Frame & Reference Podcast - 225: "Avatar: Fire & Ash" Cinematographer Russell Carpenter, ASC

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

WE'RE BACK!Kicking off SEASON SIX of Frame & Reference, we have the legendary Russell Carpenter, ASC (Cinematographer of such films as Titanic, True Lies, Ant Man, Charlies Angels, Lawnmower Man, and so so much more) here to talk about his work on the third installment of the Avatar franchise, Fire and Ash!Enjoy!► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠F&R Online ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Support F&R⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Watch on YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Produced by Kenny McMillan► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Hello and welcome to the beginning of Season 6 of Frame and Reference, episode 225. You're about to drop into a conversation between me, Kenny McMillan, and my guest, Russell Carpenter, ASC, DP of Avatar, Fire, and Ash. Enjoy. I feel like it's certainly an outlier these days in terms of, you know, most of what everybody is doing. So to me, especially getting involved in something like, say, was like, oh, God, I feel like a stranger in a strange land here, because this is a, this, this ecosystem of, just pure information is, is huge and extraordinary. And the number of, you know, it's not so many tribes when you're doing a more conventional movie. And usually there's, you know, back in the day,

there was kind of a triumbrant of the director of the DP, the production designer. And then 25 years ago, all of a sudden it was then the visual effects producer. That team became a huge player. But usually the directorate photography would start fairly soon in the process. And here, even though I spent three years on this project, I shot some tests in 2017 on an area Alexa to in a basically a jungle. And on the stage, a real jungle. And Jim said, just make this look as much like Pandora as you can.

And so that went well. And I think it set me up for being invited on to, the main gig. You know, these films are made three, four times each one, basically, because

you start with a script, and then production designers come in and they start to offer up versions of what Jim is talking about, the kind of places he's talking about. Of course, they have the first

avatar to go on. And so you have kind of a, you do have a template for how the planet looks. But as they go on, locations are made within the virtual world. And then Jim scouts those locations and make some, may make some changes. And then basically once the locations were set, and now, I mean, we're just, we're not talking weeks. We're talking maybe a year or so for a year and a half. And then Jim brings a troop of players in on his team

and they start to block out the scenes on a well, he calls a performance capture stage because he said that everything's really a performance, you know, it's just a stunt, you know. And he blocks out his scenes and he'll

actually start to cut you know, a scene with his editors just to get an idea of, okay, oh, this sets up really well. This, oh, I don't like this. Let's try it this way. And then finally, now, there's another year and a half gone.

And now finally the actors come in. And that's when the film that the viewer actually sees really starts to take shape. And then so I came in rather late. the game. I mean, but that's how the process goes. But early enough to, you know, because I first take that, well, I know what my job is going to be. My job is going to be, we want to make a fusion of our human being actors with the CDI world and do it as flawlessly as we can. And that was my main sweat, you know, for the whole thing.

But then Jim said, and I want you to start lighting. So I, I, and I watch you to start, I want you to start lighting the virtual world, which was, and that was, that bicycle took me a little while to learn how to ride that. I did want to know about the, the lighting of Pandora because I imagined as a DP, that's a fun thing and a challenging thing to do, because A, up until recent, recently, lights didn't act like lights in a digital world. And B, you can, lights don't have to exist. You can just have a source come out of nowhere.

It doesn't have to be on a stand. You can backlight someone with it here and it'll just emit, you know? Yeah. Yeah, it was very interesting for me getting acclimated to that. And also, because the lighting, especially in terms of the software we were using at the time, It was a software package called Gazebo, and it was built on another, you know, complex piece of software, and I forget the name of that is. But it was basically our lighting tool. And at that time, and I know it's changed now because I've seen the latest rigs, it didn't do it didn't do radiosity or anything like that.

But so if you wanted to make it look like a light was bouncing off a plant in the forest, You'd have to put the light, the sunlight coming through the heat, and then you'd have to put another light for whatever we're supposed to bounce off that. So that became fairly complex. And also, before I get into that actual lighting thing, it's like I understand going in. I am inheriting kind of like an, whatever we say, an Akashik record of all, everything that's gone before.

I mean, somewhere, there's six years of, of information about everything anybody did, anything that Jim does on the stage. And I can reference that. And I know also with my lighting that what I'm doing is going in. And it's having to talk to, somewhat talking to Jim about how light lives, say, under the canopy of trees in the forest. He says, I don't want any real, just white light anytime. I mean, I want to feel, here's what the light that comes through, the canopy, the hard light comes through.

And then this is the ambient light that has a cooler tone, and I want to work that in. But also, I always want to put, especially the Navi characters in relationship to the forest. And so when they go buy a plant in the Navi world, you have this light bouncing up and defining the Navi structure. And so I'm doing that. And then I'm, of course, making a mental note that a year and a half later, when we are on a stage in Wellington and we're doing this scene and say spiders in the shot, I have to have a light coming up off the stage that hits Spider too.

