Cinematography Style: Bruno Delbonnel

INTRODUCTION

It’s often said that cinematography is like painting with light. I’d say this is especially true in the work of French cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel. 

His approach to photography is painterly and stylized, rather than being strictly naturalistic. He’s never afraid to bend the rules of realism for emotional or symbolic effect.  

Let’s use this video to unpack his work by looking at his approach to cinematography as well as breaking down some of the gear and techniques he uses to achieve those images.

PHILOSOPHY

If you go through some of Delbonnel’s earlier work, particularly with director Jean-Pierre Jeunet on films like A Very Long Engagement or Amélie, what immediately stands out is his expressionistic use of colour.

The palette is an affirmation that the images are not reality, but rather a cinematic world onto itself. They lean into a stylised unnatural hue, for example in some scenes, hair may have a green tinge to it, or in others paler skin tones may skew into orange tones. 

However, these hues are not monochromatic. Although they have a tint to them, there is still a separation with other colours. Images with a green cast still have reds, yellows, blues and other tones. 

This use of colour isn’t arbitrary, and usually connects back to the story in some way. For example, A Very Long Engagement divided the palette of the film - using warmer tones to depict the world in times of peace, and cooler colours when shooting the wartime trench scenes.

While inside Llewyn Davis stuck to a single palette and look for the whole movie - using desaturated, cool tones to reflect the melancholic, sad, wintry feeling that was in the script.  

He used a similar idea when photographing Harry Potter, shooting emotionally darker or tense moments with cooler tones, or in some cases an almost black and white monochromatic look, while saving warmer, autumn tones for emotionally lighter scenes.

However, this isn’t to say that all of his work carries the same style of palette. For some stories, or when working for directors who have a particular look in mind, such as Wes Anderson, the palette conformed a lot more to their style, taking on more saturation and a truer reproduction of colour with more natural skin tones.

Ultimately, his job is to create images which translate the vision of the director to the screen.  

Another factor which makes Delbonnel’s work stand out is his lighting, which I think can be characterised by two things: it’s soft and it is high contrast. 

This lighting creates a visual language which feels very similar to a Baroque painting. These art works often have a strong, single light beam that comes from one side which illuminates characters and leaves the rest of the frame in shadow: heavy contrast.

He avoids using frontal light sources, which are placed behind the camera and directly face the character, as they tend to spill onto the background of the shot and flatten out faces. 

Like the feathered brush strokes in Baroque art, the light he uses isn’t sharp and crisp but rather soft, beautiful and gentle on the skin. The light gradually falls off into shadow. This soft, high contrast technique can be seen in much of his work, such as Dark Shadows, Inside Llewyn Davis, Harry Potter and The Tragedy of Macbeth.

This softness evokes a feeling of memory and subjectivity, which may romanticise the story or the past in period films, give the footage a slightly magical feeling, or in other contexts may make it feel like the character is passing through the world in a dreamy daze.

The interplay between brighter and darker scenes is another feature of his work. As he says, “For me it’s as if the images are the melody in a musical score, moving with contrast, between light and dark at different paces. Cinematography is about how you articulate the melody of the light.”

This idea can be seen in Darkest Hour, where in our introduction to Churchill, the character emerges literally and perhaps also thematically from almost complete darkness into the light.  

GEAR

Although, as we’ve established, Delbonnel does switch up his style based on the content of the story, when it comes to selecting lenses he has a fairly consistent methodology.

He almost always favours wide angle lenses. When shooting with Super 35 cameras he’ll usually select a spherical lens in a focal length in approximately the 14mm to 32mm range.

These shorter focal lengths give a more exaggerated, distorted perspective with a deeper depth of field than telephoto lenses. He feels that this increased perspective heightens the three-dimensional feeling, especially when the camera moves, and keeps more of the background visible behind the character which contextualises them in the space.

For example when photographing Audrey Tautou on A Long Engagement he felt the best focal length for her face was either a 25mm or a 27mm, with an 18mm being a bit too distorted, especially when combined with the low angle shots favoured by the director, and a 35mm lens a little too long.

Likewise in his work with the Coen Brothers, both Inside Llewyn Davis and Buster Scruggs were almost entirely shot with a 27mm lens. 

Like his consistency in focal lengths, he also consistently chooses the same brand of spherical prime lenses - Cooke - specifically the Cooke S4s. He likes their warmth and what he calls their ‘roundness’ and has used this set on many films, such as A Very Long Engagement, Dark Shadows, Darkest Hour, Harry Potter and The Phoenician Scheme. He mostly uses Super 35 cameras but on MacBeth, which was shot with a large format camera and lenses, he selected the Cooke S7s.

He has however sometimes broken this trend and used Arri/Zeiss Master Primes on The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Disclaimer which he co-DP’d with Emmanuel Lubezki. 

He’ll usually pair his prime lens set with a convenient zoom lens: either an Angeieux Optimo zoom, like a 17-80mm, or the 24-290mm if a long lens telephoto shot is required, or a Fujinon Alura 18-85mm or 45-250mm.

An example of when he uses a zoom occurred in The Woman In The Window for extreme close ups on Amy Adams’ eyes. When shooting such a tight shot he finds using a zoom lens easier to quickly make small adjustments to the frame than using a macro lens with a fixed focal length and adjusting the position of the actor millimeters left, right, forwards or backwards to adjust the frame.

In the past he used to use filters to manually get either the colour or level of diffusion in the right place, or as close as he could. Such as using a 81EF filter to give frames a blue-ish tint with a green fill.

However with modern post production tools he prefers to shoot without any effects filters in front of the lens and rather fine tune any of these adjustments in post with his colourist - often Peter Doyle using Base Light software. 

For example, creating a very restricted color palette with a very specific gamma and contrast, as well as adding a softening or diffusion layer using grading software.  

We’ve mentioned his soft, but high contrast painterly lighting. The key to, well, his key light, is using strong, high output light sources and placing them as far away from the actors as possible. Then passing that light through a diffusion material like a grid cloth or through a diffusion gel on a frame - as can be seen in some behind the scenes photos. 

The more powerful and further away a light source is the more it can be softened and diffused. Think of the sun’s far off rays passing through a cloud and how that big light in the sky gets beautifully softened on overcast days.

Some of Delbonnel’s large key sources include Dinos or large HMIs. For one scene in Darkest Hour he fired 17 Arrimax 18Ks through the 17 windows of a corridor in Buckingham palace.

Like much of his other work this encouraged the actor to pass through different areas of light and dark, creating his contrasting melody of light. To get more contrast on one side of the face, he likes to key from the side and uses minimal, if any, fill light on the other side of the face.

He also sometimes combines one of these high output sources, placed as a backlight behind a character, with haze to create hard silhouettes. 

A final stylistic flourish which characterises Delbonnel’s work is an aversion to handheld. In most of the movies he shoots, shots are locked on interesting compositions which often feature either low or high angles, or the camera maintains a fluid, smooth motion with the camera usually operated with a geared head or wheels.

Whether that is from a Steadicam, a dolly, or one of his favourite tools - a Technocrane with a stabilised head - which can be used to do sweeping, floating movements.

The small Stabileye is his stabilised head of choice - which can be fitted to a crane, a helicopter or drone for aerial footage, or even used handheld by an operator in specific circumstances such as tracking down a very narrow corridor.

These floating movements, soft, high contrast light, and an unconventional colour palette all effectively push his images away from pure naturalism and into a heightened cinematic world all of its own.