Stay updated with the latest - Click here to follow us on Instagram
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
The last time Kramer Morgenthau was in Mumbai in 1997, he was a budding cinematographer shooting for Kaizad Gustad’s Bombay Boys. Like a cliched westerner on his first visit to India, he too had a life-altering experience, which opened up his limited ‘American’ worldview, he says. Seventeen years on, a lot has changed. Morgenthau’s body of work includes some of the most globally lauded TV shows such as Game of Thrones (GoT) and Boardwalk Empire, and Hollywood movies such as Fracture (2007), Thor:The Dark World (2013) and Chef (2014), among others.
Morgenthau who was in Mumbai to conduct a workshop for film and TV professionals, says, “I had no idea GoT was this popular here,” seated pool side in a Juhu hotel on a breezy Saturday evening. Having shot the first two episodes and a few parts in season 2 of GoT, he explains why the show is pathbreaking in the fantasy genre. “We have seen the magical realism-kind of fantasy with Lord of the Rings, but GoT has a gritty, down-to-earth quality. The costumes are of real leather and fur, almost making you feel the texture on screen. You connect with it like they are real people and environments,” says Morgenthau, who filmed parts of the show in Croatia. “We used an expressive kind of lighting, which is more poetic than realism. And since it is set in a quasi medieval era, we used natural light sources such as fire or day light and not artificial lighting. It was quite something to climb 500 stairs of a fortress carrying such equipment, overlooking the Adriatic Sea with sparkling light coming from the West.”
A five-time Emmy-award nominee, he won an award by the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) for his work in GoT last year. The show, along with Boardwalk Empire, is Morgenthau’s career’s biggest showpiece. It is probably even bigger than the Hollywood blockbusters such as Thor and Terminator Genisys that he has worked on. It suggests that it is indeed the golden age for American television, as he says. There is more creative freedom in the long-form characters and stories that AMC, Netflix and HBO offer. “Some of the best material is happening in television and not necessarily in cinema. It is like the ’70s in the movies,” says Morgenthau, who has worked with Anthony Hopkins in Fracture, Robert Downey Jr in Chef and will work with Christian Bale in Deep Blue Goodbye.
Since his movies and TV shows involve a lot of visual effects, it is imperative to ask Morgenthau the role of cinematography in the age of special effects. The debate started when well-known cinematographer Christopher Doyle (DOP in Wong Kar Wai movies) criticised the Academy awards when it gave the Oscar for Best Cinematography to Claudio Miranda for Life of Pi.
Morgenthau, who calls himself a futurist, is among those who believe cinema is a constantly evolving art form that has to keep up with the rapidly changing technology. “We may shoot movies by the click of a mouse in the future but in the end the fundamentals of cinematography will remain the same. It will always be telling stories with light, as it was when the cave paintings came into existence or the Mughals made miniature paintings.” he says.
The director of photography holds Subrata Mitra, cinematographer in Satyajit Ray’s films, as a seminal figure in the world of cinematography. Among the recent Indian films, he enjoyed Anil Mehta’s work in Highway, he says.
Morgenthau’s suggestion to enthusiasts is to just go out and shoot. “I would encourage anybody to shoot with anything. You have easy access to amazing cameras and even the phone cameras keep getting better,” he says, “Just find your own voice, say something interesting. Otherwise there is lot of visual noise and it is hard to cut through it.”
sankhayan.ghosh@expressindia.com
Stay updated with the latest - Click here to follow us on Instagram
