Digital Cinematography Feature

High (Def) Society: HBO’s Bernard and Doris
By Jon Silberg
Mar 5, 2008, 04:36

Bernard and Doris, which premiered on HBO earlier this month, speculates about what might have happened in the final years of heiress Doris Duke's life and spins a version of the events that could have led her to leave her fortune to her butler, Bernard Lafferty. The screenplay by Hugh Costello suggests a strong bond between an icy woman surrounded by opulence but without any real companionship and a flawed but caring servant who comforts her to the end. Bob Balaban directed Susan Sarandon and Ralph Fiennes in the intimate drama set primarily inside Duke's formidable home, which she dubbed Shangri La, and on her grounds.

Though Bernard and Doris was shot almost entirely on a single Long Island estate, the production proved quite challenging for Cinematographer Mauricio Rubinstein. Despite the opulent setting and big-name leads, the film was shot on an extremely tight budget. Rubinstein was limited to a small lighting package, and the story, which covers the better part of the 1980s, required some significant physical changes for the actors. The entire schedule was 25 days, and many of those, Rubinstein recalls, really involved only six hours of actual shooting after factoring travel time and the actors' hair and makeup.

Rubinstein is no stranger to doing a lot with few resources, having shot the InDigEnt feature Puccini for Beginners on XDCAM with three or four lights in the more elaborate setups. Here, he used the executive producers' camera package consisting of one Panasonic VariCam, a P+S Technik Pro35 Digital Image Converter to allow lenses designed for 35mm cinema cameras--and those optics' distinctive depth of field characteristics--to mount on the 2/3-inch-chip VariCam, and six Zeiss Superspeed primes. A former gaffer, Rubinstein set the camera to its CineGamma mode, preferring to augment color and contrast through lighting rather than by manipulating the camera settings. His only other gear was an Astro Systems HD monitor and a waveform monitor, which he used instead of a meter to adjust his lighting.

Though a luxurious lighting package compared to what he had on Puccini, it was still quite limited. The kit consisted of a handful of tungsten Fresnels, a few HMIs, two 3K Barger bag lights and two Kino Flo units. And Rubinstein discovered something at the last minute that would add to the show's production challenges. "We learned that nobody could touch the walls, windows, ceilings of the mansion," he sighs. "We had to put cardboard under every light stand. For dolly tracks, we would have to put cardboard down on the floor, hard board on top of that and cover that with sound blanket. Then we'd put the rail on the sound blanket and the dolly on the rail. And 80 percent of the film is shot on a dolly. It was a very demanding job for a small crew."

Rubinstein credits Production Designer Frankie Diago for her ability to do a lot with a small budget to make the look of the film believable--to create an environment that felt genuinely lived-in. Of a greenhouse on the property, he says, "There was nothing to the space when we got there. She created an atmosphere that was very striking. It was an intimate space you believe someone would want to spend a lot of time in."

As with his InDigEnt experiences, Rubinstein had to remain flexible during the shoot to meet any contingency. For an exterior scene of the two just after she's released from the hospital, the cinematographer had to improvise. "The time of day caught up to us and we had lost the light," he says. "But the scene couldn't take place at night because we'd already shot what happens right afterward during the day. All I had was a 6K HMI, so I put diffusion on it and created this unexplainable beam of light, so when they get out of the limo, they become silhouettes. Things like that would happen and we would come up with expressive ways to shoot the scene anyway. For a transition, [Director Balaban] wanted leaves falling to express autumn. We couldn't be very elaborate. I panned the camera and we dropped a few leaves in front of the lens. I think it worked nicely.

"The idea was to be fast and to make everything look more expensive than it really is," Rubinstein says. "I come from low-budget filmmaking and I had a whole life as a gaffer, and I brought all that experience to Bernard and Doris. There was a lot of pressure, but I'm proud of the result. I think this is really a kind of love story, and when you watch it, you really feel the intimacy of the relationship."



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