It seems strange to call a $100-plus million dollar Brad Pitt and George Clooney movie a return to a director’s roots, but in a way that’s exactly what Wolfs is for Jon Watts.

Like his breakthrough feature Cop Car—a spartan and sinewy 2015 neo-noir made for $800,000 that impressed Marvel enough to land Watts a trio of entertaining Spider-Man movies—Wolfs is a lean, propulsive story that unfolds in a single day with no use for superfluous exposition. Clooney and Pitt star as lone wolf fixers who reluctantly team up when a tough-on-crime district attorney (Amy Ryan) ends up with a half-naked, drug-addled one night stand (Austin Abrams) bleeding all over the floor of her New York City hotel suite. To borrow Watts’ description of the movie, it’s basically “What if Michael Clayton met another Michael Clayton?”

The movie marks a re-teaming of Watts and Cop Car co-cinematographer Larkin Seiple. It’s the largest project to date for Seiple, who—in addition to his innovative music videos—has done consistently excellent work across indies (To Leslie and I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore), Emmy-nominated shows (Beef and Gaslit) and the uncategorizable genre of “Daniels movies” (Swiss Army Man and Everything Everywhere All at Once).

With Wolfs now out on Apple+, Seiple spoke to Filmmaker about the making of the movie.

Filmmaker: I checked out Cop Car for the first time before digging into Wolfs. That’s a fantastic movie.

Seiple: Yeah, it’s a gem. It’s really tight and very clever, basically just a cop car and some fields. I think it was like a 20-day shoot for maybe a million dollars. I co-shot that movie: The timing didn’t work out and Matt Lloyd had to leave halfway through, so Matt shot the first 10 days and I shot the second 10 days. I had only worked with Jon once before on a commercial. I was in Russia, of all places, when I got the script and an email: “Do you want to come and shoot half of this movie?” I loved working with Jon and the script was great, but I also loved Kevin Bacon. I grew up watching Footloose and a myriad of his other films, so I was like, “Yes, I am there. Done.”

Filmmaker: Which sections of the movie fell during your half?

Seiple: I shot bits and pieces throughout, and to Jon’s credit you can’t tell who shot what. I shot the opening—that long tracking shot where the kids are going through the field and the camera goes through the fence – and then the end of the movie with the kids in the car and Kevin Bacon in the truck chasing them. Matt shot all the interiors of the actors for that and I shot all the exteriors of the cars actually chasing each other. 

Filmmaker: Because the interior cars shots were done on stage. 

Seiple: Exactly, so they could get the performances right. I also did some of the stunts. I did the Chinese restaurant scene and a lot of Kevin Bacon going back to his house and freaking out. It was actually nice. I got to do a lot of fun stuff and not just, like, two or three scenes.

Filmmaker: The other great oner in that movie is when Bacon comes back and finds his cop car gone.

Seiple: That was Matt. That is a great oner and really well operated. Matt prepped the movie with Jon, so I view it as more of Matt’s movie and I was able to hopefully make sure it stayed the course with the photography.

Filmmaker: I couldn’t find any interviews with you or Matt Lloyd about the making of that one. I had so many questions I wanted answered.

Seiple: We had a great bit where, in order to drive the car with the kids in it, we literally dressed a stunt driver as a car seat, with the proper car seat behind him. He drove and the kid was able to sit safely just for a couple of shots. I loved seeing the man in the car seat suit. It’s very silly, but you can’t tell when you watch it. There’s a lot of great small choices in that movie. Jon has still kept some of the same strategies [from Cop Car]. On that movie he’d shoot for half a day, then go in at lunch and cut together the footage we had shot and be like, “We got it.” Or he’d be like, “We need to go back and grab this insert” or “This performance wasn’t working. I need to go back and pick up this close-up one more time.” He did the same thing on Wolfs. We would shoot a sequence, then he would take it and make sure it all clicked together. I actually loved doing that on set, being able to shoot and instantly see if what you shot makes sense and the cuts are clean and there’s a good rhythm to it.

Filmmaker: Wait, Jon is cutting the footage together himself while you’re shooting?

Seiple: Yeah, he would download clips from VTR and do a quick test on his laptop to make sure it was all working. It’s something that could also be done between takes. It was more to make sure eyelines and camera movement were flowing and appropriate.

Filmmaker: I’ve never heard of that before. Have you seen other directors do that?

Seiple: Jon is the only director I’ve seen do it himself. I think there is a joy to putting the pieces together as the director and making it something personal and immediate, like proofreading a paper after each page is written. Jon would also sometimes build and block scenes in 3D. I forget which program he used, but he would cut those together even before we got to set during the car ride to work as he was being driven. He’s always working. It’s impressive.

