Alice Brooks ('Wicked'), Ed Lachman ('Maria'), Greig Fraser ('Dune: Part Two'), John Mathieson ('Gladiator II'), Jomo Fray ('Nickel Boys') and Paul Guilhaume ('Emilia Pérez') join The Hollywood Reporter for our Cinematographers Roundtable.
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00:00We give a performance through light, through movement of the camera,
00:04through our movement with the camera, that enhances what the emotions are for the story.
00:14If acting is acting and reacting, that's really another aspect of what we do as cinematographers.
00:25Hello and thank you for tuning in to The Hollywood Reporter's Cinematographer Roundtable.
00:29I'm your host Beatrice Verhoeven and I'm joined today by six of the most outstanding directors
00:34of photography this award season. On behalf of Wicked, Alice Brooks. On behalf of Dune Part 2,
00:40Greg Fraser. On behalf of Nickel Boys, Joe Mofray. On behalf of Maria Edlachman. On behalf of
00:47Gladiator 2, John Matheson. And on behalf of Emilia Perez, Paul Guillaume. I'd love to begin
00:52and just hear briefly from each of you what your introduction was to the profession and what made
00:59you recognize and appreciate the role of a cinematographer. So I grew up in in New York City
01:05to a playwright father and a dancer and singer mother and we were super poor. We lived in a
01:13one-bedroom apartment, tenement apartment, 300 square feet with a bathtub in the kitchen.
01:18And although we didn't have a lot of money, there was so much love in our house and art and
01:24artists always filtering through. And to help our family out, my sister and I, my mother put us
01:31into child acting when I was five and my sister was three. And I fell in love with the camera people
01:38and I knew it was something I wanted to do. And when I was 15, I had my last audition for a movie
01:45called While You Were Sleeping. It was a Sandra Bullock movie and it was my seventh audition for
01:49the part and it was between me and the girl who got it. And after the audition, I knew in my heart
01:54I hadn't gotten the role. And so my mom and I went for a walk on the beach in Santa Monica. And as we
02:00were walking, I said to my mom, I don't want to be an actress. I want to be a cinematographer.
02:06And she said, I know. And I looked down and there was this little gray and white feather
02:11and I picked it up and I still have it. It is in a broken frame that I carry around the world with
02:16me. And she said, what can we do to make your dream come true? And I started doing still
02:21photography in high school and writing stories, visual stories. And I applied to film school
02:28at USC and we didn't, my mom made me walk my application in and she said, we don't have the
02:33money to send Alice here, but she deserves to go here. And two weeks later, I had a full scholarship.
02:37And then I thought that was the best day of my life. And then of course,
02:4025 years later, it has been a crazy journey. My journey, I think kind of similar to Alice,
02:48started really young. I have a picture of myself kind of behind a video camera telling my parents
02:55at like age seven that I wanted to be a filmmaker. And I remember at the time, you know, I kind of
03:01grew up thinking constantly changing my ideas like, oh, I want to be a scientist. I want to
03:05be an astronaut. I want to be this. I want to be that. And I remember the time thinking like, oh,
03:10I want to do film because that way I can live the life of and think about the life of a scientist
03:17for three months and then think about the life of an astronaut for two months and then
03:21spend time thinking about being a firefighter for five months. And it felt like this ultimate
03:27hack somehow that I think in looking back now, I think at some level it was a fascination maybe
03:33with empathy and wanting to just understand living a life in someone else's shoes.
03:40And that kind of spurred me on to work at a public activist television station growing up as an
03:46editor and kind of just always doing theater and film stuff growing up, making movies alone. And I
03:52don't think I specified what role in filmmaking I wanted to do. I just loved making movies and kind
03:57of grew up just constantly making movies with my friends. And I remember when I first saw
04:04In the Mood for Love and I remember calling my mom that night and saying like, I think I saw
04:09one of my favorite movies. And she was like, what was it about? And I was like, honestly,
04:13maybe like 15 minutes in, I stopped reading the subtitles and I was just completely
04:19enraptured by the images because I feel like they were transferring emotion into me. Like there was
04:25a purity of that connection and a purity of taking in the feelings that I think I recognized
04:34in those images. And it was enlightening. It genuinely kind of, I came out of the theater
04:40feeling, whoa, watching Mark Lee Pingbing and Christopher Doyle's work just brought me to a
04:46whole other place. And I think that it was at that moment that I specifically became just obsessive
04:53about image making and just the ability to evoke these emotions and just connecting to that first
04:59desire as a child, which was, I think, connecting and trying to have a relationship of compassion
05:04to think about another person's life and ideally be able to then create an image that evokes that
05:10in someone else. I just like movies. I think everyone does like movies. I kind of drifted
05:16into it. I moved to London and found other people who were mucking around with cameras
05:21and went from there, you know, short ends, someone lending you this, someone lending you that.
05:28I couldn't get into the union safe life. They were horrible. They were bigoted.
