“The story is told by the faces, the story is told by the faces, said Darius Khondji about Marty Supreme, last work with Josh Safdie. In fact, his photograph articulates the story through a work on shades, color variations and light density. It is a narrative that proceeds by gradations. In recent years, now becoming one of the most acclaimed film DoPs, his technique continues to be renewed in Bong Joon-ho cinema, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Ari Aster and Safdie brothers.
Darius Khondji was born in Tehran in 1955 and grew up between Iran and France, forming in Europe before approaching cinema as an operator and director of photography. After the first experiences in the independent French cinema of the 1980s, it was imposed at the beginning of the following decade thanks to Delicatessen by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro. International recognition came in 1995 with David Fincher’s Seven, opening the doors of American cinema in Khondji. Two years later, the first Oscar nomination comes with Alan Parker’s musical Evita. In the same years he alternates American and European productions, returning to work with Jeunet but also with Bernardo Bertolucci in Io ballo solo and Roman Polanski in La ninth door. Starting in the early 2000s, he began a collaboration with Woody Allen, accompanying the director in a new phase of his film in films such as Anything Else and Midnight in Paris, until Irrational Man arrives, the last film with the American director who then abandons Khondji to begin the partnership with another giant of photography, Vittorio Storaro. In this same period he signed the photograph in A Romantic Kiss – My Blueberry Nights by Wong Kar-wai, There was once in New York by James Gray and Amour by Michael Haneke.
Regarding the last years of his work – the meeting with Aster, the Safdie brothers and the collaboration with Bong Joon-ho – Khondji tells in a recent interview with The Film Stage: “Bong Joon-ho is an incredible artist, as well as Ari Aster. I was just very lucky. I never really believed the speeches about luck, but in this case it is true. I was lucky to work with directors of this kind, real film directors, with very strong personalities. Right before I filmed Josh, I worked at Eddington with Ari. It was an incredible experience. It is one of the greatest young filmmakers of modern cinema”. The director of photography then compares the most recent sets: “Mickey 17 was a completely different experience. It was a film shot entirely in the studio: we created the world within the spacecraft and the planet. Eddington, on the other hand, was the opposite, all in the outside, in location in the desert, often at night. It was incredible. Then I got to Marty. I felt really, really lucky. And that’s why it becomes difficult to make another film.”.
Khondji works for the first time with Josh Safdie and his brother Benny in raw Diamonds – a memorable Adam Sandler – and returns today to Marty Supreme with a fresh Timothée Chalamet of Golden Globe for the role of the protagonist. As for the techniques adopted in the film, the director of photography tells: “We talked about images from the Fifties and how to achieve them. We wanted to go back to what we love: turn with the old anamorphic style, a very classic style, using vintage goals. And we shot mainly with very long telephotos, more than in raw diamonds“.
There are lights and colors capable of making indelible entire seasons of the cinema. Visual choices so recognizable and identity that a single frame is enough to identify the hand. In this sense, thinking about the cinema of the nineties without the photograph of Darius Khondji is very difficult. His work between light and shadow and a fine control of saturation has renewed the thriller by redefining its aesthetics in Seven, and has reviewed French cinema through collaboration with Jean-Pierre Jeunet, from Delicatessen to Alien – Cloning, unresolved but visually fascinating films.
Article The chromatic narratives of Darius Khondji comes from SentieriSelvaggi.
