It’s been an eventful 2015 for cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi, ASC. Just a few months ago he earned what is widely regarded as the highest honor for a DP, the ASC designation from the American Society of Cinematographers.
And this year also saw the release of two high-profile features he lensed: first the Scott Cooper-directed Black Mass in September, followed by last month’s debut of the Tom McCarthy-helmed Spotlight. Both movies are smack dab in the middle of the Oscar conversation, and both stories unfold in Boston.
Quite remarkably, Takayanagi set foot in Boston for the first time to embark on Black Mass which required capturing the city’s blue-collar, Irish-Catholic neighborhood known as “Southie” circa 1975. Cooper said that while he was ostensibly making a period picture, his approach was for it to play “like a contemporary movie. We’re not in 2014 making a film about 1975. We are in 1975 making a contemporary picture. I wanted all those period details to recede into the background so that character and story would come front and center.”
Cooper initially worked with Takayanagi on the Christian Bale-starring feature Out of the Furnace (2013), leading to a return engagement on Black Mass. “I first gravitated toward Masa,” Cooper told SHOOT, “because I was so struck by the film Babel for which he shot the section in Japan for [director] Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. That Japanese section was so humanistic. I could see that this was a photographer in full control of all of his talents—nothing showy but extremely memorable footage. His use of lenses, his naturalistic lighting had an emotional effect. He brought so much to Out of the Furnace and then to Black Mass. Masa has no ego. He’s not one of those DPs whose work says ‘look how clever I can be with the camera.’ His approach instead is how to carefully construct a story, and do full justice to that story, through the camera, lenses and movement—as well as through the lack of movement. It’s easy to always move the camera. But to use restraint as needed for the story is something Masa does so well.”
Right after Black Mass (based on the nonfiction book “Black Mass” by The Boston Globe reporters Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill), Takayanagi again found himself in a Boston story with Spotlight. The movie also has a Globe connection. Spotlight chronicles The Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into the abuses of the Catholic Church. The movie’s title, Spotlight, refers to the paper’s four person investigative team responsible for exposing the systematic cover-up of the pedophilia of more than 70 local priests. The Spotlight team members were editor Walter “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton), reporters Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) and Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), and researcher Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James).
Spotlight actually went to Toronto for much interior shooting, with exteriors largely lensed in Boston along with some select interior work (in The Boston Globe building, for example). The Boston Globe investigation took place from around mid-2001 to early 2002, with Takayanagi contributing to capturing the Boston of that time period.
Among Takayanagi’s other notable credits are The Grey (2011) directed by Joe Carnahan, and the David O. Russell-directed Silver Linings Playbook (2012).
Asked to reflect on his collaborative relationship with director Cooper, Takayanagi related, “It’s such a joy to work with him. He’s a genuine, nice person who trusts you, gives you a lot of freedom along with interesting guidance. We will sit down together and go through the script. He gives me the key emotional points for the story, putting everyone on the same page. It’s a collaborative creative process. I try to spend a lot of time with him in pre-pro and shooting. Every Saturday morning, we would sit down and recap the week before and explore what’s next ahead of us. It’s a very creatively positive relationship.”
In terms of his choice of camera for Black Mass, Takayanagi shared, “We went with the Panavision XL2. We shot on film, anamorphic. Scott [Cooper] loves film and for us, it was obvious this was the way to go. We didn’t even discuss digital versus film. We already knew that film was what we needed–the grain, the texture made it the clear choice for creating the look and feel of a gritty Boston during that era.”
While Takayanagi had a track record with Cooper prior to Black Mass, Spotlight marked the cinematographer’s first time working with director McCarthy, who also co-wrote the screenplay. “I don’t know how he [McCarthy] ended up hiring me,” said Takayanagi. “I’ll have to ask him. I do remember being in Boston on Black Mass and receiving the script for Spotlight. I saw that this film was set in Boston as well, which seemed to me very convenient. I actually went back to L.A. after Black Mass and had a Skype chat with Tom. We just sort of clicked together. Tom knows the story, understands the emotion involved and does a great job of conveying it. In pre-pro, he gave me all this research he had done with Josh Singer [who wrote the screenplay with McCarthy]. It was important research, laying out the characters and the backstories. It was valuable to me to understand the story fully and where everything was coming from.”
As for the camera he deployed on Spotlight, Takayanagi said, “Tom and I thought about film originally because of the time period–2001 and 2002–in which the story was set. We fancied the idea of shooting film. But shooting a lot in Toronto, the only film lab available was in Montreal which made dailies turnaround a little bit difficult logistically. We ended up going with the ARRI Alexa. We became one-hundred percent committed to the Alexa. It wound up being a great choice for the movie. We shot most of the interiors in Toronto, the exteriors in Boston, some key interiors also in Boston, like the big libraries and in The Boston Globe headquarters. They gave us a lot of freedom to go all around the Globe building, and their library as well.”
Regarding the seemingly odd circumstance of becoming the go-to cinematographer for stories in Boston considering he had never been in the city prior to Black Mass, Takayanagi had no explanation. He simply shared, “Coming to Boston for the first time, I learned a lot about the city. It’s a great town and it was a challenge to do justice to it. It’s kind of funny how things turned out–getting two Boston stories in a row despite never having been there before. Like any project, though, the challenge is in how we can best tell the story. In this case, we had two true stories which we had to be true to emotionally–and which we had to make as authentic as possible.”
His affinity for authenticity and attention to story were among the qualities helping Takayanagi to earn the ASC designation. “I got it in September,” related Takayanagi. “It’s a great honor and feels kind of unreal to be honest. My career started reading ‘Masters of Light,’ a book with the insights of all those amazing ASC members. And now it’s strange to be accepted into that inner circle. It means a great deal to be accepted into the ASC.”
This is the fourth in a multi-part series with future installments of The Road To Oscar slated to run in the weekly SHOOT>e.dition, The SHOOT Dailies, SHOOT’s December and January print issues (and PDF versions) and on SHOOTonline.com. The series will appear weekly through the Academy Awards. The 88th Academy Awards nominations will be announced on Thursday, January 14, 2016. The Oscars will be held on Sunday, February 28, 2016, at the Dolby Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center in Hollywood, and will be televised live by the ABC Television Network at 7 pm ET/4 pm PT. The Oscar presentation also will be televised live in more than 225 countries and territories worldwide.
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