Frame & Reference Podcast - 70: "Everything Everywhere All at Once" DP Larkin Seiple

Episode Date: September 8, 2022

On this weeks episode, Kenny talks with cinematographer Larkin Seiple about the smash hit film "Everything Everywhere All at Once." You might know Larkin from his work on films like "Swiss Army Man" and music videos like Childish Gambino's "This is America." Enjoy the episode! Follow Kenny on Twitter @kwmcmillan Frame & Reference is supported by Filmtools and ProVideo Coalition. Filmtools is the West Coasts leading supplier of film equipment. From cameras and lights to grip and expendables, Filmtools has you covered for all your film gear needs. Check out Filmtools.com for more. ProVideo Coalition is a top news and reviews site focusing on all things production and post. Check out ProVideoCoalition.com for the latest news coming out of the industry. Check out ProVideoCoalition.com for more!

Hello, and welcome to this, another episode of Frame and Reference. I'm your host, Kenny McMillan, and today we have a fantastic podcast for you. We are talking with Larkin Cyple, the DP of Everything Everywhere all at once. Larkin also shot you know Swiss Army man Almost every great music video you've seen You know this is America Childish Gambino

Gold with Chet Faker You know the girls Rollerblading behind the car Smooth Sailing by Queens of the Stone Age One of my favorite bands Just a whole bunch turned down for what Just a whole bunch of amazing visual work out of Larkin

And we talk about Most of it I will say, we recorded this podcast in April. The movie, everything everywhere, had just come out, but I don't even know if it was like fully in theaters all the way yet. So if there's any anachronisms, anachronisms? If the timelines don't seem to match up with today, that's because we were talking in April.

But even so Amazing conversation Loved it Larkin's great And I think you're going to enjoy this one So I will let you get to enjoying Here's my conversation with Larkins Cyple I was actually at the The screening over at Citywalk

Oh really? Yeah so I got I got that little Is the movie being shown iMacs very much or is that uh was that like a special thing i think that was like a special thing um yeah it was i think that was a special thing it's um it was a bummer because the dants be originally going to shoot the rock sequence on iMac for the film um like that we were legit prepping for that and i was pushing it and then i think a mix of number crunching and like we can't get iMAX cameras out to the desert like it's going to be too hard

We had a crew of like seven that day. Me, the director is like an AC, basically. Was the intent just to say you had shot that sequence on IMAX? Or was there a creative reason? Yeah, I mean, it was a bit of both. I think, you know, a lot of the ideas were like, wouldn't it be really dumb if we shot, you know? Because it was also like financial incentive was like, it's just two rocks. It's like 200 feet of film.

It's just a role. like let's just grab it and knock it out and we can say we shot on IMAX I think that'd be really funny for this film and we were going to shoot like Super 8 and 16 mill

originally at one point too we were prepped for it and then you know on the day when we did all the flashbacks we had five locations in one day it was like

Pinky Universe then like the Wushu universe and then like run down an alley shoot that six times of different variations and it was okay we're not going to switch cameras

and switch to film stocks at this point what did you say 36 day shoot turns into like a 200 day shoot real fast. Oh, yeah, no. It was, yeah, and even 36 felt short. Did you, you said we're kind of jumping ahead, but I might as well just ask right now. You said you shot like 10 different sets of lenses in like six formats.

Yeah, we shot, yeah, we think we did 169, 4,3, 185, 235, 2 to 1. And then there's like weird, like weird formats in the middle. But I think so probably wasn't necessarily 10 formats. maps. But we went through like the full range and got cute about it and got snarky like the hot dog fingers is the Netflix aspect ratio which is two to one. We started

out trying to make that look like Todd Haynes is Carol and then we were like this whole universe is in this one apartment and everything is if we had done that we kind of would have lost a lot of the joke because Carol is so subjective

and like and the fray yeah we were like no we should make this a bit more blunt. It's this, the people have hot dog fingers on. We still got a little funky with the framing, but overall, we started kind of just leaning in on like showcasing a production design for that world. If you go back and watch

it, everything in there is hot dog color. There's not another color that exists. It is a very, it is a very pinkish tan apartment. Hints of red and yellow. Yeah. What was I going to say? Because normally I started different, but I did.

The film is just so fucking good. But we'll get to that. wanted to, I did want to start kind of like how we normally start, which is just saying, you know, I, I know you, uh, you said you went to Emerson, um, where you kind of didn't meet the Daniels, but around them and stuff like that. When you were, you know, prior to college and stuff when you were a kid, were you deep into film, did you start, you know, as like an engineer or something and then move your way in? Or was it kind of always the path? I think we were, I was actually just talking to Daniel Shiner about this last night. I think, um, I was at summer camp and the counselor put on 16 candles. I forget how old I was. And it's like an edgy movie. I think I was maybe 10, maybe 9. And there was like cursing and there was like nudity in it. And I was just shocked. And the counselors were like, it's rated PG.

And then I spent the next like two years going to Blockbuster and diving into PG 80s films trying to like find my version of the R film because I wasn't allowed to watch our movies. So then I just started watching a lot more movies and inadvertently some very good films. And then as I got older, like my mom was a dentist in the suburbs. And so I would just go to like a cinema, buy one ticket, and then see six movies. You know, I remember like walking out of good little hunting and going into like phantoms and going into like speed to cruise control or like seeing save it, private and running and seeing like, you know, vets, like having full meltdowns in the theater,

things like that. I got, I kind of just fell into movies just because that's what was around. And then I just got into it. you know, as a kid, like, you know, if you're around something, that just becomes your thing. And then, you know, eventually I just got nerdy about it and it became my thing. I didn't really, like, click with the filmmaking process until college. And even when I got there, it's like, I'm a director. And then I was like, I think directors only get to make one film a year.

I did something else. If I was a cinematographer, I get to work on, like, 10 films a year. And that sounded a lot better. Yeah. That's definitely a hard part for, uh, it was, me for all intense purposes, but anyone kind of coming up nowadays is, uh, like I've had to be a, you know, especially for like industrials or just like whatever, even music videos. It's like, and so you're shooting the whole thing. I'm like, can I, do we have a budget to pay literally

anyone else? They're like, no. You have to write it too. I'm like, fucking God. Juggling, juggling that many jobs sounds like a nightmare, but, uh, people do it. Yes, they do. Yeah. Could you? So you get to Emerson, you're working on, you make that, not transition to DP, but you're working on becoming a DP, I suppose. What were your, did you have any outside inspiration besides just films? Were there other, you know, maybe photographers or maybe music even or anything like that that that was kind of tickling your artistic brain? Not really. No, I think when I, when I got to Emerson, within a week, I met. a kid named Matt Ardeen.

He was like, do you want to work on a movie? And I was like, yeah, I'd love to work on a movie. This is a party. He was like, great. Shooting a feature starting this weekend. And I was like, great. And then he was like, it's all night. So I was like, perfect.

And then I spent like a month working nights, then getting back at 6 a.m. And then going to school at 7. And I had a blast. And I think I fell in love with like the camaraderie where it's like to be in a crew, like, you know, just like hauling sandbags and cable through a forest

in the middle of Massachusetts. juice at night and like chain smoking cigarettes like a bunch of other 18 year olds it was like it was like you know like camp basically um and that's when i started like clicking into like what i liked about filmmaking which was like a bunch of people making a story together um that kind of became like the drug or like the fun part about like just a bunch of people doing something kind of stupid in a weird way or like not stupid but ridiculous you know you have all these people you know putting all this time of energy and you cut to like two people at a table just something very absurd about it um all the all the effort that goes into something that you hope is going to be great. And then it's film school, nothing is great. It's all just the worst. But it's the best. I loved going to film school screening as a kid, just like blown away watching other students

because everyone is shooting films still. So just watching people that had nothing to do in cinematography. That was not who they were. Like watching like the writer be the guy that's shooting the short this week. And just watching him like either fail or like stumble into something that works great. It was kind of like a weird science experiment. I went to this New York Film Academy, like summer program before I went to college. Oh, word, the one in L.A.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, so did that. And I remember, you know, because they all shoot 16 for like, were we always, we were always shooting 16. There was like an at that time, there was like another program called the digital program. And we were all like, poo poo, poo, poo the 5D. Um, or no, I guess at that time it would have been a DVX. Um, anyway, uh, but I just remember when we were in the screening theater at WB showing everyone's films and all of our movies looked kind of the same. Ish.

And then one person who, like, uh, what was her name? Adriana. I remember her name. Uh, this is like 20 years ago. Uh, I remember hers looking like a movie. Like she exposed it correctly. Like she. lit it, although we didn't really have lights, but like

it looked like a movie. And I, and I just remember sitting there and going, wow, okay, it is possible. Because before that, we were all, you know, doing whatever, you know, whatever 18 year old, 17 year olds do when they don't know. Yeah, point to light at the actor, right? Yeah. We can go. We're good.

