- Hi, I'm Bob.
I don't want to film to look lit.
And I always get these requests for magazines,
like after "Drugstore Cowboy" or "Moonrise Kingdom".
And they say, oh, we understood you shot everything in natural light.
"- Hello."
- I said, no, we don't shoot things in natural light.
Particularly the interiors are very carefully lit,
but I try to just get into a location and get a feel for it.
It kind of taught me oftentimes the best thing to do
is use less lights and trust your instincts.
And that's something I've kind of tried to live by ever since then.
♪ Cinematography Techniques - Intro ♪
If the scene is a very dramatic scene,
I might be a little more dramatic with the lighting.
I try to have the lighting reflect the tone of the scene as best I can.
"- Thank you. - It's a book."
In "Grand Budapest", for instance,
Wes found this old department store in Germany that was taken,
so we took it over.
It was five floors and the top had this beautiful skylight.
So I bounced a lot of HMI's
into a big white above the skylight and it came through.
I always have to prepare Wes
because he likes to go with no lights
and I have to negotiate with him sometimes.
What I can do in and what I can't in that movie.
The negotiation was I could use HMI's
but they had to be outside the set.
So we had a nice even light.
We have practicals everywhere for backgrounds,
and then I'll bring in one light just to light the actors.
A soft light with an mirror.
Basically, it's a one-light deal
because everything else has kind of led in that way
we can move quickly, we can look anywhere.
And when we're on the set, he likes to move very quickly.
So it's a very simple way of doing it, but it works.
"- I became his pupil and he was to be my counselor and guardian."
- There's a lot of shots in "Darjeeling Limited".
They're the kind of whip pans in the middle of the scene.
- Yeah.
- And I've heard that actually, you don't often do a dissolve on the whip pan.
- It's still that shot. - Yeah.
- So operating in them must be quite high when you get the shot...
- ...but also must be quite nerve-wrecking. - It is.
"Grand Budapest", there's a scene towards the end
where I'm basically kind of doing a 360
and we're up on the fifth floor of this hotel.
And I'm in the center in the atrium,
and we're not allowed to use cranes.
So that grips built me this tower.
And I'm up there by myself on the tower.
And the whole tower starts going, like moving back and forth...
- Oh, my gosh.
- Because the moves are so quick and I'm moving around so quick.
And usually, I have to move, walk around.
So in meanwhile, the actors would come in
and very specific lines of dialogue that I have to make this move.
I'm like, oh my God, how am I going to do this? You know, I'm sweating.
So finally I took a laser pointer and I attached it to the camera
and I put little Xs, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
And then I closed the eyepiece and I would just hit the laser pointer.
And that way I didn't have to march around, shake the whole thing.
I remember we did like 20 takes and finally
where we supposed to say, okay, we've got it.
I've never been so like, uhh, thank God.
"- Nobody move. Everybody's under arrest.
- Who's out the window?
- Agatha."
♪ ♪
- The LEDs have really changed things.
I did a movie "Mamma Mia! 2" in England
and Dion BeeBe was out there shooting a movie
and while we were prepping and they had hung all these
ARRI sky panels above and they put a silk underneath it.
And I went to the production and I said, this is exactly what I'm going to do.
Maybe it's cheaper just to leave them all up there.
Of course, that didn't happen.
So it took them a week to put everything back up there.
But it was so fast and amazing.
The guy had a little iPad kind of thing.
And, and I say, okay, it's night.
So we cut everything in half and we'd make it a little bluer.
Or okay now it's sunny day, bang, and it would happen within moments.
So the sky panels have been really big thing
that has changed my style of lighting
and it makes it faster, which everybody wants everything faster now.
"- Come on! Move me left!
Oh! Ooh! Watch the rings. Watch the rings."
- I still love the old tungsten lights.
I still use HMI's, but light pedals have definitely changed how I light
and shooting digitally, which most of the times I shoot digitally now.
It's changed my style of lighting for sure.
"- The power of Patty compels you!"
- I was one of those film people that really did not want to go into digital world.
And I fought it and I fought in forever.
When the ALEXA came out, I started shooting more and more ALEXA's
and I love the ALEXA.
I remember the first time I shot a feature digitally was "Spy".
A movie I did in Budapest with Paul Feig.
