This is Mexico in the TV show, "Breaking Bad."
This is Mexico in real life.
This is Beirut in the 2018 movie, "Beirut."
This is Beirut in real life.
And this is Bangladesh in the recent
2020 Chris Hemsworth movie, "Extraction."
This is Bangladesh in real life.
Notice anything?
If you're seeing a big difference
between the color filters Hollywood's using
to portray specific countries
versus how those countries look in real life,
you're not alone.
The internet even came up
with a name for it,
(beep)hole color grading.
And naturally there are a lot of memes.
But what is (beep)hole color grading?
Why did it first start happening?
And how did we get here?
We sat down with filmmakers, experts,
and Hollywood colorists to get their take.
Before the invention of digital cinema
filmmakers were really limited in how they could use color.
- There've been multiple stages in film color grading.
Like, in silent cinema, they would hand tint
whole reels of film.
With the launch of Technicolor in the '20s and '30s,
it became much easier to do color.
Color was a sort of standard part of
the workflow by the '60s.
There was a machine called the Hazeltine
and you had three main controls in the Hazeltine,
which were red, green, and blue.
And so you were always trying to find
that sweet spot of not too cyan, not too red,
not too green, not too magenta,
not too blue, not too yellow.
For people who grew up in digital,
that seems incredibly limiting.
Beautiful movies were shot.
And that was the color control they had in post.
This all changed in the year 2000.
- "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" was kind of seen
as that first big film that really did
a whole digital process.
And what that did was that opened up a new set of tools.
Since then, we've seen color kind of break out
into many different avenues.
This was followed by
Steven Soderbergh's 2000 film, "Traffic."
- Soderbergh wanted a clear visual cue
to tell you which story you're following.
So he used different color techniques
for each of the three stories.
One is blue.
One is this kind of washed out white.
And the third, which is a story in Mexico
is orange and hot.
- I don't think it was inherently meant to be
offensive to everybody.
I think it was just kind of breaking down
a simple way of showing an area,
and very easily on film, without them having to
describe it in the narrative.
- Problem is, it got a lot easier, a lot faster, to do that.
As digital filmmaking and digital editing
became more common, you effectively could move
sliders around and give any footage you have
almost any look you want.
- Films now use what are called LUTs
or digital lookup tables to apply
an endless amount of film stock looks over footage.
Think of them like really fancy Instagram filters.
But along with those new creative choices
came some serious problems.
One was the way that we approached ourselves
as Americans in other countries,
and specifically how we used color to tell that story.
- The cliché of a movie set in Sweden
will be basically blue,
and then a movie set in Mexico or the Caribbean
will be much oranger, and hotter, and more saturated.
I think some of that does have to come with temperature.
I think we associate the winter months
with a cold blue light outside.
And I think we associate the summer months and warmth
with a warm highlight.
Some of those ideas played out in wanting to make
the audience feel like they'd been on a bigger journey
by making each location have its own color personality
to help us orient ourselves in space
and to make those spaces feel further apart from each other.
- And so if the script and the director want to
represent the Soviet Union as cold, stoic, then
we're going to bring kind of the bluer color tones in it.
If they want to show Mexico as hot and exotic,
we're kind of going to bring in
those older, warm, kind of rich,
maybe a little bit more romantic tones,
to kind of help sell that feeling.
- Over the years, those associations sort of lose
their connection to the original reality.
You can take a photograph of Sweden
and slap an orange filter on it,
all of a sudden it starts to feel like the Mediterranean.
You can take a photo of Mexico City
and if you make it blue enough,
it can start feel like Stockholm.
- And that's when you start to see everybody take
these Steven Soderbergh orange Mexico cues
and just pop them in
wherever they want really thoughtlessly.
The time you used to take as a filmmaker
to think about those things
and to think about how they interact
with the story you're telling,
that all goes away.
It becomes push button.
- So a lot of the films we talk about
when we talk about this are action movies,
and adventure films, and films in which there's violence
on the people where the film is taking place.
- After "Traffic," 2001, you get "Black Hawk Down."
"Black Hawk Down" is a war movie in Mogadishu in Somalia.
All the interiors with the Americans in their bases
are this cold blue.
All the exteriors in Africa are this washed out,
really high contrast, gritty look.
What happens when you take footage of Black skin
and turn the contrast really high?
You lose all of the features.
So you have this movie with these Americans
with these recognizable faces fighting
phantoms, shadows, silhouettes.
That becomes a problem very fast.
- The thing that we forget in color psychology is that
the more layers of artifice we put on an image,
the harder it is for us to connect with that image.
Some of those heavy looks can dehumanize the people
that exist in those places.
In certain movies,
it's done deliberately to make the killing of those people
something that's easier for an audience to swallow.
- (Beep)hole color grading, the concept of that
is uniquely American.
We have this sort of Manifest Destiny myth about ourselves
that we are the chosen. We are the liberal democracy.
We are capitalism at its best.
We know quickly what other countries look like
because cinematographers and directors have decided
what visual signifiers are gonna
do that quickly.
The way that's always been reflected in visual culture
is just sort of like a set of color palettes.
What could be more generalized and non-specific as a filter?
We all know that that's bullshit.
- And some of those color trends kept repeating
over, and over, and over.
- This is one of those things that I think keeps happening
because it keeps happening. W're 20 years since "Traffic."
So, you now have a generation of filmmakers
who grew up watching movies showing Mexico
looking like this.
If they haven't been to Mexico, that's their Mexico.
- Everything in cinema comes back to emotion.
The reason why that Mexico look has become racist
is because it's intended to inspire fear.
It's the same with the generic Middle East look.
- It means you reduce the entire experiential scope
of being in a place to this one visual cue,
which is cued to make you never feel comfortable
and never feel safe there.
- But people are finally taking notice.
Hollywood thinks they're being really smart
and really sneaky about how they're depicting
all these different countries, but people catch on.
Viewers are much more intelligent, much more perceptive,
and sort of meticulous about this stuff
than they used to be 20 years ago,
10 years ago, five years ago even.
- The tools have opened up.
You get people that are on Instagram now
doing their own photo editing.
They're seeing different ways of
how these effects play on their skin.
- Now that we have viral threads on Twitter and Reddit,
maybe filmmakers might kind of backpedal.
Maybe they'll try to do differently,
maybe they'll try to do better.
- Additionally, the call for more diversity in film
is changing how we look at other countries.
- I'm one of the few Black colorists
that's actually working in the industry at this level.
So "Lara and the Beat" is a narrative fiction movie
that takes place in Nigeria.
We were keen on showing a version of Nigeria
that you don't typically see in film.
I want to see more representation behind the camera.
- People are ready to talk about it.
It reflects a change in how we look at each other
and people of color being the authors of their own stories.
- The act and work of doing color correction
is not like a sacred mystic art.
It's something that someone can sit down
and if they're really interested in it,
the tools are available for them to play with it
and to learn it.