Feral Frame: How “Nightbitch” Cinematographer Brandon Trost Helped Amy Adams Unleash Her Inner Beast

In Nightbitch, six-time Oscar nominee Amy Adams hurls herself into dog mode, slurping meat from a bowl, pawing through the dirt in her backyard, and running with a pack of neighborhood canines in feral protest against the stultifying bonds of motherhood. Cinematographer Brandon Trost, teaming for the third time with writer-director Marielle Heller after Diary of a Teenage Girl and Can You Ever Forgive Me?, visualized the movie as a comedy-laced family drama studded with surreal body horror elements. Trost, like Heller, has young children. “Watching the dad in this film at times feels like looking into a mirror,” he says. “It was actually terrifying at times and a real eye-opener.” Nightbitch (now in theaters) co-stars Scoot McNairy as “Husband,” with two-year-old twins Arleigh Snowden and Emmett Snowden portraying the couple’s mischievous toddler.

Speaking from his home in L.A.-adjacent Studio City, Brandon, who also shot Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (opening Dec. 20), talks about capturing a dog’s point of view, borrowing from Poltergeist, and enjoying the perks of filming in his native Los Angeles.

How did you and Marielle Heller arrive at the plan for how Nightbitch should be shot?

There’s always a kind of alchemy where we begin the process of figuring out how we want something to feel. With this movie, it checks a few different boxes from a genre perspective: Family drama, comedy, horror film, and body horror. But at the core, Nightbitch is about motherhood and Amy Adam’s character reclaiming her identity. Once we identified what we wanted the film to feel like, I tried to translate that through lenses, camera, camera movement, and lighting.

Beginning with the set-up, right?

We needed to sell the monotony of Mother’s home life situation. And that’s one thing I can say that both Marielle and I have a lot of experience with.

The monotony of domestic life?

Well, not entirely, but we both have kids the same age, and we’re just at that stage of our lives. At its core, this film is a family drama, but I also wanted it have a little bit of a bite, and that comes down to the sharpness of lenses.

What kind of lens?

As my horror 70s throwback, I used a lot of zoom in this movie where you start wide and move in closer. Early on, when Amy’s staring at her son on the kitchen floor, sipping coffee, we’re pushing in during her voice-over, but then it goes beyond a normal close-up. We used a special macro anamorphic lens to get in really close, so it’s just her eyes.

Getting inside her head?

Yeah, a lot of slow zooms to get into her head space. That also led us to this macro level of detail that highlights the gross-out stuff in the bathroom. We didn’t want to hide from that. In another moment I liked, Amy wakes up at night and hears the dogs outside. She walks down the hallway toward us, then turns, the camera hinges over, and she goes to the front door. We push in [with the dolly] and zoom back, which makes the hallway look like it’s slowly stretching — something I ripped off from Poltergeist. It was more instinctual than anything else. The zooms just felt right.

The first act, showing Mother home alone with her toddler, includes some excellent physical comedy.

A lot of the humor comes from these emotionally stinging scenes, almost like PTSD, which can be kind of a relief for parents to laugh at because it’s so crazy. But yeah, we wanted to establish this life rut for Amy’s character where you give everything to your child and lose sight of yourself because everything you wanted to be gets put on hold.

SPOILER ALERT

And then. . .

Then, she reclaims her identity by turning into a dog. We wanted Mother’s feral instinct to feel like an itch that needs to be scratched. Compared to gory experiences in horror movies, Amy turning into a dog feels more like a flower blooming. For Amy’s character, it’s this release into becoming what she needed to be.

How did that translate into film gear?

We shot in a small house in the Valley. I wanted to give the location a little cinematic flair and chose anamorphic lenses for that reason. Being such a small space, we wanted a wide frame because I like the way anamorphic lenses can distort things a little and give you this subtle feeling that things may not be so perfect.

The night-time sequences that come later mark a distinct shift in tone once Amy starts running with dogs from her neighborhood.

When Amy makes the transformation, it’s like when a dog hits an open yard for the first time and takes off, runs around, and goes crazy. We wanted to induce that kind of motion and energy with our shots of the dogs just running.

How did the cameras keep up with the dogs?

We had something that’s effectively a souped-up golf cart, which we rigged with a couple of cameras. The dogs were moving so fast it was the only way we could film them.

What gear did you use to convey Amy the dog’s point of view?

It’s very trope-y [in horror films] to have the werewolf POV or the monster POV, so we did want to see things through her eyes, but we also wanted to make the dog’s POV very specific to this movie. What we landed on came from the flashbacks in this film where Amy remembers her youth growing up with her mom in a Mennonite community. We shot all of those memories with Petzval lenses, which are old-timey portrait lenses that have a circular smeary border on the edges.

Which lets the audience know those scenes happened in the past.

Yeah. So while we were testing lenses and cameras, I discovered a filter that’s flat on one side and convex on the other. When we mistakenly put it on backward, all of a sudden, it threw the outside of the frame way out of focus, like a Petzval times a million. The tiny little center of the screen is in focus, and everything else is smeared away. We realized, “That could be the dog POV.” I also liked how it bridged to the tone of the flashbacks.

The Nightbitch story seems like it could take place in Anywhere U.S.A., but the quality of light suggests sunny Los Angeles.

Yes, we filmed Nightbitch entirely in Los Angeles. That’s a testament to Amy Adams, who was instrumental in getting this film made. One of her stipulations was “Shoot in L.A.”

Economically, a production like Nightbitch surely means a lot to the local filmmaking community. As a department head, did you enjoy hiring crew from the area?

I feel like the best crews in the world are here so for me, there’s no better place to shoot than Los Angeles. Unfortunately, I think I’ve shot like two movies in L.A. in the last ten years. A lot of TV still gets made here, but especially with small-budget and mid-budget films, that doesn’t happen much anymore.

What are the perks?

I get to work with my favorite people, so having that level of comfort and familiarity induces a kind of calmness. And of course, I use local vendors. It’s easy to do tests because I can just go to the camera house and dial in all the lenses. And we shot our hair and makeup tests at Panavision in [Los Angeles suburb] Woodland Hills. For me, when it comes to filmmaking, L.A. is ground zero.

Nightbitch is in theaters now.

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Featured image: Amy Adams in NIGHTBITCH. Photo by Anne Marie Fox. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2024 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.