Critics are hailing David Fincher’s The Killer as his most experimental film since Fight Club: “a subjective, cinematic tour de force,” says Bill Desowitz at IndieWire, in which we get inside the mind of Michael Fassbender’s titular assassin after he experiences his first misfire in Paris.

The movie, now streaming on Netflix, divided into six “chapters,” each with its own look, rhythm, and pace tied to Fassbender’s level of control and uncertainty. According to the film’s editor, Fincher regular Kirk Baxter, ACE, the editorial process necessitated the creation of a visual and aural language to convey subjective and objective points of view for tracking Fassbender.

Baxter (Zodiak, The Social Network) goes into detail about working on each chapter with IndieWire. We learn that the opening sequence set in Paris took the most time for Baxter to assemble because it was stitched together from different locations including interiors shot on a New Orleans stage.

“I love the whole power attack, the stretching of time, the patience of what it takes to do something properly,” Baxter said. “And I love that it’s grounded in the rule of physics and how practical it is that each detail in order to do something correctly deserves the same amount of attention.”

Later, in a chapter set in New Orleans, the Killer exacts revenge on a lawyer. The setup prep is slow as he cunningly enters the lawyer’s office dressed as a maintenance worker.

“It was one of the hardest things to put together,” Baxter tells IndieWire. “It’s a little like a Swiss watch in terms of how exacting it can be in his control. David had like 25 angles in the corridor, but when you put it all together, I love how that scene unfolds by playing both sides of the glass [between the office and corridor]. Typically, he’s gonna say as little as possible and his stillness controls the pace, and when he gets fed up, these little, tiny subtle looks from him are letting you know that’s enough and where this conversation stops.”

The nighttime fight between the assassin and a character called The Brute in the latter’s Florida home is depicted as a contest between two warriors in the dark. Speaking to Dom Lenoir, host of The Editing Podcast, Baxter explains how he and Fincher choreographed this fight as well as talking more broadly about the director’s shooting style.

“David does always provide a lot of coverage [and] that gets misinterpreted as a lot of takes [but] what he’s extremely good at is making sure that I’ve got the pieces to be able to move around as needed, or to keep something exciting. It means I can edit pretty aggressively and use just the best pieces of everything. David knows these rhythms he shoots for an editor. So, if it’s a really long scene, you will find in the wide shot that they’ll often be blocking, for example, somebody coming into the room. You sort of work your way [into the scene].”

Baxter says all that matters to him once in production is the material Fincher has captured. “I will read the scene again so that I understand the blueprint of it. You know what its intention is, but then it can be thrown away because David can evolve beyond what the script was based on, whether a location or how our actors are performing. He’ll recalibrate and readjust.”

Although The Killer proceeds on a fairly linear trajectory (hey, like a bullet…) Baxter says appearances can be deceptive when it comes to cutting.

“I found it to be one of the more challenging movies to make because it’s not juggling a bunch of different character lines or going back and forth from past to present and that sort of thing,” Baxter told IndieWire. “It’s just a straight line, but the exposure of that [means there’s] nowhere to hide. It’s like everything is just under the spotlight and you’re not having dialogue and interaction to kind of dictate your pace. It’s a series of shots and everything has to be manipulated in order to give it propulsion, or how you slow it down.”

He continues this train of thought with Lenoir, “It was a challenging movie to make from my perspective because you are showing an expert on the fringes of society but he’s still a person that operates with precision. You’re trying to illustrate that by showing precision. And it is just a lot of fiddling to make things seem easy.”

He also discusses perhaps something that you may not notice in a first watch which is that The Killer doesn’t seem to blink. It doesn’t just happen in this film either but in other Fincher movies where Baxter says he has consciously selected shots of actor’s not blinking.

“I don’t think that it was an effort to remove them through the film,” he says. “It’s just the nature of how his performance was. But there’s been an effort to remove them in previous films when they’re all kind of landing off rhythm. It’s mostly about when you get into the meat of a scene and you’re in close ups and you want something delivered with intention and purpose.”

