‘I have a rule where I never say no to a director,’ says Toronto-based cinematographer Derek Rogers.

Canadian director Vincenzo Natali seems to like that rule, since he has teamed up with Rogers for a third time to shoot the tentatively titled feature The Company Man. (The film is a production of Pandora Films and picked up distribution from Miramax Films at Cannes).

Rogers and Natali collaborated on a short film called Elevated back in their Canadian Film Centre days before creating the Toronto International Film Festival award-winning feature Cube. Rogers would go on to win the Canadian Society of Cinematographers award for best theatrical feature cinematography in 1999.

‘My relationship with Vincenzo is very special, and I think he loves the fact that he can always ask me for the impossible,’ Rogers says. ‘He is very grand with his imagery, and my style is very dynamic – very strong lighting and dramatic camera angles.’

The Company Man is a spy thriller that Rogers describes as ‘contemporary film noir, with a dramatic shift in the visual.’ The film stars British actor Jeremy Northam (Emma, Happy, Texas) as a spy in the near future who assumes many different identities, eventually forgetting who he is and then realizing he’s been brainwashed. Finding himself in the dangerous world of corporate espionage, he teams up with a mysterious femme fatale, played by Lucy Liu (Ally McBeal, Charlie’s Angels).

‘The Company Man is modeled after the classic spy films of the 1960s, like John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate. The plot is influenced by the old Cold War thrillers, with a dash of James Bond,’ Rogers explains.

The film is all about the Northam character’s perception of reality. Rogers says the filmmakers relied on the visuals to distort that reality and heighten the suspense factor. To achieve this impressionism they used many in-camera technical effects, such as blink filters, extreme macro and wide lenses, periscope lenses and swing-and-tilt lenses.

‘Jeremy allowed us to do some bizarre things with him, like using snorkel lenses to go up his nostrils or into his mouth,’ Rogers recalls.

According to Rogers, The Company Man starts off with a monochromatic look, inspired by French director Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965): ‘We drained the color by taking it out of the set and costume design as well as the lighting.’ The film then develops into a ‘colorful film noir,’ ending up as ‘a celebration of colors, much like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.’

This shift takes place in accordance with the story structure.

‘As the plot thickens and the suspense heightens, we start creating scenes of highly saturated colors that are a reflection of the emotional state of the main characters,’ Rogers explains. For example, a romantic scene between Northam and Liu was shot in blue.

‘I created a thing called ‘negative noir.’ Most noir is about dramatic lighting, with light on the subject against a very dark background, as in The X-Files. But we’ve subverted that, especially in the beginning of the film, where we’d put the characters in extreme silhouettes against burned-out, very white backgrounds,’ Rogers says.

The Company Man was shot on location in Toronto. ‘The film starts off in plain generic environments, like suburban houses with a middle-America feel, but as the plot intensifies, the locations become more stylized and the set pieces more elaborate,’ Rogers notes.

Rogers says the more he shoots, the more he gets into the concept of design: ‘I consider myself a visual designer. I’ve started to do a lot of work with special effects and incorporate them into the overall visual design. I try to get involved with the director to achieve a cohesive overall design.’

All the special effects in The Company Man were done by Toronto animation and F/X company C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures. The relationship between Natali and Rogers and C.O.R.E. extends back to the work the F/X house contributed free of charge to Cube, a CFC production with a limited budget.

Rogers says he shot The Company Man using a lightweight Moviecam camera, with the filmmakers favoring a 35mm lens. The film called for using Kodak stocks, although Rogers says he doesn’t usually have a preference and likes to mix it up: ‘Every film has its own visual design – it creates its own agenda in terms of equipment and stocks.’

The Company Man’s all-Canadian crew used cranes and a Steadicam to realize the film’s out-of-the-ordinary camera moves. Rogers says the design of the film allowed for many stylized camera movements, such as third-axis crane moves using a Mega Mount.

The DOP says his biggest and most fun task was being able to light Liu, whom he refers to as an ‘A-list star.’

‘It was perhaps the most difficult challenge, making her look outstanding and at the same time creating something very refreshing,’ he recalls. ‘It’s good for me to start shooting films with A-list stars. It’s more exciting and you know it’s a film everyone is going to see.’

Dramatic docs

Following his graduation from film school at Toronto’s Ryerson Polytechnic University, where he focused on directing, Rogers went on to shoot more than 200 documentaries around the world.

‘My documentaries became very stylized, and people started asking me to do dramas,’ Rogers recalls. ‘A lot of filmmakers hire me because they say I have a ‘European’ way of filming and sense of lighting, but I don’t quite understand what that means. I just think I light very dramatically.’

The success Rogers achieved with Natali on Cube – a phenomenal hit in Europe – led to gigs on the acclaimed Canadian films The Fishing Trip and New Waterford Girl. He was later approached to shoot commercials.

‘[Spot producers] liked the way I did drama, because it had a beautiful and natural but quite dynamic look to it,’ he says. ‘There’s a big link between my work now and wanting to do good quality TV commercials.’ Rogers sees the crossover from dramas to commercials including working with special effects, production design and A-list actors: ‘Those three elements are really important for expanding my career into TV commercials and bigger features.’

The Company Man wrapped recently in Toronto. Rogers says he plans to take a break and shoot some TV commercials, but he has already been offered to lens a couple of features. *