Cinematographers
Interviews - Cinematographers
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“I Think of the Digital Chip as a Film Stock”: DP Shawn Kim on Shooting Ozark‘s Final Season
After four seasons of financial and familial duplicity, the winding saga of Missouri drug launderers Wendy and Marty Byrde comes to an end tomorrow as Netflix releases the final half of its 14-episode swan song. I have no idea yet whether the karmic scales will finally tilt towards a comeuppance for the couple but am certain that whatever awaits the Byrdes will unfold in the murky depths of low-key interiors and the cool cyan of perpetually overcast exteriors. It’s a well-defined aesthetic that has earned three Emmy nominations for the show’s cinematographers. For the climactic season, a new team of […]
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“Ninety Percent of the Lighting Was Done Pretty Much How You Would’ve Done It in 1979”: Cinematographer Eliot Rockett on the Period Horror Film X
“The story can’t just change midway through,” exclaims a pretentious adult film director incredulously in X. It certainly can in a Ti West horror film, where one of the joys is often the shift from the methodical pace of the opening to the blood-drenched mania of the finale. Set in 1979, X finds a group of ambitious but inexperienced filmmakers heading to a remote Texas farm with dreams of making the next Debbie Does Dallas. However, the troupe fails to inform their hosts – an elderly couple who rent the crew their bunkhouse – about the purpose of their visit, […]
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“We Can Give Clint Eastwood His Lens”: DP Jessica Lee Gagné on Severance
In Severance, workers at a windowless subterranean cubicle farm have their memories surgically bifurcated. The procedure separates the consciousness of the work self from the personal self—the “innie and outie,” in the parlance of the show—with neither retaining memories from the other half of their existence. Listening to Jessica Lee Gagné talk about her craft, it’s hard to imagine the cinematographer not taking her work home with her. Long after wrapping the show, she’s still irked that the shade of red in a kitchen’s undercabinet lighting isn’t quite right. She’s precise enough to carry .15 ND filters, because she believes […]
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How Alex Ross Perry and DP Robert Kolodny Made a New Video for Pavement’s “Harness Your Hopes”
In 2017, the formerly obscure Pavement B-side “Harness Your Hopes” became their number one track on Spotify. It currently has 70 million plays, over twice the amount of “Cut Your Hair,” the group’s highest charting and arguably most popular song during their original run. At Stereogum, Nate Rogers looked into why exactly “Harness Your Hopes” became as prevalent as it had and all signs point to Spotify’s Autoplay feature, which “cues up music that ‘resembles’ what you’ve just been listening to, based on a series of sonic signifiers too complex to describe.” At this point, “Harness Your Hopes” has crossed […]
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“Is That a 58 Degree Dutch Tilt?”: DP Brett Jutkiewicz on Scream
In the latest Scream installment, “elevated horror” and “requels” are among the contemporary genre trends affectionately deconstructed. The movie also lobs a little friendly fire toward the 1990s slasher revival that birthed the series—a character quips, “It was really over-lit and everyone had weird hair.” There’s not much cinematographer Brett Jutkiewicz can do about the latter, but the former served as a gauntlet thrown down. “When you have a line like that in the script, as a DP you think, ‘I guess I better not over-light this thing. I don’t want to end up as the butt of my own joke,’” […]
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“There Has Been a Deliberate Rebranding of the Alt-Right Women To Have the Veneer of Smart, Sophisticated Instagram Influencers”: Director Beth de Araújo and DP Greta Zozula on Soft & Quiet
One of the most chilling moments in Beth de Araújo’s masterful and outraged Soft & Quiet occurs early on, before the film’s sickeningly violent chain of events formally begins. After shooting side eye at her school’s immigrant female custodian, blonde thirtysomething elementary school teacher Emily (Stefanie Estes) coaches a young boy to go back inside the lunchroom and tell the woman off — to tell her that she must wait to do her job until the school is totally empty. Emily is not just using the child to disrespect the custodian, she’s instilling in the boy the sort of racial […]
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23 Days, Ten Crew Members, Two Lenses and One Joker: DP Drew Daniels on Red Rocket
“I really love to embrace limitations,” says cinematographer Drew Daniels. “I try to limit some of my choices on any film I do.” With Red Rocket, the opportunities to welcome constraints were plentiful. The latest from Tangerine and The Florida Project filmmaker Sean Baker, Red Rocket was shot in 23 days entirely on practical Texas locations with a supporting cast largely populated by local first-time actors. The crew boasted 10 members, including producers doing double duty as assistant directors or costume designers. The grip/electric department was a literal one man band, armed with Digital Sputniks, a few Astera tubes and […]
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“Once I Said Yes to That Film, It Changed Everything”: DP Lee Daniel on His Pre-Slacker Austin Days
Austin in the ‘80s was a college town dressed up as a state capitol, attracting a steady stream of students, dreamers, and dropouts hanging out on the edge (literally and metaphorically) of the University of Texas campus, where Lee Daniel and Rick Linklater screened foreign flicks and postmodern masterpieces in a DIY venue above a coffee shop. Daniel and Linklater brought revival-house sophistication to a community of misfits and film fanatics when they formed Austin Media Arts (now the Austin Film Society) in 1985. The pair lived down the street from their repertory cinema in a West Campus residence that […]
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“Often We are Communicating Without Words”: DP Daniele Massaccesi on The Matrix Resurrections
After more than 25 years of making movies alongside her sister, Lana Wachowski’s first solo feature revisits the siblings’ most famed creation with a new installment of The Matrix, The Matrix Resurrections. Daniele Massaccesi knows something about making movies with family. The Matrix Resurrections co-cinematographer grew up on the sets of his father, Aristide Massaccesi, a cult figure in the 1970s and 1980s Italian exploitation era who often worked under the pseudonym Joe D’Amato. Daniele Massaccesi eventually graduated from lugging batteries and lens cases on his dad’s Italian Mad Max and Conan the Barbarian variations to become a sought-after Steadicam […]
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“We Wanted to Avoid the Usual Thriller Look”: Rita Noriega on Piggy
Piggy follows a heavily bullied teen living in a small Spanish Town sees her tormenters kidnapped. Feeling grateful for the perpetrator who saved her, she refuses to tell police what she saw. Horror and social commentary are inseparable in Piggy, which tackles questions of justice and small-town morality. Below, cinematographer Rita Noriega emphasizes how she avoided aesthetics more commonly associated with thrillers and how the film has changed since its first incarnation as a short film. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired […]