Yeah. So that that, uh, that center of camaraderie and seeing how everyone works together that you're talking about, I think is, uh, incredibly important. Yeah. I have, I think we had one kid in our program actually made a good film. I think I ended up doing

like a stupid comedy about two guys running around their apartment complex. And I remember when you were at it and I was using the score from Requiem for a dream and I thought it was really funny because that's like that was the big movie at the time and the whatever the guy teacher, whatever came up and he was like

you can't use a song. And I was like, no one's ever going to see it. Who cares? And he was like four other kids are also using the song. If you use it. They're making dramas. If you use it as a comedy, you're going to ruin their screenings. I switched it to like the Batman theme or something absurd. But it was very surreal.

You have all these filmmakers and they're all using the exact same references for the films they're making, very much an echo chamber. Yeah, I remember a freshman year of college when the Dark Knight came out, or like maybe sophomore year. And it was like all the, in the acting class we had to take, everyone did Joker monologues. It's just like, all right, knock it off. stop you knocked that up what was your experience like at knife because you're the first person i met who actually did the exact same like program that i did i mean teachers were okay i mean it was

like a drug-fueled party for 16-year-olds and 18-year-olds it was like going to college when you were in high school it was just big like we not drug fueled but we you know it was californ it certainly felt that there were there yeah yeah there was like there was booze and pot or right and it was a blast and you're like living of a bunch of other teenagers and apartments and like you had a time of your life I had such a great time like couldn't get enough of it we got to make short

films like the teachers were pretty instructive but it was just an excuse to like just I mean you're living in California for like a month like with a bunch of other people a bunch of other strangers your age you're just going to have generally a good time and get into trouble and even I think even the counselors

are like why are we why are we counselors to like 16 18 year this is like they're like maybe two years older than us right um it was fine i think i mean i presume having shot these like weird little dixie mill films that may have actually helped me get in college to be like hey look i shot something on film back then that felt that probably felt kind of unique um was it good i'm sure it wasn't um i wish i still had them they were very silly um it was very much like last minute thought process of like i guess i'll make a short film about this and like just go for it of course like i think all the

film starred the counselors or like the people and you get it's like easier that or your friends like only a couple of kids had like the balls to actually cast actors most of us were like what if you just did it because I think I can talk to you I can't talk to a stranger yeah yeah I ended up teang there for a while for a couple summers and yeah I ended up in a lot of yep exactly right um You're only slightly older than me, but can you, do you remember sort of that transition from needing to shoot film, where that was completely out of reach for making your film and what that environment was like versus when, you know, the DVX came out, when digital cinema cameras became a little more approachable? And like what that, what you ended up working like then? Yeah. It was a weird

I had just like I graduated and I just shot my first short on like 35 mil and like half of those shorts up there was like this ambitious short that like never really got finished I was super stoked about it and I like really got finished and I was like 35 looks amazing

and then I worked at a camera house and then I just slowly watched over like the next six months like this is 2007 like the film cameras just get dustier and like the HVX was coming up and then the lens adapters came out And watching that transition, it was also just like all the short films that I was trying to work on our piece together, like the idea of shooting on films and started feeling not tangible anymore. The very first commercial I ever shot was like two months after college and it was like a pickup for like a world poker tournament and it was just like a green, like one shot of like a player like throwing a car to camera.

But it was on like 35 mil and I was just like terrified. I just, I'd only shot it once. And I was like, they were like, do you want to prep the camera? And I didn't even know the camera. So I turned, and then they were to give me like a full rate to prep it. And I was like, no, you can hire someone else and that's what they're doing. I'm just, I'm lost. But that was like the one time I shot film was the first.

I'm not even going to call it a commercial. I shot an insert for a commercial. And then I don't think I touched it again until it became like back in fashion. Like it was like shooting in a, start shooting a lot on HBOX. Then it was like HVX of adapter. And then it became like, you know, the red one, then the redomax. And then it took a while for film to become kind of, kind of like, you know, people actually shooting, you know, I had to do that weird cycle of film as a standard to like,

why would we ever shoot film to like, don't we miss film? Isn't film going to make the project better? So I just basically was, everyone I was working with was just, you know, too broke to even afford film for a lot. long time. And it was more just like whoever owned a camera. So I owned an HVX, but I never pointed up the money to own a red or an Alexa, which had good, good results and bad results. I definitely lost jobs to red owners, like at the very beginning of when that started happening. Yeah. Does that still, do you think that still happens? Because I feel like, I could be wrong,

but I feel like the sort of buying a red buys you a job era is sort of coming to a close. I think so I mean my I think you can make some of my favorite things the longest time they're shot on like a 5d that I had done I mean now you can buy you know an Alexa classic for what five grand six grand like I think that camera that camera still slaps it still looks it's still like the same chip like you can get great looking images with a very not necessarily affordable but you don't have to yeah and I'm hopefully we're at a place where people can you know get a camera that looks decent even like the C3 like most of the cameras again once you throw them into the color grade too like it's minutia you're talking about at that point like you think you can get a fully functional film camera even the black magic looks great like the even like the little guy like that's to me like the better the best match for Alexa I've found um I'm hoping that's gone and people can just focus more just on someone's real um and not about what they can just monetarily bring to a project but also it's a sign that if you're getting hired for it

job and it's just about your resources it's probably not going to be a good job or like the director probably isn't thinking about it for the right reasons yeah yeah the uh there's a few things i kind of want to unpack in that answer but uh the importance of a reel do you think that has diminished because a few of the dPs we've spoken to recently have kind of mentioned that it's really just about your last project and reels don't tend to serve a purpose anymore yeah i think you know Reels, I think, existed, Reels existed because it was really hard to show everyone your work slash your work wasn't accessible.

So that's why, you know, everyone, you know, I think everyone had like three or four tracks that they loved for their reel. I think my first reel was put to the last of the Mokieken soundtrack. I was very excited about it. It was just like four, four or three films intercut throughout, but you kept going back to the previous films. It was, but no, I think reels are dead. I don't think there's any purpose.

I also don't like reels because anyone can take, you know, two good shots from a short film and show those off and the rest of the short film is garbage you know it's like you got two shots at dusk and then the rest of your stuff isn't good um i always think you should be judging people based on projects because if they can make you have to be able to make at least one competent project all the way through or one great project all the way through um because i think the best websites you know i think your website should be incredibly reductive like my favorite cinematographers their websites are like here's four projects, like, as opposed to, like, I've known you shot hundreds, but like,

here's four. These represent what I do or these are what I'm proud of. Like, there's no need for me to be like, look, I can also do a comedy or look, I can do sports. It's like, now, here's, like, here are the four things that I can bring to the table. I think that's the most important. And last project, too, but a lot of times, you know, I think you're going to just have those, like, everyone's going to create their own iconic work and that they're going to kind of live off of like that one commercial that you're always going to get reference for um you know a lot of times for me as well it's now it's like I have to have like a secret reel for my agent for like bright shiny stuff because a lot of my stuff's too moody or dramatic and it's like no look

I can shoot really bright real flat real dumb um if I want to like you know if I want to pick up a job that's in town and I don't want to you know you know also like the cool moody projects you know everyone's going for those. There's usually a lot of, like, people in, you know, people in kitchens on phones, like doing minutia with an app. Like, that's, like, you know, the majority of commercials in Los Angeles. So I'm like, look, I can do those. I can keep the crew happy and fed by doing those that we wait to go do like a crazy movie.

Yeah. I mean, like, you know, you got to pay the bills. They're not all going to be fucking the best. They're not all going to be sweatouts. Well, a lot of it's like a lot of the projects are frustrated. because I'm kind of just want to shoot something very like if it's going to be a commercial I want it to be like simple and blunt and let's just get this done or I want us to like go for it and like push it and like make it actually like we're going to try almost every commercial like

almost everyone but the majority of them are like this is a really stupid commercial but we're going not really try and you're just like no we you can't that the concept alone isn't worth us pushing it so you get a lot of middle ground spots that think they're being really clever but you're not or that think they, you know, they're going to be great, they don't have the money or time to actually go for what they're doing. So you just end up getting in like in trouble a lot generally. That's like a lot of those middle ground spots. Can you expand on that a little bit? Because I've certainly run into, you know, clients who think that they have the greatest idea, not just even for the commercial, but just like their thing, whatever their product or

their service or their business. And they're like, we want this to look like the high highest budget film ever and we're going to give you two thousand dollars to do it and uh you know crew whatever whatever how do you how do you kind of uh talk people down to like let's keep this paired down and simple you know basic elements and it'll be effective um i think it's you know when i was a different you know when i first started shooting commercials i was a very game to take those concepts and go with it and push it and you know um you know i usually get brought on very last minute. You know, everything's been figured out for the most part. I can come on, I jump on for the scout. And I'm like, cool location you guys found. I think we can make it work.

