Embracing Happenstance, Stopping Time
“I never wanted to be a news cameraman, I honestly, I never wanted to be in this business, I, actually I am an architect.”
Everyone has a different story detailing their entrance into the art and business of cinema. For some it started as an unscratchable itch in childhood, becoming a lifelong ambition–yet for many of these, the itch is never eased and they never make the final cut–for others it was only after following a labyrinthine path of chance and coincidental necessities, stringing them along until planting them in the foothills of Hollywood. For Checco Varese, Director of Photography on the upcoming film Georgia, the path was more the latter, but like all whose lives place them far from their once-imagined futures, it is often the ostensibly unrelated knowledge comprising their own childhood itch which forms the unique lens through which their work is illuminated.
Son of Italian émigrés to Peru, Francesco “Checco” Varese learned from an early age the art of tinkering. His father, an attorney unpopular with the fascist regime prior to and during World War II, transitioned into jewelry after the family’s move to South America, and Checco gained his first employ assisting in this task. Whether it was this experience, or an innate propensity, his appreciation for putting things together grew as he did, culminating in his graduation from an Italian school wherein he studied architecture. But chance intervened before he could practice in his chosen field. Having experimented with black and white still photography, Checco was asked to operate a camera for a friend of a friend, and he accepted. While in school, to better understand how to integrate abstract ideas into ones physical design, a professor advised Checco to watch films and to examine the way that the film makers used aspects of visual imagery to express these abstractions. This effort to understand how visual choices are made and their subsequent impressions expanded beyond film to include visual arts in general, but that interest did not lead him immediately into the subjectively expressive side of film following that initial foray; instead, Checco found himself shooting documentaries and courting death to record news video from conflict zones around the world for nearly ten years. So it goes.
“[E]veryone finds their own path through life. It’s a cheap cliché, probably from a TV series. And I found my path through life through being a war correspondent. Is it good or bad, I don’t know. I think it was a very contorted way of doing music videos and commercials in LA 20 years later. I wouldn’t recommend that as a path to become a cinematographer. But to me it helped, it definitely helped.”
From there he moved on to music video and commercial work—again, as much the result of chance as hard work, his multicultural upbringing aiding in developing the multilingualism which made him a preferable candidate for that first Ozzy Osbourne music video—and then to narrative television and theatrical work. Through it all, he has attempted and, whether by force or by fortune, has succeeded in avoiding the industry’s tendency to pigeonhole, working on videos for artists as varied as Prince and The Dave Matthews Band (and Joe Pesci!), and on films covering a wide range of tone and setting, from the 1920s Florida African-American epic, “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and the modern take on vampires in the series pilot of “True Blood” to the sparse Argentine noir Aura and the celebration of love between mother and child, La Misma Luna (Under the Same Moon). Most recently, he teamed up with Renny Harlin, traveling to the nation of Georgia for the fictional account of two journalists caught in the midst of the conflict between the titular country and Russia which aroused international controversy in late 2008.
Although the film itself has courted controversy, Checco applauds Renny’s emphasis on “the human factor” and his desire to avoid the common temptation of glamorizing combat in the endeavor of easy entertainment. Here, again, the unexpected benefits of Checco’s distinct history impacted his involvement in multiple ways; having not only real life experience in war zones, but journalistic experience as well, the director offered him to the actors as a resource for finding and entering the emotional reality of the moments made visually real through the production’s use of authentic military materiel. As director of photography, if Checco cannot claim any deliberate reference to his past employment, he cannot, either, deny the influence it had: “It affected me personally, I mean one day I was shooting a scene and all of the sudden I started crying because I remembered something that happened to me. I cry easily, I’m Italian, that’s a given, but I just couldn’t stop crying, because something happened to me, probably 1985, that I don’t remember, but I saw it in the frame. So, yes it affected me in more than one way, and I hope I affected the movie in more than one way.”
“To me sexy is hair commercials, 40 frames per second, 150 frames, you know that’s sexy, that’s sensual. You slow the time, you can enjoy the details. But if you freeze the time, and the time freezes into a horrid event—somebody missing a leg, somebody missing an arm—that’s why still photography is so powerful. . . . The front page of Newsweek is still more powerful than every CNN piece I’ve ever done in my life.”
