Reconstructing the Image

It's not your typical post workflow. Then again, Danish director Christoffer Boe doesn't have your typical feature-film sensibility. Perhaps taking a cue from his countryman Lars Von Trier, who famously scanned his Breaking the Waves from 35mm Panavision footage to video and then back out to film, Boe shot his feature debut REconstruction, on Super 16 and then graded it on DigiBeta.

"We upscaled it to 2K, but that still gives you the video-res grain, which I wanted to keep," Boe explains. "Basically, the look I wanted was this strange mixture of film and video, and we got it this way."

It’s safe to say that the uncommon technique matches the film’s unusual storytelling ambitions. Drawing inspiration as readily from the French New Wave as from film noir stylings, Reconstruction tells the story of Alex, a Danish photographer who meets the married Aimee, who’s been left alone in Copenhagen as her husband promotes a new book. The two impulsively engage in a one-night affair, but matters grow complicated quickly as Aimee’s husband discovers her infidelity and Alex finds that his life – literally – no longer seems to exist. Meanwhile, a god-like narrator tracks their moves across the city.

"Love has changed [Alex's] world, and I wanted to make a great love story," says the 30-year-old director by way of partial explanation. "It’s very ambitious and also deals with themes of alienation and identity, old and new. But above all it’s a love story about being a love story."

Boe, who learned English while living as a student in Bloomington, Indiana, in the 1990s before returning home to Denmark, where he attended the Danish Film School, shot the film on location in Copenhagen in just six weeks. "We had a tiny budget, but it’s fairly easy to shoot there," he says, "even if you don’t have the official permits, which we didn’t most of the time."

The film was shot using an Arri SR3 by DP Manuel Claro, a film school friend who had collaborated with Boe on a trilogy of short films. "We used three different stocks," Boe says. " Kodak 7274 200 ASA, Kodak 7263 500 ASA and Fuji 8692 daylight. But the look of the film isn’t really a product of using different stocks. Far more important was the way we shot and then what we did in post. During filming, we didn’t use storyboards or shot lists. For me, framing is everything. I had a video screen so I could watch the framing, and we’d do every scene in one long take. That way, the DP was free to do his own framing and then we could adjust it as we went and edit all the material later."

"We really wanted to shoot a Cinemascope movie," he adds, explaining the decision to shoot flat and matte to a widescreen frame. "Obviously it’s just a framing of 2.35:1, but there are a lot of scope movies that don’t look like [scope] – such as [David] Lynch’s Lost Highway. So it’s how you use lenses and the choices you make. I also wanted to really capture the feel of the city."

To this end, the pair spent a lot of time preparing the approach and discussing the color palette, pacing and use of lenses and zooms. "We’d watch movies by people we admire, like [Jean-Luc] Godard, David Fincher, Lynch and [Andrei] Tarkovsky," says Boe. "Still photography was another big influence, especially people like Jacques-Henri Lartigue, so we shot the love scene between Alex and Aimee with stills instead of film."

The film is also interspersed with aerial surveillance shots – stock footage of Copenhagen that was graded by the production – and sped-up shots of traffic and city life that the team shot.

Post took four months at Nordisk Film Production in Copenhagen. "Editing is the most fun for me," says Boe, "as you finally pull it all together. I worked very closely with my two editors, Mikkel Nielsen and Peter Brandt, and we cut on Avid."

Colorist Jonas Drehn of Copenhagen’s Duckling graded the film in an unusual workflow. "The material was best-light scanned in from Super 16 to DigiBeta, onlined and graded in the Avid DS, then output to DigiBeta and transferred to film via an Arri Laser recorder," explains Drehn. "Everything was done in 16×9 and then cropped to scope. Today, it would probably have gone HD, but since there was a very tight budget, it was done in SD to keep expenses down. With a lot of tests with upscaling, sharpness and grading, I think we accomplished a great look."

Boe agrees. "The great thing about the Avid DS is that it can hold a lot of material," he says. "It’s very easy to go back and forth and watch the different gradings in sequence. So you can see a whole act and have a rough grading after a couple of days, and then you can go back and regrade, and that way you can pin down the visual style and apply it to the whole movie. That ability to keep going back and fine-tune it all shot by shot is what I really love about post."

Reconstruction has already won a fistful of film prizes in Europe, including the Camera d’Or at Cannes for best directorial debut. Is Boe ready to conquer the New World? "I’d love to make a Hollywood movie, especially something like Vertigo or Rear Window," he says. "I love those old melodramas and thrillers."

But don’t expect a conventional version of either from Boe, who recently completed a short for the "Visions of Europe" project, in which 25 European directors offer five-minute visions of Europe. "Next I want to do a film where the actors film themselves," he says. "That really interests me."