Pat Scola, ASC: Grit, Restraint, and Firelight in The Death of Robin Hood
Grit comes from restraint and control.
The Death of Robin Hood is Pat Scola's third film with Michael Sarnoski, made an hour outside Belfast on a production budget of around eleven million, somewhere between the scrappiness of Pig and the scale of A Quiet Place: Day One. Sarnoski wanted grit, and Scola is precise about the word. He does not mean film grain. "Grit comes from restraint and control," he says, and a large part of the job now is "the choices you decide not to make." The fight in the mud, Robin and a peasant trying to drown each other, was conceived as a oner so the viewer would be stuck inside the brutality with no cut to hide behind. The film opens in 2.39 anamorphic for the myth of Robin, and across his wounded transfer to the priory the mattes open to 1.66, invisibly.
His rule for lighting is that it should not feel lit. The keeper from a firelight test in prep was a rig the gaffer called the Dalek, a sheet of plywood carrying twenty-odd 500 watt clear bulbs, driven by fire footage so the light moves the way a real fire's does. Where real fire could carry a scene, it did. The scene of Bill Skarsgard's character washing his dead wife is a single fireplace and the only roll in the picture that was pushed. The final scene was shot on Kodak's new stock, so new it was still called SO55 and had no official rating. He is equally frank about fear. After day two he called his wife and told her he should never have shot the film on film, that it looked terrible, and that was the day whose dailies held the first shot of Jodie Comer at the window in blue. The fear burned off at about two and a half weeks.
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Pat Scola, ASC
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Jared Levy
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David Kruta
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Topher Hammond
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Read the full conversation
Cool. So thanks again for hopping on, and been a fan of your work for a long time now. So and I remember watching Pig when it first came out and being really into it, and I'm not surprised by the run you've been on and especially with this director. And so I guess I just wanted to learn, speaking about this film, about Robin Hood in particular, how'd you learn about the film, and what was your first thoughts when you heard about the idea of it?
Yeah, I mean, I think Michael had been cooking it for a while. I think there was even... I don't remember exactly, so I could be totally making this up, but I do feel like I remember thinking that would be the next one after Pig. So, I think it's been somewhere in his brain for a while. But then obviously we ended up doing Quiet Place Day One after that, which, in a way I think ultimately in terms of what it took to execute Robin Hood, I think there was something actually that kinda worked out for us in that way, you know? Going from...
How so?
Well, Pig was a sub $2 million production budget, right? So we're obviously very scrappy and kinda doing what we can. Shot that movie in 20 days. Quiet Place was obviously a bit more. It's, upwards... By the end of reshoots and everything, it was somewhere upwards of, 90 million or I don't know where they have landed, but, we're dealing with large set pieces, it's a much bigger endeavor for Michael and myself. I know that was the biggest film I'd ever shot at that point. And I don't know, it...
Was that the leap for you? Were you in the same... was it for you going from a two million film to a 90 then?
I think at that point I had, 10 was the biggest film I had done, a $10 million movie, which it's really still sounds like... It's still quite... It's just a small, but just people are getting paid better than like...
Yeah, it's like, it's the same scale of production, but everyone's getting their actual rate that time.
Yeah. And I would even say actual rate, 'cause you're still a tiered film at that point, but, it's like you're, people are getting taken care of better and... But you're not really that much more capable. You are more capable, but not by tons. And then, but having done Quiet Place where we're dealing with, massive sets, huge builds, big lighting installs, and these are all things I kinda had done in commercials, which made me pretty equipped for Quiet Place, 'cause I've been doing, big commercials for a while. So, none of that was, that intimidating. But what I do think was interesting is, when we got to Robin was a small movie. It, for what's on screen. What you see on screen, you're not gonna assume that we basically made, the production budget was somewhere around, 11 million. There was obviously a lot more above the line and whatever, the nonsense that sort of doesn't end up on screen. But, ultimately, it's still a small budget for what we executed. And I what I mean about being, having done Quiet Place second, is that we were able to kind of cherry-pick the techniques of the indie world and the techniques of the sort of large scale production, and then kind of be able to, mix these two things. So, there's some days on Robin Hood where it's like, it's, our crew hikes into a really difficult place, and we have no lighting and we just have camera, and, we're kinda shooting scenes as stripped down and as bare bones as you kinda get on a movie of that size. And then there's moments where we're kind of taking some of the more, bigger set piece things that we learned where, and we're kind of applying it to Robin Hood. For example, we have this scene where they fight in front of these... There's, this huge burning hut that's kind of on fire, and they're, fighting in front of this thing. And we kinda had to figure out a way to design this burning hut where it could burn, a controlled burn for two nights in a row so we could actually shoot this thing that was so intense and kind of make it feel organic. But, that's when you're like, "Okay, here's how we have to take a little bit of our, this sort of movie magic money idea and, we really need to put it into this set." And we built that whole village, too. That's just an empty field in Ireland. We built that little farm. And so, that's where you're doing that. And then elsewhere, we're like, "Okay, well, we can't afford to do that everywhere, so now we're just gonna go find beautiful places." And like the priory...
Luckily Ireland has a few of those, for sure.
Yeah, I mean, that was a big part. I don't think we could have made that movie anywhere else, to be honest with you. That was the perfect balance. And everything is in within an hour of Belfast, which is also crazy to think about. So we're not as wild as it feels, 'cause it is wild, but that's just the nature of Ireland. You go an hour outside Belfast and these places look like that, you know? And you're like, "Okay, cool," like, "This can work." But, the priory, when you think about the priory in that place, that's like six locations that we stitched together from finding different places. And then we built his bedroom. So, that's sort of, a trick that I think we probably, you kind of bring from an indie world a little bit more, where you kinda have to use what you can find, stick it all together with some good planning and, with some good thought and, it kinda, it can work. So I guess, yeah, for me, it's kinda interesting how that all panned out and how it sort of was our third film together, but kind of using both the skills we learned on both films prior.