05:33We've got Murdoch reading nasty people. So, but the London K music videos, I don't know how many
05:40we shot. I mean, they let you in. You didn't have to have a union ticket to work on that. But at the
05:44same time, we were with lots of independent cinemas in London. I watched Napoleon, I watched
05:49Track the Wheel. You know, you notice the photography and you remember, you know, if a
05:54film's still staying with you after three days later, you don't really know why. Music videos
05:58came along, I'm sort of mid-twenties and I sort of got on board those and then one thing led to another
06:04and ended up in drama. That's about it. I grew up in Paris in France. My mother was an art teacher,
06:12but she was also doing photos. And so I, since I was a kid, I was going to,
06:20I was surrounded by images, I think. So I think very early, I thought I wanted to do cinema and
06:27we didn't know anyone who was doing cinema. But there was this line producer that my parents knew
06:34from her wife that was a journalist. And one day she just took me on the side, I was 14,
06:43telling me, OK, you want to do cinema. Well, what do you know about it? And she told me about the
06:48journey of a director preparing a movie, meeting directors, writing the script and etc. And one of
06:55the parts was meeting this person and talking about the look of the film and maybe go to
07:02the museum to see pictures and say, oh, the film could look like this painting. And I thought,
07:07OK, I want to be this person at this moment. So I was 14.
07:13Well, I grew up with a father that was an amateur photographer and I abhorred photography. I took
07:22the position that it stole your soul. And then I went to art school and I took this survey course
07:30in film appreciation. And it was Italian neorealism. It was a film by De Sica, Umberto D.
07:40And I was so taken with the film because it was a sound film, but it was basically a silent film.
07:48It just observed this old age pensioner who loses his dog. And I realized, I go, wow, those images
07:55just don't get up there on the screen. There's a reason why. And so then I got take. And also it
08:02was much easier. I was always interested in the found image, you know, something that you see
08:08that it was much. So for me, it was like, oh, you could put together images to tell a story.
08:14So then I started to shoot my own little films like portraits of people. But I also I always
08:22thought about painters that, and then people asked me to shoot for them. And I thought, oh,
08:28this would be a cheap way to learn how to make filmmaking without the expense. Cause then
08:34we didn't, it wasn't digital. It was 16 millimeter super eight. So that's how I kind of fell into it.
08:40My journey sort of began kind of not really knowing anything about the film business. I probably like
08:47most people here, but I did enjoy photography. Like I was kind of a teen that, that was a little
08:53bit misspent youth, not knowing what I wanted to do, like having lots of ideas. I played in a band
08:59for a while. I was lead guitarist in a band, which I'd love to play you a song later on,
09:04if you want to hear it. But I clearly wasn't very good at that. And I started getting pretty good at
09:09photography when I was in high school and I really enjoyed it. And I, but I also didn't
09:14understand what a cinematographer for cinema was. I knew what a cameraman in the news did.
09:21I understood that you would go to a news story and film that. That wasn't of interest to me,
09:25but creating sort of art images was, but it wasn't until I joined a film studio,
09:31it was a film photography studio that I actually saw a cinematographer work and realized that,
09:36you know, it was the best of both worlds. I could create images that we had dreamed up.
09:41And what was exciting about that was that it told a story and you could be instrumental in
09:46telling of that story. And probably the biggest thing that I found was that it was, it was quite
09:51fun around people like photography is a lonely business. Like you walk around taking photos,
09:56it's all insular inside your head. Whereas when you're on a film set, you can't really get too
10:01inside your head because there's people trying to get into that head. So you've got to kind of
10:07be kind of a lot more, maybe extroverted than one would be normally. Like, I think my natural
10:13state is not that. Obviously at the start of one's career as a film cinematographer,
10:17one might not have options about who you want to work with in the time you've established yourselves.
10:24How have you guys picked who you work with and who you want to work with? Again,
10:29I'll quickly note that some of the films you're representing here this year, many of you have
10:33re-teamed with directors that you previously worked with. For example, Ed, you previously
10:37worked with Pablo Larraín on El Conde, John with Ridley Scott on The First Gladiator and
10:43many other films. Greg with Denis Villeneuve on Dune Part One. Alice, you worked with John
10:48Schuon in The Heights. What makes you want to work with someone again?
10:52You just build a familiarity with that person, you know, and generally there's a reason
10:58why it worked out on the first film, so they want to work to do the second film.
11:04Ed, how would you choose a film with a director that you haven't worked with before though? Because
11:08everything that you do is significantly different to each other and I think that's a bit of a test.
11:12Well, like with Pablo, I had been going to seeing his films and meeting him at different festivals,
11:19you know, from his early film, Tony Manero, to No, to The Club, and all his films were
11:28totally different visually. Not all directors are visual, but if you have the ability to work
11:35with someone that's visual, that understands what your contribution is, that's what is going to
11:42excite you. So I'm sure everybody here wants to work with directors that are visual, that
11:49understand the cinematic language, that the way you tell a story influences what the story is,
11:56and it isn't just coverage, it's not just representation, but it's the interpretation
12:02that creates the emotion for those images that translates the story. So that would be the biggest
12:11reason, and generally when you work with someone that you connect with, you want to continue that.
12:17You get out of working with other directors, multiple directors, you actually grow yourself
12:23as a result of having done that, which you can then bring to the next project with another
12:27director, or even with the same director. John, how do you feel about that? Because
12:31you've worked with Ridley, I believe this is your sixth collaboration with him, right?
12:36He chose me, as simple as that. I'd like to say that, you know, you can choose. I don't
12:41think you really can. There comes a point you can't wait for something anymore,
12:45and you have to jump. And, you know, well, if you like the script, you like the director,
12:50well, that's something. If you don't like one of those, you're in trouble.
