Performance Enhancing

All visual elements of The Wrestler were designed by Director Darren Aronofsky (right) and DP Maryse Alberti to highlight the performance of lead actor Mickey Rourke (left).

Director Darren Aronofsky's new film The Wrestler isn't so much a story about the title character as it is the wholesale documenting of a character who is, in fact, the entire story. The film, which buzzed through the Sundance Film Festival this year because of Mickey Rourke's star turn as washed-up wrestler Randy “The Ram” Robinson, is so completely a character study that virtually every aspect of the filmmaking process was designed to highlight Rourke's performance above all other factors.

“I really wanted to do something very different from my previous work,” Aronofsky says. “[My 1998 film] Pi was kind of a character study, but this movie is far more naturalistic. Usually when I talk about a visual language in one of my movies, I'm talking about it coming directly out of the story itself. But in this case, I wanted to base the visual language out of Mickey. I wanted to create a sandbox for him to play in any direction, with no limitations — something very naturalistic and authentic.”

Aronofsky therefore partnered with a cinematographer who had a background in documentary work: Maryse Alberti. At Aronofsky's suggestion, she shot the movie in the widescreen Super 16 format (2.4:1 aspect ratio — rare for a Super 16 project), rather than HD — a briefly discussed option — and executed a handheld documentary approach for following Rourke's character around.

Alberti explains that building on the director's desire to frame Rourke at the center of everything that goes on meant also designing a world around him that he naturally fits into — gritty urban locations in New Jersey and Pennsylvania that are, in a sense, extensions of the character himself. “[Tim Grimes, production designer, chose] places that describe this kind of life — auditoriums, bars, and strip clubs and things,” Alberti says. “Randy doesn't fight at Madison Square Garden. He fights at school gymnasiums and abandoned ballrooms.”

Therefore, the movie's imagery was, in Alberti's words, “rooted in the school of realism — designed to give you a sense of the soul of the man and also the larger place he inhabits. So rather than thinking so much about a color palette, we thought more about the sense of place throughout filming. It's not a documentary. These are actors, but we are putting them in real places and following them around, much like a documentary.”

Central to satisfying this sensibility was the decision to shoot the movie in Super 16. Although they were given an initial opportunity to consider HD, Alberti and Aronofsky decided early on that the story had to be told on film. Alberti tested a few different stocks before settling on Kodak Vision3 500T 7219 stock for night work and interiors and Vision2 500T 7217 for day exteriors.

Portability was a big deal for Aronofky's approach to telling the story, which was shot with an Arriflex 416 camera. That need outweighed possible grain concerns; given the gritty nature of the story's environment, filmmakers didn't worry about grain getting away from them. They felt confident the digital intermediate process at Technicolor New York would give them a way to control any grain issues in a fashion that would have not been possible with an optical blowup.

Alberti rooted all the movie''s imagery in the school of realism. Top: She shot all day exteriors using Kodak Vision2 500T 7217 stock. Bottom: For shots capturing tightly choreographed wrestling action, a handheld camera&$151;run by operator Peter Nolan—was used to get 360-degree POVs.

“We had this idea to shoot Super 16 widescreen even though not too
many people do it [for features],” Aronofsky says. “I really liked the
idea of how portable it was and how fluid and easy it was to move the
camera — to simplify things and get that kind of documentary feel. We
talked about HD, but we didn't feel we could control everything, and
add the grittiness we wanted, if we shot digitally on this budget and
time frame.”

Alberti adds this methodology was also chosen
by Aronofsky, in part, to emulate the dramatic handheld camera work
done in a film that Aronofsky discussed at length with her — a 1999
Belgian picture called Rosetta, which was directed by brothers
Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. That film had the camera feel Aronofsky
was looking for — handheld, in close proximity to the main characters
at all times.

“This whole film, like [Rosetta], is
handheld, and Darren wanted lots of improvisation [in certain scenes],
so Super 16 was better for all that,” she says. “The whole thing is
about the chemistry and dramatic tensions that come from following the
character very closely. The camera is very close to Mickey at all
times. We are moving with the character. It's very interesting when you
place a camera right behind someone. There is a sense of being in their
space, in their soul, and into what they are feeling. I used [Carl
Zeiss] Ultra Prime 12mm lenses almost the whole time to create that
feeling.”

