I’m a camera assistant, and during my last camera checkout, I wondered, “What is the DP doing during prep?”
This might be surprising, but in my experience, you won’t find many cinematographers at the camera rental house. Sure, they might pop in every once in awhile for a camera test, or to look at lenses and filters, but they’re busy people. So if a camera assistant needs to reach their DP from the camera checkout, they usually have to interrupt something important, like a location scout or a meeting.
But what happens in these meetings? How does a DP figure out what they’re looking for? And how do they decide which look is going to best fit their project? To find the answers, I reached out to the great cinematographer M. David Mullen, ASC (whom I was lucky enough to work with on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel).
The first step
“The script is what attracts me,” Mullen begins, “along with the people making the movie. Sometimes what attracts me is the chance to do something I haven’t done before or to shoot somewhere I’ve never filmed before. I like variety, so I don’t mind jumping between genres if it’s interesting dramatically.”
After he decides that he’s interested, Mullen’s next step is to meet with the director and listen to what they have to say about the project. He wants to know their feelings about colors, and if they have any visual references he should see. Often, he and the director will watch stacks of films together so they can both get on the same artistic wavelength.
“I try to get a sense of the director’s taste,” Mullen explains. “I don’t want to get locked into my own style before I’ve learned their feelings about the material.” Once he and the director are speaking the same creative language, Mullen will begin suggesting how he thinks the story might flow visually.
The game plan
Mullen usually has a game plan before he meets with a director. He tries to come up with three or four different ways to approach the script, and he keeps these plans in his back pocket during their first conversation. If the director’s ideas edge in on one of Mullen’s own, he’ll bring it up and see if the director likes it. If they don’t like it, that’s fine. He always has one or two more waiting in the wings.
Mullen bases his game plans on the idea of visual angles. He believes that every project should have its own distinct style, and that sentiment shows in his work. Mullen’s projects are always eye-catching, and they often look very different from one another. Each has a strong visual angle, from the nearly monochrome Norfolk to the “aggressively pastel” Mrs. Maisel.
The Love Witch
The Love Witch, also shot by Mullen, is a great example of a film with a very specific visual angle. It’s a feminist fable about a witch who uses magic to get men to fall in love with her. Although it’s set in modern times, Mullen and director Anna Biller decided to shoot The Love Witch as if it was a 1950s B movie.
Mullen met Biller while attending Cal Arts and recalls that she “was fascinated by old three-strip Technicolor films. We both had a shared interest in that look, so she called me up knowing that I liked that style.”
To achieve this period aesthetic, Mullen had to divorce himself from modern thinking. He decided to tackle The Love Witch as if he were a 1950s cinematographer making a low-budget B movie aiming for Hollywood studio quality—a kind of “method cinematography” approach. He had to embrace that era’s aesthetic values, so he asked himself, “What would a cinematographer in the fifties think was an attractive close-up? How would they shoot their coverage? What sort of lens would they use, and how would they move their camera?”
The result is a kaleidoscopic dream, a mesmerizing combination of romantic colors and deep blacks. To me, the look of The Love Witch specifically compliments Biller’s directorial goals: to use the classic femme fatale archetype to critically question American views of female sexuality, and to highlight the awkward hilarity that often results in the asking.
A to B Movies
Mullen notes that story is king when pitching a visual game plan to a director. He typically outlines his films by playing “mental gymnastics where I think in different terms.”
“Sometimes,” he says, “I think of the story as a journey that goes from A to B. It starts out in one world, in one setting, and ends in a very different one.”
Some good examples of this can be found in contemporary horror films. They typically begin with a family buying a brand-new house on a bright, sunny, beautiful spring day and then…
“Horror films usually move from naturalism to expressionism,” Mullens explains. “The early scenes are all very ordinary and they get weirder as the story goes on.”
For Jennifer’s Body, Mullen and director Karen Kusama wanted to emulate 1980s horror films like Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street. As an homage, they decided to give their night scenes a blue HMI look. But Mullen knew the audience would be spending at least half of the film’s runtime in that look, so he designed the early scenes to have a warm, sunny feeling. That way, the film would have somewhere to go visually.
