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“I Had to Light Seven Rooms in Two Hours”: Giovanni Ribisi on Moving from Acting to Cinematography with Strange Darling
Strange Darling Battered and bloody, a blond woman — “Lady,” played by Willa Fitzgerald — in prison garb races across a field. A rifle-toting “Demon” (Kyle Gallner) chases her into an Oregon forest. From there, the balance of power shifts several times in Strange Darling, a serial-killer thriller that aims for a fresh approach to the genre.
Written and directed by JT Mollner, Strange Darling unfolds in six chapters. Shown out of order, each reveals new details about the story’s two opponents. After screening at Fantastic Fest and Camerimage, the movie opens theatrically August 23, 2024.
Strange Darling’s cinematographer is unexpected: actor Giovanni Ribisi, making his feature debut in the role. He’s acted in films such as Lost Highway, Boiler Room, The Virgin Suicides, and in both the Horizon and Avatar franchises, all the while pursuing cinematography, shooting music videos and commercials. He spoke to Filmmaker on a Zoom call about stepping behind the camera, shooting on 35mm, and the correspondences and differences between the two jobs.
Filmmaker: Why Strange Darling for your feature debut as a cinematographer?
Giovanni Ribisi: I’m really good friends with JT Mollner, the writer and director, and we had always talked about collaborating. When he got the backing for this, I found the gumption to ask him about it, which lead to further creative conversations.
Filmmaker: What led you to cinematography in the first place?
Ribisi: My mother was a photographer, but I’d say my interest really came from being a child actor and growing up next to a camera and camera crew. Those guys were my closest friends. About ten or twelve years ago, I had a visual effects company that my partners and I ended up selling. This was after three decades of being an actor. I had a moment where I was thinking, “What am I going to do with my life now?” Then I just sort of dove into acquiring and working with equipment, shooting things for myself and then music videos and commercials. The gear grew until I woke up one day and thought, “My God, I’m doing this on a professional level.”
Filmmaker: Do you take a different approach to the two disciplines?
Ribisi: Over that course of 12 years or so, it became apparent to me that being an actor is a subjective endeavor that tries or possibly wants to be more objective. And cinematography is the inversion of that, it’s an objective endeavor that wants to be more subjective. As an actor, there’s a relief in stepping out of your head and looking at something from a technical perspective. You know, one plus one equals two.
Filmmaker: With acting, there’s never a “right” answer, you have an infinite variety of ways to perform. With cinematography, there may be a “right” exposure or focus, but you’re still making subjective choices: lens, light, format, etc.
Ribisi: But as a cinematographer, you’re looking at something and evaluating it. Will this room have top light? Will there be a window? As opposed to being an actor, where you’re asking yourself to use emotional perspectives to get to the point of “how does this person walk?”
Filmmaker: I’ve thought of you as a very precise actor, someone who can incorporate things like lenses and lighting into your performances.
Ribisi: I try not to be.
Filmmaker: It’s a compliment.
Ribisi: It may be second nature, because I’ve been an actor for 40 years now. I do think there is a subjectivity to cinematography. But it starts from an objective place. You have to have a technical mathematical understanding of certain things. I mean, even just to read a light meter, right? To understand if you want three-and-a-half stops to go across somebody’s face or to wrap, are you going to have hard light or whatever — you have to know how to accomplish that before you worry about what it will achieve subjectively, right? You’re not really doing that with acting. Like, if I hit this certain mark, if I have one tear that falls: that’s not the way to look at it.
Filmmaker: Did you have to fight to use film instead of digital?
Ribisi: There are so many misconceptions about shooting film versus digital. The digital films I’ve worked on, there are three camera crews shooting all the time and you end up with ten hours of footage at the end of the day. Plus a DIT saying, “Don’t worry, we’ll fix it in post,” and people are talking in the background because it’s not expensive to just keep rolling, keep rolling, keep rolling.
It ends up being more cumbersome and overwhelming as opposed to film. With film, it’s like, “This is an important thing that we’re doing here, everybody shut up because we have to focus.”
A lot of people are afraid to ask to use film. But aside from the superior image quality, analog is so forgiving for actors. It’s a process I think is important to maintain.
Filmmaker: What did you decide for a camera package?
Ribisi: I used an Arricam LT. Four-perf 35mm. We had Atlas anamorphic lenses, the Atlas Orions, and the Cooke anamorphic SF lens. I also had an Arricam ST, an Arri 4.35 and an Arri 2.35. Mostly we used the Arri LT.
Filmmaker: It looked like mostly natural light.
Ribisi: I appreciate that, but we had 18Ks, 4Ks,1200-watt LEDs, Fresnel, Nanlux. There’s one four-and-a-half-minute shot inside a house where we’re following Kyle Gallner’s character. I had to light seven rooms in two hours, and the camera’s floating around, so where do you put anything? We’re doing things like pushing through lace curtains in the kitchen. I ended up using 20 or 30 lights.
Filmmaker: Were you on location for everything?
Ribisi: Yes, except for the scene in the truck between Lady and the Demon. That was a set. We needed to elevate that scene, because it’s eight pages in the script, which works out to 10 percent of the film. And it’s all blue light. It was going to be blue whether I liked it or not.
Filmmaker: Talk about how you shot that, because you have several set-ups, including an overhead camera. Did you have specific lines you wanted to get in each angle?
