Cinematographers
Interviews - Cinematographers
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“One Light Has to Win”: DP Michael Simmonds on Halloween Ends
Pronouncements of finality by slasher franchises have always been amusingly premature. Final Chapters. Final Fridays. Final Nightmares: You can’t keep a good (or at least a profitable) slasher down for long. While Halloween Ends—the 13th film in the franchise—probably won’t be the last we ever see of Michael Myers, it certainly does feel like the conclusion of director David Gordon Green’s chapter of the story. Set four years after Halloween Kills, the new entry finds Myers long missing from Haddonfield and Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode attempting to move on with her life. She’s relocated from her remote survivalist compound […]
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Chayse Irvin on Shooting Blonde in Digital Black and White and God’s Creatures in 35mm Color
This week, Netflix’s Blonde and A24’s God’s Creatures head to streaming and theaters, respectively. The digitally-shot Blonde is a highly stylized look at the life of Marilyn Monroe, shifting aspect ratios and alternating between color and monochrome while employing extreme wide angle lenses, body cam mounts, infrared and more to expressionistically convey Monroe’s perspective. God’s Creatures is the antithesis—austere and somber, captured on 35mm, with an observational point of view distanced from the main characters, a mother in a small Irish fishing village whose life crumbles after providing a false alibi for her son. The films do share one thing in common—cinematographer […]
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Fincher Upstairs, Raimi Downstairs: DP Zach Kuperstein on Barbarian
On a rainy night in a rundown Detroit neighborhood, Tess (Georgina Campbell) arrives at her Airbnb rental only to find the abode double booked and Keith(Bill Skarsgård) already nestled comfortably inside. That’s about all Barbarian’s refreshingly cryptic trailer gives you, along with a few glimpses of the subterranean terror that awaits. So, that’s all I’m going to give away about the plot as well, other than to say that whatever you expect from Barbarian after its first act is most decidedly not what you’re in store for. With the movie in theaters, cinematographer Zach Kuperstein spoke to Filmmaker about recreating […]
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“We Tested a Million LED Flashlights”: DP Chris Teague on Only Murders in the Building
After joining forces to solve a killing (and create a true crime podcast) in the first season of Only Murders in the Building, the trio of Steve Martin, Selena Gomez and Martin Short find themselves the suspects in another slaying in the latest batch of episodes of the Hulu series. Set in New York in the fictitious swanky apartment building the Arconia, the show’s entire inaugural season was lensed by longtime Big Apple resident Chris Teague (Obvious Child, GLOW, Russian Doll). For the new season, Teague’s role expanded to the director’s chair for two episodes. With the season finale premiering […]
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“Spielberg is the Master of Layering Multiple Actors Within a Frame”: DP Jeff Cutter on Prey
1987 was a good year to be a young action movie fan. RoboCop, Lethal Weapon and Predator all hit theaters within five months of each other before landing on VHS, where they could be watched again and again provided you or a friend had parents with an appropriately laissez faire attitude toward R ratings. That cycle of action films made a deep impression on a teenaged Jeff Cutter. Predator, in particular, brought forth an unexpected revelation about the nature of moviemaking. “I saw Predator in the theater when it came out and absolutely loved it,” said Cutter. “The Terminator was […]
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“We Did Not Have an Interior to Shoot for Eight-and-a-Half Episodes”: DP Christina Alexandra Voros on Her Emmy-Nominated 1883 Work
“The landscape is its own character,” says 1883 cinematographer Christina Alexandra Voros. It’s not an unusual declaration for an epic outdoor adventure, until Voros adds, “And that character was the biggest diva on the show.” A prequel to Paramount+’s popular Yellowstone series, 1883 subjected its crew to both a stifling Texas summer and a frigid Montana winter to trace the Dutton clan’s westward journey via wagon train. “It was punishing,” said Voros. “It was either raining, windy or just plain freezing, or it was 500 background people in downtown Ft. Worth sweltering under the August sun in wool clothing.” Braving […]
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“Over-Coverge is the Enemy of Style”: DP Jules O’Loughlin on The Old Man and Ms. Marvel
In Disney’s Ms. Marvel, a teen in an exuberantly colored Jersey City discovers super powers after slipping a magical bangle on her wrist. In FX’s The Old Man, a septuagenarian dusts off a long-dormant aptitude for violence when his former life as a CIA operative catches up with him. In the overlapping Venn diagram of these seemingly disparate shows, you’ll find cinematographer Jules O’Loughlin. The Australian DP shot two episodes of each series, which also share critical flashbacks set on different continents than their main story, as well as shoots that were greatly affected by COVID. With both shows now […]
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When A Wide Shot is 12 Inches from the Lens: DPs Bianca Cline and Eric Adkins on Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
There’s a saying that a movie is made three times: once when it’s written, once when it’s shot and once when it’s edited. To create the new A24 release Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, that maxim had to expand to accommodate an additional creative cycle. Marcel, the story of a chatty one-inch tall seashell searching for his family, was in essence shot twice. First, cinematographer Bianca Cline captured the live-action components, leaving a Marcel-sized space in the compositions. Months later, armed with copious notes to match lighting, lensing, focus, etc., stop motion director of photography Eric Adkins brought Marcel […]
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“There Are Only So Many Ways to Light a Kitchen with a Low Ceiling”: Ellie Foumbi and DP Tinx Chan on Our Father, The Devil
The past haunts Marie, a chef in a retirement home in the small French village of Luchon. An exile from violence in Africa, she has closed herself off to all but a handful of friends. Then, a new arrival forces Marie to confront a world she has tried to forget. Written and directed by Ellie Foumbi, Our Father, The Devil was shot on a 20-day schedule. It was developed in part through Venice’s Biennale College Cinema. The film screened at the Venice Film Festival and recently at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it won the Best Narrative Feature Audience Award. […]
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Super 8 Dream Sequences and Jump Scares: DP Brett Jutkiewicz on The Black Phone
It’s fitting that The Black Phone, an adaptation of Joe Hill’s short story, was shot in Wilmington, North Carolina. Forty years ago, it was the fertile imagination of Hill’s father—Stephen King—that birthed the city’s film industry. Needing a sprawling estate for an adaptation of King’s novel Firestarter, Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis settled on an antebellum plantation in Wilmington. Pleased with the experience, De Laurentiis made the coastal town his America base of operations, shooting three more King films there (Silver Bullet, Maximum Overdrive and Cat’s Eye) and constructing what is now EUE/Screen Gems Studios—the very soundstages that The Black […]
