Back to selection
Creating Composed Chaos: DP Jasper Wolf on Babygirl
#image_title Just as its characters shift roles in their erotic game of cat and mouse, Halina Reijn’s third feature Babygirl fluently shifts between erotic thriller, existential melodrama and corporate satire. At the center is Nicole Kidman role as Romy, a successful CEO of a high-powered New York-based e-commerce company who relinquishes her sense of control when a chance encounter with a new company intern (Harris Dickinson) plunges Romy into the erotic chaos of a BDSM-charged relationship. Babygirl carefully traces how the seismic shifts of this newfound dom-sub dynamic open up an emotional rift in Romy, resulting in an explosive and messy film that seemingly wants to burst out of its seams.
Reijn, a Dutch stage and film actress turned director, has explored similar themes in her Netherlands-based debut Instinct (2019) and the A24-produced horror comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022). A throughline in her directorial output is the messiness of human desires, and the inner-struggle of people forcefully trying to break out of self imposed comfort zones. All three of these features were shot by prolific Dutch cinematographer Jasper Wolf, who has worked with other Dutch auteurs like Urszula Antoniak (Code Blue, 2011), Mees Peijenburg (Paradise Drifters, 2020) and Jan-Willem van Ewijk (Pacifica., 2024). While Wolf has helmed international projects before, Alejandro Landes’ feverish Monos (2019) being a standout, Babygirl is his biggest project to date, a visually slick and star-studded opus vying this award season for top prizes.
I sat down with Wolf in Amsterdam to discuss his ongoing collaboration with Reijn, and the myriad ways in which the cinematographer tried to capture the depths of Babygirl’s tortured protagonist.
Filmmaker: You have worked as Halina Reijn’s cinematographer on Instinct, Bodies Bodies Bodies and Babygirl. How has this collaborative alliance shaped your approach to Babygirl?
Wolf: Halina describes us as a team, which inspires a lot of confidence back and forth. Ever since Instinct, she has kept me in the loop on her future plans, so I am always ready for her, waiting in the wings. After Bodies Bodies Bodies, Halina was offered a lot of different scripts to helm as a director, including projects with major stars like Nicole Kidman. She always kept me involved in these moments—discussing the nature of the projects, weighing the options. Eventually, she decided to direct a film based on her own script with Nicole Kidman still attached, which ended up becoming Babygirl. I kept my own calendar open so I could remain available for that shoot.
Filmmaker: Thematically, Reijn’s work is very consistent in the ways that it explores erotic tension, fraught power dynamics and the inner struggles of people. You can trace an artistic progression from her raw debut Instinct to her third feature Babygirl, which is such a fluent film in the ways that it constantly shifts between vibes and moods. How do you expand your scope formally, while staying close to the thematic core of Reijn’s oeuvre?
Wolf: Halina’s interests as an auteur are very enticing to me as a cinematographer. She is invested in the psychological underpinnings of people, while also exploring more abstract values of how we present ourselves in society. Essentially, she creates fables about what it means to be human. That involves a lot of layers of shame and self-hatred buried underneath the surface that inform the masks we put on for ourselves in front of other people. Ultimately, these are films about our more animalistic impulses, about the beast that slumbers within every human being. In every new film it takes on a different guise. Those shifting forms are what we discuss the most—how we can address these heavy themes to as many people as possible, almost like a Trojan horse. That requires a type of cinema that hypnotises, intoxicates and seduces. We are not aiming to make a cinema that relies on figurative realism. We rather want to be a bit more bold and extreme.
Filmmaker: Babygirl also dissects the upper class milieu of its protagonist Romy. Most of the films you shoot in the Netherlands are concerned with people from more humble backgrounds. What was it like for you to dive into this more affluent environment, which to some degree also mirrors the bigger budget you had at your disposal while working on this film?
Wolf: A bigger budget within the American studio system comes with a different set of expectations. Our keywords for Babygirl were sensuality and seduction. That demanded a lot from the cinematography, meaning we often had to go big. Yet I think it’s important to also find ways to restrict yourself, to stay true to the intimacy at the heart of the story. Especially in the eyes of American producers, that requires a rawness and lack of control they’re often not used to. For instance, sometimes we would relinquish a bit of control over the lighting to allow more freedom for the actors. Some of the scenes consisted of twenty-minute takes where we just kept shooting. It allowed us to approach the actors and the rooms from all corners. So, it’s a constant search for this equilibrium between raw and polished filmmaking. Ultimately, it all serves to try to get behind that facade of Romy, to see what is residing behind the indescribable beauty of Nicole Kidman’s face.