12:55And, you know, you'll get the credits on my thing. I mean, I've got a lot of people put
13:00in some crappy commercials on your IMDb, and I should get that thing. It's a lot of rubbish.
13:05But people remember three or four films you've made. But just before this one, I did a film
13:10for 2.1. We had it away for 2.1, and no one's going to see that. But I thought it was really
13:15good. But no one's going to see it. Everyone's, oh, you're the gladiator guy. Give me men in
13:20leather miniskirts. Off you go, you know. Yes, you do well, but it's a curse. I violate that,
13:25everyone wants to be dead. He's got better hats than I have, for one thing. So, you know, I mean,
13:31I admire his diversity of those, you know. I mean, when you make a film for 2.1, I mean,
13:37I don't know what I got paid. I don't mean to sound crazy. I just don't. I just never asked,
13:41because I thought, well, what am I going to do? It's Thursday. Let's shoot a film. Everyone just
13:44talks about films all the time. He never gets them made. Then along come these juggernauts,
13:48and you make them. And then you want to do something in that middle distance. When I started,
13:52you could get a film for about 17, 20, 30 mark, and you'd have a few big days. You'd have some
13:58days of extras. You'd have some proper costume. You could do this. You're either doing these
14:01massive things, having a huge feast of food you can't eat and stuff everywhere, or you're fighting
14:07like dogs on the table for a boat. And you've got to sleep in your own beds. No one's going to have
14:12their own cars, because you cannot afford to do something that dreams. And that's a shame.
14:20But anyway, we did this film for 2.1, and it was big. It looked massive. But that was, you know,
14:25you can bring things to the table, because you're clever, because you've done all these clever things.
14:29So you better be bloody clever by now. So I don't know. I don't really choose them. I mean,
14:35you go and look out there, and you think, you know, what do you want to do? Men in underpants
14:41with lasers coming out their nostrils again? No. You know, when we all got attracted to this,
14:49when we were younger, it was different. Now it's very narrow. I mean, you know,
14:57June, I love. It's beautiful. There's some really big dream films. A lot of it is.
15:05There's no difference when you make these big, fancy films. In between any of them,
15:10you need famous. So I don't know. You know, I don't. It's the idea you choose the project.
15:18It's not really true. You can choose not to do it, though, John. You can choose not to do it.
15:24Well, yeah, there's been plenty of that. And I've waited plenty of times. I waited for months,
15:28even years, for people to make a film just to watch them just dry up and miss so many things,
15:36because I believed that it would happen. But that's what I did for 2.1. So what are we doing
15:41on Thursday? Let's shoot a movie. Let's go. Do we have any money? Fine. Let's go. You know,
15:45what do you got? Steal a camera? Steal some lights? Let's go. What's all huff and puff about,
15:50you know? For me, it's been I've known John Chu since film school. So we went to USC together.
15:57We bonded over our love of musicals when we were there. And we made a short musical called
16:03When the Kids Are Away. And then his career took off. And we didn't see each other for a few years.
16:10And then we started doing this little web series together, the first Hulu original content called
16:18Legion of Extraordinary Dancers. And that's when we started to form our group of people that we
16:23work with today that I just saw a whole bunch of. And we just are this really amazingly tight-knit
16:32team. And he always has believed in me. And I think someone who believes in you and trusts you
16:40and is able to speak the same language has been really lucky for me. And there are jobs I go in
16:47knowing 100% I was getting the job. Like, John made it very clear. He's like, but I don't care.
16:53I want you to shoot this movie. So you're going to go in and meet with the studio,
16:58meet with the producers. And then I would do my very best and walk away and didn't get the job.
17:08And it was year after year of no, no, no. And then one day things changed. And suddenly he was
17:16at the point in his career where he got to make his own choices. In the Heights was the first movie
17:21I never interviewed on and I never interviewed on Wicked. And it's just the thing for me,
17:28you know, you get us, all of us get all these scripts and we meet all these directors and
17:33we don't get to choose, as John said, like the projects come to you. And, and I'm very lucky
17:40because the people I work with are interested in hiring diverse crews and telling stories
17:46about diversity. And that for me are the kind of stories I want to be telling too.
17:51You know, this was, I believe your first time working with Ramel Roth, who had himself shot
17:56most of his previous work, right? For that reason, was he very clear of what he wanted
18:03his film to look like? I read in a previous interview that you did, there was a shot list
18:07that was 33 single space page typed out calculating every shot.
18:12For me thinking about working with a new director, I just, I want to work with someone who I'd love
18:18to dream together with. Like, I think that maybe it's, I don't know, a hot take, but I think that
18:26I love signing on to a script that I can't pre-visualize. I can't close my eyes and see it.
18:32Like if it, if it is beautiful to me as I'm reading it, or I feel like I can see it to me,
18:37I don't feel like I'll be truly challenged as an artist to do it because I'm already
18:40half of the way there thinking about what it could look like. Like I love taking on a project
18:45that is fundamentally going to be a challenge for me, not only as a cinematographer,
18:50but as a filmmaker, but as an artist. And, you know, for the movie Nickel Boys, the entire movie
18:56is shot from a first person perspective. So again, that was a situation when I was reading the
19:00script, I was like, I don't really know what that means. And I think even our earliest conversations
19:06were kind of sitting down and really talking about, okay, well, what does first person mean?
