Collaborative Flash

Director Marc Abraham confers with stars Greg Kinnear and Lauren Graham on the set of Flash of Genius.

Marc Abraham had a lengthy track record as a movie producer (The Road to Wellville, Thirteen Days, and Children of Men, among others) long before he jumped into directing Flash of Genius, but he had no directing experience. Thus, no one was more surprised than Abraham when his veteran cinematographer, Dante Spinotti, essentially treated him “as though I were David Lean, even though it was my directorial debut.”

Abraham''s point: his close collaboration and friendship with the award-winning Spinotti played a fundamental role in his success transitioning from producer to director on the project, and not just in terms of image quality. The movie details the true-life story of an inventor, Bob Kearns, played by Greg Kinnear, who fought the Ford Motor Company for decades over his invention of—of all things—the intermittent windshield wiper.

“I had worked with Dante before as a producer, and I always felt he was among the world''s best cinematographers—one of the great artists of our time,” says Abraham. “But on top of that, he is one of the best people in the business, and I love his sense of humor, collaboration, work ethic, and leadership of his crew—he was a role model for me. I had talked to him over dinner about two or three years ago about doing this picture, if it happened, and he told he would love to do it. When it finally happened, thank God he was available.

“He completely understood the themes and look I was envisioning, and sympathized with them and the need to focus on the emotional aspect of those things. He obviously was primarily concerned with the look of the movie, but I was so impressed with his intelligence and instincts that I made him wear earphones and listen to dialogue, and asked his advice on other things. He joked that I made him work harder than other directors.”

The prime challenge was to craft the period piece subtly—it takes place throughout the 1970s—and Abraham was insistent that the nuances of the period look, costumes, sets, and colors not overwhelm the story of an underdog taking on titanic forces at great personal cost. Abraham says he was “super sensitive to the palette and aesthetic—it was really important to me,” and so he took up many weeks and many dinners simply discussing and refining that aesthetic with Spinotti.

“The first thing I said to Dante was that I knew this was a period piece, but I didn''t want it to feel like we had a fetish about that fact,” Abraham says. “I wanted it to be subtle and subdued—to have the feeling of some of the movies I really enjoyed watching during the 1970s, rather than movies later made about the 1970s.”

To that end, Abraham honed in on the look and style of Gordon Willis'' cinematography in Alan Pakula''s classic 1976 political thriller, All the President''s Men.

“That was something of a template, and I gave it to all the crew and asked them to watch it,” Abraham says. “When it was shot, it was not a period picture—it was contemporary at that time. I told everyone I wanted this movie to feel that way, rather than as a period picture. I wanted browns, blues, and grays, some grain, some shadows—it was all very tricky.”

Abraham and Spinotti also discussed realistic light and camera movement that sometimes emulates Annie Hall and other Woody Allen work, whereby the camera doesn''t always closely follow the character speaking as that character moves around, and other creative nuances along those lines. But even as he was absorbing Abraham''s visual agenda, Spinotti was formulating his own plan for how to achieve that agenda, and that plan included shooting all interiors with Panavision''s Genesis digital camera system, and all exteriors on film.

The Genesis suggestion surprised Abraham, who resisted the idea until he saw test material while prepping for production in Toronto. Spinotti had used Genesis in 2006 on a feature called Slipstream for actor/director Anthony Hopkins that, like Flash of Genius, had a limited shooting schedule and budget. More recently, he shot Michael Mann''s Public Enemies using Sony''s F23 CineAlta digital camera system (hear our podcast with Public Enemies co-producer Bryan Carroll here). He was convinced that combining digital and film acquisition would be the best approach given the creative and business parameters set up for Flash of Genius.

DP Dante Spinotti (left) and Director Marc Abraham

“On Public Enemies, which was also a period piece [about gangsters in the 1930''s], the digital camera there gave us a kind of sharpness that let it feel real and yet contemporary for that time period,” Spinotti says. “We wanted to achieve that with Flash of Genius, but the Genesis technology seemed a better fit for this movie. I still really like the idea of using film for exteriors, so Genesis made sense because it kept us with that 35mm format, which I personally prefer more than the smaller chip with the sharper depth of field. That [the F23''s smaller chip and depth of field] worked well on Michael Mann''s picture, but every movie is different, and we had film going for exteriors on this project. Genesis, much like film, always records the image in a non-corrected mode on tape, and the image, if properly exposed, will deliver all the desired tonalities from highlights to black.”

Spinotti says the basic palette of the imagery was established on set as he worked with digital-imaging technician Brian Schultz to paint individual shots and send them to Deluxe, Toronto, to emulate in digital dailies that later came back to the set. However, what he particularly liked about recording imagery through Genesis to Sony HDCAM-SR tape was the fact that he had a whole lot more than what showed up on those dailies to work with by the time the project reached the digital intermediate stage at Company 3, Santa Monica, with colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld.

