A Family AffairLajos Koltai, ASC lightens
the spirit of an extended household By Bob Fisher
The independent feature Sunshine chronicles three generations and spans 100 years in the life of a Jewish family based in Hungary before, during and after the Holocaust. In the script co-authored by American playwright Israel Horovitz and Istvan Szabo (also the film’s director and conceptualist), Oscar-winning British actor Ralph Fiennes plays three members of the Sonnenschein family. First, he appears as Ignatz, patriarch of a Hungarian family that rises from humble beginnings to a position of power and wealth around the time of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy’s collapse. Fiennes then takes on the role of his character’s son Adam Sors, a fencer and Olympian champion who tries to assimilate in Nazi-ruled Hungary, eventually dying in a concentration camp. Lastly, he performs as grandson Ivan Sors. Once a dedicated Communist eager for revenge against Fascists, the young man eventually abandons his need for retribution in search of his family roots.
After being presented at the Toronto International Film Festival, the following commentary — with an Australian dateline — appeared on the Internet: “I’ve seen Sunshine, in Toronto. It’s one of the most beautiful and important films I’ve seen — Szabo is a great director. Beautifully shot, there are scenes of great intensity and sensibility. All in the cast. . .are excellent. But the soul of the film is Ralph Fiennes in one of the most difficult roles… He is simply brilliant. . .The best actor of the year!” The “beautifully shot” reference is attributed to the imagery of Lajos Koltai, ASC, a Guild member residing in his native Budapest. He has photographed such features as Mephisto, White Palace, Home for the Holidays and The Legend of 1900.
An English-language production, Sunshine was produced over a four- month period for a total 112 days, shooting primarily in Budapest with additional scenes staged in Vienna, Berlin and Paris. The extraordinary international cast (hailing from Hungary, England, Germany, the United States and Canada) includes William Hurt (The Accidental Tourist), Jennifer Ehle (Paradise Road), Rachel Weisz (Stealing Beauty), Deborah Kara Unger (Crash), John Neville (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) and Molly Parker (Kissed). Overall, this epic film features more than 150 major roles.
Koltai was born in Budapest in 1946 during the dawn of the Cold War that separated Eastern Europe from Western society. During Koltai’s youth, the “Iron Curtain” was not just an abstract concept — the boundary was an impenetrable cultural barrier. As a 10-year-old, Koltai witnessed the Russian army crush a spontaneous revolt. At 14, Koltai shot his first 8mm movie during a family vacation. He later wrote, directed and photographed many small movies starring his classmates. Koltai’s sister, who worked as an assistant director for the state television network, occasionally gave him rolls of outdated 16mm black-and-white film.
According to Koltai, his discussions with Szabo intensified as Sunshine evolved from a mere idea into the script phase. Their conversations included a consideration of clothing, especially the colors for wardrobes spanning a century’s worth of fashion. “During the late 1800s and early 1900s, fashions changed almost year by year,” Koltai explains. “One year, it was fashionable for a gentleman to have curly hair, and a year or two later, styles had changed and everyone had mustaches and beards.
“We wanted to be precise. Gyorgy Illes [head of the Budapest Film Academy’s cinematography department] taught us to be accurate about details, because sometimes the only information people get about history is what they see in movies.”
While researching information about the periods depicted in Sunshine, the duo did not leave any stones unturned. Besides speaking with older members of their own families, they also perused pictures in family albums, libraries and other places. “We found many pictures and paintings, from that period, of people at work and at home, how they dressed, their furnishings, what was on the wall and in a corner of an office, and whether there were curtains on the windows,” says the cinematographer. But Szabo and Koltai already had some knowledge about clothing and other decorative styles of period pieces from their work on Mephisto (1981).
Ignatz Sonnenschein, for example, is a judge quickly making his way up the echelons of government and society. At that time, government officials always grew mustaches and beards. Such a trimming would have been of symbolic importance to Fiennes’ character. “I don’t think Ralph [Fiennes] was comfortable wearing a beard and mustache,” Koltai says. “We were very careful about maintaining it and keeping it consistent with styles from that period. We had serious discussions about his character and how he would have dressed and acted during that period. He wanted to be accepted, but he was a very withdrawn personality, who would have gladly used a beard to hide his face.”
During all three periods, a constant setting is a house in Budapest, which links various generations of Sonnenschein family life. In each era, the relatives meet around a big dining room table; the father sits at the head of the table, the mother at the other end, and the children on the sides. This location, which includes a courtyard, is actually the house in which Szabo was raised.
