I had the pleasure of interviewing Sean Kirby, the director of photography for POLICE BEAT on June 7, 2005 during the Seattle International Film Festival at the Diva coffee shop in Greenwood.

EINSIDERS: I was really blown away by the photography in POLICE BEAT. What came to mind is Sokurov, or particularly Angelopoulos-LANDSCAPE IN THE MIST, SUSPENDED STRIDE OF THE STORK. It's surprising to be able to say that about a film coming out of Seattle. I feel that it's world-class work, and it's a real thrill to see it. And that's why I wanted to talk to you. Are you familiar with those filmmakers? Did you learn from them?

SEAN KIRBY: I've looked at them in the past. We did not look at them for POLICE BEAT. But I look at East European cinema and Russian cinema as my main influence in terms of photography and image making, in general. Not just cinematography.

EI: It seems as though you are the one that suggested shooting on 35 mm, and shooting with an anamorphic lens. Did you also suggest a certain aspect ratio?

SK: When I first sat down with Rob, this was a police story in some way, shape, or form. And I had even heard that it was a LAW AND ORDER-that kind of police. And I was so happy to read the script, and meet with Rob, and realize that it was nothing like that. And yet, when I was presented with the project, it was going to be DV or HD as the shooting format. And when I first sat down with Rob, he told me his take on the movie, and how he wanted to approach it.

And two things that came into my mind, and Rob's as well, was the landscape of Seattle and the fact that this was going to be a landscape movie-the classic figure-in-the-landscape. And that's why the widescreen aspect of it seemed the obvious choice. And secondly, I'm thinking of this widescreen movie of this beautiful place, Seattle, and that doing it on HD or DV just was not doing the image, or the script, justice. Because of the moods, and the fact that this was nothing like a LAW AND ORDER, or any other police genre.

EI: Speaking of doing the image justice, and the script justice, and the landscape of Seattle justice, how do you feel about finishing in HD?

SK: We did not plan to finish on HD. This came down after we had actually photographed the movie, and the movie was cut electronically. It was then that HD became an option.

The original script was something like 120 locations and 80 speaking parts, and this was a very low budget for this scope, and ambition. And on top of that, what Rob and I were trying to achieve in terms of visuals was to make them work off of a mood--of this lovesickness of the main character. And on top of that, just logistically…

We were looking for the lush beauty of Seattle that we were always blown away by-the evergreen trees, the mountains behind the city, all the water around, and we ended up, by the time principal photography got off the ground, with one of the biggest drought summers that Seattle had seen in a long time. So all this lush grass that we were hoping to surround the characters in was all burnt. And so there were some challenges with that. We were left with some locations that were absolutely beautiful a month-and-a-half before we shot, and now were burnt. We did things on set-painted the grass green, and all kinds of stuff like that to make it work-but those two factors made the digital intermediate process sound very appropriate to the project. Basically you have a way of altering colors that you would not if you went straight to film.

EI: So you feel that that advantage, possibly added to others, outweighed the degradation of the image overall?

SK: Well, the process is, that you go to a space that is able to capture just about as much information as a 35 mm anamorphic frame, and when you're done with that you send it back out to film.

EI: But that's not what you did.

SK: No, for financial reasons they have not been able to make a print at this point.

EI: But that's two different issues, isn't it? Not being able to make a print, and going through the process you just described are two different things.

SK: Those are two different things.

EI: So, the idea is that what you have now, regardless of whether it's a print or not, is a stop-gap measure, waiting for further funding.

SK: Yes. So ideally, at some point in time, there's a print, and that might be one of the best days of my life.

EI: Provided, of course, that it's not made off the existing HD tape.

SK: Yes. The true movie, right now, the raw data, is on a hard drive.

EI: 1 K files?

SK: 2 K files. Which is not the biggest, but it's enough information to hold a 35 mm film negative.

EI: And much more than you're seeing on the HD.

SK: Exactly.

EI: Are you happy with that 2 K image? Would you rather see a print from a negative made from those files, over a print made from the cut camera negative?

SK: Yes, because for me and for Rob, that process of the digital intermediate allowed us to take our look even farther than we were able to go in-camera, on-location, on a hurried schedule, on a relatively low budget. We had talked about it earlier, but it was such an expensive process that it didn't seem like we were going to be able to do it.

EI: What was the expensive part of the process?

SK: Transferring all the film to 2 K files. And it wasn't until we shot and the movie was edited, that we had the possibility to do that.

EI: By pulling select takes?

SK: Yes, by transferring select takes.

EI: And you did it slate-to-slate? You kept the shots intact?

SK: Yes, we kept them intact. The negative is all there, it's all good.