Yeah. No, I mean, it's nice to hear you talk about that, and it makes a lot of sense. Because the thing that I had in my mind was that there are... There's this really interesting needle that it threads on, the look and feel, where it obviously has a certain amount of high-end elements in it, and also as a part of the look feels really polished, but it doesn't lose some sort of grounding where it also certainly doesn't feel like a comic movie or like a Marvel movie, where it has so much veneer on it that it becomes... It lacks almost... I don't know if indie is the right word, but it manages to be both at the same time a lot. And I was curious when conceptualizing the look and the film and the feel of it, what was that process like speaking with the director, and how'd you land on this world?
Yeah. I think, first of all, I wouldn't be offended by you saying indie. I think that... I think you're kinda, spot on a little bit.
I don't mean it negatively, for sure.
No, but to me, that's a success, and I think to Michael we consider that a success. 'Cause I do think there's something about the way we kinda handled it where again, it doesn't feel glossy. The veneer is a great word. There isn't this polish on it. But it... And I think that allows you to kind of ground in the world a little bit more, and it allows you to kind of like feel like it's way more lived in. It's way more real. I mean, there are other films and TV shows that I think are shot in, I don't know what you'd wanna call... in, this universe, right? We... there's some very prevalent things we've seen recently. And I think, a big thing for us was sort of like, "Okay, how do we separate ourselves from those," you know? And I think trying to find a way that... And, we were very... Michael was very clear from the beginning that he did want it to be gritty. He wasn't looking for anything polished. So we kind of did chase a certain level of, I don't know, whatever you wanna call that. And grit is not just, film grain. That's not what I mean by that. I mean, that there's a down and dirtiness to it. There's also... grit comes from restraint and control. Sure, we could have rocked the techno for, a bunch of different shots and done more flashy things. But, the... It's sort of as a cinematographer or a director today, I do think a big part of the choices you make are... It's not the choices you decide to make. It's, almost, the choices you decide not to make. Anything is possible, you know? You can do anything with a camera now. We can move a camera any way we want. It's about, maybe finding that restraint to be like, "Okay, well, maybe that's just not appropriate for what we're trying to do or what we're trying to say." And I think that's what you see in Robin a lot, is a lot of the choices on a macro level are made to kind of pull it down to Earth without it making it feel too grandiose or big. I mean, even going back to those fight scenes, you know? The fight scenes that we talked about, there was the one where he fights the sort of the peasant, and they're just rolling around in the mud and they're exhausted and they're tired. I mean, that was conceived as a oner because we wanted it to feel... We wanted you to feel, probably what it was to fight in that time, where it's not, these perfect sword blows and you're not this perfect choreography. It's like, no, you're just surviving, you know? You're literally just fighting for your life, and that was the way we were trying to visualize that is like, okay, this is, trying to suffocate somebody in the mud. And that, it's funny, trying to get everybody on the same page for that in, the office beforehand is, harder than you think, you know? 'Cause, the first stunt vis has kind of come back, and our stunt team is great, and that's sort of them reading the page and being like, "Okay, this is our best interpretation of that." And it's kind of what you would imagine, some cuts to these, very, big hits and things that they look really cool on camera, but it's not visceral. It's not the same level of visceral or brutal, I think, is what we ended up getting. And sure it may be what we get is filled with less action per se, but I think it probably elicits an emotion or a feeling that's more effective for what we were trying to say about what Robin's life was like before the Prior...
Yeah, I'm really fascinated with what you just said about. So the stunt team comes back with this idea, and had you and Michael discussed what your hopes were for it ahead of time so that when they presented it, you both knew that this was not in the vein that you were looking for? Or was it a process of discovery to realizing that this wasn't right?
No, I mean, I think, and again, there's no shade at the stunt team, 'cause again, we love them. No, but, yeah, I do think that, I don't know, this is just maybe the way Michael and I also kind of go about certain, managing certain departments and things that we work with. You don't wanna clip someone's wings right off the bat by saying "Do this." You kinda wanna let people explore. And I think when you let people explore, there are things that came from the idea the initial ideas of the stunt team or interpretations of the page that we do end up using. It's just sort of how we get to those things, you know? So I think we definitely weren't too over-specific in the beginning, and then I think we kinda had to get a little bit more specific about how these things wanted to feel or get executed.
And that specificity... Did you guys know that you were hoping for it to end up that way or is that a reaction to what was presented to you and you realized that you wanted it different?
No. I mean, Michael knew that he wanted something that felt not like action or not like an action movie. That was very clear from the beginning. And then Michael and I shot list the whole movie basically before everybody else is in the office, or maybe not. In this case, it wasn't the whole, and we kinda finished once people were in the office. But me and him have a very clear idea...
You guys do that together?
Yeah. We do it collaboratively, in the same... We basically just sit in the same room for weeks and just talk. But so, we kind of knew exactly how this wanted to be shot or the feeling that we're trying to accomplish, you know. And then you see what comes back and you know that's really not in the spirit of what you're trying to do. So, for example, we kinda knew... Again, the scene actually doesn't end up being a oner. The point of the oner was because we wanted a viewer to be forced and sitting in the action in a way that was, uncomfortable. We wanted to force the viewer to be like, "Wow, I'm just kinda watching this brutality," and let the brutality speak in the choreography, right? So now you're not tricking anybody with the camera. You're just pointing a camera at something and, kind of just letting it unfold. So we kinda knew that was the vibe. But so when you get a stuntvis back that has lots of cuts and are hiding these, things in cuts and using, very traditional action techniques that are not bad, it's just not what we were after. And so, we basically had to help, reverse engineer that choreography for what the camera could do and, how the camera was moving. So, those hits and things that they do wanna do that we kind of do wanna bring into it, the camera has to kind of find its right place in order to hide those moments without feeling like we're hiding them or doing them for the sake of action. Does that make sense? It's still, the ethos of no, no, no, we just still wanna observe the suffering that both of these guys are going through. Kind of, with the...