Otherwise, it doesn't look like he's in the same world that everybody else is in. But then going back to that, the whole, I did have to get used to the procedure of not being able to do quite do the same things that light on a stage would do. but I immediately saw, oh, my God, there's so funny. Hit his hand and just here. Look, I can have this light hit this character, and he's standing in front of something that I really don't want to see a shadow in. So I just put something up that after the light hits him,

it just blocks the light and it doesn't hit the wall or whatever, the stone face behind him. And I said, oh, this is really cool. Or there were scenes inside the tense, The maroo is, I think, tense. And the light's coming from over here, and that is perfect. But, oh, my God, there's another structure. There's a mangrove tree blocking that light.

Yeah, okay, let's just pretend that mangrove tree doesn't exist. And so those were lovely things. I mean, that was really cool. You know, I like that, except that it's compared, it's a time-intensive process. And I also, in terms of the culture of the lighting artists, you know, who I worked with and who I was directing on these things, to kind of, we were bringing people in from different places,

and some people were very conversant with the idea that you stay as true as possible as you can to what light usually does. Physically does. And then some people were coming in from the gaming world. And I would watch what they were doing. And sometimes I would just have to talk them back from, don't do all the things that you can do in the gaming world, because here we're in the forest,

and all of a sudden, this is looking really, really artificial and it doesn't look, you know. And so they, they general would come into the culture of, okay, let's, and which, and this, this is the rule for Jim, it has to look real, you know, and all the creatures that are in Avatar, the whales, this, this creature, this sailfish or something, has to remind people of something that exists on Earth. And it has to, to move the way this creature would on Earth. So lots and lots of studies just were done on real animals. And the people who are building the motion would study something real instead of that.

And every costume was actually made by Deborah Scott. then taking out and tested. And there were studies done as, if somebody comes out of the water wearing this robe, how does the water fall off? You know, so everything's based on something real. Also, inheriting a look, basically, from the first avatar, but also working with Dylan Cole,

especially in the forest, who was the production designer for all this wonderful stuff that we're seeing. You pick up pretty soon that, well, for me, I said, you know, this just looks like the Hudson Ballet School of artists who were, I guess this was the 1825 to 1875 or something. They were kind of portraying an idyllic light, you know, and there was another group of people called the luminous. And I said, oh, I really get what this is about here. It's just whatever you're doing with a light, you want the Navi or the human being to be in that space directly connection to nature. So that's that that was, and you see that idealic vision of Pandora throughout, you know. And so, but so I did that for a year and learning.

I'm learning, like the first scene I lit was actually from Avatar Way of Water where Curie and her father, Jake, are sitting on a dock and they're, they're dangling their feet into this lovely kind of lit up, you know, Tim loves lit water. You know, you see that in that. You see that in Titanic. The water's lit, you know. And but you. Same place the music comes from.

Yes, exactly. And you can, but you could put your lights down in the water and make them disappear. So I want to have this, this rippling effect coming up. You know, it was just, you learn that there are all kinds of things you can do, kind of hacks of what you did in the real world. But again, that takes time. during that time, and if I'm just wondering, let me know. But during that time, I was also...

This is the podcast for that. Yeah. Yeah, okay, good. That's a great one. Great. Well, let's wonder. During that time, so I'm doing that. And then my gaffer comes on.

And we said, well, let's start looking at everything that's been done and get a taste for what's been done. Well, it was so surprising because so much at that time. And it was about eight months before I actually started to shoot. So much was, had it really come together as a whole, there were no like really whole scenes to look at. So we would kind of, my Gaffer, who's quite clever, knows computers very well,

we kind of work his way into the system, the library. And we would find, here's a take of this, here's of this, here's a camera take that Jim did, and let's look at that. and that would give us an idea. As we got closer, we'd get more and more information. But the thing was, eventually we worked our place into a place

where we were looking at each scene and trying to recreate in painstaking detail for our scenes where we'd have humans in. Okay, the light's falling this way, and when our human spider gets to this point, the light has to come down. We want the light to hit here and then it's like he moves into a shadow,

and then he moves through a shadow. And that all has to happen completely in sync with what's happening in the CGI world. Otherwise, the whole thing becomes kind of a train wreck. And human beings just know, especially in an exteriors, what makes sense and what doesn't. So things are off that way. So that's that area.

But we were also looking at translating, everything that Jim is doing on the stage into, well, how does this translate to what Jim's doing in his CGI world? Okay, now we're on a huge stage in Wellington, and how does that translate? And sometimes, so we would have to figure out, one, is our, when we're shooting with a real camera, did it just go through the back wall of the set?

