Five cinematographers frame their pictures

James Bond hunts an assassin in a glass office tower in Shanghai, the pursuit heightened — and highlighted — by walls of glass and neon advertising images of sea jellies.

“We were coming out of the monochromatic gray of England, so we wanted to arrive in Shanghai with a bang — a lot of color and movement of light. Gradually we came to the idea of making everything glass, so the whole thing was this big box of magical reflections.”

“We built a model to see how the reflections would work and so we could position the big billboards and have the assassin firing at the hotel room in the right position. Then we built the set on the soundstage and spent a number of weeks rigging it, positioning every light. The jellyfish originally were just a stand-in image, but it was such a good choice, it stayed.”

“The calming, poetic nature of the jellyfish imagery builds the tension of the scene. If the imagery had been frenetic, like what you usually see on billboards, we wouldn’t have been able to build that sort of menace. And that’s what we were after: the ultimate cat-and-mouse scene.”

“Not long after losing his family in a shipwreck, a waterlogged Pi cries out to God with a mixture of anger, defiance and resignation.”

“We spent 21/2 months at this tank we built that was like 150 feet wide and 300 feet long and 50 feet tall. Doing that, we could create any weather and shape the lighting and sustain the mood. Initially I thought this was a smaller movie, but it didn’t turn out to be that at all. It got bigger and bigger.”

“We spent a long time working out the angles. Every scene on the water required meticulous planning. To get around the tank, we had a spider cam, but sometimes if the weather we created got too rough, we’d work on cranes. Suraj [Sharma, who plays Pi as a teenager] is a truly amazing soul and did his own stunts. He’s not on a gimbal. He’s in the tank with these 8-foot waves crashing over him.”

“Pi’s surrendering to God. He initially thinks the storm is kind of glorious, kind of like when he’s on top of the boat when the ship sinks. It’s almost like a little repeat of that, but now the reality of the situation is sinking in even more.”

“Following a tsunami, a mother and son cling desperately to a mattress, trying to stay together.”

“Director Juan Antonio “Bayona wanted to shoot the flood placing the camera close to the characters to make the viewer live the tragedy firsthand. This shot’s function is more descriptive, helping locate the characters.”

“The water tank had metal rails in its base where we could move actors and objects like the mattress in a controlled way. The water speed and mattress speed had to be similar. The sequence had a lot of post-production work, but in this case, what the camera captured was all real due to the high position.”

“In this frame, we find several of the most essential elements of the film: the destructive power of infuriated nature and the extreme effort of two people who want to survive and help each other.”

“The tragic Fantine (Anne Hathaway) sings the anguished story of her hard-knock life, “I Dreamed a Dream.”

“With the big musical numbers, [director] Tom [Hooper] wanted to do them in one take, so if the singer nails the song and the shot sustains itself, the audience gets sucked in emotionally. So we wanted to be as unfussy as possible.”

“We did six takes, and once she sits down, it’s a single shot. We filmed the whole movie with three cameras all the time, so I had to light it for three different cameras, three different lenses. It was a bit of a juggle, but it works.”

“There’s hard moonlight hitting her, with a few candles dotted about. For the close-up, the most powerful bit is when she tilts her head slightly down and you get a lot of neck. Her head’s butted up to the right side of the frame, and there’s a lot of bare neck, which lends a fragility to the shot and this song where she’s singing about her life falling apart.”

“The movie opens with a battle between Union and Confederate soldiers in a muddy stream, the brown and deep-blue color scheme broken only by an American flag flying through the shot.”

“[Director] Steven [Spielberg] wanted to establish immediately the historical setting, that we’re in a battle between two opposite sides. The flag coming through gives you a glimpse of the reality of the war.”

“We shot outside Richmond [Va.]. The morning was overcast, and when the sun came out, we added just enough smoke and rain to soften the image and maintain lighting continuity. We had three cameras that day and shot it really fast. It was over in six or seven hours. It’s the only shot where we used three cameras.”

“The movie is about the war, its costs and why it was fought. We don’t see war often in the movie, but it was important to establish it so the audience understands the stakes.”