Because... Although it was easy, let's say, photographically,
there are still big differences between the shooting of a film as cameraman and as photographer.
When for example we look at photography,
When, for example, we look at photography, first of all it's... I was talking about it earlier
with the difference that there is between painters and Quentin Latour who was a guy
who managed to convey these little malicious looks found in people's eyes.
I mean, photography is above all about the setting, obviously, but also about the
gradation of the snapshot.
Meaning that if we want to show for example, at which point the snapshot is interesting,
if we take for example something that has been engraved on a wall, there comes a stage
when the sun will light up this engraving, the wall will be light and the back of the
engraving will be dark. But there's obviously a time when there will... it will...
but it will last for a fraction of a second, for a little while when the edge of the engraving
will brighten up because there will be a
little reflection on the edge, on the little bevel that it makes.
So meaning that a part of the tint will be grey, for example, and the back will be dark,
and then there will be a little glossy border from the paint, made from brilliance, reflections.
That can only be shown through snapshots. So when you do photography, each place,
each photo is in itself a composition. I mean, that images, whether in cinema or in photography,
are intellectual compositions, it's not... It's the vision which is photographed.
I mean, it's true that it's the vision, but it's also the fact that at any given
moment there is a certain lighting, a certain framing which will be captured.
We may not need to do it straight away because we might not have time to change the lens,
but only to capture the moment. And at the same time, technically, in laboratories,
we can develop it in different developing baths.
For instance, if we need more sensitivity, we can go from a classical developer
like we use in cinema which is the Kodak D76,
to faster developers, for instance those we used in "Breathless" to do the night scenes,
with Ilford development, or which was used when we shot "Alphaville"
which was developed in England, with a developer made with paraphenylenediamine,
a developer that increased sensibility without increasing the grain,
which is very interesting whether you're a photographer or filmmaker.
So we can do those things. We can also... if for example we want to do something with
important contrasts and that we want details in the shadows,
if we do it in cinema, since we are in industrial standards,
we won't be able to intervene on things like that, except to light them.
But if for technical reasons we don't want to light them,
when we do photography we can use developers with glycine, for example, which are developers
that don't really rust. We start developing the plate; we take it out of the bath
and with everything that is lit up, the developer is exhausted, so it no longer works.
On the other hand, it still works on all the dark parts.
Those are little things that you can do when you do photography
and which are completely excluded in cinema. Because in cinema, we pass the film through machines,
it's attached and it turns. So, we can modify the transfer time between the baths,
which we use when doing black and white, but we can't modify it too much.
So and afterwards, when we put it through the contact printers,
I mean as much as in photography, we can print it on paper leaving things
for more or less time, and eventually intervene on the parts of the image.
It's completely impossible to do it in cinema; it's impossible to do because we put it
through machines, and the printing standards are designed in such a way that we can't go
above it, or under it. So we have to stay within a certain system,
which is cinema's industrial system.