɱq0Q Drsquo;s a World War II love story with Cate Blanchett playing the lead with Billy Crudup.
QUESTION: It seems like you have gone from one film to another during the past five years. You won another Gold Tripod Award for In the Cut from the ACS, an American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) nomination for Collateral, and an Oscar nomination for Chicago. Memoirs of a Geisha recently came out, and you are going into postproduction for Miami Vice. Yet you still find time for commercials. How do you do it? BEEBE: I enjoy shooting commercials. It just takes a couple of days or maybe a week. Prep time is always tight and the circumstances are constantly changing. For a while, it seemed I was working almost exclusively with film directors who were doing commercials. That’s how I worked with Sam Mendes. I also did a couple of commercials with Doug Liman and Scott Hicks. It’s a great opportunity to work with new directors on short projects. You can check each other out and get a sense of their visual language. There’s a huge advantage in watching how different people handle lighting and cameras and how they interact on the set. There is no one right look or way to do it. Everyone does it differently. That’s what makes filmmaking an art.
QUESTION: The other things that we’ve heard is that commercials give you the opportunity to try out new tools and the freedom to wait for movie scripts you like, is this true for you too? BEEBE: That’s also true. Shooting commercials gives you more freedom to wait for scripts that you can get excited about. When you commit to doing a movie it’s two or three months or maybe six months of your life. I’ve just spent almost 10 months on Miami Vice. It makes a huge impact on your life. I really feel that if you have doubts about a script, chances are that there aren’t going to be any miracles that make it more interesting on the set. If I’m reading a script, and talking myself into wanting to do it, I know I’m better off just letting it pass by. Commercials give me that freedom.
QUESTION: Twenty and 30 years from now people are still going to be asking you questions about Chicago, because it was both an extraordinary and an unusual film. You also earned your first Oscar nomination. How did you get to work on Chicago? BEEBE: It came out of the blue. When I first got the call, I was in London doing a movie that was actually in the process of folding, because the lead actress was injured about a week after we started shooting. The project came to a complete stop while they were trying to recast her role. One of the producers had connections and he managed to get me tickets to see Chicago, which was playing in a theater in London. I was on my way to the theater when I got a call from my agent saying that a PDw iE 8 4 o talk with me about filming a musical called Chicago. That sounds like a story, but it’s true. I went to the play, and as I watched it, I wondered how they were going to take it to the screen and create the dramatic thread needed to make it work. The script arrived the next day. I read it, and then a day or two later, I had a phone conversation with (director) Rob Marshall. We had never met and I knew nothing about him. He probably knew very little about me aside from a reel of my film that he’d seen. We spoke, and I think he literally made up his mind during that conversation that we were going to do the film together. I remember that one of the things we spoke a lot about was how to make the visual transitions between the dialogu@wlb@I,^54Y4m%v9 numbers work.
QUESTION: Maybe this is a naive question, but how did you prepare yourself both mentally as well as the physical preproduction to do a musical of that scope? BEEBE: The only experience I had were some experimental Super 8 dance films that I shot while I was at school, where I choreographed movements of the camera with the dancers. The truth is that I had no idea of what to expect. It was a little scary in a sense, because it’s such it was a unique genre in terms of moviemaking.
QUESTION: What do you recall about your first in-person meeting with Rob Marshall? BEEBE: I have a really vivid memory of going to New York to meet with Rob at a theater. I came up some back stairs to the third floor. There were all these dancers standing in the stairwell. I was walking through and around them. They were all dressed in their in leotards and stockings. They were limbering up and stretching. It was like a moment from A Chorus Line. They were all Broadway dancers who were looking for parts in the film. I just sort of walked in this world of Broadway, which had nothing to do with the film industry. There was someone playing the piano. I can close my eyes and it’s like I’m there right now. QUESTION: How about your preparations in preproduction? BEEBE: We had about three months of preproduction. During the final six weeks, when Rob was starting to go through the numbers with the actors, I was there with a little DV Cam. We were shooting and getting in amongst the dancers. That gave us an opportunity to wrap our heads around how to break it down and shoot it. Rob is a great choreographer, so he could stop a number in the middle of a move, back it up three steps, and pick it up again. It was like he could stop a train, turn it around and make it go in another direction. We spoke about the transitions between the drama and the musical elements. We also tried to visualize how to film the song and dance numbers. Rob had thought long and hard about these things, and he had done a lot work in terms of preparing to create that world. He came up with the idea of Roxie (played by Renee Zellweger) imagining and fantasizing our way into the musical numbers. That allowed us to stage those elements as flights of fantasy to an imaginary world on the stage. It was a key to making the movie work. Making this film was kind of a dance where everyone had a part, including the operator, focus puller and the whole crew. We were all anticipating and moving with the dancers. I came to think of the music as dialogue.