Filmmaker: He would make 3D previs animatics of scenes himself?

Seiple: Yeah. Even for the chase sequence, we would have storyboards, then we would also have stills from Google Maps and he’d cut those together so that people, when we were prepping it, could see, “Oh, here’s the street we’re going to be shooting this scene on and looking this direction.” We even did several scouts over Zoom via Google Maps to quickly express what was happening and where, because it can be cumbersome sometimes to get 40 people in multiple vans to drive those streets and look at them. Jon’s like, “The information is here. You can see it, it’s more specific. We can talk over Zoom.” We prepped the film in Los Angeles even though the majority of it is in New York. We did a couple of small trips to New York, but ended up using technology to really figure out where we wanted to shoot and how we wanted to shoot it, so that when we did do the proper tech scout we were very prepared and we knew, “These are the stores that we’re going to see that we have to dress and have to get permission from.”

Filmmaker: The shoot was in the 60-day range. How much of that was spent on the chase scene through the streets of New York?

Seiple: I think we were in New York about five to six weeks, something like that, and we spent the majority of the time on the chase. We also had to do the exterior apartment and the hotel lobby and there’s a lot of driving scenes. I don’t really think we did many interiors there. The opening bar scene where George Clooney walks out of the phone booth was in New York. The car chase was so time consuming because we were trying to make it special. You won’t believe it, but we actually ended up cutting a bunch from that chase. We had a lot of gags and really fun small pieces, but in the end it was just better when it was tighter. 

Filmmaker: Then you did all the stage work for the movie in L.A.? 

Seiple: Yeah. We did shoot a fair amount of car mounts with Brad and George actually in the car driving for that chase—reversing down alleys and doing fishtails. We were able to do those using a Pod, which is where you put the driver on top of the car and his steering wheel controls the actual steering wheel of the car. We were able to do a bunch of stunts with the actors in the vehicle, which was really fun, but ended up doing a lot of it on stage as well. We spent a long time trying to make the stage work feel real, as anyone would. We shot plates of everywhere we went. Anytime we shot a car scene, we would then have another car with six cameras come in and shoot the same path, then visual effects would take that footage, stabilize it and add snow. Then, on stage in Los Angeles, we had a ton of LED walls that we would move around, and a very big lighting rig to try to recreate what it feels like to drive in New York, which is almost impossible because there are so many lights in the city. The footage we have of them actually driving looks almost chaotic in terms of how many lights are coming into the car and how many crazy shadows they create, but we tried our best [to replicate that] on stage.

Filmmaker: Early in the movie there’s a scene where Clooney and Pitt drive from the hotel to Chinatown. I thought that had to be practical because it looked so good. That was faked on stage?

Seiple: Yeah, that’s on a stage. My favorite was in the opening sequence, a shot of George driving through the tunnel listening to Sade. We shot it practically, then we also shot it on stage for another piece. I thought we used the practical one [in the movie] and then later Jon was like, “Oh no, that’s the one from the stage. That’s your lighting.” I was very excited by that. We were able to sell it. We put a lot of energy into trying to figure out how to get it to work. The funny part is we have all this technology now and still ended up doing the most basic poor man’s process lighting gag, where you take a light on a pole and swing it around the car to create this moving light effect.

Filmmaker: When we see neon signs reflected in the glass, is VFX adding that in?

Seiple: Generally, no. What we would do is, whether it’s a profile or frontal shot, slide in our LED wall behind them and pick the correct street. Then, if we saw the windshield or other windows, we would bring in other LED walls that had the matching street side and have those reflected in those windows to sell that they’re passing through there. On top of that, we did our own lighting pass with a bunch of lights above the car that did a chase sequence to try to mimic passing streetlights.

Filmmaker: In the driving close-ups you get this beautiful bokeh out the back window. How did you do that? Are you shooting a pass of the plates with soft focus? Or will a light source in a sharply focused plate on an LED wall give you that bokeh if you place the wall out of focus in the background on stage?

Seiple: That is actually the challenge—you don’t necessarily get the fall off and bokeh that would be there practically if the screen is really close to the car. So, what we would do is would set up the camera and get the plate in there, then  zoom in or out of the background a little bit [on the plate] to try to reflect what the lens would actually see, because all the plates are shot on wide lenses. We sometimes do soften the background to try to help mimic the bokeh. If the background is really far away, we’ll soften it even more. That’s something we did subjectively, as we shot it to taste. Then we had some snow, but visual effects added a bunch of their own snow too. The amount of visual effects in this film is actually kind of astounding. We had Janek Sirrs, who is a phenomenal visual effects artist, as our supervisor. He’s worked on a slew of Marvel films and Spider-Man: Far From Home with Jon. He was wonderful. Almost all the snow in the movie is visual effects. 