EI: How much of the image that you intended are we seeing now, with the film on an HD tape, compared to a print from the negative made from the 2 K files?

SK: It's difficult to say, but I would guess between 80 and 90%. There's obviously going to be a gain when seeing it on film.

EI: What specifically is missing-that accounts for that 10 to 20%?

SK: The improvement will be seen in blacks, in image detail, and in the fact that it is no longer a tape running by a magnetic head, but it's flicker, flicker, flicker running through a projector. I feel there is something about that that is affecting in a similar experience.

EI: You mean the same movie seen on magnetic tape versus seen on a print?

SK: Exactly.

EI: Could you talk more about what that adds, in your opinion?

SK: I think it takes it back to the persistence of vision, and how the filmmaking process on film was established, and grew into the art form that it is now--which is of course being affected by digital--but that's what we know movies as. That's that great experience up on a huge screen. And it's the way that we go and shoot something, and are able to get an image back that allows us to lose ourselves in a film. Because the motion feels right, it feels like what we see as human beings when we look out into the world, obviously with the abstraction of the fact that there are people making decisions about what you see when you go to see a movie. But I think that is closer to the sensory experience we have as humans through our own eyes. But I was amazed at the quality we got from an HD tape projection. I never thought it was going to be that good, so I was pleasantly surprised by that. Would it be better on film? Yes, of course. It would get better.

EI: What's your feeling about the handheld aspect of the shooting? Rob said in an interview that one doesn't feel as much like one is inside someone's head if the camera is locked and static.

SK: I agree with that. There is something about a handheld camera that keeps it more alive. Even though we did not use it, for the most part, in the way that is generally conceived as a handheld movie--where you have a camera that is constantly moving around, and grabbing things here and there, and going sort of free form. In a lot of POLICE BEAT the camera doesn't move a lot, it just breathes. And that's what we were after with the handheld camera--this breath, if you will. And I totally agreed with Rob on that. In the aesthetic of the movie, and the aesthetic of the reality and the unreality of the story, that felt very right to me, and it obviously felt very right to Rob.

EI: Did you hold the camera as steady as you possibly could, or was there an intention to introduce a certain type of motion, or a certain amount of motion?

SK: The way I would look at it is, there was not an attempt to intentionally hold it still. One of the producers came up with a way to describe it as "the camera is alive, the camera is breathing." Even though it's not running around or anything, it has a humanness to it.

EI: I was very impressed with the dark images, especially in the shots with the steps going down to the water, when the man was in the water listening to the voices. Can you talk about shooting that, about the light, about how you approached the shooting of it in terms of f-stop and so on, and secondarily how you approached the post process in terms of color correction or whatever else you might have done to it?

SK: In general, it's my belief that you look at a) the budget of your movie, and b) the script you have to shoot, and you must come to a very good understanding of what you're able to do on that budget, and what you need to do for the movie, and marry those. We were not a Hollywood production running around with tons of trucks, and lights, and all that stuff. But we had to find a way to do it so that our resources were going to put the best possible thing on film for the subtext and mood of the movie. And so in preparing for this very ambitious shoot--we were doing three locations a day, which is very exhausting--I had to become intuitive with the way I was going to do it in terms of the movie's mood. And that's what I tried to do as much as possible. Because 120 locations is so many locations to prep for in terms of looking at them, and seeing them in advance, and figuring out a plan to shoot them. Instead, I took a lot of time with Rob, and stepped back, and really looked at what mood we wanted to get across, and let all my technical decisions ride off this very little core group of decisions that we made. And from there spontaneously made technical decisions.

Now, getting specific, that scene was shot, along with a number of other scenes, at dusk--literally at the last possible time of the day to grab an acceptable image. Rob is very impressed by dusk, and that magic we all feel at dusk-that last possible moment. The tricky part about scenes like that is, you get there, and no one can stop that dusk. There's no switch, there's no dimmer. You have to be prepared to go. And you get a very short window of time, and your done. We did what we could to prepare for that. When we did shoot, it's realizing where the level of the underexposed blue sky, or blue water, will land on the film negative before it starts to become an unacceptable, dark image.

EI: And how do you ascertain that?

SK: A spot meter, which will tell you, based on what your f-stop is, how far down your sky will be, because it's all on the dark end of the spectrum, and you know from experience how far down you can go before it's gone. And I have to say that in some scenes in the movie, there were times when Rob said, "Can I have one more, Sean?" and the wiser, smarter part of me was "There's no way." And I did it anyway, because that's just what we were after. Be a little edgy with it, and push it as far as we could.

EI: And sometimes it worked?