Well, it's bringing the emotion... action being up back into it, and I think a lot of action scenes take the emotion out of it. Not because they're intending to, but more the design of it kind of takes away that level of humanity, and you, your choices were putting it back in. I find it so interesting that you guys were shot listing so early in the process. Just along the lines of, like... Not having your locations known. So what is that marriage between what you guys are hoping to do and the reality of the places, and how does, how did you work that out?
Yeah, I mean, we, I think in general when we do this, there are certain scenes that we get. We can basically do most of it, but ultimately, when you're shot listing like that, you're not closing yourself off from opportunity. That's not the point. The point of doing that for us is, what are we trying to say and how are we trying to say it? And going through that exercise, even in a made-up location in your head. You can still, you'd be surprised how much of it is still transferable to a new space. And ideally, when you go to a new space, now you're actually just... There's more ideas that actually come from that new space, and you can kind of apply your same intention or purpose to this now three-dimensional place. And sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you kind of have to rethink it. But it also helps you kind of know when you go into a location where you're like, "Well, what are we looking for?" You know? There's this part where, in the film where they're reunited with, where Robin is reunited with little Margaret. She kind of comes to the island, and they're on this path near the ocean and kind of you see the leper and you see Sister Brigid walking with this little girl, and they kind of come out of, over this hill, and Robin's kind of seeing that. And we had shot-listed, and sort of, whatever, hypothesized that we wanted something that felt like that. That he was, is seeing from a distance, and that they can almost appear from behind a bend or over a thing. And so when you're now scouting, sure, if we didn't do that beforehand, we'd be like, "Sure, maybe this will work for that." But because we had that in mind, we're like, "Ugh, this thing, we kind of really want it to feel like this." So we were really picking the place ultimately quite carefully about where it could happen. But you also end up in times where, it actually really helps because then you're, then you can really keep whatever, this feeling intact that you're going for when you're, thinking about it ahead of time. And then there's some times when we're shot-listening where we do table, we'll table an entire scene and be like, "You know what? This is so location-dependent, let's just maybe not do this one right now. It might just be spinning our wheels." But, the bed chamber, for example, we were able to do all that 'cause we're like, "Well, it's four walls and a bed." You know, you can... It doesn't matter if we don't have the designer plans yet. The way we ended up building it was informed by a lot of our discussions, in some way. Because we're like, "Okay, cool." We know that we're gonna be spending a lot of time looking around like this, so maybe we have to move the bed to this part of the room versus this part of the room. And, that's a simple, small choice, but when you're dealing with, 30 pages or something like that in that bedroom, you, it's important to decide where the bed's gonna be and how that's gonna affect what you look at. You know? It's like...
And the blocking involved on every little thing. A lot of the scenes had really minimal coverage, which I love. It's my favorite thing, and there's such an assuredness in the filmmaking that way, and a definitive point of view. And I'm wondering about what that dialogue is like I guess in the shot listing, but also on set, and do you feel a pressure to get more angles to create a level of safety in post or like where does that, where does the assuredness come from making those bold choices and just letting a scene be this one angle or what have you?
I can... I think I could tell you where it comes from, and I think that's from where my roots and Michael's roots, in indie film, where your schedules are so compact that you don't have time to sometimes shoot things. And so what happens is then you kinda get comfortable with designing certain scenes that, well, this could just take place in this one moment, and that might just be enough for us. And let's try to block that and shoot that so that is enough for us. So, I can tell you on, again, I know this is about Robin Hood, but, Michael and I have done three films together.
No, talk about everything.
Yeah, I think it's informative. But, there's this one scene in Pig, and it's one of my favorite scenes, where Rob ironically, that's his name, Rob. Robin. Rob goes back and he meets this woman who is this baker that used to work for him as a sous chef at some point in his life. And they sit and talk for, five minutes maybe on screen, four minutes on screen. And we had set... And that day was absolutely packed. We had three locations and, six scenes. I mean, that was our schedule on Pig. It was like total madness. And so we put up the wide of that scene first, and it's this wide shot of them sitting across from each other. And it's lit in this way that... And the way she speaks, she has this aching nostalgia in her voice. And it, so we're just watching this wide shot, and I feel like I remember, after the first take or two, Michael and I looked at each other. You know? Is this it? Do we need anything else? And, we had intended to go in for coverage, but there was just something, there was this magic about what, in this, single wide shot of, in that scene that, to me, to this day, is one of my favorite scenes in the film. And that's a product of sort of discovery on set. But it does, I think to both of us, it illustrated something can be as powerful if you're not even looking at the close-ups of someone's face ever. You know? If you can do that.
I firmly believe that. And in that moment, you guys didn't end up... You actually didn't end up shooting the other coverage, and you've, you forced post to not have it.
Yeah. We shot nothing else. And all they did was...
That's the best part because I think there's a lot of times where there is that discussion of, "Yeah, it could work in this one shot, but, for safety," et cetera, and it's just nice to just make the choice.
I mean, if I'm honest, Robin Hood is probably Michael's most covered film, and that including A Quiet Place, which is wild that somehow we got away with less coverage in Quiet Place than we did... with, Paramount and Universal.
Why do you think that is for Robin Hood?
