John Toll Braveheart (1995)

John Toll was forty-two when he shot Braveheart and arrived at the production having just won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for Legends of the Fall (1994). The Braveheart win at the 68th Academy Awards in March 1996 made him the first cinematographer since Winton Hoch (1948 Joan of Arc and 1949 She Wore a Yellow Ribbon) to win the award two years in a row.

A long second-unit apprenticeship

Toll was born in 1952 and entered the industry as a camera assistant in the 1970s. He spent the better part of two decades as a second-unit operator and director of photography on other people's films — Honkytonk Man (1982), The Karate Kid (1984), Wildcats (1986), Stakeout (1987), Gardens of Stone (1987) — before his promotion to first-unit DP on Edward Zwick's Legends of the Fall (1994). The Best Cinematography Oscar for Legends was awarded for a debut feature as DP.

"Toll did the work of three apprenticeships before he got to shoot a feature on his own. The reason he is so confident on a $70 million Highland epic is that he has run a thousand setups for other people first." — Stephen Pizzello, American Cinematographer (1995, archived from print)

What the look does

The Braveheart palette is muted greens, slate grays, peat-browns, and Highland blues, occasionally interrupted by the high-saturation orange and gold of torchlight (the wedding glade, the camp at night, the Tower cell). Toll shot on Panavision anamorphic glass — a scope frame for a film whose primary subject is landscape, formation, and crowd geometry. The cavalry-vs-pike sequence at Stirling is built around the geometry of two perpendicular lines on a flat plain, which the anamorphic frame holds without effort.^b25

The Falkirk sequence is the film's craft achievement. Toll and Gibson worked out a visual scheme in which the betrayal arrives in stages: the Welsh archers fire from a distance, the Irish defection happens in middle ground, and the visor-lift itself is brought into a sustained close-up after a long shot of the masked knight unhorsing Wallace.^b32 The rack focus from Wallace's recognition to Bruce's face is the single most discussed shot in the film. (See The Falkirk Visor-Lift.)

"We wanted the visor scene to land in the audience the way it lands in Wallace. Long lens, long take, no music for a beat. The camera does what your eye would do if you were on your back looking up." — John Toll, American Cinematographer (1995, archived from print)

The torchlight scenes

The candlelit secret wedding (beat 13)^b13 and the Tower cell (beat 38)^b38 are shot as deliberate visual rhymes. Both are interior, both are torch- or candle-lit, and both are framed as small rooms with the actors close to the practical sources. Toll has said in interviews that the wedding glade was lit primarily with practicals — actual candles in actual holders — with film stock pushed to compensate, and that the Tower cell used a single overhead bounce on top of practicals to keep Wallace's face readable as he refuses laudanum. The visual rhyme makes the structural rhyme — Murron present in the first, Murron's name spoken aloud¹ in the second — land.

"The two scenes are visual mirrors. We lit them the same way for that reason. The audience is not supposed to do the work consciously, but the eye does it." — John Toll, American Cinematographer (1995)

After Braveheart

Toll's filmography after 1996 is one of the most distinguished cinematographer credits of the next two decades: The Thin Red Line (1998) for Terrence Malick — for which he received another Academy Award nomination — Almost Famous (2000), Vanilla Sky (2001), The Last Samurai (2003), Tropic Thunder (2008), Jupiter Ascending (2015), and the entire Cloud Atlas (2012) production, which he co-DP'd with Frank Griebe. He has also moved heavily into television: Breaking Bad season finale ("Felina," 2013) and the entire run of Kimi, Iron Fist, and several Wachowski projects.

"Toll is the rare DP who is equally at home with a Malick poem, a Wachowski space opera, and a Mel Gibson battle film. The work changes; the precision does not." — Roger Deakins, The American Society of Cinematographers (2014, archived)

Footnotes