From “Day of the Jackal” to “Captain America: Brave New World”: DP Kramer Morgenthau Breaks Down 70s Thriller Inspiration
Sam Wilson returns in director Julius Onah’s Captain America: Brave New World, here to take on twin domestic threats. Sam (Anthony Mackie) and his sidekick (and replacement as the Falcon) Joaquin (Danny Ramirez) have been sent to Mexico to stop Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito) from making an illegal sale. Sam and Joaquin recover the items but lose Sidewinder. The pair then head home to train with Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), a former super soldier introduced in the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, who was once experimented on by the government.
All three are invited to a White House summit, where Bradley appears to be possessed by an unknown force, along with other attendees, to try to assassinate the president, Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford). Bradley is apprehended by former Black Widow Ruth Bat-Seraph (Shira Haas), and Captain America, in the course of trying to help his friend, winds up capturing Sidewinder. Meanwhile, it’s revealed that a global arms race for adamantium is the foundation of everything that’s happening, with a mastermind quietly causing chaos. It’s Dr. Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson), who was once harmed by President Ross and is now paying him back in kind.
While Brave New World has the expansive action scenes fans of the MCU expect, the film also maintains a sense of reality, whether it’s a fresh, spring day in Washington, D.C., or a desolate entrance to a neglected prison. We spoke with cinematographer Kramer Morgenthau about injecting nervy realism into this world, the interesting cinematic references he shared with director Onah, and how they developed the look for the film’s crucial optogenetic lighting.
This film felt really fresh and energetic. How did the cinematography play into that?
The cinematography we were going for was a more grounded and naturalistic approach than some of the other films in this genre. Julius [Onah] and I really wanted it to feel real. We were inspired by 1970s paranoid thriller movies such as Day of the Jackal and the Pakula trilogy of films, including Klute, All the President’s Men, and The Parallax View. So, we did everything we could to make it feel textural and gritty, to give the movie its own visual style.
Sam Sterns’s lab in Camp Echo One is so creepily evocative. How did you light and shoot that?
Stern’s character was a lot of fun. He’s a great movie villain. He’s someone with whom we launched off the realism and into expressionism with his lab. Ramsey Avery, the production designer, did a beautiful job designing it. The lab is inside of a prison underground, so we want it to feel dark, mysterious, paranoid, and also claustrophobic. We used a lot of red light, hard shadows from shafts of light with fans, harkening back to film noir expressionist filmmaking. There was lots of experimentation with how shiny the surfaces could be, and just built this lab and atmosphere of this mad scientist working underground. He was somebody who was created by the state and is now working against the state, and had taken a prison and turned it into his weapon of revenge. It was a lot of fun to shoot, and have the mysterious entrance into it, then the confrontation with Sterns, and finally a lot of hand-to-hand combat to get out of the prison, [plus] designing all the lighting that is used to brainwash people, the optogenetic lighting. It was definitely one of my favorite sets to work in.
How did the lighting Sterns’ uses to take control of another character’s mind come about?
This was something Julius came up with, and I don’t know how much of it is scientific or pseudoscientific, but this blue light comes on the phones and forces people to become weaponized assassins. Sterns had been experimenting with it in this lab, and these LED lights are going off in flashes and sequences. There were these lights symmetrically based around the lab, which were his prototypes, and we used them during the sequence of hand-to-hand fighting as a way [to convey] that he’s been brainwashing the guards in the prison to fight against Sam, Captain America, and Joaquin, the Falcon.
When you’re shooting well-known places, like a version of the White House, how do you use the cinematography to make that look like the real deal for the audience?
It was very important to Julius that everything be based on what a real state event would be like, having the right guards, the right type of security, and the right set dressing. It was all based on deep research that Ramsey and Julius had done to see what would really be happening in this room. Then we took a little bit of license, where these almost sci-fi screens come down for the speech. It was all meant to look real. We shot in a reduced scale White House that Tyler Perry had built in his studios. It’s a standing building that he uses all the time. It’s a fake White House, which was kind of fun. The White House has so much mystique to it, but when you get to it, it’s a big building like any other, and you approach it like another movie location.
What’s your role when it comes to scenes that are heavily VFX influenced, like Celestial Island and the dogfight over Celestial Island, or Ross as the Red Hulk destroying the White House?
In those sequences that are visual effects heavy, it’s your role to integrate what you’re doing with the visual effects. Alessandro Ongaro and Bill Westenhofer were the supervisors. In those cases, you’re working off previews, which are animated versions of what the sequences are going to look like, and you want your lighting to integrate carefully into how it’s going to be in the final sequence. We study the previews and use them as a reference on set, as well as any kind of artwork they’ve done to show what the final effects are going to be, which is still in the R&D phase while you’re shooting. That kind of filmmaking is almost closer to shooting animation, in a way, because it’s all being worked out in a 3D animation software, and what you’re doing is a small part of a bigger piece. But that’s only for certain very visual effects-driven sequences, like the aerial battle and the big showdown at the end. A lot of the movie is not. We shot a lot on real locations.
Was there a location you particularly enjoyed?
The Japanese prime minister’s location was an 80s Brutalist convention center in Atlanta, which had great architecture.
Did your work on Thor: The Dark World influence your process on this film at all?
They’re very separate worlds. Thor was on another planet, based on Nordic mythology, but certainly, working in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and creating images for such a big, exciting canvas prepared me for doing this. Integrating with visual effects on such an intimate level was certainly preparation for what I did on this, but it wasn’t necessarily a big influence.
Featured image: Anthony Mackie behind the scenes of Marvel Studios’ CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD. Photo by Eli Adé. © 2024 MARVEL.
