World War Z 01:26:09 – 01:29:08

This scene is an extract from World War Z (2013) directed by Marc Forster. In this scene, Brad Pitt plays Gerry Lane, Pierfrancesco Favino is ‘the man in charge’ (also referred to as “bossman” in this analysis because he does not have a character name), Fana Mokoena is Thierry Umutoni, and Peter Capaldi plays the W.H.O. Doctor. I break the scene in two parts to analyse, divided by the moment “bossman” walks past Gerry’s bed.

The scene starts with a close-up on Gerry’s face, the lighting is turned up by two sudden “leaps”. There two reasons I can think of why they have this arrangement for the lighting. First, the light is “bumped” up so they can imitate the light on the ceiling being turned on, the audience will less likely to acknowledge that the light comes from an artificial light source. However, this is not realistic. Later in the scene, the audience can see that the scene is set at day in a room with windows. Since Gerry is not in a dark room, the low-key lighting at the beginning does not make much sense. Plus, the audience can tell that the shots are continuous, the W.H.O. Doctor has sat by Gerry for a while therefore no one would be turning the light on in that room. They start with a low-key lighting in this scene because the previous scene features a mixture of Gerry’s memory flashback and nightmare, showing the process of going from low-key to high-key is a smooth transition from the previous shot. Also, the transition suggests Gerry is waking up as an ongoing action rather than an instant one. “Turning the light on” in this scene is more likely to be an aesthetic decision than a realistic one.

There is a quite obvious pattern in the first part of the scene, the shots are arranged in the order of “a close-up on Gerry’s face” to “a point of view shot from Gerry’s perspective” to “a close-up on Gerry’s face” and it goes on until a certain moment. However, these point-of-view shots are artificial, too. When the POV shot tilts from the ceiling to the glass which reflects the doctor’s figure, it already does not match Pitt’s eyeline in the next shot. What’s more, when Gerry starts to have the conversation with the other two, his vision would be in a more drastic angle than the supposed “POV’ shots are. When Gerry notices the shackles on his wrists, the shot has already given the audience a hint: these are actually over the shoulder shots disguised in point-of-view. The director and the cinematographer manufactured these shots to provide the an immersive experience for the audience so they can also perceive the situation piece by piece along with Gerry. Of course, Brad Pitt’s acting has to be very convincing in this scene. His acting is the key that every time the sequence cuts back to the close-up on his face, the audience does not feel bored, and they will feel the urge of looking too; Pitt has to lead them to observe his surroundings with him. When Gerry, as well as the audience, has seen everything in the location and noticed the character next to him, the scene is cut to a wide shot which captures the whole room. Then the doctor walks to a new location and a new character is introduced, the sequence goes back to feed the new information to the audience with the old pattern. This is how the director introduce the new environment and the new characters to the audience.

After “the man in charge” walks past the bed, the scene resumes to its objective approach of showing. With three characters in the room, each two of them will form an axis, it can be tricky not to break the 180 rule. What they do is isolating the doctor from the conversation (conveniently he does not have many lines in dialogue) , and apply a set of shot-reverse-shot on Gerry and the “boss-man”, so the camera only uses the axis on the two of them to operate. The doctor only gets one shot before the phone is dialed, and the shot is indicated by the eyeline of the “boss-man” from the last shot, plus it is an over the shoulder shot that suggests the position so the audience will not get confused by the directions.

In the last segment of this scene, Thierry joins the conversation through the phone call. The brilliant choice that either the director or the editor made here, is that every time they make a cut, the character in the next shot will face the opposite way to the character in the last one. In this segment, Gerry and the doctor are mostly facing screen right and the two of them do not interact with each other until the end where Gerry actually turns to screen left; so there is no cut between them until then. Thierry and “boss-man” mostly face screen left but they also walk around so there are more options when cutting between them. Every time the editor wants to make a cut from Thierry to “boss-man”, he will cut to Gerry or the doctor first and bounce to “boss-man”. But this is not the only way to avoid placing two shots of different characters facing the same direction next to each other. When they have to cut from Thierry to “boss-man”, they will either choose to cut from a wide shot to a mid-shot, so the shot type varies enough; or cut from a close-up on the face to a close-up on the phone then tilts to “boss-man’s” face. By doing so, they prevent the composition of two shots next to each other from looking to a like, further prevent the audience being distracted by the similarity. Since the conversation happens on a phone call, there is no ‘axis’ to support the 180 degree rule; even so, the shots still should not overlap because it will still cause confusion in directions. The director and the editor successfully solved the issue with the methods above.

I think everything the director and his crew have done in this scene is primary, there is no fancy tricks or anything aesthetically astonishing. What they achieved is applying the basic elements of filmmaking and completed a scene to a satisfying level, and I think it is hard enough. Thinking through all the aspects and making no mistake clearly should be the primary goal of filmmaking.