saint ex 2024

Saint-Exupéry

2024 | movie

DoP Claire Mathon, AFC

Director Pablo Aguero

Leitz lens SUMMICRON-C, LEITZ ZOOM

Production Companies Cheyenne Federation | StudioCanal | France 2 Cinéma | Frakas Productions | Radio Télévision Belge Francophone (RTBF) | Shelter Prod | VOD | BE TV | Single Man Productions | The Sound of Philadelphia Production Company | Dum Dum Films | Canal+ | France Télévisions | Ciné+ | Orange Cinéma Séries | SofiTVciné 11 | Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée (CNC) | Taxshelter. be | Tax Shelter du Gouvernement Fédéral Belge | Centre du Cinéma et de l'Audiovisuel de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles | Wallimage

Distribution Global Film | Shaw Organisation | StudioCanal | Top Film Distribution

Equipment Supplier Eye-Lite | Brussels

Country France

CLAIRE MATHON, A BOAT IN THE SKY

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In March 2023, a strike was in full swing in France, disrupting transport and complicating journeys. Claire Mathon, AFC, must travel every day from her home in Paris to the Bry-sur-Marne studios in the distant suburbs, where she is shooting Pablo Agüero's film Saint-Ex. She has therefore asked the production company - and this will be her only luxury - for a driver to get her there.

During this hour-long journey, she sees the sun rise and, for the first time in her life, enjoys the traffic jams that allow her to delay a little the moment when, every day for 47 days, she will enter the famous 1,000 m2 studio B5, from which she will not leave until nightfall.

Almost a year earlier, Claire Mathon had met the director Pablo Agüero, who had proposed this crazy project that had been rejected by others before her.

The 1930 story of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, then a young Aéropostale pilot in Argentina, who sets out in the middle of winter to find Henri Guillaumet, his best friend, who disappeared with his plane in the Andes. The story of an unbreakable friendship between two men who would meet a similar death in the Mediterranean Sea during the Second World War.

The cast is prestigious and international: Louis Garrel plays Saint-Exupéry, Vincent Cassel is Henri Guillaumet and Diane Krüger his wife.

“The idea is beautiful”, but it seems to her that, while making this film is more than exciting, it’s also likely to be extremely long and complex. Indeed, Saint-Ex is an adventure that will last almost two years.

Together with director Pablo Agüero, they will spend around two months in the summer of 2022, first in Patagonia, Argentina and then in Brittany, often accompanied by dronists. They will shoot the “first film”, that’s to say theplates that will be used to inlay the sky on the walls of the large studio in Bry-sur-Marne, in the center of which Saint-Exupéry's plane, the famous Potez 25A2, will be placed. At the time, it was the only aircraft capable of reaching altitudes of 7,000m to fly over the Andes.

In Patagonia, it's the southern winter, as the seasons are reversed to ours. They spend long hours shooting, from dawn to dusk, capturing dozens of sunrises and as many sunsets, reaching the mountain peaks after long journeys that sometimes involved snowshoeing through the snow. Rewarded by the infinite purity of the sky, Claire Mathon immerses herself in the images and unique atmosphere of the Andes, relying on her intimate memory to bring them back to her when the time is right.

She spends hours filming long still shots, and later accelerates the course of the clouds, observing that movement governs the sky; the path of the sun, the force of the wind and the air impart a constant speed to the elements, but also a random acceleration.

These moments of study and research together, in “faith and solitude,” were an opportunity to forge a friendship with the director.

Back in France, the preparation of the “second” film began with great enthusiasm. Pablo Agüero wants to “seize their freedom to shoot shots that will enchant them both.” It's a shared sense of wonder that will have to be sustained throughout the 47 days of filming, because while shooting with a small crew is often a honeymoon, the actual filming is more akin to married life, with all its pleasures and vicissitudes.

In September 2022, all the plates were entrusted to two young, passionate technicians, who assembled them according to the chronology of the story, cataloguing them and placing them in a library where they could be easily found by theme and by feature. Between them, they would be the “brains” of the VFX, which they would begin to create and invent with Pablo Agüero and Claire Mathon for each shot of the film. Preparations then begin for the shoot, which will take place six months later at the end of February 2023.