That intimate sense of being almost a part of
the character's space carried over to the wrestling scenes and the
stripping scenes featuring Randy's love interest in the film — an
exotic dancer called Cassidy, played by Marisa Tomei.

“We put a camera into the wrestling ring,”
Aronofsky says. “That's usually how they shoot boxing, but for
wrestling, most people use a master shot. But I wanted to get the
camera into the ring, moving 360 degrees, so we also chose to do that
whole thing handheld, and it worked out great.”

Alberti credits camera operator Peter Nolan
for capturing unique POVs during the highly choreographed,
ultra-violent wrestling sequences.

“The idea was to always keep the camera behind
the character, but always within his space, to experience what he
experiences,” she says. “We always had the camera in the ring with him,
usually using the 12mm or a 15mm lens, and Peter did an amazing job.
Work like that takes great physical and emotional strength, especially
when we are doing lots of takes.”

Choreographing the exotic dancing scenes involving Tomei was also complicated, she adds.

“The big thing was Darren asked me to light as
much as possible for 360 degrees, which we did sometimes,” Alberti
says. “But in the club and places like that, it is a bit hard to do
dramatic lighting at 360, so we sometimes gave him 280 or 290. But we
got as close as we could.

“[For the exotic dancing], we had the same
approach as with the wrestling — the camera was onstage with her. The
thinking was to actually be less voyeuristic. Instead of just looking
at her from the outside, we wanted to stay with her to keep with our
philosophy of experiencing what she experiences. It was difficult to
light for that in the club, because all the moving light can cause
camera shadows. It was a real challenge to get the camera so close to
Marisa Tomei when she is dancing while there is a lot of moving light
happening. We had to very finely choreograph the dancing of Marisa with
the dancing of the camera to get it just right.”

Some things that could not be perfected during
filming were, of course, addressed during the DI phase at Technicolor
New York. Among other things, the process helped adjust color and
saturation to make the project evoke a 35mm print. But the DI was not
used, in Aronofsky's words, for a major overhaul. “It was used to give
us the greatest latitude in different places, add contrast in places,
and solve some particular problems largely,” he says.

The DI, however, did play a central role in
rectifying a major challenge facing the production. Rourke had
real-life personal tattoos removed and fake ones added by the makeup
department to fit his character. During the wrestling sequences, sweat,
hot lights, wrestling mats, and pounding bodies (all wrestlers except
Rourke were real-life professional wrestlers) made it almost impossible
to maintain the integrity of that makeup. The DI process was used to
paint those problems away.

“That was a huge issue,” says Tim Stipan, the
DI colorist from TechnicolorNew York. “We spent a lot of time working
on those tattoos. Our conform editor, Jesse Morrow, rotoscoped the
tattoo areas and gave me his mattes, and then we graded to remove the
dark blue of the tattoos. The way I did this was by taking out the
contrast of that specific area and grading it to match the flesh tone
around it. I found that by doing this, it basically made it look
defocused, so then I added some grain to match the surrounding areas.

“There were also other things to blur out and
make unrecognizable, like people [in the crowds during wrestling
events] looking into the camera and making the frame a bit distracting.
For some of those enhancements, Jesse would cut mattes that would track
a certain area, and then put those mattes in the reels. I would
instantly have a matte in my Lustre system that I could then color
correct and blur without tracking a thing, since he had already done
the hard work. So, in other words, we were able to work on both the
overall look and some effects during the DI.”

Stipan used Autodesk's Lustre system for color
grading, and Morrow conformed the reels on an Autodesk Smoke system.
Film was scanned at Technicolor's Los Angeles facility on a
pin-registered Arri scanner. Morrow then pulled scans off Technicolor's
SGI CXFS storage network, conformed the material, and published it
directly to the Lustre.

“The great thing about this workflow is that
if the picture edit changes, we can reconform and republish the film in
a half day,” Stipan says. Stipan adds that the unheralded digital
dust-busting process was actually crucial, on this project as well,
since it was shot Super 16.

“Because it was shot Super 16, any
photochemical dirt was going to be very obvious,” Stipan says.
“Luckily, the person heading our dust-busting department, Jessica
Allen, had a team working around the clock to ensure there was not a
speck of dirt on this film. She did an amazing job of updating the
scans without slowing down the process.”