Cinematographer Gerald Packer has earned a living by shooting, lighting and troubleshooting on various films for about 20 years. Sitting with a coffee on the set of the new Showcase mow/pilot The Ride, Packer is relaxed in the midst of his second week of a four-week shooting schedule. The Ride, produced by Cambium Entertainment, is the first film made for specialty channel Showcase. Packer says he is very excited by the opportunity to perhaps change the direction of Canadian television.

‘I wanted to be involved with this production because it is ground-breaking Canadian television,’ says Packer. ‘I’m a big supporter of Canadian filmmakers and a lot of the films I have shot have been Canadian.’

Packer’s dop credits include H, his first feature film. H won the best Canadian feature prize at the 1990 Toronto International Film Festival. He has also lensed features Swann, Booze Can and Painted Angels and was behind the camera for director Piers Haggard’s Conquest, which was named the best film at the Atlantic Film Festival.

Packer says working on The Ride with director Steve DiMarco has been a good experience and the two have similar views on how the camerawork should be handled.

The Ride is about a taxi cab company called City Cab. It focuses on the lives of five characters depicted in the film over a two-day period. All of the plots revolve around City Cab in some way, and Packer says roughly half the film is shot from inside a cab – something that has posed a number of challenges for the cinematographer since shooting began.

The set of The Ride is located in Toronto, just off of Simcoe St., where an auto glass repair shop has been transformed into the City Cab home base. Cabs line the closest side street and sit in the open garage space, with one battered car off to the side looking like it has been in a major traffic accident. There is a small sitting area inside, with different colored chairs around a table with an apparently often-used ashtray at its centre. If someone had told you this was an operating cab company, you would likely believe them.

Packer is sitting in the City Cab’s front office. He and The Ride crew have been shooting since 7:30 a.m. and he appears in desperate need of a nap. However, he is still in good spirits and becomes quite passionate when talking about the art of cinematography, saying he is always eager to throw himself into a project and learn as much about what he is photographing as possible. This scenario is no exception.

‘There is a constant flow to the cab business, which I have kind of picked up on,’ says Packer, who decided on the film’s look with the director after they took an up-close look at the biz. ‘Steve and I talked about the look of the film and we wanted it to have a realistic look and not a typical television look. Because I come from shooting film and features, we are using film.’

Packer uses Kodak 7246 Vision 250D film because of its color and contrast latitude. He says he did many a test with the film to make sure it was correct for this project and to see just how much light would put the stock over and under normal exposure.

The camera Packer uses is an Arriflex 16SR3SR3 and he went 16MM because he says it makes shooting inside cars easier because of the smaller camera size, combined with the opportunity to shoot 10-minute takes on a 400-foot roll, which is required at certain points in the film.

With the mow being very character-driven and dramatic, and also fluctuating between indoor and outdoor shooting in a fast-moving and gritty style, Packer arrived on the set with a lighting plan ready. He says this was helpful given the fast set-up time required for a made-for-tv movie. Packer often shows up for the first day of shooting with a concise plan for the sake of efficiency and to better accommodate the director, who can then spend more time working with the actors and less time worrying about lighting and cinematography issues.

One of the things Packer had to keep in mind during The Ride was natural versus artificial light, especially when inside the cabs with the actors. He says it is important to be able to show both the interior and exterior of the cab with an adequate mix of sunlight and lighting fixtures.

‘I don’t want to light the actors [in the cab] like they are in a spaceship,’ says Packer. ‘A lot of films have car shots in them very briefly or they’ll have a scene or two in a car and that is it. This mostly takes place in a cab and it is something that creates a lot of problems, having to see outside and inside with equal clarity.’

Because The Ride is an ultra-realistic looking film, Packer’s lighting plan is intricate.

‘I have to light this film in order to create balances, but I haven’t lit it in such a way that it destroys the natural contrasts that happen in real life,’ he says. ‘I am using lights but I am not using them to destroy the natural balances that occur as you go through the life of a cab and [I am] dealing with the contrasts between indoor and outdoor, between sunny and shady. Even in a cab station we have lots of shots where the characters walk in from the outside where it is sunny.

Packer says he has drawn inspiration from cinematographers like Nestor Almendros (Days of Heaven) and Sven Nykvist (Cries and Whispers), both of whom, he believes, have a definite knack for using natural light on film, as Packer has done in his own work, most notably the feature film Swann.

Director DiMarco indicated he would like Packer to keep the camerawork with the actors in The Ride very intimate. ‘One of the things Steve wants to do is keep close to the actors because we are in the actors’ world,’ says Packer. ‘There are moments that are chosen to open up the film by widening out or using a telephoto lens. The distance from the camera to the actors is very important – staying inside their world.’

He says he is treating the shoot as though he is shooting a feature, in order for The Ride’s viewers to feel the realism around the project.

‘The camera makes you feel like you are involved with these people,’ says Packer. ‘In order to get you to care about the drama or to get into the story, you have to care about the actors. That means being close to them.’

One of the things that attracted Packer to the project was the opportunity to do a great deal of hand-held camera work. He says the hand-held portion of the filming plays an integral role in the production, and being able to shoot this way is refreshing for him.

‘You don’t get a chance to do hand-held too much these days,’ he says. ‘I think it is because proper hand-held hasn’t really been exploited very well – the kind of hand-held where the camera is as steady as you can be and it is not moving around like in films where they have to move the camera with the head loose.

‘I like the natural feeling of hand-held and the height is perfect for walking with the actors,’ he adds. ‘It’s a very human-feeling camera.’

The Ride marks Packer’s first time working with director DiMarco and screenwriter Paul Dreskin, the creator of the pilot and potential series, the latter with whom Packer attended film school.

The cinematographer looks forward to shooting the rest of the film in Toronto, and says he is very impressed by the new breed of Toronto-based talent, adding that he feels Toronto may have its strongest talent pool ever.