Jonathon Le Grice crafts a dark, fairytale-like world in Watch Me Burn, blending magical realism and deafness with striking cinematography in his NFTS graduate film.
A deaf teenager’s search for belonging leads to darkness
British Cinematographer (BC): Please can you share an overview of your film?
Jonathon Le Grice (JLC): At its heart, Watch Me Burn is the bittersweet tale of Rue – a deaf teenager whose life is turned upside down after losing her hearing in an accident. Following her move to a remote village with her parents, Rue finds herself isolated until she’s drawn into a peculiar friendship with a group of girls. In an effort to belong, she takes part in an act of cruelty that changes everything. It’s a dark fairytale-like story where the cost of acceptance is as heavy as it is tragic.
BC: What were your initial discussions about the visual approach for the film? What look and mood were you trying to achieve?
JLC: Right from the get-go it felt like Sofia Spotti (director) and I were on the same page – there were numerous discussions around some of the subtler nuances in the script. However the one thing that we kept coming back to was this idea of building a realm that felt both magical and uncomfortably real – this duality of two worlds colliding, a heightened atmosphere that captures the inner life of someone who can’t hear the way others do. We knew we wanted to push the visual language and create a film that felt off kilter with saturated tones and heavy contrast, yet balanced with a more whimsical teenage spirit.
BC: What were your creative references and inspirations? Which films, still photography or paintings were you influenced by?
JLC: Amidst watching numerous films we quickly became hooked on the ‘Sound of Metal’ and its ability to dip in and out of the subjective experience of a person with hearing loss, along with the tonality of The Quiet Girl.. There was this beauty in (cinematographer) Kate McCullough’s ability to work with what appeared to be this very naturalistic, carefully composed and soft framing that just made you want to lean in and listen. Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth was also a huge calling card when discussing the magical elements to the story. Although the artworks found from scrolling for hours on ‘Pinterest’ became a large source of our inspiration… we found ourselves constantly bouncing back and forth various demonic, witch-like artworks of girls dancing around campfires along with whimsical paintings by Herbert James Draper and abstract Japanese inspired ink paintings of wolves. We got really into wolves!
BC: What filming locations were used? Were any sets constructed? Did any of the locations present any challenges?
JLC: Sofia is a woman of nature! It’s one of the qualities I admire most about her as a director. She has this incredible ability of talking about location as if it were another character in the film. No sets were constructed, just 10 locations to muster in 7 days of shooting, with mostly exteriors… which come with their own set of challenges, such as with working with the sun (or lack thereof), access for crew, power options, the list goes on. However, one of the biggest challenges we found with the location was just finding it. Our hero “house on top of the hill” where “the outcast” lived proved to be one of the more difficult ones. There were a few main boxes that we had to tick here; for starters it needed to be a house on top of a hill, secluded away from anything else, that also fit within the architecture of our village and had a view from a road so that we could film Rue’s POV as she drove past it for the first time. We had a location locked in before the shoot but then pulled out last minute, so we had to stand down for a day and go for a scout. We were driving for hours around the Cotswolds and about to give up before this one Airbnb called us back to say we could come and have a look. It was perfect, it was everything that we had ever wanted for the house on top of the hill. So we locked it in and planned to shoot there on our final day. I had planned to have a 3mx3m helium balloon light for the night time scene as it was such a huge expanse of exterior – and on the morning of the shoot, I got a call from the company saying they were going to have to cancel due to heavy winds rolling through. So, I had to quickly pivot to another plan that I and the gaffer extraordinaire, Jamie Hitchens, had devised. After driving to the location and unloading, the skies opened up and heavy rain came down. The shoot was called off. We eventually came back to the location and managed to pull it off!
BC: Can you explain your choice of camera and lenses and what made them suitable for this production and the look you were trying to achieve?
JLC: A big part of this film was all about capturing Rue’s inner experience. Really tapping into her psyche throughout this escalating destruction forming around her. Alice Larner at Sunbelt Rentals was kind enough to help support us and took us in with open arms. We tested a few different pairing options but ultimately fell in love with the look of the K35’s on the larger sensor of the Alexa Mini LF. There was just this beauty in the way the highlights rolled off and bokeh became soft and almost milky. It felt timeless. We also knew we wanted a specific look for these truer POV moments to evoke this almost animalistic, wolf-like perspective. We looked into a few options like Lensbaby but ended up landing on this 58mm Petzval lens. It’s not-so-subtle, swirly bokeh was like a visual whisper, inviting the viewer to step into Rue’s shoes.
BC: What role did camera movement, composition and framing and colour play in the visual storytelling?
JLC: We kept things deliberately restrained for a lot of the film, opting for mostly locked-off, carefully composed shots to emphasise Rue’s isolation and help juxtapose the emotional escalation and rage that builds up towards the end. When it came time for the film’s climax, we shifted gears—using handheld, disorienting camera movements. This is Rue’s story and she is the centre of it, so compositionally, we often centre-framed her in a clean single, and when it came to the people around her we opted more for dirty over the shoulders, keeping it from her perspective, and at times swinging on the Petzval for that animalistic-like true POV. One of my favourite tools that Sofia and I discussed at length about was this high-angle 3/4 extreme close-up on her face with the 35mm. The 35 was her lens, punching it all the way open at T1.3, basically only being able to keep an individual hair sharp at one time (our 1st AC Ben Geddes got a real kick out of this one, sorry mate). It seemed so perfect for this sort of oppressive, claustrophobic anger within her, highlighting and picking out specific moments in scenes to pull her out and dig deeper. It was an approach that was talked a lot about with the whole post team and especially the sound designer, Sarah-Louise Davila, when discussing how we were going to dip in and out of the subjective sound-scape of being deaf. Then when we wanted to bring in the full sound range and get perspective as a bystander we would pull out to these wider, more objective frames.
