PARIS FROM THE TWO-INCH TALL PERSPECTIVE:
THE CINEMATOGRAPHY OF RATATOUILLE

Though the easy way to approach the story of RATATOUILLE might have been to start from a human point of view, Brad Bird naturally gravitated towards the less predictable path and chose to tell the story through the eyes of his rodent hero. Bird found cinematic inspiration in some unexpected places, including a classic thriller from Hollywood’s past.

“One sequence was a bit influenced by Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Rear Window,’” the director admits. “In that movie, Hitchcock kind of eavesdrops on the lives of others through the point of view of Jimmy Stewart’s apartment – and in our movie we see an apartment in Paris through a rat’s point of view.”

Director of photography/lighting Sharon Calahan, who previously served in the same role on “Finding Nemo,” “Toy Story 2” and “A Bug’s Life,” knew that she had her work cut out for her on RATATOUILLE. “We wanted a really rich look, we wanted to capture the feeling of what it’s like to be in Paris and in a great Parisian restaurant, we wanted to make the food look appetizing and we wanted to make these furry little characters look really cute and appealing,” says Calahan of the task that lay before her.

She continues: “I’d already had some ideas in my head about how to get a kind of richer, deeper, fatter kind of look to the colors, and it seemed right for this story. This meant trying to get our illumination model to do the opposite of what it usually does, which is to add in black where there’s an absence of light. I wanted it to replace that with more surface color instead, which took a lot of little tricks and hacks.”

Calahan was seduced by the notion of giving the film the feeling of a perfect October day in France. “When we went to Paris, it was sunny, but the light was so silvery and diffused and everything felt very soft and warm and inviting. That was the kind of overall quality I wanted for the movie,” she says. “The film isn’t lit with a lot of heavy colored light and heavy colored shadows in the usual way because I really wanted to celebrate the local color.”

When it came to actually photographing the food, Calahan looked to today’s endless array of gourmet magazines and books for inspiration. “I spent quite a bit of time looking at all the food photography out there, trying to figure out the difference between good food photography and bad food photography and breaking it down into specific components,” she explains. “Different light positions tended to make food look better. So it was a question of ‘how do we make the food look more believably translucent or look wet enough to be as appetizing as possible?’ And one of the things that we realized is that warm light really brings out the local color in food.”

Calahan ultimately used technologies that were originally developed to make the fish look more translucent in “Finding Nemo” and to scatter light off the skin of humans in “The Incredibles” to give more realism to the food in RATATOUILLE.

As for working with the rodent characters, Calahan explains: “The key to making the rat characters really appealing was to get their fur to have just the right quality and their ears to glow. It took a lot of experimentation to figure out how to get the fur to react to light properly.”

Scale was also a major challenge. “Trying to get the humans and the rats in the same world at the same time wasn’t easy,” she notes. “Light was a really big component in how we made those relationships work.”

Overall Calahan’s work is much the same as that of traditional cinematographers. “I really try to think like a painter and approach the lighting in a way that makes everything more beautiful,” she says. “As for RATATOUILLE, I couldn’t imagine a more creatively challenging and rewarding experience. Brad Bird has a way of bringing out the best in everybody’s talent.”

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STIRRING UP THE MUSIC:
ABOUT MICHAEL GIACCHINO’S SCORE
When it came to finding the right music to fuel the manic action and subtle emotion of RATATOUILLE, Brad Bird returned to the composer who had done such a bang-up job with “The Incredibles”: Michael Giacchino, who conjured up a brassy, jazzy, percussive score that is as fun, fast-paced and French-themed as the film itself.