SK: I had people shaking their heads on the set occasionally who were like, "There's no way…" I think those are some of the scenes in the movie that have had the most impact on people. There's a handful of scenes that we shot at that last hour, and those are perhaps the most magical in terms of lighting.

EI: Was there filtration used on the camera lens for that scene?

SK: There were no filters on the lens. However, I was using tungsten balanced film, indoor balanced film, for a daylight situation. And not just a daylight situation, but the end of the day, which if you take that film and you use it outside, everything turns blue. And you do that at the last possible part of the day… In my eyes it captures that moment the way we really see it.

EI: Did you push the film in this scene?

SK: Yes, I did. Also, we chose to go with Fuji film stock instead of Kodak because the response of blue and green, is better for me on Fuji over Kodak.

EI: After seeing your work on POLICE BEAT I think of you as a filmmaker more so than I would typically think of a cameraman. In a sense, everyone on a set is a filmmaker, but it seems to me you have a vision that could relate to having responsibility for a film as a whole, much as a director or producer would. So I'd like to ask you some questions from that point of view. Do you think that love can be portrayed in the cinema?

SK: Yes. I came to film from painting images. And one of the things that I learned while I studied other artists, as well as filmmakers--anyone who was making images--was that if you get yourself to a certain place when you're viewing a piece of art or watching a movie where you… I mean the movie or the image has to let you do this. It has to be a good piece, and it has to take you down the right line. But if it allows, you sort of suspend your cognitive faculty, and absorb the piece more from an emotional or intuitive sense, and then I think that filmmaking, in the best situation in my eyes, can make you experience love, through a character or characters. And I think that has everything to do--beyond the script, and how it's set up--with the mood that's set up by the images that you are seeing. Is the photography, is the direction, is the production design working together to establish a mood that would allow you to do that?

EI: Can you think of a filmmaker or film that accomplishes that?

SK: Much of the work of Tarkovsky you get that from. There's an all-inclusiveness to his filmmaking, and a silence, and a patience. Most of Hollywood filmmaking doesn't allow you to absorb what you see. And it's almost overwhelming the abilities of a human being to absorb things. And in Tarkovsky's case you have room to breath, and room to absorb, and therefore… because, you don't feel love like that. I mean the most beautiful girl walks down the street, we might say that she's beautiful, and you want to get to know her, but you don't call it love. Love is something that's acquired over time. And so I think the same is true of filmmaking. Another film I can think of is Kieslowski's BLUE. The love that Juliette Binoche has for her daughter you feel so greatly in that movie.

EI: Is it possible to portray sex in the cinema?

SK: I saw a film recently that I felt dealt with sex very well, which is POLA X, by Leos Carax. There's a scene there that's pretty powerful, and it's dealing with sex. The thing that surprised me was how much of the actual pictorial part of that was very much sex. And I was surprised at how well that worked. I thought that film did it.

EI: To go back to Tarkovsky, he said in his diary that it's an insult to the audience to try to entertain them. How do you feel about that?

SK: I agree. I think that most movies you see are insulting to the audience. Do I agree? That's such a hard question. I'll bring it back to this, as a comparison. If you meet someone, if you sit down with them and talk back and forth and explain everything in your lives, I think you'll have less of an understanding of that person than if you just sat there and watched them for the same period of time. And I think, going back to what Tarkovsky said, that supports the idea that a lot of movies have so much going on that they don't allow the audience to reflect. And see the image. They force the experience on the audience.

And there's another thing. When you're doing something and you're searching for the way to go. When I studied painting, I studied under a painter who talked about it in terms of--you're always searching, for not only your image, but why you're making your image. And you never get there, you continue to search. And I started off in film, and got into it, from a very technical side of things--working as a lighting technician, and studying everything I possibly could about lenses, and film stocks, and everything. But the more that I do it, the more for me anyway, it's about letting go of all that technical stuff, even though you need to know it and it's very important for your filmmaking process.

EI: What city do you love, and why?

SK: Seattle. I don't think any other city that I've lived in has inspired me as much as Seattle. It still feels like a frontier town. There is an openness of mind or spirit that I don't see on the east coast.

EI: In the film PIERROT LE FOU by Jean-Luc Godard, Sam Fuller, playing himself, says, "The film is like a battleground. Love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word, emotion."

SK: He's right. If you want to affect people you do it through the heart, or emotion. You don't do it through the cognitive part of the human being. I truly believe that. To me its all about emotion. And that doesn't mean someone sitting there crying. I think that a lot of the emotions we have are much more boring, or subtle. Walking down the street sometimes, and whether it be the trees on the street, or the color that the sky is at that time of the day, affecting our mood.

Stephen Les