Filmmaker: It seems like night car work on stage always looks significantly more believable than day stage work.

Seiple: It is. Night car work is great. I’m always comfortable doing that on stage. Day car work on stage is really tough. I think it’s because night is so much more minimal. We always start with no lights in the car and just the LED wall and see what type of reflections we get on the actors, then subtly start bringing stuff in and adding layers and layers. Day work is just harder because it’s trickier to get what that ambience feels like. Also, you can see more; you can feel the interactivity between the car and the background, and that’s harder to sell. The two dimensions of it starts to become more apparent as opposed to the actual three dimensions of real life.

Filmmaker: Let’s circle back to the beginning of the movie. The first third of the story takes place almost entirely in a spacious hotel penthouse suite.

Seiple: That was all built on stage in Los Angeles. We went to a building in New York that we thought would have the position that the hotel would be in, and shot 360-degree plates of the whole city, then we made our own Translight that could be the city outside the windows. Of course, we dropped the blinds in the story [laughs] so you don’t see as much of the work that went into it, but my gaffer Matt Ardine put thousands of small LED pixels in that Translight so that we could have little tiny bits of bokeh peeking through the blinds, so it didn’t feel just like one texture or one exposure. That hotel was designed to be kind of moody, then as more characters enter it gets brighter so that it creates a space for comedy, because it starts out more like a thriller and then once Brad shows up it becomes absurd. You see the layers of lighting get brighter and brighter.

Filmmaker: Once you got into close-ups on that set, what was your approach to augmenting the light? You always have great shape on Pitt and Clooney’s faces in there.

Seiple: For a movie that’s a lot of action and night shoots, the hotel room was the hardest challenge in terms of trying to keep it interesting and creating, like you were saying, shape on their faces. We opted to keep the ceiling on the room, and we wanted it to feel real and honest. Because we were trying to make very dynamic blocking where they’re moving around and we’re creating little tableaus, we ended up having to do a lot of lighting on the floor. So, what we would do is make a giant row of lights or Lite Mats, try to get 12 to 18 feet long of soft light, then chop it up so that it was pointed mainly at the actors’ face so that there was shape to it. If we didn’t do that, it would have been a very flat-looking hotel room, because it’s all top lit. So, we ended up sculpting the light for almost every shot with the actors in there, and on top of that in the color grade we went in and it’s very easy now to key an actor’s face because of artificial intelligence. You can literally just click on the actor’s face and it instantly does a pretty darn good matte of their face. So, you can add a little bit more contrast and bring the skin tone out a bit more, and we ended up doing a little bit of shaping that way as well. Luckily, Brad and George are wearing dark clothing, so it was easier to push more light at them without fear that they would look a bit more lit.

Filmmaker: You talked before about that opening tracking shot in Cop Car, where the two kids are trading curse words back and forth. There’s a great tracking shot for a character introduction in Wolfs as well with Clooney. You start the movie with a wide shot of the city, then start punching in until you get to the hotel room window. Next you go inside and find Amy Ryan with this young guy’s bloody, lifeless body. All of that is static. She calls Clooney for help and the first time the camera moves is when you hear Clooney’s voice on the phone.

Seiple: We were talking about how camera movement works in the movie and thought it would be very fun if as soon as you hear [Clooney’s] voice the movie starts taking a turn and now the camera is becoming active and you’re kind of being propelled. It’s like [when she calls Clooney] the ball has started rolling and we wanted to do that big push into a close-up on her.

Filmmaker: Then you cut to Clooney’s side of that phone call for another oner. You start wide in a bar and slowly push in to a phone booth in the back corner. Clooney comes out of the booth, and you pan 180 degrees with him as he leaves the bar while the camera looks on through the bar’s window. He gets in his car and peels out. It’s a great way to introduce that character.

Seiple: The bar shot was written that way in the script. Jon was very excited about that. It was actually kind of cumbersome to shoot because it was a very narrow bar. The references for this movie were a funny mix. There was Hitchcock in there, Buster Keaton, but also [Jean-Pierre Melville’s] Le Samourai, with this stillness and this observational [point of view], where the camera is taking in something and you get to see it unfold. That’s where that bar shot came from. 

Filmmaker: How are you moving the camera for that shot? You would have seen track if you’d laid it down. 

