Hedda Gabler, as played by Tessa Thompson in “Hedda,” is a mercurial being in the way that Greek gods are. Writer/director Nia DaCosta wanted the audience to see the process of how she decides to meddle in the affairs of mortals — aka the guests at the party she’s throwing to boost her husband George’s (Tom Bateman) career prospects. But DaCosta also wanted to stay true to her reading of the character: Hedda doesn’t even know why she does what she does, or necessarily knows that she is going to act until she’s already unlocking her father’s pistol case.
Much of the enticing capriciousness of Hedda comes from Thompson’s performance, of course. But DaCosta and her cinematographer Sean Bobbitt also put their thumbs on the scales when it comes to bringing Hedda’s desires to the fore. The film uses playful visual techniques and some innovative technology to bring the viewer inside Hedda’s volatile, passionate perspective.
One tool used in several key shots throughout the film — or, as DaCosta put it on a recent episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast, the moments of gear shift — is the Cinefade. “It’s something that’s continually getting developed, and it essentially controls the amount of light that goes into the camera,” DaCosta told IndieWire. “You have the background distorting and changing and the depth-of-field shifts, but everything else stays the same. It’s sort of like a contrazoom but it’s more subtle.”
As any fan of the Innie/Outie elevator on “Severance” (or, you know, that one shot in “Jaws”) is well aware, a contrazoom is an in-camera effect that induces a sense of visual vertigo. The camera moves in one direction as the zoom lens moves in the opposite, leaving the subject of the shot caught in the shifting depth of field like a toy boat as the tide rolls out. The Cinefade allows for the depth of field in a shot to change without distorting the subject’s face, by controlling the light coming into the camera. In “Hedda,” the result looks like nothing so much as a spark of mischief occurring to the mistress of the house.
In one notable sequence, the changing depth of field keys the viewer into Hedda’s inner world when she sees Eileen (Nina Hoss) from across the dance floor. DaCosta and Bobbitt frame the moment so that nothing in the shot is larger or more centered than these two women are, suddenly locked into seeing each other. Hedda seems to float towards Eileen, as the whole party warps around her, care of a double dolly (putting both the camera and the actor on tracks).
“We do it on the double dolly, which — was it invented by Scorsese? But then obviously [it] was popularized by Spike Lee. It’s a shot that I love and I thought, ‘OK, how do I want to get [Hedda] across the room?’ Because I know I didn’t want her to walk. I wanted her to be pulled by her heart. I wanted to have these moments in the film that feel outside of reality, and that was one of them,” DaCosta said.
There is still an emotional reality that even these moments are grounded in, however. DaCosta told IndieWire that her choices, from the behavior of the camera to the costumes, are all about finding visual ways to express an understanding of the characters to the viewer that the characters themselves might never articulate.
“Sean’s a very curious, exploratory, interested collaborator, and he’s so focused on emotion and story, so that really helps, too,” DaCosta said. “[We’re] really trying to filter everything through character and not reference other films as much as we can, but reference other forms of art — painting, photography. There’s a lot of conversations, and Sean said this the other day, like, every director’s different, but the more you talk to them, the more they talk, the more they tell you what they want.”
For DaCosta and Bobbitt, they worked out what they wanted in rehearsals inside the already set-dressed English manor house where the story is set. “I’ll have these ideas, and it’s a lot of what ifs. What if we did a contrazoom but instead of distance and focal length, that was about light and f-stop, you know? We built a new rig, essentially, because I was like, ‘what if we took the head of the Trinity [camera stabilizer] and got rid of the post but put it right on the body, and then we have this really cool thing that looks amazing,’” DaCosta said.
Hedda herself would demand nothing less than a film that looks amazing and keeps the audience on their toes. Bobbitt’s and DaCosta’s camera choices give the protagonist exactly what she wants.
“Hedda” is now streaming on Prime Video.
