The D Train, the Jack Black/James Marsden comedy will be rolling into theaters on May 8, 2015. WH Bourne of Louisiana Film and Video Magazine and VizWorld.com had the opportunity to catch up with cinematographer Giles Nuttgens who gave us the inside scoop of the film which premiered at Sundance Film Festival this past January.
The film, directed by Jarred Paul and Andrew Mogel, is about Dan Landsman (Jack Black) who has never been the cool guy. That’s all about to change if he can convince Oliver Lawless (Marsden), the most popular guy from his high school who’s now the star of a national Banana Boat ad campaign, to show up with him to their class reunion. A man on a mission, Dan travels from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles and spins a web of lies to recruit Lawless. But he gets more than he bargains for as the unpredictable Lawless proceeds to take over his home, career, and entire life.
Gilles Nuttgens
“This guy comes from nowhere’s ville and the most exciting thing in his life is this high school reunion,” says Nuttgens. “We were neither in Pittsburgh or Los Angeles, and New Orleans doesn’t look like Pittsburgh or Los Angeles. That’s one of the interesting things in the movie industry in the States at the moment. With the incentive program, it’s often challenging for people to create. I just finished a film in Atlanta which was supposed to be Seattle. There’s a lot of sun in Atlanta, and it just creates a different space.”
“Obviously on D Train, a lot of the movie happens inside Jack’s house; once inside his house you’re reliant on the designer to create something that’s appropriate on a socio-cultural sense but also in terms of the type of place you would find in a small town or on the edge of Pittsburgh,” says Nuttgens. “And I think I need to mention that Ethan Tobman, the production designer, had a very strong idea on how to separate the two elements (Los Angeles and Pittsburgh). His ideas were not so much about knocking it down to very specific places, but to bring an aesthetic, almost a period feel, of how a guy like this would have decorated his home, a guy without a wife, a guy with a few weaknesses … you know it’s Jack Black, and he plays that character.”
“Ethan was very good at showing how a style should be laid down; I know that people use this word ‘Retro’ a lot but in terms of the use, of the busyness and the colors we chose for the wallpaper within the house,” explains Nuttgens, “the slightly muted colors, the colors for each different space in the house, was really fantastic. Ethan had a style in his head that he really wanted to stick to, and what it enabled us to do was to create a lighting plan that was efficient which was important because we had to shoot quite fast; it also complimented the type of work he was doing so I was never put in a position of having to oppose anything that he had done because he had great design.”
“It was a small house with small windows,” continues Nuttgens, “and a lot happens at night so with the exception of one or two scenes, everything was reasonably muted with the lighting; it was a mixture of a certain amount of daylight coming in and a certain amount of practical lights on during the day because it’s one of those houses that never really tends to get light. I think we had only one scene that actually used some really hard light coming through some Flemish glass which was very beautiful, but it was a very specific moment in the film where Jack was almost on his way out of the door and off to Los Angeles. We wanted to indicate that he was going somewhere else, somewhere different.”
Restaurant Scene from “THE D TRAIN”
“I think our biggest challenge was trying to create Los Angeles in New Orleans which was basically hotels and a restaurant scene,” says Nuttgens. “For the big restaurant scene, Ethan spent a lot of time trying to sell this place to both me and the directors, and I was like, ‘This can’t be Los Angeles’; however, when Ethan actually did the redecoration of the interior, by using really bright colors and a lot of vegetation, he managed to put us in a space which allowed me flexibility to introduce hard light which would indicate the Los Angeles sun. And I would say that was the biggest challenge of the film.”
“When we turned up to shoot the scene, it was pouring with rain. It was literally black outside, and it was 10:00 AM in the morning. It was almost impossible to expose that. And then, partly because of the nature of the Alexa, by changing the ASA rating, we were able to take the top end off so we were able to burn out the outside and shoot wide open. I think I even shot the wide shot spherical so I could shoot it even wider to make it look like it was a burning Los Angeles sun outside, but I think the introduction of hard light combined with white, hot surfaces that Ethan had supplied us with, meant that it was actually capable of fooling people that it was Los Angeles. I do believe that was probably the biggest challenge to try and create on a very dull day, a place that had enough energy and enough power, and to imagine that there was a very bright world outside. We really didn’t have that issue when we were shooting inside Jack Black’s flat,” explains Nuttgens.
