Frame & Reference Podcast - 183: "Heart Eyes" Cinematographer Stephen Murphy, BSC ISC

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

Today on Frame & Reference we've got the wonderful Stephen Murphy, BSC ISC joining me to talk about his film "Heart Eyes" which, after being in theaters since February, is hitting DVD and Bluray on April 15th!Enjoy!F&R Online ► https://www.frameandrefpod.comSupport F&R ► https://www.patreon.com/FrameAndRefPodWatch this Podcast ► https://www.YouTube.com/@FrameAndReferenceProduced by Kenny McMillanWebsite ► https://www.kennymcmillan.comInstagram ► https://www.instagram.com/kwmcmillan

Hello and welcome to this episode 183 of frame and reference. You're about to drop into a conversation between me, Kenny McMillan, and my guest, Stephen Murphy, B-S-C-I-S-C, D-P of Heart Eyes. Enjoy. So what do you guys normally watch? It depends, you know, it depends. I mean, I'm into, I'm hugely into sci-fi. I'm massively nerdy and geeky, so I'd be into a lot of sci-fi stuff. And Aiden loves a lot of rom-com stuff, but she's got a really eclectic taste as well.

We have just managed to just finish watching the very last screener, you know, you know, left over from the BAFTA Oscar season, you know, of 200 and something movies, you know, we sort of rigorously try and go through every single one of them. Admittedly, she'll watch more than I will, but, um, so, you know, we kind of have just finished that off and now it's a clean slate, so start it again. It, well, uh, who did I just? Oh, the brutalist. Because I get, I know Loll just won a BAFTA for that.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. How'd you, I assume you watch that one as well. did. Yeah, what? It was one of the first ones. I thought it looked beautiful. I thought it was a really interesting movie. I probably thought the first half of the movie was more interesting than the second half. But I thought it was great to watch. I think this year my favorite movie movie has probably been Conclave. That surprised me a loss. Yeah, it's I just, I don't have you seen it. No, it's one of the ones that escaped. I mean, I think it's still in theaters, but everyone keeps saying that that's phenomenal. Yeah, it's kind of something I didn't think I would want to watch and I sort of grumpily agreed to watch it. And at the end of it, I was like, that was a great movie, a proper movie. So, yeah, it's good. Yeah, I think, I think people's, you know, people keep talking about, oh, there's no, there's no good movies. It's all like superhero films and shit. It's like, I think you're just not watching movies.

There's a lot of great one's out right now. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of, I think, I think there's, you know, I've sort of talked about this, funny enough about hard eyes quite a bit, but I think there's a, it's a different kind of movies nowadays. I think there's less, I think the, what I would call escapism movies, the stuff that for me in the 80s and 90s was, you know, the amblin and the, you go to the movie theater and you just, you know, fall into a world and you escape and you have fun and you, you know, that's for two hours. I think that's been replaced by kind of generic Marvel. stuff. And I think we're maybe missing that. I think you've now clearly got the Marvel-esque kind of Fast and Furious 19, you know, type movies. And then you've got the serious Oscar contenders. And I think it's a kind of a pity then because if you don't want to go to the movies and come out crying, you then are either not going or you're going to watch Cars Crash or the Hulk crash cars, you know, so yeah. I miss the escapism. I do too. Well, and

And, you know, I'm the same way about, like, sci-fi and stuff. Like, that's the kind of stuff that made me want to get into filmmaking. You know, obviously, Star Wars and stuff. But I was just talking with a buddy in mind and name dropped, like, Dark City and equilibrium. And he was like, I don't think anyone has seen those. And I was like, but they should. Totally should. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, I know Dark City, when it came out, it was like, you know, it flew under the radar, you know, even when it was released. But I remember tracking it down because I was a huge fan of the crow. And I think the one movie theater that had it, you know, in my sort of neighborhood or extended neighborhood, when I went to see it, maybe there was two people in the theater with me. And I was just like, wow, this is amazing. But it just had a terrible marketing campaign. It just didn't get seen. It's such a pity. If that came out in the cinema right now, people would shit themselves and run.

You know, it's crazy. Well, and you know what's funny. I always love, you know, as you've probably heard, like a big behind the scenes person. I love like interconnectedness and film history and stuff. And what got me to see Dark City was the fact that the opening of the Matrix I knew because of the special features on that DVD, the opening of the Matrix where Trinity is running away from the cops is just the dark city set that hadn't been struck yet. Really? Oh, yeah, yeah.

And that kind of profile, Scott. line shot which he's running over the roof top yeah that's all a dark city set and they were just like hey can we use that and then yeah go for it swings great i love that that's one of the best shots in the matrix that's fantastic yeah well and it's dude i got to see that um in uh for like the 20th anniversary screening uh in in dolly and uh it's shocking how much like even the bluerre but the DVD softened up how cheap that movie was like when you see it in a theater

it's and I saw I eventually saw it at Tarantino's theater you know on film same thing well a film helped a little bit but the digital scan you can see the the walls made out of plywood where they don't meet the floor you know just like everything is so cheaply

except the Nebuchadnezzar really but yeah just everything is so you watch it and it's very inspiring in a way because you're like, oh, okay, I could do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, totally. I mean, it wasn't a big budget movie when it was made. You know, that was like, you know, two directors who had made a movie before I and made a little bit of money off the movie and they were kind of like over the corner of the

world and studio executives didn't want to visit or pay attention to. And, you know, they were doing their thing and look how it turned out. Yeah. Well, and at the time, too, Keanu wasn't even like him, you know, You know, they're like, oh, you got that guy? That's cute. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, that doesn't happen anymore.

