DOP Notes
Rebelle: A Congolese Tale in Incredible Colour
Rebelle: A Congolese Tale in Incredible Colour
by Nicolas Bolduc csc
In the spring of 2011, Nicolas Bolduc csc travelled from Montreal to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to shoot Kim Nguyen's latest feature Rebelle, a drama about teenagers fighting with a rebel army. Bolduc had worked with Nguyen before, lensing his 2010 film La cité. Other films Bolduc has shot include Le banquet (2008) and Denis Villeneuve's short film Next Floor.
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In the spring of 2011, Nicolas Bolduc csc travelled from Montreal to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to shoot Kim Nguyen’s latest featureRebelle, a drama about teenagers fighting with a rebel army. Bolduc had worked with Nguyen before, lensing his 2010 film La cité.
Other films Bolduc has shot include Le banquet (2008) and Denis Villeneuve’s short film Next Floor.
THE APPROACH
The Congolese way of life has an energy that director Kim Nguyen wanted to capture. He had visited Kenya, Burundi, Cameroon and Rwanda before choosing the Democratic Republic of the Congo. From Montreal I couldn’t quite understand the choice from a cinematographer’s standpoint. The pictures Kim had showed me after finding the first locations were so alien to me that I couldn’t even imagine shooting in a country so vast, chaotic and unfriendly. I couldn’t see the film. But Kim had felt something over there and it was difficult for him to explain what it was. Realism was the most important part of our work on the film, and the challenge was trying to capture the magic that transcends everyday life there.
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As the plane approached the capital, Kinshasa, I could see thousands of grey metal rooftops stretched out as far as the eye can see, all scattered between trees like sprouts of broccoli. Abandoned, rust-coloured planes -- some no more than 10 years old -- sat on the runway, looted and gutted. I stepped out of the airport to a bustling crowd of taxi drivers, Congolese families, and people who were obvious airport pickpockets. It all was very chaotic and made me a bit uneasy. There was the smell of dust, smoke and burning plastic in the air, and the humidity mixed everything up into a salty tropical cocktail. Even accompanied by a security officer, the stories I had heard of corruption, violence and war obviously came to mind as we walked through the dark open-air parking. We drove for more than an hour toward the city on a six-lane boulevard with no street lamps, in a black cloud of dust and burning diesel. In the smog the slow traffic was lit only by the car headlights, and there were thousands of people everywhere. Some children were selling the traditional plastic bags of water to motorists. Others sold car carpets, cloths, toys or anything they could find to make a dollar. It seemed like a hell of a mess. The chauffeur leaned over and locked my door as I was texting my girlfriend about what I saw. The light of the phone in the dark could be seen from far away, he said. A minute later, a kid appeared from nowhere and fiddled at the door latch to go for the phone.
Not even an hour in Congo and my idea of the film we were going to shoot wasn’t clear, but I crossed off any classic storytelling, moody lighting and over-organized schedules serving complex camera work and machinery! All that was completely out of the question. Kim's approach seemed perfect for this place.
SHOOTING
When I was prepping La cité with Kim in 2008, we flirted with the idea of shooting it digital. In Tunisia, shooting in the desert with the dust-filled air, the washed out skies, and knowing that we were going to shoot with a lot of available light, including torches, well, there just was no compromise. Nothing could beat 35 mm. For Rebelle, we were going in a similar direction, lots of handheld with tons of natural light, but it was a more realistic tale that had to feel almost like a documentary. On top of that, there were some night scenes, and I didn’t want any of that classic "moon lighting" or any lighting, for that matter, that could feel artificial. So I didn’t even try to avoid digital, and just thinking of getting film in and out of the Congo was a logistical nightmare!
I tested the many digital formats available before the shoot, and I fell in love with the ALEXA in a flash. It was light, versatile, and I could pick it up with one hand and throw it on my shoulder for an improvised shot. The cards held 14 minutes of footage, and some takes would actually fill up the card. Sometimes during a very long take, so as not to break the actors' bubble, I would drop the camera on a thigh and my assistant would quietly reload in 10 seconds in the midst of the action. What an evolution! And the digital eyepiece was so bright and so precise that I could adjust the aperture by eye on the fly. It even gave any milky sky contrasted with dark black skin the depth I could filter and colour time as easily as with film.