And so first of all, there's that technical stuff. And then Jim moved the camera from here to here in such a time. Now, where is that exactly on a real set? And so we had this great person, Casey Schatz. And what he did was he took everything that's in the CD. GI world, and he would work tirelessly and translate it to,

okay, your camera has to be here, and it's three feet, ten inches off the ground. It's going to make a movement that goes from here to here, and this movement basically has to happen in 7.6, you know,

whatever. And so when it was that precise, we would do those shots with a motion capture system. There we go. That was wondering where you were going. I was like, it's got to be motion control. Because watching the film, I watched it at the IMAX app.

Motion control, yes. I was like, there's no way they freeballed this. Like, this has to be motion control. Good for me. This is a picture. Yes, good for you because there were, there were. And going in, we thought, well, we're going to do 80% of our shots, motion control. And that was our thinking.

And so we had, basically we had everything mathematically figured out. And yes, of course, there were certain scenes that Spider is running through the forest and he's running with his brothers and Kiri and took. And they're running up and down this environment. And they land exactly here to this time. That was intense mathematical. working things out. And that you just had to do. That had to be right on there. And that was, we went to motion control for all, all that stuff. What we, what we learn, though, is that

when the CGI world doesn't necessarily drive the world of live action cinematography. because there are times, especially if you've got a steady cam or Jim's handhold operating the camera, once you've got everything lined up and there is a, there's kind of, we got through a docking procedure in at the beginning of each scene

where we know where, you know, the motion capture cameras no on our real set exactly where our camera is, but the computer system knows exactly where everything is in the CGI world. So what we do is we line up our live camera with exactly where the CGI camera was. And then once they're locked, they're locked. So if Jim's hand holding something and he wants to, he's doing an over-the-shoulder shot,

and he's thinking, maybe this just works a little bit. bit better over here, or what if I pan over here and do this to bring in the scene? That now is driving the CGI world. So whatever he pans his camera, he is seeing what should be there in the CGI world. So once we went through that alignment process at the beginning of the scene, there was much more freedom than you expect, unless, of course, it is one of those oh, we got to be totally right on the money, right place, right time scenes. Right. So, yeah, go ahead.

Well, I was going to say when you're in, because I did also notice a bit of handheld, which my friend Blake Wiley was actually, you just saw it last night and he was text, he knew I was going to interview and he's texting me. He's like, can you ask him this? He also wanted to make sure that you knew that the scene of the ash people like flying over the mountain with the like light streaming through the smoke. he said that was his favorite shot. But he's just a guy.

He's not a film guy necessarily. Yeah, yeah. But when you have scenes with multiple Navi and your handheld, is it just a bunch of actors around Spider and maybe whoever else? Or like how are you visualizing? Is there like in whatever I piece you're using, is there sort of a maquette or kind of thing going on? How is that working functionally?

This is this a thing. Okay. So there was between the first avatar and the second avatar, there was a lot of work, a lot of technological process. One doesn't necessarily have to do with image capture, but with keeping Jim sanity and the sanity of everybody around him, which was out in the first avatar. You know, you have a group of people, and they're supposed to be looking up at where Jake is, which, you're, is, you know, he's quite tall. And the outlines all have to be the same. And so they were using, at that time, I think they were basically using a tennis ball on a stick. And it never, it never looked quite right. I mean, they do take after take to get people looking in the same place at the

same time. And especially if you're doing St. Dialogue and, you know, Jake or court is supposed to move from this place to this place, it never works. So what Jim asked Ryan Chapney, who works at Lightstorm to head up, was to find a way to get a system that let the actor know exactly where he had to look. So he came up with this thing, basically based on the SkyCam system

that you would see at football games or something like that. But this was super, super trick. I mean, it had a little, basically it had a glorified iPhone hanging from a stick. So you have four cables coming in. There's a mechanism that has all these gyros in it. So that when the thing is flying around the room in some sequences, like there's a sequence where Corr is in their bridgehead, and he's talking with a spider who's sitting on a table.

Now, this is, I think, in the first... And he's all over the place. He's up. He's getting... The cord is up, down, leaning. He walks over here. He kneels. Something like that. I can't...

This was in the first one. And, yeah. So this thing, it was like a little bumblebee. It would just move around the room on these cables. And then the performances, Quarge's performances, would be...

on that little micro iPad. So the actor Jack Champion was looking in exactly where he had to look all the time. Of course, it was then we on the lighting side, we have to take in, okay, all right, we have to keep our lighting out of the way. We have to keep our, you know, we have to be cognizant of shadows. In that location, it was pretty easy because everything's fluorescent light. And that became less of a problem than I thought it was going to be. So there's that technology.

There's Jim, because we were going to go with a larger sensor size, which would drive the size of the lenses up, Jim sets somebody to work on, okay, how do we pair the weight of the camera down when it's handheld or when it's on a steady cam, what kind of lenses can we use that are lightweight enough to not add to the weight? So that was a project.

