Duane Hopwood was shot in a cold, subdued style.

Duane Hopwood follows a casino worker (played by David Schwimmer), down on his luck and his marriage. Directed by Matt Mulhern, the film is a portrait of man who is on the brink of completely destroying his life and how he recovers before it’s too late. Shot by Mauricio Rubinstein on Super 16mm with a digital intermediate, the film mimics a similar production model on a previous film Rubinstein shot, King of the Corner, also for Elevation Filmworks. Rubinstein, who has shot an array of formats over the years, including the new Sony XDCAM on the Sundance Film Fest selection Puccini For Beginners, took some time to talk to us about Duane Hopwood. The film is now playing in select U.S. theaters.

An Tran: Duane Hopwood was shot on Super 16. Was this already decided before you came on board?

Mauricio Rubinstein: When I joined the film, the format had already been decided. Before Duane Hopwood, I shot King of the Corner, which was with Lemore Syvan, the same producer and the same formula. The film would be shot on Super 16mm with a digital intermediate. I had done a DI on King of the Corner and also Casa de Los Babys. Since then, digital intermediates have been completely improved and developed. The producers wanted to shoot film. With the budgets they had, they knew they couldn’t afford 35mm and I think digital is not particularly a preference for this producer.

AT: What were you going for in terms of the film’s look and feel?

MR: The film takes place in Atlantic City during the winter.  We talked about what kind of person lived in Atlantic City and worked in a casino, who was technically divorced from his wife and children and had accepted the reality that he lives in. Basically, it had to look cold, damp and desolate -- very lacking in color and very gray. 

I was extremely interested in the lenses and the filters I would work with. I knew the emulsion well, so I knew what it could give. I also knew how I could go about in postproduction to sharpen the look I wanted to give.

I used Cooke S4 lenses and I used Mitchell A filter. I had done tests and seen a print of the test, which was shot on Super 16, printed on 16 and then projected. I was very pleased with the quality the diffusion filter was bringing to it. It’s a very soft look. It was a bit of a risk to apply diffusion for a print that was going to be blown-up to 35mm and go into a digital intermediate and so on. I think it worked very well for the atmosphere of the film.

I wanted to build contrast and a very soft edge between the different shapes. The focus is selective. There is a very shallow depth of field and most of it is shot at T2. I wanted to soften the look of the whole image, as if you are in a state of mind where you don’t see things very clearly. The main character does not have a very clear vision of his own reality. Only in the end does he start acquiring it and by then, the colors become more present. It goes from being cold, to a little bit warmer. Together, with the diffusion filter, instead of at 85, I used an 81 EF.

In situations like the interior of the casino, I wanted to portray it with a colorless feeling. There is a lot of color, but the color is subdued. The saturation is brought down. I wanted to portray the casino not from the perspective of a visitor, but from someone who actually exists in that atmosphere and he is not happy. There was no reason to portray it as a place where he would find refuge from his life.

AT: What film stocks did you use?

MR: I used 7218, 500 ASA from Kodak. I had used it on King of the Corner. I find it a very versatile and helpful stock. By making it the only stock I used, I wasn’t having it on top of the other things I had to deal with on the shoot like the tight schedule, low budget and miserable weather conditions. The fact that the film has a low grain, but it is not grainless – I really like that. It does not take away that feeling of structure that film has as opposed to digital. I think one of the worst things that people can do during a digital intermediate coming from film is to put too much grain reduction, so that everything becomes flat and textureless.

I find 7218 is an emulsion that responds in the digital intermediate to bringing saturation as well as draining color out of it. King of the Corner is very saturated and Duane Hopwood is very muted. The latitude of 7218 is amazing. You can nearly work without a light meter, make flat evaluations and you still have the information on the negative. By the time you go into digital intermediate, you can always go back.

Cinematographer Mauricio Rubinstein on the set of Puccini for Beginners

AT: How long was the shoot?

MR: The shoot was 21 days. We shot with two SR3 cameras for about 90% of the shoot, which withstood eternal nights out in the cold. They ran very silently in small situations, I never had any problems with the cameras. They were very reliable all the way through.