Filmmaker: Can you describe more practically what that looks like, to try to get behind the facade of your protagonist through your cinematography? What strategies do you employ in trying to realise that?
Wolf: Halina is very keen on handheld cinematography. She specifically likes my style of handheld, which allows her a lot of freedom on set to work with the actors. She knows how fast and fluent it can be. What we wanted to convey is that Romy’s character needs to be freed of a part in herself that is holding her back. That required a kind of observational style from us, almost akin to a nature documentary about animals. We wanted the camera to be such a natural presence that the actors would forget how they were being filmed. It helps a lot to have some of the best actors on this planet on your set. Working with Kidman was especially a dream for me. She has starred in so many films that have been important to my understanding of cinema and film history. The experience of occasionally discussing her film practice in between scenes is another meta-layer that has found its way into the film. The fact that we could create the conditions for a film in which Kidman felt liberated and completely free to act in this raw way is a huge accomplishment for me.
Filmmaker: It’s obvious that you can put Babygirl next to Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and see a continuation in the roles that Kidman portrays. Did you have conversations with her about how her role in Babygirl relates to previous work?
Wolf: That is mostly a thing between Halina and Nicole. They formed a very intimate and trusting relationship. I have the luxury that when I arrive on set, everybody is very primed to create something special together. What happens before these shoots is often something that the director has worked on extensively. I have the occasional chats with Harris and Nicole about some stuff, moments in which I really see how focused they are. On some occasions Nicole did treat us to some anecdotes of her storied career—these were always inspiring, and sometimes slightly inconvenient when you are working under a lot of time constraints and want to start with the next take. Coming back to Eyes Wide Shut, that’s a film Halina and I were lucky enough to rewatch in a cinema. It only reinforced the degree of vulnerability Nicole had to put into this role, which, on some meta-level, does play out like a continuation of what she did with Kubrick.
Filmmaker: Many of the more erotically charged scenes require a degree of intensity and vulnerability of Dickinson and Kidman that you rarely see in a major American film anymore. Intimacy coordinator Lizzy Talbot was attached to this project to help guide these scenes. What does such a collaboration practically entail for a cinematographer?
Wolf: It was a great collaboration that helped to foster this sense of trust between Halina, Nicole and Harris. You can see an intimacy coordinator almost like a stunt coordinator, converting erotic or sensual gestures into stunts. That helps the actors a lot, because it means they can see the scene as something technical, which they can break down into parts and execute step by step. The added benefit for the director and cinematographer is that the resulting calmness on set allows for a more daring and complicated mise-en-scène. There’s simply less discomfort to deal with. Talbot’s presence also reassured us a lot throughout the shoot. Because Halina had rehearsed so well with the actors, Talbot was often just there to give us compliments and affirm that we were doing fine.
Filmmaker: There has been a lot of talk about the male gaze in cinema, and the ways in which a female gaze can oppose, compliment or subvert this dominant gaze. It’s interesting to note that Babygirl pairs a female director with a male cinematographer, raising some questions about this relationship between the male and the female gaze, which is an incredibly tricky thing to actually define. What kind of conversations did you have with Reijn about this dynamic?
Wolf: We actually discussed this a lot. In general, my role as a cinematographer is to physically embody the gaze of the director. With whatever film I make, I place myself in the visual identity of that film. In the case of Halina, she is mostly interested in the fact that throughout art history, most theater plays, works of literature and paintings have been made by men. What has been the effect of that male dominance in the stories we tell and the culture we foster? What Halina wants to focus on is: What are the stories we want to tell now? In the case of Babygirl, we wanted to tell a story of a woman who has to learn to love herself in entirety. Romy is successful in life, but something within is always holding her back. She has these desires she can’t accept because she is afraid they aren’t accepted by society at large. I think this question of the female gaze essentially boils down to self-acceptance here. Simultaneously, we wanted to mess around with the audience’s expectations a bit, for instance by having this scene where Harris’ character dances for Romy in a luxurious hotel room. The sensuality of the cinematography, and the ways in which the camera is fixed on his body, is a kind of reversal of what you would normally see in the erotic thrillers of the nineties when a woman would be filmed. Those hotel room scenes were some of the biggest setpieces in this film and required a lot of pre-planning to shoot them as freely and sensually as possible.
Filmmaker: Speaking of sets, is it true that the scenes set in the offices of Romy’s company are actually shot in the new offices of A24?
