Emotional Triggers :: essays research papers

When director of photography Conrad Hall, ASC and director Sam Mendes teamed to key out American Beauty, few could have predicted that their dark vision of suburban malaise would be such a smash success. The film won five Academy Awards, including those for opera hat Picture, Best Director and Best Cinematography (Halls second Oscar, following his triumph for the 1969 Western classic Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). Halls work in any case earned him his third ASC Award for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography (see AC June 00).Road to Perdition, Hall and Mendes second collaboration, took the duo into decidedly different territory. ground on a graphic novel authored by Max Allan Collins, the film is a tale about the Irish Mafia set in thirty-something Chicago. At its heart is the relationship between fathers and sons after his professional life tragically impacts his domestic life, hit man Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks) sets out on a polar journey of self-discovery with hi s son, Michael Jr. (Tyler Hoechlin). Along the way, Sullivan must come to terms with his adoptive father, Irish crime lord John Rooney (Paul Newman). Road to Perdition is a stoppage movie in which there are no double-breasted, pin-striped suits and no spats, Mendes says. I was trying to get away from all the clichs of the gangster genre.Halls overarching strategy for the film dovetailed with the directors goal by favoring naturalistic realism over a more stylized approach to the material. The thing that makes this portrayal work so well is a kind of honesty, Hall says. Its a sort of honest reality that doesnt try to be theatrical in any way. There is no blue moonlight, no green vistas, none of that kind of stuff. The film has very carefully crafted compositions, its meticulously cut, and its paced very gently and slowly all of which is good for the story.Of his photography, Hall notes that Im not trying to characterize the people in the film the actors do that. Im trying to frame them in an appropriate emotional context for the scenes. How are their characters behaving in those scenes? Are they behaving like human beings? My goal is to make a given scene emotionally accessible for the audience. I just try to make it real. Whatever the story is trying to say to the audience dictates to me the irritation I should use to reach that audience. In this case, the film is about a father whos trying to raise his son so that the boy wont grow up to be like him.