The philosophy was style through naturalism.
In terms of naturalistic lighting.
And that begins with "Memento".
You know, "Insomnia" with the light being a character.
Batman with us, trying to recreate a style of a comic book film.
And then certainly "Inception" with diving, you know, in and out of dreams.
I lean towards that naturalistic style, but
with some mood to it.
So that was the philosophy.
Good God, would have you done?
♪ Cinematography Techniques - Intro ♪
I was finishing my last year of, uh, in the cinematography program at AFI.
And I had met Janusz Kaminski through a mutual friend,
and he was working as a gaffer and second unit DP
on these small Corman films that, uh, Phedon Papamichael was shooting.
"- What are you?
- I'm not even human."
- Roger, of course, was titled king of the B movies.
Just cranking movies out.
And so I kind of fell into it that way.
Janusz brought me in
and I met Phedon and I ended up shooting
second unit for "Slumber Party Massacre Part Three".
"- My neighbor called. - What neighbor?
- This guy that lives across the street.
- Another weird guy."
- And we're shooting this on up - here we go getting technical.
It was an ARRI IIC.
I was practicing learning my craft.
You know, you got to do your time before you're going to do anything decent.
You know, after the two Corman films that I did,
I did these super low-budget,
straight-to-video exploitation films.
I honestly was feeling really like I wasn't getting anywhere.
I felt like I was spinning my wheels.
I'm burned out.
I decided to start turning down some of these films
and Phedon came to me.
He had been working with Jon Turteltaub
and they did "Cool Runnings" together.
"- Feel the rhythm!
Feel the rhyme!
Get on up, it's bobsled time!
- Cool runnings!"
It killed at the box office.
And then they pulled me in for two movies
and asked me if I wanted to operate for him on these films.
But what happened was I got this little indie to do based on the fact
that I was doing high-end big studio features.
As luck would have it and got accepted at Sundance.
Chris Nolan had seen that film that year.
He was there with "Following", and it was about a year later
that he remembered me and reached out to me for "Memento".
Long behold, you know, I got the gig.
"- Why I'm chasing this guy?
No. He's chasing me."
- What Chris had liked about my style was
it kind of went along with his aesthetic,
which was, it was a very naturalistic style.
That simplicity and the very minimal approach to lighting.
Strangely enough I think what a great value of what I brought to that film
was I had all these years in low-budget filmmaking,
so I could make it look pretty good,
but I could do it damn fast,
so we could be spontaneous with ideas.
We could, you know, I lit stuff fast
that wasn't dragging things down.
He would have time to work with performances.
"- She's gone.
And the present is trivia, which I scribble down as f*cking notes!
- Hey. Come on. Try and relax."
The collaboration really, really worked.
And again, we carried that over very nicely into the next film "Insomnia".
"- Where is she, Finch?
- Calm down. I got everything under control.
You and I share a secret.
We know how easy it is to kill somebody.
That ultimate taboo."
The essence of it for me from a visual standpoint
was the light of day that he could not escape.
"- So when does it get dark around here?
- Uh, it doesn't.
Not this time of year."
- You know, it was obviously a metaphor for this guilt
that he had for a crime that he had committed that he couldn't escape either.
But it was also this menacing thing that was constantly present.
And I had one of my best early collaborations with a movie star,
you know, Al Pachino.
There's a scene where Al goes into this young man's house
and he's kind of searching around
and he's looking for this evidence to try to get it before the police get there.
And then he hears while he's searching
the police coming into the house.
And, you know, again, wanting this
element of light to constantly be piercing
and part of the story.
You know, I decided to put this really, really bright Xenon-type light
coming through the window of the bathroom.
So it's very dark in there and it's very moody
except for this one shaft of crisp light coming through the window.
And so I went up to Al, and I said, look,
I just want to, you know, give you a little bit of, uh,
an idea of what I'm doing here, which is I've got this super bright light in the room.
And so when you're trying to hide from these other people,
you're going to get hit by this burning light, just so you know.