There is no "culture" as we know it in Kinshasa. No theatre, no cinemas, no museums. But there are thousands of artists waiting to be pushed in the right direction. They don’t have the means to create, but the raw talent is quite remarkable. The kids Kim cast for the film lived on the streets. They had no parents and no education. They couldn’t even read or write, but their energy was astounding and genuine. Since they couldn’t read the script, the dialogue was improvised, and given that they weren’t trained actors, we shot the film in continuity to give them a sense of the complete story. Page one was day one of principal photography, and Kim took it one day at a time, feeding them information gradually. They were living the film as we went through the pages, and so was I. I woke up every morning without knowing what was to come, or how to shoot it. How rare is that in this business?
On set we would discuss the plan of action, and I would usually give myself a 300-degree radius workspace so I could pan and hop around the actors with Eric Bensoussan my first AC, and François Péloquin the boom operator. The set was always prepped to be shot from any angle. We would never rehearse because I feared we would miss the best action, and Kim wanted to keep the spontaneity in the acting. If we had to shoot something more than once, I became self-conscious, and the camera work didn’t feel as natural, as improvised, as documentary. If I knew too much what was going to happen, the feeling was lost. If we were loosing spontaneity, I would quickly tell Kim that I’d do something different in the next take. I would change the framing dramatically, back up quickly or get really close in the action. This was a game I loved to play with Eric the focus puller, who never got a chance to take a single mark on the whole film! When I would improvise suddenly, he was fantastic at picking up the pace and – I don’t know how – never got crosschecked. Except one time, on the second day of shooting, in a village plagued by cholera in real life, Eric was running madly at my side, and we were zigzagging between fake rebels shooting their way through a village. I felt him trip and fall and roll in a heap of garbage and torn metal. He got up dazed and unharmed, but he admitted that his judo years had come back to save his ass. The shot was in focus till he dropped. That’s a truly devoted professional.
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On La cité the desert light had a soft, round texture, almost too perfect for photography. The February skies brought tons of dust and sand-pumped clouds that would reflect the sun like the biggest unbleached bounce I could ever dream of. Sometimes when the sun was out, I only had a difference of a single stop on the light meter between shadow and light. It was quite incredible. Kinshasa, on the other hand, is south of the equator, and July is their winter. During the two months I was there, the clouds were very low and thin and they felt wet. My Western instinct was constantly telling me it was going to rain, but it never did in two months. Not a single drop. The skies were milky, soft and terribly polluted. Three hours before the sun would set, it became an orange orb in the sky, as if it were setting. There was something very apocalyptic about it. The city itself has 8 million people packed in a cloud of diesel and humidity with open-air sewers and burning waste on the street.
To go as natural as possible, the simpler I built a lighting and camera package the more liberty I had and the more I could be in the actors' physical bubble. Kim and I always wanted to be close to Rachel Mwanza – who plays the lead Komona – with a 32 or a 40 mm, and this was quite challenging from the start because if there’s something insane to non-actors it's those three bumbling fools who are jumping around them every time they hear, "Action!" The actors had to get used to me and accept my presence, and they could never be intimidated by me, never wait for me, never redo a take because of me and never think I was anything other than part of what they had to do.
For the lenses, I opted for the Ultra-Primes because they’re sharp as hell, but also because they’re lighter than the Cookes for handheld. Furthermore, in wide-open mode the Ultras don’t have that strange circular flare effect like the Cookes do. Then I got the new SHAPE handheld grips that are made in Montreal, and they made an incredible difference for the camera work. While framing, I could adjust the handles with a quick click of a button and modify the configuration of my hands to almost anywhere around the lenses and follow focus. This was truly a major step for holding longer takes.