Audio was crucial to The Killer as well. Rather than be smoothed out in the background with the edge taken off all transitions, Fincher and sound designer Ren Klyce wanted the audio to be driven by point of view. The rules of the film’s soundscape are established in the opening sequence. Given that the protagonist is not predisposed to be chatty, we learn as much from his internal monologue as from his methodological movements.

“We crawl into his ears and sit in the back of his eye sockets instead of how it’s being presented,” Baxter describes to IndieWire. “From the moment when the target turns up, it was David’s idea to try a track that was what he plays in his headphones. And when you have his POV, we turn the track up to four, and when you’re back on him, the track drops down, and you get the perspective of it playing in his ear.”

READ MORE: Editing ‘The Killer’ So That ‘We Crawl Into His Ears and Sit in the Back of His Eye Sockets’ (IndieWire)

They devised rules for how to apply his voiceover but realized they couldn’t have voiceover and music at the same time because there would be too much “sonic noise” for the audience.

“So one’s got to occupy one space and one take the other. The logic said to us what’s blaring in his ears and when he’s in a monologue is when we’re looking at him. That was the rule of what was subjective and what was objective,” says Baxter.

“We tried the notion of ‘vertical’ sound cuts,” Fincher explains. “By which I mean, you’re coming out of a very quiet shot and cutting into a street scene and – boom! — you pick up this incredibly loud siren going by. You’re continually aware of the sound.”

This makes for an unusual but effective experience. For instance, there’s a scene in a Parisian park where the sound of a fountain constantly moves around depending on the featured character’s POV.

Was matching that vertical sound cutting hard?

“I guess even when you’re creating chaos, you’re trying to affect it in your own way,” Baxter tells Andy Stout at RedShark News. “You’re always seeking your own version of the perfect way to do this.”

Jennifer Chung, ACE was one of the assistant editors on the film — part of a 14-strong editing department. She also spoke with RedShark News about the tools they used.

“Obviously we use Premiere, and we heavily use Pix also,” she says. “We do a lot of our communication in post through Pix, especially during production during the dailies grind, where we’re uploading not only the dailies but selects that are coming out so that we can get that to David.”

Adobe After Effects is also used extensively, with the team using Dynamic Links to round trip the content out of Adobe Premiere and back in. Some of the assistants also script, so Python or even Excel, in some cases, were also deployed to help automate some of the critical processes.

The Killer was shot in 8K using RED V-Raptor and according to Chung proved a little tricky initially to grade in HDR.

“We definitely had some kinks we had to figure out early on,” Chung says. “We all needed HDR monitors, but we didn’t have HDR monitors at home, though we had HDR monitors at the office. We also use a lot of Dynamic Links in Premiere, and we were having some color space issues going from Premiere to After Effects back to Premiere, but because we have such a close relationship with Adobe, we were able to figure that out.”

READ MORE: Editing David Fincher’s ‘The Killer’ on Premiere Pro (RedShark News)

Emerald Fennell’s latest cinematic spectacle, Saltburn, savagely peels back the veneer of the British upper class of the mid-2000s, crossing Brideshead Revisited with The Talented Mr. Ripley served with a twist of vampire-infused black comedy.

The film revels “in voyeuristic repulsion and the fetishization of beauty,” writes IndieWire’s Bill Desowitz, told through the point of view of cunning Oxford student Oliver (Barry Keoghan), who becomes infatuated with his aristocratic schoolmate, Felix (Jacob Elordi), following an invitation to stay for the summer with his eccentric Catton family at their titular estate.

“I’m setting out to be honest and unsparing, and I’m not frightened of people not liking it,” Fennel explains to Salon’s Jacob Hall. “I mind if people don’t appreciate the craft or they think I haven’t done my homework, or they think I’ve made decisions that aren’t deliberate. That gets my goat, because that’s a different argument. But if you don’t like it, I don’t mind.”

Fennell’s bold visual plans began with shooting in 35mm to capitalize on the rich color and contrast, and using the 1.33 aspect ratio to enhance the story’s voyeurism.

