Cinematographers
Interviews - Cinematographers
-
“By Limiting the Toolset We Were Ultimately Enhancing the Protagonist’s Point of View”: DP Antti Savolainen on The Mission
For her first feature documentary, Tania Anderson became the first filmmaker to receive approval to film Mormon missionaries. The Mission brings viewers along with four American teens as they make contact and proselytize in Finland, reflecting on their work, themselves and the world in the process. DP Antti Savolainen explains his unusual lens choice for the documentary and why intentionally limiting his options was in service of the 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 for this job? Savolainen: For […]
-
“Family Photos Gave Me a Deeper Connection to the People Who Lived in the Suburbs”: DP Chananun Chotrungroj on Palm Trees and Power Lines
Palm Trees and Power Lines tells the story of a wild child who, after a series of unmemorable hookups and a reluctant dine-and-dash, finds herself enthralled by a man in his thirties. The feature debut by Jamie Dack evokes the fragility of even the most precocious youth. Cinematographer Chananun Chotrungroj explains how she used framing to channel the protagonist’s state and why she looked to family photos on social media to better understand the film’s story. 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 […]
-
“In Each Location I Knew How and When the Sun Would Hit”: Gerardo Guerra on Dos Estaciones
Red dirt, blue sky and green agave mark the landscape of Jalisco’s highlands, and they also form the basis of Juan Pablo González’s Dos Estaciones, which follows the heir to a struggling tequila factory as she attempts to reinvigorate the business in the face of plagues and floods. The film was shot by Gerardo Guerra, who discusses executing complicated setups with limited personnel, learning the finest details of the shooting locations and walking the line between documentary and fiction. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led […]
-
“We Wanted to Avoid the Cold and Automated Artifice of Fiction Filmmaking”: DP Jarmo Kiuru on Girl Picture
Alli Haapasalo’s Girl Picture follows two teen girls who work together after school at a food court smoothie kiosk. As the best friends swap stories about love, sex and life, the film emerges as both a coming-of-age story and a depiction of unrestricted feminine vitality. Director of photography Jarmo Kiuru describes how she concocted the film’s look and the difficulties of shooting with a reduced budget and amid Finland’s second wave of COVID infections. 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 for this job? […]
-
“The Shelter Radiated Human Warmth and Closeness”: DP Simon Lereng Wilmont on A House Made of Splinters
The war in eastern Ukraine has left countless children as orphans, and in the face of systemic failure, the burden to care for them falls mostly on caretakers at overburdened orphanages. Simon Lereng Wilmont made one such orphanage the subject of his latest film, A House Made of Splinters. Wilmont both directed and shot the film, and below he discusses the paradoxes of shooting in an isolated orphanage during COVID and recounts the most difficult scene he has ever filmed. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that […]
-
“Style Is the Choices That Are Made When Placing the Camera”: DP Andrew Wheeler on God’s Country
In God’s Country, a professor navigating discrimination in the workplace whose patience is tested by a pair of hunters who trespass on her property. Anchored by the performance of Thandiwe Newton, Julian Higgins’ feature debut is an understated examination of the human spirit and a woman who refuses to surrender to expectation and stereotype. Andrew Wheeler discusses the importance of camera placement in he film and how his landscape photography prepared him to serve as DP. 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 […]
-
“It Was Hard to Find Settings That Really Evoked the 1990s”: DP George Geddes on My Old School
In My Old School, director Jono McLeod returns to his past and reassembles his classmates to tell the strange story of a former classmate, an awkward but fiercely intelligent protector who harbored a secret. Below, cinematographer George Geddes talks about the film’s journey from a documentary with dramatized sequences and then to a heavily rotoscoped feature before settling into a mix of live-action and animation. 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 for this job? Geddes: Jono, the director, and I […]
-
“The Camera Movements Were Almost Choreographed to Amplify the Ensemble Feeling, the Dances and the Musicality of That Universe”: DP Anisia Uzeyman on Neptune Frost
Neptune Frost is an Afrofuturist musical that tells the story of a group of African miners digging for the material that sustains a digital network, as well as an emergent connection between a miner and an intersex runaway. Co-director and cinematographer Anisia Uzeyman discusses how she captured the film’s distinctive and colorful aesthetic. 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 for this job? Uzeyman: Saul and I worked side by side on the creation of this project from the beginning. We developed […]
-
“The Movie’s Beauty Comes From What Reminds People of Their Own Life”: DP Cristina Dunlap on Cha Cha Real Smooth
Cha Cha Real Smooth taps into generational angst with its story of Andrew, a recent university alum who finds himself moving in with his parents due to a lack of job prospects. Andrew catches a break when he finds work as a party-starter for bar and bat mitzvahs, where he finds himself yearning for a future that might not be his own. Cinematographer Cristina Dunlap discusses how she varied the look of each of the seven bar and bat mitzvahs and making an abandoned Pittsburgh mall stand-in for so many different locations. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being […]
-
“We Had a Remarkable Number of Catastrophes to Navigate”: DP Rita Baghdadi on Sirens
The subject of Sirens, Rita Baghdadi’s third documentary feature, is the all-woman Lebanese thrash band Slave to Sirens, who are captured here against the unrest that has shaken Lebanon in recent years as well as in performances, including one at the Glastonbury Festival. Baghdadi recalls the difficulty of capturing sufficient footage at the festival and how she turned a film about a band into a film about being in your twenties. 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 for this job? […]
