There is a moment about halfway through Netflix film “The night always comes“Where the energy is shifted. Which does not say that the story-a hard-crab part-time student, part-time bakery worker, part-time sex workers in Portland called Lynette (Vanessa Kirby) have one last shot, for a single night, to bring the money for a payout that would save her family’s home and finally offer them some security-has been good up to that moment.
However, when Lynette has followed the work friend Cody (Stephan James) into a sketchy garage workshop containing two (2) meth heads and a (1) band saw, the opportunity to crack open a stolen safe to recover the money that Lynette needs to disappear, and the chance that the real danger had pointed out. In fact, it is a box cutter that ends up at Lynette, when everyone else realizes what is actually on the safe.
“Night Always” stands out to make extremely small -scale action sequences feel as influential and as volatile as much more baroque mixtures of bullets, car accidents or explosions. Instead of large sets, the challenge for Director Benjamin Caron And his filmmaking was to find danger in the details.
“I remember talking to Vanessa about this-I didn’t really want to fall into a kind of more genre action. Wham-Bam, the artifice who is extremely exciting in certain types of movies,” Caron told IndieWire. “It meant staying slightly wider and letting the action happen within the framework without too much emphasizing the specific action’s hit points, just trying to allow the slow, creeping fear and fear of having if you were in that situation.”
There is a understood language of action that really marries close -up, sharp efforts, the propulsion of rapid editing, Wham-Bam Sound effects and visual carnage to create tension. But “Night comes always” is a much more intimate story. But neither the hotel from which Lynette escapes with a safe nor the one where she steals a John’s (Randall Park) Mercedes, has ever been visited by John Wick. To make the act of feeling naturalistic, grounded, but still visceral, Caron and his cinemator Damian Garcia needed to embrace not just another style, but different styles.
“Damian Garcia and I talked a lot about trying to approach each chapter or sequence or scene with what felt like the right instinctive style of camera work,” Caron said. “I was excited to bring together all these forms to create this weave with different film styles, and it was quite scary, because as a director you want to keep control of things and you want it all to feel like it’s the same, while this was a little inclined in the film’s chaos.”
Caron knows the number of opportunities that each scene can hold. Works with its previous feature film “Sharper”, or on a series like “The Crown”, Caron has a lot of excitement and very visual impact from composing polished frames and moving with stately and/or surgical precision. He has done no less accurate work with a show like “Andor”, but has been able to inject a sense of immediacy, uncertainty and excitement by moving the camera and coming up to the characters in a definite invalid way.
In “Night comes always”, Caron and Garcia do everything, and that kind gives the viewer an implicit sense of how unstable Lynelette’s world is – how worrying it can be rocking and important and terrible moments is when she needs to think about her feet.
“The sequence with Doreen and Lynette when (Doreen) comes home – the whole sequence that we shot in a long single from start to end and I think it works on so many different levels because it means that the actors can only run that scene from start to end, you feel the visceral energy in it,” said Caron. “Then there are other moments, like when we come to the workshop, where you could have gone handheld maybe, but I wanted to sit back and feel the space. We talked far about the style and movement and the lenses we would give to create the best stage.”
The visual variety is also designed to carry us through the movements from the long, long Portland night and keep them feel fresh even as we move near real time. “I have always been drawn to movies that take place over a day or a night. I love the fact that it feels like they are happening in real time, as if you are there, as if you are living with these characters. There is an intensity to it,” Caron said.
Restrictions on time, reality and place forced Caron and his team to make non-typical, more creative decisions on how to shoot, block and tempo and also how to direct the viewer’s attention. Each shot had to fit, each threat must be telegraphed properly, and each blow had to land with the same impact as action that is more increased.
“It was almost (about) just trying to release a little and lean back and let naturalism in what would really happen in that scenario. That was the guiding principle for most of these scenes,” Caron said. “It doesn’t follow your traditional Hollywood template as a movie.”
“Night Always Comes” is now flowing on Netflix.