Metaphorically, Koltai likens the table to an island where the family members — regardless of generation — gather to discuss their lives. Most of the important dialogue takes place around the dinner table. As the picture opens, Szabo and Koltai escort the audience on a room-by-room tour of the house, introducing each character. As circumstances change, wardrobe, props and the quality of light speak as loudly as words. “When the first generation is seated around this table, you can see their wealth and taste in the paintings, crystal and furnishing, and even in the texture of the wallpaper,” the cinematographer notes. “There is a golden-brown glow of light coming from a candlelit chandelier.”
The story’s non-verbal elements include interactions between the actors, how they look at each other and touch one another. In the earliest scenes, Szabo wanted the audience to feel the warmth and love connecting the family members. He wanted to make an indelible impression that the audience remembers and can compare to the sparser, colder images of later time periods.
Szabo and Koltai filmed Sunshine in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio with an Arri 435B camera and Cooke zoom lenses used for variable focus. Only occasionally did Koltai employ a second camera: in action sequences — during the duels, for instance — and when the number of people within a scene required additional coverage. “Istvan prefers shooting with one camera,” Koltai says. “Even when we needed backgrounds without actors, instead of sending a second unit, he would usually say, ‘Let’s you and I go do it.’”
Throughout production, he exploited Kodak’s Vision 500T (5279) emulsion, which was processed at the Munich, Germany-based Arri Labs. Although film dailies took two to three days to arrive on location, Koltai never found the slow turnaround time to be problematic due to his good communication with the timer. “The film gave me the latitude I needed to work any kind of light. I slightly overexposed it to get a richer negative. [The Vision 500] has a broad tonal range that allowed me to record the subtleties Istvan wanted in contrast and colors.”
Visually, Sunshine is all about people and faces, emphasizes Koltai. “We wanted intimate close-ups shot with 85mm spherical lenses. Even though there are important scenes with the family seated around the table, we felt this format was a way to bring the audience into more intimate contact with the characters.
To vary the looks of different periods, he manipulated the images in subtle ways. In the film’s first era, Koltai applied very light diffusion for a slightly softened quality; during Adam’s time, he removed the diffusion filters from the camera lenses; and in Ivan’s epoch, the lighting is much more harsh and colors are, for the most part, eliminated.
While the filmmakers did have a general sense of how to stage the scenes, Koltai states that not one single storyboard was used. A master shot — usually with a wide focal length — presents the scope and mood of each scene to the audience. He and Szabo would then follow the dialogue and non-verbal reactions, picking spots to come in close. “We had a video tap on the cameras but Istvan was usually standing right beside me, behind the camera, where we could see everything. We discussed everything, including when we should come in for tight close-ups. He is a director who wants my eye, my soul and my heart. That gives him more freedom to concentrate on the actors.”
Their longstanding relationship as regular collaborators helps in that Koltai can usually figure out what Szabo is thinking about as he stages a scene. “Sometimes he’ll ask me to look at the monitor and tell him if ‘the focal thing’— the angle of photography — is right. Our close-ups are usually very tight, because we believe most of the story is in the eyes of the characters. That’s how you can tell what they think and feel — that’s something you can’t hide. When Istvan is casting, he always looks into the actor’s eyes. I don’t like eye lights. I tried to use source light to get into the actor’s eyes. When that wasn’t enough, I would sometimes use something simple, like a piece of white paper, to reflect light into an actor’s eyes.”
Budapest was an ideal shooting site because many old buildings dating from the mid- to late-1800s still exist. Certain locations in Sunshine, including a coffeehouse, are re-visited by several generations of the family. Though the décor, and even mood, might change, the architecture remains the same. “A few times, we asked the city to close a street, so we could clear it of cars and have people dressed correctly for a period,” he says, “but most of the scenes during the first part of the film were inside. As Ignatz Sonnenschein climbed higher on the political and social ladder, we showed him in increasingly grander offices.”
In the second generation, athlete Adam Sonnenschein begins fencing at school and later spends much of his time sharpening and showing off his skill at a posh, private club for army officers. He is a member of the Hungarian fencing team that wins a Gold medal at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. The fencing competition at the Olympic Games was filmed in a museum in Budapest. (Szabo intercut black-and-white stock footage of Adolf Hitler opening the Olympic Games with black-and-white scenes of Adam shot by Koltai.)
When Nazi Germany casts its dark shadow over Hungary, Adam changes his name and abandons his religion. Accordingly, the paintings on the sets’ walls shift to an Impressionist style, and in most settings, the warm yellow and brown colors give way to blacks, purples and other severe shades. The family table, however, is forever a refuge. “We added a few practical lights and the chandelier has electric bulbs instead of candles,” says Koltai. “There is a different style of furniture with a German Bauhaus influence, but there is still a warm golden-brown glow around this table. There are things that happened in reality that you could never recreate with the same intensity and power. We have scenes with hundreds of thousands of people dressed in the right clothes lining the streets of Berlin and filling the Olympic stadium. We also shot black-and-white scenes with Ralph Fiennes, and when we cut away to that, he appears to be watching the crowd — the story is on his face.”