“For A to B movies, you try to create a visual path,” Mullen says, “one that will take the audience from one look to another.”
Mullen is quick to point out that not all horror films are A to B movies. Films like Sleepy Hollow and Seven, for example, have a strong, somber look throughout. But if you look closely, even those films have visual arcs. Sleepy Hollow begins with a series of tranquil, bucolic scenes and ends during a stormy night. Similarly, Seven starts out in an overcast, claustrophobic city and finishes in a sunny, yellow field.
A vs. B movies
Other films are about the juxtaposition of two separate worlds. Mullen likes to call those films A versus B movies.
“Those tend to be about the world of one character versus the world of another,” he explains. “Some of them are even time-based, where one half the movie is set years before the other. So, you create one look for the past scenes, one look for the present scenes, and intercut the two.”
For the second season of Maisel, some of the characters went to France, and the show alternated between New York City and Paris for two episodes. Mullen used his theory of A vs. B movies to create a different look for each setting. He first had to sit down and think about what color schemes he would naturally encounter in both cities. Then he had to figure out how to augment those schemes to create a strong visual difference.
“Paris is lit with sodium vapor streetlights,” Mullen says. “It has a golden orange look at night and the buildings tend to be sandstone colored. Knowing that Paris would feel warm, I made the New York scenes in those two episodes a little colder.”
A cold look for New York delivered a starker contrast between the two locations, which allowed audiences to immediately recognize when they were in a different city. If both cities had looked the same, audiences might have required title cards or time-consuming establishing shots to explain where the scene was taking place.
A vs. B vs. C movies
But movies and TV shows aren’t always binary. Sometimes, a story takes place in many locations across an entire city, or a whole planet. Mullen calls these A vs. B vs. C movies (you can add as many letters as you need).
“For example, you have movies like Munich,” Mullen says, “where there are scenes set in Paris, Israel, and London. Each city has its own look so that you know where you are geographically. You immediately see when you’ve moved to a new city based on how it looks.”
In the pilot of Maisel, the main character Midge moves through three separate worlds: the Upper West Side, a Midtown office, and the seedy bars of Greenwich Village. Mullen and the rest of the crew took great pains to differentiate each world in terms of art direction, lighting, and photography so the audience would feel when Midge had entered a different area of the city.
Three very different worlds were showcased in Maisel’s pilot. Images © Amazon
Mullen observes that “TV shows tend to be structured this way. In a feature film, you have a story with a beginning, middle, and end, and then it’s over. It’s very tight in terms of style. TV shows must be more open-ended because you’re going to spend a lot of time in different locations. You can’t say the pilot episodes will only go from a warm look to cool one because, in the next episode, you’re going to have to do it all over again. So, you tend to think more in terms of locations or worlds.”
Graphic ideas
But how does a cinematographer begin to construct these worlds? According to Mullen, it starts with having bold, simple, graphic ideas. And you must accept that these ideas won’t really end up on screen. In fact, they’re designed not to.
“If you have a graphic idea and you shoot exactly what you’re thinking, it might come off as too stylized, too arty, and too precious,” he warns. “You should rely on the fact that real-world photography, shooting on location, and dealing with other departments is going to give your simple idea more colors and dilute it a bit.
“What you end up with is a more natural, less contrived image. You may say, ‘I want everything to be tan and brown.’ But when you get to the set, an extra might be wearing gray, or there might be a blue sky in the shot. That’s good because then you won’t end up with a scene that is only one color. It will have a bias towards one color, but there will also be other accents.”
A great example of this is the film Northfork. Here, Mullen had the idea to make the film as monochrome as possible. But instead of shooting on black-and-white film, he asked the production to switch out props and set pieces with gray-colored counterparts. The production designers put gray paint in ketchup bottles, used gray frosting on a cake, and even made an all-gray American flag to sell the idea.
The gray production design of Northfork helped sell the graphic idea behind the cinematography. Images © Paramount Classics
The result is a film that is almost monochrome, but not quite. Skin tones and blue skies bleed through the gray production design, elegantly diluting the graphic look. The result is magnetic and eerie, a perfect visual palette for a film about a town preparing to be submerged forever under the waters of a bursting dam.