19:14And in the, in the conversation of first person, you know, we came up with this concept
19:19that we call the sentient perspective. You know, we would use first person with the crew,
19:24so people could kind of pre-visualize. But for us, it was idea of this sentient image, an image that
19:29it was less concerned about what it looked like to see, but more what it feels like to see.
19:35And towards that, an image that's just always tied to a real body, a real person with real
19:40stakes as they're kind of navigating, in our case, the Jim Crow South. Like, what does that feel like?
19:45What does vision feel like when someone's going through such an oppressive system around them?
19:53So yeah, for me, it was truly the excitement doing Nickel Boys because it was sitting down with
19:58someone who does have a photography background. So we could really get into our ideas around
20:04what is the image and what we wanted to express visually in this movie.
20:09Would you say right now that you took away a lot from that process,
20:13having learned from that director, given that he'd shot his own stuff before?
20:17Absolutely. I think that there's a way that him being a photographer and a brilliant photographer,
20:22and a photographer I had referenced long before I even saw Nickel Boys or kind of came onto this
20:28project, that there was a way in which being a visual artist outside of film, he just thinks
20:33about images in a totally different way. So our conversations always felt so fruitful. And also
20:39with this movie, it was a totally different relationship as a cinematographer to capturing
20:46an image from inside the scene because there's a way in which traditionally throughout my career,
20:51I've maybe witnessed through the camera people's emotions, scenes, but quite literally for a lot
20:57of it, if I was operating the camera, if Hattie, one of the characters, hugs the protagonist Elwood,
21:04it's me she's hugging. Physically, the camera quite literally has to respond to the actor,
21:10has to respond, and it has to be vulnerable, has to be truly inside the scene and a scene partner
21:17to the people that are with him. It's, I think, a greater witnessing that maybe taught me maybe a
21:24deeper compassion around composing images and thinking about actors having to be a little bit
21:30more on their side of the line across this production.
21:34Visually, how do you arrive at a game plan for the look of your film?
21:38Paul, for example, I know that the idea for filming of Emilia Perez changed a little bit
21:44and you shot very operatic style. Is the filmmaker asking you, how do we make this happen?
21:50Or is he just telling you, make this happen? Or is there a conversation somewhere in between?
21:55Well, it's true that I've always, until now, kind of been afraid of being the only person that would
22:02carry on the style of a film. I think it's not my role. It's not the way I see it. I really feel
22:08that I have to be here to make something happen that's maybe latent somewhere. Very often you
22:14can feel that reading the script and you mix it with the personality of the director of the previous
22:20movies he's done and maybe you just kind of can imagine if something can happen almost by itself.
22:29And I have the feeling that very often you're like scratching a dinosaur for size and you are just
22:37working and in the end there is the structure, the image of the film that you just found, revealed
22:45maybe. Yes, with Jacques, I say this because it was a collective process of many people
22:52sitting in a room for many months and in the end you don't know where the ideas come from.
22:57They just circulate and probably at one point everybody in the room has said this very idea
23:03that finally someone just grabbed the latest in the group and it doesn't belong to anyone,
23:11the ideas I think. And in Emilia Perez it was first due to be like a very gritty handheld film
23:18shot in Mexico and something else was let's shoot an opera on stage and we'll do a lot of
23:26lighting effects. And the two projects, they gradually merge into one. When imagining shooting
23:34in Mexico, we're realizing during location scouting that the film would be very much
23:41to the ground, maybe too much. And the opera would be maybe not in the world enough. So
23:51it just, yes, it's with work and with approximations that we found the idea of this film.
23:57Interesting. Greg, I know and I don't know if Dune II was the same, but I read that
24:02Ginny wasn't very prescriptive of how to lens. The first one, was that the case with
24:08Dune Part II as well? Being a Part II, we kind of got all of our technical foibles out. There's
24:14a flip side to that coin where on one hand it's fantastic, the other hand it also can sometimes
24:20make you confident that you've solved all the problems. Whereas if you're making a film,
24:25as Paul just said, you're constantly looking for what the film is. As Gemma just said,
24:30you're constantly watching and trying to sort out what is this film we're making.
24:34And there was an element of like, we knew what the film was because we'd made it, but actually
24:41we didn't. And we were discovering it as we went. I discovered at the end of the beginning of Part
24:48II that he actually didn't like the anamorphic lenses we were using. So, which is a really
24:53tough time to hear about that. When the film's out, you've done it. And he came to me and said,
24:58oh mate, I just don't love those lenses. And I was like mortified because my lenses are like,
25:05you know, my babies. And I personally love those lenses, but ultimately as the director,
25:11he is the guy that's his choice. And every job you do, I do still. I learn why a certain director
25:21just completely goes ape over anamorphics, like Matt Reeves, for example, who just,
25:26every time I show him a funky anamorphic, his head explodes in a good way. To Denis,
25:33who would probably freak out if I showed him that same lens. Like it's trying to kind of get into
25:38the mindset of each of these directors to understand what makes them tick and what
25:42helps them tell that story more. Does Ridley at this point in your collaboration still
25:47kind of give you pointers or is he like, John, you know what to do, do it?