And not that I wanted to guide or effect his performance,
but I wanted him to be able to use it.
You know, Al's got it.
"- Turn the place over."
- But I just felt like it's a moment where performance
and lighting come together, so, you know, organically.
And in particular, when the light is such a strong part of the narrative,
it really kind of helps take it to the next level.
And that's, that's what we were trying to do.
"- Are you watching closely?
I don't know what you've done.
But you're not afraid to get your hands dirty anymore, aren't ya?
- No, not anymore."
And when we did "The Prestige" coming after Batman movie and
you know, Chris wanted to do things a lot looser.
"- So this is the Great Danton."
- He wanted to much more handheld camera.
And we shot probably about 85% of "The Prestige" handheld.
"- Hold out other hand.
- What's conducting the electricity? - Our bodies, Mr. Angier.
Quite capable of conducting and, indeed, producing energy.
- Interesting workshop. - Yeah, we make do.
- My name is Olivia... - I know who you are.
You're here to steal the rest of my show?
- No, I'm here to give your show what it's missing.
- You don't know if the camera's on you.
If it's on somebody else."
- It's a messy way of filming.
And I think for me, my favorite way, you know.
When there's a little bit too much order, I really want to kick against that.
He's a no-talent magician, and they call him
the bloody best in England.
And all that we know is he uses a trap door.
Ah, brilliant. What is going on under that stage? Huh?!
Why can't you out-think him?"
And the style in the lighting,
for me, it was all about the firelight, you know.
This wonderful orange firelight.
And so there are times when we use real lanterns
and, you know, as the sources, lighting sources.
And then we built a bunch of lighting instruments
in that same color temperature that augmented the firelight.
"- You don't really want to work it out.
You want to be fooled."
Leading up to "Dark Night".
You know, Chris sort of, couldn't talk to this idea
that we should try to shoot, you know, a portion of "Dark Night" on IMAX.
And he brought it up to me early on.
But so we started looking into, you know, the functionality
and the potential of shooting IMAX for narrative feature film for the first time.
And the fact that it was this large-format, immersive experience.
There's no place to hide lights.
You are dealing with this massive frame.
You're dealing with more shallow depth of field.
And feel the focus is very different and more challenging.
And later on...
"- Gotham...
Take control of your city."
- When we did "Dark Knight Rises",
we actually have a special lens built.
So we kind of started revolutionizing lenses for IMAX
with that one who was a T2 50-millimeter IMAX lens,
which really made it useful for us for night exterior work.
"- Light it up!
- Impossible."
But, you know, what's interesting,
we didn't shoot IMAX on "Inception".
"- My question is what happens when you start messing with the physics of it all?"
- It's just too lengthy and bulky to make it around corners,
and to be nimble with it.
And we did a lot of nimble handheld camera work in "Inception".
Let's say Joseph Gordon-Levitt and the, uh, the rotating hallway.
You know, Chris comes up with his idea of this zero-G effect
in the hallway and its execution requires sort of us figuring out
how it is we want to see it on the screen.
So, you know, the conversations were more about, okay, how much are you going to use
sort of the camera mounted to the floor that we dollied along
as it's rotating and how much are we going to be in an arm that's free of the floor.
From the lighting standpoint, it had, again, be practical lighting
built into the set
that sort of lit all the action in a way
that the camera could go anywhere at one or two.
So all the work that goes into determining
how this is going to be photographed
happens, you know, in pre-production.
That was my fourth nomination.
And then I won for "Best Cinematography" on that.
Oscar goes to Wally Pfister for "Inception".
So I was really, you know, stoked and yeah,
it was the game changer -- changed my life.
It really did.
It made me realize that I was
sort of getting tired of being a cinematographer too.
Which is really takes us up to the present directing TV commercials.
I light the sets myself
and then I'm directing by hire camera operator.
So I can spend time with the agency and with the actors,
and setting things up.
But I still light the sets.
Because that comes sort of easy to me.
"- Hi."