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Shutter Angles
Conversations with DPs, directors and below-the-line crew by Matt Mulcahey
“I Don’t Covet Shots, I Covet the Film”: DP Matthew Libatique on Highest 2 Lowest
Denzel Washington in Highest 2 Lowest In November of 2023, always-busy cinematographer Matthew Libatique embarked on a particularly prolific period that saw the three-time Oscar nominee lens a trio of films nearly back-to back. That grueling feat was predicated on the fact that a triumvirate of Libatique’s most frequent collaborators came calling: Spike Lee with Highest 2 Lowest (briefly in theaters, now on Apple TV+), Darren Aronofsky with Caught Stealing (now in theaters) and Bradley Cooper with Is This Thing On? (scheduled for release at the end of the year, premiering shortly at NYFF).
“It wasn’t lost on me how rare of an opportunity it was to do three movies back-to-back with those guys,” said Libatique. “I have special relationships with each one and would not want to miss working with any of them. There was no consideration not to do any of them.”
Highest 2 Lowest transports Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 kidnapping thriller High to Low from Yokohama to New York City, swapping Toshiro Mifune’s shoe executive for Denzel Washington’s record label impresario. When the son of Washington’s driver is mistakenly taken instead of his own offspring, Washington must decide whether to pay the financially ruinous $17.5 million ransom.
Filmmaker: I watched Kurosawa’s High and Low for the first time right before seeing your remake. Incredible film. Did you have a relationship with that movie already?
Libatique: I saw it at the AFI in the early 1990s. It’s one of those Kurosawa films that is a must-see. People talk about Seven Samurai, Yojimbo and Ran, but High and Low is one of my favorites. I thought it was amazing how the man could, as a filmmaker, take us into this samurai world but then also do this contemporary drama in an urban setting and be just as impactful a storyteller. I have this memory of the first time seeing it and seeing the view outside of the shoemaker’s house. I always wanted a view like that. So, when Spike said, “I’m doing a remake of High and Low with Denzel,” it was unbelievable.
Filmmaker: The pre-ransom portion of Kurosawa’s film is so stylistically restrained. There’s no score. The average shot length is probably somewhere between 30 and 45 seconds. The camera only moves for functional reasons to follow characters through space. There are almost no close-ups and no inserts. Pretty much the entirety of that fire hour also takes place in this single open living space in Mifune’s hillside house overlooking Yokohama.
Libatique: Yeah, it’s very stage-like. I think Highest 2 Lowest actually retains that spirit in a modern way. Our film starts more patiently. There’s less anxiety in the camera work. In large part, you’re taking in the space, [which] is also a character as it was in that single room in Kurosawa’s film. The amazing production design of Mark Friedberg mimics, in a modern way, what was happening in the original in terms of contrasting [Washington’s] apartment with when we go into ransom mode and leave that penthouse behind. We don’t change the language until we go out into the real world amongst the common people.
Filmmaker: Kurosawa’s film used a stage built with a practical view of Yokohama for its day exteriors and an identical set on a different stage for its night exteriors and portions with the curtains drawn. What approach did you take for the view from Denzel’s penthouse?
Libatique: Early on, Mark suggested the use of LED walls. With all of the windows, it made sense rather than to go greenscreen and have to deal with the reflections of green all over the house. With the enormity of our set, we employed a couple companies, Fuse and also Rosco, who did the backing. Plates were shot months prior and processed and we basically used Volume technology to create the backgrounds. Sometimes it was successful and sometimes it wasn’t as successful.
Filmmaker: For a day interior, how much of your lighting does the LED wall itself do and how much are you having to amplify?
Libatique: We had to amplify a lot. Years prior I had done extensive testing in the Volume for Obi-Wan and learned that when you’re dealing with a day exterior and have a smaller or shallower set, you can rely on the walls to do a lot of the lighting. In our case, we weren’t surrounded by the wall. The wall was basically adjacent to the set [and mainly served to provide the view out the windows], so we weren’t getting the advantage of 360 degrees of LED wall. We had to supplement the light, which wasn’t an easy task, actually, because our set was so deep. It was difficult to work around this enormous LED wall and not be able to get prime position for lighting. Many times we are using [that view of the city] as a character as well. We’re selling that “high and low” relationship of being in this 27th floor apartment and then the city below. So, it was important for us to retain the visual of the city outside the window more than to use the wall as a lighting tool. We would isolate parts of the wall that weren’t in the frame and use them as light cards to bring more light into the set but definitely had to augment it. In some of the sunnier shots, we rigged lighting above the wall that we could bounce into the balcony to bring the ambience up in the set.