“She wanted to convey the hot summer and foggy night, influenced by the legendary landscape painter Gainsborough, as well as more dramatic lighting inspired by Hitchcock, Nosferatu, and baroque painters Caravaggio and Gentileschi,” we learn from Desowitz’s interview with the film’s cinematographer, Linus Sandgren (La La Land).

The DP landed the job at the suggestion of Saltburn producer Margot Robbie, who had just worked with Sandgren on Babylon and knew first-hand what dark beauty he could achieve shooting in 35mm.

“I had seen Emerald’s debut film, [Promising Young Woman], where she made some very interesting decisions,” Sandgren said. “For example, letting the lady die in a single take, which was horrible to watch. And then when I got the Saltburn script, I thought it was brilliant. She writes very visually and in a descriptive way and I got some very clear images in my head.”

READ MORE: ‘I Wonder How Many People Are Going to Buy This?’ Inside the Sensual, Stylized ‘Saltburn’ Cinematography (IndieWire)

They both agreed that shooting on film was right for the story, as Sandgren explained following a screening at Camerimage, as reported by Will Tizard at Variety. The medium’s reaction to red light in some key scenes inside the family home was particularly well-suited to the growing sense of horror, Sandgren said. So were close-ups of characters feeling extremes of emotions, with sweat, hair and bodily detail helping to build on the descent into obsession.

To strike just the right tone in these scenes, Company3 colorist Matt Wallach says, “We got into using tools in the Resolve, like the Custom Curves and the Color Warper, to subtly bring out, say, the red lights in a party scene or the steely blue moonlit tones and a night exterior while always keeping the skin tones where they should be. With Linus, skin tone always has priority.”

Sandgren shot with the Panavision Panaflex Millennium XL2 camera equipped with Primo prime lenses to get colors and contrast with under-corrected spherical aberration. It all worked out well to propel the journey into darkness, Sandgren said, growing into other scenes of seduction that push boundaries. All of which just enriches “the bloody cocktail of Saltburn,” he says, noting that, after all, “Vampires are sexual beings.”

READ MORE: Emerald Fennell-Directed ‘Saltburn’ Conjured Images of Dark, Bloody Comedy, Says Cinematographer Linus Sandgren at Camerimage (Variety)

When the director first spoke with Sandgren about the project, she described it as a vampire movie “where everyone is a vampire.”

Elaborating on this to Emily Murray at Games Radar, Fennell says she liked the vampire metaphor as a vehicle for attacking the class system and our unhealthy fascination with the rich and famous.

“We have exported the British country house so effectively in literature and film, everyone internationally is familiar with… their workings,” she says. “As we are talking about power, class, and sex, this film could have existed at the Kardashians’ compound or the Hamptons, but the thing about British aristocracy is that people know the rules because of the films we have seen before. We all have an entry level familiarity but the things that are restrained about the genre are overt here — as we look at what we do when nobody is watching us.”

READ MORE: Saltburn director Emerald Fennell on why her follow-up to Promising Young Woman is actually a vampire movie (Games Radar)

This embodied the vampire ethos at night in all its gothic beauty and ugliness. “Emerald’s attracted to something gross happening, but you see it in a perfectly composed image with the light just hitting perfectly,” Sandgren said in an interview with Tomris Laffly at Filmmaker Magazine. “I think the challenge was finding a language for the film with secrets that you don’t want to reveal and having it seem ambiguous.”

Fennell wrote Saltburn during COVID, when people couldn’t even be in the same room together, “let alone touch each other, let alone lick each other,” she said, commenting on some of the film’s explicit scenes. “This is a film really about not being able to touch. Now, especially, we have an extra complicated relationship with bodily fluids.”

As Laffly prompts, this sounds like Fennell wanted to unleash a beast we all have in ourselves that was so oppressed during lockdown.

“That certainly felt like one of the motives,” she admits. “There’s nothing that is more of a rigid structure than the British country house and the aristocracy, nothing more impenetrable. So yes, to unleash the viscerally human into that arena was so much of it.”

To Fennell, so much of film is “frictionless, smooth, so consistent. And I feel like cinema — without being so grandiose and pompous — is designed to be watched in a dark room of strangers, and it can be expressive, it can be to some degree metaphorical. When I look at the filmmakers that I love [like David Lynch or Stanley Kubrick] these are people who are making films that I feel in my body.”

