June / 2009

Shooting the Shooter:
Pierre Gill csc and the Making
of Polytechnique

by Maurie Alioff

Before he decided to commit himself heart and soul to director Denis Villeneuve's Polytechnique, Pierre Gill csc was spooked by the project. "I refused to shoot that movie," he told me during an interview, remembering how he stormed out of his car at a gas station in the Laurentian Mountains and "threw the script a mile away. I lived that moment in 1989. I know exactly where I was when I heard the story. I had friends who were at the Polytechnique."

The moment was a snowy day in early December. Marc Lépine walked into the University of Montreal's engineering school, looking like any other 25 year old until he pulled a semi-automatic rifle out of a garbage bag and opened fire. During his shooting spree, Lepine murdered 14 girls, wounded 13 other students, and traumatized an entire society. In his suicide note, he ranted against women, especially the feminists who "ruined my life."

Gill's first reaction to Villeneuve's nervously anticipated dramatization of the slaughter mirrored the apprehensions of many Quebecers who wondered why anyone would want to probe such deep wounds. Naturally, some feared that the movie would turn a horrific loss of life into some kind of splatter-filled shockorama.

In fact, Villeneuve, highly regarded director of Un 32 août sur terre (1998) and the Genie-winning Maelström (2000), is the moviemaker least likely to see the Polytechnique massacre as an opportunity for cheap thrills. Villeneuve wanted to break the taboo against confronting the event, offer catharsis and create, as Katherine Monk wrote in her Vancouver Sun review of the English-language version of the picture, "an ode to the strength and beauty of the fallen." As Peter Howell said in his critique in the Toronto Star, the film reflects on "moments in life when nothing makes sense and sadness descends."

Three weeks after being rattled by Jacques Davidts's script for Polytechnique, Pierre Gill took another look at it and met with Villeneuve. Once past his initial misgivings, he saw the restrained power the film could have and signed on as DOP, eager to help Villeneuve achieve his disturbing but scrupulously respectful vision. When the film was released earlier this year, critics and audiences responded positively to the duo's approach and the controversy waned. Telefilm Canada included Polytechnique in a showcase of Canadian movies at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Bloc Québécois set up a pro-gun control screening for parliamentarians, and the film played at Cannes Film Festival.

Maxim Gaudette as mass murderer Marc Lépine in Polytechnique Photo credit: Dominic Bourget.

Gill recalls that as soon as discussions about the "touchy project" began, he not only agreed with Villeneuve's idea that Polytechnique should be a black-and-white movie; he saw it as an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shoot one. The widely experienced cinematographer (winner of five CSC Awards, one from the ASC, two Genies and a Prix Jutra) says that he was a "bulldozer" in his support of the director's choice because monochrome "was the only way to get the audience to participate" in the film's imagining of the attack.

"There's a very big difference between colour and black and white," Gill explains. "When you have a black-and-white picture in front of you, you find your own emotion. If you look at an image of the Canadian Rockies in black and white, the mountains are very textured and they feel old and powerful. If you have the same picture in colour, the image will tell you that you have to feel good, you want to ski and do this and that." In the case of Polytechnique, the insistence of colour, spilling over with red blood, "would have been a disaster."

Once producers Maxim Rémilllard and Don Carmody okayed black and white, Gill and Villeneuve began refining their visual strategies, a process that continued into post-production. "We have to shoot this film with four short lenses," Gill remembers saying to Villeneuve: "a 21, a 27, a 35 and a 40. Anything that's longer is dangerous because we have a guy with a gun." Short master prime lenses, mounted on an Ari 235, gave the movie a naturalism, rather than engage in typical movie glamorization of a gun-wielding young man.

Polytechnique was shot entirely on Kodak Vision3, 5219, "a very fine grain, amazingly crisp and beautiful colour stock," says Gill. Combined with the precision of the lenses, it allowed cinematographer and director to avoid making what he calls "an artsy, grainy black-and-white movie." Moreover, at 500 ASA, the 5219 gave the moviemakers the latitude they needed to shoot with the fluorescent lighting of two college locations, as well as other instances of available light. Gill credits his gaffer René Guillard with matching the light sources on sets constructed in warehouses, with "the fixtures and colour light that we had in different real schools. It's not because you take out colour that you match. It's far more complex."

For both moral and creative reasons, Gill believed that he and Villeneuve should resist the temptation to hyper-aestheticize the black and white into the glossy contrasts of a film like the Coen Brothers's The Man Who Wasn't There." At the stage of the final correction, "the first thing we did was to start putting contrast into the picture," Gill recalls. "But I said to Denis and the colour timer, 'We're going to stop and watch the film, the offline on a big television screen.'" Viewing the footage with sound, it was clear to Gill that Polytechnique "is a grey-and-white movie."

Working out the tonal subtleties during 2K post-production, Gill experienced "one of the most exciting things that happened to me on that project." At Technicolor Montreal, a Parisian colourist called Charlotte Mazzinghi figured out that a friend's special plug-ins would allow the team to "play in the blue, red and green layers" on the Lustre-colour correction system.

Rather than merely render from colour to black and white, "we were doing what you do in a darkroom. We were able to do a beautiful black and white much easier and much faster. It made my vision come up very quickly and easily, instead of working hours and hours on different levels. It was an example of technology and film mixing perfectly."

