(Above) The cover to a Psycho (1960) pressbook supplement titled “The Care and Handling of Psycho,” which emphasizes the William Castle-esque gimmick that no one – “not even the manager’s brother” – will be allowed into a screening after the film has begun.
Year – 2018
Decade – 2010s
Cinematographer – Marcell Rév
Director – Barry Levinson
Aspect Ratio – 1.78
Distributor – HBO
Genre – Drama
Camera – Alexa Mini (3.2K ProRes 4444 XQ)
Lenses – Spherical; detuned Panavision Primos
Format – Digital
*Some of Paterno’s flashback scenes were shot with 8mm and 16mm film, the latter with Arriflex 416 cameras and Arri Zeiss Standard Speed lenses
Other Key Words
Scene Breakdowns Low key lighting Highlights Flashbacks
Thanks to Paterno director of photography Marcell Rév for providing me with tech specs. Check out his official site.
Click on any link for a list of other films featuring frames from that category.
(Above) Ghana artist Heavy J takes on David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983). This pic comes from the Instagram feed of Deadly Prey Gallery, a Chicago-based gallery that collects, sells, and commissions Ghanaian movie art. Check out their official website.
Unit stills photographer Philippe Antonello captured this silhouetted camera crew on the set of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004). The film held the record for highest grossing R-rated movie at the American box office before being dethroned in February of 2016 by Deadpool.
Year – 1975
Decade – 1970s
Cinematographer – Gabor Pogany
Director – Aldo Lado
Aspect Ratio – 1.85
Genre – Horror
Lenses – Spherical
Format – 35mm
Other Key Words – Video Nasties; Color (Blue); Zooms; 180 Degree Pan; Shot/Reverse Shot; Phone Calls
Click on any link for a list of other films featuring frames from that category.
“Every seat in this theater becomes a coach seat to hell!” – tagline from the Night Train Murders trailer
I was doing a bit of reading up on Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) before revisiting the movie on Netflix and I came across these set photos over at Cinephilia and Beyond. Cinephilia’s post also offers a downloadable PDF of the script.
I also recommend this “making of” story from Empire magazine and this 2012 interview with Mann from DGA Quarterly.
Here’s a nugget from the Empire piece about the film’s origins…
…(Mann) first got the idea in the mid-’70s, when a friend of his, ex-Chicago cop Chuck Adamson (a technical consultant on Thief) told him of the time he took a criminal he had under surveillance for a cup of coffee. That criminal’s name was Neil McCauley.
And here’s Mann on Heat’s famed Al Pacino/Robert De Niro coffee scene, from the DGA interview.
“We shot that scene with three cameras, two over-the-shoulders and one profile shot, but I found when editing that every time we cut to the profile, the scene lost its one-on-one intensity. I’ll often work with multiple cameras, if they’re needed. In this case, I knew ahead of time that Pacino and De Niro were so highly attuned to each other that each take would have its own organic unity. Whatever one said, and the specific way he’d say it, would spark a specific reaction in the other. I needed to shoot in such a way that I could use the same take from both angles. What’s in the finished film is almost all of take 11—because that has an entirely different integrity and tonality from takes 10, or 9, or 8. All of this begins and ends with scene analysis. It doesn’t matter if it’s two people in a room or two opposing forces taking over a street. Action comes from drama, and drama is conflict: What’s the conflict?”
