“Director Kenneth Branagh assembles an all-star cast of potential murderers for Death on the Nile, a new feature adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1937 novel. Disney’s follow-up to 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express sees Branagh as the fabulously mustachioed and famously fastidious sleuth tasked with solving the death of an American heiress onboard a honeymoon cruise in Egypt. Like Orient Express, it is written for the screen by Michael Green, production designed by Jim Clay and photographed by Haris Zambarloukos BSC GSC.”
Source: Adrian Pennington, British Cinematographer
AT A GLANCE:
Disney’s Death on the Nile was delayed by several months due to both the pandemic and the purchase of 20th Century Fox, but saw a limited pre-Christmas theatrical release that gave at least some audiences a chance to see the large-format 65mm feature film in its full cinematic glory. The follow up to 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express, the new film stars director Kenneth Branagh returning as Hercule Poirot, along with Tom Bateman, Annette Bening, Russell Brand, Ali Fazal, Dawn French, Gal Gadot, Armie Hammer, Rose Leslie, Emma Mackey, Sophie Okonedo, Jennifer Saunders and Letitia Wright.
Director of Photography Haris Zambarloukos, BSC, GSC detailed the production of the Agatha Christie remake, his sixth collaboration with Branagh, in a Q&A interview with Adrian Pennington for American Cinematographer. Principal photography took place in England at Longcross Studios, with VFX plates filmed on location in Egypt. Virtual production techniques were employed throughout the film, including sequences on the S.S. Karnak, which were shot using 15-meter high rear-projection screens and Arri Sky Panels. The filmmakers also had to recreate a realistic version of 1934 Egypt that barely exists today. “Our whole design and research went into creating a set. We wanted to build a life-size boat inside and out; not to break it down into small sets but to shoot it as if we were on a boat,” Zambarloukos said:
“Jim Clay built an amazing set to scale for the Karnak. It was so big we needed to build a temporary sound stage around it. We also wanted to use some real daylight when we got great sunlight in Longcross and use a little bit of water to basically film the boats carrying guests to the Karnak.
“We recycled the railway from Orient and built the boat on that so we could wheel it in from outdoors to indoors. We built a very elaborate lighting rig that you could pull back and see the entire boat in one shot. You could step onto the boat and walk through all the rooms which were all lit for an analogue film f-stop. It was complicated and took most of our planning but I personally don’t think you can tell the difference when we cut — even from a shot filmed outside in real sunlight juxtaposed with one in apparent sunlight on our sound stage. It’s seamless because we took such great care and a detailed approach to our rig and construction.”
Death on the Nile was shot on film using two Panaflex System 65 Studio synch-sound cameras with a combination of Panavision System 65 and Sphero 65 lenses, Zambarloukos noted. “The Spheros are slightly older, from the David Lean era of 65mm. The System 65s are made for the format’s resurgence in the early nineties led by Ron Howard’s Far and Away (1992) and Ken’s Hamlet (1996),” he said, adding:
“Our film stock was a Kodak combination of 500T 5219 and 250D stock which is super fine grain. Exteriors in sunlight on 50 ASA 65mm look almost three dimensional. And 200T as well, even though we were large format we wanted to go further and do large format and fine grain film. I certainly chose lenses based on their clarity. I know many people go for a vintage look and find something a little softer. I was going for the most immersive type of analogue filmmaking I could.”
The first eight minutes of the film are in French and in black and white, recounting Poirot’s past as a solider in World War I before moving to a gritty, 1930s blues club where we meet a trio of characters played by Hammer, Gadot and Mackey. “There is dialogue but it’s really about body language in this dance sequence,” Zambarloukos said. “We shot this with very long Steadicams that intertwine the music, the choreography and their relationship. We planned all of this to be a very visceral and immersive introduction.”
The sequence, of course, wasn’t actually shot in black in white, Zambarloukos explained:
“We shot color for a couple of reasons. Although Kodak could manufacture BW 65, there is no lab in the world to processes it. Plus, there’s a certain skill to grading BW using color negative and the added benefits are that that you can place a grey tone to a color. For example, you could take red and decide it will look a very dark grey or a light grey, so you get very detailed tones. Ultimately, I get much more control in the DI this way. They were very monochromatic battlefield sets and costumes so it was quite limited in this case. The Germans wore grey and the Belgians wore dark blue and it’s a dark sooty gas-filled battlefield but you could manipulate the blue in the sky a little bit more and certainly manipulate the intensity of people’s eyes — especially if they had blue eyes (which Branagh does).”
The studio work was augmented with plates photographed on location in Egypt, filming on the Nile from a boat with a 14 8K RED Camera array. The top of the boat was outfitted with a 360-degree bubble with two three-camera arrays pointing forwards and backwards as the production travelled up and down the river.
“VFX supervisor George Murphy edited the footage and stitched the plates together into an essentially very, very advanced virtual reality rig in which I could pan my camera,” Zambarloukos recounts. “We did that before principal photography, so we never had to guess a month or so later what to put there. That’s a big help. Most shoots do their plate photography afterwards. It meant I could pretty much place the camera on any deck of the Karnak for any scene and know what the background would be.”