PLSN: As the cinematographer for Breakthrough, how did you approach the concept of light for this film?
Zoran Popovic: “This movie was the perfect vehicle to explore the motif of light. In Christian mythology and throughout the history of the Western World, Jesus and God were represented as the light. I wanted the look of the film to resemble somewhat the old painters, Rembrandt and Caravaggio, mainly, in their expression through the direction and quality of light…”
PLSN: Light seems to have a special power in this film.
Zoran Popovic: “You see a deep ray of light shooting down at the beginning of the fall [through the ice]. We see it, again, at the end of the film when the mother decides to let go. When the hospital takes the boy off the life-support machines, we have the same basic theme recurring, reinforced visually through the light from above shooting down. The boy is on the hospital bed and it appears as though he’s sinking to the bottom of the lake. Then the light comes up, he wakes up, and he swims to the surface. This sequence provides a kind of connection for the fall and resurrection. In the hospital room, when the mother calls the Holy Spirit to bring her son back, I use super-hard light that was shooting straight at him. It’s almost like the mother and the son, that motif…”
PLSN: The Pieta?
Zoran Popovic: “Yes, exactly.”
—Will Romano, PLSN, April 2019, page 69, in a Q&A with Zoran Popovic, Director of Photography for Breakthrough.
