Love Hurts

Fred Elmes, ASC embarks on a
minimalist journey for Broken Flowers
By Bob Fisher • Photos by David Lee

Broken Flowers begins in Don Johnston’s posh living room, where his girlfriend is leaving him because he can’t commit to a relationship. An anonymous letter on pink stationery arrives and announces that Johnston might have a 19-year-old son. That sets the stage for a character-driven story that focuses on human relationships.

Johnston is an affluent and self-indulgent bachelor who spends much of his time alone laying on a sofa in his living room, sleeping, listening to music and watching television. Writer-director Jim Jarmusch (Down By Law, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai) scripted the role with Bill Murray in mind.

“Bill is in almost every scene,” says cinematographer Fred Elmes, ASC. “The character is conflicted by the notion that he might have a son. He wants a son but doesn’t want the responsibility.”

Johnston tells Winston, his neighbor, that the letter could have been sent by one of five women. Winston uses the Internet in a quest to find the women. He discovers that one of them is dead, and finds addresses for the other four women in different parts of the country. Winston prods Johnston to visit the women and discover the truth. He takes the initiative by planning a trip for Johnston.

This marks the third collaboration for Elmes and Jarmusch. Their first venture was Night on Earth, which took top cinematography honors at the Independent Spirit Awards competition in 1993. Elmes also shot most of the eleven vignettes for Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, which was released last year.

Broken Flowers was produced on a modest budget by Focus Features at practical locations in New York and New Jersey. The crew spent one day on sets built in the new Brooklyn Navy Yard sound stages. The film won the Grand Prix at the 2005 Cannes International Film Festival.

“It’s a low budget movie, but Jim attracted a terrific cast,” Elmes says.

Sherry is played by Julie Delpy, Winston by Jeffrey Wright and Johnston’s four ex-lovers are portrayed by Jessica Lange, Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy and Tilda Swinton. Stone plays Laura, a sensual widow who has a daughter named Lolita. Conroy plays Dora, a former hippie who is now a realtor. She lives in a model home with her partner/husband. Lange plays Carmen, who sells her ability to communicate with animals to troubled pet owners. Swinton portrays Penny, who is down and out.

Murray was instrumental in the decision to produce the film in New York and New Jersey because it was close to his home. Elmes lauds the New York technical support infrastructure. He says that working in the state gave him the opportunity to organize a talented and experienced crew. His crew included camera operator Sandy Hays, assistants Carlos Guerra and Angela Bellisio, gaffer Jonathan Lumley and grip Bob Andres.

Elmes was born and raised in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey. He studied still photography at Rochester Institute of Technology. After his interest shifted to motion pictures, he enrolled in the graduate film studies program at New York University and subsequently earned a fellowship at the American Film Institute, where he launched his career shooting independent features with fellow student David Lynch and established filmmaker John Cassavettes. Elmes’ body of work includes many commercials and music videos and more than thirty narrative credits, including Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, The Ice Storm, Hulk and Kinsey.

“Jim asked me to read his script for Broken Flowers,” Elmes says. “It’s a character study of a man who finds himself alone in the world because he has trouble with relationships. It is also a road movie that follows Murray’s character as he retraces his past with a particularly dry sense of humor. Jim wanted my opinions on the story and was wide open to discussing my ideas. In preparation, we looked at a few Japanese and German films that Jim admires and studied moments in them where characters feel lonely in the frame.”

Elmes initially suggested framing Broken Flowers in a widescreen aspect ratio, but following their research and discussions, he agreed that the 1.85:1 format was the right aspect ratio for this story. Jarmusch wanted to cover scenes with a single camera whenever possible, which enabled them to optimize composition and lighting.

“We didn’t need a second camera at most locations because the staging was very simple,” Elmes says. “There are many dialogue scenes with two or three characters reacting to each other rather than cutting away to close-ups.”

Elmes shot extensive costume, makeup and hairstyle tests with the characters, in addition to testing paint colors, wallpapers, wood trim, bricks and different camera films.

There are a number of brief dream sequences that give the audience glimpses of Johnston’s memories. Elmes decided to record those scenes on 16mm Eastman Ektachrome (7240) film that was cross-processed. He also undercranked those shots at 16 or 18 frames per second and sped up the sound in some cases, so the audio is slightly warped.