Filmmaker: Like a lot of the Japanese classics of the 1960s, High and Low was shot anamorphic in TohoScope. You also went anamorphic with the Atlas Mercuries. What drew you to those?
Libatique: When you’re dealing with an LED wall, that dictates a soft fall-off in focus so you can sell that reality. In combination with the Arri Alexa Mini LF, which has a large full-frame sensor, I thought the Atlas Mercuries, which are a 1.5x [anamorphic squeeze], would get me halfway there already. Once the police arrive, we’re dealing with a lot of characters and a lot of group shots [in Washington’s apartment], so I knew I would be on the wider end [with focal lengths]. Anamorphic provided me the ability to create compositions on the wider end of things, but then still have some focus fall off. The contrast of those Mercuries also just felt right to me, knowing that I was going to struggle a little bit with light in the deep parts of the set. I didn’t want it to get too contrasty, which you get with a lot of other modern lenses.
Filmmaker: Then, as you mentioned, there are aesthetic shifts when Denzel leaves his penthouse for the ransom drop.
Libatique: We went to spherical at that point, only because I liked the look of these Canon Rangefinders that TCS in New York calls the Canon Dreams.They bloom in the highlights. I wanted to take advantage of the way they reacted to highlights in the subway with fluorescent lights or practicals and really draw a distinction between what I was doing inside the house and outside of the house. Sometimes we’d also use a wider Canon K35 inside the house. The Mercuries tend to fall off in focus [on the edges of the frame]. If we had a composition where it didn’t feel right because somebody was a little too soft on one side of the frame, I would switch to a K35 and go to a wider focal length.
Filmmaker: Did you use the 50mm F0.95 Canon Dream lens for anything?
Libatique: I didn’t use it. Nothing in this show really spoke to being shot at a 0.95. Sometimes you see a piece of gear and want to do a shot with it just because that piece of gear can do something [unique], but I didn’t have anything it was right for on this one.
Filmmaker: You’ve got a couple of Spike Lee “double dolly” moves in Highest 2 Lowest. Does Spike already know what moments those are going to be, or do they ever happen spontaneously?
Libatique: He usually has an idea for it. Sometimes you learn about it in prep, sometimes you learn about it a week ahead of time, sometimes the day before. There’s only been one time in our relationship that it happened the day of and that was Christopher Plummer on Inside Man, when he is sitting at the desk. He sprung it on the grips right before lunch. [laughs] It was a giant desk, so a platform had to be built. For Highest 2 Lowest, he already had an idea for it. Toward the end there’s a sequence that is essentially a music video. We have A$AP Rocky’s Young Felon on [a double dolly] and have Denzel Washington’s David King on one too. We did a similar scenario in a film called Chi-Raq. It was something Spike had in mind, and I think it just stemmed from him hearing the music that A$AP was writing.
The other one that happens is when the detective [played by John Douglas Thompson] is breaking down how the whole ransom drop is going to go down [on the balcony of Washington’s apartment]. What’s interesting about that was the frontal shot was no problem, but we did those on the stage and, [for the profile angle of the double dolly] we were going along the LED wall and the VFX guy and myself were like, “This isn’t going to work, because we’re not going to get the accurate parallax because the screen’s only 20 feet away and the city should be a half a mile away.” So, we ended up roto-ing that one and creating the parallax via visual effects later with plates.
Filmmaker: The same key grip has been setting those shots up for decades, right?
Libatique: Yeah, our great key grip Lamont Crawford, who I met through Spike on my first film with him. He’s done it countless times. Someone should do an interview with him, and he could describe each and every one he has ever done. I think he came on the scene on the grip team around the time of Malcolm X, and he’s been with Spike ever since.
Filmmaker: Is the only Super 8 footage the shots of Denzel and his family in the park?