“I used an Alexa Studio for this film which is basically a film camera with a digital back on it. “The Alexa for me is the closest thing you can get to film, and I grew up in a film world,” says Nuttgens. “It’s getting harder and harder to push a project through on film. Every time I go to shoot a film, the directors will say, ‘Well, I like the look of this film or that film,’ and I’ll say, ‘Yeah, talk to Kodak about it.’ Arriflex came up with this fantastic camera that doesn’t force you to learn some new technology. They tried to make it as simple and as familiar as possible for those experienced with shooting on film.”
“A lot of the better DPs in this country use the Alexa including Roger Deakins (Shawshank Redemption, Skyfall) because it does create an image that’s fairly close to film,” explains Nuttgens. “It does have a very good top end; it’s very pleasant with how it deals with the brighter parts of the frame. The roll off into the whites is very gentle on the Alexa, and that’s a thing that’s very pleasing for those who have come up in film; whereas, there’s a lot of other digital cameras that hit the top end and hit it hard.”
“Shooting anamorphic digitally was very nice for me because I’ve shot a lot of anamorphic on film. The one other project I had shot on the Alexa was shot spherical. When I came up for the interview for D Train, I was expecting everyone to take the standard it’s comedy, shoot 1:185 … and the directors weren’t interested in that. They wanted to produce something that was slightly different. I suppose there are a lot of people now shooting1:235 so I did some very simple tests for them (the directors) on what you could achieve with a spherical master prime and what you can achieve with a V-lite, the Hawk anamorphic,” continues Nuttgens. “I thought the directors would like the very sharp, hard edged, clean spherical look, but to my great surprise, when we put it up on the big screen, they just looked at me and said, ‘There’s absolutely no question about it, we’re shooting with anamorphics.’ They wanted to get away from this very hard-edged, clear, everything-in- your-face comedy so when those images came up, they just loved it.
“I tend to use the edges of the frame a lot, and on anamorphics that’s quite difficult in the sense that it’s never as sharp as the center. I found that working the lenses quite hard, not wide open but at 2.8, and using the edge of the frame, it just took the digital edge off the images,” says Nuttgens. “When projected with 2K on a screen, it looked really fantastic. It’s sort of like film, but cleaner and sharper and certainly in many ways better technically, but it’s also very appealing. It started the whole process off in a great direction because the three of us, the two directors and I, thought we could do something pictorially interesting with this film… It was a nice start for collaboration.”
“The first time I worked with a directing team, it was a bit strange because there was work the two of them were doing that I would normally do with the director like analysis of mise-en-scène and camera placement … A lot of that happens with two directors and then extends to me; so in a way, it has slightly different implications. Now, after working with two different directing teams, I almost don’t understand how you can just work with one director because when you get two directors working together, you realize they’re checking each other all the time. You know that all directors say that the loneliest place in the world is being a director,” adds Nuttgens. “With both of those two groups of people (directing teams) that I’ve worked with, the reliance of one on the other is so massive and the comprehension of what they’re trying to achieve … They both head in the same direction because it’s like the same mind that’s thinking …The great thing about Jarred Paul and Andrew Mogel is that they really do it (direct) equally. The one who is really quiet all morning will be forceful in the afternoon. And the great thing is that you can’t pull the wool over anyone’s eyes because you have two people checking each other all the time and also checking you.”
“Jack’s a magnificent actor, and you’re in a lucky place when you’re working with Jack and James Marsden. Kathryn Hahn was fantastic as well,” says Nuttgens. “Because the directors knew what they wanted, because the original intention was so clear, and the intonation that was needed in order to achieve that was known, it was just such a pleasure to watch, and it meant that stuff could all happen simultaneously to the three of us deciding exactly how we wanted the mise-en-scène to come about. We were actually very specific in the breakdowns during prep about when to move the camera, when the camera was static, when was it hand-held, when we would cross a specific line in a scene, and how long were the gaps between cuts. We had a very short prep time, but we just went through every single scene, found a way we thought was interesting and appropriate to view it, and then tried to figure out the rhythms that were in that scene. There was a certain amount of evolution of that on the set, but in most cases what we actually planned was followed through.”
“I would say that the one set that was most problematic for us was one that we knew was always going to get out of control. That was the scene with Jack at James Marsden’s flat in Los Angeles … Unfortunately when we got to this scene, it was our last day and everyone was tired. There was a massive electrical storm and the generator flooded … Because we were delayed, we had to shoot into the night even though it was a day scene. It was the one day we went into overtime, and I mean serious overtime,” explains Nuttgens. “I think it was two o’clock in the morning and that’s when we were going to ask Jack to do the most difficult scene in the film. And Jack was like, ‘I can’t believe you did this to me right at the very end.’ The ability to deal with the sensitivity of the situation and turn it into a comedy situation was a big challenge for the guys (Jarred and Andrew) to actually carry off, and it was also a huge challenge for James and Jack to carry off … so ultimately what I did was to defer to what they actors were feeling and to accommodate what they could do as fast as possible because we were going to burn out. We did one take and it was so funny. It had all of those elements of pain, nervousness, and sensibility but also humor. I was there focused on Jack’s face, hand-held, and I couldn’t stop laughing. And of course it was two or three in the morning … and Jack was like ‘Look even Giles is laughing.’”