So, like I said, before we started, we were going, the, I kind of went into hard eyes, the sight unseen. And same thing about the marketing. I think the way me and my sister have been trying to tell everyone to go see it, because it is just like one of the most fun films we've seen in a while. but we keep on having to go it's a rom-com but there is murder

but it's not it's not a horror film but it is there's a lot of blood people be dying you know but it's funny the comedic timing

of the main two actors is incredible yeah it's great Josh is great at that he had a really clear handle from the beginning about the tone and I certainly

it's the question I asked him first when we did our meeting together what's the tone what way are we aiming for I'm pretty sure he had that conversation with every single person who he encountered around

the making of this movie because it is a you know it is an unusual combo of genres and it's only because he is so deft at handling both the comedy and the slasher side of things that

it you know he makes it work so well um and you know he was very clear from the beginning at least with me anyway uh about how he didn't want a short change either genre he was he loves rom-coms as much as he loves horror movies and i think that's what shows through in the final product yeah well and also uh you know speaking of like movies getting made for low budget those that's like right now when you go to film schools they tell their students like, if you want to get something made, make a horror film or a rom-com

because those gets funded really easily and you guys are like, bet. So like? Oh, my beer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Was that semi-intentional like to make sure the thing actually got made

or was it just like I love those genres that's mush them together? No, I think, I mean, I think the project, the genesis of the project was obviously with the writers and I think they had sort of moments of inspiration from what I've read and what I've talked to them about it

and they kind of yeah they ran with the idea and I don't think it was consciously oh this will make lots of money here this will be a success it was more a case of wouldn't this be an interesting idea if we took this idea

of a date and date gone wrong and how could it possibly go any worse and off they went yeah well and just I don't want to like like say too much about the film itself in specificity for people who haven't seen it. But I just, the simple concept of them going, we're not together. Like is such a funny, yeah, you know, through line for this whole thing.

Just kill somebody else. It's not like, it's so stupid that I love it. It's great. It's right. The odd couple. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So talk to you about like pre-production on it because watching it, two things happened, which sucks for me.

One, I immediately stopped focusing on the cinematography because I was having too much fun and I kept on having to like re-center. So you might have to fill in some blanks for me. But it, the scope of the film feels very large, but it does, like my memory of it, now that I'm thinking about it,

there weren't like too many locations. How are you guys in a lot? I mean, we were like a 30, 35 day shoot, I think, 34, 35, something around that mark. That seems reasonable. And, you know, during prep, obviously you have the script. The script is still being worked on and adjusted, you know, as we sort of find locations together. And, you know, the locations inspire you to kind of go, oh, you know what?

It doesn't say this on the page, but maybe we could do this here and, you know, change the sequence slightly that way. Or maybe we could combine these two scenes to work in this one amazing location and, you know, sort of, you know, reposition stuff. And so that feeds into what the script and what you're going to do. But in terms of the scope of us, you know, there was always, you know, obviously everyone goes into every project with ambition, but this was very ambitious and, but we were kind of all up for the challenge, you know. We really wanted to sell the 80s, 90s sort of blockbuster horror side of things or the

slasher side of things, you know, um, in terms of the visuals. And we wanted to shoot anamorphic, which gives it a certain scale. Um, and yeah, so we kind of reached, we sort of reached for the stars. Um, I really like wide shots. I'm, I'm always trying to push for wide and wide and wide. Uh, even if they only get used briefly, I just still think it kind of gives you a lovely geography and a lovely sense of scale. So yeah, we were, you know, we had that in mind. And every time we walk into a location, I go stand in the corner. in look towards the windows of the light source and think of what's the wider shot we could get in here

and, you know, Josh will come over and go, I'm probably going to play this all this way and this way. And I go, yeah, yeah, but just have a look at this. And then allow the time you go, yeah, you know what, looks pretty good, let's do it. So, yeah, yeah, we definitely, definitely had sort of ambitions of grandeur. Well, it totally makes sense you saying that because, like, there's a few shots that come up,

like the restaurant where she kind of first meets him. So not the coffee shop, but the restaurant. And then also the drive-in theater, you know, there's that big swoopy thing. And I don't know why those two. I mean, I know where the drive-in comes up to mind. But you do have this way of shooting those wides, those establishing shots in a way that feels very blockbuster, as you said. Like, you know, it definitely adds to the production value of everything while not even being too flashy. You know, it's just something I don't think you see a lot of.

I think you jump in pretty quick these days. Yeah. Yeah, I think, I mean, Josh and I both love a lot of the same movies from the same periods, you know, the 80s, 90s stuff. You know, we grew up on all of that, you know, like I said, the Ambulin stuff and the Spielberg stuff and the, you know, a lot of the classic horror movies and things. So we had a lot of the same goals in mind. And when Josh and I started talking about the visuals, he, you know, straightaway was talking about the, visual idea of blue moonlight he loves blue moonlight from all those movies and um you know that's kind of falling away a little bit in the last sort of 10 or so years in cinematography um because we've kind of veer towards like a more naturalistic visual style since the advent of you know faster sensor

digital cameras and all that kind of stuff um and i was you know really keen to embrace the blue moonlight and and also embrace like lighting the night scenes, you know, the way it would have been lit in the 90s rather than maybe the way we, you know, another job might do them now. So that adds to a lot of that sort of richness that you see in this, you know, because you can see it lit. We haven't just turned up at the car park of the drive-in and gone, hey, let's stick a little light here for a close-up and let's go with the streetlights. You know, we've actually consciously switched things off or change out the streetlights. our street lights and things like that.

And I think that definitely gives you a, gives you that sort of glossier Hollywood, you know, blockbuster visual. You know, you combine that with the animorphic lenses and I really love wider animorphics. I think the longer you go on an animorphic lens, the less animorphic it feels. It starts to be hysterical.

So we're doing a lot of our, you know, obviously our wides are on the wides and then we're doing a lot of our coverage on animorphics, a wider animorphics, but closer to the actors. which means it's a little more dynamic for the camera as well. You can sort of feel the camera moves a little more and a little more energy when you're chasing someone or, you know, preceding someone. And then we save the longer length stuff for a few key scenes that we were where we wanted it to feel more romantic.

