The Savages is the story of a family in which a sister (Laura Linney) and brother (Philip Seymour Hoffman) must face up to each other and their responsibilities as their father (Philip Bosco) grows old and frail. It was written and directed by Tamara Jenkins, best known for Slums of Beverly Hills.

The look of The Savages grew out of conversations between Jenkins and DP W. Mott Hupfel III. The director and cinematographer took visual cues from a French film called The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005).
“That movie almost seems as though it’s a documentary,” says Hupfel. “The entire film is handheld, and at first it seems as though there’s no cinematic lighting. If you look carefully, you discover that neither of those things is true. But the film just feels that way, effortlessly. It’s a beautiful film.”

They chose to shoot The Savages almost completely handheld, sometimes using two cameras in order to speed things up on the set. Most of the other choices about lighting, blocking and lenses grew out of this decision.
“We were extremely lucky to have Peter Agliata (30 Rock, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) to operate the camera,” says Hupfel. “He became the backbone of the movie. His handheld style came to define the cinematography. Everything followed from his mode of working, which was perfect and instinctual.
“He handles the camera skillfully and manages to be in the right place, but he also knows the script as well as the actors, and moves in at just the right time. His operating helped the actors dramatize the comedy, which in this film is somewhat tragic in nature. He could do a great take, and then do another take that would also be great in a different way that we hadn’t thought of. That also had the benefit of giving Tamara options in the editing room. Within the first week, Tamara and I were in awe.”
Agliata usually shot with an ARRICAM Lite with a 400-foot magazine. The lenses were Cooke S4s, and the 32mm became the standard lens. A second camera or a second take might use a 75mm lens for a closer shot.
“I like to use one lens, especially on something like The Savages, where we wanted the camera to disappear,” says Hupfel. “I think it helps the audience feel like they’re in the same place. You get to know the shape of the lens and how it works with the actors. Also, there weren’t a lot of singles in this film. Most shots included multiple people, and the 32mm worked well for that, too.”

The handheld aesthetic also made pulling focus difficult. “Dan Hersey, who has been my focus puller for 15 years, did a fantastic job,” says Hupfel. “Often it was people walking around in the dark, so to speak, with no rehearsal, and Peter changing the shot on the fly. But Dan hit it every time. To make things more difficult, I asked him to limit measurements to minimize intrusions. We could have expected focus problems on every other take, and instead we didn’t really have to worry about it. That kind of skill makes a film like this possible.”
The majority of the film was shot at practical locations in the New York City area. Ditmas Park, an older Victorian neighborhood in Brooklyn, stood in for scenes that take place in Buffalo, New York. The filmmakers also commandeered a disused nursing home in Staten Island for an entire week.

Hupfel and Jenkins visited as many of the locations as possible beforehand and mapped out a strategy. “At the nursing home, it was important to figure out how to stage and time scenes in an interesting way,” says Hupfel. “There were many long walking and talking shots down hallways, sometimes moving from interior to exterior while pulling stops. We planned on using a fluid camera to keep things from getting visually boring.”
Some important emotional scenes take place in the parking lot of the nursing home. In one scene, Laura Linney’s character smokes a cigarette with another character in his van.“

Some of the scenes in the parking lot are very dark,” says Hupfel. “Often I was only lighting one side of their faces using a China ball. It’s a pitch black parking lot except for one or two practical sodium vapor street lamps. There was a moment of concern when we went from DVD dailies, which were not very accurate, to seeing the scenes projected. But the scenes turned out the way I envisioned them—very dark.”
The film stock for the parking lot scenes was KODAK VISION2 500T 5218 color negative. “With the ‘18, you can literally make it look almost exactly like what you see with your eye,” says Hupfel. “There’s a little more contrast than your eye would see.”

For daylight scenes, Hupfel used KODAK VISION2 250D 5205 film. In most interior situations, he used extremely small lighting instruments. “I think two or three times, in the airport and in some day exteriors, we used an 18K,” he says. “But in most situations we lit with small units—Dedolights, K5 kits taped to walls, LED units, or bulbs hidden in corners. My gaffer, Ken Shibata, has a lot of experience working on indie films in New York. He was very good at knowing what was possible in the time we had.”

