The Big Picture

Based on the novel by Jane Harper, the feature The Dry stars Eric Bana as Aaron Falk, an Australian Federal Police agent who returns to his rural hometown following an apparent murder-suicide involving an erstwhile friend. As he's pulled into the investigation, connections emerge to another mystery from Falk's and the town's past, and old wounds open anew.

The Dry opened on Jan. 1 in Australia, only in cinemas, and has been met with critical acclaim and tremendous box-office success. We shot it in large format on the DXL2 camera with these beautiful Panavision lenses, says director Robert Connolly, who also served as co-writer and a producer. I want people to have to engage with it in the cinema.

Cinematographer Stefan Duscio, ACS was behind the camera for The Dry. Connolly and Duscio first crossed paths on the 17-part compendium film The Turning, which Connolly produced and two segments of which, Long, Clear View and Small Mercies, Duscio shot. They then partnered as director and cinematographer for the four-part miniseries Barracuda. I had an awesome time working with Rob on Barracuda, Duscio reflects. It was a very auteur, director-driven drama, which is rare in TV.

Principal photography on The Dry took place entirely on location, with 34 shooting days spread over seven weeks at the tail end of the Australian summer in 2019. We were prepping in January and February and then shooting March and April, Duscio recalls. It was not quite as stifling as the height of the summer, but the landscapes still looked really bleached out.

When Panavision caught up with Connolly and Duscio in mid-January, the director was in the midst of preproduction for his next feature, Blueback, with cinematographer Andrew Commis. Once again, Connolly will be working in large format with Panavision's Millennium DXL2. I absolutely love the format, the director enthuses, and I'm excited to take it even further into the future.

Director Robert Connolly.

Panavision: There are two mysteries in the film, one about the apparent murder-suicide in the present, and the other about a death in the past. How did you seek to distinguish those two time periods visually?

Robert Connolly: For the film, I wanted the audience to have absolute and utter clarity about whether we were in the past or the present. If you think back to moments in your own past, the way you remember them is rarely complete. Memory isn't locked-down in the same way as the present. The pieces of the past are depicted in the film as a jigsaw puzzle that comes together in a different aesthetic than the way the present does.

Stefan and I worked on a visual strategy that depicted the present as having very muscular, beautiful camera moves and compositions; the camera's got more weight in it. We did use Steadicam, but there is some beautiful tracking work that Stef did where you feel the camera is moving with the character in a way that's planted in the world. Whereas the past, in contrast, could be lighter and more handheld, with less of a shot-reverse-shot aesthetic.

Stefan Duscio, ACS: Rob mentioned that in the old days he might have shot 16mm for the past and 35mm for the present, and I realized the DXL2 would be really sympathetic to that because it's very simple to change formats and lenses on that camera. So we shot the past on C Series anamorphic lenses, which have beautiful aberrations and are soft on the edges, and the present was shot on large-format Primo Artiste lenses, which feel both classic and modern, with more detail. The past was looser, handheld, improvised, so we were happy to use lenses that weren't as perfect,' but for the present, we wanted it to feel a bit cleaner and more precise, like Eric's character. To be able to swap and change between those lenses on another camera system would have been complicated, but on the DXL2, it was simple.

We also worked with LiveGrain to simulate a 16mm grain for the past and a very subtle 35mm grain for the present, and we applied that to the dailies, so Rob and editorial would only look at colored, textured work. With DIT Christopher Reig, we created a LUT for the past, a LUT for the present, and we occasionally used the DXL2's built-in Light Iron Color 2 Film LUT. I selected one per scene, and after we wrapped shooting for the day, Christopher and I would finesse the color in a controlled space.

That, on top of the different lens formats, helped place you immediately in the past or the present as well as so many other decisions we made. We weren't trying to be subtle about those differences. We endeavored to put a lot of green in the past, whereas I don't think we had any green at all in the present. We really wanted you to go, This landscape has been devastated by drought.'

Where did you shoot The Dry?

Connolly: There's always this pressure to shoot within the vicinity of a big city, but there's a point about four hours out of Melbourne, into regional Australia, where the landscape changes in such an extraordinary way. We made the decision to take the film out there and film in the real world of our story. That subsequently opened a complexity of how we would find the locations. I think we spent 90 percent of the time in pre driving around, location scouting.

Duscio: Our first week of shooting was predominantly flashbacks, which were set in a time when the landscape was lusher and greener. So that was an area which had more forests and river, about an hour and a half north out of Melbourne. And then we traveled another three or four hours north, where it's very dry, and that's where the contemporary scenes of the film were shot.

Were there any locations you used for both the past and the present?

Connolly: There were a few, so for the past, they had to be dressed by the greens unit to

LINK:	https://www.panavision.com/highlights/highlights-detail/the-big-pictur...
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