Yes. And or the scene in the restaurant. Yeah. Right. I'm so glad you brought that up because, uh, the, you know, night, night is a very, like both contentious, as you said, but like it's difficult to shoot. Even if you've got, you know, a 12,800 base ISO, it's very easy to phone it in with that, you know. So I was wondering, I was just, I was going to ask you already, like, if you could go into specificity about how you lit the night scenes.

Because there's a ton of night stuff, which is pretty bold. But obviously with the drive-in, you've got kind of the, it's a little softer because you're selling the. screen. That's great. But, um, yeah, if you could go into like, so, um, how can we steal that? Yeah. The super techie version is, um, it kind of all stems from the tests we did. Uh, when we, in pre-production, we, I was really keen to test the hard eyes mask as soon as possible to see what the colors would look like under the blue moon lights and, um, you know, to see what we could do, how we could create this character on screen. Um, and the best, way the light hard eyes that I found a light hard eyes was with a hard back light and or a hard

edge light because that would catch the texture of the mask of the prosthetics. Such a good mask. It's great, right? It's a really beautiful design. And there was so much lovely texture sculpted into it that when we, you know, the makeup team added a little sheen to it so that they would just catch the light and skip off it and you'd get all these nice specular highlights and it would look cool. And then any light, you know, the makeup. light that you'd have on his face, you needed that to be, I tried to keep it moving a lot of the time so that he wasn't fully revealed. And sort of the idea of lighting him that way and then lighting the cast in a more complimentary way so that they would always look good or always

look like movie stars meant that I, you know, it's going to use big soft sources for their closeups. So to kind of make all that work for the amount of nights that we had, because we, you know, Well, because it'll be 30 something days, 35 days, which is, you know, not a luxurious schedule. It's not terrible, but it's not luxurious either. Efficient. Yeah. So what we decided to do was I asked Sam, Sam Jellie, my Gaffer, to look into moving headlights, you know, theater style lights. Oh, sure.

And he found a bunch of very lights that we carried on our package. and a lot of the time say if the drive-in it's a great example we go to the drive-in and because we were facing the water's edge it was very difficult

finding positions to put traditional cranes to light from even if we had all the money in the world it was still going to be tricky but there was a whole bunch of street lights

you know everywhere as far as you could see so we would pick an axis to shoot on and we'd know okay the set is 180 degrees looking this way

and this way and then Sam could rig all those moving lights on the top of the street lights and then I could control them from the ground via the desktop so we could handle and tilt those whatever way we want so I had six back lights which were all motorized all moving covered me in all different directions and that kind of style started to become the kind of the norm for the show would have if we could get a condor in or a couple of condors in

we'd put the newer sky panels on them the they're called the x23s the ones that have the sort of lens, more focused lenses on them. I don't know. The orbiter is funny if I never actually used the orbiter, tried it, but I've never sort of used it in anger. I love you guys, Ari, but yeah, no one. But the S-23 is like a nice sort of punchy backlice and it's obviously LED and controllable. And yeah, we would use things I've asked. We'd tuck them around corners, put them on buildings. We had to, we put them on cranes.

a couple of times we needed very, very big cranes and we'd make a bank of 18Ks, depending on how far away the machines needed to be. It's all very, I don't say old school, but it's all very tried and tested ways of lighting, night exteriors. It might just be not the way that lots of people have been doing it recently

because it's slightly fallen out of fashion. But for me, for my tastes and for the style of the movie, it worked perfectly. That's sort of, you know, smoky, you know, sources in the streets and wet down the streets and big back lights and having the lights in shots half the time so they'd flare as the camera pan through them. I think it looks amazing.

So we, we bought it to us. Yeah. I've got to learn how to write faster. The, I don't think it's actually fallen out of fashion. I think it's fallen out of fashion with filmmakers because it takes a little bit more effort. you know, you got to block off parts of streets or stuff. I'm fascinating, because I think audiences, like, you know, I spend a lot of time on the internet that I probably shouldn't.

And I constantly do see discussions about people clamoring for that style of, usually that's the example because it's so dramatic, you know? Yeah. But there's people go like, oh, why do movies look flat? And they always blame the great, the color grade. And it's like, it's the lighting. Yeah. It's the lighting and it's, I don't want to say lazy filmmaking,

because a lot of times it looks fantastic. It's just easy to do and look and it's everyone does it because it's easy and looks good. Yeah. And they can look flat if you're not careful. Yeah. I think the, I think with the, you know,

part of my sort of tendency to lead towards lighting the nights that way is we, you know, I've done stuff in the past which has been super dark and super moody. And that's great and it looks great. But it's on the verge of being, you know, gloom or murky. And, you know, in this case, we wanted everyone to look still, you know, look good, look like movie stars.

And we wanted to see the story and we wanted to still have shape and texture and, you know, shadows and dimension to the images. And that is, you know, classic Hollywood's nice exterior lighting, which I think, I agree. I think everyone still think it looks great. I think it's just, I think there's a whole generation. of filmmakers that have grown up not knowing but not knowing how to do that and maybe that's you know part of the issue and you know the same with you know it's not just the dps it's the production teams too so you rock into a show and as a dp and you start saying to the line producer yeah i'm going to need four five six condors every night for the next six weeks and they're like

holy shit we haven't budgeted for that right and luckily on this i had an incredible crew in new zealand's a fantastic production team and they're like yeah great that's how we know that that's how you do night exterior. So we've allowed for that. Yeah. Or if you're on, you know, my end of the budget, it's less the production and more the AD. You know, just, hey, don't, don't set that up. All right. Yeah. It's, and the thing is, you work that way and, you know, you need to work fast because, like I said, this schedule's tight. And I have this thing about momentum on set. I, I really like working fast. I think momentum is really important for the director. It's important for the actors. And I would rather spend longer

setting something up so that when we start shooting, I'm spending less time stopping them between takes to relight. So once I can show the prediction team and the ADs how quick we are by doing this, everyone buys into us. You know, it's like whatever the extra cost is of the machine or access to the roof to put a light on it or whatever it is. It saves us time and money and gives the director another take or two or another shot or two. And it just helps everybody just stay in a faster rhythm on the day, which everyone appreciates.

