Sundance Film Festival

Director Sean Ellis and DP Angus Hudson sit on either side of me at the Filmmaker Lodge—Hudson, smart and earnest, Ellis, savvy and charismatic, with an actors expressiveness; they seem an unlikely team until they start trading thoughts about The Broken.

“I’ve never been so proud of something I’ve shot,” Hudson is saying, and that’s an understatement for what the pair accomplished visually. The two previously collaborated on Ellis’ short Cashback produced through Ridley Scott’s company RSA. But they had a much bigger canvas to fill on The Broken and an ambition to do something that has never been easy: scary movie that’s more atmosphere than gore.

Of course if anyone at this festival knows how to manipulate an image for atmosphere it’s Ellis, one of the world’s foremost fashion photographers, known for images that take their glamour from an almost impossible fluency with light and muscular storytelling that is often described as cinematic. It strikes me as he talks about the darkroom techniques of dodging and burning, as his hands make the familiar, urgent motions–shaping the volatile mix of chemicals and time–that he thinks reflexively, like a cinematographer. He describes making movies like making photographs, with the emphasis on making.

“A lot of our references were early Gordon Willis,” Hudson says without a touch of irony, “not very many lights, inky blacks,” and I think, “why not?” Both men liked Klute and not surprisingly referenced Ellis’ stills. Hudson shot 35mm anamorphic, Fuji Eterna 500T, 250D and a bit of 250T. “The stocks are so similar now in terms of performance. But one of the things we liked about the Fuji when we did our grain tests (to discover what we could do if I screwed up) was that the Fuji had this kind of wormy grain. Kodak is sandy grain and just for this particular project, the Fuji grain looked right to me, it looked new, like breath of fresh air.

“I wanted to shoot on E-series anamorphics,” he says wistfully, “but anamorphics seemed the ‘new black’ in the UK in the moment.” Even with good supplier connecitons, he was on the wrong side of demand. “A lot big films were going out and we weren’t grown up enough to get the E-series, in the end went with Primos. And we would occasionally go and raid the lens room for some funny little zooms, and some other old fashioned problem solvers.”

The London shoot was mostly bitter days around Bayswater. “Daylight was our enemy on that film,” Ellis grumbles as Hudson nods. “It was the dead of winter with five hours of useable light, at 1:30 we’d start losing the day. Really grim locations. A lot of time spent waiting for the rain to stop.”

“One of the good things about British light is you can light it,” Hudson breaks in optimistically. “It’s like lighting a Tupperware box. When it’s beautiful it’s very beautiful,” he says and goes off on a tangent to Ellis—not to me–about the painter John Singer Sargent and his single source light.

The film, financed by Gaumont, had a six-week DI at Éclair in Paris on an Autodesk Lustre with colorist Marjolain Mispelaere—successful after a tense start. “The first two weeks we were just figuring out the system with them and getting past the ‘you can have any color as long as it’s magenta’ part,” Ellis recalls. By his reckoning the DI really started at week 3. “If we hadn’t been desaturating the film we probably would have gone with traditional,” Hudson notes. Mispeleare, who he describes as “serious and quite intense” has a first-class photochemical background, so eventually everybody got on the same page. “You know in France they have these very lovely words for it all, digital is ‘numerique’, photochemical is ‘argent’—for silver,” Hudson says.

“It took so many workarounds to get the look we wanted, she was mixing linear and log grades….she was stretched at times,” Ellis says. Another two weeks was spent on a photochemical grade. When Hudson starts to talk about a 7-camera car crash, I finally have to ask about budget. Ellis answers two ways—citing the inevitable kicking and screaming, and then saying something you hear less often about the money: “The French believe in the director as auteur and they let you get on with it.”

And get on with it they did. “It’s a film I didn’t think anyone was making,” Ellis said. “a kind of film I remember watching as kid with it’s sense of ill ease and dis-ease.” “We have all these wonderful holding shots, shots where nothing happens,” Hudson adds, acting out the slow, suspenseful pans to nothing.

So how does the workload play out between these two? “I respect Angus work and opinions, it means that part of it’s covered, my back is covered. Angus would light and we’d look,” Ellis says. “He knows what he wants, he’s incredibly visual,” Hudson says of the famously dyslexic Ellis. “I start from images, convert to words, convert back into images,” Ellis interrupts as Hudson is about to finish saying, “And he’s bloody irritating, you can’t pull the wool over his eyes.”

The Broken has its last screening Saturday 9:15p at the Holiday Village. Click here for theater info