Frame & Reference Podcast - 199: "Landman" Cinematographer Robert McLachlan, ASC CSC

Episode Date: July 17, 2025

This week we've got the incredible Robert McLachlan, ASC CSC on the program to talk about shooting the Paramount+ show Landman!Robert's work includes Game of Thrones, Final Destination, Ray Donovan, Lovecraft Country, Westworld, and one of my cult favorites, The One with Jet Li!Enjoy!► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠F&R Online ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Support F&R⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Watch on YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Produced by Kenny McMillan► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Hello, and welcome to this episode 199 of frame and reference. You're about to drop into a conversation between me, Kenny McMillan, and my guest, Robert McLaughlin, ASC, CSC, DP of Landman. Enjoy it. just recently like a couple days ago the corridor digital people down the street here in LA made a video about you know they're watching BFX stuff and I had this moment because I was like I interviewed the DP from from that what they were talking about and I realized I didn't it was the steady cam operator Jacques Jafray I know Jacques yeah on the one right and then I learned you shot the one because I was complimenting him on how much

I loved that movie, but I should have given it to you. Yeah, Jacques did a few days on it. We didn't use much stay cam on that show, actually. It's such a fantastic little sci-fi. It's so of the time, too. Like, the soundtrack is so early 2000s, like Jet Leads. It's so polished. I love that movie.

Yeah, that was some funny. That was my first movie in Hollywood, actually. I previously didn't. Yeah, I'd worked with Morgan and Wong, who made it on several movies, but they were all shot up in Vancouver, including the first and third final destiny issue movie and a couple of others. So, yeah. Yeah, they were taught the YouTube video, they were talking about the, the difficulty of the

BFX, like all the face replacements and all that. Yeah, they didn't really, the Viz FX house that they were, that they used, I kind of underdelivered on that front. nobody had ever really done it before yet so it not to that extent where so you know gently was fighting gently but i don't know if you knew this story but that movie um originally it was written for the rock it was going to be the rock's first movie and it was going to be a completely different movie it was going to be the rock slaps down the rock and and um at the last minute he got he he he got his burlough from

WWF canceled because somebody was sick or injured or something so the movie shut we were all set to go and the movie shut down for three months while they decided well let's make it about Jet Lee and then it kind of became you know the whole the whole thing about the different

styles of kung fu fighting and stuff became an issue but it's it's still a really entertaining movie it's certainly fun to do well I look first of all I don't think it would have better with the rock. Just various versions of...

It's been very different. Yeah. But it's also when I think about like the movies that made me want to... I'm a DP. I don't know if I established that. The movies that made me want to make movies, I very

vividly remember the sort of behind the scenes of Jet Lee doing like backhanding tennis balls through a parking, like a loading dock. And going like, that looks cool that we're going to replace it with like slow-mo people that was the other thing you guys

had so much slow-mo on it that was like comped into real speed i was like this is impossible crazy no one's ever done this yeah yeah i also use something on that that i developed it back in the 90s um for millennium um where we used clermont used to make the used to have these strobes that kezlo has now but i don't think they've been maintained um and they were fired for a 50,000th of a second at whatever point in the in the in the in the 24 you know 24 frames a second point of the shutter being open that you wanted it to I usually put it right in the middle but what it did was it gave prantic action really crisp if you lit it that way it gave them you know it froze the action so right it became incredibly crisp but what I like to do was and I don't I've never

seen anybody else do this is shoot at 12 or 16 frames a second, print it back to 24, light it with the strobes for like maybe an edge, and then light the front with tungsten light. So, you know, hands doing kung fu shit or whatever, or running really fast or whatever, have a huge amount of motion blur because you're going at six or 12 frames a second. But at the same time, they're outlined incredibly crisply. Right. Some of the stuff where he's running down the street and stuff, looks like it was of his effects, but it was actually entirely done in camera. Interesting. Well, and it's, that's something that probably they would want to step away from now because visual effects are so

common, but at the time, you know, that would have. That was a big deal. Yeah. And the other thing was that, you know, I, I convinced them when we were in prep, oh, brother, where art thou had just come out and doing digital intermediates and color timing that way. That was, the first, that was the first movie that did that. And I convinced Sony to do that with this movie. And, you know, because I'd done so much television where you had all those same tools available to you, but you didn't have them in a traditional film print finish. But now we, now we'd be able to apply those same tools, which, you know, you were talking about, you know, all the, all the, all the little cheats that you've got available to you, you know, doing a dynamic mat, doing, you know,

sweetening the edges, you know, all that sort of things, adding shadows somewhere. And we kind of shot it with that in mind that we were going to get to do that at the Kodak facility where they did, what brother were right now. And we were going to apply looks to it after the fact and so on and so forth. In the end, they came down and they accelerated the release date and it wasn't going to allow us to do that because at the time, that was a very, very slow, laborious process. Right. Digital timing on a movie because, you know,

I literally only been done once before. And so they pulled that rug out from under us, and we had to go back and do a traditional film finish, which was a bit frustrating. I think it would have been a more interesting-looking movie if we had that opportunity. But on the other hand, you know, it wasn't, you know, it was, you know, I gave it a, you know,

the negative was, was malleable enough that we could do a lot with it in the final color timing. Well, and to be fair, it does have such a unique look to it, like whatever you pulled off in the baths, as it were, I think, I don't know. It would have been interesting to see what the, you know what, are they, at some point someone's going to ask you to do like a 4K Blu-ray remaster. You know, they're going to put it in the Criterion collection maybe, and they'll have you go back and re-color.

