It must have seemed like fate to Paris-based director of photography Kevin Jewison that his director father Norman would be coming to France to shoot his 24th feature, The Statement, and would be requesting his services.

The $27-million adaptation of the Brian Moore novel tells the story of Pierre Brossard (Michael Caine), a Frenchman with past Nazi ties who is shielded by the Church from a mysterious would-be assassin. The film is a coproduction of Serendipity Point Films, the U.K.’s Company Pictures and France’s Odessa Films.

Despite the apparent alignment of the stars, the younger Jewison initially felt some trepidation.

‘It’s the biggest film I’ve done so far, so I was a bit apprehensive about taking it in the first place, but after having a couple of chats [with my father] last summer, I decided I would take it on,’ he recalls from his Paris home.

Although Jewison’s dad (whom he refers to as ‘Norman’) may have talked him into this particular gig, the 47-year-old cinematographer insists his father never pushed him into the film biz.

‘I got interested in filmmaking mostly as a summer job,’ he says. While other teenagers may have been flipping burgers and jerking sodas when school got out, Jewison was serving as a grip on his father’s productions of Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) and Rollerball (1975). The experience seduced him away from pursuing the sciences to enrolling in film school at the University of Southern California.

After graduating, Jewison decided to come up to his father’s Canadian homeland looking for jobs, since U.S. union regulations restricted him to film loader status, whereas north of the 49th he could work as second assistant camera. His first such credit was on Porky’s (1981), and today he laughs at the notion of having contributed to the most successful Canuck production of all time.

‘The person who really believed in the project the whole time was the director, Bob Clark,’ Jewison recalls. ‘He never lost faith when we were on the set, sometimes saying ‘Omigod, is this rubbish or what?”

Jewison acknowledges that being his father’s son has opened some doors and also led directly to work. In fact, his promotion to first assistant camera came on his father’s 1985 film Agnes of God, which shot in Montreal and Toronto. That production was also a turning point in that it allowed him to work with Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist, director Ingmar Bergman’s longtime collaborator and a two-time Academy Award winner.

Nykvist called on Jewison again for The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988). The first assistant hoped to continue his ascent to camera operator with Nykvist, but the Swedish master preferred to work with more seasoned operators. So Jewison went on to man the camera on films including the 1989 Canuck flick My American Boyfriend before rejoining his mentor as operator on What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Sleepless in Seattle, Chaplin and his father’s Only You.

In the midst of his travels, Jewison fell in love in France and decided to carry on a transcontinental existence, until the idea of raising a family came along and he decided to make Paris his permanent home. His career continued to progress in Europe, and he made the jump to DOP with director Manuel Boursinhac on the features Un pur moment de rock’n roll (1999) and La Mentale (2002).

Now that The Statement is in the can (it filmed March 31 to June 18), Jewison is glad he took it on, characterizing the shoot as ‘smooth.’ Despite the out-of-the-ordinary relationship between director and DOP, he adds, the on-set dynamic unfolded professionally.

‘We had a respect for each other, and the result was that twinkle in the eye when we would see each other,’ he says.

The cameraman found it highly educational to once again witness his dad, the man who helmed In the Heat of the Night and Fiddler on the Roof, at work.

‘The interesting thing was to watch him blocking a scene and working with the actors, and he also knows where the camera should be in the first place,’ Jewison says. ‘There were never any big battles about where to put it. We had long conversations about perspective and from whose perspective things should be seen.’

In addition to the scope of the film, Jewison felt challenged by a short preproduction period and the film’s many locations, which involved six weeks in Paris and its environs and five weeks down in Marseille and Aix-en-Provence.

Part of his homework involved viewing Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, lensed by Pawel Edelman. In addition to both films’ European settings and related themes, they share the same screenwriter, Ronald Harwood. When the filmmakers were unsure about the perspective of a particular scene, they would consult Moore’s original book for reference.

The period of the film’s story – about a decade ago – was put across mostly through picture vehicles and set decoration, while Jewison concentrated on imbuing the sequences in the north and south of France with ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ looks, respectively. He had to keep this straight at all times, since some of the Paris scenes were actually shot in the south and vice versa.

The climate helped matters, as it so often doesn’t.

‘We had great weather when we were [in the south], although it was very hot,’ the lenser recalls. ‘But at least it was consistent. Inconsistent weather can be a cinematographer’s nightmare.’

An opening sequence in which the Brossard character rounds up Jews for execution in 1944 was shot in a naturalistic manner on black-and-white Eastman Double-X 5222 stock. Other references to Brossard’s past are made in the form of his own dreams, and these black-and-white scenes are put across with a more stylized hand. Meanwhile, the majority of the film was shot on Kodak Vision2 5218 500T color stock, which the cameraman chose over Kodak Vision 5279, which he had used previously.

‘On this film, I already had a lot of high contrast built into the images, so [the Vision2] was helping me to reduce the contrast a little bit. I was going basically filter-less,’ he says.

Jewison used both an Arriflex 535 B camera fitted with Cooke lenses and a Moviecam Compact. He initially wanted a Moviecam SL, but there was none available. The Compact proved handy, however, especially for shots inside tiny French cars from the early 1990s. The crew’s lens of choice, enabling them to cope with such cramped quarters, was a 32mm.

‘Thanks to my grip [Raphael Jourdan], we were able to get interesting shots inside a car on a bazooka [support], the camera completely stripped down,’ the DOP explains. ‘You couldn’t get the magazine out the window because, say, Michael Caine might be whispering or speaking very gently. So I couldn’t use a [small but noisy] Aaton camera and I couldn’t even put the windows down.’

The newest piece of gear he employed was an Arri Sky Panel, a soft daytime light that can substitute for a small window for interior shooting. (‘It’s great with women,’ he says.) The lenser notes that The Statement was the first film in France to get to try the prototype, supplied by Arri and a local rental house. The production also used 18K helium balloons for illuminating delicate locations such as a grand ballroom with gold column and trompe l’oeil decoration that could not be touched.

Despite his experiences as an operator, Jewison was happy to hand over those reins to Henri Fiks on the complex shoot. The cinematographer estimates that 80% of the film was shot on a dolly, with some incorporation of Steadicam and handheld work. He convinced his father to use the Steadicam on several occasions, to the point where the elder Jewison got used to it.

‘Once or twice he would say, ‘We’ll whip out the Steadicam,’ and we’d say, ‘Well, Norman, we don’t have a Steadicam here [today],” he recalls, laughing. ‘And so, after making mad phone calls in the early evenings to get a Steadicam down as fast as [possible]…’

Jewison is currently taking a breather while post-production on The Statement is underway at Deluxe Toronto. The film is skedded for release before the end of the year, with THINKFilm handling distribution in Canada.