For the lighting package, while intentionally shooting in a 300-degree radius, large bleached bounces were often of no use, and HMI lights during the day were out of the question. In the jungle, there’s nothing I hate more than feeling the shadow of an HMI, bounced or not. I didn’t want to "feel" any light, and I was often so close with a 40 mm that I would have had problems with shadows anyways. But mostly – since I got so close to the actors, and their skin is so dark – I avoided the square bounce effect in the eyes of the actors. That felt phony and staged. Black actors have fantastic reflective skin to film, and the light, be it natural or artificial, just envelops their faces elegantly. Trying to light them artificially so that it seems natural isn’t as simple as with Caucasians, I find.
The only times we lit with HMI were for those rare day interior scenes, and I used the 1.8 ARRIs that are very powerful and that can be plugged into a wall. I would then bounce the light on an existing surface so the eye of the actor would reflect the set and not a white artificial surface. We also had a couple of small tungsten lights in the truck, some 650s, 300s and peppers that we used for the night shots, but I rarely used them, preferring normal sockets with bulbs that I could actually put in the shot or just throw on the ground like they would have done in real life.
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One scene in the film that I’m quite fond of is the rebel camp scene at night. We were shooting at an old palace that Mobutu Sese Seko – the crazy dictator that ruled the country for more than 30 years - had built in the 1980s. The palace was inspired by a visit he made to China where he had been so fascinated by the Imperial Palace that he flew in 200 Chinese architects and painters and built a Chinese palace with a view on the Congo River. The insane buildings and ponds - where he would throw unwanted guests in the basin with the crocodiles - were now an abandoned concrete ruin, inhabited by thousands of bats. Our rebel camp, set in the old crocodile basin, was the biggest set of the film. The night scene was a victorious rebel party thrown by the leader to congratulate the soldiers on a successful assault. On the menu: an improvised soccer game, musicians, dancing, food grills on wood fires, the works. Rebel sentinels surveyed the camp, and actors roamed the scene participating in the celebration.
I was thinking if real rebels were having a party in this exact spot, how would they have lit the place with the little they had? So to remain authentic to our approach, I wanted to light the set, not the actors, and still be able to shoot 300 degrees. I asked our incredible set designer Emmanuel Fréchette to hang bare neons on the walls here and there and have a couple of wooden stands lying around on the set where I could suspend some clear household bulbs. We also built real wood fires everywhere, and I had the art department get the rebel vehicles' headlights pointing in the direction of the soccer game. That way, the camera was always getting a light in the frame at any moment or a violent flare. Even the main palace building in the background was lit simply with a double 4-foot neon thrown on the ground. The effect was amazing and the ALEXA was getting it all with so little light. We threw in a little smoke to get some silhouettes, and I put the camera on my shoulder. We did two improvised 14-minute takes of the whole scene without any rehearsals. I jumped around the kids playing soccer, I ran between them to catch some of the actors in the melee, I shot the sentinels guarding the citadel, I got wide shots and close-ups of the musicians, others eating, dancing, laughing, whatever I saw that could be cool. In two long takes, the scene could never be more natural. No one knew where I would be going next, and it kept the actors and extras in the moment and the team on their toes. In this case, the realism of the lighting was more important than the classic physical beauty of it. And it came out great.
Films are not shot in Kinshasa, or anywhere in the Congo, for that matter. The reasons are of course political, and that is why hundreds of United Nations trucks patrol the city. The armed rebels are outside the city, thank God, but when the sun sets in Kinshasa, it’s to each his own. The under-lit streets are very dangerous and no one goes out at night without a chauffeur, locked inside an SUV. Gangs of kids – the chégué - are hidden in shadows. These are just street kids with no families, trying to make a dollar. They have no guns because they’re too expensive, but knives and machetes are common.
In the script, there were a lot of night scenes, but they were almost all changed to day scenes because of the dangers of shooting night. We needed more guards and more police protection, but because of the corruption we couldn’t even trust the police.
This is why this film for me was not just a film; it had much more meaning than anything I’ve shot. Upon my return, my impressions of Kinshasa are a never-ending palette of colours, lights and shadows that stayed printed on my retina for months. Just can't wait to shoot like that again.
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