Best of 2023: How “The Color Purple” DP Dan Laustsen Made Visual Music
*It’s our annual “Best of the Year” look back at some of our favorite interviews from the year. This interview with “The Color Purple” cinematographer Dan Laustsen more than qualifies, and, with the film opening wide in theaters today, it feels like a fitting Christmas Day post. Happy Holidays! Danish cinematographer Dan Laustsen has been ...
“All of Us Strangers” Cinematographer Jamie Ramsay on Lighting a Lonely Life
Based on Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers, writer and director Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers takes place between a barren tower block in London, where Adam (Andrew Scott) leads a solitary existence, and his childhood home in the suburbs, where he frequently visits his parents, who died thirty years earlier. In London, Adam spends ...
How “The Color Purple” DP Dan Laustsen Made Visual Music
Danish cinematographer Dan Laustsen has been shooting movies for forty years, earning two Oscar nominations along the way for his contributions to Guillermo del Toro’s films The Shape of Water and Nightmare Alley. Director Blitz Bazawule, on the other hand, had never made a major Hollywood motion picture before helming The Color Purple (opening Dec. ...
“Saltburn” Cinematographer Linus Sandgren on Creating a Fluid Painting for Emerald Fennell
The comic drama Saltburn from director Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman) is as beautiful as it is macabre. It’s 2006, and Oliver (Barry Keoghan), an awkward, lonely student at Oxford, finds his place within the scenic confines of his university by becoming friends with Felix (Jacob Elordi), who is everything Oliver is not — handsome, ...
“Radical” Cinematographer Mateo Londono Takes us to School in Christopher Zalla’s Moving New Film
A maverick teacher challenges the norms at an elementary school in the border town of Matamoros in northern Mexico. Such is the fact-based story that unfolds in Radical (in theaters now), led by Mexican star Eugenio Derbez (Coda, Instructions Not Included) in a film directed by Chris Zalla (Blood of My Blood). The teacher, Sergio ...
“The Killer” Cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt on Re-Teaming With David Fincher
David Fincher’s lean, mean The Killer is a film stripped down to its bare essentials, much like the work of its titular assassin. Based on a French graphic novel and adapted by Andrew Kevin Walker (Se7en), Fincher’s adaptation tells the story of an unnamed killer (Michael Fassbender) and the strict, self-imposed protocols of his trade. ...
Cinematographer Oliver Curtis on Bringing Intimacy and Opulence to “The Buccaneers”
With director Susanna White’s The Buccaneers, an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s unfinished final novel set in the 1870s, Apple TV+ adds a period drama with a modern spin to its lineup. If any 19th-century chronicler of the era’s mannerisms can withstand a contemporary update, it’s Wharton, whose insight into upper-class idiosyncrasies on both sides of ...
How “Lessons in Chemistry” DP Zachary Galler Created a Show-Within-a-Show
In writer Susannah Grant’s adaption of the novel Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, currently airing on Apple TV+, Brie Larson plays a budding chemist, Elizabeth Zott, thwarted in her work by her male colleagues who put politics and patriarchy above credible scientific achievement. Shut out of any hope of a chemistry career despite her ...
“Killers of the Flower Moon” Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto Illuminates Martin Scorsese’s Twisted Tale
When I connected with Rodrigo Prieto for our video interview, as one might imagine a cinematographer to do, he was perfectly lit in a warm amber glow, perhaps a nod to a fire motif visually laced in Martin Scorese’s Killers of the Flower Moon – a love story between Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) and Ernest ...
How “Quantum Leap” DP Ana M. Amortegui Keeps the Show Dynamic Across the Centuries
The past is prologue, but on Quantum Leap, the past is also the present and the future as Dr. Ben Song (Raymond Lee) and his team embark on dangerous lifesaving excursions through history. The time travel epic is back with more mysteries that continue to escalate and may even threaten the project itself. Director of ...