Let's go. You know, but the, you know, if I had director friends, I had commercials that they thought could be good, but they had no money. You know, I would director scout with them a bunch or we'd figure out like how we can, you know, reuse a location or maybe we've, you know, we moved it to this part of town. We could, you know, change the scene to dusk because we're not going to be surrounded by wall. You can start gaming, you can start figuring out. I mean, the solution to making anything great is just prepping the shit out of it. It's, you just got to figure out. And by that, it's not just, I think everyone will say like prep, prep, prep, prep. But it's, it's trying to focus what that means, which is problem solving what's holding you back, as opposed

to just, you know, I think everyone hears prep and they go, oh, you're going to shot list and then you're going to storyboard. And then you're going to, you know, it's more just trying to like identify what you're not going to be able to change on the day and get that figured out far in advance so that on the day you can't have room to change variables around but the same time I don't at this point like commercials come so fast that I director scouting a commercial now seems kind of crazy in terms of I get hit up like maybe two weeks before something wants to go but that's just the US I feel like Europe they have like you know two months before they shoot a commercial they're reaching out to crew and here it's like what do you guys doing next week is your

around do you guys mind working nights like you know it's funny is I a few years ago I shot a spot for many with this group that came in from Germany and they were like super apologetic that they could only hire actors to do basically nothing for $600 a day they're like this is all we can do and I was like we'll find someone like definitely find someone for like it was like just a run and gun you know no equipment just like following people walking through Santa Monica or whatever. And then, yeah, they prep for two months. And then afterwards they went on a two-month vacation.

And I was getting a lot of angry phone calls from various people. Like, hey, how come I haven't been paid yet? And I'm like, they're not in the office. I don't know where they are. They turned off their phones. Yeah, yeah, usually, yeah, I forget. I think very early on as electrician, I remember watching like gaffers and key grips, find out that production was from outside the country

and be like, we need cash in hand at the end of the day before you leave. Oh, is that pretty common? Yeah, it was a thing. It was just like if you found out that the production company was not only from outside the city or the country and that they were leaving the next day after, like, that's also like on some of the smaller scrappier spots

that you're working on or like even scrapier web series back in the day we had that issue. Yeah. Back on our web series still a thing? They're not a thing, right? It's just streaming. now, right? Yeah, I mean, I'm sure people are, you know, my friend Chanon made a web series that

she took to a bunch of festivals and won a handful of awards for. So I think, but I think it's far more low budget, you know, a little more student filmy than what it used to be, you know. Have you always been a very technical cinematical, like, you know, more nerdy or no? I think I've been pretty nerdy for like a long time. Like, when I first got in the film, I got really into, like, the chemical part of it. And I only ever got to make up one Trent and one short. But I remember loving the idea of, you know, this is, I was also like, you know, watching, like,

when reading about Savities and kanji and the cord and all these guys that were doing so much work to the negative to make their own look. But that's what really got me into that side of it, even before, like, the glass and the lighting. And then when I was at school, I came up on the lighting side, I started like just juicing and gripping and then, you know, best going in the morning to gaff. And I just kind of just got into that part. I think the idea of like the thing about lighting is, you know, basically you're putting 10 variables on set. And if you make a different concoction every time, you can keep tweaking. I mean, like, that's the first taste you get of cinematography is tweaking lighting. And so once that happened, I got really excited.

And then you could just, you know, as a kid, you're looking at, you know, magazines of, like, crazy rigs or crazy lights and everyone's, like, fiending for, like, HMI's. I think one of the bigger experience, I think I remember, like, a memorable experience I had was, like, I'm like, the film that I was the most proud of at school. Like, we had, like, a 2.5 HMI panned onto the scene, and I was, like, metering it and looking at it. And it was like, I think I had to pan it off. I think it's too much. And I don't think it looks good. And it was, like, a big deal. They were like, but that's the, that's the big gun we got.

And I was like, I know, but I think we can just use these, like, little tiny park hands. It'll look better. And then, like, got back to, like, you know, got the dailies back. And I was like, I was right. It looks better. But it was like a, it was very silly, like, all of, like, the weight you put on the equipment, like, a big gun. Or, like, you know, being able to shoot 35 over 16, things like that. Yeah.

I'm not sure where this question was going. Oh, well, the main reason I asked was just because, you know, there seems to be, a I have a theory. I also am very scattered brain, so I apologize. So I have a theory that the sort of, whatever you want to call it, quote unquote, current generation is so enamored with photochemical film and vinyl and analog stuff

because they grew up in an era where none of that was made available. Everything was, for the past 20 years, everything is ephemeral and digital and not tangible. And so there's been, I'm sure you've seen this heavy push to shoot digital and give it, quote unquote, the film look. And I was wondering if you had, A, an opinion on what that actually is or whether or not it's relevant to make stuff look like film beyond just aesthetically wanting to do that. and B, since you've shot a lot of film, how you were shooting film versus how you shoot digital

for more of a practical sense. It's a lot to unpack, I'm sorry. There's a lot of like, there's this big push for everyone to shoot film, and I remember being so stressed out, just trying to get my eye wrapped around film. Just like you needed so much more exposure than your eyes used to,

and like a lot of it was just getting your eye dialed into what you thought what you, you know, on set you could see it and it would look like, my face is blown out now and I'd be like, oh, that looks too much, but later it's all going to be there, like, having to build your eye to ages. And I never, like, as soon as

I, like, I got close to, like, I think I understand how film looks now, how to light film. Digital came in. And then the next time I came back to film, I was like, oh, shit. You had to, like, kind of relearn, pull out the meter, like, you know, try to shoot some tests. Like, I get, I get why, I mean, I think, I mean, if I shoot film now, I generally want to

shoot it for the flaws. Like, you know, I'm dying to do a movie that's just 16-mill, no lighting, it's just capturing it and seeing it and giving it this, like, maybe potentially too much of a documentary feel. But, like, I love the flaws of it and the way the colors mix and the weird, you know, minutiae from the halation that comes from, like, lights and overexposure and, like, kickbacks and filter reflections and all these little, like, artifacts that get saved. I think what people are pushing to make digital look like film, I think they just want it to feel cool.

Like there's a part of that, that part of it's there. But like, why I do it is I want people to kind of forget about the image. And I think images that are too sharp, like my eye just looks at the pores. It just feels the artifice. Like it brings out all the things I don't like. At the same time, I'm not trying to, you know, make it like an army of ants fighting with grain. What I'm looking for is actually just to soften the image. I don't actually want people to, like, see the grain kernels.

I just want to kind of step on it, if you will, so that you, again, you just kind of fall into the image and you're not being directed by, like, the resolution as much where to look. That's it. It's just kind of weathering it in a way, making it a bit more timeless as opposed to saying we actually shot this. But then there's, like, small things like you're going to add halation imposed to, like, you know, lamps and highlights and windows. And I love that. I think it adds a romance to the images. And I think it works in almost every situation. You know, if you watch Deacons work, it's the opposite of that.

That stuff isn't really there. But at the same time, like, when you have flawless actors and flawless sets and someone that's been, like, thinking about this shot for three months, you know, it's probably going to work. Whereas if you're, you know, scrappy and you're running and gunning and you're like, okay, master primes in this camera and the LF are probably not going to make this location look great. I should probably think of something else. Yeah, that actually kind of brings me to a question I had, which was, I understand you worked in reality for a while.

Oh, yeah. I, oh, go ahead. What were you going to say, sorry? Oh, no, I was just going to say, you know, doing that for, because I know you probably don't want to harp on it for too long, but. I'll talk about it. That's great. I was wondering, like, what that taught you about narrative filmmaking, because obviously it's not the same thing, but, like, moving fast. lighting, effective lighting versus maybe lighting that's too nitpicky or anything like that.

Like, did you kind of learn anything that you carried on into your narrative or music video or even commercial work? Yeah, I was, I forget, a year or two in LA and I was working as a non-union electrician getting, trying to get my days for the union. I was one day away from getting into 728 when the writer strike hit. So, like, I was like, cool, my days are going to lapse. I'm not going to get in the union. What am I going to do?

My friend was working on Ace of Cakes, which was a TV show about a cake bakery in Baltimore. And he was like, we need like a camera PA. So I don't know why they just didn't get a local, but they flew me out there and I lived in a bakery for two weeks. And I hated it because I was in like a 10 by 10 room that just smelled of cake all day. I don't even know if the iPhone was out then.

