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" Photographer-turned-filmmaker Anton Corbijn (Control, The American) is a master portraitist. His work, including music videos for U2, Nirvana, and Tom Waits, is united by his exacting eye for character-defining detail. In A Most Wanted Man, Corbijn&amp;#039;s exceptional adaptation of John le Carr\u00E9&amp;#039;s spy novel, he focuses on Philip Seymour Hoffman in the late actor&amp;#039;s final completed performance. Hoffman plays Gunther Bachmann, a Hamburg-based anti-terrorist spy who works with desperate banker Thomas Brue (Williem Dafoe) and idealist human-rights advocate Annabel Richter (Rachel McAdams) to turn Chechen refugee Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin) into an informant. We talked to Corbijn this week about photographing Hoffman, distinguishing filming from photographing, and separating Hoffman from his character. ESQUIRE.COM: You&amp;#039;ve said you&amp;#039;re not very good with dialogue. But the bulk of A Most Wanted Man, the book and the film, is dialogue. How did you approach shooting dialogue scenes?   ANTON CORBIJN: With Philip, you rely a lot on the script, but you also change things on the day of shooting. Because as the movie progresses, you feel, maybe the character would do this, or maybe the character would do that. It becomes clearer sometimes what the dialogue should be. Then you block it, and see what works. Sometimes it takes forever. Dialogue keeps changing, and you can&amp;#039;t seem to get anything right. But it&amp;#039;s interesting, Philip had such an incredible delivery. I was making a point yesterday that I sometimes shot scenes in one take, because I liked it so much. ESQ: Wow. AC: I&amp;#039;d say, &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s it. I don&amp;#039;t want to fool around with it, I don&amp;#039;t want to do close-ups.&amp;quot; That was the case in this film during the scene with Philip and Jamal [an informant played by Mehdi Dehbi]. I liked that so much that once, that was the scene, for me. I had no fallback, because I thought it was amazing, the way the dialogue went. There&amp;#039;s so much body language in that scene. Body language is so important, as is composition. You can not say something, and then the body reacts, and it says a lot of things dialogue can also say. ESQ: Has your style of shooting changed since Control?  AC: I feel that when I shoot anything, and I have something beautiful, I just move on. I did that with Control, partly because there wasn&amp;#039;t a lot of money for it, but also because I knew what I liked. It&amp;#039;s only when people get involved, when there&amp;#039;s money involved, that you have a lot opinions around you. I try not to listen to them too much. ESQ: You&amp;#039;re not overly reliant on extreme close-ups of your protagonists&amp;#039; faces. In a recent interview, you said, &amp;quot;Depth is important. I can see quite quickly which features of a face are worth photographing.&amp;quot; What aspects of Hoffman&amp;#039;s body language did you know you wanted to highlight?  AC: I wanted the Bachmann character to have a slightly larger physicality. Here&amp;#039;s somebody who doesn&amp;#039;t take very good care of himself. I liked that quality. The world keeps ganging up on him, but he has faith that he&amp;#039;s doing the right thing. He will deliver; he will do it the right way. You feel that, based on the way he moves around, there&amp;#039;s a weight on his shoulders. It&amp;#039;s personal as well, I think. That&amp;#039;s why I showed his apartment. He&amp;#039;s an educated man. He has a good record collection, and some very nice things. He plays piano. So it&amp;#039;s not somebody who&amp;#039;s just uneducated, or doesn&amp;#039;t care. There&amp;#039;s an incredible focus on his work, and he forgets a lot of things because of that. Philip&amp;#039;s nuances, whether it&amp;#039;s his fingers or his face, are so beautiful for me to watch. I can get lost in them. ESQ: Is there a gesture you associate with Hoffman as a performer, or just Hoffman as Bachmann? Was there a feature of his performance you were most drawn to? AC: His no-nonsense approach to everything. At the same time, he clearly loves the people he works with. He takes care of his team; he&amp;#039;s very nice to them. But there&amp;#039;s no bullshit, like with Annabel [played by Rachel McAdams]. I guess he likes her. He takes no prisoners. But you see that he cares at the end. He&amp;#039;s just a man who has to get where he has to get to. ESQ: Was there any research done to make sure Hoffman was true to the character and spying? AC: I was able to talk to le Carr\u00E9 about the reality of spying, which isn&amp;#039;t so Jason Bourne-like. It&amp;#039;s quite mundane. You have to court your spies, and protect them. That&amp;#039;s what [Bachmann] does with Jamal, he&amp;#039;s like a father figure. We integrated those elements into Philip&amp;#039;s performance. ESQ: In your photography, you prefer to shoot with grainy film. Since moviemaking is now an almost exclusively digital medium, how does that affect the way you visualize and shoot your performers? AC: I don&amp;#039;t think I treat my film work as an extension of my photography. There are two different sets of rules there. Photography I shoot analog, while the first two films I shot on film, and the most recent two were on digital. I just finished the next film, which is now in post-production [Life]. There are qualities that I like about digital photography, but I don&amp;#039;t see my films as an extension of my photography. ESQ: In an interview, you said Hoffman was with you while you edited A Most Wanted Man. Isn&amp;#039;t that unusual? AC: Oh, no, no. He visited once, just to see where we were with the film, to see if there was anything he could offer, his opinion, or some feedback, to see if there was anything that needed to be done. We shot for one more day. ESQ: What did you add? AC: Some bits here and there, the opening telephone call. I think people had, before that, found it difficult to connect the dots. ESQ: You&amp;#039;re attracted to stories about loners living in fatalistic worlds. Why is that? AC: Well, maybe my view is quite fatalistic. [laughs] I fuse that, maybe, into my characters. Le Carr\u00E9 already brought a lot of that to his characters. The challenge with adapting this book was finding the main character. In the book, it&amp;#039;s not obvious, but to me, Bachmann was always the main character. He&amp;#039;s the character that I associated with most. ESQ: You said you separate your photography from your films. But what difference is there between shooting a narrative, as opposed to photos that stand alone? AC: I can&amp;#039;t remember who taught me this, but in photography, you photograph somebody in a dark tunnel. There&amp;#039;s no point in or out. But in film, you eventually go out again. So in film, the time spent in the dark has a function. In general, because you don&amp;#039;t shoot chronologically, you have to keep a clear mind of what&amp;#039;s happening, what&amp;#039;s the mood in any given scene. Sometimes that creates happy mistakes, sometimes not. Photography is quite different. My photography is very European. In America, I always get the sense that people are comforted by understanding what they&amp;#039;re looking at. Photography&amp;#039;s quite clear here [in the U.S.], it&amp;#039;s very well-explained. My photography&amp;#039;s perhaps not as well-explained.  ESQ: There&amp;#039;s no narrative. AC: No, not really. And in a way, you can make it what you want it to be. I don&amp;#039;t think people here are that comfortable with that approach. ESQ: All three of your movies about character studies in a way. The book A Most Wanted Man made it less clear who the main character was. What made you put your finger on Bachmann so quickly? AC: I have to make clear the emotional linkage: What character do I want to go through the film with? That&amp;#039;s how you come to Bachmann. For me, it&amp;#039;s the most interesting way to look at the story. There&amp;#039;s not much backstory for these characters, not as much as I would have liked. But like stories, people have individual lives, and are all caught up in this murky thing. All of them have the best intentions. In that sense, you could just as easily tell the same story from another character&amp;#039;s perspective. Maybe that&amp;#039;s a good idea for a TV series. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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