Well, Robin... And, there's a lot of other visual choices we can talk about too that kind of lean, that are related to this, so maybe it's good we get into it. But Robin is a movie that, the first 30 minutes is what it, you kind of understand what that is. But, once you're in the priory, you're dealing with people who are constantly misrepresenting themselves, right? You deal with, you're constantly you have people who are not really being forthcoming with who they are, and that's Brigid, that's Brigid and Rob. And that, everyone's sort of hiding something. The leper's hiding something about himself. And so the film, this film required us to sort of... you kind of have to be looking at actors a certain way to understand, what they're saying might not be the most important thing in the scene. It's kind of what they're not saying. And as a result of that you kind of need to be looking into their souls a little bit to, watch these performances unfold, where the actors are acting one thing with their face but saying another thing with their voice. And so coverage is not, the coverage was not necessarily out of fear as much as it was, how do we really make sure we're getting this across in this case? And, it's just there's so much nuance to Jodie and Hugh's performance that we didn't really wanna miss those things, you know? Even the way we lensed it, even the aspect ratio that we end up in at the priory, all... These are all chosen out of man, we really need to make sure the face feels like a landscape, and, it's something that we can be discovering on the screen when we're watching it. You know? And, having started the movie in 2.39 because, the beginning of that movie is sort of the, if you divide the film into two sections, right, the first third we could say is the myth of Robin, and the second two-thirds is the man of Robin, right? So we kind of lean into the mythology in the way that we've seen other Robin Hood movies before. We do shoot anamorphic. We're in scope. We're in 2.39, and, you kind of it's the movie I think a viewer's expecting to get from watching it. And, obviously with our, with Michael's own spin on it and kind of like approaching it the way we do, but we are... There's a certain feeling to it that we were kind of after. And then when you get to the priory, when Robin gets injured and there's, that four-minute sequence of him being transferred to the priory, in that very, impressionistic sort of subjective montage you have the mattes opening from 2.39 to 1.66 over the course of, that five minutes, so it kind of happens invisibly to a viewer. And then you kind of just feel that it happens. I don't think you notice it happens. Most people don't seem to notice it happening, but it's like, it's just a feeling that at the end of the movie you're like, "Wait a minute, did that change for me?" Yeah. You know?
Yeah, I definitely didn't feel it. The thing that I felt, and I wrote it down immediately knowing that I was gonna talk to you, was the blue of her dress. And how it... the film was almost monochromatic up until that moment, and the power of seeing color, it felt as, impactful as, when color happens in Wizard of Oz. And I was... Were you aware in production that would be such an impactful moment for that color in that time?
Yeah. I mean, the talk about color and the color of anything, and the color of light, was something that was really, really... we kind of hammered in over the course of all of prep. I mean, even the first third of the film, you... it is very monochromatic, bleak, gray. Again, we're sort of trying to make sure the oppressiveness of Robin's life is felt. And even in that first third, you don't actually feel a saturated color until basically, more or less certain, death occurs.
Fire.
Fire. Fire becomes this sort of rage, this anger, this blood. It's the only color in that. And but that's all when the violence begins, right? It's like when they kill, it... the first time you see, the really feel that redness is when he kills Bill Skarsgård's wife in the cabin. And then the fights, then it's the funeral scenes, and you have this sort of built up, this sort of rage that's this... What is it? Like a potential energy. It's potential rage is sort of building in these sort of simultaneous funeral scenes, both lit by fire. Then we kind of go into the fights that happen in front of fire, and that's sort of, the first time you really see that saturated red. It's almost like you can't distinguish between blood and that color, you know? Then when we get to the priory, there's obviously all of a sudden a color we've kind of really never seen. And that color of blue, which is not just on her, it's sort of amongst people in the priory, was something that Michael really, really talked about a lot with David [Lee] and the design. The flowers, yeah, the bluebells, that's very, very intentional. I can't remember who actually did that, but I remember being like, "Oh, man." I loved it. "It'll be so hard to do that." It's so awesome. I remember being like, "Oh my God, it's gonna be so hard to plan out exactly where they go." And they had this amazing method, and it's so simple, but sometimes you get caught up in your own work so much you can't think about how some simple something else could be. And it's like they just had them in these little plastic things, and they would just run around, stick them anywhere we needed on camera. I'm like, "So simple. Amazing."
It looked great. And the point of them and the way that the blue was the same as her dress, it all... It's clear, but not in a way that feels thin. It was just really, really...
That's a very pretty... Those bluebells, I'm glad you noticed them, 'cause they were very important to Michael. It was, very, very important. It was something that, people might have tried to kill and be like, "Do we need to do this?" You know, 'cause it's an easy thing to kind of like, "Oh, we're so over budget." Like, "Do we need to do this?" And he was like, "No, no, we need them. They need to exist." And to be fair, part of that was, you're trying to show this sort of, going from winter to spring in this new season of Robin's life, right? This is all driven by Robin's own personal journey, right? So you kind of have the growth of these flowers that kind of occur over the film. And there's a similar thing going on with the lighting when you kind of get to the priory where, the first time you see sort of yellow sunlight is the moment where Robin sort of is exiting after he's sort of been healing for a little bit and, Jodie's teaching him how to...
His first walk is unbelievable. I loved it so much, and it was so nice how one movie can feel so different, you know? And that the amount of thought, obviously, that went into that difference while still managing for it to be the same movie is certainly not an easy thing to do.
I mean, I would... I could send you, I have a huge spreadsheet of every scene in the priory, basically, in the room and outside of the room, and basically tracking the emotion of the light, if that makes sense. It's like every scene, and I think when I handed it to Seamus [Lynch], my gaffer, I was like, "Hey, man, I want you to have this." He's like, "What the fuck is this?" So Irish. He was just like, "This is crazy." And I'm like, "No, no." He wasn't against it was just so specific. Because, and Seamus is wildly talented gaffer, you know? He's done some really great films. I learned a lot from him on this one, if I'm honest. But it...
What do you think the biggest thing you learned from him?