Colour was also a really big factor in this film – There was this duality at play from daytime to night. We really wanted to ground it when the sun was out (well, I mean grey clouds will do) and bring it into a more natural colour palette. When the sun went down, we wanted it to feel magical, other-worldly. So going for a richer blue tone, something you might not typically see on an evening stroll in the park.
BC: What was your approach to lighting the film? Which was the most difficult scene to light?
JLC: Lighting during the day was to feel natural and clean. As most of the film takes place in exterior locations it was mainly working with bounce and neg – but for night time we wanted it to take on this magical feeling, with a heightened sense of reality. Pushing a more stylised approach, we wanted to keep night time feeling blue, like very blue and contrasty.
One of the hardest scenes to light was definitely the final scene with the house on top of the hill that I mentioned earlier. To give you a run-down of what needed to happen, Rue was to run up a hill, light up a Molotov cocktail and throw it at a house that would light up on fire… all taking place at night…. using VFX for the house on fire… opting for longer handheld takes… viewing close to a 360° expanse…easy. It was one of those scenes that definitely needed a lot more thought and care taken into the logistics of it.
Greenkit Lighting rental company had this light called “Senna Masterpiece” – essentially they were like a sky panel 360, but produced an extremely hard quality of light due to the lensing on the panel, and had an output equivalent to an m40. It was a beast, so I started with two of those to streak across the field, alongside a few smaller units to bring life to the tree line in the background. Thankfully BPS came to the rescue and lent some of their NXTGENBPS GOAT batteries to help power these outside. For the house on fire we were able to get our hands on a bunch of 2×1 hard light Geminis that we had on DMX and rigged to punch through all the windows. Jas (additional shooting shoot gaffer) absolutely nailed it! There were lots of little timing technicalities to all of this though, and we used a DMG dash by Roscoe to fake the Molotov cocktail in her hand for some shots, then combining that with the real Molotov cocktail (fire… very cool!) and also running around with a 1×1 Aladdin flyball to help key her in certain scenarios. So yeah, this was the more challenging scene to light.
One thing to note, just before we were about to start the scene, a wave of fog rolled through the hills of our location. All of a sudden those lights were blooming the fog and giving away the source in frame – so in a quick pivot we decided to place all sources on the ground and shoot up into the sky. Luckily because we were on top of a hill, we could hide them below out of shot. It just lit up the night sky and had this real ethereal quality to it which lent itself so well to that final scene. A happy accident to say the least.
BC: What were you trying to achieve in the grade?
JLC: We pushed a lot in the grade. Ellen Yu was amazing and absolutely nailed it – one of the main things we were trying to do was essentially heighten what we had already achieved on set, working a lot with the colour palette Terezia Torousova (production designer) had created for the film. We wanted a bite to the image, something that felt magical, taking a lot of inspiration from films like Pan’s Labyrinth and Gretal & Hansel.
BC: Which elements of the film were most challenging to shoot and how did you overcome those obstacles?
JLC: There were quite a few challenging aspects to this film such as recreating a believable fire light, shooting a night time scene in a bedroom on the first floor with moonlight coming in during the day, recreating exterior lighting scenarios in a studio, shooting a whole scene at blue hour (Devan CS the Steadicam op went above and beyond here!). But above all else I think one of the most complex challenge wasn’t even related to cinematography – it was working with wolves… yes wolves. We drove to a wolf sanctuary in Sussex, where we were set to shoot the final shot of the film – where the girls turn into wolves and start growling at Rue. I had to match this shot to what we were going to shoot on location at a later date – something that hadn’t been filmed yet, so it required a lot of planning. But the real challenge was spending three hours trying to get these damn wolves to snarl. Unfortunately the real wolves were cut from the final film… don’t want to clickbait any readers.
BC: What was your proudest moment throughout the production process or which scene/shot are you most proud of?
JLC: My favourite shot of the film has to be the hero shot of the house burning at the end. I mean this was the very first image that Sofia had in her mind when talking about the film. It was the one shot everything was leading up to. Numerous discussions were held with different departments how best to tackle it. There was a stage when we were planning on shooting a miniature model of the house and burning it, then having it play out on a volume wall with Lucy (Rue) standing in front – there were even conversations around using SFX on the house to have real fire coming out of the windows… but quickly realised that wasn’t quite a student budget level of production, nor the location owner’s idea of a fun time. So, we ended up going down the VFX route. We worked with Paddy Eason closely who was going to do all the post work on that shot (and many others) – he was such a dream to work with, taking everything we got on set and making it exactly how Sofia and I always imagined.
BC: What lessons did you learn from this production you will take with you onto future productions?
JLC: Don’t work with wolves.
On a final note I would just love to say a massive thank you to Alice Larner & Sunbelt Rentals for the camera kit, Greenkit London, BPS and Glo Film for the lighting, Craig Dean Devine and Stuart Harris for supporting me along the way as well as Oliver Stapleton, Benedict Spence and Duncan Bruce for all those conversations and brain picking along the way.