Here's the thing, you'd be surprised how often they do. don't tell you when they're going to do a remaster. And really? Like most of the time, they don't because my experience is that that colorists and the guys who do those things all think they know better. And they, you know, I mean, I had a, you know, the first time I experienced it, I was, I was shocked, actually. I did a remake for TNT of High Noon with Tons, Garrett, wonderful Ozzie director

who named Rod Hardy directed it. We did it up at the Loadsome Dubs set in the Rocky Mountain, Woodhills in Alberta. And we wanted to, the producers had gotten hold of the original script for high noon. They didn't have any other rights of music or anything else, but they had,

so we remade that script, which is a very good script, obviously. And the first, the original version with Kerry Cooper was shot over, if I remember correctly, it was shot over like 45 days on a back lot in Burbank. um we had 18 days um on a practical western set that was prone to all kinds of we we had a white out blizzard day one and day 18 just to you know we're up against it but one of the things

the director and i wanted to do was um was to desaturate it as much as we could and and you know we showed them some tests that we did ahead of time um in the grade and the studio said nope nope nope no way nope it's got to be color um so instead what we did what i did was we started it in color full on color we shot more or less in order in very much in sequence um and as the story went on every day i had the colorist pull a little more color out so nobody noticed we were doing it so it started in color and when things start to get really grim for the sheriff we'd suck most of the color out of it and the other thing that that helped us with was was weather wise because if it was a gray day or a sunny day, that really affected the vibrancy of the colors and the set

and stuff. And if you're desaturating it, it made a lot easier to match that and just have the consistency because here's a movie that takes place over one hour. Right. So, you know, that kind of maintaining that kind of continuity is always a headache. And pulling a color out helped us helped us do that. So it finished. They found out what we did. They thought it was fantastic. They put me on camera talking about it and all the EPK kits and stuff like that. And they were so happy with it. They struck a print. I had Dan Muscarella at photochem do the print for me. And we, I think it was still a photochemical process, but we did a bleach bypass thing with it where we were able to slowly draw the color out. Had a big screening and

Hollywood, all the actors and everybody were there, look fantastic. Yeah. And then came, then they asked me to come in and do the commentary for the DVD. And I got there and the guy at the, the guy at the DVD mastering place, it said, oh, you're going to be real happy with the picture on it. Like, I went through it and I talked through it about how we did this process with the picture. He says, you're going to, you're going to love it. We got all the color back in it. It just looks great.

And it was like, what the fuck? Right. And that, you know, I'm not sure that there's, I'm pretty sure there's a, I don't know if there's a Blu-ray of the one out there, but nobody talked to me about it. They typically don't. I think, I think part of it is that, you know, some DPs insist on being paid to sit in on do it, which is counterproductive because now they just simply leave us out of the mix anyway. And it's insulting.

And it doesn't, it doesn't do anything to help the movies. They, they look a lot worse than they, than they ought to. Yeah. I mean, that,

that is like, the one that comes to mind immediately is the, the matrix. Obviously, the, the difference of Bill Pope's, you know, intended great.

Same thing with, um, seven, the new release of seven. Oh my God. People talking about like, oh, this was supposed to be,

this isn't how I remember it. And Fincher's like, because you watched a shitty contact print. Like this is, or whatever, release print. And, you know, I didn't, that's not how this was intended. Same thing with the Matrix. It wasn't supposed to be that green. We had to bring it back, you know, but it's only the 4K, not the regular Blu-ray.

DVD's a little bit closer. Oh, this 4K releases a little bit. The color grade is where I feel like all DPs can either win or die. And it's, it's, I hadn't really thought about re-release being that much of an issue, but you're so right. Well, you'd think they'd go back and look at, you know, you know, ideally the original print or, you know, something like that, but they don't. They go in and it's, and they treat it as a blank slate and their opportunity

to become creative and they have nothing to do with it. And I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to disparage colorists because they're also our best friends. Yeah. But it, you know, when, when, when the studios are, you know, doing that kind of thing, they, they, they, I think they get it wrong more often than they get it right right because they're trying they're also trying to especially if they're going back to a film that's maybe like a decade or more old they're going to try to color it to today's sensibilities and not at the time very much so you're absolutely right about that you know i was thinking about like i had i went i had a a criterion edition laser desk of seven which i think looks and and fincher's commentary on

that version, by the way, is incredible. So is the production designers. But it's really interesting to see what happens because then they went back and remastered it for DVD and then they remastered it for 4K. And even when, you know, I'm sure Fincher was involved in it, but I felt like that that, that, that, that laser desk looked a lot more like this stunningly good print I saw in the theater when it came out. And the more removed they got from it, the more different.

it got now you know and and you know maybe maybe fincher was able to make it look more like what he originally thought it should look like but um i thought that that original transfer that you know deris kanji probably supervised uh look really bang on and um you know another movie that that i think suffered over the years was which which in the theater and a laser disc was spectacular was Evita by Alan Parker, which is, you know, and I think that was conji as well. I remember correctly. Yeah, I feel like if Fincher given enough time, he would just meddle incessantly with. With, to be fair, he is probably the greatest master of like using the tools in post to get his only great production side, you know, like,

getting those two sides but aesthetic perfect I have a director friend who did a lot of house of cards and he said the first time he delivered a cut it came back with 37 notes and he said it 37 and he said it

and he went what the hell but only one was about something he had done and all the rest were requests for reframes right framing like my new framing adjustments because they shot you know they over scan the whole thing they that the way they shot they always had the mic

right in the shot so they get great sound because knowing that they were going to paint it out right it's actually from house of cards that I learned to do that in all the uh like uh I guess you'd call them industrials or whatever but uh you know all the corporate work I do I'll just I mean it's not like they're framed that wide anyway but if I do want like an interesting wide you know camera where I'll just chuck it in there I'm like all you got to do is it's one of the greatest tricks I've learned for you know modern easy editing or digital editing you know

as opposed to film school right but I actually interviewed the DP for house cards he's very nice to me crap there were quite a few well that that first season

I keep trying to say Vanya it's not Vanya did he also work on that but then he shot oh heavens even yesterday i've been terrible with names and i've interviewed them twice i feel really bad right now but anyway uh that you actually so i was going to say first season houseguards obviously great but to your credit uh my favorite season of television i think and or's pretty high up there uh first season of west world might be the best season of television i've ever

seen it was pretty darn good that that had to have been uh quite a journey because because you guys didn't even know what was going on half the time, right? That was a tough one, you know, because they didn't, it was a weird vibe on set because they didn't, I think the production designer knew that we were shooting multiple time frames at the same time, but they didn't tell anybody else. They didn't tell me. They didn't tell anybody, you know, and there was a case where the costumer got a royal ballicking for putting the wrong belt on Dolores.