Yeah, that's the old Fincher thing in it. Like I was talking to Eigle Burled and he was talking about it because he shot first season House of Cards. And he was saying that like the camera, I don't know if this had changed, but he was saying that the camera car, like all the camera equipment had to fit in a sprinter van and it had to be ready to go in 15 minutes and like they would pre-light everything. And so when they got on set, it was just like, as you're saying, momentum from the jump.

Like everything's just rigged up. And he's like as much time as the actors get, like as much time we have, the actors get it. Why are we spending 30 minutes routing a cable? You know, if the cable gets 30 minutes and the actor gets 15, that's ridiculous. Exactly. Exactly. And it's, you know, when you work with a really experienced crew as well, they buy into that. They know that. So when I start saying, hey, I've got this crazy idea.

I want to do this, you know, lighting set up this way, you know, the gaffer and the ringing gaffer are able to go, okay, the way to make that work time wise is let's do it like this. And, you know, they're all conscious of trying to maintain a good crew is conscious of trying to maintain that rhythm. You know, no one wants to stand around and watch me tell the electrical team had a light a set for the. two hours, you know, not that I'm going to be given that, you know, but it's, it's, it is important for everybody, especially night shoots, you know, you're going to do six, seven weeks of nights, people's energy starts, you know, crumbling, you know, if they feel that we're not wasting time and that there go, go, go, go all the way, it helps everyone's happy with that. We do reasonable hours because we're in New Zealand, you know. So, yeah, it's a good way to

keep the spirits up. Yeah, I did, I did want to touch back on the, uh, use the movers for a second because I'm actually fascinated by this as I like I feel like more people should probably do that. But were you mounting them just two light poles or are you mounting them like where the light normally comes from? Mounding them to the streetlights and then switching off the streetlights if they weren't in shots. So basically in the same place though where the light actually was? Above us. So if I wasn't going to see the light source, you know, if I wasn't going to see the street light source or if I well, even if I was, depending on what height the street light was that. I could put the moving light sitting right on top of the street

lights. And if I was going to look right at that street light, I just need to pan that moving light over towards the lens. It flares the lens out because we're in an amorphic world. So you can't really see that it's a cheated light source. So basically I'm using the street lights as a poor man's version of a cherry picker. Mm-hmm. It means I need one cherry picker in the in the pre-rig to just drive around and do all that instead of needing six cherry pickers. on the shoot mat. Yeah. I don't need to move them.

They're never in the shot. So it means you can pan 180 degrees through all that stuff. You're never seeing any of the chutney as I call it. The lights are all up there. It means I can control the lights from the ground.

I can pan them around. If I need a bit of extra backlight over here, a splash of light in the background over there. It was just really clever efficient filmmaking for us. Yeah, I'm definitely, well, Lord knows when I'll be at that budget. But I'm stealing it.

if I can't stay away. But the other thing I'm wondering about, because I'm, you know, a couple years ago, I got a color meter and I just became a fucking, you know,

quality nerd. The spectral output of those things is like good enough that it didn't look crap on. Oh yeah, no, they're great. I mean,

again, it depends on, I suppose, which model you go for, but the ones we went, you know, for a very high end. And yeah,

it's 98, 99% CRIs. So it's like, it's great stuff. Yeah, it was great. I wasn't necessarily going to use them to light a close-up on the floor. Sure. That would be, but for our purposes of, you know, big, broad backlights or punchy backlights, you know, they were perfect.

Gotcha. And so you weren't modifying them in any way or just hidden people. Just hidden people. Yeah, no, no diffusion in front of them because, again, we kept them as edge lights or backlights. So they were always hard. There is a diffuser built into them that we use quite abyss, which softens the beam a little. It's not anywhere you're the same as. putting, you know, large textile in front of it.

But they were never intended to be sort of soft sources. So if we were going to do something softer, we'd use a soft box over the set or so the movie theater, the drive-in has a 40-40 soft box, or maybe it's only 40 by 20, actually, softbox above the set. And, you know, everything else on the floor was, it was still LED, because we used LED almost exclusively through the movie. Oh, you know what I was using a lot of, I keep calling them sausages. They're not sausages.

They're like an inflatable sock that you can put on a, made of diffusion that you can put on in a stare at you. Yep. It's kind of like a modern version of an old covered wagon. So you can put them on a stand, you can throw them on the floor, you've got total control over them. They're really soft source. They were great.

You can hide those lights really easily. They were great for the night stuff, you know, when you're sort of in horror mode and running around like crazy and trying to hide lights around corners and stuff. And then for the rom-com world, we were more traditional in using, you know, the biggest source, we could,

our softest, biggest source that we could get as close to the camera as possible. So you had this big romantic key lights wrapping around their faces. And usually that was vortexes and stuff through that. Yeah. I do want to touch on that, but I wanted to show you something that you brought that up.

I found for like 30 bucks. Have you seen these things? They're like weird. That looks like a slightly thinner version of the sausages that I'm talking about. But these are stupid because you blow it up and then it holds up. Yeah. Yeah. Great.

