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“Each Day Was a White-Knuckle Ride”: DP Ryan Kernaghan on Kneecap
Still from 2024 Sundance premiere Kneecap In Kneecap, Rich Peppiatt depicts the rise of the eponymous Belfast-based rap trio, who have become unlikely leaders of a movement to save the Irish language. The 2024 Sundance premiere is the festival’s first ever Irish language film, as well as the first film from outside the United States to screen in the NEXT section.
Below, cinematographer Rich Kernaghan explains how he found a visual language for the film and how the crew managed such an ambitious location shoot on such a tight schedule.
See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here.
Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job?
Kernaghan: Rich was looking for a DP and he called me and invited me out for a coffee. When I initially heard about the film, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but nothing could have prepared me for how audacious and ambitious the script was. Once I heard how Rich wanted to approach it, I was completely sold.
In our early discussions Rich and I found that we had very similar visual sensibilities. Before I officially came on board, we spent some time exchanging images and ideas, and it became clear very quickly that this was the kind of film where we had to take risks and swing for the fences with the visual language. It was a daunting prospect given our tight schedule, but we were determined to go for broke and embrace the fact that every day would be a high-wire act. Before prep began, we spent two weeks storyboarding every frame of the film, which allowed us to refine the visual ideas and find the right strategy to shoot it. We filled a 200-page notebook with our terrible drawings, later refined by our storyboard artist, Jack Wright. By the time preproduction began, the crew had storyboards for the entire film, and I think what we ultimately achieved wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.
Filmmaker: What were your artistic goals on this film, and how did you realize them?
Kernaghan: The film straddles many different styles and moods; it bounds between surrealism, poignant drama, musical sequences and absurdity, and is peppered throughout with explosions of mad, anarchic energy. My artistic goals were to blend all these elements together cohesively and have the visuals support the story in exactly the right way for each scene. I worked hard to find an overarching visual language which would work across the film, and the specific techniques which would work within a scene. Our storyboarding process was critical to this, it was a very open process—no idea was off the table and nothing was deemed impossible. It was a really exciting part of the process, and that’s how we were able to find the visual heart of the film.
Filmmaker: How did you want your cinematography to enhance the film’s storytelling and treatment of its characters?
Kernaghan: We wanted the cinematography to have an unrestrained, playful quality to it, and over the course of the film we used every kind of technique and visual sleight of hand in the book. Fundamentally, though, the cinematography had to be grounded in the drama and connected to the characters. Despite all the visual trickery in the film, my favorite way to operate the camera is handheld, and I loved the simplicity of the scenes where I was moving around with the band with the camera on my shoulder. Early in the schedule we shot a sequence where the band take their first tentative steps in recording a track and I was responding spontaneously to them as they started to find their voice and grow in confidence. Later that day we shot a scene of hedonistic abandon where the band begin to bond. We had planned a detailed sequence of shots for this, but we ended up shooting the whole scene one take with me throwing the camera around the room.
Filmmaker: Were there any specific influences on your cinematography, whether they be other films, or visual art, of photography, or something else?
Kernaghan: We had an incredibly extensive number of visual references, but we did look up to films like Trainspotting and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, as well as Michel Gondry’s work. We looked at a lot of Francis Bacon’s portraits as well as Justin Quinnell’s unusual pinhole photography. I also found my mind drifting to a show that I love called Jam, by Chris Morris, which is an extraordinarily dark, blackly comic show. It’s bracing stuff, but the visual ideas in it are astonishing and nothing remotely like it has been broadcast since.
Filmmaker: What were the biggest challenges posed by production to those goals?
Kernaghan: Our time and resources were limited, so each day was a white-knuckle ride in terms of achieving our day. Our crew were astounding and completely invested in making the film a success. They were, in the David Lean sense, a band of dedicated maniacs.
Filmmaker: What camera did you shoot on? Why did you choose the camera that you did? What lenses did you use?
Kernaghan: Sony Venice 2. I tested the Venice a number of times prior to Kneecap, and this ended up being the perfect project for it. The images that the Venice 2 produces are gorgeous, but the camera’s extraordinary low light performance was invaluable to us. We had a lot of material that we knew would challenge us in terms of light levels—a lot of night scenes, a lot of high-speed work and many shots with a probe lens. Without the Venice 2’s amazing sensor, it would have been incredibly difficult to achieve these shots.
Our main lenses were Cooke S6 Anamorphics. We also carried a Fujinon 18-85mm Zoom, and a Laowa 24mm probe lens.
Filmmaker: Describe your approach to lighting.
Kernaghan: Ordinarily I try to find natural sources to motivate the lighting, but on Kneecap we frequently go on surreal flights of fancy, so this allowed me to push the boundaries in terms of the color and the direction of the light. As I normally do, I’m careful to place practical sources around the set with the help of the art department, and I’ll often use these as a motivation to refine the modelling on the cast as we move through a scene. Our gaffer, Kevin Heatherington, was a huge asset to us and was able to find innovative solutions for the many unique lighting scenarios that we faced.
Filmmaker: What was the most difficult scene to realize and why? And how did you do it?
Kernaghan: This was the scene where Liam Óg is pursued by a 13-strong Orange Order band on a foot chase through the city. We had to shut down a main road to shoot this scene, and the council would only allow us to lock it off for four hours on a Sunday morning. As with the rest of the film, this sequence was storyboarded shot-for-shot and we were under a massive amount of pressure to achieve what we needed in the time we had. The scene required two camera teams, an electric tracking vehicle and multiple car rigs and required a huge amount of co-ordination from our AD and locations departments.
The camera and grip teams, led by our first AC, Dáire Mac An tSaoir, and our grip, Cormac Long, did a phenomenal job in this scene, where one camera would be shooting while the other was being rigged for the next shot, ensuring we got everything we needed in our four-hour window. This scene also has one of my favorite shots in the film, which we called our “Lawrence of Arabia shot”—a 400m at 48fps on Liam Óg cresting a hill as the pursuing horde appear behind him.
Filmmaker: Finally, describe the finishing of the film. How much of your look was “baked in” versus realized in the DI?
Kernaghan: Kneecap has a vibrant and varied color palette which I tested in prep, and so I was able to achieve much of that in-camera as we shot. I did use my own LUT during the shoot, but our colorist, Ciara Gallogly, rebuilt the look during the grade to get the contrast levels into a place that we liked. We were aiming for a reversal film look that had a lot of punch to it. Much of our work in the grade was dialing in the right balance between the saturation levels and the contrast of the image.
TECH BOX
Film Title: Kneecap
Camera: Sony Venice 2. 5.8k X-OCN. 6:5 anamorphic.
Lenses: Cooke Anamorphics, Fujinon 18-85mm T2.0 Zoom, Laowa 24mm Probe, Laowa 12mm T2.9, Arri Alura 45-250mm T2.6 Zoom
Lighting: We used many different lighting units but the core kit was Astera Titans, Helios, Creamsource Vortex 8s & Nanlux Evoke 1200s
Color Grading: Graded by Ciara Gallogly at Outer Limits