And eventually we found two prosumer Bujan lenses that were a fraction of what the Pramista Fuji lenses. Yeah, the zooms, eight inches long. Each one was 2.2 pounds. Oh, you had. No, they're amazing. They're the most of amazing lens.

And I looked at them. I looked at them on a big screen. I said, I'm not seeing indifference between these little lenses and the permissible. I mean, this is amazing. And we really looked at it. And because their computer, I mean, basically, they tracked in line perfectly. So that problem got some. But the biggest problem and the biggest piece of technology, going back,

Sorry. Going back to what you asked me was, the, uh, what something, uh, a really souped up version of, I think they had something like simul cam, but this simul cam would basically do real time composites.

Uh, and really good composites. I mean, there was nothing flaky about the composite. I, there was a lag time of like three to four frames, which is nothing. Uh,

but, But this is where the technology got amazing because so in this big record of where everything is, now the computers know where everybody is. They know it knows where the Navi players are, the CGI players. It knows where every single asset is, there's a couch over here. I'm not a couch, but you know, something over here. There's a tree over here. Yeah.

And so, but when you introduce a human being into that also, you know, Spider's not going to be loaded up like he was when they were doing the virtual stuff. He's just the character. So they had, they knew where everything was. And then on the camera, we also had a system, like a depth sensing system that says, Okay, Spider is five feet away from us. This Navi, the computer knows that the Navi now is seven feet away from the camera. So when the Navi goes, the virtual Navi goes behind Spider, it instantly cuts out a mat.

And so it just, you know, like anybody would, they disappear for, you know, a little bit. And then they come out behind Spider. And if they walk me off, the Navi is four feet away, and spider, and spider is four feet away, and spiders, or three feet away and spiders five feet away, it works in reverse. Spider disappears. So we were getting real-time lineups of where everybody was, and it was so great because I could tell,

I mean, really accurately, if my lighting was working or not, you know. And this was this, you know, of course this is all try, We try to work this all out ahead of time. But then there's also a lot of improvisation when we get to the sets. Yeah. So that was huge. The simul cam thing was just a whole game changer, I think, and such a valuable tool for me.

And you know, when you guys are on like space. I was telling you. guys are like doing the space shuttle and we're still finding rocks over here. I was wondering about like the emulation. Wait a bit. Wait a bit. I have a counter argument. You say space shuttle.

Every shot seemed like we were launching a satellite, you know, because there were so many people, so many, so many camps of computers around finding rocks on the beach. There's, it could be a lot more joy. You know, I'm just saying, you're just, you're on a set, you've got actors or you're out and there's just a joy in terms of that. And in feeling like at the end of the day, oh, we got a great scene. It wasn't that performance. That actor's performance was amazing.

That's something you have to give up when you're, when you're operating. this way. I was not going to, don't get me wrong, I don't envy you, but it is cool. It was a great, it was a really a great challenge. That was, it was, but it was, it was, because of all the moving parts, it was just, you know, I'm kind of a Murphy's law, or whatever it can go wrong, we'll go wrong. So there's like, okay, what are we doing on an aesthetic level? But are we, are we sure, we're sure, we're sure that, everything that has to be there and technically lined up is there because you don't want to, you know, yeah, screw up. I just thought of two separate questions, but while we're still on the lenses thing, is there a, so we're watching the film, right?

A lot of it is CG. You wouldn't tell. Especially in 3D, I can't, at a certain point I gave up trying to pick out, you know, but is there a specific lens that is modeled? Because at one point there's like lens flares. Like are that, is that a generic lens player? Did someone go like,

oh, that's a K-35 or like, oh, that's a, well, no, you will see what you will see is getting back into what's real. And then Jim said,

okay, um, well, we talked about, uh, flares that bounce off things, flares that, uh,

the lens introduces. And we did test and we said, okay, these lenses and stuff, look, this is how they, they're handling a flare from a light. This is a flare that comes off, you know, a piece of shiny metal. And we looked at a lot of filters and stuff like that. And then Joe LaTerry at Weta, and Weta, of course, is Weta. They are the gods. Let me see if I can do this from my end so you get exactly. exactly what you want, when you want it, and it's not, and it looks real. So you'll see stuff like that.

You'll see, I think they have some things where even there's the, there's the feeling of water dripping off front of a, you know, a house. Wasn't that weird? I blinched a bunch. No, the first time it happened, I remember doing this to try to get it out of my eyes. And I was like, what are you stupid? Like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, I think that's amazing thing. And also, um, focus racks. Oh, because we're using simul cam and we know where everybody is, we can follow the action.

The focus puller can follow the action. So we do the focus pull. When we're doing live action, we do the focus pull. We can see where it's supposed to be. And so that's all done. Everything done to have, you know, so there's some familiarity to it.

