1.3x Hawk65s deliver “best of both worlds”
Big Gold Brick is a darkly comedic feature film about an enigmatic middle-aged man who hires a fledgling writer to pen his biography. Genre-bending chaos ensues. The principals – writer-director Brian Petsos, actor Oscar Isaac and director of photography Daniel Katz – had previously worked together on several projects that predated Isaac’s burst into stardom with the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis. The cast also includes Megan Fox, Lucy Hale, Andy Garcia and Emory Cohen.
Katz is a New York-based Dublin native who came up through lighting. Both he and Petsos came to the project as long-time fans of anamorphic photography. But this time around, they chose to use a larger format, combining Hawk65 1.3x Anamorphic lenses, a Red camera with the Monstro VistaVision sensor, and an unusual 2.66 aspect ratio.
To design the visuals, Petsos and Katz took inspiration from a disparate array of sources that included Jacques Tati, Douglas Sirk, and Spike Jones films like Adaptation and Being John Malkovich.
“Brian left it up to me to figure out the through-line among all these films,” says Katz. “We spent a lot of time watching movies, looking at paintings and photographs and frame grabs, and philosophizing. Our previous work had sometimes been very geometric, symmetrical and tableau, but when everything is static, there’s an intrinsic quirk factor that can bring attention to itself as well.
“We wanted to move from that into a more large-format style – to play more with staging, choreography and sophisticated blocking. It’s not necessarily kinetic or crazy motion, but subtle movements like bringing actors to the camera. We wanted motivated camera movement to draw the audience in, utilizing the impact and awe factor of the big frame that we see in the large format films we love. We looked for frames with multiple cues and sight gags and various depth cues a la Toland in Citizen Kane or Tati in Playtime. We were really trying to use multiple focus planes in this film, partly because the format gave us that option.
When I’m looking at a film, I’m often watching for all the tension and contradictions,” says Katz. “I’m very interested in the inherent paradoxes, where you can find a bit of play that brings to light new ideas and new ways of seeing. It’s a good departure point for finding the key to the photographic vision.”
Katz had previously shot with Hawk 2x anamorphics on a number of projects. At the time he was prepping Big Gold Brick, the trend toward larger formats was still relatively nascent. David Goldsmith of Hawk Anamorphic LA provided a prototype set of five Hawk65 lenses before their official debut. (A full set of Hawk65s includes ten focal lengths.) He shot most of the film on the 60mm, the 80mm and the 95mm, and used the 40mm occasionally for wide shots.
Cinematographer Daniel Katz
The Hawk65s covers 41.95x21.6mm Monstro sensor, and the 1.3x squeeze factor delivered the 2.66:1 frame.
“I’ve grown to like the 1.3x squeeze,” Katz says. “I loved celluloid, and when everything went digital, I often leaned on 2x anamorphic because of the more impressionistic spatial rendering and bokeh, and the way the horizontal plane is rendered. That helped take the curse off of digital. Some of my favorite movies are spherical, but those are largely on celluloid. At first, I thought of the 1.3x as a lukewarm choice, neither here nor there. Maybe it’s my evolution as a cinematographer, but I eventually started to see 1.3x as the best of both worlds. There’s something to be said for the less pronounced spatial rendering, where you just get a hint of it. We can get a little bit of that impressionistic background and extravagant bokeh, but in terms of lens characteristics and aberrations, we had a fairly clean geometric image. So I’m a fan of the 1.3x squeeze and the Hawk65s.
“Brian and I are both very pleased with how it came out on Big Gold Brick,” he says. “When you’re prepping, you’re in the theoretical realm, the realm of art, and you go on intuition. But when you’re shooting, you’re exiting the philosophical arena, and a lot of that goes out the window. I hope that the choices we made fit seamlessly into the tapestry of the film, and marry the look with the story and the themes we’re trying to communicate.”
Katz used his Covid downtime to shoot two short films, one using Super 16 and Hawk V‑Lite16 Anamorphics, which also use a 1.3x squeeze to deliver a widescreen image using the smaller image area. That film, which he shot in Ireland, is based on a James Joyce short story. An Encounter took home awards for Best Short Film at both the Dublin International Film Festival and the Cork International Film Festival.
“The Hawk team was instrumental in making everything go smoothly,” says Katz. “They bent over backwards, and their service and professionalism were second to none. They never treated us as ‘merely’ a short film.”
Big Gold Brick was released on February 25th, 2022. See the trailer here.
images: Alisha Wetherill / Samuel Goldwyn Films / IMDb