At one point, the Sonnenschein clan is huddled around a radio, listening to an announcer explain the new rules of Hungarian life under Nazi rule. Because Adam has won an Olympic medal and altered both his name and religion, everyone believes that his life will be spared. But the family receives a telegram ordering Adam to report to a concentration camp with his son Ivan, who, while there, witnesses his father’s brutal murder. Koltai shot that sequence at a prison set (originally built for an old John Huston movie) situated outside of Budapest.
The third period is set in the post-war years in which Ivan, having survived the horrors of the Holocaust, returns home. One particularly chilling sequence takes place in 1956 during a spontaneous revolt against the Communist regime. Scouring the archives, Szabo and Koltai discovered black-and-white stock footage documenting the conflict. As fate would have it, some of that film was shot by cinematographers Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC and Laszlo Kovacs, ASC before they fled the country; when this sudden siege occurred, Zsigmond had just graduated from Budapest’s Film Academy and Kovacs was still a student. Borrowing a camera from the university, the duo captured the insurrection on 30,000 feet worth of film. After the Russian army crushed the revolt, Zsigmond and Kovacs made a quick break for the border.
After the war, other family members also return to familiar turf. Their surviving grandmother has saved the home’s furniture, pictures and paintings. However, when the clan meets around the table, the old chandelier is gone. In its place is a modern fixture that provides an ambiance of harsh, neon-like light. The home’s walls are painted white, the family’s language is vulgar, and the aura of warmth has been supplanted by a cold feeling of emptiness. “It’s a reflection of the reality of that period,” Koltai says. “The harsher light brings out everything you never want to see in faces. It is more than cold light because we know what was there before — it is an absence of warmth.
“The table is now used for interrogations by Ivan, who is a policeman for the regime. I chose neon light because I knew exactly how terrible fluorescents make people look if they aren’t color corrected. The light was as ugly as I could make it without being obvious — it painted the white walls with a sickly bluish-green color.”
In this section, the city is stripped of color. Everything, including clothing, seems shaded black-and-white. Koltai observes that “colorless” is a better description, one that is based on his own personal memories. “I was 10 years old in 1956 during the revolt, and I still remember that the coat I wore, and my mother’s and father’s coats, were colorless. Istvan’s idea is that the audience will remember the warm colors and feelings from the beginning of the film when they see these scenes. There is one shot where the grandmother is remembering how beautiful it was [in the days of yesteryear]. We intercut a scene — where she is much younger — in the family room that was bathed in that warm, golden brown light.”
Ivan is obsessed with the need to avenge his father and believes that the Communist regime ruling Hungary is the perfect instrument for achieving that end. But after his grandmother dies, Ivan is left feeling totally alone. He finds a letter from his father and as he reads the words, Ivan hears his grandfather’s voice urging him to remember his family and where he came from. He also finds the black book containing the family’s secret formula for distilling the Sonnenschein’s special brand of liqueur. While he is reading the letter, the little book slips through his fingers and falls on the floor. Since Ivan is unaware of its contents, he casually tosses the book into the trash. These images are a perfect metaphor for Ivan’s life having slipped through his fingers. In the end, Ivan becomes disillusioned with the Communist regime and goes in search of his own heritage and identity. Although he cannot restore the family that he has lost, Ivan can keep their memory alive by reclaiming the Sonnenschein family name.
The vast canvass covered by Sunshine gave Lajos Koltai the rare opportunity to exploit all facets of his education, and to fully explore his talents with a partner who understands his every artistic whim. What more could a cinematographer ask for? “When I was a student, our teacher, Gyorgy Illes, would tell us to study everything — history, culture, painting, architecture, and not just cinematography,” he says. “He also said that every movie should have a meaning. It wasn’t enough to make a film that is just entertaining. All of that advice was correct. I needed everything I had ever learned to make this film, and I believe it has a meaning which will make people think.”
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One
year, while Koltai was in his teens, he won first and second prizes
at an amateur film festival. Coincidentally, a promising young director
named Istvan Szabo headed the jury. When Koltai graduated from high
school, he wanted to study cinematography at Budapest’s School of
Drama and Film, but no openings were available. So he spent a year
pulling focus on a live video camera at the national TV network. The
following year, Szabo sat on the panel that admitted Koltai as one
of only a few new students at the Film Academy. In 1974, Koltai shot
his first film with Szabo for Hungarian television. Since then, they
have collaborated on a total of 10 films, including Mephisto, which
earned a Best Foreign Feature Oscar in 1981, and Colonel Redl, a 1985
nominee in the same category.