Lance Acord (Lost in Translation) Lost in Translation (2003)
Lance Acord was the cinematographer on Lost in Translation and the practical reason the film could be shot in Tokyo at all on a $4 million budget in twenty-seven days. Acord had grown up partly in Japan, spoke functional Japanese, and was a friend of Sofia Coppola's by way of a shared circle that included Spike Jonze (for whom Acord had shot Being John Malkovich in 1999 and would shoot Adaptation in 2002).
A Coppola-Jonze-Anderson collaborator
Acord was born in 1964 in California and trained at the Brooks Institute of Photography. By 2002 he had built a career split between music videos (Beastie Boys, Beck, Fatboy Slim — much of the Spike Jonze music-video catalog), commercials, and a small but high-profile feature filmography: Buffalo '66 (1998) for Vincent Gallo, Being John Malkovich (1999) for Jonze. Lost in Translation was his first picture for Coppola, and is now generally considered the visual baseline against which all of her subsequent work is read.
How the Tokyo shoot worked
The production worked largely without filming permits. Many of the street and pedestrian shots — the Shibuya crossing footage, the Shinjuku neon driving sequences, most of the sidewalk material — were grabbed handheld with a small camera, with Acord and Coppola moving in a small crew that could pretend to be tourists if anyone asked.
"We were stealing shots all over Tokyo. The Japanese authorities are very strict, but if you keep your crew small and you don't put down a tripod, you can get away with quite a lot. Lance was the practical reason we could do it — he had grown up there, he spoke the language, he could talk us out of trouble in Japanese." — Sofia Coppola, American Cinematographer (2003, archived)
The Park Hyatt was the principal interior location, and the production negotiated permission to shoot only between one a.m. and dawn. The Park Hyatt's New York Bar — the actual bar where Catherine Lambert performed her residency — provided the bar scenes.
The image vocabulary
The film's visual signature is a small set of recurring frames: Charlotte against a window, looking out across Tokyo from a great height; Bob in a mirrored elevator at conspicuously the wrong scale; faces in extreme close-up against a soft-focus background of neon or bokeh; long handheld pedestrian shots in Shibuya. Acord shot on Super 35mm with available light wherever possible, augmented with practical sources — the actual hotel lighting, the actual neon, the actual karaoke-box color wash — rather than film-set rigs.
"Lance has an eye for the available. He doesn't try to impose a look. He photographs what is there, and the look comes from his selection of what to point the camera at and when to release the shutter." — Spike Jonze, Filmmaker Magazine (2010)
The opening shot of Charlotte at the window in pink underwear and a sweaterb2 is the most-discussed single image in the film and is often credited as a deliberate visual reference to the photorealist painter John Kacere; Acord has said in interviews that the staging was Coppola's and his job was the light.
After Lost in Translation
Acord shot Marie Antoinette (2006) and Somewhere (2010) for Coppola, Where the Wild Things Are (2009) and Her (2013) for Jonze, and continued a substantial commercial-and-music-video career. He is widely cited as one of the small group of cinematographers who, in the early 2000s, defined the visual vocabulary of American art-pop cinema.
"Acord's Lost in Translation is the picture that made handheld available-light Tokyo into a recognizable film grammar. Every subsequent jet-lagged-in-a-foreign-city movie is in some sense quoting it." — Manohla Dargis, The New York Times (2013)