The Method to the Madness in Guy Ritchie’s “The Gentlemen”

Guy Ritchie’s signature crime caper genre wouldn’t be complete without some boxing, and scenes in Episode 6 of his Netflix series The Gentlemen presented one of the biggest challenges for the camera team on the show.

The location was a venue called The Magazine, that overlooks Canary Wharf in London. “It looks awesome but it is also just an event space with massive windows that we had to turn into a big boxing arena using a 360° lighting rig,” says DP Callan Green, ACS, NZCS, who shot this and three other episodes.

The New Zealand-born filmmaker is now established as a main unit DP, having begun his career as a clapper loader and assistant camera on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.

“I like to backlight or sidelight boxing scenes as much as possible but what made it tricky here was that we wanted to get our fight camera operator right in amongst the action on a 21mm wide lens,” he tells NAB Amplify.

“With the actors dancing around inside the ring it seemed almost impossible to keep the lighting looking good and consistent unless there was some way of rotating the percentage of the values of the LED backlight as the boxers move around in relation to where the camera is.”

The idea struck Green just a day before the lights were to be rigged, but gaffer Jack Powell and desk operator Charlie Stallard weren’t fazed.

They pixel mapped the moving lights around the ring and established the best lighting levels for the fighters. They created a grey scale blend in photoshop to overlay the pixels.

“This photoshop image would then rotate over the pixel map itself which created the smoothest possible dimming whilst rotating the light levels during the fight,” says Green.

There were nearly 2,500 instances and pixels within the lamps reacting to the change in position of the fighters. “This gave us the ability to continuously rotate as the fighters did for several rotations.”

Virtual masks were added within the levels around the ring to counteract any camera shadow. The opposing sides of the venue were lit symmetrically for aesthetics and ensured all the lights had full-color control.

Around 500 lights were rigged in total, including a truss rig directly above fighters that was the same size as the boxing ring and had three separate fixtures totaling 140 lamps.

“Impression X4 Bars were used to give a general ring backlight and ambience as the boxers moved around,” Powell explains. “Robe MegaPointes were deployed for the cage feel for the ring entrance and Fusion X-Par 12 to push lights out to the crowd during the fight.

The trusses above the crowd had a mixture of P5 wash lights to augment the ambience. Ayrton Perseo wash lights enabled background interactive lighting.

“For the ring walk we went with Chauvet Strike 4 for the background and Impression X4 on the floor, then we programmed different effects and colors to suit individual ring walks,” Powell adds.

A set of Robe Spiiders backlit the boxers in the ring from around the stage edges. They created a program to track the backlight and kill the frontlight as the fighters moved around the ring.

“We also added MegaPointes on the perimeter to allow us to flair the lens on the ring walks whenever we suited,” Green says.

“That was our biggest set to manage lighting wise as we only had a short window to rig the location. We had four days total in and out, using two rigging crews over two days, and then a pre-light day with 20 sparks and 12 riggers. Plus a derig. This was a military operation led by Farrow and installed in 24 hours.”

Inspired by the director’s 2019 movie of the same name, featuring a new cast of characters, The Gentlemen is set in the same heightened and often hilarious world of aristocrats and gangsters; one with the breeding and the birthright, the other with the brawn and the belligerence.

Although mostly real-life backdrops, the production also used Alperton Studios to create some interiors — including a council flat in Croydon, South London where Eddie (Theo James) gets physical with a goon.

Lead DP Ed Wild had created a four-page pdf detailing the show’s look and feel. Green also got to watch early cuts of the first two episodes. “I was pretty scared, watching those, since the bar was set high,” he acknowledges.

He watched Ritchie’s original film as well as Snatch and Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, pulling out a few shots to “nod to” in the series. Sexy Beast, Rocky, Creed and Amelie were other cinematic reference points.

“We were given quite a lot of scope to do what we wanted as long as we didn’t get too crazy,” he says. “I collected as many stills for reference as I could find that I felt resonated with the color and tone of what we were about to do.”

The series is shot at 6K using a Sony VENICE camera equipped with Tokina Vista Primes, typically with a quarter-black satin filter, “which takes the edge off [the resolution sharpness] a little bit and gives the highlights a bit of halation.”

Sony FX3s were also used to cut into the A camera and were placed on props like guns, whisky bottles, pigeon cages, and a traveler’s caravan.

All episodes worked from one show LUT, which was versatile enough to work for night exteriors and day interiors. “When I first started working with it, it freaked me out a little because it was quite heavy and deep in the blacks and darker areas. That paid off in the long run because you had so much more information in post.”

Following his experience shooting two episodes for director Eran Creevy, Green jumped at the chance to continue shooting Episodes 7 & 8 for director David Caffrey.

“Having just come from Masters of the Air and gone on to work on Gangs of London Season 3, I feel very lucky to have had three awesome jobs in a row,” he says.

Green grew up in a suburb outside of Wellington, NZ, and began taking stills when his mom bought him a camera. When his brother got into acting, his interest in filmmaking was sparked.

In 1993 he helped shoot a commercial for a peanut butter brand “voted the year’s worst ad in New Zealand,” he smiles, but on set encountered an ARRI film camera for the first time. Asking the key grip how he could break into the industry the advice that came back was “A lot of hard work, mate.”

Green studied photography at high school and following graduation got a job as a video split operator (now known as a VTR op). Shortly afterward he found himself part of the rapidly growing local filmmaking scene jumpstarted by Weta and LOTR.

“Peter Jackson used to get me to clean his glasses for him. He was really lovely to me. He’s one of many people I’ve met along the way who took me under their wing.”

He won a place at Sydney’s prestigious national film school, leaving in 2003 with a masters in arts and cinema and never looked back. Based in London since 2015, Green’s work has included second unit work on Christopher Robin, The Witcher, Fast F9 and Fast X, as well as on all nine episodes of Masters of the Air. He also recently served as DP on four episodes of the latest season of BBC crime drama Guilt.

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