QUESTION: You went from Chicago to In The Cut. It was both a love story and a murder mystery directed by Jane Campion. It won another Golden Tripod Award in Australia. Your next film was Collateral. Would it be accurate to describe these three films as polar opposite genres? BEEBE: They couldn’t possibly have been more different, but I feel that every time I do a movie, there is a massive learning curve. I came onto Collateral a few weeks into production. Paul Cameron had done the prep work with Michael Mann and the first few weeks of production. They’d done a lot of work testing and experimenting with high definition cameras. By the time I came on the decision had been made to shoot with Thomson Viper cameras. I had not shot or been on a set with a high definition camera before Collateral. I had seen them, but had never experimented. I was able to shoot some side by side with the film cameras on the streets and inside the taxicab, so I got a quick education. My first scene was a shootout sequence in a Korean nightclub with 300 extras. We shot that scene on film, as it was an interior with controlled lighting.
QUESTION: What did you learn from your experiences on Collateral? BEEBE: When I first went out and shot on the streets at night and we were able to photograph the night sky, it was amazing. We reached right into the darkness. That was the real breakthrough. When you can see so much of the night, it changes your approach. You can use the existing, ambient night exterior. When we had controlled lighting situations, we shot film. When we were out on the streets at night, we shot high definition.
QUESTION: Your next film was Memoirs of a Geisha, a reprise with Rob Marshall. This film is based on a novel that is a portrait of a slice of life in Japan from 1929 through the mid-‘40s. It really feels like you shot it in Japan during the time period. How did you achieve that? BEEBE: Rob Marshall was very thorough in his preparation. One of the things he did was take the core group of the creative team to Kyoto, where we visited geisha houses and the primary teahouse where a lot of the story happens. That was important because it ensured that everyone had the same picture in his or her mind. QUESTION: When did he first tell you about this picture? BEEBE: It was probably about a year before preproduction. QUESTION: Did you have a sense of that time and place in the world at that time? BEEBE: That mostly came through films and art, and a little personal experience. I had some familiarity with Kyoto, the location where the story takes place. One of my first projects was a documentary that I shot in Japan. I had also shot part of a feature in Japan. I had heard about geishas and geisha houses, but not in terms of their artistry or history. That part was a real education and a fascinating exploration of another culture. QUESTION: Did Rob Marshall suggest any visual references? BEEBE: There were a lot of visual references, mostly taken from Japanese art. We looked at a lot of wood block prints that the Japanese do so brilliantly. There were also interesting film references, including movies made about geishas. QUESTION: What kind of testing did you do before settling on the look? BEEBE: We started shooting tests with Japanese stand-ins before the actors arrived. We tested lighting and makeup on faces for about a month. The actors arrived during the last two weeks. We had gone through the process of defining sort of a white palette for the makeup. There are various shades of white, so we worked with the actors to fine-tune it. QUESTION: How much of this film did you shoot on studio lots in the U.S? BEEBE: Around 80 percent on stages at Sony Studios in Culver City and on a back lot in Ventura, where we had period sets of Kyoto streets. Rob thought it would feel too claustrophobic to shoot certain parts of this film on stages and the back lot. When we plotted Chiyo’s (the geisha) journey, we looked for ways to use the landscape, streets, temples and other buildings in Kyoto to create a sense of scope and scale. QUESTION: How about the color palette? Did you do that in the camera or in post? BEEBE: We created it in camera with a combination of costumes, makeup, production design and lighting. The signature color is almost a yellow tobacco stain. We settled on motivating light with lanterns and fires. It’s warm light using sort of a yellow straw tone with a little green instead of more traditional reds and oranges for the fires. QUESTION: Was this done with gels, filters, choice of films or a combination? BEEBE: It was primarily done with gels on the lights and flicker boxes that we used to send the color temperatures of the lamps up and down. Once we settled on colors in preproduction, we got (costume designer) Colleen Atwood to bring in samples of fabrics. The color palette for each kimono also matched their characters. QUESTION: Can you give us an example? BEEBE: Hatsumomo’s (Chiyo’s nemesis) costumes tend to be shades of red and orange that sort of reflect the fire theme without it being too obvious. QUESTION: Can we talk some more about your visual references? BEEBE: We looked at Barry Lyndon because it’s the ultimate reference for shooting in low-key light motivated by fires and lanterns. I knew that we weren’t going to go to the extremes that Stanley Kubrick and John Alcott did in that film. They created the magnificent tableaus in which the camera remains static due probably to the miniscule depth of field, whereas Rob likes to move the camera. This also motivated my choice to shoot anamorphic.