It was some, I wouldn't say a red one instead of a blue one. And she said, and they said, that's, no, it's supposed to be the red one. And she's, but she was just in the blue one in the last scene. And they didn't, oh, for continuity, she's like, that's not the right continuity. Yeah. She was doing her job and she got chewed out. And they said, don't ask questions, just do what we say. Oh, geez.

It was an odd vibe but you know the production design was Zach's production design was exquisite and yeah obviously the acting was outstanding too

so it was a real pleasure to do well and it's it was I'll tell you what wasn't you know what surprised me it was it was going to be you know they had trouble finding DPs who'd shot a lot of film for that because they shot on film.

And I was just coming off of, I actually turned down season six of Game of Thrones to do that because I'd been away, you know, for half of every year for the last five years. And it was shooting 20 minutes from my house. So it seemed like a good idea. And I was excited to do film again. You know, that discipline of film after however many years,

I hadn't shot film since 2009 on a series up in Vancouver. and you know what it took me about three days before I thought this is stupid this is dumb we it ate up so much time we needed so much more light you know I was used to I was well accustomed to shooting with Alexa at 800 ISO you know it's a stretch at 500 with the with the with the latest clip kodak film stock we were going through absolutely miles and miles of it God knows how much how much more it costs to do it that way And after three days, I came to the conclusion, you know what? There's one advantage of shooting film. There's lots of mag cases around for an old tire DP to sit on.

Yeah. Or mount on the wall. Yeah. Whatever. Whatever. Yeah. And so just in that five years, an incredible amount changed in terms of, like, so many people had just not experienced your own film. like the first time a mag cord you know he had a cord you know roll in the mag and the camera assistant started smacking the mag to uh you know spanking the magazine nobody knew what the hell they were going anthony hawkins knew what they were doing he was nonploid you know he was absolutely uh oblivious to it but everybody else didn't or you take your light meter out they'd never seen a light meter up and they'd go test test i don't know what they thought it was i'm

still a light meter guy. I carry one, or I have one with me on set because, just simply because, you know, I know the camera's going to react the way you know it's going to react. And if you don't have time to get your monitor up, a DIT up and stuff, yeah, shoot with me, it just can't go wrong with light meter. Well, and for me, because I'm not, you know, I'm either shooting documentaries or, like I said, like corporate shit or whatever. I just don't don't not corporate shit I did corporate shit for for a long time and it pays the bills quite well

here's the other thing I tell I tell young filmmakers too um it don't feel bad about doing that stuff don't feel like you're slumming or anything like that because you're you're you don't get better at being a cameraman by watching movies or thinking about or reading about it you get better by doing it and it doesn't matter what you're doing if you're shooting it day in and day out because I did that stuff and all my friends who'd gotten into the union were working on big features and series and stuff looked down their nose at me with my little company making their only little industrial films and stuff like that. But I was shooting and I was shooting and I was shooting along the way I got hired to shoot actually 40 years ago this summer, my first feature film

shot on 16mm got blown up to 35, got a big theatrical release. But when I got my like real break and my real break, and my real break was being hired to do second unit on the original MacGyver, which was the biggest show on network TV at the time. A few guys had gone before me. They were looking for somebody local. They were shooting up in Vancouver at the time. And, you know, most of them didn't last long.

But it's that, it's like that Malcolm Gladwell thing about that you're putting in your 10,000 hours so that when you break, you don't blow it. Because a lot of people get breaks. And a lot of people, it doesn't do anything for them because they, because they shit the bed. And it's, it just, so I don't care what you, you're shooting commercials for some crummy pizzeria or something down the street. Every time you do something like that, you're going to learn something. And, and I just don't think there's any substitute for shooting, shooting, shooting. Now, in my case, I was shooting on film because they hadn't invented digital yet.

And that was very handy because a roll, a 400-foot roll of 16-millimeter film cut by the time you processed it, bought it and processed it, and printed it was about, probably about 400 bucks in 1980. That's a lot of money. So if you can get somebody to, you know, now, now you can go and do it, you know, learn, shoot, play around and everything basically, essentially for free, but it doesn't matter. I think, I think, I think being on a job and shooting something where you are trying to, and I'm sure you always do, anybody who does this, I mean, or else why do it, is make it look as good as you possibly can. It's going to move you forward and is going to prepare you for the day when somebody calls you up and says, hey, will you come and do

second uniform you on this movie or whatever? And you're going to do a great job on it. Yeah. You know what's crazy is you almost exactly laid out what happened to me. I ended up working on the last Bruce Willis film ever made, which, you know, is all right. But, yeah, 100%. I have one, pretty much one corporate client at this point, who I've worked with for like four years. And he always trusts me to just, every time I'm like bringing a new tool, trying a new thing,

you know, Lawa gave me new animorphics. I'm like, we're going to shoot your next testimonial animorphic. He goes, I don't know what that means, but sounds great, you know. That's, you know, that's perfect. But yeah, it's stupid. Eric, you're not going to get to do otherwise. So you can experiment and learn and know what work. and what doesn't work.

Well, and I feel like it used to be, you can correct me from wrong, but I always kind of asked deeps about like the sort of 90s or least 2000s sort of music video, boom, because that seemed to be where you could do a lot of testing,

try out a lot of new stuff, whereas nowadays there's just no budgets for that. So you kind of have to do it on your own. Right, exactly right. But again, back then it was filmed. So it was like inexpensive to test stuff out. And now it's essentially free. Yeah.

Was your film company called Omni? Yes. Still in business. I founded it in 1979. Last time I dropped by to say hi, they had three dozen full-time employees just to keep the doors open, including in-house counsel, distribution, not counting their productions. They got heavily, did some dramas, but mostly, you know,

Discovery Net Geo, that sort of thing. Gotcha. And you started that for like doc sort of work? Or was that more like, I need a company so that people take you seriously? Because that's also what I did. Well, I couldn't, you know, I couldn't, you know, I picked up a couple of jobs as a camera assistant, but I didn't really know what I was doing and I was terrible at it. But I had a 60 millimeter camera and I was able to get people to hire me to make their little TV commercial.

