According to the filmmakers, nothing really compares to Nothing. ‘It has things in it I don’t think anyone’s really done before,’ says director Vincenzo Natali.

The premise of the feature, currently shooting in Toronto, might sound familiar enough: the codependent and anti-social Andrew (Andrew Miller) and David (David Hewlett) room together in a grimy house and their friendship becomes the focal point of their world.

Everybody involved on the project willingly invokes comparisons to Withnail and I, the similarly plotted 1987 British cult film, but Nothing incorporates a way-out twist. Way, way out.

Events transpire so that Andrew and David get their ultimate wish – the rest of the world simply disappears and their little house ends up in a vast white void. The visual design of the film plays up the darkness and density of the opening ‘realistic’ scenes in contrast to the expansiveness of the fantasy world in the second part.

In the early scenes, a handheld camera follows the characters around their junk-filled abode. To avoid worries of lighting continuity and lots of shadows – and because there is no overhead grid – the crew eschewed directional illumination in favor of numerous practicals. There is a hodgepodge of different fixtures in the mix, including regular house lamps, Christmas lights and small Ikea lights the crew has painted black and dubbed ‘barbecue lights.’ In all, there are about 10 times more practicals in the frame than one would usually find.

The overall effect is a smoky dimness accentuated by numerous tiny hotspots. For maximum control, the fixtures are on what gaffer Jeremy Hudspith describes as ‘a million little dimmers.’ The practicals provide sufficient illumination for the Kodak 5279 Vision 500T stock director of photography Derek Rogers is shooting at T2. Outside the kitchen windows in the indoor set, 2K Fresnels peak through lowered blinds, providing a hint of the sunlight the dwelling’s inhabitants would rather keep out.

The production design, headed by Jasna Stefanovic (Josie and the Pussycats) is painstakingly detailed with slacker bric-a-brac, and the rooms each have a distinct hue. The kitchen is yellowish, the living room is green, David’s room is blue, and Andrew’s is red. The latter two spaces are to be built in the production’s first studio stop, a converted warehouse in Toronto’s west end, just across the lot from the offices of 49th Parallel Films, which is producing. After completing these early scenes, the crew will relocate to the roomier StudiOasis to shoot the tricky ‘David and Andrew in space’ sequences.

The ‘white void’ segment presents the biggest challenge in the F/X-heavy film. This fantasy world will be created with the help of physical F/X from Paul Jones Effects, wire stunts co-ordinated by Paul Rapovski, and CGI from C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures, where the production team spent as much R&D time as its reported US$4-million budget would allow.

24P HD gets nixed

Initially, there was much discussion about originating the film in the Sony 24P high-definition format. However, HD would not give the small house set much of a sense of space with the format’s sharp depth of field. The crew ran some tests.

‘With the kind of lighting environments we had and for some of the effects work we were doing, [HD] wasn’t going to work as well as 35mm,’ Natali adds. ‘There are also issues with keystoning [image distortion] and pulling mattes from characters in front of a white background that were going to be problematic, so we decided against it.’

The production chose instead to shoot with an Arriflex 535B motion picture camera. In the house interiors, Rogers is shooting with a Cooke S4 50mm lens, leaning towards shallow, blurry focus. He is also digging into his cinematographer’s trick bag.

‘We’re putting a Christian Dior stocking on the lens,’ he reveals. ‘They’ve been doing that for 50 to 60 years, and it works. It softens the image a bit, and blows out the highlights. We’re also using a lot of smoke. We’re trying to create a visual density.’

The theory is to open with a verite look and then shift to highly stylized fantasy. For the void, the camera will rest more on a dolly, crane shots will be incorporated and the crew will use wider lenses for a greater sense of depth and openness.

Nothing is being captured on 3-perf stock, allowing the crew to expose more frames than usual on the same amount of film, thereby saving on stock and processing costs. The production will finish at Command Post/TOYBOX, taking advantage of that shop’s proprietary Cinema HD digital intermediate process, as Natali did with Cypher, his still-unreleased Hollywood debut.

The director is excited about shooting for the first time in the super-widescreen 2.35:1 ratio. The lead characters’ low-ceiling digs might seem an odd setting for a format usually reserved for epics and Westerns, but that’s part of Nothing’s innovative style. The filmmakers say they have looked to Lawrence of Arabia and the John Ford classic The Searchers for inspiration. But instead of framing characters against the desert expanse of Ford’s beloved Monument Valley, Nothing’s terrible twosome appears in a white vacuum, the ultimate manifestation of their anti-everything stance.

Another advantage to Nothing’s format is its flexibility.

‘The way the 3-perf frame breaks down to 2.35 to 1.85 and to television is fairly TV-friendly,’ Natali explains. ‘It’s not a typical pan-and-scan situation. The TV frame actually goes outside the 2.35 frame, so we have common headroom for all formats. All you’re losing is about 20% on each side of the frame, maybe less. It’s very easy to compose for all three formats, which we had to do because some of our European delivery commitments required a 1.85 version for high-definition TV.’

Meticulous preprod

In order to achieve the film’s ambitious visuals on a small budget and tight shooting schedule (six weeks wrapping in late August), with some days entailing as many as 30 setups, preproduction was meticulous.

‘Because we knew we were going to make the film for more than a year before we actually went to camera, we really had an opportunity to let it gestate,’ Natali explains. ‘Jasna, Derek and I spent a lot of time figuring out exactly how the set would work and what the feel and look of the film would be.’

The director, who got his start in the biz drawing storyboards for Nelvana, boarded every shot for Nothing. (The boards are, according to Rogers, ‘as big as a telephone book’.) Natali also shot a cheap video version of the entire film, using collaborators such as producer Steve Hoban and line producer Paula Devonshire as actors. This way he knew exactly what he would need on set.

‘Vincenzo’s films are all about getting a lot of interesting shots and a lot of coverage,’ Rogers says. ‘And that means just shooting a lot.’

Most of the Nothing crew dates back to Cube, Natali’s 1997 debut feature. Rogers shot that sleeper hit, winning a Canadian Society of Cinematographers Award for his efforts, as well as Cypher, which shot in Toronto last year. Natali likes the comfort of constant collaborators.

‘It’s just an awesome crew,’ he says. ‘The crew gets better with every film I make because we grow together.’