“Genesis put onto tape all the information we needed, and that let us have proper dailies, but we could still go further for the final look in postproduction,” Spinotti says. “With the larger chip, on tape I had the ability to change things—I wasn''t locked into a single look or exposure, beyond basic stuff. It''s like shooting film in that respect—you are putting onto tape the whole picture, and not just part of the information.”

In fact, Spinotti says he rarely spent much time focusing on the digital dailies in terms of shot design, and instead relied on his on-set monitors when shooting digitally, and looked at filmout tests for other particularly complicated shots. One example: a practical-effects shot in which he glamorizes Kearns'' new invention by showing the windshield wipers in ultra-slow motion, moving water across the windshield in swirling patterns.

“It''s nice, at times, to see it in a big screening room (rather than on DVD on set), which we did sometimes to see if something was working,” says the DP. “I don''t really use the DVD dailies much for things like that. There were things I tested in preproduction like this shot in which the intermittent windshield wiper is working with the whole family in the car seeing the invention work for the first time. I wanted to make this a moment of emotion and show the wiper being somewhat spectacular. So I had the effects guy build a very high-speed wiper with a beefed-up motor, so I could run them at high speed with a lot of rain falling on them. I would shoot them at a fast frame rate, like 60fps or 120fps. I did this whole set of tests showing the wipers dancing, moving the water right and left. It was quite effective, I thought.”

Achieving the period look was “all about keeping mid-tones where we wanted them and sufficient detail in shadows,” Spinotti says. “We would watch it all, checking waveform on a CineTel monitor, and I got to see exactly what I was doing. In writing, the writer gets to see the words on the page, read and reread them, and change them around. The painter can make changes to his canvas. For years, using film, we couldn''t do that instantly, and that is why we had to go to dailies the next day—to find all the surprises. I just love the idea of working this way and seeing exactly what I''m doing. I could construct an image, as opposed to just interpreting how my eye sees light and trying to guess how that will reproduce on photochemical film. If I can control the image on a very sharp HD screen, and then later transfer that image onto film to project it on a big screen, so much the better, and that is how we shot this movie.”

To help ensure a seamless unification of film and digital imagery, Spinotti shot exteriors using Kodak Vision2 50D (5201) and Vision2 250D (5205) stock to moderate grain structure and achieve, according to Spinotti, “a classic kind of look.” Because he was shooting Genesis for interiors and film for exteriors, the DP utilized the same Primo prime lenses, 35mm spherical lenses, and Primo zooms, all supplied by Panavision Toronto (the film takes place in Detroit, but was shot in the greater Toronto area), for both film and digital acquisition.

For exteriors, Spinotti says, traditional filmmaking and old-fashioned film stock worked best, and was strategically used to smoothly combine with the digital material.
“Since we shot film and digital, it was important not to push the film stock and to use a film that does not have a heavy grain structure,” Spinotti says. “There is one beautiful shot we did where Bob Kearns is happy, driving to Ford to show them his invention for the first time. It''s a beautiful day, we had a great location across the water, with a big factory in the distance that could have been the Ford factory, and we did a shot from the car. The sky was amazing—big, blue sky and white clouds. I put a polarizer filter on the camera, and the 50 ASA film stock collected it all in a particularly beautiful way with the polarizer in front—this glorious wide shot with the sky and glorious background.”
Most of the film''s palette was captured on set, but the DI process was subtly used to great effect on key shots throughout the movie, according to Spinotti.

“We had one sequence that belonged to the fall, but we shot it in the summer—when the main character is on a bus ride and ends up at a diner by the side of the road,” the DP says. “So we did lots of turning green into yellow and red to create a fall look, and we also had to desaturate the greens and make it generally look colder.”

Abraham raves about his collaboration with Spinotti, and the entire experience of directing his first film—a film he did not produce. Now that he''s been through it, he has advice for producers who want to try their hands at directing.

“My many producer friends told me I''m a good producer, but to let that guy go,” Abraham says. “As a producer, you constantly have to juggle exigencies and realities of particular situations and the financial implications with the creative vision of your director. In the end, on this project, I was fairly pragmatic and reasonable about what I asked for, and some directors aren''t, because I do know the realities of those things, but I didn''t have to self-censor myself. So, in other words: throw that pragmatic guy away, and figure out your desires more than what it would take to solve them. Then, you can fight for those desires with every fiber in your body, and see how it all turns out. Directing is a job of great responsibility and requires all your energy and commitment—that''s what I learned from the directors I''ve worked with in the past, and what I learned working on this film.”