GREAT CINEMATOGRAPHY
Chernobyl, Sky Atlantic/HBO
The atomic monster “We couldn’t just light the scene to tell the story – it had to have a meaning and reflect the real people and the gravity of the circumstances. “When we were scouting in Kiev, I came across this mural [The Blacksmiths of Modernity] and it gave me an idea. How do we portray the radioactivity, this invisible threat? Chernobyl isn’t a horror film, but the race against the radioactivity became represented by the rays of the sun. You see the star in the mural, the atom that becomes energy, and the star is the new God. We wanted the sun to come across as a threat and the radioactivity to be more present. Throughout the film, the sun becomes ever more present. At the start, you see how the sun has entered the apartment like The Fog in the horror film. “When they confront the reactive core on the
roof, the most dangerous place of the planet, it’s very over-exposed. We had a purpose, a reason why we wanted it to look like this. Why is the light hard on him here? It’s like this because he’s dying. You feel the presence of something foreboding. Earlier we had the flicker from the fluorescents. After this catastrophe, the elements are not as
IT WAS NOT JUST ABOUT RECREATING THE SOVIET UNION AT A GIVEN TIME
they seem. Nature has collapsed, reflected in a mutation in the light. “The courtroom scene towards the end was originally recorded by Soviet cameramen and so we had a reference point from which we could mimic the real footage. When you see the stills from the
trial, you can see the film units and the hard lights they used. We thought we can light it the way it had been lit for real, and it perfectly matched our earlier vision and our aesthetics. We had four cameras recording the scene as if we’d taken the place of the Soviet cameraman. And within that reality, with the climax of the speech and the reimagining of the explosion, we have the sun fading in through the curtains at the end. “Originally, we were going to shoot with anamorphic lenses and look through the mechanical eye of the Soviet Union and to feel the glass between the viewer and the camera to give the project weight. But then we realised it was not just about recreating the Soviet Union at a given time but about getting closer to the characters – to be more intimate, to be more humanistic. To be more Humanity of Man.”
Special Supplement Spring 2021
televisual.com
30
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