There was just some technical thing. They are the toughest crew I've ever encountered. I mean, I love my people in LA, you know? I've worked with the same guys for like 10 years, in some cases. Love them, love a lot of the crews I've been with around the world. Love my UK crews. But these Northern Ireland sparks, man, they're built different. There was this one location there, I don't know if you remember the beginning of the movie where the girl finds Robin in this sort of amazing quarry encampment. And yeah, we loved the location obviously. We're like, "This is unbelievable." Our line producer found that. We were on a location scout, and he walked up this path that no one wanted to walk up, and he's like, "I think I found it." And we kind of all go up there, and we're like, "Yeah, this is... It was a absolute headache to get there. We had to like build a little road to get up there and all this. But it was not easy getting anything. Getting yourself up there was hard. Getting gear up there was a nightmare. A whole other set. And I remember when we were scouting, we had a whole night scene where she kills Robin, and I'm like looking around, and I've lit my fair share of big, complicated or difficult sets. But I was like, man, and like basically that quarry is surrounded by these super steep mountains. They're pitched in this way that's like I'm like, "I can't ask anybody to put lights up there." And we were, no, we were trying to get on top of it from behind, but that couldn't work. We couldn't get any cranes up there. There was just like no... And I was just like, "I don't know." You know? And so I kinda was like, "Shane, let's maybe we just settle for kinda lighting." In a way that would be... I think him and I both knew it wouldn't be the way I would wanna do it, but it was a way that, like I'm willing to do it, you know? Again, small movie. We don't have, we can't be heli... For sure we could have helicoptered lighting up there. And that could have worked, which, I've done before. I've helicoptered gear onto glaciers. It's a thing that can work, it's just you have to have cash. And you were like, "That's not maybe worth the money to spend." You know? So I was trying to figure out a way to do it. And he basically was just like, "We'll do it, Pat." And I was like, "No, man." Like, "That seems insane." 'Cause you're like looking at this mountain, it's like fucking like this, right? And on the day I'm like, "How's he gonna do this?" And like I look over and there's like five sparks with a wheelbarrow, and they were just like full like bobsled team pushing it up a mountain. Cabling up a mountain. And I'm like, "Man, you do a shoot in New York" and like again, I'm from New York, love my people, but they're like, "What do you mean this building's got no elevator?"
I'm from New York too, and I know what you're talking about.
And you're like, "These dudes are just insane." And like it would be hailing sideways, pissing rain. They're like, "Do you love it, Pat?" And I'm like, "Should we go home? Is this safe?" We're flying Technos in winds that I just know would come down. We would cancel the shot in the States. Like it would just be like, "No, we can't do this." And there was one scene where, I don't know if you remember, but we're pulling out... It's like when after Robin kills the girl in the beginning, and then you kind of see him start to bury her, but then it kind of pulls out and reveals that there's many people that he's killed and buried. I mean, this is like 35, 40 mile an hour winds or maybe I'm overestimating that, but there is like six grips on the back of the techno. I've never seen six grips on the back of a techno because if you have six grips on a techno, you're like, "Hmm, I don't know. Maybe we shouldn't be doing this." But there was like our grips all felt safe enough, and again, it's 'cause they're so... They know how to work in this world that is pretty foreign...
Guess if you can't work in those conditions, you can't do much stuff in the Irish countryside, you know?
Yeah. So it's like, but they're just so prepared for it and so ready. So anyway, my point is that like I think Seamus showed me that, there's always a way. It might not be the easiest way, but there's always a way, and I think I learned that on... and he did that a couple of times on that shoot where we were lighting up huge cliff side at night, this other cliff side at night where he just like drove this huge machine on top of a field on top of it, and like you're just like, "Ah, it's just..." You know, these sort of impressive things that you're almost nervous to ask somebody to do 'cause I don't wanna sound like I'm asking... I hate... you don't wanna be like, "Well, let's..." Then they'd be look at you like that's a stupid idea, you know? But like he kind of made it very easy to ask for things that seem crazy, and we could have an honest conversation about it.
And then once you start seeing him operating, your confidence in him grows. Like I joke, once I have a certain rapport with crew and they start doing things that blow my mind, I just tell them I have irrational confidence in you. And like I will now start asking for things that are outrageous because you have given me irrational confidence. I wanna talk about your nighttime exterior lighting because I found that it just always felt so believable in certain ways. And I was curious to your philosophy around how you're doing it, because I think that there is a way that you can kind of just easily throw a bunch of balloons up, and you get even exposure, and it just has that look that is good and polished. But it can end up lacking... It can just feel like what it is, and I was curious what... How do you think about it? And it doesn't have to be in the nitty-gritty of, talking about a specific lighting plan, but just your overall view of how you approach it generally, I'd just be so curious to hear.
I mean, I think generally all my lighting is rooted in story to some degree. I think that's my work in general, is like I'm a very story-first person. I don't read a script and go, "Man, I can make this look so sick," right? Like that's not really my... That's not what happens when I read a script for me. I'm like, "Okay, how do I tell this story that they're trying to tell in a way that feels appropriate?" Even if I think I've said this before in some other interviews or whatever, it's like, I'm less interested in me coming away with something beautiful, and more interested in us coming away with something impactful that makes the movie better. If it can be both, and I think Robin, a lot of times can be both because of the subject matter, because of the world, that's just my general approach to all filmmaking in my craft. In nighttime lighting, in this film in particular, again, I think there's a certain agency I had to allow a certain level of grit, you know? Don't need it to be this polished nighttime exterior. So I think a lot of the times you're seeing... I mean, there are scenes where we are lighting an entire scene with the burning hut. The burning hut lit basically everything in that one scene. We lit a house on fire and we let it light the scene.
Including ambient? Like there wasn't other things that were...
The scene that's close to the hut is only the fire. Like the one that's like when they're fighting in the mud, it's like the elder father, that's basically just the thing that's on fire. We cheated them around to like basically if I needed like profile light, I'd move them around a bit more. The one that's further away with the sort of peasant guy in the mud that obviously has supplemental lighting going on. So what you're seeing there is like, again, I don't want it to feel like it's lit generally. That's just my whole philosophy. It's funny, Michael talks about this in interviews, which I do love that he brings up, because there's always this assumption that what I'm doing isn't lit. There's a lot of that. Even on Pig, going back to Pig, people are just, "Oh, well you just use natural light all the time." He's like, "Well, no." He doesn't use natural light all the time. He just designs light that feels like he's using natural light. Which is maybe funny. You're like, "Oh, this feels more shitty." He spent all this money to make it feel shittier.
