Benoit Delhomme on Shooting the City at Night

No Big Lamps, No Zoom Lenses, and a Near-Documentary Style For Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering

His very first screen credits included an assistant camera stint on Claude Berri's Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, but Benoit Delhomme's name first became familiar to arthouse patrons in the mid-1990s, when his elegant, understated cinematography graced acclaimed films like Anh Hung Tran's The Scent of Green Papaya and Cyclo, and Cédric Klapisch's When the Cat's Away and Un air de famille. He made his big English-language move working with David Mamet, Mike Figgis and Michael Winterbottom, and honed his style on demanding projects like The Loss of Sexual Innocence for Figgis and Sade for French director Benoit Jacquot.

His films have been characterized, in general, by a sophisticated control of color and a strong sense of place. Those talents were on full display in director John Hillcoat's Australian western The Proposition, which played Sundance last year and offers an appropriately forbidding widescreen vision of an especially grimy and violent frontier. There's nothing especially grimy about the version of London at night that we see in Delhomme's work for Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering, although Delhomme says he took pains to let London look like London, and not like some stylish cinematographer's idea of what a big city at night should be. F&V talked to him about making actors comfortable, making the DI serve the story, and the influence of Wong Kar-wai, Krzysztof Kieslowski, and Ingmar Bergman.

Click here to read the F&V interview with Breaking and Entering production designer Alex McDowell.

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