So I'm just reading like the same one. I think they had comic books in there. Anyways, I kind of just started doing with that. company, I started doing all these smaller reality shows, like to different parts of the world and different parts of the U.S. and loved it, actually. It was just like four people rocking and rolling, following the talent around, meeting people, having to light rooms on the fly, like bouncing things around, having to light a bunch of interviews, which I actually really love. They got to start working on portrait lighting. And we were actually trying to make it look

real, like the part of the shows we were going for is how can we make the interviews feel unlit. which I love, and I got to just do some type of lighting to it. I think the thing that I noticed was reality TV operators are phenomenal at conversation and dialogue. And I remember just trying to like pan between two people having a conversation the first time and like the DP walked over and he was like, we're going to look at the tapes tonight. You have no idea what you're doing, do you? And I was like, I'm just panning and he's like, no, no, no.

You got to like, you have to like feel it. And those guys can be like programmed differently, even sometimes better than narrative operators, I think. and that the reactions to, like, guessing what's going to come up. But I just basically just got to, like, I call reality, but in the end it was probably closer to documentary and that we were just dropped into a location. I wasn't doing the Love is Blind take on things. It was much more like me, a producer, and two other camera folks.

I went to, where is it, I went to Chile with, I had 70 cases in my room. The first thing I did was lose of Carnay. Yeah. And it was, yeah, I was doing that. I had 70 cases. I was the, I was the AC for all the cameras. I was C camera operator. And I was doing sound, which was they taught me on the fly, like full pack, six wireless receivers or whatever, like chasing talent. It was like, it was insane. I don't know why they let me do it. I'd never done it before. There was a great way to travel and have great stories from doing that. It was a fun way to just see these kind of wild countries. But I mean, I basically just took away like from that. I don't know, kind of how to be scrappy and work on the fly, but also, like, how to operate around, like, non-actors was a big part of it and kind of feel like the pace. And it's also interesting to watch, like, reality producers, well, you know, they'll stop someone talking and ask them to say it again or they'll revisit something. To see how you can actually, like, they are inadvertently directing non-actors. And seeing that, seeing some of them be really good at that.

is kind of like, because there are a lot of directors out there that like to work with non-actors now, too. But you're, I'm watching the, you know, producers that are basically just directing scenes. And it was really cool to watch because they didn't actually think they were directing them, if that makes sense. They were just trying to get that bite

or to get that little narrative chunk. But in reality, it was like, no, you're doing a great job directing, but he just keep, keep doing that. We'll get it. That's cool. I did want to draw kind of a line. My first introduction to your work was actually smooth sailing

because I'm a big Queens of the Stone Age fan. Did you know that band before you shot that? Or was that? Oh, yeah, no, no, no. Songs for the Death was one of my favorite albums when they came out. And I have a couple of friends that were just obsessed with them. So I was really amped. And the producer on that, too,

it was a massive Queens of the Stone Age fan. So he was, like, really excited and really pushing Hero to do the video. He's like, we got to do it. We got to do it. Yeah, and it was pretty fun to do that. I was like, oh, this is like, you know, it's kind of rarely you get to sync up with, like, some of your favorite artists. And that was actually a good song, too.

Sometimes you do get to sync up with artists that you love. But the track you're working on is like, no, this isn't your best. But that actually was a great track. Was there anything that you learned on that set or learned? Because I, whenever I, I've often talked about how in my head, music and film are very similar. And I oftentimes have a hard time articulating why. And I'll be like, no, it's like, like Josh Hami will like do this thing on his guitar. That's like film.

And I don't never know how to like explain like get that out of my head in a coherent way. But I was wondering if on that shoot, if working with Josh or anyone else kind of, what was that creative environment like? I think he really, you know, we kind of let him do his thing and we got to really play around with it. And he was there and was watching us work with all of like the businessman. And he saw like a lot of the video is, you know, interpreted like the swaying of being drunk. It was interpreted with the rhythm of the song. And that's why we had all these body camera mounts. Remember, he was very excited to put the mounts on and get these very weird shots.

It was, I mean, it was pretty fast and furious. when we shot it. It's a bit of a blur. We shot in this little Tokyo Mall in downtown LA and we shot like in like a Korean restaurant to start and then we like ran down escalator and then we went to a bowling alley that happened to have karaoke and that's where we shot Josh for most of it and then staged the fight outside of it. I forget, I mean he was I think the whole, you know, it was this very silly video that had like a punk rock thing going with it and he just kind of leaned into that i remember he actually went too big and did some pretty outlandish stuff and then after we shot it he was like you guys can't use that too far too

far i know it was my idea but i just saw the playback and we shouldn't use that that's too much um he was having a good time yeah because uh you know it's interesting because um you know i found that and didn't you obviously didn't know hero didn't know you didn't just saw that i was like that's great And then I remember seeing, it was literally was like sweatpants and, and this is America and going like, man, I really like these three separate, didn't think they were all the same like team or whatever. And so it was a very exciting, uh, aha moment. You know, I think it must have been when this is America came out where I started to put all those pieces together and was like, oh shit, this is all the same people. Um, what, how did you get involved with you? I know people probably asked you this.

So I just didn't do that section of research and then we'll get into the Daniels. But like, how did you get involved with Hero and what does your guys' relationship look like? And then I'll ask another thing instead of loading you with seven questions. I mean, here's a funny story. There's like, bizarrely harkens back to like the film school question. I was like, why do you go to film school? I think when I graduated one of the teachers or professors or whatever was like you paid X amount of money. need to meet 10 people that will determine

the rest of your career. He was like, that's why you went to film school. I was like, sure. I'm a hero because a friend of a friend was producing a small music video for partisan, and he knew that I was like a younger DP doing scrappier stuff, and he was like,

hey, check out my friend Hero, he's doing this project. And that's like the first time I got connected just randomly through someone who I kind of knew through school. and I saw Hero's very first music video and it like blew me away

it's still one of my favorite music videos when I was like I need to work with him and then I forget that the next video came for a bus being called bus driver and I wasn't able to do it and I was like oh shit I'm not gonna it's the one where he's got the giant head

and he's like he's like a pinata or something I'm trying to remember it it's a very silly video but I was super bummed I couldn't do it I think the whole thing took place of like a Chucky Cheese and he's like a Chucky Cheese type

I forget. It was very absurd and this is back when Hero was doing a bit more of like outrageous pop stuff but I thought like I'd miss the boat and the very first thing me and Hero did together

was a bubble gum commercial involving a unicorn which is completely not either of us but we kept trying to work together and then we just started making these like dark weird music video

is that and every time we'd shoot There'd always be, you know, pickups, which is kind of unique to music videos. You don't really do that, but we'd always be like, well, what if we went back and got these one little, you know, got to him, me and him cruising around at night in, like, grocery stores or alleyways trying to, like, find little details like that. But we just clicked, we got along really well, and, you know, he just felt like someone that I would have been friends up in high school.

We just kept trying to play with themes that we've been working on throughout all of our projects. and you know he'd come with like a really weird idea and be like what if we did this and then we just kind of mess around I think a lot of a lot of the work we made just because we had time to let things kind of marinate and metabolize before we shot it so we could actually like bring themes and ideas to it as opposed to like let's shoot next week and we'll just figure it out on the day a lot of it is like just slowly figuring it out and he's a lot of his treatments usually have a lot of interesting references that aren't direct visual references for what you want but like a tone that you can kind of take and spin and put in a different direction.

