Cinematographers
Interviews - Cinematographers
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“If You Want That Melodramatic Shaft of Light, You’d Better Mean It”: DP Sam Levy on Shooting Lady Bird
There’s a tradition of young directors looking for inspiration in the bygone eras of their adolescence. For George Lucas in American Graffiti, it was the California car culture of the early ’60s. For Richard Linklater in Dazed and Confused, it was the Texas high school rituals of the ’70s. And for Greta Gerwig in Lady Bird, it’s Catholic school and the suburban doldrums of early-aughts Sacramento. Written and directed by Gerwig, Lady Bird follows the titular character (Saoirse Ronan) through her senior year of high school as she fights with her mom (Laurie Metcalf), pines for a philosophical dilettante from the […]
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DP Rachel Morrison on Mudbound, Her Ideal Extinct Film Stock and Using Waveform Monitors
In Mudbound, a friendship between two returning soldiers – one white (Garrett Hedlund) and one black (Jason Mitchell) – sets a pair of neighboring farming families on a path to tragedy in post-World War II Mississippi. For cinematographer Rachel Morrison (Fruitvale Station, the upcoming Black Panther), filmic references for the harshness of agrarian life in the Jim Crow South were few and far between considering the Hollywood studio offerings of the era were preoccupied with propagandistic war movies and opulent musicals. Instead, Morrison looked to the Depression-era photography commissioned by the Farm Security Administration – specifically the work of Gordon […]
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“ARRI is a Woman…”: Christopher Doyle on Finding a Film and the Gender of Cameras
Cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s interview with Kaleem Aftab was one of our most highly-read pieces of last year, and in this concise interview posted at the ARRI channel, he discusses specific aspects of his methodology, including adapting his approach to his physical surroundings and the importance of camera ergonomics.
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DP Dan Laustsen on The Shape of Water, Judging Exposure without a Meter and Capturing Rich Blacks
There’s a line in Bob Dylan’s “Brownsville Girl” that goes, “(It’s) strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than people who are most content.” Suffering together connected director Guillermo del Toro and cinematographer Dan Laustsen on the set of 1997’s Mimic. The Miramax-produced giant insect creature feature marked the first American effort for del Toro and just the second studio gig for the Danish Laustsen. The experience was not a pleasant one. As del Toro put it during an on-stage interview at the BFI London Film Festival last October: “Two horrible things happened in the late ’90s: my father […]
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All the Magician’s Tricks: DP Brandon Trost on The Disaster Artist
In Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, Jason Schwartzman plays a precocious prep school student whose interests include staging age-inappropriate plays like Serpico. Rushmore’s crew had its own precocious teenager in 16-year-old Brandon Trost, who worked on the film as an assistant to his dad/special effects coordinator, Ron. “I grew up on set with my dad. I’ve never had a job outside of the film industry,” said Trost, who was working on set by the age of 12. “You would think that growing up in movies would ruin the magic for you, because you know everything that goes into putting a movie together. But […]
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DP Erik Messerschmidt on Shooting Netflix’s Mindhunter with a Custom Red Xenomorph
When mere mortals gear up for a job, they are restricted to selecting cameras currently in existence. Not David Fincher. Fincher has long hated all the gak required to make a digital cinema camera functional: a wireless transmitter to get signal to video village, the add-ons to provide wireless iris and focus control, the assistant camera’s onboard monitor hanging off the side — all the things that turn a small, lightweight camera body into a labyrinth of cables and breakout boxes. Red Digital Cinema responded by making Fincher his own set of custom Weapon Red Dragons for use on the […]
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Color, Crews and Shooting Digitally: Ed Lachman and Vittorio Storaro at NYFF 2017
One of the highlights of the 55th New York Film Festival was the Master Class with Vittorio Storaro and Ed Lachman. Hosted by Kent Jones, the 90-minute presentation covered a wide range of subjects and also included key clips from the work of the two great cinematographers. Storaro and Lachman have been friends for over 40 years. Lachman claims that he was Storaro’s first American fan, after seeing both The Spider’s Stratagem and The Conformist at the 1970 NYFF. He subsequently worked with Storaro on Luna, when the Italian DP began shooting American movies but had not yet secured a […]
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It Comes at Night DP Drew Daniels on New Lenses, Old Dogs and Using Actors as Bounce Cards
As the end credits rolled after my screening of Trey Edward Shults’s It Comes at Night, a perturbed woman behind me angrily groused, “This is bullshit. WHAT comes at night?” In her defense, the mesmerizing trailer for the film from A24 certainly leads you to believe something is in fact coming at night — a concrete something, not a metaphoric something. But no horrific, plague-mutated creatures ever arrive at the red door that separates the apocalyptic outside world from the isolated home of Paul (Joel Edgerton) and his family (wife Carmen Ejogo and son Kelvin Harrison Jr.). What does come […]
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Directors Josh and Benny Safdie and Cinematographer Sean Price Williams Talk Shooting Good Time in NYC on 35mm at IFP Week
Directors Josh and Benny Safdie and cinematographer Sean Price Williams go way back. Their latest collaboration, the crime thriller Good Time, is the trio’s fourth joint effort. They’re not only used to each other; they’ve also been through some real shit. The Safdies love to work rough and tumble, filming most of their movies — including Daddy Longlegs and Heaven Knows What, both shot by Williams – on the streets and apartments of New York, feeding off and bottling up the city’s uniquely chaotic energy. For Good Time, they even dragged a big name, Robert Pattinson, along for the ride. To get […]
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The Color of the Future: Roger Deakins on Blade Runner 2049
There isn’t much left that legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins hasn’t done behind a camera. He’s shot science fiction, war movies, biopics and westerns. He’s dabbled in gorgeous black and white and lensed a Bond film. He’s forged rewarding collaborations with the Coen Brothers, Sam Mendes and Denis Villeneuve and worked with Scorsese and Sayles. So, is there anything remaining on Deakins’s cinematic bucket list? “What I really like doing is small personal dramas,” said Deakins with a laugh. “I don’t really like action films. I like films about people. I would’ve loved to have done Ken Loach’s films or movies […]