Claire Mathon and Pablo Agüero both had insights that would help steer the film in the right direction. First, Claire Mathon decided to use the color blue for the inlay background, rather than the usual green, which has a wavelength that only occurs in exceptional cases. As for the blue, it runs the risk of drooling on the reflective parts of the plane's body, but she accepts the principle as blue is the color of the sky. The other idea is to aim for maximum image sharpness, to reproduce the impression you get in the mountains, outdoors and in broad daylight. 

Moreover, Pablo Agüero felt that the atmosphere created by the clouds, mist, fog, rain, dust, sand, or snow would have to be added at a later date, and that shooting the film with the actors and the plane in the studio against a blue background with overlay of the plates was not the definitive film.

And in fact, during the preliminary studio tests, they realized that if the atmosphere was added live, overlaying would be more difficult. So, they decided to make very simple inlays, and to make them more complex afterwards.

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The atmosphere would be shot separately, on black and blue backgrounds, and then added afterwards. This is why, while the “second film” had not yet been shot, the “third film” was already taking shape: post-production, where all the layers that would make up the film's final image would be brought together and calibrated. A third stage that would last even longer than the previous two, leading Claire Mathon to the summer of 2024, when the calibration will be completed.

Right from the start of his work with Claire Mathon, Pablo Agüero suggested that, to help the whole team understand the directorial and visual intentions, he should have a model of the entire film made in 3D, showing the chronological succession of the chosen plates, the set elements and figurines representing the film's actors.

From the shoot in Patagonia, Claire Mathon brought back the idea that we can see infinite variations in the sky over the course of the day, from dawn to sunset, but that describing them to reproduce them is not enough, as the impressions attached to them can be similar even though the moment is not at all the same.

It's a thought she'd begun years before, when she was still a student at the Ecole Louis Lumière, whose final dissertation was entitled: “Intervening in natural light”!

Prior to this trip, she reread the book of her childhood, “The Little Prince”, written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in 1942, which has since become the world's best-selling book after the Bible.

It tells the story of an “extraordinary little man” who comes from a planet the size of a house, visits the surrounding planets and lands on planet Earth.

Inspired by this poetic journey, and to help her lighting technician Ernesto Giolitti and her first camera assistant Sarah Dubien understand the different states of the sky, Claire Mathon imagines several “planets” whose names are all related to observations and sensations experienced during the filming of the plates in the Andes:

Petite Princesse, Mer de Patagonie, Zonda, Montagne de Condors, Petit Berger.

For each of them, she painstakingly prepares a sheet with the technical correspondences between light and camera.

Shooting began on February 27, 2022. Saint-Exupéry's plane landed in the middle of an ocean of blue. The studio is immense, as are Claire Mathon's anxieties, solitude, and doubts.

Her final tests, which she almost didn't show to the production team, were a failure, apart from one rather pretty shot. And yet she's supposed to reassure everyone and make sublime images!

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On this first day of shooting, however, she understood something that will guide her. You mustn't choose a set that's too beautiful and self-sufficient, because then you can't see the actors. Instead, for each shot, you must ask yourself the question of the background and imagine the layers of material you'll need to add later to achieve the ideal result.

While director Pablo Aguëro isolates himself in front of his screen under a small black tent, the actors enter the stage and measure the difficulty of performing in front of blue walls and on an equally blue floor. Claire Mathon knows the actor Louis Garrel, who plays Saint-Exupéry and with whom she has already worked. His childlike, inventive side plays on these constraints, and he decides to ignore the technique, not to be a prisoner of it, and to throw himself joyfully into the adventure. He will be an invaluable ally.

Three weeks of pre-lighting were needed to equip the studio. Claire Mathon imagined a lighting system extending over all sides of the studio, representing the four cardinal points. Patagonia lies in the southern hemisphere of the globe. An observer's position is therefore reversed, and he sees the sun rise on his right (in the east) and set on his left (in the west), following a trajectory that is the opposite of the one we are used to in the northern hemisphere, that’s to say from left to right, as it passes through the north and not the south.

Three canvases, each 50 m2 in size, have been placed high up, representing east, west, and north, made of white cotton on either side of a 1.20m-wide strip of white silk, to provide directional light and recreate contrast. 50 spotlights have been placed behind each of the three canvases - 9KW maxibruts, SkyPanel and Vortex - while a fourth canvass, representing the south, will act solely as a reflector.