This idea of foregrounding intimacy led to their decision to shoot within the Academy ratio. Again, she and Sandgren referenced classic portrait painters.

“To do that formal framing, if you’re looking at Caravaggio or lighting in a Joshua Reynolds and that kind of blocking, it is so much easier the more square you are. And I like extreme closeups, especially when you’re talking about sex and intimacy and inhuman beauty,” she told Filmmaker. “If you’re 1.33, you can have a full face. It can fill the frame completely.”

READ MORE: “The Crueler My Friends Are, the Funnier I Think They Are”: Emerald Fennell on Saltburn (Filmmaker Magazine)

Scenes in the film are deliberately uncomfortable to watch. They are what Desowitz calls “disgustingly beautiful moments,” but Fennell emphasizes that they aren’t in any way there for shock value: “A lot of this film is an interrogation of desire,” she tells the Inside Total Film podcast.

“With this type of love, there has to be this element of revulsion, and for us to feel what Oliver is feeling and understand that, you need to physically react to stuff. We did a lot of work then to make it a physical experience — uncomfortable, sexy, difficult, queasy. I thought a lot about the feeling of popping a spot — queasy pleasure.”

Much of the more salacious coverage of Saltburn has concentrated on its final scene where Keoghan dances stark naked through the estate to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s hit 2001 song, “Murder on the Dancefloor.” “Everything is diabolical, but it’s exhilarating,” Fennell explained to Jazz Tangcay at Variety. “It’s post-coital, euphoric, solitary and it’s mad.”

As for Sandgren’s camera moves, he pointed out that Oliver was always in frame for most of the film. “But this way, we see him full-figured. I think it was clear we wanted to follow him. Following him through that scene felt more natural to watch everything about him, and watch from the outside. It’s about his physicality and how he feels in that moment.”

It’s a tour de force for Keoghan, who, according to the cinematographer, was fearless throughout, but worked especially hard at rehearsing and shooting the choreographed dance sequence.

In capturing it, Fennell used 11 takes. “They were all very beautiful,” she said. “It’s quite a complicated and technical camera. A lot of the time, he was immensely patient because there was a lot of naked dancing. Take #7 was technically perfect. You could hear everyone’s overjoyed response, but I had to say ‘sorry’ because it was missing whatever it was that made Oliver that slightly human messiness. So, we had to do it a further four times.”

READ MORE: Barry Keoghan’s Naked Dance Scene in ‘Saltburn’ Needed 11 Takes (Variety)

“[I]t was incredibly difficult to do because obviously it’s a oner, and we had to light every room completely from outside without seeing any of the kit,” Fennel tells Salon. “We had to set up all of the sound so we could switch to every room because of the lag, without again, seeing any of the kit.”

Fennell likens the actor to Robert Mitchum, as she explains to Filmmaker Magazine. “I think he’s just exceptional, not just now but for all time — someone like Robert Mitchum is a good comparison. There are actors who have a thing that nobody else has had before, and I think Barry has that.”

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Cinematographer Paul Cameron, ASC is most known for his collaboration with Tony Scott (Man on Fire, Déjà Vu) and he has taken lessons from the late director’s approach into his own directing work.

In Paramount+ series Special Ops: Lioness, for instance, Cameron takes an unconventional approach to coverage.

In Cameron’s hands, even a standard dialogue scene between two actors has extra dynamism and energy that come simply from looking for unorthodox angles or alternating focal lengths in a manner that might seem counterintuitive.

“The idea of matching singles or overs in a conventional cutting pattern has never really become part of my vocabulary,” Cameron told IndieWire‘s Jim Hemphill. “It’s more about what looks good on each side — a 65mm lens on Nicole Kidman’s side might be better with a 50mm on the other side with Zoe Saldana, or one side might be more emotional at a steeper angle on an 85mm,” he said.

“Sometimes you need to be a bit bold and break the ‘Five Cs of Cinematography’ [camera angles, continuity, cutting, close-ups, and composition] and deconstruct them.”

