Test d’objectifs avec le chef opérateur néerlandais Pawel Pogorzelski

All is not as it seems in Holland, Michigan, the eponymous setting of director Mimi Cave’s new feature. The movie stars Nicole Kidman as Nancy, a schoolteacher who begins to suspect her husband, Fred (played by Matthew Macfadyen), is harboring a dark secret, which her colleague Dave (Gael García Bernal) helps her investigate. Following her previous feature, Fresh, Cave again teamed with cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski, who in turn called on his longtime collaborators at Panavision for comprehensive support with his lens and camera package.

In the weeks preceding Holland’s release, Pogorzelski was in Los Angeles on a location scout and stopped by Panavision Woodland Hills to catch up with two of those key collaborators: his customer rep, marketing executive Mike Carter, and his point of contact with Panavision’s Special Optics team, lens manager Brian Mills. The three sat down for a conversation moderated by Panavision’s Jon Witmer, diving deep into Pogorzelski’s preproduction testing process. 

For Holland, Pogorzelski tested a variety of cameras — including large-format digital options as well as 2-perf 35mm film — and a wide assortment of Panavision’s proprietary lenses. As the following conversation details, the cinematographer ultimately decided to pair Panavision’s very first series of taking lenses, the APO Panatar 1.25x prism anamorphic primes, with the then-brand-new Arri Alexa 35 camera; complementing the prism anamorphics, Pogorzelski also carried Ultra Panatar 1.3x anamorphics and H Series spherical primes.

Finding the Look

Jon Witmer: Had you tested the APO Panatars, the prism anamorphics, before?

Pawel Pogorzelski: No, this was the first time they were brought out. Mike Carter brought these giant boxes out. I was like, ‘Oh my god, what’s this?’ And then I looked at these lenses, and they were beautiful.

Mike Carter: You were liking the 1.3-squeeze Ultra Panatars, so we said, 'Okay, since you're feeling the vibe of these lenses, we have their older brothers in the back, the old prism lenses.' Immediately you wanted to test them, and then in the theater Mimi really liked the look of the prism lenses over everything else.

Pogorzelski: Even in post, we were like, ‘Do not touch what that lens did. It’s perfect. Color the rest to that lens, please.’

Witmer: Do you remember how Mimi described Holland in your first conversations about the project?

Pogorzelski: Oh man, I was really hoping these two guys would be talking. As Brian can attest, I don’t even remember what lenses I shot my movies on. That’s why I have to test everything again, just because I don’t remember.

Brian Mills: It’s Memento every time.

Carter: He’ll say, ‘I need to see Primo Artistes,’ and I’ll say, ‘You shot Midsommar on those. You know what that looks like.’

Pogorzelski: But I have that movie in mind. I don’t know how the Artistes would look now with a different approach for this movie. And for Midsommar, we mostly shot outside, so I did very little testing inside. So every movie, the testing will differ. I have to see the Artistes again for this movie.

Witmer: Brian and Mike, what do you remember from your early conversations with Pawel about Holland?

Mills: I remember you saying that you wanted deep saturation, and you sent me some Kodachrome references. The first direction we took was to try to find you some modern lenses with coatings that would give you that deep saturation, but then the softness of the prism lenses won the battle. 

Pogorzelski: They’re soft, but they’re sharp at the same time. Wherever the focus fell was so sharp — the eyes were amazing, but then the skin was so soft.

Mills: They also have a lack of distortion. The Ultra Panatars have a little bit of field curvature, but you were using the sweet spot in the center of the lens [with the Alexa 35 sensor], so you probably didn’t see much of that distortion.

Carter:  You’ve changed cameras often, from project to project, which is interesting.

Pogorzelski: You know what, I just thought about this now. When I started doing photography, when I was 18 or 19, we were shooting black-and-white, and the teacher told us, ‘Start with one film stock, like [Kodak] 400TX, and shoot that, and when you get really comfortable with shooting it and developing it and printing it on one paper, then you begin to explore.’ But I shot one roll, and I said, ‘Wait, what is this 1600? Let me see. What is it pushed one stop? Oh my god, it looks great! What is this 50?’ And I never got to know the 400TX.