I made, you know, hundreds of TV commercials and industrial films, documentaries. Then I hooked up with this fellow Michael Chetjik who made, nature and wildlife advocacy films for Greenpeace, which back when it was a tiny grassroots organization before it became this big corporatized thing. And he had a Niagara and a Steenbeck and editing machine and I had a camera. And so anyway, we kind of joined forces

and he would do sound. I would shoot. We take turns directing. And the building, the company grew and grew. And then I kind of got to a point where, I just, I just didn't want to sit at a desk. I wanted, you know, I started it to supply myself with, with, with, with, with cinematography and directing work.

Um, and now I was starting to sit at a desk a lot. So I think, I got divorced in, in 2000. I think, I think around a year or two after that, I sold my share in it and just focused on cinematography full time. But I don't regret it. And, and, yeah, I was, I was, I was, I was, Michael toured me around the company introduced me as the guy who started it and all these kids were saying thank you for my job and i'd never really thought about it that way but it really touched me yeah that's did they know did he hit you with like

and here's all the move did you like game of thrones or was it was more just like this is just this is bob uh some of them do yeah yeah yeah it was yeah it's uh to your point to earlier about by the way it was Eigle Burl, who I was thinking of who shot House of Cards, I remembered it. Ah, that's right. I think I lost the Emmy to him that year. Oh, no. For the Westworld?

No, for Game of Thrones. He's so nice. He's a very nice man. I was really bummed. I forgot his name there for a second. But to your point about, like, film being more expensive and stuff, I was reading an article from a while back

where you had used G-H-1s when they first came out on Human Target? It did, yeah. It just, you know, that was the year that they, you know, the whole thing with SAG and AFRA, and there'd been the SAG strike, which really, which really accelerated the switch from film to digital, and Red had just dropped. So they wouldn't let me, you know, we had tons of action on Human Target, and they wouldn't let me, you know, it was, you were not.

allowed to record anything with film right and everybody forgets this but by learning their deal with the actors the actors only had that deal to do it work on a non-film format well digital came along and replaced film that's why that's why film went away instead of gradually almost overnight it was like my 435 went from being worth 85 000 to 10 000 like over over about three months period um um and yeah so we needed we needed a digital IMO basically and these things had come along and they were you know they were bad so we built housing support of them and that became our digital Imo nowadays I use and on landman I have a set of Sony FX-3s which are fantastic I love that oh wow that that's our crash cam we we've got

fireproof boxes we put it in for the pump jack explosion on landman they survived we we melted an air Alexa 35 into a piece of modern art but interestingly the Zeiss supreme lens survived those things are really built wow yeah that's crazy too well camera was a giant blob of plastic

I'm sure I was actually just talked to do a chase over at Ari a couple weeks ago for this and he was the product specialist for the 35 so I'm sure he was thrilled with that to be fair though I bet he took notes like, all right, that's what happens when you, like he seems very, oh, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you,

I don't, I think, I think, I think, I think what we do next time is put it farther away. We thought, we were a hundred, we were a hundred feet from that fire, um, which was done, you know, the pump jack explosion, um, uh, uh, on land man and, and, which was a hundred percent, uh, real, no, vis effects at all and none of us were prepared for the heat that that thing through absolutely yeah yeah you've been around a lot of explosions in your career like you yes that's funny i mean it's a big ass explosion in that one but yeah yeah well one of the wonderful things about working with taylor sheridan is he he just wants very similar to that he wants, he, you know, it, and, you know, like, you know, like the standing rule is,

if you're going to use a drone, it's got to look like it was done off of a helicopter. Right. And it's not a drug, it's like, and, and I think limiting yourself, now that the audience knows you can do anything. So the question you have to ask yourself is, you know, how much don't we do to keep the audience as engaged in the story as we possibly can? So you also watch the director's commentary for the game. for the game

I don't know if that's a known quote but I stole that quote from David Fincher from the director's commentary for the game and it's the number one question I ask when I run out of questions on this show what didn't you do? Well it's so illustrative

of like it's the best question because it's something I never thought of for film school the 10 years after like you're but it's it's so it makes it so much easier to conceptualize something when you go, okay, we're not going to do Michael Bay FPV drone stuff.

We're not going to do handheld. We're not, you know, it cuts the branches off the decision tree. It makes everything so much easier. Right. Well, actually, you know, speaking of decisions, working in Taylor Sheridan world, there's a, you know, we were issued a style guide, the Bosque Ranch style guide. This is how we do things. And I think, you know, some directors would probably find it limiting and frustrating. But it's actually, it's actually liberating.

knowing that, all right, we're approaching the scene. We're going to shoot, you know, we shoot with three or four cameras all the time, three cameras minimum on Landman unless there's some action. And long lenses as much as possible to fit with the style, backlit as much as possible.

Now, and the great thing about, you know, obviously we'd love to all work and backlight all the time. But if you don't have the clout, which I did have on Game of Thrones to, you know, have sets built so that you could you could accommodate that which you know i think i think the best example of doing that was was the season finale of uh uh season five when we're shooting in a old bouldering in spain and so we had a circular set and we scouted it in june we weren't going to

be shooting it until, till December. But the art department had a lot of work to do. And I saw the plans. And, you know, there are all these entrances into the bull ring. You know, I don't know if you remember the scene. It was the first time Danny flies on a dragon. There's thing we had like 800 or several hundred extras. Our days were going to be really short because it was December.