QUESTION: Do you literally mean anamorphic lenses? Some cinematographers are choosing to shoot in Super 35 format with a digital intermediate (DI) finish. BEEBE: Rob and I had that discussion. When we were preparing to shoot this film the studio hadn’t budgeted money to do a digital intermediate. They basically said that decision would be made later. Based on that, I suggested shooting with anamorphic lenses and using the full frame instead of spherical lenses with /p> It was a tough decision, because we were going to be shooting scenes in low-key light, and the anamorphic lenses aren’t as fast as spherical lenses. Dan Sasaki at Panavision and my 1st AC Mike Weldon, went through every anamorphic lens they had available. They found two sets that allowed me to shoot most of the film under stop T2.8. Dan customized a 40 mm lens so we could use it at T1.8. It wasn’t easy on the focus pullers. We were shooting with a 500-speed film that we often pushed a stop, and the camera was almost always moving. QUESTION: Who were the focus pullers? BEEBE: Mike (Weldon) was on A-camera and John Grillo on B-camera. &nѠ*ӧa *0O^Ɂ'\BESTION: Was this primarily shot with multiple cameras? BEEBE: I came up through the Australian system using a single camera, but I’ve become accustomed to lighting and shooting with two cameras. I knew from my experience with Rob on Chicago that he likes to work with two cameras, but we also choreographed shots with a single camera moving through sets.
QUESTION: Does your documentary background
affect your approach to moviemaking?
QUESTION: Did the fact that the story is set in the 1930s affect the way you moved the camera and used lenses? Did you emulate visual styles of films from that period? BEEBE: We looked at Tokyo Story (1953) and other brilliant films by Yasujiro Ozu, a Japanese filmmaker who primarily used a 50 mm lens at kneeling height. That was useful because we were going to shoot a movie where nobody was going to be sitting at a table or on a chair. Our characters are usually standing or kneeling. We didn’t feel that we had to recreate the cinematic style of camera movement in films from that era. Rob has a special talent for choreographing actors and movement.
QUESTION: You were obviously collaborating with a lot of people, the director, production designer, costume designer, your camera, lighting and grip crews, while keeping the actors happy, and production of schedule. How do you balance all that? BEEBE: I try to not have rigid parameters. I find that is a much more interesting and rewarding experience to have an open mind about the story and what you want to achieve. I try to really listen when someone has an idea. I try to visualize what they are saying even if it’s not how I would have necessarily approached it. If you want an analogy … say you are filming a shot with an object on a table, I have my way of looking at that object, but sometimes you need someone to prompt you to walk around the table and see it from a different perspective. Often the results are surprising.
QUESTION: Conrad Hall coined the phrase “happy accidents” to describe unplanned things that happened while he was shooting that he integrated into his film. Did you have any happy accidents while filming Memoirs of a Geisha? BEEBE: We had happy accidents every day. Shooting is mostly a process of discovery that Rob and I both enjoy. It’s a little tricky when you’re dealing with period subject matter, because if you haven’t discussed it prior to shooting it’s not going to be there. You don’t just happen upon 17th century exteriors of Kyoto in Southern California. You have to design and build it. We did a lot of preproduction planning. We had a beautiful, period Japanese town at our disposal. That allowed for a lot more freedom than if we’d built three or four facades that required us to shoot everything in one direction. I think happy accidents are more frequent on the set when there is a lot of preparation and the cinematographer and director have a strong sense of the visual language of the film.
