The Main Event

Tami Reiker, ASC and Light Iron supervising colorist Ian Vertovec detail their collaboration on director Regina King's feature One Night in Miami

On Feb. 25, 1964, Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston at the Convention Hall in Miami, Fla., to become boxing's heavyweight champion of the world. Afterward, Clay who would shortly change his name to Cassius X and later to Muhammad Ali joined singer Sam Cooke, football star Jim Brown, and civil rights leader Malcolm X for a celebration in the latter's room at the Hampton House motel. Written by Kemp Powers and based on his stage play of the same name, the feature One Night in Miami explores the dialectic that might have ensued between the four men as they each stood at a personal crossroads within the larger context of the civil rights movement.

Starring Eli Goree as Cassius Clay, Leslie Odom Jr. as Sam Cooke, Aldis Hodge as Jim Brown, and Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm X, the movie marks the feature-directing debut of Regina King, who partnered for the first time with cinematographer Tami Reiker, ASC. Reiker reports that the opportunity to collaborate with King came about in a very normal way: The producers sent the script to my agent. I loved it, and I created a look book to present to Regina, and we had a great meeting. We had some of the same ideas about having a very rich and saturated film, with vibrant colors, and we dug right into how we could keep things moving when half of the movie takes place in a hotel room.

To that end, the filmmakers strove to continually shift the story's perspective among the four main characters. We had these long scenes that would be 12 pages of solid dialogue incredible dialogue, but not even a screen direction, Reiker says. We approached it by shooting long masters. We would shoot the entire scene from two floating jib arms in this very small hotel room, coming at it from different angles. And then we'd find these moments where, as we got tighter and tighter, we saw that we could shift the perspective or change the focus from one character to another.

After shooting large format with Alexa 65 for director Gina Prince-Bythewood's The Old Guard, Reiker again turned to the camera for One Night in Miami When I met with Regina and we started talking, I felt large format would be perfect because it was so often going to be all four characters in the frame, and we were going to use every inch of the frame. The need to capture the four leads side-by-side also led the filmmakers to frame for the 2.39:1 aspect ratio.

Reiker had approximately six weeks of prep, after which production commenced in New Orleans in January 2020. Principal photography then wrapped in late February, just before Covid-19 brought productions around the world to a temporary standstill.

Light Iron provided color-grading and finishing services, completing the project ahead of its early September premiere at the Venice Film Festival. The digital grade was performed by supervising colorist Ian Vertovec at Light Iron Los Angeles. Producers Keith Calder and Jess Wu Calder brought One Night in Miami to Light Iron after having previously worked with Vertovec on the features Anomalisa, Blair Witch and Blindspotting.

This was Reiker and Vertovec's first time working together, and to help them quickly align on the movie's look, the cinematographer shared stills that digital imaging technician Tyler Blackwell had graded throughout production, after wrapping each day's shoot. I loved what we did on set, the cinematographer says, so that was our jumping-off point.

Working in Baselight, Vertovec shares, I rebuilt the LUT Tami had in dailies so we would be able to deliver all the different versions for multiple platforms. He describes the rebuilt LUT as being based around getting the skin tones nice and rich, without too much red or too much green. Skin tones on the shadow side can often get ruddy, but we wanted more red in the mids, and then as it gets darker, we wanted it to get a little bit cleaner. Also, with highlights on skin tones, you sometimes get too much green, especially from yellowy lampshades or sconces. So we wanted to make sure we had a good balance of not too much green and not too much red, and for everything to render properly across all the different formats we had to deliver.

Another important element of the LUT was the way it defined the roll-off through the shadows. This film has a soft toe, where black is not all the way down, Vertovec explains. There's contrast, but it doesn't have a crunchy black level. When it's softer like that, you actually get less noise in the shadows, so you can get very dark without it feeling like you can't see anything. Everything can still be very clean. I think that was a good choice for a movie that takes place largely at night.

During preproduction, Reiker and King had shared a wide swath of visual references, including real-life images of the four men. The filmmakers directly evoked a number of those references, for example with a striking shot of Clay standing underwater in a swimming pool, his fists raised in a boxing stance, posing for a now famous Life magazine photo taken by Flip Schulke. It's interesting, Vertovec notes, because a lot of those photos are black-and-white, like the shot of Cassius Clay underwater. So you recognize it as this famous photo, but now it's beautifully in color. You actually see the blue of the water, with the sunlight coming into the pool.

Following a prelude that introduces each of the four main characters at slightly earlier points in time, that shot of Clay underwater brings the story to the day of his bout with Liston. The shot also adds blue into the movie's color palette, which was carefully controlled across Reiker's lighting, production designer Barry Robis

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