Yeah. I mean, it's funny because you guys have like super detailed videos like like sweatpants and then super simple shit like the Chetfaker video, which I'm sure is a little more difficult to execute than just, yeah, we just put it on the back of a camera, but simple in premise. And I've seen so many people. rip off that that video that that video spawned a whole slew of copycat music videos

so chet baker one yeah there was a whole debate on reddit if that was green screen like a like a huge debate about if it was green screen no yeah no it was it was baffling to me um yeah some very elaborate concept someone even pitched that that we had built like a like a treadmill pavement or something i don't know. There was a pretty great deep dive on people's thing because we frontlet it kind of like the Fiona Apple video, criminal and then

we didn't like how that looks so we had rigged a keynote to the bottom of a truck and uplit it which gave it this weird fake thing happening to it which I think is what kind of threw people off but yeah I'm not sure how many people thought it was being screen

but it was a good there was a good couple of days that you read it just kept going. It's, dude, I've noticed a lot of people overthink stuff like that. Like, you know, the example I've used a handful of times is like, I grew up as a magician and kind of getting back into it now because I'm bored, but like there's a trick where David Blaine

puts a hat pin through his hand. And everyone has a lot of theories about how he does it. Uh, he puts a hat pin through his hand. That's how he does it. He fucking stabs himself in the hand. or it's bicep like he just does it and i think people don't want to conceptualize the like the simplest answer yeah put a camera on the back of a truck and had a bunch of people rollerblading like it's it is what you saw it was um but i did want to know uh when working with hero uh what aren't you guys doing is there like a list of things or maybe some stuff that that you're just like we that's not us

when you're doing projects with him we don't really shoot safeties like we don't shoot coverage or stuff just in case you know a lot of times you'll make some bold choices and you'll shoot a shot that's going to be the glue and edit um generally we like we don't really work on the fly that much either we like it's a lot of the stuff well that's not necessarily true i take that back but the things that we don't do I don't think we we don't expect to find things on the day if that makes sense

I think we kind of we really like to figure it out at the same time everything we've done is like kind of fluid and evolves but there's very little improv necessarily like it's fun to like thematically build something up

and then kind of get weird, like kind of create like a place to get weird. That makes sense. I'm not sure if what I just said is, like, makes sense at all actually. I'm not quite sure what we don't do. It very much feels, it's different than other, than I work with other directors and that we generally are playing with an idea. I don't think we're directly defining that idea until we get close to shooting, whereas some people are like, this is what it is. It's a oneer. There's a lot of, with hero there's a lot of what if like even like for this is america i have a bunch of footage of me and him just walking around like playing around the opening shot like he'd sit in

and play the guitarist might be the camera and then vice versa originally we're going to have like kids run by and then what if he goes around the corner like we we kept playing with how to do it and just kind of figuring it out on the day um i think a part of it is also just kind of being silly and and, you know, photographing yourself and trying to, like, figure out some visual way to communicate to someone else what you're doing. Yeah, I don't know. It's all kind of blurry. It's a very organic thing with him because we've been doing it for so long.

It's less of like a, there's less of a checklist when we go into making projects together. It's more of like, we just start talking about the exciting stuff or like, how the fuck do we do this is another big part of. of it. Yeah. Before we get into the Daniels stuff, I did want to ask, I get the impression that you color a lot of your own stuff? I used to.

I used to color all my stuff. Like, right when I started, Apple Color came out. I'm not sure that's still a thing anymore. But, like, it was a legit color grading program. I think DaVinci is free now. It is. Which, what Apple Color really. kind of was a breakthrough for me.

That's really helped me figure out a lot of photography, just like how to like, you know, what can you shoot and how far can you push it later? What's stable? What's too dark? What's going to give you inky black? I remember, like, building our first luck with, like, the HVX back in the day.

We had, like, a great secret sauce. That gave us, like, a really good black by, like, crushing the toe in camera. So that way, when you expose that, you were actually filling your shadows in. So anyways, it was like a good stuff you can you can rant about that for a hot minute that's good that's good info yeah no we like we like back when you know camera settings were such a thing um everyone had like

the pedestal and like the it's like i forget how many different sub menus we'd go through but i had like my roommate got real nerdy and we basically took an hvx and another camera and like we just put the lens cap on them and looked at a histogram and we saw the bottom line was like trembling And then we kept taking the pedal stool to a point where the bottom line stopped trembling. I'm like, oh, that must be pure black. And we thought we were geniuses for doing this. And it looked great. It was really cool. I, like, gave, like, an edge to all of our, like, digital photography to be focused. But that was, like, the first taste of, like,

what luck can do. Whereas now, I don't, like, I'm heavily involved in the color grade. I generally work with one colorist now a guy named Alex Deccle who's the bees and he did Moonlight and a bunch of other movies and I found him on a film

called Kin but he's been kind of doing every film with me but he's as nerdy as me and wants to keep kind of pushing and playing with the idea of like what is what is what are we chasing when we're doing all this stuff

like what are we actually trying to do that we just in like the are we trying to make things look like film what does that mean to look like film you know are we just chasing like we're kind of like we're always chasing a good skin town which is range you know you want like film gives you skin that has like magenta and pink and red and green and like in a slew of other colors to it and then you know with digital a lot

times you get that patina of like and it's just flush just this one tan yeah so giving that range is like what you're chasing however to like give you that amazing range you usually have to do a lot to the image and it fucks up the rest of the image you know you're like oh we just crank the reds and the blues and do all that and then you like zoom out from the face and you're like the world's on fire this looks insane like their skin looks great but everything else looks terrible um so it's trying to find that middle ground of a lot that will work for everything um but yeah i used to do it a lot and that really helps me understand what the hell i was talking about um and how power windows has worked and how it could be subtle with them.

Yeah. The thing I wanted to know was, and you kind of touched on it, but like in what ways did coloring inform your cinematography and vice versa, but also, you know, getting it in camera is always good, but what are you doing in the grade that pushes it over the edge? Because I've noticed that an Alexa can look like dog shit, and then in the hands of a good color, and Alexa can sing, you know.

And so there's something happening, but there's, but, uh, it can't just be, you know, seven or nine let from, from Ari drop, drop the exposure by two stops. No, no, which was what I did for a long time was just like two stops under seven nine. Like, um, one of my favorite music videos, um, the fly live video did a hero was like four stops under exposed at 2000 ISO or something. Um, that was probably more like two and a half stops, but, Anyways, two and a half stops under-exposed 2,000 ISO, 7.09.

And we shot it, and then we took it to our colorist Ricky. And we were like, you don't really have to touch much. They barely touched it. And that was just like the look and camera just looked like, you know, that was us chasing film, which was like tearing the negative, the digital negative apart was the first approach. But now it's like polar opposite. And that I'm like the trick of using luts now is you,

as opposed to like applying a lut and color grading. something you want to start with it when you're shooting because that changes everything because you you want a lot that's going to make you overexposed because the more information you have the more range you can create on skin it's also lets you make ballsier choices when you're making your exposures you know if you have like a really thirsty lot that wants you to overexpose you can be less afraid about doing a movie shot because you know there's actually going to be more in there or you can just be a pansy like me and change the so to like a stop like from like 800 to 400 and shoot it and be like it'll be okay later um

but a lot of the a lot of it now because of because it does that i can actually see much closer to the end product you know if you're like hey we want to let it's gonna give us purple shadows you know all of a sudden i can be like oh this thing this scene needs way more fill because their face is purple and i want the shadows just to be in there i want the purple just to be in their hair or something, we can start up doing that. Basically, you want Lutz to be interactive on set so that when you get to the grading process, you're really not making big swings. You know, you're just kind of finessing it, you know, smaller paint brush strokes.

And the Lut itself is like the big choice that you're making and then you're shooting with it so you can actually feel it. And usually when we're shooting, we'll tweak and augment the Lut a bit or boost the contrast. I just did a TV show where we had a Lut based on film stock from 1972 which is really fun to play with because cyan doesn't exist in that film stock so it doesn't look like modern films or cyan isn't everything interesting it was more like a cobalt blue which was like a different you know all of a sudden like your shadows got inkier much quicker

and you had to like kind of light your nights differently is there anything that you're doing in those luts that are kind of like um I don't want to say compulsive but you know know something that you're like that you're always looking for because the look is always going to change but are there some like tent pole um adjustments that you're like this this is this looks are good well usually so i usually we for the lot each lot we build per project and i did an indie called two leslie right after EAO or like the year after um and we went to a motel and we shot, you know, 16 mil, Alexa, and 35. And we did the exact same frames for each shot.

And then we did ectochrome, 200 T-16, 500 T-36, and then 500 T-35 in Alexa. And it was really fun to put all those together, you know. So Alex was like, all right, here's film. And you're like, fuck, man, doesn't look that different. It looks pretty close. And it was a little sad. And you were like, and then you're like looking at 200 T-16 and you're like, fuck, that looks a lot like 35. That grain's really tight.

Like, should we shoot it on that? And then you'd go and we shot a night exterior and we're like, okay, well, now film is shining. Like that's the last place I was thinking film's going to be great. But you have headlights and neons and all of that. And it just, you know, you get that film look. You get these like colors and range and halation and burnout and it just felt like you were, you know, any night exterior when you have like, especially like, say, like older glass or something, it's going to feel very vintage. Yeah, so that was, it was the,

I was getting back to the question in terms of tentful. We'll go and we'll shoot like the last TV show I did again, set is about Watergate. We went and shot like moody interiors and another, and like a motel on stage. We tested, you know, 10 different lenses. And then we, we shot, you know, frontlit, backlit, side lit, you know, warm lit, cold lit.

