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Emmanuel Lubezki for Birdman

"The whole movie was thought-out to be shot, the way it is shot. It’s not something that happened posteriorly, it was how Alejandro wrote the movie. His other movies are very cutty, sometimes he uses multiple cameras. His movies are wonderful and beautiful, but he wanted to do something different with "Birdman."

I don’t think we could have done this movie a year or two years ago. The ALEXA camera and the ALEXA M especially, allowed me to do handheld for so long. The fact that you can record media for so many minutes and also that the video system gets an image that is so clear for the director…It allowed us to do the movie. Otherwise, I think it would have been probably close to impossible.

I wanted the movie to look as naturalistic as possible. We did not use movie lights. It’s all light bulbs. All the lights that you see in the set are the lights that are lighting the scene. These cameras allow us to do that because the dynamic range of the camera was able to capture the light bulb and the face of the actor without clipping. There is one scene where we used probably a 20K. It was outside a window in the stage to create the impression of daylight, but all the other lights are just lamps and practicals.

We did something that also can be scary; we combined a lot of color temperatures. For example, when Michael Keaton is walking in the theater hallways: sometimes we have two daylight fluorescents, then he would step into a greener environment and then into a tungsten environment. It made it more naturalistic and dirty. You think these great theaters are all glamorous, but when you go into the guts of some of these places, they are pretty rough, ugly, small, uncomfortable, smelly...We wanted to capture that."






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