QUESTION: The colors and look are so integral to this story. We are wondering how you kept everyone on the same page while this film was in production and later in post? BEEBE: I was sort of insistent that we have selected film dailies at least for myself and my crew every day. That was especially important because the way we shot this film put a lot of pressure on my operators and my focus pullers. We were looking at film projected on a 70-foot wide screen. That was invaluable. It really helped us stick with the approach that we had planned and to take chances when necessary. (Editor) Pietro Scalia was at film dailies. It was important for him to see how the film played on the screen.
QUESTION: You had more than a few postproduction facilities involved. BEEBE: Deluxe processed the negative and provided film dailies. FotoKem provided digital dailies. We ended up doing a DI at Technicolor. Deluxe made the prints. QUESTION: At what point did you know you were going to do a DI? BEEBE: It was probably only two months before they locked off the picture. I was already on location on Miami Vice. Due to the time restraints, we did the DI in an unconventional way. I flew in on weekends. Rob Marshall and Pietro Scalia, the editor, were also there. I selected and timed frames from different scenes. Those frames became the key references for Scott Gregory, the digital timer.
QUESTION: Were you primarily timing for shot-to-shot consistency or were you also finessing the look and doing things that weren’t planned when you shot the film? BEEBE: There really weren’t any surprises. We didn’t make any dramatic changes to what we had recorded on the negative. There were a lot of subtle details in how the sets were constructed and in the costumes that we recorded on the negative. One of the first things that Rob, Pietro and I spoke about and worked on in DI was the gamma levels of the density of the blacks. Those are really easy things to control in DI if you have the details on the negative. There is often a temptation to enhance contrast and chroma beyond what WAS planned, because it’s so easy to do in the DI stage and there is an almost instant satisfaction. You are looking at the images projected on a screen and thinking it would look great if you crush the blacks a little or dial up the colors. But this was not that sort of movie. We wanted shadows you could peer into, this is a mysterious world full of exquisite detail and we wanted to capture that, not just a fairytale facade. We wanted to recreate the look and feelings of a world that existed in Japan 70 to 80 years ago. We shot Memoirs of a Geisha on (Kodak Vision2) 5218, a 500-speed film that has an expansive mid-range and capacity for recording multiple levels of contrast. One of the things we did in DI was make sure that the audience sees details in the blackest tones.
QUESTION: How do you think that the evolution of DI technology will ultimately affect the role of the cinematographer? Will auteur directors create their own looks in post? BEEBE: I believe that the basic relationships between cinematographer and director will remain the same. To say that the cinematographer’s role is merely to create the image is naive. We communicate a director’s vision and integrate it with our own. It is a collaboration that extends beyond just the frame. However protecting the cinematographer’s intended look and approach is also important, and he or she must be involved throughout the DI phase.
QUESTION: You literally just completed an almost 10-month stint shooting Miami Vice with Michael Mann. He was an executive producer of the original TV show that ran from 1984 until 1989, and he wrote, directed and produced the movie. Is the movie a cinematic version of the original television show? BEEBE: The movie is set in contemporary times and is much more down and dirty. The Miami of the 80s is long gone. It just does not exist there any more. This movie presents a very different face. The characters are still undercover cops that share the same names as there TV counterparts. This version digs a little deeper beneath the skin of the undercover world. QUESTION: Was this film produced on stages or locations? BEEBE: Around 75 percent was produced in Miami and the rest in South America and all was on location.
QUESTION: We understand that you coped with some interesting weather, is that an accurate description? BEEBE: We had several hurricanes, which probably cost us about a month. I think we ended up with about 105 shooting days.
QUESTION: Was Miami Vice primarily
a digital production. QUESTION: Was the entire film produced digitally? BEEBE: We shot most of the high-speed work on film. We also used a film camera with the T-Rex (SuperScope lens extension system). This is a lens system that Michael likes to use to step inside a character’s personal space. It works to really put you in the moment and give a strong sense of being present. You can use it to create a feeling of tension that’s almost claustrophobic. It is used to great effect however it is a demanding lens that requires high levels of light to shoot with. QUESTION: Did the digital camera change your approach to cinematography? BEEBE: It’s a different tool, so you do some things differently. It can record images at night at incredibly low levels of light. The trick is augmenting that light as seamlessly as possible. You have to be careful, because it’s very unforgiving. Just a bit too much light on a face relative to the background and it looks artificial. |
