Limited series retells a legend of 1930s Hollywood
And They Came at Night – a.k.a. Y llegaron de noche – is a Mexico-based production built around a true-life Hollywood tale that has fascinated cinephiles for a century. To create the perfect blend of 1920s film history, comedy and silver-screen elegance, director of photography Alejo Chauvin, a native of Ecuador currently based in Mexico City, chose VantageOne4 spherical large format lenses. The close-focus capability of VantageOne4s was a major asset, along with their versatility depending on the stop – a distinguishing feature of the T1.4 Vantage One4s that offers a range of looks in each lens.
FLASHBACK: Dracula, the 1931 Bela Lugosi classic, is a landmark that helped create the horror genre. During the legendary shoot, after director Tod Browning and cinematographer Karl Freund, ASC wrapped each day, another cast and crew would shoot using the same costumes and sets, but with dialog in Spanish for the then-new talkies. Aficionados says that the resulting film, shot by another master, George Robinson, ASC, in some ways surpasses the English-language version in terms of filmmaking ingenuity, camera movement and visual richness. And They Came at Night recreates the story of this alternate, Spanish-language version of Dracula.
Over the course of seven episodes, and in collaboration with five different directors, Chauvin’s goal was to recreate the world of 1930 Universal Studios and Hollywood, seasoned with a lively sense of comedy and character. The plan was to shoot with ALEXA Mini LF with extensive Steadicam work.
“Our aesthetic concept was to capture the kinetic energy and rhythm of that nocturnal filmmaking process,” says Chauvin. “We wanted to evoke the period, but without ending up with a very vintage, glowing look. The texture and softness that the lenses gave us was important.
“The show is also about an American crew working in the day, with plenty of budget, and a Latin crew at night, with a grittier feeling,” he says. “The lenses gave us a way to express that on the screen. Shooting at 4.5 or so, with mostly LED lighting, gave us a cleaner characteristic, which worked for the more glamorous daytime crew. For the nighttime crew, we changed it up and shot closer to wide open, with old open faced tungsten lights that we basically rescued from the garbage. I wanted the feeling of a film set where outside the frame, light is flaring, hard to control and spilling everywhere, and that light is illuminating the crew. That combination gave us an ‘underground’ realism, with the dirtiness and the richness in the skin tones we were looking for, and rainbow flares that we loved.”
For occasional black and white imagery of the actual film images made by the two crews, rehoused vintage lenses were used on the Mini LF, which was normally set up to capture with a 4.5K LF 3:2 codec. The pace was brisk – usually about 15 to 18 pages a day.
“If you work with the One4s properly, their texture and artifacts help you create true beauty,” says Alejo. “As soon as you put the right lens on the camera, it’s like magic happens. And it was that way in the testing, too. You immediately have 60 or 70% of what you want to see. Everything starts to look the way you want to see it. You don’t have to work around the lens to get the look you want, and that allows us work more efficiently, too.”
And They Came at Night has gained popularity in a number of global markets and is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Vix and other outlets. It has been nominated for ten Premios Produ Awards, including Best Cinematography, and for Best Comedy Series in the 53rd International Emmy Awards.
Watch the trailer here.