Ribisi: We used one camera with a 1000-foot magazine, around 11 minutes. I used the Cooke 35–140 SF Zoom, truly one of my favorite lenses for its image quality. We planned two days because we wanted different perspectives. We had the French over, then raking across the front, using the camera to inform the dynamic of what was going to happen between the two characters.
We’d do the whole take all the way through, then certain points we would pick up, like the kiss. It was about what the director felt and the actors felt, but also about what we could achieve that day. We probably shot a total of 120 minutes.
Some directors might come in and grab certain moments separately. “I’ve got that and that and that, now I have a scene I can edit.” We usually went straight through the entire take. But we did the kiss by itself. It’s a moment where I wanted to isolate them in darkness.
Filmmaker: Strange Darling has its share of sexually provocative scenes. How did you make sure everyone was comfortable with them?
Ribisi: My aesthetic is I want to be invisible on set. That doesn’t mean being hostile or uncommunicative, it means not distracting the performers. As far as being intimate, getting close with a camera, I think in my experience as an actor, that shouldn’t be what you’re thinking about. These two actors never ceased to amaze me every day. The schedule, the material didn’t bother them. They had other fish to fry.
Filmmaker: What kind of preparation went into the car chase scenes?
Ribisi: We shot-listed those within an inch of their lives. First you should know that JT and I looked at the structure of the film and did a complete shot list, 82 pages typed out. We allowed ourselves 12 setups a day, so on our second pass if we saw a scene that had 18 or 30 setups, we realized that we had to cut it down to what we could achieve.
For that opening chase, we scouted that street three times before the entire crew arrived. Not just about will the street work for where the sun is at a particular time of day, but paying attention to when the trees are creating shadows, things like that. So we knew we needed this shot before that one.
Filmmaker: You didn’t try to shoot the chases in sequence?
Ribisi: After 40 years of being an actor, I grew to really love shooting things out of sequence. It makes you think about what you have to do, and it makes you contextualize things. You really have to understand everything, which makes you work harder. I like doing that. With the chases — really anything exterior but especially with cars — what’s dictating the sequence of your shoot is the sun. We do all of the stuff looking at the drivers when they’re back lit, and grabbing whatever else we can get. When we’re shooting behind her, we’re going to do that at the end of the day because that’s what we scouted. In the first sequence we wanted to use a U-Crane, which is what it’s called now instead of a Russian arm. That allowed us to move in on the car, which really added to the suspense. Whenever you’re in one of those apparatuses, you always have the best day. Those guys at Filmotechnic just are just incredible. I love showing U-Cranes to directors who have never used them.
Filmmaker: What about flipping the car?
Ribisi: That’s one time we used two cameras. It was funny because we needed the car to roll and then land on its wheels, and it didn’t.
Filmmaker: You have a shot near the end of the movie, I’m not sure how you did it. The Lady’s in the passenger seat of a pickup, someone is driving her down a suburban road, you see the steering wheel moving a little but you don’t really see the driver.
Ribisi: For that we used a 50 mm lens on a hostess tray. We needed to tilt down to see a gunshot wound and then tilt back up. We shot one take on two different days.
Filmmaker: Did you time out the roadside we see out the window?
Ribisi: Sure. What happened was the special effects person who was supposed to pump the blood quit. The visual effects guy said he had some fake blood, but he used way too much. The poor actress was just covered in it. We hear, “Rolling,” so I hit the roll button, tilt down, tilt back up, and then the key grip Bruce Lawson cinched the camera down. Then we ran back to the follow van. We did it again the next day, which is the take they used.
Filmmaker: I could have watched that it forever.
Ribisi: You don’t know how much we had to fight for that shot. JT had a director’s cut test screening in his contract. Once they saw what we were doing, the studio execs to their credit ended up giving him final cut. He didn’t really have to fight anymore. But a lot of people had issues with that shot.
Filmmaker: It was hypnotic.
Ribisi: Someone dying in real time. You’re on that journey with her.
Filmmaker: You have a shot where the Lady is sitting at a campsite and you tilt up past her to the sky. Did you know the lens would flare?
Ribisi: Yes. I knew exactly where the sun was. And I knew we would catch the shafts of smoke from her cigarette in the light. Back in the day we tried to avoid flares at all costs. They would put all these different anti-flare coatings on the lenses. I was using a Cooke SF, which stands for Special Flare, it just seemed appropriate.
Filmmaker: Did you ever argue with Mollner over images? For example, if you thought one way would work better than another?
Ribisi: I think everybody encounters that. The cinematographer has got to serve the director’s vision. I have been on too many projects where a cinematographer was arguing or refused to do something. It’s just deplorable to me. As an actor, I’ve had to watch directors who were literally crying in front of me. As a cinematographer, you have to serve the director, period. That’s the job you signed up for. Within that, do the best job that you can, and be a support system, a collaborator. Of course, you always have conversations. You always want to put your opinion forward. But at the end of the day, there has to be one decision maker.
Filmmaker: What can you say about your role in Kevin Costner’s Horizon?
Ribisi: I think what Costner’s doing, and what Coppola is doing, they are the true definition of mavericks. They are putting everything on the line to tell their story when other people wouldn’t. You need them. There’s a studio system and its ecosystems, but you need people who aren’t afraid to have an original voice and to show a different perspective. From what I’ve heard, Megalopolis is incredible, epic. This is a guy who spent, what, 20 or 30 years working on something? Same with Costner, you know?
As far as my personal experience, I’ve only worked on Horizon for two days. One day on part one and one day on part two. The third episode is really where my character shows up.