READ MORE: Taylor Sheridan’s ‘Special Ops: Lioness’ Breaks All the Cinematography Rules — and It Works (IndieWire)

Speaking to Matt Hurwitz at the Motion Picture Association’s The Credits, he added, “With Tony, I learned to just be fearless with cameras and put them in places I think are emotionally appropriate and not necessarily coverage-oriented. Looking for a shot, say, with a steep angle, a little too close, to make it just the right level of uncomfortable if the scene calls for that. It’s a matter of what makes it feel right, as opposed to matching focal lengths on lenses and distances, which many shows do.”

READ MORE: “Special Ops: Lioness” Cinematographer & Director Paul Cameron on Taylor Sheridan’s International Thriller — Part 1 (The Credits)

Taylor Sheridan created and wrote the military thriller that also stars Morgan Freeman, Laysla De Oliveira, Michael Kelly and Jennifer Ehle.

The genesis of the story was a real unit that the CIA set up in Afghanistan for handling female prisoners. Taylor’s idea: “What if we take young Special Ops women and put them in situations with high terrorist targets?” Namely, befriending the daughter of a target, or a sister — female to female.

“This way, they could either track and/or take action against high level terrorists. That, to me, was a pretty extreme and interesting idea. It may be slightly different than what Taylor does with a lot of his other shows, but it’s so female-oriented,” Cameron told Owen Danoff at Screen Rant.

He served as the DP on the first two episodes and directed Episodes 5 and 6, and in collaboration with Sheridan and pilot director John Hillcoat established the kinetic visual language for the series.

“Sheridan is very, very specific about scripts,” he says. “If there’s time to do additional lines, or additional shots, or coverage, or anything of that manner, that’s fine, but you’ve got to shoot the script, and you’ve got to treat it like the Bible.”

The challenge is that high-caliber of talents like Kidman, Freeman and Saldana are used to improvising their lines. So how did Cameron handle that?

“It’s just always that situation, like, ‘Listen, we’re going to shoot the lines the way they’re written and then, if there’s an idea, we can either address it together or let’s get Taylor on the phone, and we’ll see if it’s something we want to address or extend a little time to shoot as well,’ he told Danoff. “Again, it seems very constrained, but it’s kind of freeing in the sense that you really have that voice of the writer and that showrunner, and that’s what you’re doing.”

READ MORE: Special Ops: Lioness Director Paul Cameron On Making New Show With & Without Taylor Sheridan (Screen Rant)

Lessons from “Westworld”

Cameron was also heavily involved with Westworld, helping create the initial look of the show and directing episodes even in the series’ final season.

Working with Jonathan Nolan on Westworld, Cameron saw a director who “had linear beliefs of story and stayed with it, and doing that within the work of television,” he says in part two of his interview with Hurwitz. “The reason I started directing there was because I could see somebody setting the bar as high as I’ve ever seen.”

He also learned how to handle a massive amount of scenes in a limited time window. “We might lose a day for some reason and need to make it up, and even with all my experience, I was, like, ‘Oh, my God — how are we gonna do all this stuff?’ And, inevitably, we did it. And that gave me great confidence when I went to direct on Westworld.”

For Special Ops: Lioness, he had to hand his director of photography hat to cinematographers like Niels Albert, John Conroy and Nichole Hirsch Whitaker, something that can be difficult for someone who’s been in their shoes for so many decades.

Most important, he says, is to make sure to include them in prep as much as possible, evaluating scenes and locations, “And to really be open to big decisions,” he says. “What is this scene about? What are the storytelling aspects, and how are we going to manifest it in this location?”

READ MORE: “Special Ops: Lioness” Cinematographer & Director Paul Cameron on Taylor Sheridan’s International Thriller — Part Two (The Credits)

Camera Package

While Cameron and Hillcoat originally considered using a large format camera, like the Sony Venice or the Arriflex Alex LF, the two settled on the popular Alexa Mini LF for most of the production.

