At CBC’s Studio 40 in Toronto, Luc Montpellier, the director of photography on Foreign Objects, sits in front of the video monitor right beside writer/director/executive producer/star Ken Finkleman. For this scene at least, Montpellier is more vocal in blocking the actors than Finkleman.

Foreign Objects is the latest offering from Finkleman, the small-screen auteur behind The Newsroom, More Tears and Foolish Heart. The Rhombus Media production, in association with cbc, will feature six episodes in the life of George (Finkleman), a traveling director of fluffy documentaries. The tone of the program, however, is anything but fluffy.

The scene at hand, filming on day 14 of the 28-day shoot, involves George waking to a row with his younger wife Julia (Traders’ Kim Huffman) over his latest assignment, the profile of a supermodel. The dissolution of their marriage is expressed not only in the characters’ confrontational dialogue but in the cold grays and blacks of Paul Ames’ production design and Montpellier’s austere lighting.

The cinematographer has lit the room with a 5K shining through a window and two backlights fixed to the set walls, which create shafts of light the couple walk in and out of, and which requires several rehearsals for the actors to hit their marks. The crew has loaded its Arriflex 16 SR3 Advanced camera with Kodak Vision 7279 500T stock to capture the low-light atmosphere, with the color in the sequence to be dialed out later in the film-to-video transfer.

According to Montpellier, the visual quality on this project is just as important to Finkleman as the performances.

‘Ken’s always been technically minded, but more so on this one,’ he says. ‘It’s not just about the actors – it’s about the style of what we’re doing with the actors. So if they sometimes step out of their light, we have to move them in there. I guess that comes through me, because Ken explains what he wants, and I make it practical.’

Montpellier gets the call

The young cameraman was initially surprised when he got the high-profile gig.

The Sudbury-born dop attended film school at Toronto’s Ryerson Polytechnic, and went on to lens many music videos. Along the way he collaborated with another writer/actor/director – Jack and Jill’s jack-of-all-trades John Kalangis. After shooting that low-budget feature three years ago, it was mostly back to videos – until he hooked up with Phillip Barker.

Barker, who served as production designer on Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, has also directed several short films, bringing Montpellier on board for one called Soul Cages. The two came up with a look quite apart from the frenetic quick-cut style of music videos, scenes that allow the viewer the time to absorb their gentle, hypnotic images, many of which incorporate water. These images often then surprise the viewer by changing context via experimental camera techniques.

Soul Cages won Montpellier the 2000 Canadian Society of Cinematographers’ Award for Dramatic Short Cinematography, which subsequently secured him representation by The Characters agency.

He then worked with legendary experimental filmmaker Michael Snow on an installment of Preludes, a 25th anniversary initiative of the Toronto International Film Festival whereby 10 of Canada’s most acclaimed directors each shoot a one- to four-minute film produced in association with Niv Fichman.

Describing his collaboration with the 70-year-old Snow, Montpellier says, ‘He was just so much fun to work with. It was one four-minute shot. Niv and Danny Iron [the Rhombus producers on Foreign Objects] saw it and I met with Danny and the next thing I knew I was meeting with Ken [Finkleman].’

Cameraman and director saw the series in the same light.

‘Your interpretation of these scripts could go anywhere when you read them,’ Montpellier says. ‘They’re quite visual in a sense, but it comes out of the relationships between the characters in the scene. I guess I just happened to hit the same sensibility as his, and since then he’s taken my input and changed things to make it better overall.’

The six episodes of the series, which include ‘The Body,’ ‘Evil,’ ‘Celebrity,’ ‘Chaos and Order,’ ‘Disasters’ and ‘The Award,’ tell six different stories involving George, with a different style and tone for each. In fact, the visuals within each individual episode are eclectic. For example, the scene of George’s and Julia’s tiff, to be shown in a black-and-white film look, is followed by a video segment.

Montpellier points to another episode that incorporates rear projection.

‘We’re using the new Digital Light Processing Cinema technology,’ the dop explains. ‘We rented [a digital projector] and we’re using it to shoot people against. Whether it’s in the equipment budget or not, we’ve worked it in to make it part of the action.’

Finkleman and Montpellier are trying to benefit from visual references to the work of certain luminaries of film history. ‘In lighting [the scene between George and his wife] dark, like in 8 1/2, you might think ‘Oh, it’s a Fellini film,’ and people who know that film will be put in a certain mindset,’ the cinematographer illustrates. ‘It’s not necessarily copying so much as kind of matching the style but changing the content. By doing that it becomes a satire in a way.’

Montpellier explains that the episode ‘Evil’ has a less expressionistic look.

Deep drama, verite style

‘It’s all shot docu-style by George’s camera crew that goes around with him,’ he says. ‘They get side-rooted in Kosovo to do a story about an Albanian and a Kosovar, friends who have a business relationship that goes to hell. That episode has really deep drama and a verite style.’

Decisions on the various looks were made between Finkleman and Montpellier during a one-month preproduction process. The director, wearing so many different hats on the production, has allowed the cameraman a great degree of freedom in many of the series’ more visual sequences.

‘He said things like, ‘You’ve got the job – just go for it,’ and ‘That’s your sequence – you just have to give me something,’ ‘ the cameraman recollects.

The dop is free to sit on set with his director and discuss their setups since he is not acting as his own camera operator. Being a ‘hands-off’ cameraman is not something Montpellier is accustomed to, except on the occasional episode of Nikita that he’s worked on, but he’s enjoying the system.

‘It’s been fantastic having an operator like Joel Guthro, his first assistant Akira Nishihata, and the whole team, because I’ve been jumping around so much as far as the different styles are concerned,’ he comments. ‘It’s also been good to communicate the shots to Joel, because he throws his input in there, too, and it makes me think about it. I am addicted to [having an operator] now. I want to keep doing it that way.’

‘The Body,’ slated as the introductory episode, also incorporates a sequence that goes for the other extreme from the 8 1/2 look.

In the episode, George, on the job in the French Riviera, bumps into his friend Tibor [Colm Feore], who recounts a tale about his girlfriend Maria [Arsinee Khanjian] losing her bikini bottom in the ocean.

The filmmakers sought a distinct style to establish a different time frame and illustrate point of view in the flashback. They ended up choosing a saturated look, recalling the Technicolor of 1950s and 1960s Hollywood films, accomplished half in-camera with filters and half in post by colorist Peter Jorgensen. Montpellier compares the color quality and frequent cross-cutting to Oliver Stone’s 1997 film U-Turn.

‘It’s in that same vein,’ he says. ‘She’s in the water and she starts to slowly panic and see people bear down on her. We have all these beautiful close-ups of people going by looking at her. The style helps get into her head and at the same time mark a certain era of filmmaking that cues viewers.’

This feature-film approach is what excites the dop most about the series.

‘The first thing Ken told me was ‘I really want to push the cinematography in this show to tell the story,’ ‘ he recalls. ‘That’s why it was a good project for me to be involved in.’

(For more on Foreign Objects, see p. 9.) *

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