Well, there's that famous conversation that Tequiez has about Shawshank Redemption where people were saying that he didn't use any lights, so they didn't know if he should be like nominated for an ASC or something to that effect. And he was like, "No, that's fully lit." And I was like, "Yeah?"
It's fully lit, but also, and even if you don't though, it's about using the tools. Natural light is a tool. I mean, it's a, they're all tools in an arsenal that allows you to complete something, to tell a story. And like I think you should know how to use all of them. I mean, in some of those night exteriors, yeah, there is, you can't lean on that as much, especially in a world that has no practicals, right? Like aside from torches and fire. So, finding a texture for that moonlight that we're using, in a few places is, it's about just having enough for me to make out enough detail. That's, that was kind of it for that. Like any time I was supplementing that, 'cause Michael was very hesitant to me also supplementing. He was like, "Well, should we just basically use real fire for that fight that's down in the mud?" And I was like, "Yeah, but the house is so far away." Like I could marry real fire, like I could easily bring a source that could mimic like, oh, the fire's getting in here, but it felt so phony to me. Fire travels at a distance, but I understand the impetus for it, but it felt like more like this would be sort of away from that and sort of in the moonlight, in the mud. And you're sure, you have some fire making its way in there, but I wanted it to just kind of, with it buried in the ground so much, you just wanted to make sure that you're getting something that can kind of I don't know, show the brutality of what we're seeing and not be lost in like high contrast shadows with that scene in particular. But making it feel like it's not there is the important part for me. And that's sometimes, my meters are saying zero. I have errors on my meter and I'm like, "Okay... I think this is..."
Well, 'cause I did wanna ask 'cause are you doing, are you like pulling a stop or two on the LUT to help you there? Or to give yourself some safety in the negative because you're riding that line
there is no safety. I mean, no, there's no safety in that stuff. In some of those low-end scenes, you're, those are some really thin negatives I think, you know in a way that I like. I mean, even when I shoot digital, it's funny, it's harder to do this today than it was with, the original Alexa Mini, but my original Alexa Mini stuff was so thin, and I loved it. You know? I had a LUT that I was like, there was just nothing there. It was just a very thin image. Now I'm actually... I have more trouble on digital doing that now 'cause they've made the cameras so that, the Alexa 35 is, can't... It's like you can't even fuck it up. It's like too easy.
So you haven't done, that thing with having, it pulled a couple stops in a light and therefore, you just...
No, I mean, for me it's just, I mean, it's between onset, I meter and I use my Fuji, and my Fuji is really well dialed. I trust it very much, particularly in the shadows. That's kinda what I use for shadows. And I've shot several movies on film now. I kind of have this, I've dialed that process with that camera, and what I'm seeing on set so I know when I can trust it. 'Cause again, I can see into the shadows that your meter is even a .5 meter, 'cause the Sekonics only go down to .7, even the .5 meter will be in error. And...
That is some serious... and I'm like, "Oh, I can certainly trust it" confidence, man. That takes time because that must be scary.
No, it's terrifying. I'm not gonna tell you it's not. I'm not gonna pretend like I'm sitting there being like, "Nah, it's fine." I mean, I say that to the crew and I say it to the director, but, I think no matter what, when you're shooting film and you're really dealing with the really, really deep low end, there is always a fear. But, when you've kind of have a process that you've used over and over again, that you do get the confidence from it. And I think that's, again, that's just like having experience on the medium over and over again. It's tough when you know... Well, a good example of this, all right, is that, we shot the very last scene of the movie on Kodak's new stock. Uh-oh, did I lose you?
No, no, I'm here.
Oh, you're there. So we shot the very last scene in the Kodak's new stock, Verita, 200, right? They actually hadn't released a rating when we used it. I found out we're the first film to have ever used it, which is fun. Yeah Marcell Rév had used it on Euphoria, but we are the first film to use it, which is cool. But I had shot on it twice before I used it on the movie, and I kinda told Michael about some of the qualities of it, and kinda pitched it that we use it for this last scene, as we're searching for a feeling in this last scene that's a little bit different than what we've seen before in the film. And there's that painting by N.C. Wyeth, The Passing of Robin Hood, which was on the cover of Michael's script, which is, if you check it out, it's something that we're kind of... there's an amazing feeling to this thing, right? There's this guy in his bed, and it's Robin in his bed dying, but there's a hopefulness to it. There's a closure to it. There's like a, "Okay... like you can rest now" feeling. And I think that was something we wanted to channel in that last scene, was not like this sort of sad death, but rather like, "Rest now, man. It's over." "You're good." And so that's, I wanted to end up using that stock because of certain qualities of the highlights and how the skin tones render, way peachy and way more, I don't know. There's something to it that I feel like is different than Vision. Now, there's a whole point of this is when I got to that scene, we shot that in our last week I think. So I've now shot this whole movie on Vision 3, and now like my head is so dialed into the risk-taking of Vision 3, right? Where I'm like I know what I can get away with up here. I'm watching five weeks of dailies. I'm very dialed into that, the stocks that I'm using. And it's this moment, like I didn't really consider that I was switching stocks. I went to sleep that night not really thinking about it 'cause you're kind of, you're in it. You're in it at that point. You're not, there's no more fear. After, to me, I feel like the fear of things sort of dissipates around like two and a half weeks, and you're just kind of a machine that's moving. Oh, the first two and a half weeks, it was a disaster. For me emotionally, like I remember I called my wife I think like after day two, and I'm like, "I fucking, I should have never shot this on film. I made a fucking huge mistake. It looks like shit." I'm like, "Well..."
