The Colourist Who Paints With Light

Ji-woo Han works in a room with no windows and one screen, and she has spent fifteen years there, adjusting the colour of films that were shot by other people in places she has never visited. Her credits include three of the most beautiful movies of the past decade, which is a sentence she would dispute on the grounds that nobody has ever seen them.

Pakistan Actors: People say you "fix" films in the grade. Does it feel like fixing?

It feels like conducting a last movement. The picture is written, the performance is shot, the edit is locked. What remains is feeling. Colour is the last chance to tell the audience how to feel, and it is the only one you can take back.

Pakistan Actors: Take back?

In the shoot, a decision is permanent. In the grade, I can move the audience one degree warmer and watch the whole scene change meaning, and then move it back. I have a month of second thoughts. Directors sleep in my room, metaphorically. I am where their doubt goes to work.

Pakistan Actors: What do directors get wrong about your job?

They think it is about making the image look better. It is usually about making it look stranger. A film that grades to "beautiful" is a film I have failed. I am looking for the one decision that makes the story unavoidable. Sometimes that decision is ugly. Sometimes it is making the fog slightly green so the audience cannot say why they are uneasy for the next forty minutes.

A colourist does not make films look good. A colourist makes them impossible to look away from.

Pakistan Actors: Is there a shot you are proudest of?

There is a scene in a hospital corridor, two actors walking away from camera, and the director wanted us to feel the distance between them in colour. We did it in the walls. The corridor shifts from a green that is slightly too clean to a green that is slightly too old over four seconds. Nobody in the audience can name it. Everybody feels it. That is the whole trade: invisible work, visible feeling.

Pakistan Actors: Does the work linger when you leave the room?

I see the world in scopes now. A sunset will do something in the highlights and I will think, that is clipping, I would bring that down. My partner says I have ruined weather for both of us. It is true. But I also see more than I did. The job rewires you to look. That is not a bad way to spend a life.

Han is currently grading a documentary about deep-sea cable-laying, which she describes as the most colourful footage she has ever been given and the most difficult to make quiet.