AT: Do you shoot differently when you know you’re going to a digital intermediate?

MR: First of all, you have to take a lot of care with your highlights. Even if you let your highlights burn and you have plenty of information there, basically everything is data whether you originated in digital or film. I’d rather balance my practicals and put my contrast and highlights into a range that is more in line with digital than it would be in line with film. I don’t want to come into the digital intermediate process and spend a lot of my time bringing down the levels of those lights, so you have to start doing Power Windows and acclimating those elements. If there’s movement you have to trace the movements. You’re giving away time where you could be doing more important improvements for touch-up to your work than what you end up putting off time on the set. When you know those things, when you know the levels, you start to shoot differently.

AT: Was Duane Hopwood shot in real locations?

MR: All of it was shot in real locations, in and around Atlantic City. We shot all of the casino scenes in a day-and-a-half. We shot on the edge of the casino that they had designated for us while the rest of the casino was in full swing. That was very helpful because obviously being a low-budget production, we didn’t have the money for extras to be in the shot. Angling the camera from afar and seeing all the movement from the real people who were actually at the casino in the background made it look very real.

I was shooting in the casino at levels of available light, just giving a little silhouette to my main characters from the back and the sides but keeping them at the same level so I could make use of those backgrounds. Otherwise my backgrounds would have been too dark. The level helped, so I often used the casino’s available light when I could.

AT: Did Super 16mm help with location shooting?

MR: Some of the locations were very cramped spaces where we had a large amount of people: the boom operator, dolly grip and the actor could barely move. If you start working with bigger cameras and needing to have wider lenses, it can become a problem.

When shooting exteriors and if you don’t have protection from bystanders who come over to watch – it’s always helpful to have a smaller camera. It grabs less attention. The moment they see a bigger camera, immediately they think there might be some movie stars, so they can be more nosy. Shooting 16mm does have its advantages. In any case, that was one of the reasons for us for shooting with Super 16mm.

Rubinstein often covered scenes with children using two cameras

AT: What kind of lights did you use?

MR: Basically, the shoot was done only with tungsten lights. The biggest lamps I had were two Ruby 7s. I had a couple of 5Ks, two 500W Fresnels and some Kino Flos. It was a very small package of lights. In general I don’t tend to use many lights. When you’re working at 500 ASA you don’t need that much power, even for night exteriors.  

AT: You mentioned shooting with two cameras.

MR: I worked mostly with two cameras covering different angles for scenes with the children. They were not professional actors and with every take they gave a different performance. This way it was helpful for us to move faster with a tight schedule because the schedules of the children were more restricted, and also to capture more of the spontaneity of their performances. This was one of the decisions why the producer Lemore Syvan wanted to shoot Super 16. For shooting with two cameras it could have been shot equally on 35 mm, but not in that amount of days, with that amount of locations, and with the restrictions we had in terms of children. 

AT: What do you think are the advantages of shooting Super 16mm?

MR: One of the main advantages of shooting Super 16mm is that you have enormous mobility. You have very light equipment and you can be shooting handheld, you can shoot on dollies, on sticks – moving locations and moving the camera is always very fast. You require less people on your crew as opposed to 35mm. You have the advantage of creating very selective focus and you can use 35mm lenses. Of course, it’s not 35mm but it approaches the look very closely to 35. You have a huge choice of emulsions. Specifically in the case of first-time directors or directors who want to take a lot of material to the editing room, you can run quite a lot of stock and not go over the top with your costs. I like the format a lot, I think the improvement in lenses, in the equipment and the emulsions, makes it a very cost-effective choice.

I think 16mm is very reliable, very versatile and very cost-effective and it can deliver great looks. The most important thing from my experience about making a decision about Super 16mm is knowing what you’re going to be doing in post-production. As simple as it sounds, there are very few people who really know how to go through a DI and deliver a print that really looks good. It’s important to shoot tests and run the test at the facility and make sure the process and results are to your total satisfaction.

An Tran