Front Page > World > Article Title/Fixture Title

Front Page > Entertainment

Email | Print | Subscribe

Click-2-Listen

advertisement

Media Room

---

Robert Elswit is a busy guy. While directors rarely make more than one film a year, cinematographers are often responsible for two or more. If you're Mr. Elswit, both might get Oscar nominations for best picture — he was the director of photography for "There Will Be Blood" and "Michael Clayton." Now he's filming "Duplicity," Tony Gilroy's follow-up to "Michael Clayton," but instead of kicking back on his day off, he's spending it talking to reporters, promoting the DVD release of There Will Be Blood (Paramount, $34.99 two-disc, $29.99 single-disc).

What's more, the genial 57-year-old sounds more than happy to do it. He loves talking about his work.

Mr. Elswit won the Oscar this year for his work on "Blood," but he says he's more proud of the fact he was DP on two best-picture nominees. He was happy to win, of course, but adds: "The nomination, as everyone is tired of hearing and saying, is the big thing."

It was his first win but second nomination, after 2005's "Good Night, and Good Luck."

"Blood" also earned its star an Oscar. Daniel Day-Lewis astonished audiences as Daniel Plainview, an oilman in turn-of-the-century California. The two-disc edition has a slide show of vintage photographs selected by writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson and set to a startling modernist score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood. Mr. Elswit says such photographs did help to create the film's dark atmosphere, but he adds, "It was more an amalgam of other movies or other filmmakers and not so much the actual period detail."

Even more important was the amount of time the cast and crew spent in Marfa, Texas, where most of the movie was filmed. "We weren't just showing up at a location we'd scouted two months earlier, which is often what happens in movies. We lived there," Mr. Elswit says. "It's what movies used to do years ago, in the '30s or '40s. You took a train out to Monument Valley, everyone pitched a tent, and you stayed there until the movie was done."

Mr. Elswit's work is more on display here than usual: The first 20 or so minutes of the film are virtually silent. "Paul's idea was that we were going to create a history of the oil industry from the time people first started digging in the ground with their hands and how precious metals turned into oils," he says. "It's wonderful filmmaking." It's a bold and risky way to start a film.

And, Mr. Elswit reports, the wordless sequence was at one point over twice as long.

Click-2-Listen

Front Page > Entertainment