Happy Thanksgiving Hollywood tech nerds!

In this week’s post:

🎥 How Cinematographers Shot 5 of the Year’s Biggest Films

📀 Bring Back DVD Commentaries!

🍿 Kernels: 3 links worth making popcorn for

How Cinematographers Shot 5 of the Year's Biggest Films

I’ve previously mentioned my intense admiration for cinematographers, so in the spirit of giving thanks for this influential but sometimes-thankless role, I’ve compiled a pile of interviews with the cinematographers for some of this year’s biggest films and likely Oscar contenders.

First: Rodrigo Prieto, a Scorsese staple who DOP’d both Killers of the Flower Moon AND Barbie (talk about diversified talent)!

On the famous scene from Killers of Osage dancing in an oil bloom: “We shot it with a Phantom camera which we set to high frame rates — 700 frames per second. That’s why you get that slow feeling of euphoria and that exaggerated sense of excitement.”

On the challenge of shooting within the relentlessly pink aesthetic in Barbie: “Anytime I turned on the backlight, the bounce on the faces was pink, so all the actors looked magenta. I didn’t want to create hard contrast or anything, so I wouldn’t be able to bring in black — they call it negative fill — so instead of negative fill, I created a neutral fill. We had tons of neutral gray material, and we’d drape everything that was not on camera with gray. That way it was bouncing some light, but it wasn’t tinted with color.”

Another cinematographer with multiple jobs in 2023 was Erik Messerschmidt, who worked on both David Fincher’s The Killer and Michael Mann’s Ferrari, speaking to The Film Stage about working on both.

On shooting using RED’s V-RAPTOR: “When The Killer came around the V-RAPTOR had just been developed and it remedied some of the color-fidelity things we had struggled with. There’s some logistical menu stuff the assistants liked better, the cameras were quite small, and it also fits right into the color architecture of the KOMODO extremely well, which we were using on the movie. There’s a lot of things that made sense.”

On shooting Ferrari using the Sony VENICE: “we [shot] on the VENICE because it has some high-ISO options that I kept in my back pocket if I had to lean on them. Michael [Mann]… very much cares about the image, but if he is in the moment with a performer he is not interested in seeing a second AC walk up and swap a glass filter so that I can keep the iris where it needs to be in terms of depth of field or whatever. To him—and I think he’s quite correct—that is very much a secondary conversation. The VENICE was great for me because I could work at the pace that he wanted to work and still protect depth of field, image integrity, all that stuff.”

Last but obviously not least, Oppenheimer’s Hoyte van Hoytema spoke to the MPA’s publication The Credits, which included information on the special lenses built just for the film: “We always use custom lenses. They’re not off-the-shelf… We shot a lot of close-ups on slightly wider lenses than we usually do. Our IMAX workhorse lens is a 40-millimeter. Traditionally, we would never shoot close-ups on that. When you get close to an actor, you have to reduce the distortion on the face. So we needed to rebuild that lens to get closer while reducing the distortion. There was a balancing act, but we were fanatic about creating a language in which we feel we were participating and not just observing.

For the technical stuff — the atoms colliding with each other, the stars, the black hole — we built a super macro lens that didn’t exist before. It enabled us to actually put a wide lens in between two small entities and gaze through it as if it was a landscape. We were building and engineering those kinds of things all the time. But this lens became pivotal to a lot of that microworld.”

There’s lots more within all of the interviews, so make sure to click through and thoroughly nerd out!

Bring Back DVD Commentaries!

To start off, I know there are still commentaries being produced for films that one can access via physical media or Extras on Apple; my issue is that it’s now so much more difficult for the average consumer to get access to them in a streaming universe. Wouldn’t it be cool if Netflix, Peacock, MAX etc. all had a director’s commentary track you could switch to, the same way you can choose a dubbed language or audio description? Sign me up for that service!

This got me thinking: what are some of the greatest filmmaker commentaries of all time? IndieWire recently published a comprehensive list of some excellent options, everything from Scorsese on Taxi Driver to Allison Anders on Grace of My Heart to the doomed X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen.

To those I would also add:

• Francis Ford Coppola on The Godfather, who provides incredible insight on its low budget and incredibly-pressured shoot

• Joe Berlinger on Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, a fascinating look at the relentless studio interference that plagued the post-production of the film

• Steven Soderbergh and Lem Dobbs on The Limey, basically a film-length argument between the film’s director and its screenwriter

Speaking of arguments, there’s also the commentary for Superbad, which features this (NSFW) gem:

@artofafool

#superbad #juddapatow #jonahhill #fyp #moviecommentary

Of course, if awful commentary tracks are more your speed, The AV Club’s now-defunct feature “Commentary Tracks of the Damned” might be up your alley, such as this one for the Rob Schneider-starrer The Animal.

Any commentary tracks YOU think are essential? I’d love to hear about them! Hit me up at [email protected]!

Kernels (3 links worth making popcorn for)

Here’s a round-up of cool links about Hollywood and technology:

An interview with the writer/director of the Nic Cage film Dream Scenario. (link)

Internet sleuths have spent 2 years tracking down a song with only a 17 second snippet to guide them. (link)

Here it comes: an AI-generated Edith Piaf biopic is in the works! (link)