Seiple: Jon wanted it really solid and rigid. He didn’t want it to feel floaty like Steadicam. So, we ended up putting down dance floor, which is plywood, then you put down a very smooth plastic sheet of material on the floor that we call dance floor, then we rolled a dolly on it with a small stabilized head. Our operator, Michael Fuchs, who’s wonderful on the wheels, was able to navigate around George and the background and some chairs, and our dolly grip Joaquin [Padilla] did a little U-turn in the middle of it to keep George in frame. It took a lot of takes, actually, and for a while it was like, “Maybe this is the wrong tool?” [laughs]

Filmmaker: Let’s talk about the luggage cart oner. This is a shot in the hotel parking garage where the camera moves with Clooney from his car to the elevator. He then wheels a luggage cart carrying the body in a garment bag to the vehicle and dumps the corpse into the trunk in one smooth move. The details I’ve read about are that there was a stunt person in that garment bag, and you used a motorized cart.

Seiple: Actually, it only started that way. We were like, “We’ll have the cart be motorized, so it can move at the right speed.” But George just practiced the move [and performed the shot with a regular cart]. The biggest trick to that shot was having our stunts team there so that when the body is pushed into the trunk, [the stunt person] could use his momentum and fall properly into it. We tried it with a dummy and the dummy never quite fell into the trunk the right way. There would always be a piece hanging out. We wanted the bag to fall in perfectly, then have George slam the trunk very smoothly. It wasn’t actually that complicated. We had a really great stunt team on this. George Cottle, who did Deadpool & Wolverine and a ton of other movies like Tenet, and his guys had this very silly challenge of, how do you get a body on a cart to fall into a trunk like that? They worked with SFX to figure out how to do a rig that would release the body as it fell into the trunk. In the end it was just practice. It wasn’t anything too crazy. 

Filmmaker: Let’s circle back to that chase scene and talk about the piece where Clooney runs into Austin Abrams with his car and Abrams flips through the air in super slow motion. I’m sure a lot of the pieces are composited, but it’s pretty seamless.

Seiple: One of the hardest shots that was composited is this POV of the car charging towards Austin. When we were in New York we shot a reference of a stunt double for Austin, then shot the car driving full steam ahead down an empty street. Then in L.A., we had to get a camera that could move as fast as a car going 40 miles an hour charging towards Austin. We had to use—I believe the name of it is a Power Pod, but it’s a high-speed motorized rail system that could fly the camera 40 miles an hour towards Austin and come to a dead stop, which we had to then shoot on greenscreen. It’s very scary when you shoot it because it’s very loud and feels very dangerous, but it worked out great. That was how we were able to composite Austin into the POV of him about to get hit. 

That whole sequence was a little tricky, trying to figure out how to shoot a thousand frames per second on a New York City street at night. How do you even expose for that? Matt Ardine, my gaffer, actually posted a video on Instagram where he kind of shows all the different lighting units we used. He posted another fun one of the whole bridge chase sequence with Austin going into the bowels of the bridge and then on the top of the bridge. That’s all shot at Magic Mountain in their parking lot. We just made our own road and put up bluescreens, then built all the truss system for the under part of the bridge. That’s all done on bluescreen, then comped together.

Filmmaker: Did you shoot that on the Phantom? Is there anything else yet that does those kinds of frame rates digitally?

Seiple: Yeah, the Phantom Flex 4K is still the highest speed option right now. We needed a lot of light, so we were like, “We’re going to need 20Ks.” We found these lights called Vortexes that are very popular now. They’re like a better version of the SkyPanel; their blue channel where they just emit blue light is incredibly bright and saturated. So, we were able to expose the greenscreens fairly easily with just a ton of Vortexes, which also meant that the stage wasn’t sweltering hot because we could do it all with LEDs. Then Austin was just in this crazy harness doing backflips. We had these giants foam paddles for when his leg makes contact with the car, and you see that whole ripple effect across his thighs. I think that was Jon running up and just knocking Austin through the air with those paddles. [laughs] 

Filmmaker: I love the close-up of his toes in these white sweat socks grazing the top of the hood.

Seiple: Yeah, they had a lot of fun with that in post. Originally it was just dragging it, then I think they added a little extra sock and then a little water fling [from the snow on the hood] in visual effects to really enhance that piece. 

Filmmaker: You shot with Arri Master Anamorphics and the Alexa 35?

Seiple: Yep, Alexa 35 and shot almost everything in their high ISO mode, which is like 2,560. It’s great that you can have a camera be that sensitive and have no real loss in resolution or image quality. 

Filmmaker: Did you use Arri Textures? 

Seiple: We didn’t. I prefer, especially with visual effects in mind, to get the best possible image on set, then step on it in post. We added grain and halation to things just to make it look a little more gritty and real. We wanted it to feel modern, but also didn’t want it to feel crisp and grotesquely modern. We were going for timeless, hopefully. That was the idea. We built a LUT based on the night exteriors from 1980s and ’70s films. In prep we shot a bunch of tests at night in bars and different locations on the Alexa 35 and on 35mm film to compare and contrast what skin looks like and what halation look like, so that when we did our post we actually had a guiding light for what was realistic.