I think I'm trying to think of the name of the brand of what I'm talking about because the manufacturer will kill me. But I think the American version is called an air scientist. sock or something like that. Yeah, I think you're right. Is it DOP choice who makes some or? Not those guys. There's a, you know what, I'll have to, I can always email you. I can dig out the brand, but I had them on, um, was an American gaffer on

mystery, Mrs. Smith showed them to me and I was like, these are amazing. And I said it then to a UK gaffer and he was like, oh, the UK version is called something else. RST visions, uh, could be. Don't know. Honestly, can't remember. But essentially it's a, it's a, it's an inflatable sock in four, foot, eight foot, and you just, you know, it's like maybe one foot in diameter, it's made a

diffusion, sticking a stereo chip in there, you're good to go. They just go everywhere. Yeah, if you Google Lights sock, they show up. Lights up. Whoever's trying to buy one, that's how you get it. Yeah. There's my free light sock gone. Yeah. Oh, no, we'll get you the hook. They sell them with film tools. We'll air ship them to you. I did want to kind of, you brought it up, but I kind of wanted to ask about the beauty world versus the horror world star slasher stuff. Yeah.

Because it's not as defined as you might think. Meaning the whole film looks cohesive. It's not like you're watching two separate films. So I kind of wanted to know, A, was that intentional or was that just, you know, because you guys are good at your job, but B, using two examples like the coffee shop. Like, how did you like the coffee shop versus like the police station,

for instance. I mean, in a very different way. They're both very different. And a lot of that's driven by the space that you've got in both places. So the police stations assess, see you a little bit more flexibility there. The coffee shops are relocation. But the kind of needs, the visual needs of the coffee shop are very different from the police station. So a lot of the, you know, Josh is sort of two, or in my head is two keystone images that I certainly that I latched onto in prep.

Or the idea of Jason lives for the nighttime, you know, the blue or moonlight stuff. And he had an image of Tom Hanks from Big, the scene where Tom Hanks goes to the party, tries the blue cheese or whatever it is. And behind them are these pink curtain shears, which look horrendous. But he loved that. And so that was going to be our big date night, our restaurant with the pink curtain shears. And so in my mind, I was trying to make those two ends of the spectrum kind of work. You know, we built our language between those two goalposts, if you like.

The thing that kind of carries through between them, even the color is totally different and the quality of light is different from the rom-com side to the slasher side is that the lensing is the same. So we're still on the wider lenses and kind of closer to them for almost all of the scenes. And then the idea of trying to keep the actors looking like movie stars is kind of the through line that travels through. I don't normally do that. Normally, I'm like, no, no, no. They can have circles under their eyes and, you know, we can not see their faces.

And, you know, and obviously some people are like, oh, we really want to see their faces, Steve. But I made just a very conscious effort to try and keep them looking like movie stars the whole way through. and I play with the amount of shadow that they guess in the Ramcom side versus the horror side which helps define the two looks but I'm still sort of treating them in a similar way I know that if I'm in the horror world I can make the white shots moody

and I can sketch them out with backlights and then when I get in for a close-up I know I need something nice and soft to key them I just don't wrap it around their faces as much on the horror world as I do in the, the comedy or the rom-com world. Well, and I kind of want to drill down on the beauty look

because I think for a lot of filmmakers that could be a very valuable lesson. You know, with a more conservative lens. What lenses did you shoot? So we were on these lenses from Panavision. They're anamorphic and they are custom made for somebody else, someone bigger than me

that I managed to an heirs. They are at their B series anamorphics that they have pulled apart and mated with their modern T-series anamorphics. So what it means is you end up getting a lot of the benefits of the mechanics of the modern lenses, like close focus and a kind of a nicer, lighter weight package. But you get some of the beautiful flaring and softening of the older animorphics from the B-series, which really helps with the beauty work and helps with the portraiture.

So we had those. Yeah, we were very lucky to sort of. of land a set of those. I'm glad you said that because the next thing I was going to say was like, I'm just proud of myself for picking up on it. I was like,

because they're not, they don't fall apart or anything, but they are very, they are a choice of a lens. Like they look really cool. And so I was going to say for a more, if someone were to pick a more conservative lens, that beauty look absolutely could be on a Super Bowl commercial

or something like that. Like it's shot great. So what, when you say, um, you wanted people to look like movie stars. What did that look like? practically on set, you know, when you're setting up the lights and stuff.

So again, in the big white shots, you know, you don't see the lights are all coming from but usually behind the actors. The key thing for me, I kind of, like a little obsessed with it is I'm always trying to shoot towards the light source or across the light source. I never want the light sources to be behind me. When I say me, I mean the camera. If I can keep the lights, you know, behind the cast or alongside the cast and they'll always be backlit or side lit. And that's better for them. It's better for the camera. It's better for creating dramatic images. The degree to which I can keep them in shadow or semi-situetted shadow is depending on the story, you know, whether we're in rom-com world or horror world. So the thing that

sort of inspired me was I'm a huge fan of Yanish Kovinsky and his work with Steven Spielberg. and I read a article with him a long time ago when he was doing Catch Me If You Can and he said that on that movie Spielberg said he wanted it to feel more romantic like a glass of champagne and

that's kind of what I had in my head when I was trying to shoot the rom-com stuff I wanted it to be a little sparkly and a little bit beautiful not a little bit of a loss beautiful more beautiful than I'd normally go for I would normally strive for more naturalism. And, you know, like I said, I have been slapped on the wrist many times for making everything way too dark.