Right. And you don't have to model. post specifically with Spider. Yeah, except for the focus pulls we did we did live. Yeah, because that that I think would have been tougher. Yeah, so

that kind of stuff is really fun. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, you had it. Oh, I was just going to say second question was it's not as distracting as I assumed it was when it first happened in the second film, but the switch between high frame rate and 24 just off and on.

I was wondering what the, I couldn't really work out what the rhyme or reason was to it. Like I figured for fast action it would go to HFR, but not always. Yeah, in way of water, I think that they went to, because we shot at 48 frames, that was our go-to. We always had that. And then we worked out where at the shutter angle should be,

because we still wanted it to look natural. And so we did test on that. We figured that out. But Jim, on way of water, whenever they went underwater, he went to 48 frames because he wanted something kind of a little bit magic about that world. But where he really, he had it as kind of a go-to in his pocket that when you get into certain scenes, Either the camera's panning faster, people are moving so fast

that in the left and right, I mean, this horizontal movement, you would get strobing. And in 3D, that's a really hard thing to take. It's really hard on the brain. So he would,

you know, I didn't notice it that much, but in certain scenes where it's chaos and people are really moving around or fast action scenes, he would default to 48 frames. And these are all decisions that were made in post. So that's the basic rationale behind it. It was the first of, if we have strobing,

which we normally have at 24 frames, it's going to take a toll on people's eyes, their brain system, And so that was the idea behind it. It is funny how you guys have basically broken every rule, not rule, but, you know, common wisdom where it's like, oh, you know, Ang Lee tried high frame rate, you know, a handful of people have tried high frame rate. They didn't like it.

I like this one. Everyone under the suns tried 3D, never took on. This looks great. You know, CG, everyone complains about CG. This looks phenomenal, you know. It's the church of Jim Cameron. Yeah, the Church of Jim Cameron is, if it's going to take 10 years to do this,

it's going to take 10 years to do this. You know, there's, you know, in a way, and this is a thing, I just, it just, this is a little side thing, but I watch him work on scenes, you know, workout scenes, you know, we're on a big, he has this stage.

It's the most, boring place in the world because all of his is flat services. There's nothing there. But when you look at the monitor, you're just going, oh, okay, oh my God. And he's with his virtual camera, which he can, he can have it at exponential distances. He says, okay, if I go one foot this way, it's one foot. Now rack that up by 10. So he says to his brain bar behind him, give me a 10 fold. He goes one foot and the camera is moving 10 feet. So he says, I want to get an overhead shot, make this 20 to 1. He just goes like this with his camera.

And it's like the, you know, he's looking down to the trees or something. That's pretty amazing. But to watch him work something out, one thing I was watching was, oh, from Fire and Ash, when the, the asses, when the, the ash people come into Bridgehead and land on at Bridgehead. You've had helicopters landing at night. Oh my God, it looks so good. It looks so good.

Well, literally that was my note here. Yeah. He worked that scene over and over and over and over. And he said, okay. And he would try different speeds. He would try different clusters. you try it. And he just, this is the thing about Jim that's just amazing. He's not, there's never, that's good enough. It's just, he just keeps working and working and working

until he's got it right. And I think that every one of these scenes, he's building something in that every scene that is just kind of a visual gift to the audience. And that's, that's, whenever I've worked with him, he said, my feeling is, he said my feeling is that going to a movie is a fairly expensive thing. And people have got to feel like they've really seen something special when they come to see one of my movies. And that seems to be, you know, that's a touchstone for him.

But has that always been the case? Like even going back to Titanic, did he feel that weight? or was when it, but when film going was a little more mainstream than it is at the current moment, was it more about just putting on a good show? Well, you know, it was, I mean, still he was working in the scenes out. Of course, you know, that we weren't working in the same world as he is in an avatar. But there was still, well, we had a scene, you know, especially, when it, you know, what's the reason the schedule was what it was,

is that he was trying to do things that hadn't been done before at the scale they'd been done. And our kind of our thing was, well, if plan A fails, you're going to hate plan B because it's going to be 10 times more complex than plan A. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't, he's not backing down from that, you know, he just says, okay, I'm just going to up the ante here. And, yeah, I mean, I think, I think in some way, especially in Titanic, he didn't feel the pressures of the time and the expense. And you've probably read he gave up certain fees and stuff like that. And he, in that film, that's really funny because, you know,

on Avatar, we could talk about things. You know, I said, okay, I'm doing, I have a scene with an eclipse in it. And he would talk about the eclipse, and he would tell me about the gases that were around this planet and how long it would take this. And he had a whole cosmology in his mind. When I first talked to him about Titanic, with just a brief phone call,

because it's really funny because you think, okay, that's a big film. And I said, well, okay, okay, Jim, let's just talk about the look of the film. He says, it's a period film. You know what period films look like.