Libatique: We also used it in the Puerto Rican Day celebration. The idea about mixing in film came in prep. Spike comes to me and he is like, “Where can we fit film in?” It was a great notion, because I was looking for ways to distinguish what life was inside this luxurious apartment versus what it was like in the everyday world in Manhattan, going through Brooklyn and ultimately into the Bronx. We also mixed in 16mm. Spike is so game for anything. He’s fearless that way. He had no reservations. So, immediately upon exiting the apartment, we incorporated 16mm.
Filmmaker: What stocks did you use?
Libatique: We shot some positive film and some negative. If I had the right light for positive, I’d shoot positive. That was my favorite look. We didn’t cross process it. We found a lab in New Jersey that would process it as positive, then Kodak handled the rest of the processing for the negative. I was just trying to create as much random chaos as possible in those scenes. If I didn’t have the light, I’d switch to [500T] 7219 or [200T] 7213. It was kind of a pain in the ass for our loader. I would say, “Just have a mag of everything loaded so that when we get there and we understand what the light is, then we can pick.”
Spoilers
Filmmaker: Walk me through the recording studio showdown between David and Yung Felon. Were you shooting multicam to get them both at the same time?
Libatique: We couldn’t cross-shoot them. It just didn’t work out. We did do a wider over and a tighter over through the glass to Denzel, but we also had a camera wedged into the corner of the set to do a profile of him too. So, at one time we had three cameras in there. We did the same exact thing [for the reverse angle]. We had two cameras on one side over Denzel’s shoulder, then we had a profile on A$AP. If the lighting can accommodate it, Spike does like to put up multiple cameras when he can, especially for that type of scene. There are a couple shots that we designed, like an overhead where David goes through this corridor and ends up opening the door and you see the set of stairs, but by and large it was pretty straightforward. It’s just really setting up frames to let these performers do their thing.
Filmmaker: You have two major setpieces on the subway. What was the most difficult part about shooting on those practical locations?
Libatique: Probably the night work. When [Washington] confronts Yung Felon and they do that little French Connection thing in and out of the train, that was shot at a platform in Brooklyn. There are also shots with that train coming in and taking off from 161st Street in the Bronx, next to Yankee Stadium. Trying to match the color of the light was difficult because 161st street is very warm, sodium vapor-y light and then the light at the platform was super neutral. I was adjusting the color temperature of the camera to try to warm up the existing light that existed on the Brooklyn platform. It never got exactly there so in the DI I had to [do further adjustments]. I have anxiety over the stupidest shit. [laughs] For some of that [chase] scene we’re on a real platform with a real train, and when Denzel is looking for him, some of that is on a real train. Then when you get into between the cars, that’s actually greenscreen on a stage. Subsequently we’re on stage and we have Young Felon on top of the car, so how do I make that lighting match? To me, that was the most difficult from a cinematography standpoint. A lot of that stuff [in the practical cars] reminded me of doing Requiem for a Dream or Pi. We just got on the train with cameras and hoped for the best.
Filmmaker: How did you do that shot at the end when Denzel is visiting in A$AP in jail? It’s almost like two different frames laid side-by-side for this incredibly wide aspect ratio.
Libatique: For that we had two dollies [going at the same time]. Part of that is visual effects and editorial, creating that effect that you see in the center [that links the two shots together]. We had the same lens on two cameras. It’s actually two dollies tied together so that one guy could push at the same speed. What they did in the middle is create this sort of reverse parallax thing that changes the perspective of the center of the shot so that the center object becomes one thing when we get close to them.
Filmmaker: In Sidney Lumet’s book Making Movies there’s a story about him asking Kurosawa why he framed a shot a certain way and Kurosawa basically says “If I panned left, there was a Sony factory. If I panned right, there was an airport.” Is there a shot like that in Highest 2 Lowest that you love that’s a product of the restrictions or limitations you faced?
Libatique: Sometimes, I love shots that other people do, but I’ve never been one to covet shots [in my own work]. I don’t covet shots, I covet the film. My end game is to make a great film, or at least a good one. I do love Denzel’s closeup at the end in that scene that you described with the push-in of the two profile cameras. There’s one other cut to Denzel that’s in front of him. Spike double cuts that moment when he is about to exit out of the profile and then cuts back to the front of him. That moment is a finale to what that character has been through. I love seeing Denzel in a closeup. His expression there is a culmination of the film’s journey. That’s probably my favorite shot.
