This month’s issue is to illustrate the techniques and methods of how to shoot a dialogue based on the cinematography Roger Deakins used in John Patrick Shanley’s play Doubt (2005) which was turned into a movie in 2008. In this process, the dominant focus will be placed on the camera angle and its potential to display different experiences and emotions.
1964: The winds of change are literally sweeping through the tight-knit religious community. Sister Aloysius (Streep), the notoriously strict and discipline-loving principal of a Catholic School in the Bronx, comes to suspect that the school’s charismatic and progressive head priest Father Flynn (Hoffman) may have developed an erotic interest in the school’s first African American student Donald Muller (Foster II). The distrustful nun Sister Aloysius begins circling Father Flynn, propelled by the tentative suspicions of young and naïve Sister James (Adams) who, with her doubts, gets caught between the feuding pair.
Doubt is a movie of little physical action which has to count on its actors to convey the unbearable air of paranoia in its war of words. Meryl Streep acts remarkably with intoxicating energy and, yes, comedy as a righteous nun on a personal crusade to hunt down child molestation. Her adversary, the ostensible leader of Christian faith Father Flynn, played brilliantly by Philip Seymour Hoffman, juxtaposes with Sister Aloysius’s cold and disciplined austerity.
Nevertheless, not only the characters had placed the movie on numerous critics’ lists of the best films in 2008, its camera work, especially in the dialogue scenes, contributed to a great extent to the movie’s tense atmosphere and the unpleasant accusation.
The movie’s several dialogues are beautifully punctuated with the camera angle, which affects how the viewer perceives the action. In the first dialogue between Sister Aloysius and Sister James the hierarchy is not only displayed by their positions within the school or the religious order, but also by the camera angle. The low-angle shot used when Sister Aloysius speaks separates her from the other nun and shows her predominance. Sister James however, is portrayed with a high-angle shot, which makes her seem vulnerable and powerless due to the lower position. Her inferior standing clearly indicates that she is talking to someone on a higher level. In the fierce discussion with Father Flynn a lot of scenes are shot as point of view shots to include the viewer in the battle of words. By showing the antagonist through the protagonist’s eyes, the camera work creates the impression as if the characters are addressing the viewer directly. The continuous alteration between leading actor point of view shots and over the shoulder shots between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn demonstrates and leaves the viewer in an undecided state of mind with constant doubts of which side to pick. The Dutch angle used sparingly throughout the movie, portrays the psychological uneasiness and unstable tension of the character in an ostensive way as it is used in the climactic discussion at the end of the movie. The lopsidedness of the pictures is employed to express that the world is off its hinges.
John Patrick Shanley choreographed the dialogue scenes almost like a tennis match where the viewers have to turn their heads continuously from one side to the other in order to keep track of the exchange of blows. By that he propels the viewer to decide which side to take for their own, for he gives no hint of who actually did wrong, neither in the plot nor in the camera work. All other scenes appear slightly uninspired, almost boring in contrast to those highly creatively conducted ones.
Initially I feared that such little physical action, in comparison to the amount of talking, could lead to a certain long-windedness, but the film itself is not boring at all. On the contrary, it grabs the viewer’s attention at least after the conflict is revealed and never releases it until the very end and even beyond that. This thought-provoking spiritual drama about faith is a brilliant movie for all of those, who can stand the uncertainty of a possibly wrong witch-hunt. At the open ending the viewer is left alone with his personal doubts about what is wrong and what is right. Only one thing is made absolutely certain namely, that life is not black or white.
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