Director Ramin Bahrani just remade the classic Ray Bradbury novel, Fahrenheit 451, for HBO…and I got the call from Jennifer Dorn at Variety to shoot him for this weeks issue. Kaz and I packed up the bus and headed downtown to HBO in midtown and here’s how things turned out…
First, we set up my favorite cement wall drop from Gravity Backdrops for kind of a raw look…
Pretty simple lighting setup…just an 8″ fresnel spot with a couple of 5′ umbrellas for a soft wall of fill…
…for a natural sunlight look…
But when Ramin arrived and we saw him dressed all in black, we decided to to crush the shadows and darken things for a more menacing overall appearance…
On the other side of the room we dropped a medium grey seamless…
Once again, a little more contrast and a bit less shadow detail helped a lot…
No, you’re not listening to a long-lost Simon & Garfunkel single…this is Paul Simon’s son, Harper Simon, and if not for me clearing out some of the stuff taking up space on my DVR last night, I would probably have never heard this. It played as the credits rolled on the first episode of the new HBO series, ‘Girls’, and if you’ve seen the show (and you’re like me) then you probably can’t imagine a more perfect song to encapsulate the characters and themes…
Everyone seems so certain
Everyone knows who they are
Everyone’s got a mother and a father
They all seem so sure they’re going far
They all got more friends than they can use
Except me ‘cause I’m a fool…
The show, by the way, is excellent! Writer/Director/Creator/Voice-of-her-Generation Lena Dunham’s super-smart look at four twenty-something girls trying to make their way in the World is peppered with dialogue that flows like a hipster mash-up of a David Mamet play and a Whit Stillman movie. And is it coincidence or by clever design that Mamet’s daughter Zosia plays one of Dunham’s girlfriends and Stillman regular Chris Eigeman plays her boss? I dunno…just watch it!
But back to the song…which was chosen by the show’s music director Michael Penn…it’s off of Simon’s self-titled debut that features some serious bold-faced indie friends…Aaron Espinoza of Earlimart, Yuka Honda of Cibo Matto, Sean Lennon, Joan (As Police Woman) Wasser and the amazing violinist Petra Haden. Oh yeah, he also called upon Steve Nieve whose day job is Elvis Costello’s keyboardist in the Attractions, percussion superstar Steve Gadd and of course, his Dad. Finally, if all that talent wasn’t enough, he got Tom Rothrock to twiddle the knobs and mix the final product. How he Hell did I miss this album when it was released?!!
So your assignment is to watch ‘Girls’ on Sunday nights and check out more of Harper Simon at his website!
Damn Ugly Photography 