25:52No, not much discussion, I'm afraid.
25:55You've got it.
25:58Was the process different on two? There's so many years between them, John.
26:02Did he change?
26:03The difference to me was film and digital.
26:06But did he change? Did he change his evolving style?
26:09Yeah, I think he's moved with the times. I mean, he's made a lot of films between those two.
26:15He's very prolific. I mean, you know, the language of films got faster.
26:20You know, you don't have to explain or be sort of, well, what you'd say was pedantic about setting
26:27stories up anymore. It's a short term. I think we thought about music video director.
26:35You relied so much on practical effects and also big budget sets. John Chiu said he hasn't seen
26:42anything like that before. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that, shooting everything
26:49pretty practical, like 95% of it, and then how much you were involved with the VFX after.
26:54Yeah, the first movie has very little blue screen in it. We shot on 17 stages
27:01over across three different studios, and our sets were built fire lane to fire lane,
27:06floor to all the way to the reds. Every single inch of every stage was used. Two of our sets
27:12were the size of four American football fields each, two of our backlot sets, and we had four
27:18backlot sets. So it was John, Nathan Crowley, our production designer, and our visual effects
27:26supervisor, Pablo Hellman, and I all had a conversation very, very early on, maybe a year
27:32before we started shooting, that we wanted to do as much in camera as possible, that
27:37our goal was to make an old Hollywood movie and not rely on visual effects. And of course,
27:43we do have visual effects, we have visual effects characters, we have animals,
27:47but I had real practical sets to light. John Chu is a director who likes to be able to go in and
27:53shoot 360 degrees, and so I would pre-light every Saturday and Sunday. I worked seven days a week
28:00from January 2nd to July 18th when we got shut down for the strike. I only had seven days off
28:06during that period of time. The sets were so massive that there was no other way to do it.
28:12People have said to me that the ceiling in the Wizard's Throne Room, how was the set extension
28:18on that? There is no set extension, that is all real. When John and I first talked, we talk about,
28:25he's an emotional storyteller, and the technical is not at the forefront, it is all about emotion.
28:34We talk about the emotion of each scene, we talk about languages, of Oz, of dance, of music,
28:43and then we talk about goals for the movie. He asked me what my goal was for this film,
28:48and I said that it was one of the greatest love stories between these two women ever made,
28:53that it is a love story like The English Patient, or Gone with the Wind, or Casablanca.
29:00That was the emotion that we wanted to tell, and we needed sets to be able to let those characters
29:07perform in. I needed to light them in a way that we could be able to look 360 degrees in
29:14almost every shot. We had thousands and thousands of lighting cues.
29:19Wow. John, I know in an interview once you said you turned down offers to lens Harry Potter's
29:24last parts because you felt there would be too much green screen involved, but in the end you
29:29said, quote, what an idiot I was after you realized there wasn't that much involved at all.
29:33I was curious what your position is in terms of VFX versus practical in your films.
29:42Harry Potter at the time was thought of as very VFX heavy. Going to a stage,
29:49you know, the standard way to make a sort of marble or whatever. You have five stages, two of them,
29:54one's green, one's blue, or two are green. They've got a bit of a half a piece of set in. There's a
29:59couple of other places, and you just go there for however many days it is. In the end, you get a
30:03movie. Ridley, I think, like me, you know, we kind of got into this game to go around the next bend in
30:08the river. We wanted to go on location. He very rarely shoots in a studio. Going to real places,
30:16real things, you know, he builds on this old sort of Napoleonic neoclassical fort in Malta,
30:22but the background is kind of there. These are the walls of the old Napoleonic fort. It was the
30:26largest fort in the British Commonwealth. It was a big area, and in the middle of that you put the
30:29Coliseum, put some temples, you put the Forum, you put other temples, you put some palaces,
30:33and these are huge. Denzel and Paul, the other day, they walk into Rome. It's real. Rome's the
30:39oldest city in the world, or oldest city as we understand it, so people know what it looks like.
30:43They know what it's like to be in a big arena, so you've got to get that VFX balance right.
30:47The first film, I don't think he trusted the VFX. I don't think he understood it
30:52fully, which was just as well. I'm glad it's one of those magical films that people just
30:55love, but I think one of the reasons it stayed with us is that it's real. Ridley does worlds.
31:01His Rome is not really a real Rome. It's kind of got mixed with classical through the ages,
31:05from the 11th century when it re-emerged to the Napoleonic time, to fascism, architecture,
31:12but spear to the modern times, Victorian times. Everything's busy. That's what he loves,
31:16the multi-camera thing, because you layer it all up. There's no inserts, or here comes the insert
31:21shot. Everything is there at the time. You've got to get it, and it has a proper background,
31:26even if it's an out-of-focus shot or close-up. In the background, there's lots of stuff going on,
31:30so I think his visual effects now, he enjoys that more. He likes digital. He can see the cameras.
31:36He hasn't got to run around between these enormous sets. It all pipes back to him.
31:41That's different between the two films. Now, the image is the image. Now, I'd rather shoot
31:47it on film, of course, but he won't go back there. For this sort of filmmaking, it's better suited.