We just basically put it through the range and then you kind of, you know, a lot of it is always like, I like high contrast generally. It's usually something I push for and then I push for skin to pop. Like I want to have a let that recognizes that like, you know, right around the 60% at this type of, you know, opacity or whatever that they can actually arc. And I think that, I think Alex calls it spark is what he does. He adds it into a lot that'll actually. pop face is a bit more recognized that part of whatever's spectrum and then lift it a bit

so you don't have to light as hard is it like a skin tone like in the color curves is it just like a luminance boost in the skin tones it's a luminance boost and I think a contrast boost in the area there's a there's a lot of there's so many crazy little things you can do now like he also has I forget now you can start isolating colors within skin so you can just have red be boosted, but just in the range of skin. Oh, interesting. I forget. These were, if you want to get an interview, he's like the best of all time.

I would love that. The reason I'm asking is because over the pandemic, I just got really, I didn't have, you know, anything to shoot, obviously. And so I really got into coloring and stuff, coloring all my own stuff and just learning about it and definitely helped me work wise because I can really, you know, it's the value add for the client or whatever but um very educational as well so i'm always just trying to pick up like little tips he's he's great because he's also knowledge he like like the very very talented color it's like top tier but he like runs and owns his own color house so he's a lot of colors you'll

meet are very talented but they have like a couple of assistants and they work for a big company like he knows the full thing top to bottom he knows we know what cables are going where he knows what the systems running he knows why your your shit just shut down for no reason like he's like knows the full concept and execution of of it from like machines and guts to like over the top conceptual software ideas like it's really fun to actually dig into it with him because you can tell you exactly what's happening you know I had not seen interesting ball until um about two hours ago but I had I had been running around after the screening at Citywalk I had been telling everyone like you gotta go see this everything everywhere movie it's fucking dope because i i still haven't

seen um swiss army man and and you know there was a bunch of people had seen that and they're like oh if you hadn't yada yada yada but a few of my more uh educated friends i suppose had seen interesting ball whenever that came out and we're like bro you've got to watch it's the same it's the same thought process it's like the same thing so i was wondering if you a what that shoot felt like at the time versus what you guys are doing now, but also just like how you feel you have progressed between those two projects, that one and everything everywhere. Interesting, Ball, trying to figure out why we made it. I forget if we had funding from somewhere.

I think we used it as a camera test. It's like three different cameras. Like some scenes are out Reds, some scenes are out like the Alexa. I wasn't even available for all of it because it was so pieced together over a course of a month like my first AC Matt Sanderson shot the broformers on the beach because I wasn't there for that and I think he shot the runaway fridge

and I did the butt suckers and the ball and then like the balls of fare and then a couple of the other scenes I remember what was I had a restaurant scene of women it's funny that is that movie is looking back at it now yeah yeah well that that name came from that wayman

and that wayman is in our movie as well he is one of the he is one of the followers of Joe Bo and he's got a couple of shots he's a fascinating actor but they took I believe they took

they loved his name so much that they're like we'll name our main character after him but yeah that I mean if you watch that you can see that that swirl cosmic idea of everything's connected and what matters is what you do with it not so much about what you could do with it um yeah it's been i don't how that road started well we shot swissy and then you know it hit and it was you know people loved and hated it and i'm not sure

how many people saw it but you know things were brewing and the daniels were doing like little commercials and some tv and they just spent forever working on this script um because i I just saw it kind of build in pieces of, like, we know how we're going to do it conceptually. At one point, I tried to have them change the name to, like, everywhere, everything, everywhere, every time. So we could call it E3. But they didn't like that at all. The original name was called, I know, but I was like, it's just going to be cleaner to call it E3. It was originally called Bubbles.

I mean it kind of rude organically like that you know I would check in with them and eventually I got sent the script and read it I remember reading it twice on a plane and becoming very confused between the second and third act about who's doing what and what everyone is alive

and what everyone's dead and even when you watch the movie now I don't think most people know that like the main Michelle Yow that you've been following died and that you were actually following a different version of her through the film for the second half of it. But it feels like, no, she woke up, but no, she died. There's a different universe

but she comes back to life. And the end, it doesn't matter, though. But I remember being I'm glad you said that, because I was wondering that when it happened. I was like, wait, was that a wake up or is this a new one? New one. Yeah, no, it is, I believe technically it is a new, Michelle, it is a new one because that one died, so she can't be brought back to life. Right. Um, um, insane.

Yeah. I remember we tried to make the movie for, they kept talking about it and they kept pushing and I was terrified because I have a, my daughter was due to a ride when they wanted to shoot and the dates kept moving because of talent and then like luckily, you know, when we started prep, we timed it out.

They kind of, you know, we timed it around them and they kind of timed it around me and that like, prep ended around. the holidays and my daughter was born basically on Christmas so I had like a week with her or two and then we jumped into the film

which was pretty surreal because there was a moment where I was like oh I'm not going to be able to shoot this like if my daughter's born during the shoot I can't I'm not going to not be there but magically she arrived to Christmas when no one was shooting so it worked out

yeah I know it's been a funny path I mean I did a bunch of things since Swiss Army Man, but the Daniels, you know, they were just kind of occasionally dayplane, not daypline, but like jumping into direct episodes at TV and doing commercials. I'm really just working on this and figuring it out. There's, as you can tell, there's a lot going on in that movie. And even sometimes I'm like, where did this idea come from? Like I get everything else. Where did that idea come from? Like, what made you think that was

going to be the idea to throw in there? I'm like, Rackacacacconi. I was like, why? Why is this I love Rackacchooley. Everything else I get, but I was like, what was this one about? You just wanted to go for it. It was actually a nod to Interesting Ball in the Rackacconi story. When she's running on Harry, you know, and interesting ball, the proformers are all running, kind of falling apart. And I believe they throw one of the bros at the end so we can reach his goal. and we did the same thing with raccoon

she ends up throwing Harry towards the raccoon. You don't even actually see him get to his raccoon. You can just tell he's probably going to get there. It does a hard, hard, hard, hard reference to their previous work. It's, yeah, it's so much fun. I did want to know, though, how are you conceptualizing each look?

Because there are some really overt references in this film to other films, and I'm sure there's some that are more subdued. And I was wondering, A, like, which films were you referencing that weren't obviously their own? But then also, how were you conceptualizing all these format changes, all these lens changes? Like, what was the reasoning behind each one beyond, you know, that's the form of referencing? I assume the pre-production process was a little intense. Yeah. Yeah, we, you know, we, you know, I, we, tried to collect all the universes.

And I built a big PDF of, you know, what I like about, you know, what were thematics. I wanted, no universe was a direct, like, it is this movie. It was more, to me, it was more of like this, it is a memory of this movie or these movies. It was the idea of what something felt like, as opposed to what it looked like. So even, like, in the Wongar Wyverse,

we're actually a lot more colorful than in the mood for love. Like, in the mood for love is actually not colorful at all. except for like two very specific shot and ours is like soaked in neon but it feels like it because you have you know payment just like Tony you know Michelle is like it's very elegant and we're we're clearly going for in the mood for love but it's more of like it's what I think people think in for the mood what people think in the mood for love feels like because when you watch it it's actually just it's tungsten light exposed for tungsten like it's actually kind of it's beautiful but like it's bland in terms of color it's this very very

bear and we did the opposite of that we're like hard saturation we'll go for it um but we made a PDF and then me and costumes and makeup and hair all sat down and kind of talked about the theme for each universe and again I think we made a color palette list for for each universe but then also we talked about what colors should not be in there and I think choosing which colors you don't want is sometimes a stronger choice kind of like you know with um Spike Jones is her. They chose to remove the color blue. Completely changed how that film look. For this one, we tried to save certain colors.

So, like, the laundromat, New Year's Party, red is the predominant color for that. And we tried to keep it out of as many other universes as we could. You know, the subtler ones are like the Rakikuni universe is our PTA universe, even though it's not at all. But that was the theme of, like, these very bold, rich, like, 1990. 98 colors, like these like real blues and like fleshy skin. And if you watch it, you would be like, no, this does not, you know, but it's like animorphic. It's like bold skin tones, locations. We didn't have time to really light them the way they would have been lit.

Like Magnolia has some like phenomenal lighting and, you know, we had time and money. We would have brought condors and let the shit out of it. But it was like, no, we're just going to use the streetlights because we have two hours to shoot her running on top of a man's back, chasing a raccoon and truck. So we just had to go with it. But it was like you start somewhere small, hot dog hands started with Carol as a reference and then very quickly left that concept because Carol's too stunning and we just couldn't do it in our locations. It was like, we can say we did, but we're not going to, that's not what we're doing. Um, 2001 was just like bizarrely, we got lucky, I think, with that one. Like we found rocks next to the stages.

we were doing pickups for and just timed it at the right time of day. And we shot on old Tadeo ones that were barely in focus. You know, that's also, we only had one monkey. We had two monkeys. I take that back. So all the wide shots was just, you know, Daniel Shiner in a monkey suit, just running around to different parts of the rock, pretending to be a monkey.