“The Ektachrome film has a very saturated look in comparison to the negative stock we recorded the rest of the movie on,” he says. “I decided to use the 500T (Kodak Vision) 5229 negative for the entire rest of the movie, because we wanted to soften the colors and contrast and have a consistent feeling in terms of grain and sharpness. The 5229 film records slightly less saturated colors and the flesh tones and contrast are more subtle.”

Elmes had previously worked with production designer Mark Friedberg on The Ice Storm and Ride With the Devil and segments of Coffee and Cigarettes. Friedberg did considerable research with the goal of creating different worlds for each character.

“We chose locations very carefully, and then created color palettes that complimented the character’s lifestyle,” Elmes says. “When you meet each of these women you learn a lot about them by the way they are dressed, and the neighborhoods and houses they live in. Their place in life becomes clear in a couple of seconds.”

Stone plays a character whose ex-husband was a stock car driver killed in a crash. She’s single again and has a daughter. They live alone, probably somewhere in the South. She doesn’t have a lot of money and is self-employed. Their house is a little bungalow with bright colors, including very flowery wallpaper.
Swinton’s character lives on a very run-down farm that Johnston has a hard time finding. Her current boyfriend is out back working on motorcycles and playing loud rock-and-roll music.

Elmes describes Johnston’s home as womb-like. The audience only sees him in the comfortable living room on the couch, where he occasionally sleeps, and where he has his stereo and big screen TV. He’s a very solitary person.

Conroy plays a fragile character. She and her husband live in a model home that is pristine and stark. The signature colors are beige with white walls. The location we chose was an unfinished housing development with no shrubbery and nothing on the walls. The walls were already white, the carpet was beige and there was no shrubbery.

On most the other sets they repainted walls, put up wallpaper and changed the furniture. In some locations, they also redressed windows and added or took away foliage on the outside.

“One of the clues in this mystery is that the letter is on pink stationary,” Elmes says. “Johnston’s neighbor is a would-be sleuth and wants him to look for any sign of pink. One of the women has a pink motorcycle and another one is wearing pink clothes, so the way pink photographed was important. The negative we were using didn’t reproduce pink the way we thought it would. The answer was to make our own pink stationary that was much brighter and more vibrant in order to get it to register on film the way we wanted.”

There were no storyboards. The filmmakers scouted locations and discussed how they could block scenes in those spaces. Elmes notes that Jarmusch and Murray were constantly talking about the character and where the story was going during rehearsals. The director also solicited opinions from the performers and was constantly tweaking the script.

The camera was an ARRICAM from CSC in New York. Elmes says that it’s a quiet and compact camera with a bright viewfinder. He used Zeiss variable prime lenses. Elmes explains that a jib arm combined with these lenses enabled him to make little adjustments in framing from one take to the next. He could decide that a 32mm lens was the right size for one take, and instantly shift to a 37mm frame without changing a lens or moving the camera. Each take was just slightly different than the one before.

“Our camera was usually an objective observer,” he says. “Movement was planned and carefully thought out, because Jim doesn’t like to leave those things to chance. Wherever possible we put the camera on the jib arm on a dolly that I could use to make subtle adjustments if an actor leaned this way or that way during the shot.

“There are subtle things that we did to help draw the audience into the story,” Elmes says. “Often a dialogue scene would be covered over Bill Murray’s shoulder on the other actor, but the reverse on Bill would be a single shot clean of that actor. Our hope was to put the audience in his shoes. There is also silent dialogue told with expressions on faces. This is a story where on the surface, not much seems to happen. The main character does a lot of thinking and we decided to give him enough room visually to do that. It was wonderful watching Bill work. He’s a magician when it comes to subtle humor.”

Camera angles helped to reflect moods, including the emotional state of Johnston’s mind. There are moments when he’s feeling low and beaten down, where Elmes made a conscious effort to have the camera look down on him and to put him a little lower in the frame. Other moods and emotions affect where and also how big he is in the frame.

There are close-ups of all different sizes designed to make slightly different impacts. There are moments in Johnston’s living room when the audience sees the entire room with a very small character lying on the couch in a spot of light. At dusk, the rest of the room has fallen into complete darkness. Elmes explains that the combination of his size, framing and lighting reflects his state of mind.

“Lighting is always interpretive,” he says. “It may be motivated by natural and practical sources, but we get to decide the character of that light. Whether sunlight is coming into a room through windows, or it’s a cloudy or rainy day, or the scene happens at sunset. We can decide where the shadows fall in a room and what mood is set.