31:52I'm kind of curious, for you, Greg, how do you approach VFX-heavy setups? I think that you're
31:59someone who I really think is so incredible in how intimate and tender you can make scenes that
32:08still have pretty VFX-heavy items to it. I think in Dune 1, I think Rogue 1,
32:17I think how you design a lot of those shots almost feel to me as if you were on location
32:24shooting them, like some of the things on Arrakis truly feel just very of the world and very
32:29emotional. What's your process like even approaching some of those setups?
32:33Well, listen, I think it begins with the people that you're working with,
32:37let me say, because you are only as good as the VFX supervisor and the director who will allow
32:43certain VFX to get through. So ultimately, I can't take any credit beyond the fact that I've
32:49worked with some incredibly talented people. So that's number one. Number two, one thing I've
32:53learned is that people know bad lighting. Actually, my mum knows when things aren't right.
33:01People understand it when the lighting doesn't feel real or honest. And going back to what Alice
33:07was saying before, what you were saying about trying to create that emotion and that emotiveness
33:12with light, it's very integral to try and be honest with what the lighting is that you're using
33:18and to try and mix that. Like the hardest thing I've ever been trying to do is trying to create
33:22daylight inside. I mean, we all face that challenge where we stick up an HMI or we
33:28stick up 100 vortexes or something and we try and create sun. It's tough. There's nothing quite
33:34like that sun. The main takeaway would be that I don't fool myself into believing something's
33:39going to be fixed in post from a lighting standpoint, because I've been burnt so many
33:43times. If it's supposed to be outside and we can shoot it outside, we do it. I would pitch. I know
33:49there are a thousand reasons not to, weather, particularly in the UK, shooting days, winter,
33:55all those other things. There's a thousand reasons not to do something outside. I would
33:58always try and shoot something outside if I have that chance. All of your films are visually daring
34:03in different ways. You know, we've got long tracking shots and Busby Berkley shots and
34:07Emilia Perez, thousands of extras in a single shot in Wicked, switching of POVs. That's not been done
34:15a lot before. In Nickel Boys, the list goes on and on. Greg, you shot in infrared. Which scene
34:21or sequence in your 2024 film was the most complex or most challenging for you?
34:26It was very important for Pablo to shoot in La Scala. They'd never let a film crew,
34:34other than like a documentary crew. So it was finally negotiated four hours with $250,000.
34:43So I had to figure out how am I going to go in and shoot this massive scene of this opera.
34:51With an audience. So it was like an army. They wouldn't let me in in the pre-light. So I
34:59literally went in with like 12 par cans to bounce off the ceiling. And then I brought in a bigger
35:08projector. And the way I was able to do it was work with their lighting crew because they knew
35:14the lights on that stage. And in 45 minutes we were up and running. So that was the most
35:22hair raising or complicated technical part for me was how to light La Scala in
35:31the shortest time I could. I think the most challenging for me,
35:35because I had not worked on films of that scale before, was the ending of the film. There is a
35:40long night scene where you have mixed interiors in the studio, exteriors, that we shot that
35:46happened in the desert. And we shot it in a quarry near Paris. And full 3D VFX shot that were mixed
35:53into the thing where you can see the cars riding in the desert. And the cars, the exteriors are
36:01full 3D. So it was a lot of time to figure out what would be the right balance between all of
36:08these elements. We took this big crane. It was like a 200 feet crane. And you have this soft box
36:14that just naturally lights the set. Maybe like the moon. But I think the hardest thing was just
36:22to keep everything together and consistent. And on this film, I had the first time of my life,
36:28the feeling that maybe sometimes it was important to resist not just being like the CEO of the
36:36iMAGE, you know, and keep something a bit fragile in the way you do it. And maybe to forget there
36:44are 200 people involved around you as you work. And try to imagine what it would be if you just
36:52were with the director, the actress, and the actresses and a camera. And that's all.
36:58I think the bigger things get, the harder it is to wrangle. Alice's descriptions of what she went
37:02through, it blows my mind. It actually makes me have an anxiety attack, Alice, listening to the
37:09amount of sets that you had to light. And Fire Lane to Fire Lane, Reds to the floor, that sort
37:15of thing. I go, oh my god. Because that's a significant thing to manage. And it is literally
37:22wrangling cats. How do you keep all that stuff in check? And then ultimately, all it ends up
37:30as being, it's just an emotional shot of a character. That's all we're trying to get.
37:35It's nothing beyond that. But then you've got all these other things going on, big set pieces, or
37:44multiple people, multiple extras, multiple characters, whether, as Ed's problem,
37:49it just had 45 minutes to light. You've just got a multitude of problems. So
37:54trying to keep that in check, trying to maintain the focus on what ultimately you need to do,
38:00which is shoot. Shoot emotion. You need to record emotion through that lens. And everything else
38:08be damned. But if you're not getting the emotion, then it doesn't make a difference.
38:12You may as well not be there. Interesting. John, I'm curious about yours.
38:16You know, no one seems to get pre-lights anymore. I don't know if anybody else does. But yeah,
38:20the weekend, something, when you've got to get something. But when you're mid-stride,
38:24use of lighting for the day, and you've got a lot of cameras around you, and then suddenly you've
38:28got a 25-ton crane with an arm on it, and lights on it, and horses all around. It's in the wrong
38:32place. And you've got cameras pointing straight at it. Trying to guess that riddle or be prepared
38:39to move quickly out of that position is the challenging bit. The answer to that is, yeah,
38:44I suppose the nights are difficult because you don't have all night. You'll have till about
38:50eight o'clock. And in the summer, we shot in the summer. It's the wrong time of year.