And then they just comped it all together. The Alphaverse was, which is mainly just in that van that Weyman is in with his buddies it's supposed to be in a hot desert but on the day i tried to sell but it was more of like the battle of hawk because the out the costumes that the alpha people were wearing reminded me so much of star wars that we just pushed the idea of like a bright and snowy the exterior kind of pumping in through the windows um and then in the lot we are in the grade we like went a bit harder and i think we drove we went down the 16 mil grain at one point and then came back because it was doing too much damage to the image.

But we wanted to make it kind of bristly and over the top and it's just very kind of bright and blown out. And the bagelverse is like, I think you're saying it's like an amalgam of like memories of like films from my childhood. And I'm trying to remember what their direct references were, but you know, never-ending story like the princess from that was a big, just kind of clicked in my brain. This weird crystalline palace lynchy thing happening.

There is also, like, the black rainbow film was also, like, a theme in that this, like, these, like, very stark images of these weird, lifted blue shadows. This kind of, like, flawed film was like a, like, is it beyond the black rainbow? Is that the film, you know what I'm talking about? I haven't seen it, so I do not know. It was, yeah, it was just kind of, again, it's one of those weird, like, what was your memory of, of this scene, like, when you, once you see it, as opposed to, like, this is exactly that. Like, you know, Swiss Army Man was a million references, but, you know, my main reference for that was hook. Because I was like, two lost boys in the woods and, like, we're going to go really big with warm fire and colors.

I could feel like they just threw it together. But yeah, no, I think we slowly built upon it. And the bigger thing was actually trying to create the look for the action universe, which was, like, trying to figure out, you know, what's the big choice we make for this? And we shot a ton of different angles at the laundromat and at the IRS building, and then we brought it back and gave it to Alex Bickle. And he sent us like four variations on different stocks, and we showed us to the directors. We'd pick two and then debate them. We ended up on like a Fuji look, which kind of, you know, gave us cyan shadows, which was really fun for a building like that and had really beautiful skin tone for that type of skin. But even in the grade, I was like, there's too much Siam.

The movie, we've got to get rid of it, killing me. Alex was like, you have to just embrace it. It's a theme. You just got to live with it. And I think the dumbest one we did was for Hot Dog Hands, the musical, which was shot in the same location as the Wang Karwhi universe. Literally, they're on the stairwell. They're in the stairs, the first time they meet, and it's really beautiful.

And then the reverse angle of that is the Hot Dog Musical, which is like a weird fountain and that was based on the sound of music and Alex made a really cool lot that did that whole technical color like purple pink skin with like weird shadows and that was one of the first

letts that we built and the Daniels were like oh wow this is like a lot lot it's like doing like the Scorsese Aviator thing you know where it's really going for it yeah it was it was

it's fun to get to actually have an excuse to do those for a good reason. Yeah, it's, what lenses, because you said you had like a shit ton of them, like which, what lenses did you have on the film?

I'll get real specific. There you go. Where is it? I can't imagine for that budget you had full packages of each. No, no, I mean, I, you know, the, I work at, I've been going, trying to go through the same camera house, Keslo, because they've been friends for like a long time. And, you know, I think the idea is, you know, you bring them big stuff.

Like I was like, hey, let's do the pickups for Spider-Man, you know, Spider-Man 2. We did all the pick-ups for that through Keslo or like, you know, do all your commercials through one house so that when you can, you do it to a fashion project, you're like, hey, we have no money, but remember all like the, you know, all those dumb things we shot that had budgets like this one is an awesome thing that doesn't have a budget you know and they were you know they've been they've been wonderfully kind and supportive and really never said no um because we asked what we do we had hawk v lights for the action universe which is you know if you can't get panavision anamorphics to me that's your best bet in terms of it's got decent they just come out with a macro

animorphic 50 mil which became like a cute 55 mil which became a huge workforce because minimum focus is so garbage on most animorphics um that a lot A lot of it was shot on that lens. And then the majority of the like normal world or like the apartment stuff or the Andre Mat was shot on Zeiss Super Speed. And then we had for the first six weeks, we had the, an Atlas Orion anamorphic and the scorpion anamorphic because we wanted to have wider animorphics that didn't distort. And the scorpion is literally like a soulless lens.

like it is super clean but has no funk and then the Orion's are actually like I think you're going to see a lot more of those coming up I think when the Sandgren and Fraser are shooting up them a bunch now but they're like the super speeds of animorphics if that makes sense

and that they're like sharp they don't distort that much but they're still just enough like well just they've been stepped on just enough that there's like an edge to them you know but the same time they feel clean oh yeah then we shot the cook anamorphics as well

we use them for zoom for anamorphic zooms we had an optimo zoom and then the day play lenses where the super ball tarth I want to say that was hot dog hands and then the toddeos were the were the bagelverse but they may have been too crazy for that

and they may have switched the hawks in the middle of it and then we shot cannon k35s for the long car Godcha. Yeah, that's just, that, I assume this is the most involved film you've worked on in that regard. Yeah, I think so. Like, it's, I mean, it's funny because, you know, the most involved film when you jump on a TV show and it's like, here's eight hours of material for you to go shoot and you're just like, Jesus Christ. But still, you don't remember it the way you remember the work you put in on movies. Yeah, no, it's, I'm impressed that we didn't. We all, I take that back.

We also shot 16 mil glass as well. So all of the Michelle, when Michelle decides to not leave of Wayman and she decides to stay in town and becomes a martial arts superstar, all of that, majority of that was shot on 16 mil Zoom. Specifically also when she's like working out with the master and like the tiny, tiny garden that is shot in Elysian Park. was like um all of that stuff is shot in the lesion park in chinatown um but uh the universe so to speak yes that one exactly yeah those are all a lot of that was just 16 mil zoom which are really fun to play with um but um yeah it was i mean it wasn't necessarily daunting it was like that's the part you know that's the stuff you look forward to right and you get to like pick lenses and do tests and like make some very stupid ideas and choices and

ultimately a lot of it was the look really comes more from location and costumes and then the lighting like the glass and the luts are helpful but we did a lot more with like what was actually in front of the camera

we showed a lot at some old stages called DC stages where they just had standing sets that are terrible just like can only function from one angle and they're gone now but that's like a whole ton of the universes were shot there like half of like the Michelle, like when she's doing martial arts TV shows,

when she's doing martial arts tournament, and there's like the whole prison sequence when they're like walking through a row of prison cells. Oh, right, right. Yeah, and then we also shot like the young Michelle when she's blinded and her father is singing to her in bed. And the pizza universe was shot outside in the parking lot, and then the school bus where Joe Wu like tries to run in the traffic

was shot in the parking lot. And then the bar down the street is the bar from all like sunny, where that's the first time you see joy as Joe Boo. It was like you'd, we shot all of those in one day. You'd shoot, like, you know, like that last week was like, you know, every shot was a new scene. It was like, here's the shot. Running, get it.

I mean, it was, you know, and we're used to doing that. How big was the crew? For that type of scale. We didn't, even on the film, you know, we had a budget of 15. I have no idea where the number 25. million that's what i keep seeing on the internet keeps popping up and i was like if we had that number it'd be a very different film um it was it was very it was actually surprisingly scrappy in that you know we didn't have any rigging teams so like the lighting department like run by

matt ardeen who's that my friend that i met the first day of college who's been gaffing with me now for over a decade um you know he had no one to rig anything and so part of shooting in that building was we would you know basically just send our best boy getting mike beckman around on stilts because we had so many titans in the building he spent like days upon days in stilts just walking around like a like a monster basically just changing out tubes and moving things around and just kind of slowly attacking things that were going to be coming up in the days ahead because it was kind of absurd were those titan tubes playing as practicals or were you like hiding them to be film lights we played we played them as practicals for several sequences

there's like a sequence where Michelle or Evelyn meets Jobu for the first time in a hallway after Jobu like kills three cops and the lighting is going kind of wild and there's all these different chases that are happening and you have to install them and then you have to run

because of the delay in wireless you have to run cable to all of them and you have to actually get into like the guts of the building and run cables down so you can break them in the pixel mode so you can actually do these kind of crazy chases so it took a long time to rig um and we again we didn't have a rigging team so the the onset crew just got very slim

be like matt and like an electrician and then everyone else was just out rigging lights for something coming up like a day from them and hoping we can get it done in time what we also like the atrium sorry oh no go ahead i was i was just going to say like what was that lighting package like and how are you keeping it small but we we didn't have enough money to actually light the atrium so we're shooting in winter and so the atrium is lit from a giant skylight so like when we lost the light at 5 p.m. we lost the light

