The In-Depth Film & Video Interview with Benoit Delhomme and Alex McDowell

If you've seen Breaking and Entering, the new drama from writer/director Anthony Minghella about urban relationships amid urban renewal, you know that, despite the film's status as a departure from Minghella's recent, large-scale work, it has the kind of unity of purpose that characterizes all his work – the sense that the entire production is firing on all cylinders, and that all of his on-set collaborators are working from exactly the same page.

Minghella's cinematic strike force this time around includes Benoit Delhomme, a cinematographer with a long pedigree in small-scale international cinema who's starting to make a mainstream impact with beautifully shot pictures like 2004's The Merchant of Venice and 2005's The Proposition, and production designer Alex McDowell, a real heavyweight whose groundbreaking work includes Minority Report for Steven Spielberg and, gulp, both The Cat in the Hat and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The look of Breaking and Entering is both distinctive and evocative, with straightforward, almost documentary-style views of the city at night complemented by the easy complexity of McDowell's sets, Delhomme's felicity with shots that feature windows and reflections, or move in and out of focus, and a color scheme that gets inside the lives of the film's very different characters. F&V talked to both of them about working at the top of their game, and the nature of their collaboration.

Click here to read the F&V interview with Breaking and Entering cinematographer Benoit Delhomme.

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