38:53Previous film we shot really in the beginning of the year, and we had a longer light and all that.
38:57So, you know, you're never going to get the sweet light at the end of the day or the beginning of
39:01the day. But also the night when it comes, it will come late in the evening. And by then,
39:05you know, he just wants to be gone. So you better get it already at once. You won't actually get an
39:10exposure or an idea of how your lights are working until that moment when the fire starts
39:15cutting through, the lights start cutting through your big lights. So, yeah, I think the nights on
39:20Gladiator were the biggest challenge. For us, it really came down to, you know,
39:26in thinking about point of view, just how deeply literate everyone is with that perspective. We
39:33spend our entire lives inside of our own bodies. So there's a way in which you kind of can't
39:39hide. And so towards that, it's also that, you know, we, Ramel and I, we wanted POV,
39:46but we wanted fundamentally poetic images. So towards that, it was a situation where every
39:51single scene we designed as a one-error. We knew we would cut it up, but we wanted to spare the
39:57actors more artifice than they were already interacting with, looking into the camera and
40:02having these apparatus. So, you know, it meant building a lot of custom apparatuses for every
40:08single shot to get it done from that point of view and doing all the lighting with almost
40:15all reflective surfaces where I would just surround buildings with mirrors and put mirrors
40:19on condors and redirect light into spaces. So there was almost no stands on the ground,
40:24any lights on set where the actors could truly feel like they didn't have to hit any marks and
40:29they could kind of just go. And then as a camera, you know, we had so many different modular designs
40:35to again, try to get that perspective. Since we were after a feeling and an emotion, it's,
40:41you know, if I was trying to think of what point of view might look like, you know, I might grab
40:45something like a Steadicam because we as humans stabilize our own vision in our mind, but in
40:52reality, seeing it put up, it actually looked more ghostly. So there was a way in which, okay,
40:57handheld actually feels more present. It feels more inside a body, maybe because of just the
41:03general grammar of cinema up until this point that feels more connected. But, you know, again,
41:09it was doing handheld, doing remote heads and mimic mode and kind of putting a remote head in front of
41:16an actor under slung. And then in another room, I could do handheld and look down on my body and
41:21the camera would look down on the actor's body. Engineering, basically industrial easy rigs for
41:26the difference sometimes of feeling a shot connected to your spine, moving through a space
41:31and more connected to your neck and looking around and kind of having a camera float and operating
41:37it from my wrist became kind of more advantageous than operating it from my shoulder, needing to
41:43build custom body rigs for the actors for certain shots. So there was a way in which it was a lot of
41:49engineering and each scene kind of needed a very specific camera system that could take you from
41:55the top of the scene to the bottom of the scene. And again, just that aspect of it where looking at
42:01a monitor, sometimes the difference can be centimeters different between something feeling
42:06uncanny and something feeling inside a body. So, you know, it was always kind of that dance
42:13throughout the movie. And these shots feel really organic, feel inside a body. But as you're
42:19speaking about earlier, it's like they were meticulously designed between Ramel and I to
42:24kind of, again, kind of match this feeling of sight and connecting, you know, different pieces
42:31together and hooking them together. You know, again, it's, you know, the question of, you know, what is
42:35an establishing shot? What is a cut? What is a transition when you are fundamentally only in
42:40the perspective of one, if not two characters throughout a movie? It really became about us
42:46trying to think more broadly and again, almost at a quantum level of how do we articulate meaning in
42:52cinema? And then with this perspective, how do we kind of reform and rejigger those things so that
42:59we can still have a shot that has these traditional aspects of cinema in it, even though they've been
43:05reworked or realigned to maybe articulate that idea in a slightly different way. It's like the
43:11simplest shots in the movie. Oftentimes there's a shot in a movie where our protagonist is on a bus
43:17and he looks down and he sees a young girl kind of climbing or like kind of moving her way
43:23underneath the seats and he leans down and then looks under his chair as she kind of moves her
43:28way through the seats and goes up with her parents while the bus is moving. And it's like a shot like
43:34that involved us taking a period bus, undoing all the seats inside of the bus, lifting a dolly into
43:41the bus, putting dolly track on the bus, strapping it all down, putting a remote head on that dolly,
43:47so that when the head goes forward, we're dollying forward and then we're booming down as the remote
43:52head is in mimic mode and is looking under the seat to see the girl moving and the bus is moving
43:58so that the light is playing in a dynamic fashion. It's like, you know, there's so many shots of the
44:04movie that I think seem and look very kind of simply gestured, but almost every single
44:13shot in the movie had some amount of intense orchestration to get it done. But again,
44:19trying to get it done, not to just do it, but to do it in a way that felt poetic, that felt organic,
44:25that felt natural and maintaining that kind of ethos throughout the movie. So not getting too
44:32overwhelmed by the technical aspect of it, but also having to, in many cases, kind of invent what we
44:39needed to get that done. I think the point that you raised, like, it's kind of part of our job
44:44is to shield the audience from all that garbage, isn't it? Like, that's part of our job as filmmakers
44:49is like, you don't want anybody thinking about what you just described. I mean, as you were
44:54telling me that, I'll be going, of course you did that. Makes total sense. But I wouldn't have
44:59thought when you were describing the shot that it would have been so involved. So hopefully
45:03the audience doesn't think, I'm sure the audience doesn't think that, which is fantastic.