And we were only going to have sunlight in the, in the ring from about, from about 830 in the morning till about 5.30 at night. And it was a massive scene that required hundreds of setups. And in order to do it, and we also obviously wanted to look really great, and we didn't have time. The director was not going to take the time to let me bring in butterflies or silks for when people were unflatteringly frontlit or mismatchingly frontlit. So I had the art department change up all their banners that they had by all the

entrances to the ring so they all looked exactly the same. And I was a great thing about five months of prep because you can, you know, it took me a month to like come up with the idea of doing this. And that way we could go in and then we designed our shot list, which was meticulously laid out in terms of what time of day we were doing every shot for the sequence. And we could start looking east in the morning. And as the sun progressed, we just clocked the whole, the whole thing around so that it was always looked at the arena looked the same in every direction. we just marched our background round. Now you're backlit all day long and you don't have to do anything

to make it look great. Right. And in fact, I only had, I had one close-up of Amelia Clark where I did have to, right at the end, there was no way around geographically that we were going to be able to cheat it. She was very unflatteringly frontlit

and I did bring a butterfly in and then added a backlight, an artificial backlight to her. And you know what? It kind of stick, it sticks, I think it sticks out like a sore thumb you know it was a good it was a good compromise and at least i didn't have to do that all day long and in any event the schedule the time would never have allowed us to use the the you know i had big

huge butterflies on equipment just right there but we didn't we didn't have the time we didn't even have the five minutes it would have taken to put them in we had to we it was it was a sheer flat out um sprint from every morning for eight days on that see watch it Well, a lot of your work has been sort of managing daylight. I feel like you do a lot of exteriors. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think it's probably 50-50. And, yeah, that's, that's, I mean, especially Landman is, you're in the landman. There's, there's, there's, there's, luckily, you know, again, Taylor, Taylor loves his backlight.

And, you know, if it looks backlit, looking every, if everybody's backlit in manner, looking, that's, nobody, nobody worries too much about it. And the nice thing about that is, again, it becomes very unlabor intensive to get a, to get an attractive picture, especially, you know, if you're adding long lenses to the mix. But, yeah, yeah, I mean, managing daylight is, is probably the top. and most frustrating aspect of, you know, a big sequence that takes place over a lot of days. And I mean, I think my best example in my case was the, was episode four of season seven of Game of Thrones, which was the known as the Luke Train attack. I think the title was called Spoils at War, where the dragon strafes and burns up a huge long wagon train and there's a massive, massive battle.

I think we had 12 days to shoot that sequence among other things we had to be able to tile our whatever 200 extras to make them look like right thousand and so

you know in a scene like that I actually everybody said oh it must have been so much fun to shoot that and you know what it was really not that much fun to shoot that it kind of you know made me remind me of Hitchcock's quote about you know

he would prep and storyboard very meticulous in advance. I actually worked with a guy who storyboarded for him. He was a very good episodic director on Millennium years ago. But he would meticulously storyboard in advance as we had to do on that show in order to budget the visual effects and make sure we were going to do anything we couldn't afford. So all the creative work was done in advance. And when you get out there, it's just a matter of like now doing it. But for me, the most excitement I had on that scene, I think was hoping that the light wasn't going to change while we did these huge wide shots

to tile everybody because it just wasn't going to, it would never have worked if you got a cloud halfway through tiling, you know, 400 guys marching them down the battlefield, that sort of thing. But that was, you know, my ace in the hole on that, on that was that there were going to be these fires, but once the, once the battle started, there was going to be a huge amount of fire. so I'd have a lot of excuse to use a lot of smoke. So I got them. They got a couple of huge U.S. Navy surplus smoke screen devices. Put them on pickup trucks, and we built a one-mile road around the battlefield

so that they could drive wherever it was upwind so that it would drift over. And then you could, you know, if we got a cloud or whatever, it would feel like it was smoke. we got sun came out we could just turn up the smoke and blot the sun out um so you know that that that's where the creative creativity in terms of trying to maintain consistently over a scene that takes place over 10 minutes but you but you're shooting it over 18 days or whatever it happened what it was in that case yeah do you thought do you uh approach just think about exterior like you know if we're talking game of thrones exterior versus west world versus landman obviously each show has their own look but is there kind of like a unified approach you take to

exteriors and stuff because they i feel like they're all you know like you said like backlit is it just like a bounce thing because i feel like everyone kind of it's kind of like moonlight you know where like everyone has their own way to do moonlight i feel like everyone has their own sort of daylight just naturalish looking exterior plan yeah um you know i i i kind of to treat every, every show and seeing according to what I'm going to have to work with or what I'm going to find when I get there. And I, you know, I just, you know, I, I, I've used this analogy a few times, um, uh, employing in Napoleon's battle plan, which essentially somebody once asked him, you know, before a battle, what, what, what the plan was. And his, he

said his plan was to go there, first we'll go there and then we'll see what happens. And that doesn't mean that you don't have your artillery and your cavalry and your infantry ready to deploy, however, but let's see what we're faced with, and then we'll make a plan. And, you know, I've told that to some directors, and I think it scared them. But actually, and especially in Taylor Sheridan world, that works especially well, being able to work that way, because, you know, often he, you know, we shot in locations that he had only seen pictures of. And, you know, if I'd gone in there with a meticulous plan about where I was going to have all my lighting or where we were going to look and what time of day and everything like that, often is not you have to throw that out the window and then what are you going to do? So it's great to have a plan A, but if you can pivot easily and quickly and, you know, and this is also where, you know, having done this for 40 years, you kind of, you forget a lot of stuff.

until you need it and then and then and then and then something comes bubbling up and you and you and you you draw on some experience to get you out of a pickle yeah well and to your earlier point about like in the corporate stuff or industrial documentaries i feel like that's where you build those chops like if you're always in reproduction land and always have like an exacting plan on a set you know when you're thrown variables it's not as easy to put it right and yeah yeah that's you know and the other thing when you're working on those kind of things is you don't have a lot of resources. You don't have trucks and trucks and trucks and trucks of equipment and 20 grips and 10 electrics and, you know, a huge camera department. So you learn to make the best of what you've got. And, you know, that still informs the fact that I, you know, I shot from my own company and with limited resources. And I had to make it look as good as possible so I could get the next job. But I also had to do it quickly and as efficiently and with as least equipment as possible so that we could keep

the lights on. To this day, even with I would say close to limitless resources on shows like Landman, Game of Thrones, you know, we had decent resources on Ray Donovan. It still informs my approach. I still try to keep it as minimalist as possible. And to this day, you know,

if I'm doing a day interior on a practical location or even a, even a, you know, a built set, um, I'm never happier and with the results than if I can light it just with lights from outside the set and there are no movie lights inside the set. It's always the dustful artistically and, and I think story wise. Well, and it's the, you know, I know we brought up a bunch, but I feel like that's the sort of fincharian thing of like minimal care when you can. And also like we, if we have, have 18 hours to shoot, 16 of them need to be actor and not fussing with cables, putting up

stuff, you know. Very much so. Yeah. And that, you know, if you want to work a lot as a cameraman, and I mean, I've been very fortunate. I've, I mean, there are quite a few years. I mean, if there were two of me, I, we'd have been working 100 weeks a year instead of only 50 weeks a year. But, and I've had a, you know, good choice of some of the stuff that I do.

