Cinematographer Part II

I think another memorable scene from the book is when Mama Tataba was telling Nathan Price (the father) that he was planting everything wrong. In the book, Nathan plants in long, straight, flat rows. Mama Tataba comes out, telling him that he needs to make mounds. She also notices that he has stuck his hand in the sap of the poisonwood while attempting to cut it down. He ignores both of her statements.

After he is done tilling (or whatever he has done to prepare the garden, I can't seem to remember whether he put the seeds in or not yet), Mama Tataba changes the entire layout of the garden, creating the little mounds that look like burial sites (she had told him that the plants would not grow without them). Nathan later changes it back patiently.

This scene is an interesting one because it is one of the first "conflicts" that a member of the Price family has with a local. This, of course, leads to the devastation of the garden when the rain comes.

In terms of filming it, I would desaturate the colors. I've always like desaturation along with black and white and Super 16 mm film (instead of the industry-standard 35 mm) because of the atmosphere it brings. If you watch movies such as Saving Private Ryan, you'll notice that the skies are grey instead of blue. This is because of desaturation in the editing process and also because they used a filter on the cameras to take out most of the blue in the picture. If you watch many movies based in africa, such as Black Hawk Down (coincidentally, another war film), you'll notice the high levels of yellow and red. I think that using this and accentuating the hot colors would be almost contrived or cliche...therefore, I would desaturate the colors, leaving more of a dead picutre with more emphasis on the cold colors. I think this is appropriate from a symbolic standpoint as well, showing the relative coldness to the African lifestyle of the Price family from the get-go. Much like how Martin Scorsese subtlely used sharp blue and red contrasts in the Departed, I would attempt to slowly crank up the color spectrum as the movie progressed.

In terms of actual camera work, I would, again, use a wider shot, never overlapping Nathan and Mama Tataba in the same frame together. This would symbolize the separation the two have in matters of planting the garden (for this particular scene - of course, they are separate in other times as well, since they do not really "know" each other). The scene would begin with the camera on the ground, going for the "Hoth" look (a reference to the Empire Strikes Back, where the camera shows the vast expanse of flat, snow-covered terrain). This would emphasize Nathan's plans for making the garden flat, obviously. After Mama Tataba's "improvements", the camera would be poking out of a hole in the ground between two of the "burial mounds". It would show Nathan, from the POV of the ground, sighing and then breaking up the mounds. Dirt would be flung onto the camera, blacking out the picture (a trick using plexiglas over the lens).