To meet Jenkins’ desire for a distraction-free zone on the set, Hupfel asked Shibata to run the lights through a dimmer board. “Because of the handheld approach, you go in and light the whole room,” says Hupfel. “Prepping for handheld can slow things down, in part because people don’t realize exactly what the camera is going to see until after the first take. We wanted to avoid that. With every light on a dimmer, Ken and I were able to make our adjustments remotely, without invading the actors’ space whenever possible. He could call up the dimmer board on his Treo smartphone and change the lights while standing next to me. It was a lot of extra work to begin with, but it was worth it. Ken was really the perfect gaffer for this film.”

Hupfel did make use of larger units for scenes taking place in Sun City, Arizona, the 1960s retirement community where the movie opens. The warm, colorful atmosphere contrasts almost comically with the dreary Buffalo winters seen later. Jenkins and Hupfel found inspiration in “Pictures from Home,” a book of photographs by Larry Sultan. The pictures depict Sultan’s aging parents in their Florida retirement.

“Sun City is very colorful, but we went out of our way to emphasize the colors further,” Hupfel says. “I used a trick that I had perfected on The Notorious Bettie Page. In order to make the colors pop more on a bright, sunny day, you just have to fill everything in 100 percent so that there are fewer blown-out highlights. We were blasting 18Ks everywhere to make sure that all the crazy colors showed up. It looks like they’re on the surface of the sun. We really want the audience to feel the intense heat.”

Interiors were treated similarly. “We shot two sets of actors sitting in a living room with sliding glass doors,” recalls Hupfel. “We had wide shots that looked across the living room and out the doors, and of course it’s nearly impossible to bring the interiors up to the very bright levels visible through the doors. We couldn’t even light through the glass doors because of reflections. The solution was to set 18Ks outside the doors that crossed the room and reflected off mirrors, filling the room with light.”
Linney’s character is stressed-out and approaching middle age, so the actress insisted on working with little or no makeup for most scenes.

“It wasn’t important to her to look great all the time so we didn’t do anything special for her,” Hupfel explains. “I did use a 1/8 Black Pro Mist filter at all times to take the edge off the lenses. We found that Laura’s skin tone tends to pick up any color that was around her, from the set walls to the wardrobe. Any kind of color shift, like some blue light sneaking in through a window, shows up on her hair and on her skin. We figured this out early on and we were very careful with her, keeping the light clean. There were scenes that took place in motel rooms where the walls were ugly colors, and it was difficult to keep those colors off her. We spent quite a bit of time in the digital intermediate bringing her skin tones back to something real.”

Plans for a digital intermediate (DI) were not finalized until principal photography was complete, but Hupfel knew that the extra level of control would be crucial. “I was hoping that we could work out a DI for the film, and was lucky that the production was able to make it happen. Our tight schedule and budget, along with our method of lighting and shooting, made the film a worthy candidate for the DI process,” he says.
The negative was processed at Technicolor and scanned at LaserPacific in Los Angeles on a Northlight scanner at 4K resolution. The images were then down sampled to 2K for digital timing. Hupfel collaborated with LaserPacific’s Colorist David Cole.

“I was amazed by what can be done,” says Hupfel. “We could pick up Laura in the back of the room, circle her face and bring it up a bit, and she would end up in the foreground after the adjustments. Dave was extremely quick and exactly right. He was very good at telling me what we could and couldn’t do. Sometimes he’d show me why something wouldn’t work, and I’d tell him that I liked it that way. He was very good at listening to Tamara and keeping us both happy. Everyone at LaserPacific was terrific and very supportive.”

With Hupfel at his side, Cole added verisimilitude to plain interiors shot on stage by giving more bloom, halation and wrap to the light. Scenes in Buffalo were made to feel chillier, and colors in the Sun City sequences were fine tuned. The film’s final shot shows Linney running with a dog. Cole was able to alter the time of day by warming up the images and isolate the dog to bring out details and make the animal stand out more clearly against the background.

The digital intermediate took roughly two weeks, with the deadline for a Sundance screening looming. “We were able to pretty much nail it in that time because of the great collaboration among Mott, Tamara and myself,” says Cole. “If you don’t have that communication, you can be twiddling your thumbs for half of the grade. But everyone was on the same page from very early on. Tamara had specific ideas about what she did and didn’t want. We all had opinions that we could quickly test out, and the best parts of all those ideas made it into the film. That communication was one of the driving forces behind the speed of the DI process.”

Unlike Hupfel’s previous feature films The American Astronaut and The Notorious Bettie Page, The Savages is not a stylized film. “We were going for the feeling of the camera being totally integrated into the scene, where the acting is more important than the look, and where hopefully the audience begins to feel like they’re a part of it,” he remarks. “I feel like we succeeded in that.”