Just watched The Constant Gardener, starring Ralph Fiennes and Oscar winner Rachel Weisz and directed by Fernando Meirelles.

The lead actors deliver stunning and believable performances, particularly Rachel Weisz with her endearing portrayal of “Tessa Quayle”. What stood out immediately was Fernando’s directing style, especially his camera direction. While not as kinetic and stylistic as, say, a Tony Scott movie (Man on Fire, for example), he does keep the camera moving and employs quite interesting shooting techniques.

He loves doing close-ups (so do I…for obvious reasons), but his are of a style I’ve not seen a lot before: he focuses in on odd parts of the face, like the chin or parts of the cheek, or the nose, with eyes or mouth barely visible.

Something else he likes to do a lot is to purposely de-focus on objects, then slowly re-focus them. For example, he may have a shot of Ralph Fiennes talking and all of a sudden Ralph’s face blurrs out (that’s when the lens is de-focused), then normalizes again. This is a neat style if you do it once or twice but I think Meirelles overdoes it a bit. He uses this little visual throw-off several times and that’s when the camera’s presence becomes obvious.

There’s a saying among editors and directors to the effect that the best editing and camera jobs are the ones you don’t notice. Meaning: don’t overdo it. If the viewer is reminded that he’s just watching a movie, that’s not a good thing. Being subtle goes a very long way.

Meirelles directed the critically acclaimed Brazillian movie City of God, another wonderful and very powerful feature. While certain parts in The Constant Gardener appear to have an almost documentary-type feel (particulary some scenes in the African village), City of God employs quasi-docu style shooting even more so. But somehow Meirelles manages to keep a good balance between cinematic excitement and documentarian realism. I love that style and am looking forward to looking into more movies from this director.

According to the end credits The Constant Gardener was shot on Arri equipment and Kodak film ($$$$$$) but watching the Making Of featurettes I think I spotted some HD video cameras in the field. This makes sense as lugging around a bunch of heavy film cameras is simply not as practical as using video cameras when you’re running around in the African desert.

This is exciting to see for me because I’m a BIG fan of all-digital equipment. So far there are only a few Hollywood- level directors who admit to using digital cameras, notably George Lucas (Revenge of the Sith) and one of my favorite directors, Robert Rodriguez (Desperado). Rodriguez shot Once Upon A Time in Mexico with digital HD cameras and the quality of the movie is stunning. It pretty much killed the then-current Hollywood attitude of thinking that video/digital cameras can’t possibly produce film-like quality movies.

You should check out Once Upon a Time in Mexico to understand what digital cameras can do. And remember: this was a few years ago and digital cameras have come a long way since. Note: of course Rodriguez didn’t use an off-the-shelf camcorder for a few hundred bucks, rather he used the professional Sony HDW-F900 (aka CineAlta) and shot in 1920 x 1080 @ 24p (meaning 24 frames per second in progressive mode.). The CineAlta is a HDCAM.

Rodriguez and Lucas proved those naysayers wrong and I hope to see more filmmakers go all-digital in the future.

For my money, digital filmmaking is the way to go. It’s faster (no dailies are needed, the director and crew can review footage right away) and can be done for less money. Developing/processing and converting film is very expensive and if the negatives get screwed up there’s no way back. Working with digital footage is different. I believe it is the way of the future and as so often the adult industry was one of the first entities to employ all-digital workflows. This was done out of necessity and to cut costs, but quite frankly, even if money isn’t an issue, the time savings alone are worth seriously considering digital production.