Working with Art and Locations
Speaking of production design, feature films and TV shows usually hire a production designer long before they ever think about cameras and lights. Since sets take a long time to build, how they look is often already determined before a DP comes aboard.
So, after his first few director meetings, David Mullen’s next stop is usually the art department. A good DP can quickly spot a stylistic clash by looking at a mood board or plans for a set’s design.
“Sometimes you’ll notice a certain wallpaper color,” Mullen says, “and you realize it’s going to not work with your lighting plan. Then you can politely ask the designer, ‘Are you wedded to this color?’ Sometimes they’re fine with changing things if you have a good reason, but you have to ask early enough in pre production.”
Locations can also dictate a look—or a budget. On Maisel, Mullen chose to embrace the warm Paris streetlights, but John Wick: Chapter 4, lit its Parisian nights with bright cyan moonlight. To achieve that look, the crew had to bathe the streets in bright blue backlight to overpower the naturally orange Paris street lamps, which was an incredibly expensive maneuver. Wick also built many of its Paris scenes with CGI, which can be very hard on a production’s bottom line.
“You have to work within the budget,” Mullen warns. “You want to make sure that you’re not asking for the moon and getting it, only to find out later they took a day off your shooting schedule to pay for it.”
The story determines the tools
When it comes to picking the right gear, Mullen leans on the script and the director for guidance. When choosing cameras, some models can get a certain look more easily than others. If a script calls for a lot of camera movement, Mullen says he might choose to shoot with a smaller-bodied camera, like the ALEXA MINI, since those are easier to move around. Or, if the director wants to film in a lot of high contrast situations, he might choose a camera that can capture a higher dynamic range, like the ALEXA 35.
The same goes for lenses. Mullen insists there are no right or wrong lens choices. “You could shoot a period film with sharp, modern lenses,” he says, “or you could do a modern film with soft, period lenses. It’s all valid if you have an aesthetic reason for it.”
“But,” he cautions, “you also have to think logically. If a lens is prone to flaring and the set has a lot of bright windows, you might have a lot of unusable takes because the actor will have flares over their face.”
Creating the ideal prep schedule
Mullen advises that on features with small-to-medium budgets, DPs should ask their producers for five total weeks of prep time, working backwards from the first day of shooting.
He reasons it out like this: the week before Day One is always taken up by the camera prep, equipment load-ins, pickups, and actor rehearsals. The week before that is filled up by tech scouts, production meetings, and last-minute casting sessions. The director and DP must be available for some or all of that, so they might not have much time to plan the look in detail. That means there might not be any significant time for purely creative discussions until at least three weeks before the start of shooting.
Knowing this, Mullen usually asks producers for two full weeks of morning meetings with the director before those complicated three weeks leading up to production. He uses that time to go through the script with the director scene-by-scene. If they’re lucky, they can talk through around five pages of the script per day. They might not get through the entire script, but they will at least cover the most difficult, logically complex scenes.
If you’re running low on time, another way to prep is to break the project down by schedule. That is the advice that Allen Daviau, ASC gave Mullen when he was prepping his first feature film.
“I ran into Allen on the streets of Hollywood,” Mullen recalls, “and we talked about the problems I was having. He told me, ‘Know your first week of work backwards and forwards. Then everyone will be impressed by how prepared you and the director are.’”
Know your first week of work backwards and forwards. Then everyone will be impressed by how prepared you and the director are.
Mullen says that Day One of the shoot should always move like clockwork. “You want the first day to leave everyone with a good impression,” he says. “Then it looks like you know what you’re doing and that things will go smoothly. It’s also important because the studio, or whoever is financing the film, is watching you very carefully.”
Fix it in pre
How a DP preps goes well beyond mere technical expertise. My talk with Mr. Mullen taught me that DPs aren’t just in charge of making pretty pictures: they are the co-authors of motion pictures, along with the writer, director, and producer designer.
Since DPs are just as important to the storytelling process as any other creative lead, they need to prep accordingly. A pro DP needs to not only understand storytelling, but also how to craft a style that compliments a script, and they need to know how to achieve that style practically and cohesively in the real world.
That doesn’t just happen; it takes time and many conversations.