Wolf: They are. It proved to be tricky to find the right location for the office scenes. We had a clear vision of what we wanted, but it was hard to find a location that could match that. When A24 just moved offices in New York, it was tempting to shoot there. From a productional and logistic standpoint it would be very advantageous. We were also charmed by the identity of this office space, so ultimately it all came together quite nicely.
Filmmaker: You also capture this hyper-commercial corporate culture, especially with slick advertisement videos of the grid-like robotics that Romy’s e-commerce company employs. Do you shoot those scenes yourself or outsource this kind of material to a B-unit?
Wolf: This corporate layer was part of Halina’s initial vision, so we had to execute it as well as we could. Essentially, these grid-like machines are a visualisation of Romy’s inner world that is motivated by maintaining a sense of control. So, we had a clear vision of what we were going for and had to find ways to visualise that. There was discussion of rendering these robots with CGI, but ultimately we fought hard to actually film these machines. Halina did a lot of research on this and had some connections in Silicon Valley. It’s a fascinating and somewhat frightening world, to be honest. Eventually, we were allowed to film in one of those factories. Halina couldn’t be there for the shoot, but I drove out for four hours to shoot it myself. We could have outsourced it to a B-unit, but it was of such symbolic importance that we decided I should actually do it myself.
Filmmaker: Did you enjoy shifting your style of cinematography to match this slick and polished corporate culture?
Wolf: It was very interesting, yes, but I also see that as an integral part of the work that I do: to work on technical solutions to execute the visual concept of the film. In this case we were wondering, how are we going to shoot it? Are we going to fly drones through the factory and make these kinds of topshots? Can we basically lock ourselves on the grid in that factory? Can we create a way to weave Romy’s inner world in these machines? We knew we had to film at very specific times, when a lot of orders would come in, forcing the machine in a kind of hyperdrive. It required the drone operators to find the perfect timing to glide through the roof to film what’s under the hood, to capture that grid on a grid on a grid.
Filmmaker: In your previous interview with Filmmaker Magazine, you mentioned you shot Bodies Bodies Bodies on the Alexa Mini LF. Did you use the same camera again for Babygirl?
Wolf: We considered working with the Alexa 35 this time, but ultimately settled on the Alexa Mini LF again. The combination of a large format while still having a high dynamic range works so well for this film. We tested quite extensively prior to the shoot, and I ended up with a mix of lenses, which helped to explore this duality of Romy’s character. I hope it’s subtle enough that you don’t consciously see it, but that on a subliminal level it conveys something deeper about this person. I switch quite deliberately between anamorphic and spheric lenses within scenes, employing different tools to draw out Romy’s face in different ways. This compliments Halina’s approach to filmmaking, which is very much concerned with a kind of push-and-pull dynamic, where something new constantly arises that catapults our characters into new directions.
Filmmaker: All her films seem to be about people caught in some kind of flux. It gives a frenzied and unnerving pace to everything.
Wolf: That’s the tempo in which Halina wants to tell her stories. You can see that in the way the films are edited. We shoot a lot of coverage, so the editor has a lot of material to jump through to keep the pace high. It gives the sensation that you should be on your toes all the time. Things stay unpredictable.
Filmmaker: Did Reijn’s experiences with stage acting factor into that? Do you sense that she applies some principles of theatre to the way she directs film?
Wolf: That’s a tricky question. I think the fact that she has this extensive theatre experience drives her to occasionally try to find ways to fend off this leviathan of a film shoot that constantly surrounds you. When you manage to do that on set, it allows for a lot of new dimensions to what you can shoot. So, yes, she has a tendency to minimize the technical stuff that weighs a shoot down. Somehow that also frees me, and allows me to operate the camera with less restrictions. For Halina, these kinds of strategies are an integral part of her craft.
Filmmaker: This reminds me of your work on Alejandro Landes’ Monos, which also has this simultaneously freed and embodied type of cinematography, where it almost feels like the camera takes on the guise of an extra character in the film. Is that something you actively seek out in your cinematography?
Wolf: That’s a valuable point of comparison, because it explains why I am so enthusiastic about working with Halina. Just as in Monos, we create composed chaos. On the one hand you have these expressionistic choices which require a fully planned shot list and a visually developed script, and on the other hand you have these very clear turning points where we can give in to the chaos and full trust is placed in the individuality of the camera. This combination suits me very well. It gives me a lot of satisfaction to feel like you’re accepted to the inner circle of the actors with your camera. Trying to capture the intoxication of your actors is always the most memorable part of my work.
