Celebrated color timer Dale Grahn, CSI, helped shape the look of modern cinema through his work with directors including Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, and cinematographers Janusz Kamiński, Michael Ballhaus and John Mathieson. A Colorist Society Fellow, Grahn also helped to inspire the formation of the organization through his belief that there could be no recognition for color professionals without representation.
A defining project in Grahn’s remarkable career was Saving Private Ryan, the 1998 feature from Steven Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński. The film’s stark, desaturated aesthetic has since become synonymous with its depiction of the Normandy invasion. But for Grahn, the path to achieving that look was anything but routine.
Grahn, who previously graded Spielberg’s Amistad, received the initial reference for Saving Private Ryan without explanation. It was a short clip of Tom Hanks’ character, dazed in the surf during the Omaha Beach landing. Sent from Technicolor’s UK lab, the shot conveyed the high-contrast, aggressively desaturated palette Spielberg and Kamiński wanted—but carried no technical details.
At Technicolor Hollywood, Grahn was running a 60 IR developer configuration for the ENR process, which he believed was the upper limit. The UK clip, however, had been processed at 100 IR. “That made it impossible to match the desaturated look,” he says. After checking with Technicolor’s control department, he learned the IR could be pushed to 100. Once implemented, the very next print matched the reference perfectly. “I was on my way to a victory,” he notes, “only problem is that 100 IR is so desaturated that it’s very hard to work with. It doesn’t accept color the same way normally developed film does. It moves very slowly, then jumps if pushed too far.”
With Kamiński away on another project, Grahn timed the film directly with Spielberg and editor Michael Kahn, running the work print and answer print side by side, shot by shot. Grahn made timing corrections in real time, allowing a fresh printer tape to be pulled immediately afterward. The approach saved hours of hand-winding on a still projector—critical, because each 100 IR setup required draining, refilling, and rebalancing an entire developer, a process that could take a full day or more.
The success of the team’s achievement came during the screening of the finished production negative. It was late afternoon and Spielberg ordered In-N-Out burgers for the group, which they ate while watching the completed film. “The way the look of the film captured the time, place and emotions of D Day and its harrowing aftermath confirmed that the four of us—Steven, Janusz, Michael, and me—formed a potent team for color,” Grahn says.
Grahn color timed seven Spielberg films, most recently Munich, but Saving Private Ryan remains a career touchstone—not only for its technical challenges, but for its emotional weight and the creative trust shared among the filmmakers. “I knew that this film would be a forever film,” he says. “Everyone who saw it would be truly moved by it—as I was.”