people have asked me you know they they think it's yeah i don't think i don't think of myself is that great a cameraman but i am very adaptable and i'm i'm very time and budget conscious and um i think i think to be a successful cinematographer you need to be some kind of a package of all of those unless you're you know you know i i don't i think there's very many movies being made now where where you know you can you can have the kind of time that my you know my older men mentors told me about, you know, when they were working on the Godfather or, you know, the bounty and, you know, or true, the original true grit, stuff like that, you know, the, or even when I was operating, my brief operating career for some, for some big time Hollywood DPs, just looking at the kind of time that those guys took to light a set and, and were completely oblivious to the clock and anything else. I don't I just I just don't I think that those days are over for 99.9% of us well and this actually brings up something that I that I experienced recently which was I got put

as the main DP on a documentary about this spud web doc you know my friends I'm going to say all this but my friends are the producers like I love them. This is not like disparaging to them. But they were giving me a whole lot of like, this is going to be really low budget. Half the reason why they picked me, you know, this is going to be real low budget, you know, let's let's not get crazy, blah, blah. And then I started operating under the assumption that that meant I needed to save all the money possible. So I wasn't asking for things. And then after a while, like I'm sitting there with a massive gimbal, you know, like in a ring and stuff, just Hollywooding it. And afterwards my producer buddy goes,

Why didn't she ask for an easy route? And I was like, you told me no budget. What are I'm supposed to be? And that was a lesson. Ask. Ask for stuff. No, you got to ask. You got to ask.

Don't ask for stuff that you're not going to use, though, because you'll be that guy who took a 50-foot techno and a 15-footer would have done just fine. You know, you don't want to be that guy. But, yeah, no, you absolutely have to ask. You go in with your perfect world, but if you can pivot and you, can, and you can get as close to it as possible. And, you know, I find that the best argument for it, it's not, don't tell them it's going to look way better because you're going to have this

equipment, tell them it's going to happen a lot quicker because you have this equipment. And then you could, then, then, then they start to open the purse strings a bit. Right. Yeah, it's, uh, I don't know why this just occurred to be. It was, you said, you said, uh, you're shooting A35, on Landman, but then FX3 is for crash cams? Right. In a perfect world, I'd be shooting Venice, too, but Taylor is very, very, I think it's the best camera ever made by far, but Taylor's very loyal to people and equipment that have

served them well from the get-go. So that's what we're using. I did, I did introduce them to Zeiss Supreme, Full Frame Prime, or Large Format Primes last year and now they're they're they used them on uh the finale of yellowstone last summer and uh madison and we're back with them this year too which um is a good thing because they're spectacular lenses yeah and i don't know why that this came to mind but i had i just actually purchased because like i figured you would have shot venice but i just bought because again to your earlier point about like the four 35 like dropping breath i bought an f55 for

two grand and even that thing is like incredible still yeah i i did one project on that you know it's heavy and everything but it's it's um it's a it's a great camera they take great pictures you know what else takes great pictures but you're never going to see one and you don't want to use one is the airy d 21 i was going to ask you about that okay wonderful yes i used it on i used it on um on human target when the whole the whole you got a shoot on digital came along and i was lighting you know i found it looked best we were according to an SDRW deck, and it'll look best if you rated at 160 ISO, which was like crazy. And then halfway through that, the Alexa, the original Alexa dropped.

I got, I got, Denny Claremont got me one to test. We all looked at it. The producer looked at it and managed to talk Fox into letting us switch cameras halfway through the season, and it was mind-blowing because my set went from being lit to 160 ISO to 800 ISO. It took a while to get used. So I would leave the village and walk 10 feet into the set and be convinced that somebody had turned all the lights off during my walk because I was so used to walking into this

really bright set. And now, of course, it was absolute game changer. And I think the Venice, too, with its dual ISO is, you know, that is a really great camera. Do you find, I'm always fascinated by this. because there's a lot of, I suppose, audience discourse about, you know, modern, so, oh, film was better, whatever, you know, the tools have made everyone lazy. Do you subscribe to that kind of idea? Because I feel like the only thing I've seen digital really kill is hard light. And we're starting to get hard light back. But I think the keynote flow is what made soft light, not digital. yeah no you well i mean i don't i don't know that hard light ever went away i mean i was

you know i always felt like the pictures i made that had both were the most satisfying but uh i um Yeah, just, just, I'll ask my train of thought. I'm sorry. Oh, no, no worries. I didn't really ask a question. Yeah, it was, yeah, go ahead. Let's see. Well, yeah, because I would, oh, no, that's where it was.

I was just going to say, like, do you light different for digital? Because, you know, you can have that dual native ISO. So you can go with just natural light, whether it's made it's lazy or not. Maybe not lazy, but just like, do you find yourself going like, oh, I don't have to do that? Or is it, do you play to the strengths of digital versus like shooting the way you would shoot on film, I suppose? I think, you know, I was just remarking to someone on the crew about this the other day who didn't, who wasn't around before this technology was available to us. Like, you know, I have single channels where I can control the iris right in front of me at the monitor. So there's a case where the fact that you can ride the stop remotely as opposed to riding on the camera and getting on it and having your hand on the lens, which if you had to do a stop pull, I mean, that was so egregious that you almost never didn't, you almost never did that.

So the alternative to that was spending ages, balancing your light so that you didn't have to do a stop. because it was almost impossible or almost impossible to do one. Now it's incredibly easy to do that. And it's imperceptible. That speeds up production a huge amount. I don't think it makes you lazy. I've embraced digital from the time the Alexa, the area came out. Basically, the Alexa, you know, like, and I'm on the same time.

