Maelstrom is by no means your average film. For starters, the Max Films production is narrated by fish on the butcher’s block.

The movie, which opened the Perspective Canada series at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, tells the story of Bibiane (Marie-Josee Croze), a superficially successful young woman whose life spirals out of control when in short order she has an abortion, her business fails and she drunkenly kills a man in a hit-and-run.

Montreal-based cinematographer Andre Turpin explains he and director Denis Villeneuve, with whom he collaborated on 1998’s Un 32 Aout sur terre (August 32nd On Earth), sought an appropriate look for the film’s downbeat opening – a look not often found in Quebec cinema.

‘We don’t have a big expertise at the labs here to work with this trend of texture that’s been going on for seven or eight years with films like The City of Lost Children, Delicatessen and Seven [all lensed by Darius Khondji],’ says Turpin. ‘This expertise existed in Montreal when we had the nfb lab, but that’s gone. We found a texture in one shot in the Wong Kar-Wai film Happy Together, and we had this guru who worked at the nfb lab come in and we asked him, ‘How the hell can we get this?’ ‘

The kind of texture to which Turpin refers is a distinctly cold, silvery look. After getting input from the nfb ‘guru,’ the filmmakers embarked on hours of testing. They eventually cracked the procedure, part of which calls for printing on special internegative stock, which causes color saturation, the greys to go green and the ‘cold’ look. They also employed a processing method whereby instead of using regular interpositive stock for their intermediate printing master, they used their final copy, which produced a lot of contrast. This meant that while shooting Turpin had to use special camera filters and light accordingly, as the contrast reduced the film latitude to two or three stops.

Turpin admits the filmmakers had some initial reservations about the technique.

‘It was a big gamble for us to do this pronounced look, because we wanted it to underline the story, not go against or upstage it,’ he says. ‘It was a touchy decision, because we are presenting a character who is not at all sympathetic at the beginning of the film. All she does is screw up everything, and she’s selfish. We were scared that giving it a very contrasty look, very dark and grainy, would make her even more unsympathetic. It’s very cold – the white has no detail, and it’s very blue and green. There’s sort of an objective look about it. This created a distance, and we were scared of pushing it too far and losing the character’s power of identification with the viewer.’

The next technical decision the filmmakers had to make was on film stock, and they ended up choosing Fuji. Those who went to film school in the 1980s and ’90s might recall the adage ‘the color on the box is the color of the film’ – in other words, Kodak gives a warmyellow hue, Fuji a colder green.

Turpin says with the availability last year of new Fuji stocks, the two brands have actually become quite comparable. He shot Maelstrom on 35mm Fuji F-250D stock for daylight interiors and exteriors and F-500 for night scenes, especially exteriors.

‘We tested the process with Kodak and Fuji, and frankly there wasn’t a big difference,’ he recounts, adding that Fuji merely offered a better price. ‘It’s more the process that gives the special ‘cold look,’ and of course art direction creates a lot. We knew our process was going to saturate the colors – red would come up extremely saturated and warm – and could have made it a very warm film.

‘The principle cue to Sylvain Gingras, the art director, was to get all the red, yellow and purple out of the streets where we were shooting and out of the sets. The real colors of the film come from selecting the color of clothing and of her apartment. We would paint in cold colors always. Lighting was also very cold.’

The biggest scene for Turpin to light was a nighttime exterior in which Bibiane tries to push her bmw – the murderous weapon – off a ledge into a river. Turpin used mercury lamps usually found at construction sites or on highways to create pools of light down the steep wall on which Bibiane is positioned, illuminating the car and giving the viewer a sense of depth. 12K hmis and 6K Par lamps scattered about provided key, back and fill lighting. The particulars of the film’s look called for a very basic scheme.

‘Because of the texture I was using, I couldn’t be very subtle,’ Turpin admits. ‘It was a new type of experience for me, because in the last five or 10 years I’ve been trying to get more subtle with lighting, going into little details and shadows. Here I had to either light one-and-a-half stops over or not light at all, because everything would go dark. It’s more like 1940s or ’50s lighting, where you either light the character’s face or keep them in the dark because it’s so contrasty. For this scene we needed a lot of hardware to just strike up everything and get any detail at all.’

Villeneuve set about to make a film to shake people up, and to that end he insisted most shots be handheld. Even in those instances when the camera had to be on a tripod, the crew would often place a sandbag on the tripod, and put the camera on the sandbag to maintain a jerky quality. Because Turpin had to carry the camera around much of the time, the production opted for the lightweight sl model from Austrian manufacturer Moviecam.

Turpin used mostly Zeiss prime lenses, and for the numerous long lens shots, a Canon 400mm lens, with a doubler when necessary. To his chagrin, Villeneuve originally wanted to shoot the entire film on a 25mm lens.

‘He said it had a certain roundness to it and he liked that lens a lot,’ Turpin recalls. ‘I was a bit scared, because I don’t like it at all. We experimented for a day or two, using this lens to do handheld. He wanted the handheld stuff to be rough, not Steadicam-like, and we tried it and it was okay, but then on the third day we tried it with a long lens, and when he saw the rushes Denis said, ‘That’s it, this film is going to be shot with a long lens,’ and we would almost always put the camera as far as possible from the subject.’

A director in his own right (he brought his debut feature, Zigrail, to tiff in 1995), Turpin is currently halfway through helming the feature J’ai un Crabe dans la Tete, which he also wrote. The film is being produced through Quatre par Quatre Productions, the Montreal-based commercial house where Turpin has been a director of photography for a couple of years.

‘It’s about the desire to be loved and the incapacity of saying no,’ he says of the film. ‘It’s the story of one character who is so scared of being judged that his way out is to seduce everybody. He falls in love with everybody and has everybody falling in love with him. It has a lot of very dramatic moments, but there’s also a lot of comedy in it, almost like burlesque. It really swings in tone.’

It might seem as though a director/dop would have the urge to direct every film he lenses, but Turpin says in his case it isn’t so.

‘I really prefer to bend to the director’s vision,’ he says. ‘When the director has a strong vision, I try to listen and understand that vision and try to technically help them achieve it.’

Maelstrom is distributed through Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm in Quebec and Odeon Films elsewhere in Canada. *