we're like all right I guess we're done shooting in the atrium now and that's where a ton of the scenes happen so I think when we were doing the fanny pack fight we shot incredibly we had to do all of the dialogue in the whole area which is really frustrating because there's a lot of dialogue of her like

seeing the divorce papers and getting to the elevator and awful women and her punch in Jamie and then we had to do the panic that fight um we had to shoot as much as we had to show everything looking out the atrium first and then when we turned around we had like an 18k that we could kind of bounce into the ceiling but even still it didn't look good like because the light is like it's very diffused directional top light and then we're trying to like bounce this broad light across the room so it gets a little like you know it gets a little sketch in terms of lighting and then for the finale when they're on staircase and they're you know they're they're making their way up and it's all lit from above

we only could afford blanket lights for one half of the atrium so we would have to shoot like the pinky fight and then the next day we'd have to like you know spend three hours moving lights from one side of the atrium to the other so we could shoot the staircase fight um it would have been a lot nicer just the light the whole thing but we were like even that was like a big um not fight but it was a big hurdle for production just to get the light to aid you in appropriately for that. Yeah, it was pretty

scrappy in that regard that we, and again, like now if I'm working on most movies and TV shows I work on, we have a fully dedicated rigged thing like their job is to just, you know, go on our scouts, we walk up, sets are rigged, and on this one it was like, no, our main unit's just doing that when it has time.

And we were able to do it again because we spent 30 days in that one building. Right. Did I hear correctly that you were using a handful of split comps to just hide lights places that you wouldn't otherwise get them? I love doing that. I like doing that as much as I possibly can because I know it's pretty easy. I don't remember doing it too often in this, but I think I, like, anytime there were scenes of stunts, I was like, well, we're going to be pulling ceiling tiles and putting in cables there anyway.

It's like, why don't I just throw a light on there and just, you know, copy paste, you know, one drop ceiling to the next. But we didn't do it too often. I wasn't actively seeking it out. I remember the first time, like, hearing about it, I think, hearing you could do that. Obviously, Deacons did that in the Chamelon film, and he would just, he literally had the 18K through the moon.

And they just panned out the stand. But, like, Adele's first music, her big hit video, So I was like, man, she looks, she looks great. How are they lighting her? And then I found out like later, it's like, oh, there was a sea stand of a fluorescent just, just in the shop. And I just painted it out. That's why she's, I'm like, how is she lit? Like, that's, there's no lights in the room.

And then that's what they did. But no, for this one, we were also just moving too fast to maybe even get that creative. I'll put a light here. A lot of the movie was spent trying to make the building look different. So a lot of, we started very bright, and then we started just turning things off. trying to go for like a die hard feel and getting pretty dramatic and there's like

Wayman has like a big monologue about how the world's changed nothing tastes the same when they're like in a dark hallway with like security lights beeping and there's no light coming in and I was like yeah this feels right right no one will question why it's always dark

it was just kind of just leaning into the film pretty strong at that point well and correct me if I'm wrong but having a I'm using chaotic because I have no other word to use, but I don't mean it as a negative. Having such a chaotic script does, I feel like allow you the freedom to kind of do shit like that

where no one's going to quit. People have too many other questions to question why this thing is going to be dark. Yeah, no, I think, I mean, yeah, we, their Daniels are, I think if someone said, they're maximalist to a degree. but I think they just like to take bold swings and I like to take bold swings too I feel like if the audience has time to question like why is this hallway dark or like why is it there

something else in the movie is wrong like you fucked up somewhere else if they have time to like break away and start debating your creative choices or logical choices unless it's like something truly egregious it's like no they're just you know the building's in chaos and this hallway the lights are off

because they're you know that you know our production designer kept setting up you know an office under construction hints throughout the opening act um throughout the film also to justify like places that could be moody or like the lights don't work or like you know the butt plug fight is in totally a staged construction site like it's like oh there's a construction site here how do we do this um because we already had done like you know the fanny pack was a fight in an office space and i was like well we can how do we do another office space fight without making it feel the same

And it was like, oh, we'll just have dramatic low-lit, you know, work lights on the floor. And that's going to be able to look for that scene. You know, it was a bit, you know, it's a bit cheeky, but it was still fun to do. Like, and would they, like, leaning it to that. Yeah. I, I would love to talk to you more because, like, your whole music video and commercial world, I think we could dig into a lot more, but also this film has a lot to talk about. But I have to do another podcast in five minutes.

So I have to go now, which is this is the first time I've ever come up against my own schedule, which sucks. But I'll end. Hopefully we can have you back on next time you're free. I know you've had a pretty rough Sunday, especially working on TV show right now. But well, hopefully you have you back. But I do want to end on the same two questions I ask everyone. And the first one being, do you remember something you've read or maybe a piece of advice that you got? It doesn't have to be the one, but just something that kind of has stuck with you throughout your career as a cinematographer.

Um, yeah, there probably was at some point. I think I forget some director once said he was like, think about your choice now, but think about your choice in seven months from now if it was the right choice. Meaning, like, you know, whatever you do on set right now, is it good for now or is it good for later? And that, like, you know, when you get to the final product, does you make the right choice? And that comes from different areas. It's a creative thing of, like, where you're just getting bored of how the film looked and you wanted to change it up so you broke the theme. to also like you should push yourself to for greatness if you can because seven months from now you're like man we should have done another take or I should just turn that fucking light off even if it was awkward for the act I should just fucking turn that light off um that's what's kind of been sticking to me lately is the idea of like you know don't take the easy path sometimes and it's more like don't take the awkward path or you're afraid to take the awkward path of like I just need to do this one thing or like I should really say we should do another take because I think we need it something like that and then you know because you got to be like great your teeth and be like

seven months from now I'm going to be thanking myself but right now I'm not happy yeah it's the combo of that thing Fincher said where like the DVD is forever yeah yeah he's me I mean you think he said I'm making a film for 10 years from now yeah you know that's what his he's like I'm making it for now I'm making it for 10 now when people are at a party and they say hey did you see that movie that ends up ahead in the box yeah yeah but also the the thing that you're saying that I, every time I don't do this, I kick myself. He's like, if I have an instinct, I just do it. So like, if it's, you know, simple shit.

Like, if I'm leaving the house, I'm like, am I going to need that, like, sticker? Maybe I should bring some stickers with me. And I don't. Then I find myself in a situation where someone's like, oh, I love your podcast. Can I have some stickers? Fuck, you know, every time. So I'm sure when you're on set and it's like, I should, you know, whatever, turn off that light or whatever it may be.

Yeah, better to just do it, you know? Yeah. Yeah, I think I think this is hard. Yeah, second question, this is going to be a hard one because of this film, but it's usually if everything, if you're programming a double feature with everything everywhere, what is the second film? You know, the Daniels said, you know, turning red, the new Pixar film is kind of a sister film to this in a way. You know, it's a story that uses basically an extreme concept to tackle the idea of generational love and how to do that and also make it very entertaining. You know, I think they're both, you know, a good variation on that.

You know, there's sister film is kind of funny to this because it's, you know, it's so maximalist. I'm trying to think of like another film that would be the inverted version of this, the simplified version of this. I don't know. I mean, you know, the matrix is obviously the biggest touchstone. But turning, I think turning red. Yeah, that one's very. There are some, I mean, do you know, fuck, I wanted to ask about Bill Pope. Why was he there? Um, he shot, he shot, uh, Shang-Chi and I think Michelle's a ticket. And Michelle's in Shang-Chi. I see. Okay, okay. Because I was like, I'm going to talk to him, too.

Yeah. No one's going to understand what that means. But I, yeah, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, He was like sitting like three rows in front of me and she was like, and there's Bill Poe. I was like, wait, hold on. What? You can get him on the podcast. He's great.

He's amazing. I love his interviews. He's spicy. Absolutely love to. All right. Yeah, Travis has joined my meeting and it's, I haven't started it. All right. I'm going to go.

Thanks so much, man, especially for the extra time. And like I said, I'd love to have you back because your body of work is really admirable. I don't want to say envious because that sounds creepy, but you've done a really good job for yourself so far. Thanks for having me on, dude. I really appreciate it. Frame and Reference is an Owlbot production. It's produced and edited by me, Kenny McMillan,

and distributed by Pro Video Coalition. Our theme song is written and performed by Mark Pelly, and the F-at-Armabox logo was designed by Nate Truax of Truax Branding Company. You can read or watch the podcast you've just heard by going to Providiocoolition.com or YouTube.com slash Alibot, respectively. And as always, thanks for listening.