That was it. It's going to be soft. It's going to be warm. What are you worried about? No, and I, you know, I know, I mean, but he was, he was fashioning, somewhat fashioning,

Titanic, all of the things that he loved about the David Lean films. That's what Dr. Chavage. which is spectacle or a love story, an intimate love story, set against a huge spectacle. And that's basically how he felt about Titanic. So, you know, in some way, that was really a good, you know, thing.

Because we didn't really talk so much about the specifics of stuff. But I did go on that. Then I ran over to the art department. I looked at everything the art department had then at that time because, well, visual effects being so expensive to do. And I looked at all the storyboards that they had and all the art that they had. And that gave me a darn good idea,

kind of overall where it was going in. And that at night it was going to be quite a luminous, even though it was a new moon. But you're going to see. you're going to see everything. I mean, I love how, like, you know, obviously this story has been beat to death, but it is funny how, like, meticulous he was about factual reality until it didn't serve the story. I think that's the thing what a lot of people talk about, oh, you know, Neil gets mad at him for

the Starfield and, you know, Adam and Jamie get mad at him for the door thing that, you know, it's like, yeah, but it didn't serve the story. Like you can only be like if you're slavish to the details, you've made a documentary and you should have just been there in the first place. Yeah. We, uh, we, and flip a head to Avatar, the way of water and this eclipse thing. And so how long does it last? How long does it last? And so we kind of figured out how long it lasted.

And then a week later, maybe it would last this long. But in the film, it's how long did it take to do the same? scene. I mean, I mean, it was felt abbreviated, you know, for the, he, there was the fact, his factual and then what serves the film. Yeah. And I think any filmmaker anywhere has to come to that, you know, uh, well, yeah. What's, what's funny? It's so the IMAX screening I went to was a guild screening. I don't know which guild because I'm not in any of them, but I walked up and they're like, what guild are you in? And I was like, I'm, I have a podcast. And the guy was like, all right, in you go.

And so in the guild screening and also just hearing whispers about Avatar coming out again, the phrase I heard every single time, someone would say like, well, why is it back or like, why is it three hours or whatever? And the answer was always, it's James Cameron, he can do whatever the fuck he wants.

Every single time. And so when you have that level of to whatever it is, What restraint do you show? Like when you're the DP on one of these things, like where do you go like, all right, we can do anything? The audience knows and expects us to do anything. What don't we do?

Well, first of all, just going back to the treatment was one thing we don't do. And I think Kim completely held to this throughout both avatars was 3Ds just to immerse you in the in the movie. We're not using it in any way for shock value or playing with depth or we're not doing anything of that. In fact, yeah, yeah, we're going to, the camera convergence is going to converge on the eye on the focal plane. We're not doing razzle dazzle that way.

You know, it's it'll come through. You know, of course, the beautiful production design that was done and the action and stuff like that. I mean, what don't you do? I mean, well, that's kind of out of, you know, I just think every day with just trying to get the scene, and there wasn't like, not what don't you do, but it's just what do we have to do today?

What do we have to accomplish? that for me that was the well that that yeah I mean a lot of I'll be perfect honest I ask that question all the time because I find it very instructive when you realize like oh like I've had people go oh you know what

we actually had a no handheld thing you know we had a no nodal pan thing you know like we never right yeah yeah yeah but what do we have to do does speak to a great pre-production you know because like the whole like oh here's the rules we built melt away and now you just have the game plan. Yeah, it's, I mean, my, I mean, my, I mean, my internal role, especially when we got, we started this, this journey in Wellington with on these huge stages, we had lots of people, lots of human beings, lots of things that had to match up.

They had that big sea dragon scene in the launch and the, first avatar. I mean, that was a huge set. So you go from that to basically scenes that are just with spider in a forest or something. And my ground rule was something that cinematographers often say is, well, I wanted my work to be invisible. You know, and there's some movies that I say, no, it's some movies that great because the cinematography is visible and wow, you know, That's fantastic. But I had to just take that to total heart and make sure what my team's contributions was invisible. And that to me is the great thing about the Avatar series, because when you look at it, you go,

okay, he's employed 3,800 people on this movie. he's got all these different departments who are doing all these amazing things there's all this magic happening in terms of what you can do with in the computer world and all these contributions and over this time he's thrown out all these what he calls provocations to people he says I want this see me see me see me in two months and give me what I just asked for you know so he's got tons of really talented people doing that. But what I do love about the Avatar films is that at the end of the day, all that melts away and you just don't see it. You just see, you know, you see this beautiful environment and that you can immerse yourself at. And that's what I like,

is that there wasn't something that was so technical that was just jarring or just obvious. It was just what was left was that a beautiful visuals and story. So to me, to me that's a miracle. Well, you know, it's, I think that's,

you know, the joke is always you can't bet against James Cameron because it, you know, I think he never lose, you tell me, but it certainly seems like he never loses sight of the story in the audience, even if there is all this spectacle. No,

no, he does it. And he, uh, uh, when things really got awful on Titanic when we're so far behind, he went stead in some kind of moment of waiting for something to happen.