Jude Law plays kind of a James Bond kind of character.
And we were in this basement that had very high ceilings.
So the production designer hung a lot of China hats along the hallway,
Jude is running down the hallway, chasing the guy shooting at him.
So I went down there with ALEXA.
I looked at it and I was like, God, this looks great.
And in film, I would have used a lot more lights
and lit up the walls and done all kinds of things.
And we just kind of chased Jude around using those practical China hats.
And then we just had my gaffer following with just a little China ball
just to give him a little fill and it looked wonderful.
And I said to Paul, because Paul is a digital guy, you know, the director.
I was like, I couldn't have done this with film, you know?
And it just gave us so much, you know, it's so much easier and faster.
I was really happy with how it looked and so.
That was when I kind of converted a little bit to the digital world.
- I read "Bottle Rocket" you use just the 27 millimeter at lens.
- Yeah.
"- Sparkler. - Certainly can't feel any worse than I do."
- Wes is a big fan of Roman Polanski.
And I know "Rosemary's Baby", I think we shot on a 20-millimeter lens or something.
"- Whatever you done to its eyes?"
- The very first day we put up a Panavision 27 Primo
and we just started shooting with it.
And then we moved into the closeups we were shooting with it.
So he said, why don't we just shoot the whole movie on a 27?
And I said, yeah, why not?
And with the 27 up close, it kind of distorts you.
"- Who is in charge here?"
- There was a couple close-ups of Lumi Cavazos.
And we all love Lumi. And I said, Wes c'mon, can we just shoot the 35?
And so he allowed me to use the 35 on a couple of Lumi's closeups,
but other than that, it was all 27.
He kind of followed that on with "Rushmore", which was our next film.
We went anamorphic and most of it was on the 40 anamorphic primo.
"- What are you doing? What are you doing?"
But that and "Royal Tenenbaums",
probably 90% of it was on a 40 mil.
"- Why'd you try to kill yourself?
- Don't press him right now."
- Occasionally we would shake it up.
There's a couple of zoom shots on there.
- How about "Moonrise Kingdom" then,
which was 16.
- Yeah, because it was super 16, I wanted to sharpest image.
So I got ZEISS primes.
"- What kind of bird are you?"
- And we were using those, but our zoom was...
I love an Angenieux zoom, but I'm not trying to say anything bad,
but it just wasn't of the quality of those ZEISS primes.
So whenever we use that zoom, it looked a little mushy to me.
And so I complained and,
but everybody else loved it, you know?
Wes, the editor, everybody else loved this.
No, we love this. We love this, you know?
So when you see the zoom shots, they do look a little mushy
compared to the ZEISS primes.
I tried to stick to those ZEISS primes as much as I could
cause I wanted the sharpest image I could.
- It looks great.
And I mean, I think to do all that magic hour stuff and night work.
Very impressive.
"- I'm listening. Read on."
- Kids today, I told them they're lucky.
When I started everything was film,
which was expensive to shoot.
I have to rent a camera and buy film and process it.
And today you can shoot digitally.
It's so much easier and it's less expensive.
Shoot anything and take your iPhone.
And just go out and shoot things and you'll learn.
They can do a dramatic thing.
You can do a thing about cars driving down the street.
I don't care what it is.
Just start shooting.
And you will learn.
Look at your dailies and evaluate what you did.
And if you can edit it even better,
because that's where you kind of learn what works and what doesn't work.
My daughter is actually a cinematographer.
Her first film was shot on the iPhone with a black and white app
and it turned out really well.
And I told her she gets so nervous about things.
I said, guess what?
Most student films are terrible.
I went to film school.
I went to USC film school, and most of the student films are terrible.
I said, but that's the whole point of it.
'Cause that's where you go and you learn
and then maybe make a couple of bad films,
but then you learn later in, you know,
by maybe your third or fourth film, that becomes a good one.
"- Little trouble there."
- Like many cinematographers I tended to overlight,
you know, you first start out, you get nervous and you're looking at your meter
and you know, you kind of don't trust yourself.
And it kind of taught me oftentimes the best thing to do is
use less lights and trust your instincts.
And that's something I've kind of tried to live by ever since then.
"- Stop it.
Who's shooting who?"