Shooting Rapito with VENICE

Rapito was directed by Marco Bellocchio and Francesco was delighted to work him on the film as his father had worked with him on three previous movies.

“The asthetic of the production was based on Italian paintings from 1840 to 1870,” Francesco explains. “It’s fascinating as a historical piece but perhaps actually less fascinating in terms of light and colour.”

Although electricity hadn’t arrived in this era, they did have more modern oil and candle lamps. So, the look is less contrasty and softer than the classic Caravaggio look of the 16th century.

Marco didn’t want large areas of darkness, he wanted audiences to be able see everywhere, and he didn’t want candles. Francesco says this was quite a challenge – candles were used when appropriate but often he had to light using just a few practicals and some of the spaces were very big, so it was quite difficult to deliver something that looked realistic.

As so many of the cast were children it was necessary to shoot almost everything during the day, including most of the night scenes. One option for night scenes was to place a tent over the buildings or completely block the exterior light, but Marco wanted at least a sense of something being outside. This was particularly important for the opening scenes where the kidnapping takes place at night.

The film’s production designers dressed the windows to look like old leaded windows and then curtains were used to reduce the amount of light coming through them. Because the key characters were often children, the camera was usually quite low, so when there was a window in the background the “night” sky should at least be faintly visible out of the windows. Francesco’s rather clever solution was to use polarised gels over the windows and then a polarising filter on the camera. By rotating the polarising filter on the camera, it was possible to adjust the exterior sky exposure and this way obtain a suitable balance between the interior and exterior brightness.

Francesco told me that this was one area where the VENICE camera really excelled as you could use the high base ISO combined with the filters to get a truly believable looking night time exposure.

Some of the exteriors that were shot at night take place in large open squares in Bologna and other historic cities. Francesco says that this was particularly difficult because they needed to get all the street lights turned off. Plus, it wasn’t practical to block streets for Condor cranes and large lighting rigs as these cities that rely so much on tourism. So, he knew he would have to rely on shooting at very high ISO’s.

He also went on to say that a problem with other cinema camera at high ISO’s is not just noise but poor colour performance, but VENICE performs very well at high ISO’s thanks to the dual ISO system. So, VENICE was the obvious and easy choice for this film.

The lenses used were Zeiss Supremes. Francesco didn’t want a lens with a strong character for this film. They had considered other lenses, but to maintain Marco’s concept of a naturalistic feel they didn’t want the lenses to add a particular look.