Digital Cinematography Feature

Doubling Down on 21
By Kevin H. Martin
Mar 5, 2008, 05:38

At first glance, the young protagonist of 21, Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess), seems to have it all. He attends M.I.T. and has achieved a 4.0 grade point average but then he discovers his dream of attending Yale has become seemingly unattainable, owing to a tuition gap of $300,000. The boy's gift for mathematics makes him an ideal recruit for Mickey Rosa (Kevin Spacey, who also produced), a university teacher with a scheme to strike it rich in Las Vegas. Ben and other bright M.I.T. students are put to work on a series of weekend card-counting schemes at various casinos, and for a time, are immensely successful, raking in millions of dollars. But nothing lasts forever, and soon enough, casino security forces begin to put two and two together about the team, while friction develops between Ben and Mickey.

Based loosely on author Ben Mezrich's nonfiction book Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, the film takes certain liberties with the true story, which took place more than a decade ago, updating it and streamlining the number of players in the drama.

For cinematographer Russell Carpenter, ASC, 21 continued his exploration of smaller-scale storytelling. After shooting a 3D short and a pair of mega-budget features for James Cameron (one of which, Titanic, won him both ASC and Academy awards), plus the Charlie's Angels films for director McG, Carpenter worked on a pair of comedies and more recently, the thriller Awake. "For me, this film was a kind of Tale of Two Cities," he says. "We start in a cold grey place-Boston in winter-where I used very neutral light from natural sources. Then, with the Vegas segment, we're all squiggly lines and energy, almost a Mardi Gras of colors you don't see in the natural world. So even if the scale differed from past films, there were still a variety of looks that presented their own set of challenges."

To read the complete article in ICG magazine, click here.



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