But for the rom-com stuff, I wanted it to be bubbly and beautiful. And I just wanted some of that beauty to then travel through into the horror world. Yeah. That is such an evocative phrase. I want it to look like a glass of champagne because that could be interpreted so many interesting ways. Yeah. Yeah. you know, especially like me being a dumbass immediately goes,

oh, glimmer glass. That's how they advertise it. So like in practice, what that meant for me on hard eyes was if I'm looking at one of the cast, instead of keeping the key light all the way over to one side so that half their face drops off in shadow, which is what we did on the night work, I was bringing that key light closer to the lens

so that it would start to fill in more of the shadow or what would traditionally be the shadow side of the face, you mean you'd get two catch lights in both eyes and it would just wrap way further around the face than you'd normally do on a drama. When we then do the night work, that same idea of that big soft key lights gets pulled back to a side position

or sometimes a third or three-quarter back position depending on how much you wanted to wrap and how many eyes you want to catch. And sometimes depending on the shot, you might, you know, I'd be playing with that with Sam and the Gaffer going, okay, if we bring it just another tiny bit this way, it'll just catch the second eye, but it won't fill in the shadow side of the face, you know, or sometimes you'd say, screw it, we don't need the second eye, we can just

have one eye of it. So it was that, that was the kind of dance we played, played with the key last, if that makes sense. Yeah, of course. Yeah, you know, for whatever reason I was just reminded of, it was earlier in the film, so I was still in my analytics mode and not in my having fun mode but uh the um first what do you call it conference room scene oh yeah where she gets uh you know chewed out for blowing it um for whatever reason i remember going this like this room looks lit way better than it should like there's like so many ways you could have done that and i was like damn like he really is just like making everything look really good i was wondering if you can tell me like how you came about that because obviously you've got all those windows

that you can yeah you know uh makes things look better but whenever i do like corporate interview stuff because all the corporate people only think in literal terms so they go oh you're going to interview someone that's a meeting you know where meetings happen um so yeah how'd you get away with making that that look nice was that a set no unfortunately it wasn't i really wish it was a set that was a That was a location and that was a very beautiful boardroom at the top of the 37th floor, something like that, which meant I had absolutely no control of the weather outside. And in fantastic New Zealand fashion, the sun was in and then out and then in and then out all day long. And it made me cry all day long. That was one of those locations that, yeah, I didn't enjoy.

but I'm glad that you liked saying that. Maybe I just felt for you, you know, I knew intrinsically how shit that was. Sympathy pains. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, essentially what we had to do in that space was, was trying to like the foreground, as in the cast, the actors,

to enough of a level that I could then pull as much detail out of the highlights in the background as possible and try and have a little bit of a balance to us. The trick being that, every time you turn a light on in that space, you see the light reflected in all of the glass surfaces that are all over that space as well. So it was a little tricky.

And it was a tight location by the time you bring the crew up and all the cast and all the extras and stuff. So that, yeah, that was a hard day's work for a DAPE. Yeah, no kidding. Were you sort of just like doing the classic shoot it into the ceiling and just try to go even with it? Or were you a little more? No, we were able to shape, but again, we, we, it has a kind of an unusual shape space as like a slightly sloping roof.

And so this sort of architectural supports along one side of it, one of the window sides. So we could hide some of those lights that we're talking about, those kind of sausage lights in those places. And you sort of try and disguise their reflections in the background. And sometimes the reflections are still in the shots. You know, they're just on the longer lenses, they're very soft and so you don't notice them. But, you know, we had a whole bunch of little tricks that we were using to try and get away with that stuff. Yeah. Was that the most challenging, you know, seeing your face with?

Yeah. Yes, absolutely. Even though it's weird, it's like, oh, yeah, it's a bunch of people in the boardroom having a conversation. Actually, from a lighting perspective, that was the most challenging. And there is a, there is a light shift in there. you know, everyone, if you're keen-eyed, if you see it, we lose the light at a certain point and there's nothing we could do to get it back. But yeah, that was hard.

Everything else, all the stuff with scale, the scale doesn't phase me. You know, it's when you're working on like large set pieces, you just do them in bite-sized chunks and you just have a plan and you work through it and that's, you know, not hard. What's hard is when you're 40 floors up and you have no, control over the tools outside, the sun outside, you've nothing, you know, and you're trying to sort of play that game of balance between what's going on inside and what's outside. That's tricky. It's hard. Yeah. Well, and, you know, I interviewed Greg Frazier about Dune. And he released all,

not all, but like a bunch of his lighting plots with behind the scenes photos of a bunch of the sets and the thing that struck me was like it's it's a shit ton of fixtures it's like you know at times thousands of i think vortexes or something um but if you if you just kind of step back and look at it as sources and not like fixtures it's usually just top light key light you know something for some interest and that's it and i was talking to him about i was like this actually gave me a lot of like confidence because even at a huge scale like this it is kind of the same it's always the same thing you know you don't you don't got to think about it's the gaffers problem to figure out how many to put up there yes i mean what you're doing like what you're doing in every

zero like scenario is you're trying to replicate one source or maybe two you're trying to replicate the sun and maybe the sky and maybe practicals and and that's kind of it you know um The idea of sort of single source lighting is not new, but it doesn't, the goal of single source lighting doesn't change, you know, even if you're on a $300 million movie, you just need more units to make a single source work. So as long as you, again, like I said with the scale thing, as long as you break it all down into components, you might have, you know, like I said, six or seven moving heads on streetlights, but you're not trying to make all of those six or seven heads work at the same. time you're trying to make it feel like there is a single source and some of them are doing it when you look this way and you turn around and some of them are doing it that way you know the simpler simpler you make it is usually you know better simple is better usually in lighting terms yeah i did want to ask about uh you'd kind of brought it up earlier but like

for contrast and for education like what was kind of maybe one of the more like indie setups you had or like executions and one of the more sort of like Hollywood wants if you know let me think about it I suppose the more Hollywood stuff is the night the jet I just generally the night exteriors where we you know or some of the set pieces like the carousel or on the driving theater where we have you know larger setups he built bigger cranes and a lot more lights and more cameras and stuff with us um in terms of indie. Let me see. My memory's terrible, so I'm kind of racing too, dude. Well, I'll give you a second because I did want to bring up. I'm pretty sure I remember seeing like at least a source in the

background and, you know, like the, or maybe I just felt it, but I feel like I saw it. And I honestly think that's very Hollywood as well. Like when I think of like Terminator 2 or whatever, there would always be just, you can see the lights right there. And it's like, there she is. You know, yeah. And it's something I love doing that. Josh loves this. It made some people nervous. And I was like, I literally went to home that nice and came into the set the next day to show a few people a bunch of photographs from West Side Story, Spielberg. And I was like, dude, there's a musco in that shot and a Wendy line in that shot. And that's the same shot. You know, it's okay for Spielberg. It should be okay for us. And, you know, me and Josh were loving us.

