“Stylistically, A Little Princess and Sleepy Hollow are quite close to what we eventually did on Lemony Snicket, and I think that’s why Brad called me,” says the cinematographer.
Some of it worked and some of it was less successful, but the film has an interesting mood, and it was a great opportunity to experiment.”īased on the books by Daniel Handler, Lemony Snicket traces the plight of three plucky orphans (played by Emily Browning, Liam Aiken, and the infant duo of Kara and Shelby Hoffman) who must contend with their beyond-eccentric relatives, including the exceedingly greedy Count Olaf (Jim Carrey), who dons a series of elaborate disguises in his attempts to control the kids’ immense inheritance.ĭirector Brad Silberling sought Lubezki’s help from the outset. “We’ve tried to do a lot of things in camera, as we did on Sleepy Hollow, such as using painted backings as opposed to TransLites or bluescreen effects. “It’s a very stylized movie,” says Lubezki, who has become something of a go-to guy for magical-realism filmmaking, given such credits as A Little Princess (see AC June ’96), Meet Joe Black, A Walk in the Clouds, Sleepy Hollow ( AC Dec. It’s exactly this effect that director of photography Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, ASC, AMC sought for the project at hand: Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. One could dismiss these as a collection of clever façades, foam boulders, forced-perspective miniatures and painted cycloramas, but the uniquely soft light illuminating each set fully sells the illusion, binding each element together with a palpable atmosphere of subtle magic. But by taking a few steps past the scores of generators quietly humming in the sun-baked parking lot, a visitor is transported to an alternate universe: a rustic seaside village with waves lapping against the shore at sunset an immense, dank underground cavern with shafts of light streaming in from above and a vast cornfield bisected by a set of train tracks, upon which a dilapidated sedan is precariously positioned. The industrial exterior of the decommissioned Boeing factory south of Los Angeles now called Downey Studios hardly suggests the impressive realm of fantasy housed within. Unit photography by Francois Duhamel, SMPSP
Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, AMC creates a sense of “cinematic illustration” for the melancholy comedy
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