45:08Alice, what about you? And was it defying gravity?
45:11It was defying gravity. I think early on in the movie, John and I, or during prep, during our
45:17lengthy prep, we talked about the theme of the light is not the light and the darkness is not
45:23the darkness. Good is not good and evil is not evil in our movie. So I had this idea that the
45:30sun would always rise for Glinda and always set for Elphaba. And so I asked John, can I go through
45:35the script and present ideas of time of day that aren't, they might not be what lines up with the
45:42script. So for instance, we meet Glinda in her bubble and it's bright and it's beautiful and
45:48wondrous. And Oz is this beautiful, bright space. And so we meet her during the day and she meets
45:56Fiyero in the morning and Elphaba meets Fiyero at night. And there's a long sunset sequence that we
46:04did through I'm not that girl. And then the last, and then in popular, the sun rises for Glinda.
46:12And then the last 40 minutes of the movie is that takes us through the end of defying gravity
46:18is all one long sunset. And I had this image of what the sunset was going to be like. And I kept
46:24showing it to everyone. I'm like, this is what the end of our movie is going to look like.
46:27And I had to get everyone on board. And I also had to get everyone on board with the fact that
46:32Emerald City is, is one of our, is our biggest set. And it's, and so instead of shooting,
46:40instead of shooting that during the day, which is what it was in the script, it was going to be
46:46night for evening, night for sundown. So we had to, I had to get everyone, including the
46:52producers that costs a lot more money to shoot at night to agree to, to this idea. And then,
46:58and then we go through the wizard's palace and we end up up on top of a, on top of the highest
47:04tower in Emerald City. And Elphaba finds her power as she leaps off a building and into the sunset.
47:11And as the, as, as darkness descends, and it was such a huge challenge to get everyone to agree
47:17to this idea. Our movie goes from the brightest bright to the darkest of dark scenes. And I'm
47:23just very proud of the film. Paul, you had a similar, you used lighting in a similar way,
47:29right? Much of the first part of the movie is in the dark and daylight only really appears when
47:36Emilio wakes up in the hospital, which I thought was very interesting. I'd love for you to talk
47:41about that stylistic choice. That was really a script thing. You know, the, the, the,
47:46in the script that was first sent to me, it was still in the opera form. There were five acts in
47:53the film. And the first act when Emilia is still Manitas, this drug lord, and the first act is
48:00happening by night and it's in, and then the light comes in the second act and the film was ending
48:08also by night, but in, in a very different night. So my work was not really to, to decide that.
48:15It was much more to decide what kind of night would be the first act and what kind of night
48:23would be the last act. And for the first night, it was pretty easy in the way we approached it.
48:32We thought, okay, let's, even if we're on a, on a studio, it should feel natural. So the first
48:40big musical scene is a market building up Zoe Saldana, who is dancing and singing
48:45in Mexico, but that was shot in a studio, obviously. And we actually brought a lot of
48:52references and even light bulbs that we bought in Mexico, equipped all the lighting stands with
48:58wheels, and it was equipped with batteries. And the choice was to do only practicals
49:05for, for this sequence. And obviously with a lot of lighting in the frame, I don't know, like in,
49:11in Good Time or Uncut Gems, this use of light, you can see where it's just a very
49:22conscious and, and choice of practicals almost sometimes. And it's maybe the hardest things to,
49:29to achieve. And the last night was not as contrasty. You don't have these highlights
49:33to feel that the black is black and, and the colors pop out thanks to, to these bright lights
49:41that you have in the frame. The last night is something that's much more made. We were talking
49:47about Nope, for example, or Zero Dark Thirty as movies where you explore a kind of night
49:54where you just are staying the bottom 10% of the signal. And suddenly, because of the cinema
50:01technology, you don't have any highlights anymore. So the, the, the screen looks gray, actually.
50:09And, and the whole question is, how long should I stay into this shot? Or is the shot long enough
50:16not to have any highlight? And maybe I can have one shot in the middle of those shots that would
50:21be extremely bright. I don't know, a gun shot, for example, that just resets the, the eye and
50:28just makes you feel that the black is black again. And that was a much more complicated night
50:34to set up, obviously. Well, I think everyone's talking about a psychological authenticity,
50:40whatever style the film that you're shooting in, you want people to believe what the image
50:47represents. What's so important is we, as the operator, even if you're not operating,
50:57is that we're another actor. For me, we give a performance in the action with the other,
51:05with the actors, through light, through movement of the camera, through our movement with the camera,
51:13that enhances what the emotions are for the story. And that's, you know, something that I don't think
51:23gets discussed about how the movement is. And, you know, if acting is acting and reacting, what
51:32they say acting is about, that's really another aspect of what we do as cinematographers,
51:38is we're able to interplay with the images, but also with the performance.
51:46Well, that's a very wonderful place to end. I do have thousands of more questions. But
51:52alas, too little time in the day. Thank you all so much for joining the Cinematalka Roundtable,
51:57such wonderful films, great year of cinema. I really appreciate all your time. Thank you so much.
52:03Thank you. Thanks, guys.