“Special Ops: Lioness” Cinematographer & Director Paul Cameron on Taylor Sheridan’s International Thriller – Part Two
As noted in part one of our interview with Paul Cameron, he took his first turns at directing for series helming two episodes of Westworld, and he drew on his experience as a cinematographer and from his work for some pretty important mentors. “I learned so much from working with Tony Scott,” Cameron said, referring ...
“Special Ops: Lioness” Cinematographer & Director Paul Cameron on Taylor Sheridan’s International Thriller
As director of photography, Paul Cameron has shot such disparate films and series as Man On Fire, Collateral, Déjà Vu, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, and Westworld. He has worked with a slew of top-tier directors, including Michael Mann, Tony Scott, and Jonathan Nolan. Now, for Paramount+’s acclaimed limited series, Special ...
“Ahsoka” Cinematographer Eric Steelberg on Lensing a Rebel Jedi’s Journey Through Time & Space
For Ahsoka cinematographer Eric Steelberg, lensing the latest live-action Star Wars series was a dream come true. Growing up in thrall to George Lucas’s original trilogy, Steelberg would find himself on set while filming the new series, surrounded by massive spaceships both practical and virtual (the latter thanks to Industrial Light & Magic’s LED immersive soundstage the ...
Best of Summer 2023: How “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” DP Fraser Taggart Pulled Off That Insane Train Sequence
*It’s our annual “Best of Summer” look back at some (not all) of our favorite interviews from the past few months. This non-comprehensive look back includes the Barbenheimer phenomenon and the wonderful interviews that followed those two history-making films, chats with the talented folks behind Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, our profile of MPA ...
Emmy-Nominated “Barry” Cinematographer Carl Herse Steps into the Darkness for the Final Season
The life of a hired hitman may seem mysterious and exotic, but Barry has a blunt message for us all. No one is immune to insecurities, mundane moments, or our own very bad ideas. The series’ final season freed the characters to face their fates, be they heroic, humble, or humorous. Barry ended with tight and ...
“Oppenheimer” Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema on Making History With Christopher Nolan
Oppenheimer marks the fourth collaboration between director Christopher Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema. And like their past efforts, the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the theoretical physicist who spearheaded the effort to create the atomic bomb and then came under attack when he warned the world of its dangers, is anything but ...
How “Sanctuary” Cinematographer Ludovica Isidori Turned a Single Room Into a Dynamic Psycho-Emotional Arena
How do you make a single location subliminally consume an entire story? That was the question Italian cinematographer Ludovica Isidori had to answer in director Zachary Wigon’s sophomore film Sanctuary. Starring Christopher Abbott (Girls) as Hal, an heir to a luxury hotel empire, and Margaret Qualley (Maid), a dominatrix named Rebecca who is equal parts ...
“Haunted Mansion” Cinematographer Jeffrey Waldron Gathers Ghostly Delights in Frame
Directed by Justin Simien, Disney’s Haunted Mansion has an all-star cast, a funny, touching script, killer New Orleans scenery, and for a wellspring of inspiration, the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland, which holds particular sway over the movie’s aesthetic. The original ride veers from comedic to creepy, which for cinematographer Jeffrey Waldron (Little Fires Everywhere, ...
How “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” DP Fraser Taggart Pulled Off That Insane Train Sequence
Editors’ Note: This story contains mild spoilers. The action in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One rolls out like a conveyor belt of delicious candy, leaving you wanting more. And director Christopher McQuarrie delivers those highs again and again. The global affair treks from Abu Dhabi for a swirling desert shootout and on to Rome ...
“The Last of Us” Cinematographer Ksenia Sereda on Shining a Light in the Darkness
The Last of Us, HBO’s thrilling, best-in-class adaptation of Naughty Dog’s critically acclaimed video game, provided 2023’s first certifiable must-watch series. Co-created by the video game’s mastermind, Neil Druckmann, and Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin, the series followed a pair of intrapersonally opposed survivors of a fungi-borne apocalypse as they picked their way across a devastated American landscape ...