Mills: [Laughs.] So this is just hardwired into you, right from the beginning.

Pogorzelski: Honestly, it’s really about the lenses. With the right LUT, it could be any camera. But it can’t be just any lens. The lens is the character.

Custom Solutions 

Witmer: Were you using the Ultra Panatars for the additional focal lengths that aren’t available with the prisms?

Pogorzelski: Yeah. We had three focal lengths of the prisms: 57m, 75mm and 104mm.

Carter: Did you also use the Ultra Panatars for handheld?

Pogorzelski: No, we used the prisms whenever those focal lengths were needed, even on handheld and Steadicam and remote head. The only exception was a few times we had to be closer to an actor, because there’s no diopter for the prisms. Our operator, Jarrett Morgan, also loved the look of the prisms, and he said, ‘Throw them on the Steadicam, wherever.’

Witmer: What T-stop were you using with the prisms? 

Mills: The 57mm is a T3.5, the 75mm is a T2.8, and the and the 104mm is a T3.0.

Pogorzelski: So I was probably around T2.8½ most of the time.

Witmer: In addition to the prisms and the Ultra Panatars, did you also have some H Series lenses? 

Pogorzelski: Yes, we did, for the Frazier [Lens System], for shots of the miniatures. In the movie, the dad is building a miniature with his son, so we had a giant miniature half the size of this table. [Ed. note: This conversation took place at a 16-seat conference table.] We tested a bunch of lenses, and the H Series were the ones that matched the prisms best for the Frazier.

Mills: We made an adaptor for the Frazier so you could use the Hs. We also made a convertible bayonet to turn a 35mm Ultra Panatar into a 28mm.

Pogorzelski: Right, we could take it on and off to make the lens wider. You also made special eyebrows we could use on the prism lenses with a clip-on mattebox. We used that on remote head, on Steadicam — it was fantastic.

Witmer: Were there any modifications that needed to be made across the Ultra Panatars or H Series to help them match the prisms?

Mills: We did modify the UPs a bit to match the softness of the prism lenses. The Hs are natively pretty soft lenses, which made a good companion.

You also had a request for a POV shot of someone who has a watery eye, like after putting in eye drops. We made an attachment that went in front of the lens that had a liquid in it to simulate that POV through an eyeball.

Pogorzelski: There was another shot where we have a big crane move combined with a tilt-shift effect. It starts with the tilt-shift so the actors look like miniatures, and then we undo the tilt-shift effect as the camera cranes down.

Mills: Yeah, because that was on a crane, you had to be able to remote-actuate the lens to bring it into focus from the slant angle. So we put a motor and a transmission unit on an existing 45mm Slant Focus lens, which we also widened to be a 32mm. 

Pogorzelski: Making movies and making magic is about waiting for something spectacular. When that lens arrived, it was like, ‘Here we go.’

Exhaustive Testing

Witmer: Getting back to your lens testing process, what are the actual tests you’re conducting?

Mills: Pawel’s got the most entertaining testing process I’ve been a part of. He gets a variety of lights, textures in the backgrounds, colors.

Pogorzelski: I usually have costumes and production design bring stuff that they want to test. If the movie has a lot of interiors, I’ll have practical lamps. I’ll test for day interior, day exterior, night interior, night exterior — I try to do all of that.

Carter: There’s camera movement, panning, tilting, the stand-in is doing something, there’s multiple lighting gags. There’ll be LED flashlights, old-school flashlights, Christmas lights. It takes a couple prep techs and Pawel and other people to do everything.

Pogorzelski: It’s like a dance. It’s because lenses have characteristics on the edges, they have different flares you want to see, you want to move the camera so you see how the focus racks, does it breathe? I learned that early on. I would do a test and only look at the actor’s face, and then I’d go and shoot the movie, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, this focus breathes,’ or, ‘I don’t like how this looks on the edges.’ This dance makes me test as much of the lens as possible.

Mills: For the amount of lenses and cameras you test, it’s almost an assembly line. Turn this light on, turn this light off, move the camera this way, pan right, pan left, next.

