Left to right - Marc Van Agten (Fujifilm), Andrew Commis and Simon Murphy (Fujifilm) at the 2010 Australian Cinematographers Society National Awards
The phone call to set up a meeting came completely out of the blue for cinematographer & NZCS member Andrew Commis ACS. He hadn’t heard of the project, but the director had seen his work on a short film called Nature’s Way.
“I think in her mind she basically decided I was the guy,” says Commis, “I flew in not really thinking much of it, because I had been in this situation before. On half a dozen films I’d run second to a more experienced DP because I hadn’t shot a feature film before and it was too much of a risk.
“But the director was adamant, and once they met me it worked out pretty well from that point on.”
The director was Rachel Ward, the project was Beautiful Kate, and the award that Commis picked up as a result, was the prestigious Milli 2010 Australian Cinematographer of the Year award.
Originally inspired by his Adelaide high school photography teacher, Commis worked his way into the camera department, becoming a cinematographer after graduating with a masters degree from AFTRS in 1999. His work on Beautiful Kate was recognised when the film was nominated for ten AFI Awards, including Best Film and Best Cinematography, and nine Film Critics Circle of Australia Awards, including Best Film and Best Cinematography.
As well as the Milli award Commis received the IF Award for Best Cinematography, and from the ACS, the Golden Tripod for Best Feature Film.
Even though it was his first feature Commis earned the respect of the director.
“Rachel gave me so much trust and so much rope I could have hung myself a couple of times over,” smiles Commis.
“But I also knew that she didn’t want the classic Australiana thing that you’ve seen a million times. Nor did she want a kind of play-by-the-rules thing. She wanted me to bring something unusual and unique to it and push the story telling. It was a kind of dream. I had 35mm production, a crew, a budget, a really dense drama to work with, and the encouragement to go make it work on screen.
“It was Rachel’s first feature film as well. She was a very experienced actress in a former life and had made a half hour film but never a feature. Both of us knew we could never be over-prepared.
“We pretty much spent a month just going through every scene. I came along with my bits of cardboard and wooden figures and we worked it out.”
Commis explains that because Ward had also adapted the novel and she had a strong sense of the narrative arc.
“We were able to work out details without being totally prescriptive to the actors. We created the spaces. Pretty much all the interiors except of the kitchen are sets, so during that month of story boarding we almost designed the house at the same time; we gave it a logic.
“We shot for a total of 32 days with only two and bit weeks on location. It was very tight and we tried to make a seamless transition between when we were on location and when we were on set.
“Not much of what we shot got cut out. We put all our eggs into the basket & to a large degree we knew what we wanted so we really fought for those things,” Commis recalls.
“Technically, we shot 3-perf super 35mm. We used very old Zeiss superspeeds on purpose. I really liked the fact that these lenses just didn’t resolve, they weren’t super sharp. I didnt want it to look particularly modern or of a time, I wanted it to feel like it was film you saw in the 70s or something like that.”
The movie is set on a homestead in a forbidding outback landscape and the shoot included both day and night exterior sequences.
Commis left the exteriors predominately dark. “I didn’t want you to see everything” and that went for the interiors as well.
“I wanted a sense of heat and tension coming from that heat. It’s just too hot, people kind of lose their threads,” explains Commis.
“Metaphorically you are dealing with things like people not quite finding the truth. They search for it in the shadows, in the dark.”
The film entwines past and present narratives as Ned Kendall (Ben Mendelsohn) looks back to his teenage years and the events which unfolded around his twin sister, Beautiful Kate (Sophie Lowe).
“Pretty much my first conversation with the director was how we were going to represent memory,” says Commis.
“We had to weave in all the flashbacks and the past story. There is so much of it that we had to try and find a way to do it seamlessly and at the same time differentiate it.
“I had this idea of using shift/tilt lenses. My interpretation of memory was that it should be kind of selective & you shouldn’t see everything in detail. When you think of things in your memory it is in sort of fragments so I did a test very early on to show Rachel what it looked like, and that became our device.
“We represented the past as very alive. We shot it all hand-held, very direct POVs to camera, whereas the present was much more stagnant, much more composed, things were lifeless.
“I wanted it to feel like nothing had really changed; it was just the interpretation of events. Apart from the art department and design of things being more dilapidated I wanted the feel of things not really changing too much in 20 years – that’s nothing.”
The film was enjoyed by members of the New Zealand Cinematographers Society in early July thanks to a screening and Q&A session with Andrew Commis sponsored by Fujifilm, the film’s stock supplier.
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