Cinematographer Jonathan Freeman admits he was surprised when asked to shoot Quebec director Robert Lepage’s first English-language film, Possible Worlds. But considering Freeman’s credits, which include the cbc mows Promise the Moon (1997) and Clement Virgo’s The Planet of Junior Brown (1998), as well as the nbc series Prince Street (1998) and the cbs mow Beauty – all nominated for either an asc or csc award – it’s really no surprise.

Freeman is currently in the u.s. lensing the tnt movie Monday Night Mayhem, a docudrama about Monday Night Football, starring John Turturro and John Hurt and directed by Ernest Dickerson. Dickerson was a prominent dop in his own right, having shot Spike Lee’s first six features before making the leap to helmer. One might expect Dickerson would meddle somewhat in his cinematographers’ domain, but Freeman says the director is respecting his space.

Lepage, on the other hand, may never have been a dop, but Freeman says he is quite knowledgeable of the cinematic medium.

‘[Robert] is certainly very aware of light and exposure and the way things photograph,’ Freeman says. ‘As a visual artist, his name speaks for itself. I’ve followed his work in theatre for 10 years, as well as the beginning of his film career [Le Confessional, Le Polygraphe, No] and have been constantly amazed.’

Freeman’s career has taken flight in the time Lepage has built up this filmography. Having grown up in Dundas, Ont., Freeman attended film school at Montreal’s Concordia University. He met Paul Sarossy [Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter] at a CSC Awards banquet, and the successful dop offered to let him apprentice on a couple of films.

‘I was a horrible trainee on The Adjuster,’ Freeman recollects with a laugh. ‘I was dyslexic reading slates, I couldn’t keep track of the shooting ratio, and I kept forgetting where half the equipment was.’

Despite that not-so-memorable experience, Freeman says he learned a lot from Sarossy.

‘Paul is not much older than I am, but he had shot some features, and he told me ‘When you’re ready, just take that next step and do it and don’t second-guess yourself.’ ‘

Freeman took the next step in la belle province, shooting the indie tv series Quand le coeur attend. He later volunteered in Toronto at the Canadian Film Centre, working on shorts and taking any opportunity to shoot drama, including serving as ‘b’ camera operator and second unit dop on the cfc feature Blood and Donuts (1995).

Brain work

Possible Worlds is based on the Governor General Award-winning play of the same name by John Mighton, who also wrote the screenplay. It tells the story of George Barber (Tom McCamus), a highly intelligent man whose murdered body is discovered with its brain carefully removed. Police officers Berkley (Sean McCann) and Williams (Rick Miller) come to suspect a controversial scientist named Dr. Kleber (Gabriel Gascon), who has been performing advanced experiments on animal brains.

As the investigation proceeds, the narrative unfolds with flashbacks seemingly originating from George’s brain, as it recalls his times with ladylove Joyce (Tilda Swinton). True to George’s philosophy that ‘each of us exists in an infinite number of possible worlds,’ the film inter-cuts among various portrayals of Joyce and the couple’s relationship.

When Sandra Cunningham of the East Side Film Company [producer of Possible Worlds along with Bruno Jobin of In Extremis Images] approached Freeman to shoot the film, Lepage was heading to Japan to mount an opera. Freeman wanted to catch the director before he disappeared.

‘I flew into Montreal to meet him personally, and we just talked about some of the ideas and hit it off,’ Freeman recalls.

The dop says Lepage had a solid vision for the film from the get-go, and it never wavered throughout the six-week shoot in Montreal and on the Magdalen Islands.

‘Our first discussions were about how he wanted to approach the film in general, then specifically in my department, and then we laid the groundwork,’ Freeman says. ‘During the shoot, if there was a scene or even a shot that wasn’t working for him, he was able in a few words to simply plug me back into that overall vision, and I was able to make the correction. He was able to keep everybody on the same page, including the great designer Francois Seguin and the fabulous actors.’

One visual motif Lepage and Freeman worked out in preproduction was a very operatic color scheme, unsurprising considering Lepage’s theatrical background. For example, in the opening scene, when a window-washer discovers George’s corpse, the atmosphere is drenched in heavy red tones Freeman describes as ‘Wagneresque,’ designed to represent blood, death and rebirth.

The film then shifts to paler tones. Freeman explains that the silvery look is supposed to convey not so much a cold world as an uncertain one, with the viewer never certain of which ‘reality’ is actual reality. Freeman credits Seguin, whose other projects include The Red Violin and Jesus of Montreal, with contributing to this surreal quality. He points to scenes in which George’s brain recreates meetings between him and Joyce in a cafeteria in the building where she works as a neurologist.

‘[The audience] is trying to understand what’s going on with George, and he’s trying to understand as well,’ the cinematographer explains. ‘We wanted to create an atmosphere that seems bizarre. Having everyone wearing lab coats that are a striking white was part of the design, and it’s also a reference, because we understand later that [George’s brain] is in a lab and being experimented on.’

The police scenes are the most rooted in reality, and so Lepage and Freeman wanted to keep them white and neutral. Towards the end of the film, however, as Detective Berkley’s health is failing and George and Joyce’s relationship deteriorates (in one representation), the film takes on a sickly green hue. But in a different incarnation the couple seems to be headed toward a more hopeful conclusion, and the filmmakers infuse these scenes with warmer tones.

Freeman achieved the different looks through various techniques, including camera filtration, especially with the warm, golden hues, and adding gels to his lights. He did a partial correction in the case of the cool, steely sequences.

‘We were shooting with daylight lighting but on tungsten stock, which tends to be very blue,’ he explains, referring to the Kodak Vision 5279 500T film he used. ‘Then if you correct back, in other words put some warmth back into it, it ends up being that slightly cool tone. For the tones in the lab we used a cosmetic filter as a way of pulling the negative towards a pale green.’

Freeman chose a camera from Austrian manufacturer Moviecam for that system’s versatility, initially believing he would be doing some speed ramping, an idea that was later scrapped. He says he will opt for a Panavision camera primarily when he’s using zoom lenses, since he has ‘yet to find any other zoom system that compares with the Primos,’ which are manufactured by Panavision and work with its camera systems. On Possible Worlds, Freeman used the Series 4 prime lenses from British manufacturer Cooke Optics.

Freeman says he enjoys dividing his time between the big and small screens. For him, the main question he asks when contemplating an assignment is ‘Can it tell a compelling story?’ And he knows his contribution is critical to that end.

‘One of the worst compliments you can get as a cinematographer is if somebody tells you ‘The film didn’t get that much response, but everyone loves your cinematography,’ ‘ he says. ‘That means you’ve failed to do a part of your job – in fact, the most important part, which is to help tell the story. If you’re not doing that, you’re just getting in the way.’

Freeman is nominated for a Genie Award for his work on Possible Worlds, which is an Odeon Films release currently playing in Toronto and Vancouver. *

-www.eastsidefilm.com

-www.ie-images.com (In Extremis Images)

-www.cookeoptics.com