What was making you feel that though?
No idea, man.
Specifically, like...
I think you just question all your choices, you know? You question what you're feeling.
Was this before dailies? Or were you getting dailies and...
No, this is like the second day of dailies. I was just like... And there's some, I have to tell you, there's some beautiful stuff in the first two days of dailies. The first time you see Jodie, that shot of her near the window with the blue that's in the second day of dailies. And I'm like...
You got that back and you were saying you shouldn't have taken the movie? I mean, listen... What's going through your mind with that?
listen, it's not rational. It's not a rational thing.
As long as you acknowledge that, I guess
I think it's important to talk about though, 'cause I think it's like this sort of like imposter syndrome and fear that we all have that we're not good enough, and, the work we're doing isn't good enough. And like I think no matter what you're making, what level you're making it at, I think that feeling's real. And I think it's important to kind of push through that and just be like, "No, trust your gut. Trust all the choices you made up to this point," you know? So yeah. I don't, that was just a sort of an aside to, I guess, what was I talking about? Just the basically getting to this day now, not thinking about anything...
When you switched to the other stock.
And I realized putting up the first shot as I'm like metering, I'm like, "Wait a minute." I'm like, "Holy shit, like..." The low end...
Was the ASA that different?
Well, I rate that at, again, having, there was no official rating designation from Kodak.
That's unnerving to begin with.
Yeah, I mean, it was called SO55. It didn't even have a name yet, and when I had tested it, I'd rated it 400 and had great results. However, I rated it 400 and had talked to a few people about, Marcell Rév specifically was really, he had shot so much with it, he was, the expert on that stock. But I was very careful about the way I exposed shadows with... 'cause even though I'm rating it a 400, the low end of the curve is just not the same as vision, you know? The low end, high end they're different, and so you can't go that deep into, again, with vision I'm so comfortable going, way into the shadows. I know it's gonna be there. With this, it's not the same, and it's not, that's not a shortcoming of the stock. In fact, I think it's maybe one of the coolest things about it is that you're actually dealing with a range that's slightly more compressed, and I think it allows for maybe some more photography that maybe we kind of felt like we were seeing 20 film stocks from the '90s, you know? To me it's very exciting. But I was kind of in a little bit of a panic when I was like, "Oh, wait." I'm like, all of a sudden I'm feeling differently than I was in every other scene before this, and it's the most important scene of the film in this way that, again, it's not that I'm not prepared for it's just, I'm just talking about the honest human aspect of changing your entire mindset about this stock that you've been comfortable shooting for the whole movie. And, had I been using it more sporadically throughout, I think that'd be a different case, but the fact that we kind of brought it in at once means you gotta change your eyeballs.
Well, 'cause once you've been doing something for weeks on end, your comfortability in eyeballing your exposure starts to really happen. And then if you're, changing up, that knowledge base on a dime, that's really hard.
Yeah. And so anyway, just again, so, I kinda like telling stories about the things that you're afraid of when it's happening because I think sometimes when you do these, when you hear these podcasts or anything, no one really gets into that. It's just like, "Oh, no, I was in control and focused the entire time."
My whole plan is that regardless of any interview I'm doing, I'm always gonna ask the guest what made them nervous.
I mean, everything is the answer.
Well, 'cause I mean, that must have been something at the onset of discussing this film with Michael, and you kind of understand the world that it's gonna be visually. That's a tall order knowing how dark everything is gonna be, 'cause I did wanna talk to you. I mean, we already discussed it, but I did write down, for the interior nighttime stuff, just the stuff lit by fire or candle, that's the tallest order I think we have in our profession, and you... It never felt source-y, and I'm just really curious to hear how you did it.
Yeah, I mean, fire light was an interesting thing in this. I think there are a few, maybe you even talked to these cinematographers. There's a few cinematographers that on films that take place without electricity are militant about only using real fire. And I have a lot of respect for that. However, I do think that puts your visuals first because when you start to understand the limitations of real fire there are things actors can't do. They can't get X amount of feet from it. There are certain things that it starts to now change. So, if that's your priority using real fire... You're making a strong choice and you're going with it. That is not necessarily Michael and I's priority when we're making a film. An aesthetic choice like that would never really take over an actor's performance or I understand what an actor can and can't do. So obviously we wanted to use real fire as much as possible, which we do in a bunch of scenes, but we also wanted to make sure that our actors could do things and we can get the quality of light that we wanted, in certain ways, in certain bits. So, we did a pretty intense test of fire light. We basically brought real fire into the studio in different ways: candles, witch's fingers, an actual bigger lit fire. And then we brought, for me, I had maybe eight to... Eight or I don't know how many. We had a bunch of different sources to try to mimic this. And, we came away with... We were able to project these results, look at them on film and be side by side them and be like, "Nah, you can't. This you can't tell. I'm sorry." Even with the most discerning eye, there are certain aspects of it where you're like, "Yeah, sometimes it's not feeling right, but sometimes it's feeling really close." And so we were able to kind of define a few techniques that we brought to us. One of those was a lamp built by Seamus, called a Dalek, he called it... from, I think, Doctor Strange, right? And that, I think, was initially built for another film. But basically what it is, this two-by-four piece of plywood with... Had to be, I don't know, 20-something 500 watt clear bulbs. Now, as a result of that, you have so many different independent sources and clear bulbs creating harder shadows. And I think we ran video through that. So, we would run fire video through whatever the data center thing that they make. And then basically you're not seeing the video of it, but you're seeing the values, the illumination values changing in a very natural way.
So that was the inputs for the different bulbs going off?
Yeah, rather than just using a full
Board or whatever?