He says, you know, I think I'm just going to have to go back to 20th century Fox and make them something surefire, a surefire action movie, because he says, this movie has to be a love story that works in an action movie that works,

and I'm not sure I have either. He says, and so there was that, and then flash forward to Avatar, and he said, Avatar, Way of Water, he says, well, this movie has to make around $2 billion dollars. Yeah.

And it was just like, it was just like another day at the office, you know? And I go, who has that kind of, confident, you know? Yeah, there it goes. That does bring up something I did want to ask you because, you know, there's a few male directors that I look up to is obviously plenty of directors from all over the spectrum.

But Jim Cameron obviously is one of them and who I'm most interested in. And specifically for everything we're talking about. But I was wondering as like a department head, as someone who leads a team on your own on a, let's call it more traditional film. What are some of the lessons that you've learned from James that you've taken on into your own professional career? That's a tough thing, because when you're working in a James camera world, you know you're going to have, I mean, a structure, a backstop in terms of, well, if you need this, you're going to get this, you know.

The main thing I think is planning, you know, because we're, especially with Avatar, but also with Titanic, you had, you had to plan. You couldn't quite make it up as you went along.

I mean, there are certain things on Titanic that happened. Like I said, I would look at something and say, well, this isn't up to stuff. This sucks. What am I going to do? And we, we, you know, panic as the mother of invention.

And then we come up with something that, oh, okay, I think we've got it now. But I, you know, and I know every cinematographer is different, and they approach out what they do differently. And some people are quite instinctual and are quite intuitive. And it totally works for them. I feel like I have to have the planning, the planning lined up, and that every person in my king, all my other department heads, they have to know exactly what kind of weapons of we have to bring to this scene,

this day, what we're trying to accomplish. I can't just make up something and expect that it's going to be there. me planning, not only planning on what I want to do, but planning in terms of, well, what happens if, you know, there's no sun or it rains or it's, you know, what do I have? How many, how many options do I have? And if I, and then I think also for cinematographers who are just kind of moving along, you know, and they see something. you know, they see something on screen and they say, I want to do that, I want to emulate that. And they hone their craft and they work to this place where they're making beautiful images.

But what happens is that now you're on a set and now you're having to spin so many plates because there's the beautiful image you want to make and then say there's the reality of only having so much time. So, oh my God, I don't have enough time to do this. What's the next thing? What's the next thing that's simpler and elegant that I could do? So it's kind of building up a library of things, you know, that you can do. Yeah, or decreasing the complication. Or maybe even if it's a minor restaging of a,

scene that helps get you out of jail in terms of, you know, the time that you have to do things, you know, but yeah, that does remind me because I was, I can't remember who I was talking to, but it was, it was someone who had done a Marvel film, I know you did, Ant Man, that's fun, but I pretty sure it was a Marvel film, and they were talking about having to light for CG extensions, you know. Yeah. And it just never occurred to me how much this is going to sound dumb, especially after all we talked about. But it just hadn't occurred to me at the time that, oh, yeah, you've got to not, it's not just a white light, as you said earlier.

It's like there's all kinds of stuff that you, if you're given the tools and you're doing it properly, like you have to fake. And so I did want to know that in lighting avatar, did you find yourself going like, ooh, I can take that onto a stage where there's to emulate, because obviously the hardest thing in the world is to emulate real sun, but there's all kinds of things that you have to fake on a, in a stage. Was that instructive? Yeah, I was, I think by the time the avatar rolled around, I had kind of a library of

things that I knew. Well, to create, I know that this instrument is going to give me this kind of sun and it's great. I mean, we had some fairly large scenes that were, uh, sunlit base or even the sea dragon scene, we had a sun coming in from one direction and yet we didn't really have the space, you know, the distance to put a single source out there.

So we go, okay, how can we cobble together in the viewer's imagination, what looks like a single sun source? And look, we have to use four sources here to do this. Where we have a scene again, now I'm going back to the first avatar where the bridgehead is being built and

God, I forgot, I forgot, just forgot a name. Anyway, the, they're walking, Scorney Weaver. No, it wasn't Sigourney Weaver. E. Falco. Oh, I always called her nurse Jackie. Yeah, yeah, Nurse Jackie. Nirstiaki is giving a...

And they're walking a distance, and we're doing it, you know, and a stage, and then, okay, how do you cobble all this distance together to make it look like a single source? You just have to learn things, and you go, okay, well, look, we can make this here, that it looks like they kind of fell into a shadow, and we disguised going from light one to light two,

and then something else for light three, You know, it's just, it's time consuming. But, yeah, I hope I somewhat answered your question. Yeah, I mean, it was kind of a, I figured I'd just ask anyway, but I figured you, you're already know that, you know, because your career has been, you know, to your point to, are those your photographs? I'm in my second career. I have been, I'm taking on being the grand die.

and family photographer. There you go. And I just put them up on the, yeah, whatever. Yeah, that's my family back there. I was going to say the, when you open the window, that is my secret is I've got an eight-foot quasar tube here because it's pitch blackouts.

Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes I didn't do, I didn't do that, but often sometimes, I'll get my one. There you go. Excellent. Perfect. Yeah, it's not.

Right. Movie magic. I love Edie Falco, by the way. Me and my girlfriend just rewatched a nurse Jackie. Oh, speaking of excellent women, I did want to ask, you know, Sigourney Weaver obviously has had one of the greatest careers in film history, in my opinion. Did you find, this is another leadership question, did you find her kind of instructing maybe other people, other,

castmates, maybe even other crewmates. Like, did she bring, was she more just like team player? Did she kind of take a matriarch role in any capacity? No. On that film, she was team player. And also sometimes, I'm going to open this curtain because I can see. I'm getting down to pitch black here. Okay.

So, no. And a lot of the scenes that she was in, there was a lot of kind of technical ledger domain. going on and it was like we could shoot those scenes handheld and she could do this

or that or but she you know she is hemmed in by kind of like the vision for which way you're supposed to be shooting and stuff like that

and so she came on she was yeah very much a team player in that in that capacity again, there's there's there's some room to move because we don't, we can do handheld, we can do

steady camp, but also because of the way that the virtual characters are laid out, we can't re-block them instantaneously. So you have to somewhat stay with the blocking of what was done in CGI months ago. Right. You're talking about the, like the, where we see actually her. I meant more like as a, as the, let's say the eldest actor in the room.

Like if the younger actors were like, if you noticed any like leadership on her part. Because I'm always fascinated to see when you got like people going like, all right, I'm willing to teach here or is it all just like straight across the board. We're all on the same team. I'm not going to tell you what to do type stuff. I think he needs these situations because, again, probably the largest dog in the room, the alpha dog is the technology. And we have, yeah. So, no, but she, no, she was, everything is great.

You know. It does seem like, especially when you're working together for some of these people forever, you know, you know. you know, they're all going to be friends. I got to let you go. But the last question we have, and he'll make it brief, I have my intern Jackson now.

This is the final segment where he's been sitting on and he's a film student at Arizona State. And so... Yeah, hi, Jackson. Hey. How's it going? Good.

I've been lurking in here while you guys have been talking. Sorry, my legs, that's great as y'all's. I'm just dealing with a single fan here. back here for Christmas. Yeah, I guess kind of like in this world of Avatar,

I feel like it might be easy. It is just kind of my thinking, but like you're kind of getting lost in all the technical aspects of everything and there's all this CGI going on. And like, I guess it's more of like a personal question as like how do you kind of stay grounded

in like, your beliefs that you have with traditional cinematography. And how do you kind of apply that to the CGI and Avatar world that makes sense? Like how is, how do you? Just speaking to that is because now you have all this technology, but we mentioned it a little bit before, you're taking that technology and that, but you're trying to bend it back toward what the audience,

a filmic experience that the audience is used to. So hence, yeah, we do, there's stuff that doesn't look quite perfect or, uh, and it's getting back to the whole like lens flare or focus or, uh, this or that.

It's just the, the issue, and, and that's why there's such a joy in films that is simpler is that by the time we get to this point where we're on this stage, just a lot has been set in motion that would be very, very, very difficult to rewire at that time.

That years or months after, you know, it was decided. That's not to say that Jim didn't have an idea, like maybe a week before we were supposed to film a scene and he'd get his actors in. And he'd either give them new lines or slightly different. blocky, but that was pretty much all that was settled before we got to the set that day. Yeah, I like that was interesting how he also said that he relies a lot on improv as well. And that must be like, just like you're going into it.

Is that, you say like it's like a week out kind of thing? Or is it kind of a day of where it'll be like, okay, I'm going to throw in a line here and you've got to kind of adapt on set? I know we have to go. That's my last question. Sorry, you don't have to answer. No, no, I'm going to answer because it says, we work for maybe an hour, hour and a half before Jim comes to the set. And the greatest thing is to look at it and go like,

you look at the rehearsal and go, wow, there's nothing wrong with that. We are ready to go. Which means that there's going to be an hour of fudging this, moving that, taking this and that and that, till he gets it. So there's definitely stuff he can move and do with, especially if you've got a lot of human actors or something, he'll rework that. But yeah, there's always room to do something.

But you just don't have as much room as you would, as you would if you're standing on a set, a real set. It's been phenomenal, yeah. And as much time as you're willing to give us in the future, we'd love to. I'll be back. Okay. All right. Great. Thank you. It was lovely to hang out with you. Yeah. All right.

Take care. Bye. 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.