Throughout the making of Polytechnique, the moviemakers aimed at drawing viewers into a close approximation of un-sensationalized reality. "With every shot we needed to be careful," Gill says. "Every single shot, and I'm saying every one of them, was a question of 'is the camera too low, are we too tight, are we too far?' Before opting for any of the film's rare close ups, "we talked about it for a long time. A close up in that kind of movie means a lot."

A movie in nearly constant motion, Polytechnique relies heavily on Steadicam work executed by the skilful Daniel Sauvé. "There are no dolly shots," Gill continues, pointing out that some shots were possible only because of the short lenses. "With Steadicam, we could move slowly into corridors, follow the actors anywhere and go through doors." Set on an apple box, the Steadicam was even used for static images, a big time saver according to Gill.

In certain key situations, Gill hooked up a small camera to "different rigs we called the cat cam, the monkey cam, the crazy cam or the guitar cam, whatever you want," and often operated himself. For instance, when depicting the shooter attacking groups in large open spaces, "I was running with the students, hiding under the desks, pushing chairs. I was wearing a helmet and a lot of protection equipment, looking like a Robocop. I wore so much protection, I could film three feet away from the shooter with no problem, concentrating on the feeling of being a person in the crowd." Fond of plunging into the action, Gill also shot hand-held while skating with Roy Dupuis during the filming of Charles Binamé's 2005 bio-pic of Maurice Richard, The Rocket.

Director Denis Villeneuve wanted to break the taboo confronting the Montreal massacre and offer catharsis.

Of all the movie's painful scenes, the toughest to shoot was the one in which the seemingly robotic killer (played by Maxim Gaudette) interrupts a classroom lecture, orders the men to leave, and mows down the women, including characters played by Evelyne Brochu and Karine Vanasse. "To film that scene was unbelievable," Gill remembers. "You wanted to vomit."

Shooting the film's most traumatic moment, Gill worried that the professor's overhead projector would provide a light source that would look "so good and so cool that we would be in trouble." Gill found ways to bring down the impact while allowing for the camera to pick up the abstract shapes of the projector graphic on the killer's face. "I was going nuts about this," says Gill, who is happy that the film's occasional "crescendos" never disengage audiences from the grey zone he and Villeneuve created.

Loaded with evocative details like orange peels strewn on the floor beside the girls' bodies, Polytechnique never stops reminding viewers that the horror of the massacre is unfolding on a snowy Montreal day. Flakes swirl through the Polytechnique windows. The killer's face appears against frost. He trudges through a heavy snowfall with his death kit. The network of wintry images gives the film a dreamy sense of place, contrasting with the story's brutality while paradoxically enhancing its chilly darkness.

Because the more elaborate images of snow strained the picture's budget, Gill had to convince the producers that "they were to die for. I fought with my blood. There was colour on the meeting table. I said, 'Guys, we need the snow, don't cut it. It's a character in the movie.' And finally, they decided to go for it."

Pierre Gill csc: Cinematographer as Robocop. "I was running with the students, hiding under the desks, pushing chairs. I was wearing a helmet and a lot of protection equipment, looking like a Robocop. I wore so much protection, I could film three feet away from the shooter with no problem, concentrating on the feeling of being a person in the crowd." Pierre Gill csc. Photo credit: Dominic Bourget.

This wasn't the only time that Gill put up an argument for something that Villeneuve wanted, acting as a buffer, or finessing the director out of a tight spot. When the producers were breathing down Villeneuve's neck, and he worried about overruns, Gill would say, "Sorry, but we're going to shoot that scene; it will be in the movie until the end of time. There are some scenes in the script that are not important, and we'll save time on those days."

After abstaining from moviemaking for nearly 10 years, the 42-year-old Villeneuve dove back in with last year's short Next Floor, which picked up innumerable prizes, and then took on the challenge of Polytechnique. "The movie put a lot of weight on his shoulders," says Gill. "I think I made him feel very secure, and sometimes he told me, 'You're my big brother.' Denis is a great director and a great human being. I would work with him anytime."

Pierre Gill has put in 20 plus years as a cinematographer, working numerous productions at home and abroad, collaborating with some of Quebec's most interesting and talented directors, including Jean-Marc Vallée, Léa Pool and Charles Binamé. His work ranges from the restraint of Polytechnique to the experimental flamboyance of Binamé's Le Piège américain (2008), which deployed 17 different film stocks. At this point in his career, Gill wants to direct himself, and is developing "a very big feature film called VK with a story set in 1763."

Co-producer and star of Polytechnique, Karine Vanasse.

Evelyne Brochu. Images courtesy of Alliance Films.

Written by Doug Taylor, VK depicts the real-life Wolfgang von Kempelen who created a chess-playing automaton with the appearance of a turbaned-and-robed magician. Known as The Turk, the machine matched wits with Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. They apparently didn't realize it was operated by a human player hidden away within its mechanical innards. In March, Gill flew to L.A. for a meeting with Oscar-winning Adrien Brody, who had been intrigued by the script. "He is delighted with the project and my approach," Gill told me recently, just before Brody signed onto the project.

Few cinematographers direct, or even want to. Gill says that he "ended up working as a cinematographer by default." At Concordia University, he studied all aspects of moviemaking, but he was a gifted cameraman whose fellow students wanted him to shoot for them. "I've always been closer to the script than the lights," Gill continues. If he's a successful cinematographer, it's because "my goal is to make sure that we get the shot that will tell the story."

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