Well, it is a board, but you're not dependent on the randomness of a programmer. You're actually getting the randomness of an image. And I remember we could move the image around so you can get different pieces of that in the fire, which you can do with, most any source. I mean, I've done that for things with, northern lights before, but it creates a randomness I think that was, you're kind of always chasing when you're dealing with something that's has a flicker. You're always wanting something that feels less human, you know? And so, that became a really big tool for when we were inside and we wanted to use fire, but we also wanted the actors very close to this place that we're shooting at, or I wanted the fire to feel very close to them. That was one of my favorite fire light sources. Yeah, it was cool. We had a big one and a small one, so if we needed a small one for a thing, we had a big one for a thing. Yeah, they worked. And then, exterior fire, if we needed that, if we were doing big source fire, Maxis, I had an army of Maxis that we would, again, do a very similar idea to create, again, all... 'Cause Maxis are the same thing, right? Individual bulbs, you're not dealing with pixel mapping, you're dealing with these individual bulbs that can move from all places. So you kinda get that natural dance of shadows. So, yeah, I mean, all this to say, our focus on how to achieve fire light was serious, and trying to make sure it felt as real as possible all the time. But there are scenes that are just fire. There's just fire in a fireplace. When Bill is washing his dead wife, that's just a fireplace. And it's the only, I think it's the only roll of film in the movie that's pushed too. Not two stops, pushed as well. It's just a push one stop. But, it's the only one, and I'm like, "Damn, I should've pushed more," 'cause that scene just looks so good.
Well, the thing about it is that if you're living in a world where you and the director are cool with that being, heavily silhouetted for the most part, and, living in those values is desired, then world's your oyster a little bit
Yeah. Again, that all comes from, again, I've kind of expressed it before, but me and him talk about the movie so much ahead of time. We spend a lot of time in each other's heads. So by the time we get there's not a lot of surprise or, worry about that kind of stuff, which is great 'cause like you have that agency to make these choices that feel bold because you've had conversations about them for so long.
We're nearing the end here. I'm trying to have a bit of a motif where I ask these same questions at the end, and I'd love to know, what do you think the hardest day on set was physically? What do you think the hardest day on set was emotionally? That could be one and the same or it could be different. And what are you most proud of in terms of the contribution you specifically made to the film?
Hardest day, I guess, I wanna say maybe it's the two days combined, but it's basically when we did the fights. And it's not because, I mean, A, our whole field got flooded by rain. We were about like ankle deep in mud. We literally had to like move mud out of where they were fighting because it was so deep in water and muck that we had to like clear stuff out to move around, to move the camera. Like Charlie Rizek, who did the Trinity for that scene, it was just really tough on him. But those two days we had so much to accomplish in that farm, whatever that was we redid. Whatever it was we had too much to do. It was simply too much to do. And I think when you're dealing with these fight scenes that are very grueling on the actors and you have these big fire effects and then we have these big oners we're trying to execute. We kind of like really piled it onto ourselves and I think that was maybe, those were maybe the worst few days on the production in terms of like just in terms of things just feeling like, oh, this feels crazy, 'cause normally things do... I think our shoots are pretty well organized and we kind of always know exactly what we're doing, and we're always pretty much, if we're not on time we find a way to be on time, and that was like, that was the only day I think we lost a scene or two that we had to cut, which is I think fine 'cause the movie absolutely, survived without them. But those were just really difficult from physically being on set to trying to, make sure we're getting what we need in these scenes that, are again, not traditional action fight coverage. Is this gonna work? You're also questioning that. Is this feel too flat? I mean, it felt brutal to us, but you don't know if someone's gonna be like, "This is boring and dumb." And so that was I think maybe the hardest for me on that level.
And emotionally?
Emotionally I don't know. It might be that I think those things are tied. My... I'm so tied up in my work that way. I think if I'm feeling that way, it's likely... It's actually likely that it was emotionally worse than it was physically. You know what I'm saying?
And why is that?
I think emotionally for all the reasons I just expressed, but I think the physical part was just the absolute chaos of dealing with mud. But every day we were in mud, rain, wind. Every day was brutal when it came to that stuff. It's kind of fascinating, towards the end of our schedule things got easier with the weather. And the sun was out more and, which we were hoping for. So we planned our schedule intentionally so that the grayest, bleakest stuff we shot in the early days of February, knowing that we might be able to still hold on to winter where we needed it. And then, we allowed the spring stuff towards the end of the schedule where we would hopefully actually get, real spring.
It certainly worked. It feels that way in the film.
And I guess what I'm most proud of, if I'm honest, yeah, I mean, I think there's a very, painterly quality to the film in a way. And I think there was a lot of references for me that were rooted in paintings. Vermeer was a huge painter that I think was... if you look at some of his paintings like... Yeah, I mean, Girl with the Pearl Earring is, if you Google that's literally the shot of Jodie. It absolutely is. But like woman... I forget the woman opening a letter, woman with pouring milk, or the milkmaid. The milkmaid is what it's called. Sorry. These are, these compositions are these, flat two-dimensional compositions of people against walls. And what really I took from a lot of these paintings that he did was, he creates this amazing depth through light. Even though there's just somebody against a wall, the, you look at the layers of light that are kind of worked into the paintings, and I think that saved me because it was a problem I had to solve in the bedchamber. It's a very small room, you know? These walls are quite... I mean, it's an amazing set. It's really well-built, but, I was just... Again, I was so scared of things feeling flat and one-dimensional in there, and I think Vermeer was instrumental in, unlocking a bit of, man, just light, man. Just do what you do and, create layers of light and depth through light, and that will take care of the space. And when I look at the finished product, I'm like, "Damn, that kinda worked." So I feel quite proud about that.
Well, thanks so much for sharing so much about the process and the technical side, but also the emotional side. I really... I was looking forward to this conversation, and it didn't disappoint at all. I really appreciate your time.
Oh, man. For sure, yeah. Anytime. I appreciate you having me. It's cool to talk.
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