Cinematographers
Interviews - Cinematographers
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DP Paul Yee on The Fits, Achieving Close Eyelines and Getting an Unexpected Steadicam Bump
In the opening shot of The Fits, the slender frame of 11-year-old tomboy Toni glides in and out of a static medium shot as she counts off sit-ups while peering down the center of the camera’s lens. The image embodies the distinctive dichotomy of the film’s style – a mixture of neorealism and abstract lyricism that taps into the simultaneous horror and yearning of adolescence. The influence of neorealism is found in the cast of non-actors (led by Royalty Hightower as Toni) and the setting, a community center in Cincinnati where a mysterious wave of seizure-like fits strikes the dance […]
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DP Philippe Rousselot on The Nice Guys, Learning from Néstor Almendros and Loving China Balls
Shane Black was just 24 years old when he sold the spec script that would become Lethal Weapon. Since then Black’s name in the credits – whether as writer or director – brings a certain set of expectations: tarnished, mismatched heroes (likely of the cop and/or private detective variety); a plot overflowing with set-ups and pay-offs, reversals, and sly humor; the subversion of genre tropes; and at least an 85 percent chance of a Christmas setting. Most of that checklist gets ticked off in Black’s latest The Nice Guys, a detective yarn in which a private investigator (Ryan Gosling) and […]
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DP Peter Suschitzky on The Empire Strikes Back, Collaborating with David Cronenberg and the New Wave’s “Boring Light”
British cinematographer Peter Suschitzky is known for his collaborations with David Cronenberg (Cosmopolis, A Dangerous Method, Eastern Promises, A History of Violence, Spider, eXistenZ, Crash, Naked Lunch and Dead Ringers). His eclectic career saw him start working in fantastical “what if” tales on It Happened Here (1966) and Privilege (1967). He worked with Peter Watkins, Albert Finney, Peter Watkins, John Boorman, Ken Russell and Warris Hussein in Britain, before Hollywood came calling. is first trip to Cannes, working on Charlie Bubbles by Albert Finney, was cancelled after the festival was stopped by the May ’68 protests led by Jean Luc-Godard. This year, I met him at the […]
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Five Questions with Tracktown Directors Alexi Pappas and Jeremy Teicher
It’s rare, if not unheard of: a first-time feature film director who is also an Olympic athlete. Such is the case with competitive long distance runner Alexi Pappis, who, along with her boyfriend Jeremy Teicher (one of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of 2013), co-wrote and co-directed Tracktown, a new feature film which will have its world premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival on June 4. In addition, Pappas, who will compete for Greece at the upcoming Summer Olympics in Brazil, stars as Plumb Marigold, a young Olympic hopeful trying to find balance in life. Filmed and set in the real-life “Tracktown,” […]
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A Miles Davis Fever Dream: DP Roberto Schaefer on Miles Ahead
Like many aspiring filmmakers, cinematographer Roberto Schaefer spent his youth fermenting his imagination by creating his own backyard epics. But unlike your typical kid – who concentrates on, depending on the era, recreating Harryhausen or Spielberg or maybe just blowing up G.I. Joes with M-80s on camera – Schaefer crafted abstract, experimental 8mm films. “I did do a couple of stop-motion things, but I was always more into art than movies growing up,” Schaefer said. “I liked going to the movies, but I wasn’t thinking about making movies like the ones I saw at the theater. I was thinking about […]
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“OK, Storaro, Let’s Go”: DP Shane F. Kelly on Working with Richard Linklater and Everybody Wants Some!!
After a decade working with Richard Linklater, cinematographer Shane F. Kelly has learned that the most important rule on a Linklater set is that the performers have primacy. “Rick wants you to provide him with a stage for his actors to work within. So as a DP you can’t really be too controlling,” Kelly said. “He wants the actors to have freedom of both performance and movement and if I try to restrict that, I’ll get a little nod from Rick.” It’s a lesson Kelly learned in his first collaboration with Linklater on 2006’s A Scanner Darkly, when the Irish-born […]
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Managing Anamorphics in 16:9 and the HBO Learning Curve: DP Rachel Morrison on Confirmation
During our talk about her work on HBO’s Confirmation, cinematographer Rachel Morrison lamented that “as a DP you wish you had total freedom to tell whatever story you want to tell, however you want to tell it.” Of course, that’s not the reality of production. Parameters are always imposed – whether they are budgetary restrictions or technological specifications. Morrison talked to Filmmaker about working within her given parameters – including a 16:9 aspect ratio, losing the hero location shortly before production, and dealing with the garish decor of the early 1990s – to craft HBO’s reconstruction of the acrimonious Clarence […]
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Tribeca 2016: Five Questions for High-Rise DP Laurie Rose
Cinematographer Laurie Rose began his career as a feature film DP with Down Terrace, the debut film from British director Ben Wheatley. Rose has gone on to shoot all five of Wheatley’s features, including his latest, High-Rise. The first major adaptation of a J.G. Ballard novel since David Cronenberg’s Crash, High-Rise depicts a society in all-out decay. The film is set largely in a single apartment building, where tenants’ petty squabbles and decadent parties devolve into a hellish dystopian vision of mankind at its most feral. Below, Rose discusses his love of practical effects, his career with Wheatley, and how Andrew Bujalski’s […]
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DP Jeff Cutter on Shooting 10 Cloverfield Lane in Near-Sequence, Dragon vs. Alexa and Six Specific Shots
Because the wheels of the movie machine turn slowly, timeliness is not among cinema’s primary virtues. Thus when a movie reflects an aspect of the cultural zeitgeist, it’s either an act of Nostradamian foresight or sheer luck. I don’t know which is the case with 10 Cloverfield Lane, but there’s something about this tense three-hander—which finds a paranoid middle aged white man (John Goodman) fighting to preserve his notion of American ideals inside a bomb shelter alongside a young woman (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) who refuses to accept his envisioned role—that feels right at home in a world where a President […]
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SXSW: Teenage Cocktail DP Justin Kane on Capturing “Raw Youth”
In his directorial debut Teenage Cocktail, director John Carchietta examines the plight of best friends Annie (Nichole Bloom) and Jules (Fabianne Therese), who just want to get out of their small town and move to California. Nothing is off the table, including webcam modeling, which places the adventurous young women in danger. In advance of the film’s premiere at SXSW, DP Justin Kane talked about his work on the project, going deep into the technical aspects. 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 […]