I think Roger Deacons would say the same thing. I mean, you know, I said film. film film film film film and then Alexa came along and was like oh this is pretty good right um and you know it it requires less light there there are so many advantages to it but what it means is that you can make a show with the production value of landman in 10 days and once upon a time that would have been that would have been 20 days at least if you're shooting that on film traditionally, if you're going back, like, say, 15 years and shooting with the technology

it was available at the time. So, no, I don't think it makes you lazier. I think it makes you more efficient. Oh, you know what? You're right. I think that's what spurred that thought was just the idea of if you're good at it, it'll be efficiency. If you're bad at it, it's, you know, somewhat over your shoulder going, we got to move faster and then you, you know, start dropping stuff.

I suppose, but yeah, the thing about, like, buying that F-55 is I was comparing it to Alexa footage and I was like, we really have like, like you're saying, like the Venice too is one of the greatest things ever made, but it really is tools that it affords you, not the look. The look is pretty much been great since about 2012 when the Alexa first came out. It's fascinating because, like, I, yeah, I don't know, I'm a nerd, so I love like, the idea that technology's this good. Yeah, I mean, I kind of, you know, I used to understand, you know, I could tell you

know, I can pull a camera apart and I could tell you how film, you know, what was happening photochemically with film and stuff like that. And the longer I do this, the more I've kind of gotten to the point where it's just like, I don't care what happens inside that box as long as it looks like what I want it to look like when it comes out the other end, you know, after I've pointed out, what I want to point it at. Yeah, I'm not, at this point, I'm not, it's more about, you know, the artistic side of it than for, that's always where I've gotten my most job satisfaction

anyway. I mean, you know, I've got a huge collection of frame grabs I've done from shows that, that, you know, when I show other people, they say, oh, that looks like a painting. And as far as I can get, that's like the ultimate compliment when you can have a, you know, you've got a frame that decompositionally and from a lighting standpoint looks as much like a piece of art as possible. And this is actually something interesting about one of the reasons I like, loved working with British camera operators as opposed to North American ones is they've all. been brought up and you know i was just in i was just in london in um december and sure enough there were like classrooms full of kids being heard it through by the dose and being lectured about you know it's it's it's part of their their education their upbringing is to be fed a heaping

helping of fine art growing up and um to the point where one of my first days on game of thrones we're setting up this kind of prosaic shot with some you know there's an arbor and a broken wagon And I looked at the operator, I said, they were going for a, for a John Codstable here. And he said, and he looked at it. He said, ah, the hayweight. He named the very painting I was thinking of, that would never happen here. Nobody is that school. And when I have gone and spoken to students and stuff and said, and I got this from Gordon,

from reading an interview with Gordon Willis back in the, you know, when he was doing Godfather. It's like, look at fine art. You're just like go to the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam, go to the National Gallery, soak that shit up. Yes, it will, you know, sink in your brain and it will come out when you're composing a shot. And, you know, you're talking about a painting. This is something that somebody might have spent two years making. And they might have, I didn't move this figure from here to here, this one from here to here because it made a more pleasing and more meaningful composition that told the story. better in a frame. If you can do that, you know, your goal on set. And again, you know,

you've got to be in a milieu that allows you to do that. And we had that, for instance, on Game of Thrones very much. And I'm really proud of some of the images that we made on that. It's a bit different working when you're working with three cameras all the time. But again, a good operator, a good proactive operator will go in and manipulate, think quietly. manipulate things as much as they can to, to, you know, so that they can go home feeling like they, they've created, you know, something approaching art. Yeah. Well, and, you know, five years ago when I started this show, I interviewed Tim Ives, brought this up before. He's great. And I was asking about references for the show he was on. And he started,

he brought out a stack of photo books. And we did. did about a 10-minute show-and-tel where he was showing me all these photo book. And I'd turn around and all the ones that weren't, you know, like $400. I went and bought. And then, because I'd never really thought to do that. Like, I took photos, but they were, you know, I worked at Red Bull. You know, they were events and stuff. And it was more about documentation or anything. But I never thought like, oh, photography informs film, which sounds crazy, but I always thought of them as two separate art forms. But painting, I feel like is more like film in that exactly like you said, this might have taken two years to make this.

the composition is incredibly considered. Whereas I was talking to Jessica Lee Gagne about severance and she said this was one of the references. William William Eggleston guide.

Oh yeah. And I look through stuff like this and I'm like, it's certainly considered but you know what happens in a moment whereas painting is way more I feel like you can learn more from pain and that's actually something I'm trying to do better at is just I think both you know

I mean and before I you know lean more heavily into the into the art I you know I was uh you know in high school I was totally into Edward Weston and Ansel Adams who are who are just starting to be really discovered um yeah the print maybe I've got I've got I've got two Ansel Adams at home and and 200 Westons, you know, just you soak that stuff up and, and oodles of photography books, too. I think they teach you a lot about, more about composition, photographic composition than lighting. I mean, I think certainly, certainly painting for, especially in a non-electric world, which is the one I get the most satisfaction shooting, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, um you know the most useful for getting into that yeah if you ex well i so of course um i i

feel like i was so i grew up in the bay area so i got a lot of anzel adams you know just the proximity to um carmel yeah well and uh uh why do i keep trying to say yellowstone that's not the National Park Yosemite Yosemite actually this where is it there that's a Yosemite the post office did like the whole thing with Ansel Adams to meet sealed notes and they got it

but the one thing I will say about they didn't take us to a lot of museums up in in debate there's a handful for sure up in San Francisco area but the one that really I grew up in San Jose and there's a place called the Explore And it's just like a museum built to sort of shock your curiosity. Everything is interactable.

And I think that was one of those museum situations that I think helped me more than anything was just fostering within me and my classmates and everyone just an incessant need for to have curiosity fed, you know. I was just talking about it yesterday with my girlfriend. So I was like, because we both grew up in the same area. But, yeah. Where was I going to say? I have this note that I wrote down while you were talking about a landman being an actor's show.