Carter: The poor stand-in for your last one. He had to say, ‘Hi there, how you doing,’ probably 7,000 times. 

Pogorzelski: I was tired of it as well.

Carter: You said it back to him!

Pogorzelski: Of course, because I have to be polite, right? It’s exhausting. I’m so tired after those 8 hours. It’s not even 12 or 14 hours of shooting, but it’s like, ‘Did I do everything right? Did I forget something?’

Carter: I think you’re homing in on what you need to see with each job. You’re getting faster narrowing it down. Now you can put something on the camera and know within 30 seconds if it’s not right for the job.

Pogorzelski: I always used to ask for different non-Panavision lenses too, and I stopped doing that because I think the way you capture faces with Panavision lenses is unique. There’s a three-dimensionality where all the other lenses feel flat. There is, to me, a significant difference. It pops, like, ‘Oh, that’s a special lens.’

I've noticed that this whole process saves us a week in post, because we've created the look and we know we're not going to veer away from it. So in post, we're not looking for the look, we're just coloring the movie.

Carter: Do you have to sell production on that with your tests, like, ‘Give me this time now, and I promise it will be made up on the back end’?

Pogorzelski: I think now it’s easier, but it’s always been something I wanted to do, and when I was doing it on smaller movies, I would do it off payroll, pay for the stand-in myself. It’s always been an essential part of my process. It’s not something I’m not going to do.

From left: Mike Carter, Pawel Pogorzelski, an APO Panatar 1.25x prism anamorphic lens (beneath a photo of the late Tak Miyagishima) and Brian Mills at Panavision's Woodland Hills headquarters.

An Evolving Collaboration

Witmer: Brian and Mike, at this point, when Pawel calls up with a new project, you have a sense of what you’re in for, but that wasn’t always the case. What were your first collaborations like, and how did the relationship grow into what it is now? 

Pogorzelski: Start with Mike Carter, who got me as a client by accident.

Carter: I did. You came in with a friend of yours, another cinematographer, for a test, and I think his rep just happened to be out that day, so I was watching over you guys, and then you had a commercial the next week.

Pogorzelski: Mike Carter kept giving me a chance. And Brian, on Hereditary, he modified lenses for me. I had a relationship with Panavision, and we did the same tests, and we modified lenses. Hereditary was the first time we did that, and then we did the same thing on Midsommar.

Because of this relationship, Brian is always one of my first calls. He asks what this movie will look like, and I'm like, 'Jeez, Brian, I have no idea, I just started the project.' But I need to send him something so he can look for lenses, so that's a great inspiration for me - I have to look for inspiration for Brian. Then I send what I find to the director and ask if it's a good starting point for the movie, and when they say yes, then I send it to Brian. And Brian narrows down the lenses, like, 'I think this and this and this could work for you.'

Mills: The early collaborative effort is hugely beneficial because it gives me time to process Pawel’s vision. I might then have a couple weeks to let the ideas mull around and talk to the rest of the Special Optics team and get their input as we home-in on the right recipe.

On the first couple movies, it took some time to understand how much you wanted to push the envelope. I think in the beginning I probably played it a little safe with the modifications that we made to lenses, whereas now I'll kind of go all the way to the extreme and show you that version, which is almost always closer to what you're looking for than if I were to baby-step my way towards the look. So that's sped up the process because now I know to go full throttle, and we can pull it back from there. 

Pogorzelski: It’s so cool to be able to make these adjustments — you can actually bring the project to life here. I don’t know what other place would send their lens tech to go watch tests at the post house on a day he’s working. It’s so cool that Brian was able to do that. For me, it was important that we all work together for this look.

Mills: We get so much of our inspiration from the cinematographers who are prompting us to push the boundaries and come up with interesting ideas, things that we haven’t thought of. It’s a collaborative effort. It’s the work that we do with cinematographers that inspires us to develop interesting products.

Pogorzelski: There are so many lenses to choose from, and I’m sure there are so many more in the vaults that Mike Carter can bring out for my next film. This vault seems infinite. Let’s keep looking.

Frame grabs courtesy of Prime.