Tina Kakadelis
In Neo Sora’s film Happyend, Japanese high school students are counting the days until the semester is over. Two best friends pull a prank on the principal that backfires and results in the school deciding to install a surveillance system. The movement of every student is now documented in minute detail. In a sense, these cameras become characters of their own in Happyend, and the person behind the devices is cinematographer Bill Kirstein.
Kirstein and Sora previously collaborated on Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus, a documentary/concert film about Japanese musician Sakamoto’s last concert before his death. Even though they’d worked together before, the role of director and cinematographer changes between narrative and documentary films.
“Opus was basically entirely composed of black and white footage of Ryuichi playing piano. We prepared heavily for that project, and Neo was able to get the setlist beforehand, so we could spend time on each song thinking about the overall arc of the project. We hit on this idea, let’s make this film take place over the course of a day. Working in a concert hall with abstract forms, piano, and light only, how do you create the sense of a day passing?”
“For every song, we became very dialed into luminosity levels. Where the light is coming from, what’s the angle of light in the afternoon coming into this imaginary space through windows and giving you that feeling subconsciously as the audience? We’re allowing the music to lead everything and using those lighting and camera tools to showcase the texture of performance, physicality of hands, reflections of the piano, basically always pulling us back to the music.”
“That intentionality is identical to what we did on Happyend, but the content of Happyend is the script rather than the content being the music and the performance. Everything, all the other choices about how you achieve the goals of telling the story and what you want the audience to feel and come away with, how you want them to engage with the experience of watching the film, comes back to the overarching goals. Then you make creative and stylistic choices based on that.”
While surveillance plays a major role in Happyend, Kirstein sees it as more of a coming-of-age, friendship-focused film. As Kirstein puts it, the guiding force of a film is perspective. That serves as the basis for his initial conversations with directors, and those then inform the approach he’ll take.
“I think the camera is almost always a character. It can be a very removed character, very ‘objective.’ It could also be one that’s really part of the action. Often, when you’re in a POV, you’re a specific character and then you’re actually acting. As I move the camera, that’s a performance.”
“In this case, I think surveillance is a separate element from a lot of the perspectives of the rest of the movie. It plays an important storytelling role. The way a lot of that footage is treated in post-production, you’re really in the perspective of a surveilling machine. It’s doing facial recognition and processing and being like, oh, no, they’re doing something wrong. There’s a very, almost intelligent but really dispassionate, sort of force behind that viewpoint.”
“For the rest of the film, the perspective was something that, again, so brilliantly hit upon the perspective of looking back on these formative events from even further in the future. It’s something we applied to basically every choice we made with the camera. It also flows through the music of the film and the shot selection. The idea that was applied to the cinematography was to let this be a memory of the future. How do we take this future world and then shoot that as if we’re at a distance from that looking back?”
“The solution we hit on was to use longer lenses. Let’s shoot deep depth of field so you can feel, touch, and sense this environment. We’re not separating the characters from it. They’re embedded in it. You can see where they are. Using the longer focal length, which compresses space and, in a way, time, I think subconsciously gives you the feeling that you’re looking through a pair of binoculars. You can see something that’s far away, but you can’t touch it. I think that’s one version of how to visually represent memory.”
The idea of a futuristic memory carried over to Kirstein’s lens selection as well. For Happyend, Kirstein selected a series of vintage lenses to be mounted to a modern digital camera. It’s this blend that creates Happyend’s distinct visual language.
“Current digital cinema cameras have one or two standard lens mounts. L-mount or LPL mount. In this case, what we did was these vintage still lenses, the Minolta Rokkor, had been rehoused in cinema housings. They were already improved in terms of close focus and aperture. They were rehoused in very robust metal housings that could stand up to the rigors of being on set, and they could fit on the camera easily. We tested them along with ultra primes, lomo spherical, Cooke S4s, and a number of other lenses to kind of say, let’s do our due diligence and really learn what the right alchemy of lens filtration and LUT (lookup table) is for this film.”
“We wanted to be able to look at something on set that would feel like the final product. I talked a lot with our colorist, Tim Messick, about what is the atmosphere like in the air in the future in Japan. We wanted to marry this futuristic environment with that slight feeling of this is a tale, this is a memory. We went after a contrast curve that was reminiscent of celluloid. A little bit like film, but not tied to a true film emulation so we can feel the technology and the presence of the digital sensor as well.”
“Then how can we put some of the color? Bring warms into the highlights, the way a more polluted atmosphere might actually look in front of the lens. Tim made us a bunch of different LUTs that we tested and then selected the one that felt most emotionally correct to the story. Then we tested that with all the different lenses until we hit on the perfect feeling that felt present, three dimensional, immersive, while also giving a hint of, this could be a tale out of time, or this could be a memory in your mind.”
On paper, Happyend seemingly has nothing in common with the 2024 movie musical Mean Girls. Where the former is a lot of grays and stark buildings, the latter is bubblegum pink and whimsy. However, the two films have more in common than one may realize. Both are films about friendship and surveillance within the walls of a high school and both had Kirstein in the cinematographer’s chair. For Kirstein, the films were shot a month apart and had some unexpected similarities.
“It’s a great question. It really comes down to the director. Arturo Perez Jr. and Samantha Jayne, the directors of Mean Girls, are both brilliant and have incredibly thoughtful perspectives on film and how they want to immerse the audience in the story. Mean Girls is a story in which you are caught up in the present. It is not a reflection of the characters from some time in the future, it’s what they’re going through in that moment.”
“I think we actually ended up using some similar techniques. Mean Girls makes use of a lot wider angle lenses that also immerse you and make you feel present and closer than we did in Happyend. Both films I used a deep depth of field because Mean Girls also was shot on location. We’re like, we have the location, we want to feel the texture of the world. We want to see everything, not separate our characters or make it feel plastic in any way. To that end, we also didn’t want it to feel overly sharp.”
“It’s so specific to each film, but it’s always asking about perspective. Asking about what experience do you want to create for the audience, and how do you want the film to feel overall? What’s the tone? What’s the emotional range? Really interrogating that and creating the solution for each film that’s perfectly suited to that movie and no other. High school is a time where we all have big emotions and, if we’re lucky, we can express them coherently, but often can’t. In both of these films, the camera helps to represent for the audience moments where maybe something couldn’t be expressed in words.”