“You have to manipulate the light on a character’s face to help tell the director’s story and to support the mood and emotion of the scene. Jonathan Lumley is a wonderful gaffer whom I’ve known for many years. I relied on him and everyone else on the crew. I need all of them to do my job.”

The dream sequences recorded on Ektachrome are interspersed throughout the film. During airplane trips Johnston sometimes nods off and relives moments from his past romantic encounters, which embellish the mystery of whether or not he has a son.

Scenes where Johnston is driving a car were mainly staged in daylight. The car was generally towed on a trailer with HMI lights rigged to come through the windows. Elmes was riding on the trailer, keeping an eye on the light inside the car. Close-ups of Murray behind the wheel and point-of-view shots show enough details outside the windows to give the audience a sense of where he is. In one scene, the exterior was a generic mall. Another time he was driving near an ocean. A third setting was a beautiful countryside in the fall when the leaves on trees were changing colors.

Shots done on stage include scenes of Johnston on an airplane flying to meet one of his former lovers. He was used to flying first class, but his neighbor booked the trip for him in the economy section of the airplane. Murray was filmed sitting in a row four seats wide, sharing the space with several children and an old lady who was nodding off with her head on his shoulder. The set was part of an airplane cabin, including the seats, aisles and roof. Elmes put the seats slightly closer together than normal to make it feel a little more cramped and uncomfortable.

In a night scene on the airplane set, Elmes put a very deep blue backing outside the window, because the sun had set, but it wasn’t quite pitch black yet. The interior of the cabin was lit by the overhead reading lights on the plane. Elmes believes that all of those nuances contribute to the audience’s sense of realism.

There were just a couple of other small scenes filmed on stages, including close-ups of maps on the car seat. They wiggled the seat and rolled the light around to simulate movement of the car. Other pickup shots included a scene in a motel room. Elmes explains that they had filmed a scene in an actual motel, but couldn’t get back when a couple of pages were added to the script, so they built a two-wall set.

“Sometimes it’s difficult working in practical locations, such as Sharon Stone’s house,” he says. “We had some night interiors where I wanted a warm, glowing, soft light coming from a fixture in the ceiling. The problem was that the ceilings were so low that the soft light I would normally use overhead was too big. Jonathan (Lumley) welded a metal frame that was four by six feet long but very thin. It contained many small quartz bulbs and very soft diffusion. We were able to squeeze it into a space a couple of inches below the ceiling. It was a wonderful source of soft light and we used it at several locations.”

Elmes says that Jarmusch liked to be very close to the camera, where he could watch and listen to the actors perform, while staying in close touch with them. He occasionally referred to a small, portable monitor, but there was no video playback.

“He felt that video playback was an unnecessary expense,” Elmes says. “He wanted to put that money on the screen. We had a monitor that was always set up next to the camera. If it was a dolly shot, Jim was usually riding on the dolly, watching firsthand. I think that was important, because so much detail is lost when a director is watching performances on a video monitor. You can learn so much more by watching the subtleties of the actors performing and being close enough to hear and see what’s happening.”

Elmes says that Jarmusch relied on rehearsals and talking with the actors rather than multiple takes to get the right action. They typically rehearsed once in front of the camera to get the technical part down. Jarmusch generally got his shot in just a few takes.

The front-end lab was Technicolor in New York. Jarmusch and Elmes wanted to see film dailies to judge the mood of a scene and how the action played when it was projected on a screen. Even though it was a relatively low budget film, the director insisted on printing selected dailies on film, using a new sound syncing system with the audio on a CD. They used screening rooms at the lab and also in the neighborhood where Elmes lives.

“We chose to do a traditional optical finish,” Elmes says. “We did our testing upfront. We knew the looks we wanted, and we were seeing film dailies, so there was no need for a digital intermediate. Deluxe Labs in Toronto handled release printing. They flew our timer, Cathy Rait, and answer prints to New York for timing sessions.”

Elmes observes that it was a difficult movie for Murray, who is in almost every scene. “It was very wearing on him,” he says. “I think he took this film because he likes Jim Jarmusch and respects him as a director. It was also a role that was written for him. All the performers were a joy to work with. I’d ask, ‘If you don’t mind on the next take just give me another inch here, I need a little more room to get you in the right part of the frame.’ On the next take, they gave me that extra inch we needed.”

Elmes concludes that while many scenes derive humor from putting Johnston into awkward, unexpected situations, without giving the ending away, he says that Broken Flowers is a story about the parts of human nature common to all of us.