“21 days of the shoot were in Louisiana,” says Nuttgens. “There was a 2nd unit that was a single day shooting in California which I wasn’t available for because I was already onto another picture. Essentially, it was two guys getting drunk … going through very specific places on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. At the same time, they also shot the commercial on the beach, the Banana Boat commercial, with James Marsden.”
“We did the DI last summer. In terms of the DI, it was very straight forward and fast, like 40 hours or something. It went fast because we actually stuck to what we had initially shot. We had very little variation. Beyond balancing the daylight exteriors, we didn’t do very much windowing; in other words, we didn’t try to pull people out and drop the backgrounds back. We just left it where it was. It was very rare when we pulled out faces and pushed the background back. I know a lot of people tend to do this, but we felt like Ethan had done such a great job. We just wanted to feel Jack’s house around him, the type of person he was, the type of limited life that he had in this small town,” explains Nuttgens.
“Two things we did do in the DI were that we made the Banana Boat commercial very warm and golden since it was an exterior beach thing; the L.A. nightclub, which was shot in the center of New Orleans, we made much darker than what we actually shot. Los Angeles has those dark bars where you almost can’t see anybody, and we just wanted to give it that feeling. We shot it with a lot of practical lights,” continues Nuttgens. “Those were the only two things.”
The cafeteria scene, from “The D Train”
“We pretty much shot everything the way it ended up in the film. That was great because I’m a big fan of shooting something the way it’s going to look in the end as opposed to going back and giving something a look (altering in post). I never really understood that process. I’m like, ‘If you want to give it a look, do it in the lighting. Make the decisions before you actually go in there instead of making the decisions later on.’ When people add on layers, whether they are colored layers or contrast layers,” explains Nuttgens, “or they do very specific things like burning whites or making the blacks very hard, I think they change the nature of the film so much that I wonder why didn’t they make it that way in the first place? Unless you really don’t know what you’re going for or you haven’t been given the proper amount of prep time, some people will apply the lut, but that’s now how I like to do it. I like to say, ‘This is what it looks like, this is what it will look like while shooting, and this is what it will look like at the end when we are done.’”
“We had to film on a very dull day. On film, that would have been a real challenge. By shooting spherical on the wide shoots until the sun came up, it really helped the directors believe that we were in Los Angeles … In the defense of digital, that is one of the great things about it,” says Nuttgens. “If you can actually create the mood and emotion on a monitor, the directors can see it and feel what they want to feel. They can feel like they’re going in the right direction, and the actors can also feel like they’re going in the right direction. I’m a big believer of letting the actors feel the actual space that they’re in. I try to keep as many lights off the set and try not to cover things all in black so that it changes everything into a different space. I think it’s very important for the actors to be able to feel the environment and feeling that the environment is very appropriate. I think it was great for them to be able to look at the monitor and say, ‘Yeah, that looks like it was shot in Los Angeles’, and feel comfortable during the whole scene.”
“The weirdest thing is that some of the scenes that were extremely simple had a real power … These were scenes that you just wanted to flow … All the scenes that happen in the places in the school such as the toilet where he meets one of the other guys, all these places that could be extremely boring and extremely flat, I got really nice modeling on the two actors and further back, we lit the back room in blue; it changed the nature of that space. It takes a very dreary boy’s toilet and turns it into something very different which is sort of surprising but not out of place. And I think when you’ve achieved something over and above banality while staying within reality, it’s very, very rewarding for me … For example, there’s a scene in the school cafeteria where Jack is having a bit of a meltdown. I think we shot that on the first day or very close to the first day. The things that excite me are not the big, obvious streaks of warm (Vittorio) Storaro (Apocalypse Now, Reds, Last Emperor) type lighting, but actually when you go into a really normal place and you can provide really nice modeling, a certain amount of contrast on people, and still retain the feeling that it could possibly be in a cafeteria,” explains Nuttgens.
“So the thing for me is learning more about the Alexa to see how it can look as much like film or even better,” adds Nuttgens, a statement that is really indicative of his love for cinematography and his dedication to his craft. Be sure to check out his work on The D Train on May 8, 2015.
(All photos courtesy of of IFC Films)
