Colorist, PostWorks, New York

Q: What were the artistic challenges of coloring Everything is Illuminated?
A: The film is a very emotional film and we had to come up with
different looks for different moods of the film. Most notably, there's
a flashback sequence that is very sad, and the cinematographer Matty
Libatique, ASC and director Liev Schreiber decided to go for a look
that was really contrasty, desaturating colors, and adding colors into
the low lights.
Q: Was every mood this dramatic?
A: The flashback was the most stylized look. The rest of the film had a
natural feeling. It was shot in Prague with muted colors and the way
Matty lit everything was fairly natural.
Q: What did the DI add?
A: It gave us the opportunity to enhance Matty's lighting or put
shadows where there weren't any. There's a crucial point in the film
where the main protagonist Jonathan finds who he's been looking for.
It's a shot of a sunflower field and we accentuated the yellow in the
sunflowers to make them nice and rich, more saturated. That was
beautiful and gave the scene a satisfied, happy look.
Q: How did you work with the cinematographer?
Matty and I worked every night or day for seven days. He was there from
the beginning to the end. He was in NY shooting Spike Lee's film, so
his schedule was hectic. He'd color with me during the day and go shoot
at night or vice versa. He had a clear idea of what he wanted, but we
experimented to get there. He'd come in with photos of the look that he
liked and we'd try to emulate that. I would make suggestions, such as
certain vignettes to mute backgrounds and have people stand out in the
foreground. He was very open to suggestions but he did know exactly
what he wanted.
Q: Technically what was the most challenging?
The most interesting part was just keeping the continuity of skin tones
throughout the film. When black levels are crushed, you can get away
with different skin tones, but most of the shooting was fairly natural
and the black level is up. It gave it a natural feeling ‘ and required
us to be very consistent with skin tone. We used the FilmLight
Truelight system for LUTs. A month before we started coloring, we did a
test on a few shots and got the print back and did a split screen from
the 35mm print and the 2K files ‘ and they were very, very accurate.
The Truelight system really needed to come through and it did.