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| FEATURE FILM |
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Dan Laustsen views Dina's debut
Danish Director of Photography Dan Laustsen is shooting the English-speaking period film I Am Dina on Kjerringøy, a small remote island near the north polar circle in Norway and he's giving it a dark, atmospheric image. But it's mid-summer in this region and daylight lasts for twenty-four hours a day every day, with only a very low sunset to signify night. So how's he doing it?
"I wanted to make a period melodrama with a darker look, so I'm not going in the usual direction where the oceans and skies are blue and the forest is green," explains Laustsen. "For the summer night sequences, we're playing it as low sunset with some very grey overcast skies. Although the story is set in 1860, I'm giving it a more modern atmosphere and a look that's a little bit dirty. I'm taking some colours out in the digital scanning and making it darker; although it's nice to have a big picture postcard view of the beautiful landscape, this is a cast-led movie and I'm concentrating on atmosphere and good action."
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 From the left: Grip Assistant Line Dybwad-Olsen (girl with cap), Dolly Grip Bo Lundgren (blue t-shirt), Key Grip Morten Magnussen, DP Dan Laustsen, Focus-Puller Nicolay Poulsson (white sweater), Clapper-Loader Kristoffer Aamot and Video Assist Operator Lasse Gretland. |
But how did Laustsen shoot the two or three dark night location sequences in I Am Dina? At the very beginning of shooting in March, prior to the eight-week studio shoots in Oslo, he and the crew spent a few days filming on Kjerringøy. It was winter then, and the nights -and days - were very dark.
I Am Dina is based on Dinas Bok (Dina's Book), the first part of a trilogy, written in 1989 by popular Norwegian poet and novelist Herbjørg Wassmo. Dina (played by Marie Bonnevie) is a headstrong young woman who was unwittingly responsible for her mother's horrible death. She grows up without love or comfort and finds her own unconventional ways of handling her life. She enters recklessly into marriage with Jacob (Gérard Depardieu) but her own death wish affects her chances of a fulfilling life.
Although it's midsummer, the weather in this very mountainous part of northern Norway has been unpredictable, to say the least. "It's so tough for shooting because the climate is constantly changing. The clouds hang very low and everything is grey-blue, blue and brown - the scenery is amazing," says Laustsen. "We've often had the four seasons in one day. We were in the middle of a big sequence with Gérard Depardieu and it started to snow. It's really rough, so I need to be able to change the film stock frequently because often the light is varying by two or three stops every five minutes; it's really jumping up and down." Laustsen is actively using a twelve-metre crane with hot head and Steadicam, because he wants a moving camera image for the film. Despite the elements, and thanks to a weather cover, filming is on schedule. "It really is an issue for a period movie. We have a big machine to run - a large cast, costumes, hair and makeup - so we can't improvise, we have to keep to time," he says.
"We're scanning the Super 35mm negative digitally because we're going to release it in anamorphic format, just like my last movie, La Pacte des Loups. We'll shoot it out on 2K and print onto Kodak Vision Premier film to get even more black in the blacks and a very high contrast. It's much easier to change colours too, much of the blue in the mountain shots, for example, will be taken out. The post-production team can also lay and match the visual effects during the scan. In my opinion, when you're going digital you need all the sharpness you can get from the beginning and that's the reason I'm not using any soft effects filters, just the usual 85 and 85ES filters." Rushes have been flown in every other day and Laustsen is able to view them with a portable ARRIflex projector.
His ARRI 435 and 535B cameras are fitted with new size Ultraprime lenses (16mm - 135mm) and he's carrying a set of Hawk zooms. "I don't think it's good to have too much depth of field when shooting outdoors, so I'm trying to film as wide open as possible - around f3.5," he says. Eastman EXR 100T (5248) and Kodak Vision 200T (5274) films comprise Laustsen's daylight stock, with Kodak Vision 500T (5279) film for all the interiors and night shoots. "These three stocks match together so perfectly and I can switch them when I'm experiencing exposure problems shooting outdoors. I'm very pleased with the results."
I Am Dina is believed to be the most expensive film ever made in the Nordic countries. It is a Scandinavian, German and French co-production and is supported by The Norwegian, Danish and Swedish Film Institutes, The Nordic Film & TV Fund, Filmstiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen and EURIMAGES. It will go on general release in spring 2002.
Data File
I Am Dina
Producers - Per Holst, Axel Helgeland
Executive Producers - Erik Crone, Frank Hübner, Gerhard Schmidt, Eric Altmayer, Nicolas Altmayer
Director - Ole Bornedal
Director of Photography - Dan Laustsen
Focus-Puller - Nicolay Poulsson
Clapper-Loader - Kristoffer Aamot
Screenplay - Ole Bornedal, Jonas Cornell
Egmont-owned Dina Production, for Nordisk Film (Denmark), Northern Lights (Norway), Felicia Film (Sweden), ApolloMedia (Germany), Gemini Film (Germany) and Mandarin Film (France).
Dan Laustsen
Laustsen trained at the National Film School of Denmark and made his first feature film at twenty-five years of age. He has been a Director of Photography for twenty-five years and is based in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Recent credits include:
FILM & TELEVISION -
La Pacte des Loups (Brotherhood of the Wolf), Running Free, Heart of Light, Mimic, Nightwatch, The Miracle in Valby (Best Cinematography, Danish Film Academy Award Winner), Emma's Shadow (Best Cinematography, Danish Film Academy Award Winner) and Thunderbirds (Best Cinematography, Danish Film Academy Award Winner)
COMMERCIALS -
Filmnet, Stimoral Gum, Volvo, Kildemoes and Carlsberg Beer
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