Will’s Place 2025
- Paul Mitchnick
- 5 minutes ago
- 6 min read
By Paul Mitchnick:
I put my feet in the water off the dock and make figure eights with my feet. Sometimes in sync and sometimes in opposition. I am conscious of the water falling off my feet back into the lake. Once into a nice fluid rhythm, I look up at a view I have seen many times. In that moment, there is peace in my universe.
Getting to this destination physically and spiritually means something.
For the last five years, Will’s cottage is a place that we rent for a couple of weeks. Spacious and open and old but with modish cons. The cottage itself is a little funky. Not dirty, but in need of some love. The furniture and everything else are its patina.
Older cottages share many of the same things. Will’s is a little unique. The perfectly positioned dock with sun from dawn-to-dusk is prone to sharing dock slivers and always seems to be on a little angle. The 16-foot aluminum boat proudly wears the scars and dents of tenants with no boating skills, and the pressed-into-service anchor is a 5 lb. dumbbell on a fraying yellow nylon rope.
The lake at the other end of my feet is perfect. Perfect in ways that tick every box. Not too big. Not too small. Quiet. Very quiet. With a little inlet making my swimming area the size of two football fields. Big enough for four people to swim at once without feeling crowded. My route is two versions of the same direction. The first week is the shorter, the second week the longer. The shorter has me swim to the other side of the inlet where there are fallen trees and branches in the water with a rock for resting. On rare and beautiful occasions, I am greeted by emerging water lilies. The longer has me rounding the corner to the other side of the next inlet where there is a place for a necessary rest and an appreciation for my accomplishment. Sometimes more lilies.
A water baby forever, I like swimming unencumbered by the confines of a swimming pool. The idea of swimming forever continues to be a big draw.
Quiet. Standing on the cottage deck, you can hear someone toweling off on the dock 50 yards away. A boat-access-only cottage, the nearest neighbours are 300 yards away.
My growing up was visiting other people’s cottages now and then. I was always a guest.
In university, my girlfriend’s parents owned a Chinese takeout. If you were one of their children, you had to work at the takeout. If you were a boyfriend of one of their children, who wanted to see his girlfriend on weekends, then you worked at the takeout. Her parents were smart, hardworking people. One summer, they bought a cottage. Work would finish at 2:00 a.m., and I would drive the gang up to the cottage. They had a new-for-them suicide-door Lincoln Continental that puts modern SUVs to shame for room.
Wake up, go for a swim or something, enjoy breakfast, play a little mah-jongg, and drive back to the takeout to start work at 4 p.m. Nice.
Will’s cottage is the first cottage where I am not a guest. Our first time there, we invited our niece and family. Upon entering the cottage, I went immediately to the guest bedroom. Habit.
As a boat-access-only cottage, some twenty-first century amenities do not exist. Spotty internet, no tv service, and marginal cell-phone service. Mmmm, that is quite a bit. TV entertainment is a 24” no-name monitor with a built-in DVD player that doesn’t do HD or 4K. There is a collection of DVDs and VHSs (a separate player).
Going down to the dock gets you a bar or two on your cell. Sometimes you might get internet on a device. Might. Reliable internet comes at the community centre in town, which means a 20-minute boat ride. Quite often I would get interviews for work. If they wanted to see my face, I would get my ass to the community centre early and wait in my vehicle for the video call. It was always late. I warned every production person that it was a bit of an ordeal to make it happen. Once, an interview got pulled up 4 hours. "Can you talk to the executive producer in 15 minutes?" "Sure, but I can’t guarantee the video." When it failed, they were annoyed.
Part of the job of a Director of Photography is to colour-time a project once it is put together. Large files sent on a computer must to be observed and noted. This goes back and forth between the post-production people and I a few times. Often the files wouldn’t download at the cottage. I boated and drove to the community centre, blacked out the windows of my vehicle, and made notes.
The lake is most beautiful before dawn, at dawn, and as the day breaks at the other end. I make photos with my iPhone, with my digital camera and, this year, with my new-to-me film camera.
Every year I wonder what I am going to shoot without shooting the same thing. Weather helps me out a lot. It is always different. It is always changing. It is always evolving. So is my canvas. Seeing all of this is my real reward.
Photographing it is servicing my witness. Every year I find things to shoot that are different and challenging. And beautiful.
My age gets me up in the middle of the night. I go to the dark sky and see what kind of sky it is. If it is clear, I go back to bed. If it is raining, I go back to bed. If it is a little cloudy, I might stay up. If it is a little bit foggy, I stay up and make a coffee and then load film and prepare the gear. Fog is a changing animal. It always reveals in a different way. It always reveals a different thing. An hour before sunrise, tripod, camera cases, film, and a slightly cold coffee go down to the dock; quietly, so as not to wake others.
Sometimes things present themselves that I have never seen, and the camera gets assembled anticipating something that might happen.
The weather paints the picture. I wait. Part of that waiting includes finishing the now-cold coffee. A photo of a soft, foggy sunrise recently sold, and it was printed very large. So large that colours I had not seen, textures I had not imagined, appeared. The print, not the file.
Both dawn becoming day and hunger end the photo session. If the tripod has been in the water, it gets disassembled and dried. Film gets reloaded, camera and lenses get cleaned, and breakfast gets eaten.
The afternoon can go one of two ways. One is by foot into the water and reeds. Walking is slow and determined, gestures precise and small. Falling means wet and broken gear.
The other is a combo, my favourite. Boat and foot. The little aluminum boat with the little motor. Gear gets loaded and off I go. There is a place of reeds that is calm, quiet, and backlit. The boat becomes a sled that gets pulled. Once an "area of interest" is found, the boat gets parked. Slowly and gently, gear gets moved to the spot. A tiny water garden of both delicacy and grace. The tripod and waist-level finder get me to water's or swimmer's level. There is movement everywhere. What I feel is what I see. The warm breeze on my back is the breeze moving the grasses. The water massaging my calves is the water moving the bulrushes. I feel on my body what I see in the grasses; the clouds hiding and revealing the sun also alter my vista. I witness, and I am in awe. And I shoot.
The end of the light and the fatigue in my thighs end my day.
There is always something new. Always.
Paul Mitchnick is a cinematographer living and working out of Toronto, Canada. He has spent time with many gifted filmmakers in his career—Sean Penn, Lawrence Kasdan, and John Woo as directors, as well as many Oscar-winning cinematographers. For the last decade, Paul has been Director of Photography on award-winning Canadian Independent Features and television Movies of the Week. He shot KEIF AL-HAL, the first feature film produced by a Saudi Arabian company. Whenever on assignment, Paul travels with his still camera and has taken photographs all over the globe. "I make my living looking at things, and when I have my still camera, opportunities kind of present themselves. Whether those things are looking for me or I am looking for them, I am not sure."
Instagram: @pmmitchnick
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