Oh, it was your three, when you're talking about three cameras and not having everything be like such a, you know, doesn't need to be a painting. It's an actor's show. As long as you point, it feels like as long as you pointed at those people, you're going to get something good. Yeah. And, you know, I just, I just did an every early. earlier, and I was reminded of a quote, I had the pleasure of having dinner with Connie Hall years ago. I was,

they were having a retrospective of his work at the Vancouver Film Festival, and they needed someone who spoke his language to come and kind of entertain him at a dinner. And, you know, I got a couple of, you know, I was really excited about it. It was a nice dinner, but I, you know, I was working with some pretty crappy episodic TV directors at the time. It was pretty frustrating to try and, you know, get them, steer them to, to, you know, just not try and show off, but to tell the story. And I said, what do you, what do you do when you've got a, you know, a visually not very significant director?

And, and, and he said, I tell them, I just tell them to point the camera at the story. And that was my big takeaway from that dinner because I was expecting, I was hoping to get a lot more out of it, but he spent quite a bit of time complaining about the fact that all these European cameramen coming to Hollywood were undercutting everybody and working for cheap and he was pissed off about that. And he was also pissed up that he was pretty sure Alan Davio was getting more per week than he was.

And he thought that was bullshit. So it's nice to know that, you know, you can be at that level of working. And, you know, you're still, you're just the same as everybody else. You know, it's, I know where I've held you for the hour. I really would love to have. you back on the show, because I have it, I feel like you've, not to tweet your horn too much,

but I feel like you've touched every era of every movie or television show that I've ever loved in the past 30 years. So I could ask you quite a few questions. But my sister just texted me. I have all my notes on my phone, which is random, so of course I'm getting distracted. My sister just texted me and said she bought us tickets to go to the new final destination movie in a couple hours. And I guess, I'll end on you got shooting the first final destination you set off a maybe

you and whoever shot saw probably set off like two of the greatest like horror kind of franchises to where now now it's they're like part of the lexicon you know everyone everyone knows if there was a guy driving around L.A. with a truck full of stumps

like poles you know how's my driving yeah yeah you know the first final destination I almost got fired off that because I got hired on it by Morgan and Wong who had run a season of millennium when Chris Carter was making the X-File series and the movie at the same time and he couldn't handle both and we got along really well and they said something which you know I'd heard many times before but nobody followed through on which was we love your work and when we do our feature we want you to do it because boy I heard that a few times but they actually did and they and they and they kind of forced me on new line cinema it was going to be my first studio feature and um you know i don't you know you know remember millennium but it was

the darkest show on television largely because chris carter had so much clout he could make the network broadcast it the way he wanted to and that got me like three straight ASC nominations three CSC awards a whole pile other stuff and it kind of put me on the map and it made me bankable as a horror film cameraman at least. So first two weeks of shooting on Final Destination, you know, the whole point of our going in was to make all those environments look as normal as possible. The one thing we tried to avoid

was having it look like a horror film because our thinking was, as soon as you make it look like a horror film, soon as you get creepy lighting or bad lighting, and the hallmark of a lot of horror films is just shitty lighting because a lot of the classics didn't have much money. We wanted those kitchens and those bathrooms

and all those environments to look as familiar as possible because the more familiar and comfortable they look, the bigger the shock value when shit happened. Right. And one of the studio execs said, what the hell is when Glockland's lighting? It doesn't look like a horror film. We've seen it's lighting. It's dark as hell. You know, like, you got to do something about this. And they said, just be patient.

And then the movie opened, you know, had, had, and to just, it ran for ages, made, made them like a crazy amount of money. I became totally bankable with New Line Cinema. I, you know, I was like greenlit for any movie that they had coming up that my name came up on. And for about five years afterwards, and even just six months ago, I had somebody phone me asking me how we did that bus hit. because everybody wanted to do a bus hit. Sure. And it was, yeah, that was good. And by the way, you're in for a good ride this afternoon.

I've read the script. I haven't not seen the movie yet, but I think it's going to be pretty great. Yeah, I love the direction they've taken. Like, even the trailer is just like, they're so absurd. And I love it because I'm not really a horror guy necessarily, But I think Final Destination is its own category of, you know, it's almost a comedy. Yeah, I got that way. Yeah.

Not yours, but as they went on. Well, nobody knew what to expect with the first one. You know, I was at the very first test screening they did. And, you know, Bob, Shea and all the new line execs were there. And after the plane blows up in the first, whatever, seven minutes or whatever it was, and the audience's reaction, I looked over at all the, all the, studio execs and they all had shit eating and grins on their faces and after the bus hit um it was just like slam dunk so um it was it was pretty fun watching that process yeah i uh damn i wish i had you

for long because now i i really wanted to dig into like how much like vFX stuff you've done for how little it all feels obviously the one is like very vFX but even stuff like that you know how you end up going there but i guess i'll just have to uh have you back on next to I'll come back any time you want. Just give me plenty of warning. And for the foreseeable future weekends are the only time I've got. Hey, man. I live in Los Angeles, so I'm not working that much.

But thank you. What's that? I'm to Texas. You know, the documentary I was talking about with Spud, we were shooting in Dallas. He lives in Dallas, but, you know, the crews out there are great. I, you know, I can't say enough about it. the Dallas crews I was working. Well, I've got all my keys are from L.A. here.

They've been with me since Ray Donovan. And that's part of what makes my job so easy and how I can keep doing this at my age. Does the name John Baines ring a bell? It rings a bell, but I can't say where from. I went to college with him. His name is Jonathan Baines. But he was, I want to say he worked in production management on Ray Donovan. okay for like multiple years um but i was i was going through the i mdb and i was like john worked

on this yeah i don't follow his you know i mdb we just go out and get drinks sometimes oh i know i know i know who it is i know who you're talking about yeah yeah yeah you in the production office yeah anyway i just thought that was fun um anyway i'm gonna let you go thank you so much for uh spending the tie with me man i like i said my pleasure anytime and um you know i tell everybody anytime i do any of these things if anybody's got any questions they want to ask me how we did something that didn't come up or whatever, direct message me on on Instagram.

Okay, cool. I'll get back as I can. Awesome, man. I really appreciate that. Pleasure. 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. I don't know.