Cannes winner shot on HDCAM

French director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire repeatedly breaks the cardinal rules of filmmaking. As well as routinely working with children, he likes to cast non-professional actors as his leads and shoot in hostile environments. After following a street boy living in Colombia for his 2003 documentary Carlitos Medellin, Sauvaire turned his attention to children’s experience of war with his latest film, Johnny Mad Dog. Again, the leads had no formal training and the locations, this time in Liberia, were far from the comfortable confines of a Hollywood soundstage.

“It all started with a friend of mine who said, ‘I thought about you when I read this book called Johnny Mad Dog by the Congolese writer Emmanuel Dongala’,” says Sauvaire. “I read the book and I was overwhelmed.” The book tells two opposing stories, one of destruction and the other of hope. Johnny is a 15-year-old child-soldier, who goes on a robbing spree with his small group of fellow underage fighters. Laokolé, meanwhile, is a 13 year-old girl trying to escape her home city with her father and little brother, after it is occupied by teenage militia.

Dongala does not specify a location for his story and this, thought Sauvaire, gave the book its resonance. “I was moved by its evocation of the contemporary tragedy of Africa, which we talk about so little, and, not least, by the universality of its story,” he says. Sauvaire turned to long-time acquaintance and director of the seminal La Haine (Hate) Mathieu Kassovitz to produce the film adaptation of Dongala’s novel and then set about choosing a location.

Liberian cast

With its recent civil wars and heavy reliance on child soldiers, Sauvaire decided that the West African country of Liberia would be the perfect setting for the film. According to UN figures, around 21,000 child soldiers were involved in Liberia’s civil wars, between 1989 and 2003. After securing the backing of the UN and Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Sauvaire decamped to the country’s capital Monrovia in 2006 to find his cast.

“Jean-Stéphane wanted to film young people who had taken part in the civil war,” says director of photography and fellow Frenchman Marc Koninckx. “He chose 15 ex-child soldiers from a potential 500 or 600 children who came to the casting.” Their background made them perfect for the narrative but tricky for the shoot. “They had no family structure and most had never gone to school,” says Koninckx. “They were not ready for a system like filming and were very unpredictable.”

As his cast were both illiterate and new to acting, Sauvaire spent the next eight months preparing them for the shoot with regular improvisation sessions. "It was a way to get them used to the camera and to get them to play around with acting,” he says.

Given the demands of his novice cast, Sauvaire called on Koninckx, a veteran in less than hospitable locations, for the shoot. “For years I have been shooting films in countries such as Mozambique, Namibia, Algeria, Syria and Rwanda,” says Koninckx. “The involvement is so much deeper. You learn to trust your intuition and to react faster.”

Shooting with the HDW-F900R

After two weeks of camera tests in Paris, pre-production got underway in April last year, followed immediately by a six and a half week shoot. With time short due to the oncoming rainy season, the 15-strong production team were pushed to their limits by the cast. “They were not accustomed to any constraint of schedule or discipline,” says Koninckx. “The boys were impatient when it was necessary to repeat a scene more than two or three times. They were aggressive with each other and sometimes fought. It was an enormous responsibility.”

While the cast fought tooth and nail, Koninckx had technical concerns of his own. “Shooting on 35mm film would have been too expensive, since we even wanted to shoot the rehearsals,” he says. “Between Super 16 and HD, we chose high definition. I was a little apprehensive about HD. It was my first experiment with it and under difficult conditions with the colour palette, dark skins, enormous contrasts, moving between several locations, the dust and the moisture.”

Koninckx eventually settled on the HDW-F900R HDCAM camcorder after testing out a few choices. “I finally chose the Sony for its greater definition,” he says. “We played with the camera’s Details function, in combination with filters in front of the lens to obtain the definition I liked.”

Under strict instructions to follow the actors at all time, Koninckx spent most of his time shouldering a Steadicam. “We chose it for its flexibility and its ability to film in low camera positions,” he says. “We filmed all the scenes in master shots and changed axes when we were satisfied with the actors’ performance.”

With an unpredictable, constantly mobile cast and challenging locations, HDCAM proved to be a winner. “It was a great help,” says Koninckx. “It was not too heavy and we had a much longer recording time. It was really important not to stop the action too often for a reload.”

Benefits in post production

The benefits of HDCAM were also apparent in post production. “The digital grading enabled me to harmonize the various skin nuances and reflections,” says Koninckx, of the work carried out at the Belgian post production company, HoverlorD. The negative grading at Parisian facility GTC was equally surprising. “I was astonished by the quality of the transfer,” says Koninckx. “The technical progress is enormous in this field.”

The results have not only pleased Koninckx but also festival juries in Cannes – which awarded Johnny Mad Dog the 2008 Hope Prize – Deauville, Hamburg and Moscow. For Koninckx, technology helped to secure the film these prestigious accolades. “The final look of the film, this incredible feeling of madness of a civil war is due to the complete freedom we had during shooting,” he says. “This is notably thanks to the versatile combination between the Steadicam and the Sony 900R.”

5 December 2008