For the sun, a 20KW and a 10KW are each mounted on an independent crane, providing stronger or weaker light depending on the time of day, evening, or night. And as is customary in the studio, no HMI projectors at 5600K but only tungsten light at 3200K, with the corresponding color temperature displayed on the camera to obtain the desired colorimetric rendition, warmer with a higher color temperature and cooler with a lower color temperature.

Every morning, Claire Mathon tells Ernesto Giolitti, her gaffer, and Sarah Dubien, her first camera assistant, the day's “planet” that will inspire the type of light desired, the camera's color temperature and filtering. And every day is a new adventure in the sky.

Will they find themselves in the dead of winter on the cold, foggy, snow-white planet Petit Berger, or on the planet Zonda, named after the foehn wind, one of the hottest planets of all, depicting a sandstorm in the middle of the Sahara?

Once the planet has been chosen, the light set and the camera ready, the third and equally important parameter is the animation of the light. Saint-Exupéry's plane sits on the ground, very often motionless and fixed, but sometimes mounted on a gimbal that allows it to move on its axis. But to give the impression that it's moving forward, all the light must move around it to create the illusion of movement.

All the projectors are connected to a console that allows them to be moved on all axes by remote control. Software switches them on and off randomly, as if clouds were moving in front of the sun, to recreate the luminous impressions of a passenger on a plane. And the electricians also move shapes in front of the spotlights, or ripple sequined fabric to recreate ocean reflections.

This permanent movement of light is the exact opposite of the process imagined by the great American director Terrence Malik for his film Harvest of the Sky, where he had his main set built outdoors, installing it on jacks so that it could rotate following the path of the sun, never to be lit again. Because filmmakers sometimes like to turn themselves into demiurges...

The fuselage of Saint-Exupéry's plane is silver, which means a lot of unwanted light reflections for the inlay. Claire Mathon is constantly mattifying it to make the image as soft as possible, while maintaining contrast. She solves this squaring of the circle by using Leitz SUMMICRON-C optics, which she loves for their round flares, soft yet precise and brilliant rendering, and absence of aberrations with a very closed aperture.

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During testing, she realized that to keep some leeway for post-production of the “third film”, which would reveal the other two, she needed a soft image with maximum depth of field, including for close-ups.

To achieve this, she used Arri's Alexa 35 camera with a sensitivity of 2560 ISO, which often enabled her to shoot with an aperture of 8 or 11 for maximum sharpness, following in the footsteps of great cinematographers such as Philippe Rousselot, ASC, AFC and Jose Luis Alcaine, and completely bucking the current trend of working at full aperture, thus isolating the character at the center of the image and surrounding them with blur.

And contrary to the habit of the first camera assistants, and this since the advent of digital cameras, to focus on a distance from the camera, Sarah Dubien insisted on being permanently at Claire Mathon's side to exchange, discuss and compare views. She has even had a microphone installed on the camera, enabling her to talk to her from a distance. On Fridays, the eve of the weekend, it's “Radio Claire Mathon”, with jokes of all kinds, songs, and general fun. 

For in the great solitude of the studio, shooting the film is exhausting. Claire Mathon must constantly delve into her memories of the Andes, into her intimate memory, because for her, cinema is demanding: “It must invade us”. This credo is the only compass that gives her wings.

And, just as the Navy tradition demands that each passenger is responsible for only one person - his soul - whom he will try to save if the boat sinks, her close team feels invested with a mission of help and support, which they fulfill all the better because “Claire Mathon instills such a sense of sharing, of trust, that you want to help her, to take care of her.”

A film and an extraordinary adventure, together, like a boat in the sky.

 

Written by Ariane Damain Vergallo

Edited by Seth Emmons

 

Interview with: Claire Mathon, director of photography; Sarah Dubien, 1st camera assistant and Ernesto Giolitti, chief electrician.

 

Picture 1

Overview

DoP Claire Mathon

Lens used

Leitz Zoom 25 75mm horizontal right

SUMMICRON-C

Character

Premium prime lenses designed for larger sensors on film and television productions.

Summicron C 35mm horizontal right

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