It's a very, you know, it's Michael Bay thing as well. John McTiernan thing, and I'm a huge John McTiernan fan, you know, so it's, I think if, especially if it's anamorphic, if it's anamorphic and you're getting these, you know, movie lights and shots, and it's not, you know, if it's a 200-foot crane and it's like, you know, the other end of the street, that kind of could be a street lights, maybe, you know, you try and hide the crane arm as much as you can. I don't want to see the crane arm but I don't mind seeing the head you know the unit especially if it's flaring the lens and it doesn't say you know Ari or something on the side of it

just a lens flare like you know street light so I yeah it doesn't bother me all and I just like I said I think it's got energy you know if the camera pans through that sees that it flares pans over here sees a little bit of that it's beautiful it's great

I mean you know I think you can do that even on an indie budget you know especially now you're working at low A or high AIS A's low light levels, you could stick a park hand on the rooftop of a building and point it right at the camera and, you know, you know, feel a little bit of a nice lens where. Yeah. Or even these days, there are some LED flashlights that are way too bright and you just get your buddy on the second floor of a building poking out the window, you know?

I mean, funny if you, because you touched it earlier on, one of the things with the idea of us lighting the night exteriors in a kind of an older school fashion, is when you decide to shoot at like 12,500 ASA, you spend a lot of time flagging lights and controlling light that you don't see when you're, you know, if you're doing it my way, if you're doing the hard eyes way, where we've lit the set and we're working to a control T-stop,

that helps your contrast hugely, which helps you sort of the apparent sharpness of the image a lot. And it gives you a lot more snap to the image. if I was at a higher ISO and wasn't lighting it that way and I'm working off the street lights, you're having to work to shape the lights a lot and to control the spinel from like everything, you know, the lights from the shops

or the car headlights as they drive by, you know, stuff like that. It's just a different way of doing it and it's not necessarily right or wrong, it's just different. You know, I personally have been shooting at lower. I primarily shoot Canon just because I own them. And their base ISO is actually like 160. They tell everyone it's 800, but that's just because of the latitude. But I've just been shooting at like 400 just to force myself to give it a little more contrast.

Because even the negative quote unquote in most log formats is still too not flat. But it's like we have too much latitude. When people tell, I need more dynamic range. I'm like, I don't think you do. I think you need to plan better. Yes, exactly. Exactly. I think, you know, I, the last couple of years, all the stuff I've been doing has been a mix of are mostly Alexa 35 and Sony Venice, one or two. And I have leaned towards higher ISOs, not because I need the light or because I need the sensitivity, is because I'm really keen on stressing the sensor. And in the same way that with 35 mil, you know, I rarely shot 35 mil at its vanilla setting. I'd always be pulling it or pushing it. because I think it performs in a more interesting way when you push it around a little bit.

And I think it's the same with some of the digital cameras, especially the Sony Venice and the Lexa 35. You know, they're so good. But I think they're more interesting, at least to my eye, they're more interesting when you try and break them a little bit that way. And then it means, you know,

on that last job I've just done, did last year, it was a studio job, almost all interiors and a big cess. Venice 2, we were at 3,200, No, 2,500 maybe for the whole movie. And it was, it meant I could just MD everything down.

So for the wide shots, I could pull the ND and shoot it as wide open as I want to. And then we go into the mediums and the closeups. I can, you know, get a bit more stop. And it's, you know, better for the focus pullers, better for the lenses. It means you have all the snap to the image. You're not sort of struggling with the mechanics of the lens. But when I want it to be a little wider and little softer, I can just pull, the ND and I get total control over it.

So it's, yeah, it's part of it as well as me, you know, with a bit of experience learning that, you know, the lenses love light and they're not designed to necessarily have you run around shooting everything at T1, you know, at 1,200 ASA. That's a look and it can look really beautiful, but it's not the look that, you know, know, I necessarily want to go for on a movie like this. Yeah, be able to shoot like an F4. Yeah, yeah, that's it. I think I, we had, I'm going to say most of our movie was two, eight and a half,

between two eight and a four, even all the night exteriors. Yeah, it's, it's funny, like, going back and reading all of the American cinematographers. And, you know, kind of at the beginning when you were talking about, like, it's not, things falling out of fashion or whatever. It's like, this formula has worked for so long. and then technology and it's the I feel like it's the same problem with TVs you know the TV salesmen are always like it can do whatever the fuck and you watch it on the screen and or at the Best Buy or whatever and they've got it on demo mode and everything's flashy it's like but the thing we liked this whole time hasn't changed yeah why are you changing it so it's you know just read an American cinematographer even like 2005 and it you know not that long ago and it's like it's the same techniques from the 70s from the 90s from, and they all look good. Shooting at like 2.8 or whatever

when that was wide open. Yeah, I mean, the thing that controls your image or that will influence your image the most is never going to be by and large, it's never going to be the lens or the camera or a filter or a light. It's your lighting.

I think when you learn enough that you've got enough of a sense of control over that lighting, that's what's going to affect your image the most. and give you the most, you know, visual difference. Yeah. Were there, I know you mentioned a couple of it,

but were there any other influences for hard eyes that you guys like purposefully looked at and said like maybe you let's not do this, let's lean more into this? I don't think there's a, you know, we sort of talked around about, again, in a sort of a tonal conversation about the violence, wanting to be fun.

