Cinematographers
Interviews - Cinematographers
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A Devotion to Cinema: DP Ed Lachman on his Career and Collaborations with Todd Haynes
At 69, and with more than 90 movies on his CV, cinematographer Ed Lachman is on something of a roll this fall. He received recently the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographers, and will see his latest stunning collaboration with director Todd Haynes, Wonderstruck, released in theaters from Amazon Studios and Roadside Attractions. Shot on Super 35mm color and black-and-white stock, Wonderstruck follows Lachman’s ravishing work on Haynes’s Carol with another film in which the image carries a seductive charge and an analytic weight. An avid historian of visual history, Lachman dives deep into a story’s period […]
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Shooting From Dock to Dish with the New Canon C200
For the launch of the C200, Canon hired producer Andrew Fried of Boardwalk Pictures to create a short introduction video, From Dock to Dish. Boardwalk Pictures specializes in nonfiction programming, most notably producing the Chef’s Table series for Netflix. The team, including DP Bryant Fisher, shot From Dock To Dish over the course of two days using pre-production units loaned from Canon. In this interview producer Fried and DP Fisher talk about the camera and their experience shooting the video. Filmmaker: How did you become involved in this project? Fried: Canon approached me to see if I had any ideas for a short […]
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Cinematographer Lucas Alvarado-Farrar on Shooting Whose Streets?
Opening today in theaters is Sabaah Folayan’s Whose Streets?, co-directed by Damon Davis. Both visceral and thoughtful, it looks back at the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO in September, 2014, capturing all the turbulence and outcry of the moment before moving forward and following the activist energies ignited by the event. There’s archival and citizen-shot material, most only on cell phones, in the movie, but also expertly-captured footage of the original protests and following actions shot by the film’s DP, Lucas Alvarado-Farrar. Here, in an interview conducted just prior to the film’s premiere at the 2017 Sundance Film […]
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DP Andrew Droz Palermo on A Ghost Story, Shooting 1.33 and That Pie Shot
The polarity between director David Lowery’s $65 million Disney film Pete’s Dragon and the micro-budgeted A Ghost Story has been noted repeatedly in reviews and profiles. But the man behind the camera on A Ghost Story has a unique career trajectory of his own. Cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo made his feature debut with Adam Wingard’s tone-mashing home invasion horror flick You’re Next in 2011. He followed that by co-directing a documentary (Rich Hill, an affecting character study of Missouri teens living in poverty) and a narrative feature (One and Two). Palermo is back in director of photography mode on A […]
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“Every So Often a Train Would Come Rumbling By and the Set Would Shake”: DP Doug Emmett on Shooting HBO’s Room 104
An octogenarian couple returns to the hotel room where they spent their first night together — it’s a logline that would typically preface an elegiac rumination on love and mortality. But by the time that set-up arrives in the season finale of HBO’s new anthology series Rooms 104, it seems just as likely to give way to horror or violence…or interpretive dance. That’s the joy of the newest Duplass Brothers creation — each episode begins as a blank slate capable of unexpectedly evolving into any genre or tone. The 12-episode series — which debuted last Friday night — unfolds entirely […]
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“Was Everything in Focus?”: Wonder Woman DP Matthew Jensen on Shooting 35 and Digital and How Tequila Sunrise Inspired His Career
I have to admit I can no longer distinguish 35mm film from high end digital cameras when I go to the movies. I can spot 16mm or anamorphic lenses, but the line between digital and 35mm celluloid has become impossibly blurred. Wonder Woman cinematographer Matthew Jensen can still spot the subtleties, but for Jensen the aesthetics of film are only one of the reasons he enjoys working in that format. “It’s very hard to tell the difference, especially when you’ve gone through a DI (digital intermediate) process and you’re projecting digitally. We have some shots that are digital in Wonder […]
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“If You Can Fall Asleep, in a Movie, it Means that the Movie Often Works:” Legendary DP Christopher Doyle on Winning the Pierre Angenieux ExcelLens in Cinematography Award
This year at the Cannes Film Festival, Christopher Doyle became the most recent cinematographer to be graced with the Pierre Angenieux ExcelLens In Cinematography Award, a prize given for a DP’s impact on the history of world cinema. Sponsored by the renowned lens maker, this year’s “trophy” was an Angénieux Optimo 15-40 zoom lens specially engraved with Doyle’s name. Born in Sydney in 1952, Doyle left his homeland as a teenager to begin an odyssey in Asia, where he has predominantly worked. He had a number of jobs — from oil drilling to cow herding — before his photographs caught […]
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DP Henry Braham on Shooting Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 with the First Weapon 8K Vista Vision Full Frame Camera
Compared to the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with its squeaky clean Captain America and solemn United Nations accords, the Guardians of the Galaxy — a rogues’ gallery of smugglers, thieves and assassins — are outliers. Yes, by the end of Guardians Vol. 2 the titular team are two-time galaxy savers. But for Rocket, the genetically enhanced trash panda voiced by Bradley Cooper, that just means they can jack up their rates. Guardians’ departure from the status quo of Marvel’s ever-bloating Avengers coalition – which they will no doubt eventually be subsumed by – extends to behind the camera as […]
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Tribeca 2017: Five Questions for Flames DP Ashley Connor
Flames marks cinematographer Ashley Connor’s third feature collaboration with filmmaker, artist and performer Josephine Decker — she previously lensed Decker’s Thou Wast Mild and Lovely and Butter on the Latch — but this time there’s a twist. Decker “co-directed for a long time” (see the film and you’ll understand) with director Zefrey Thowell, and the movie bracingly, explicitly details the emotional, sexual and psychosexual gyrations of their turbulent eight-month relationship. The pair would often call Connor over to film a recreation of something that happened to them just a day earlier — like a bout of lovemaking leading to a […]
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Surveying Inner Landscapes
In the current climate of conglomerate studio entertainment, the Holy Grail is no longer the summer tentpole or the once fabled franchise. It is now the “shared universe,” a property capable of infinite expansion across an ever-enlarging landscape of consumption platforms. No outfit has embraced this new paradigm more than Marvel, whose television and film empire spans multiple networks and studios. As a product of FX and Marvel Television, Legion belongs to that universe, yet the new series from Fargo creator Noah Hawley feels like its own creature — not an offshoot or a spinoff or a cog in a […]
