Before Dune’s initial release, director Denis Villeneuve compared watching the film on a television to driving “a speedboat in your bathtub.” Beginning today, audiences have another chance to take that speedboat out into open water as the sci-fi epic returns to select IMAX theaters for a limited run. Cinematographer Greig Fraser was a bit more diplomatic in his analogy. In the December issue of American Cinematographer, he equated seeing Dune in a cinema to dining at a five-star restaurant vs. getting take-out. Ahead of the IMAX return, Fraser (Rogue One, Killing Them Softly, Zero Dark Thirty) spoke to Filmmaker about […]

Adorned with a wooden sword and a garbage can lid shield, nine-year-old Buddy (Jude Hill) begins Belfast fighting imaginary dragons, cloaked in the bliss of summer. That idyllic youthful revelry is ruptured by an explosion. That blast—and what follows—are based on the childhood remembrances of writer-director Kenneth Branagh, whose family was forced to grapple with the prospect of leaving its tightly-knit neighborhood after sectarian violence erupted in Northern Ireland in the summer of 1969. It’s a dilemma cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos understood well. Born on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, Zambarloukos and his family departed following a 1972 military coup and […]

There are moments in the new Netflix western The Harder They Fall that glean inspiration from Sergio Leone or the paintings of Kadir Nelson, but the film’s style—replete with split screens, zooms and precisely arranged widescreen compositions—was also shaped by cinematographer Mihai Mălaimare Jr.’s choice of lunchtime perch.  “Because of COVID, we couldn’t all eat together, so we would each pick our own spots. I always ate up on the balcony of one of the sets,” said Mălaimare Jr. “The crew always joked that was why we have so many high angle shots in the movie, because I would be […]

Comedian W.C. Fields coined the often-repeated adage, “Never work with children or animals.” One would assume that aphorism extends to hybrids of the two as well. Cinematographer Eli Arenson learned the difficulty of that amalgamation on the new A24 film Lamb, while also braving a petting zoo’s worth of critters, including horses, dogs, cats and, of course, sheep. Set in the remote north of Iceland, the film finds a sheep farming couple (Noomi Rapace and Hilmir Snær Guðnason) pulled from the depths of grief when one of their ewes gives birth to a part human/part sheep child they christen Ada. With […]

Barry Sonnenfeld was less than ten years into a successful career as a cinematographer—with credits including Blood Simple, Raising Arizona and When Harry Met Sally on his resume—when he sat down in the director’s chair for the first time on 1991’s The Addams Family. It followed what turned out to be his last job (Misery) as director of photography; from that point on Sonnenfeld would work exclusively as a director, and occasional producer, on visually inventive and conceptually ambitious comedies like the Men in Black trilogy and Pushing Daisies, continuing to hone the dynamic style he had established as a DP. […]

In Midnight Mass, the arrival of a new priest upends the small, isolated fishing community of Crockett Island. It’s an original idea from writer/director Mike Flanagan, who made his name in the horror genre adapting Shirley Jackson, Henry James and multiple Stephen King opuses. Flanagan has been excavating the bones of Midnight Mass for years and at various stages it morphed from novel to film to series. The characters’ inner demons and struggles with addiction and faith mirror his own, with details taken from Flanagan’s youth as an altar boy on New York’s Governors Island. With the personal nature of […]