You know, Josh never wanted to make, you know, something nasty he wanted it to be fun so we were kind of talking about some movies in the way oh that's you know not necessarily the visuals but more the tone that's a little too that's too violent it's not what we're going for but you know we would trade a lot of different references you know we talked a lot about sam ramy stuff um you know i'm a huge fan of um medieval dead evil dead three uh he loves dark man um you know and you know even though the movie doesn't look like either of those movies, it's more the sort of I, the sense of fun that Sam has in those movies with the film, the story and the filmmaking, you know, the practical effects

and stop motion puppetry and model making and prosthetics and stuff. You know, we talked about other stuff like Monster Squad, again, it's a just, it's a great sort of fun movie. It has a great and look like a beautiful night exterior look where you can see everything but it's still moody and you know kind of scary um we you know we were talking about stuff like that um yeah a lot but and a lot of that is not i think it's really important with references that you don't sort of take them too literally you know you don't sit down and sort of clone us because then you're just cloning something you're not really making your own version of it I think it's more important that you sort of discuss this stuff broadly or loosely and let it sort of infuse into

your way of thinking, but not become your literal way of thinking, you know? Yeah. Well, on every job, right? You got a, not necessarily experiment, but there needs to be some form of risk on your part in terms of, you know, trying something, not leaning back on everything. I mean, sometimes you got to lean back, you know, for speed reasons or you know it just works, but I'm always trying to, as you said, like not clone something, because that's not fun, artistically, you know, enjoyable. You know, it's making your own thing is what we want to do, right? Yeah. Yeah. You, you know, you want to, you know, in our case, we wanted it to evoke a certain feeling. You know, we wanted it to, we wanted people to go, oh, it's like a 90s slash movie or it's like a 90s

rom-com movie. And we've done that. We've absolutely done that. But if you were to, to literally side by side it with a 90s movie, not that I've done this, it would be different. You know, it's, it's our version of, of that or of our memory of that. And sometimes that's its own thing altogether as well, you know. Yeah, my sister actually has been pitching it to all her friends as it's a lot like scream. Yeah, yeah.

Right. So, and I wonder generationally, if you said that to somebody, you say that to me and I think of the original screen, because that's what I want to see, you know, like him out. That's what she means, yeah. We're both about the same age. But does she, you know, there's a whole bunch of people that will take that as, oh,

the Scream from whatever was, 2006, 2007, you know. They just remade it, right? There was one in like 2022 or something. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, Scream is definitely, it's funny, if it's not actually something I recall us talking about in prep,

you know, much. It's not, it wasn't either of us going, oh, it needs to look like that. But my memory is, of Scream, and I haven't seen it in quite a while, and Scream 2 as well, as that they were both gorgeous-looking anamorphic horror movies where everyone was great, you know, the cast stayed great looking throughout the whole thing. It felt lush and big budget and, you know, anamorphic-y. And so there's definitely some of their visual DNA sort of rubbed off on us. But it wasn't necessarily

what Josh and I were discussing, you know, as something for us to watch, you know. Yeah, I think from her perspective, it was more just like tonally where it's not, I wouldn't call scream a horror film, you know, but it's the same thing of like there's certainly tension, but. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and it's a hell of a lot of fun. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

I, uh, I've been asking now, because we're coming up on time, I, uh, been asking because I keep forgetting to do this with people who have, you know, joined the ASC, join the BSC, all these international organizations. I always like to know, like, what was it that got you there? Because I feel like a lot of DPs, that is one of the, maybe not one of the goals, but one of those things where you're like, all right, I'm, I'm on the right path.

I made it into there, you know? So what got you into, because you're into, right, your ISC, BSC? Yeah, Irish and British, yeah. Which was first and how did you get into both? The British came first. So I was living in London for a long time. I've only recently moved back to Ireland so the British one came first

and the Irish one came a couple weeks later by coincidence and the piece of work that I think got me in although you'll never know because with both of the societies and it's probably the same for the ASC you submit like a range of work and there's a panel that will discuss this

and you know a lot of people are asked to resubmiss you know maybe in a year or two kind of later down the way but you're never kind of you're just told you you've come in, you've been accepted or you need to come back, you know, and try again. But you're never sort of given any feedback on the specific, oh, we loved that movie and that's why you're

it. But I have sort of a, after I got in a few of the people, you know, kind of made a few comments to me. And I think the piece of work that got me into the BSE was a mini series called Death and Nightingales, which has Jamie Doran in us. It's the complete opposite of hard eyes. It's a period piece. It was a really fantastic piece of work to do. It's quite hard to track down in the US, I think. It was done by the BBC with a great director. And we had, again, it was a great experience.

It was a great crew, which is very like Hard Eyes, you know, great team around me. And yeah, it was my chance to do a kind of a classic, you know, English period piece set in Ireland. And it turned out really well. just a great time and like I said it was everyone was rowing in the right direction so it made the job really easy to do it's making me think of you know how like when a movie comes out and you're like oh this is for the Oscar voters it's like you make a you know a British you know

classic British thing and they're like oh he did it into the BSC you come you know that's it quick check that box yeah got him um well I really appreciate I'm gonna have to try to find that series if I can um I really appreciate you uh Nightingale it's really good Yeah, I very much appreciate you coming on the show and chatting me as a lot of fun. And like I said, the movie was phenomenal. And I've just been telling everyone to watch it. I've been telling everyone to watch that in The Brutalist. It's like one different, different weeks, different weeks.

Very different. That's very different. Of course, yeah, next time you want to chat, just let me know. I'd love to have you back. Cool. All right, no problem. Frame and Reference is an Albot production, produced and edited by me, Kenny McMillan. If you'd like to support the podcast directly, you can do so by going to

frame and refpod.com and clicking on the Patreon button. It's always appreciated. And as always, thanks for listening.