Peter Rosenfeld is reaping the rewards of Canada’s current production boom. The Toronto-based Steadicam/camera operator is presently in the position where he can turn down Hollywood ‘a’ projects which, in different times, would have seemed like opportunities of a lifetime.

Films he has recently said ‘yes’ to include Warner Bros.’ Get Carter, a remake of the 1971 u.k.-produced Michael Caine gangster yarn, which shot in Vancouver with Sylvester Stallone, and Angel Eyes, Warner’s story of tortured love starring Jennifer Lopez, which filmed in Toronto this past spring and summer. Rosenfeld is currently working on John Q, a hostage drama shooting in northern Toronto with Denzel Washington and Anne Heche.

Although Hollywood productions venturing north of the border bring the principal talent with them, their crews are virtually all Canadian. Many dops, however, actually hail from overseas, as the American cinema seeks to incorporate a more exotic flavor in the style of its movies, exemplified by the fact that Angel Eyes and John Q are both lensed by Europeans: Poland’s Piotr Sobocinski and the Netherlands’ Rogier Stoffers, respectively.

In such cases, a culture clash can occur, as with Stoffers, who is best known for his work on the critically acclaimed 1997 Dutch film Character.

‘He was telling me he generally does his own operating,’ Rosenfeld recounts. ‘For him this is a big American movie – shot in Canada but working in the American style – and he’s frustrated by the conventions.’

Rosenfeld has had to adjust to different dops’ particular working methods. Sobocinski, who shot the Hollywood thriller Ransom and was nominated for an Academy Award for the Euro copro Three Colors: Red (1994), might be more familiar with the American style, but in certain areas he retains a ‘European’ sensibility.

Rosenfeld illustrates: ‘Here I think the tendency is to let things go – ‘Uh oh, I’ve got two hours to shoot this scene, so let’s make the close-ups really beautiful, but the big wide master, we may have to let that go.’ But Piotr won’t cut those corners, and as a result, his films look quite amazing.’

Rosenfeld can recall at least a couple of shots Sobocinski asked him to do that were unlike anything he had ever done before. These ‘signature shots’ lend the project, slated for a 2001 release, its distinct visual style. One of the shots is a recurring 360-degree pan.

‘We did one in [actor] Jim Caviezel’s character’s apartment, where he lives this very hermit-like existence,’ the cameraman explains. ‘The camera finds him sitting against a post and then starts to pan off. It shows the whole apartment, 360 degrees, and you see it’s basically empty – maybe a couple of dishes, no furniture – and when it comes back to where he was, it’s empty. He’s thought of something and gone off, and we cut to the next scene.’

New digital remote heads can store a shot’s movement for easy replication. But when you factor in the unpredictable nature of an actor’s movement, it meant Rosenfeld’s brain had to do the job of the memory chip.

‘I own a remote head that I use sometimes in this type of situation,’ he explains. ‘We were toying with the idea of recording the shot digitally so that we could actually reproduce the same speed, but eventually it came down to me remembering. It wouldn’t have been practical because the frame would be slightly different anyway.’

And he speaks Mandarin, too

Rosenfeld was born in Montreal, and his love for film developed making Super 8 films at Vanier College. He credits the golden glow of the 1978 film Days of Heaven, shot by Nestor Almendros, as his inspiration for wanting to be a cinematographer. The spectacular tracking shots executed by Garrett Brown and Ted Churchill in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) made him want to become a Steadicam operator.

Working for the cbc later sent Rosenfeld to China to lens documentaries. He won a Gemini Award in 1992 for cinematography and was nominated for a 1993 CSC Award for documentary cinematography for Return to the Killing Fields.

Although it is standard for a North American Steadicam operator to own his own gear, in China it was virtually unheard of circa 1994. That’s when director Zhang Yimou hired Rosenfeld to do the Steadicam work on his feature Shanghai Triad. The overall look of the film amazed worldwide audiences, and Triad received an Oscar nomination for cinematography.

Rosenfeld pretty well cornered the Chinese market on Steadicam shooting, and proceeded to lend his services to such noteworthy projects as Temptress Moon, directed by Chen Kaige. Since his return to Canada, Rosenfeld has decided to focus mostly on Steadicam and operating work, and occasionally acts as lighting cameraman.

‘I dp modest productions, like Bravo!fact and music videos,’ he explains. ‘I was more driven to be a dop 10 years ago than I am now, because every year that goes by, I get more opportunities as a camera operator, and I love that work. It would be hard to turn your back on that and start over trying to pick up second unit [cinematographer] work on some tv series.’

Rosenfeld also gets a kick out of working on some of the most prestigious shoots in town, where one project leads to another. Explaining how he got the John Q gig, he says, ‘The producer knows Piotr, and he was [my reference].’

Working on these types of productions also means collaborating with the top technicians in town. Just now everybody is booked, but luckily for Sobocinski and the Angel Eyes producers shooting began in May, before the Toronto summer production frenzy was on.

‘Piotr had one of the top two grip teams in the city, and the same goes for his gaffer, electric crews and art department,’ Rosenfeld points out. ‘[Productions like that] can attract all the best people. The shows that are suffering are the episodic programs and mows that don’t pay as much. As soon as more experienced tv crew members want to take on something with better pay and more prestige, they leave.’

Having shot recently in both Vancouver and Toronto, the cameraman says the West Coast has a major advantage in luring Hollywood productions in addition to its proximity to Los Angeles, and that is its studio infrastructure.

‘We don’t really have a studio space like Lions Gate Studios here in Toronto,’ he says. ‘That’s a full-on deal. When you’re dealing with a show that involves a lot of special effects, a lot of green screen and a lot of stunts that have to be green screened, you need space. You’ve got to have the height.’

Neither Rosenfeld nor Sobocinski felt compromised, however, when shooting Angel Eyes’ interiors at Cinespace Studios Marine Terminal 28. Of course the film, about a policewoman (Lopez) and a man with a personal tragedy (Caviezel) whose lives become fatefully intertwined, is not an effects bonanza, but rather a personal drama.

‘The stages we built there could have been built almost anywhere,’ Rosenfeld says. ‘It wasn’t as demanding. Our stages there consisted entirely of building Jennifer’s apartment and Jim’s apartment.’

John Q is also limited in scope, and thus easy to accommodate.

‘The production found some sort of factory – a huge building with offices and warehouse space, which they converted into a stage,’ he explains. ‘They built the emergency room set, which is where most of the movie takes place.’

As high as times are for film crews right now, Rosenfeld has been around the business long enough to know that what goes up must come down.

‘This is a cyclical industry,’ he says. ‘I think it’s wrong to assume it’s going to stay at this kind of hyper-active level for the foreseeable future. There will be a downturn eventually, and it could come for several different reasons. It doesn’t have to just be the currency. It could be labor strikes or the government tinkering with tax credits. Everything has to be in sync or the whole thing stops.’ *