Understanding that Renny Harlin was a fan of The Hurt Locker, and how the slow motion sequences in that film avoided the aforementioned inclination to glamorize, for the slow motion sequences in Georgia, Checco had to find a high speed camera suitable for the material and the location. Given its nature as a high speed capture device, some complexity was expected, but the controls needed to be intuitive, straight forward, and the capability substantial in order to satisfy the needs of the group as they were headed far beyond the nearest help center should a problem or difficulty arise. The camera also needed to be tough enough to withstand the punishment that the location and subject matter might engender. For the right camera, they turned to Michael Mansouri, who also acted as Digital Imaging Technician (DIT) on the film. For the job, Mansouri chose the camera he knew was able to provide the necessary bit depth while robust and simple enough to endure whatever the elements or effects might offer and still be ready for the next shot: the Y5 built by IDT. Unbeknownst to the filmmakers, the camera he provided them for the Georgian shoot would not only meet their requirements, but it would also provide them with an updated version of the same which shot the Bigelow film that helped to inspire their own approach.
Contrary to the effect of slow motion in The Hurt Locker, which was utilized so as to create an impression of physically feeling the events portrayed, Harlin and Varese planned instead to use the sequences to emphasize, always, the “human factor” of each instant, realizing that even the most international of events influences discrete individuals, family members and friends, each living a real life as much separate from as dependent upon one another. Merely slowing time in the same fashion as is generally employed when using the technology would not be appropriate to the realization of their intent: with slow motion the focus can too easily become the superficial elements, the aesthetics, the commercial-like attractive elements within a scene. Checco wanted a motion picture analogue to frozen time, to the art of still photography with which he experimented in his youth, and to which he never felt his video journalism could compare in conveying the visceral, immediate impact of combat or tragedy at the human scale. To accomplish this, he set the IDT Y5 camera to 800 frames per second, merging the moving and static image in order to put on display not the sexy combat of Hollywood action–composed of colorful explosions and dramatic near misses–but the immediate and personal violence which, more often than not, is heaped upon those who are innocent of a conflict’s root cause.
“[T]he trick is to not try to make something out of something that’s not meant to be . . . there are different mediums for different films. When your decision is to make a movie with [digital cameras] that is only, specifically based on financial considerations, and it doesn’t take into account any other subject than finances, there is a mistake here.”
Influenced as much by Vittorio Storaro and his photography for Apocalypse Now as the war photographers from his journalist days, and Barry Ackroyd for The Hurt Locker, Checco Varese’s dedication in his work has always been, ultimately, to the successfully pairing the narrative with only those images which enhance it, moving beyond the references to build a visual landscape specific to the project at hand. Despite an appreciation for the flexibility and products of film, for Georgia, Checco understood that Renny Harlin wanted to film completely in digital, and in addition to the IDT Y5 for slow motion, chose to film predominately with RED cameras, also using SI-2Ks for certain shots requiring the camera remain hidden. Fortunately, Checco’s past yet again revealed its value in that his familiarity with shooting on formats other than film allowed him to maximize his use of the equipment to both capture what the director desired and to do so while capitalizing on the strengths of the medium, rather than trying to force it to fit the strengths of another.
This experience, and his sense of familiarity with the photographic instruments at his disposal, again seems to mirror the path of his life in that what comes before is just as important as any particular application. Before shooting, Checco spends as much time as he can preparing, visualizing how to tell the story, how to serve the story with images through test shots and discussions with the director. Once the shoot begins, the focus becomes interpreting by intuition those decisions made beforehand and aligning them with the reality of the moment. For slow motion as well as traditional 24 fps cinema, this means taking into consideration the limitations of where the camera can be placed, and, especially with the slow motion cameras, similar to the goals of the still photographers Renny and Checco hoped to imitate, this means being able to successfully capture the transience and significance of all life within an image easy to miss but difficult to forget.
At the end of the day, as Orson Welles once said about directing, a person’s journey through life is a matter of “[presiding] over accidents”; coincidence takes everyone along, but it is the knowledge and experience attained in living, and the choices made regarding the partners and tools that make the accidents manageable. For the filming of Georgia, choosing the RED and SI-2K proved successful in attaining the shots for which they were needed, and IDT’s Y5 proved essential for creating the sense of frozen time required in the slow motion sequences. For the future, Checco plans to continue following wherever the path leads, confident that those with whom he works can accomplish their roles as he does his.
By Adam Smith