Hillcoat didn’t want to see any lens built after 1980, so Cameron gathered an eclectic set for the shoot, including Canon K35s and Zeiss uncoated Super Speed lenses (with both rear end and no coating). “They all react so differently,” he told Hurlitz. “The K35s have a great softness on large format, falling off on the edges really nicely. The uncoated lenses have different qualities of halation [spreading of light beyond the source] and blooming and flaring. So if there’s something bright, the image just blooms a little, or the top halates a little bit.”

Locations

Baltimore stood in for countless locations in nearby Washington, DC. The production also shot in Morocco and Mallorca, Spain. The ISIS compound seen in the first episode was shot at a location in Marrakesh, as was the first meet between Cruz and her target, Aaliyah (Stephanie Nur), Amrohi’s daughter, filmed in the city’s new upscale Rodeo Drive-like shopping area, Q Street, subbing in for Kuwait City. The show’s wedding sequences were filmed at a beautiful house on the ocean in Mallorca. Additional sets were also built in Mallorca, including the White House Cabinet Room, seen in several episodes. Beach scenes representing The Hamptons were shot at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, 120 miles from Baltimore.

“The challenge on this show was a lot of it takes place in DC, and we were situated in Baltimore, which is not the easiest place to film,” Cameron told Tom Chang at Bleeding Cool.

“We had to make a lot of Baltimore locations work for DC and get the establishing and aerial shots. It came together, but it’s always a challenge when you’re not in the exact place. I enjoyed going over to Morocco, I had some things directed there, and I had several scenes shot for John on episodes one and two there. It ended up being the better part of seven months. That was a challenge unto itself.”

READ MORE: Special Ops: Lioness Director/DOP Paul Cameron on Pulling Double-Duty (Bleeding Cool)

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At first glance, a murder mystery set at a remote luxury retreat for some of the world’s most influential people recalls shows like The White Lotus  and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, but new seven-part FX series A Murder at the End of the World has a different spin.

“With its time-jumping structure, uniquely eerie tone and warnings about artificial intelligence and climate change, it is also unmistakably the work of the idiosyncratic creators behind Netflix series The OA, Sound of My Voice and The East,” Esther Zuckerman writes in The New York Times.

Those creators are Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij — a creative team who’ve been together since their first short film in 2007.

Their new show — marking the first time Marling, a writer and actor, has stepped behind the camera as director — is an Agatha Christie-inflected whodunit, featuring a Gen-Z amateur detective played by Emma Corrin (Diana Spencer in The Crown).

“I knew that Brit was going to be a natural director; I just didn’t understand how much I would enjoy the experience of watching Brit direct,” Batmanglij tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Certain actors, when they get into the directing chair, just have a sensitivity. I saw Emma[Corrin] and Harris [Dickinson] bloom in certain ways when Brit was working with them, and that inspired me to want to go take acting classes.”

Marling explains, “When you’ve spent a lot of years acting, you’re really aware of what actors need to create their best work.”

Marling also co-stars as the wife of Clive Owen’s tech billionaire, who invites a motley crew of guests including an environmental activist, a roboticist and an astronaut to his Icelandic retreat, where one or more of them wind up dead.

“It was really eerie, actually, to see the number of things that, when we had set out to write it four years ago, were science fiction,” Marling told Zuckerman. “When we talked about any of this stuff with people, we had to explain what is a deepfake, what is an AI assistant, what’s a large language model — how does that work? And then by the time we were editing it, to see everything come to pass.”

Marling tells Vulture, “Directing feels like you’re taking the world-building part to its ultimate conclusion.”

READ MORE: ‘The OA’ Creators Are Back With a Murder Mystery (The New York Times)

To film their story, Marling and Batmanglij sought out acclaimed cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen, ASC, who shot horror hit A Quiet Place; All the Old Knives, directed by Janus Metz Pedersen; Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut, Molly’s Game; and Denzel Washington’s film Fences.

“At heart this is a coming-of-age story about a child of the internet who knows more how to live her life in cyberland than in the real world,” Christensen tells NAB Amplify. “The script had this larger than life quality as if the world of the internet can’t be contained or quite grasped.”

She continues, “As a teenager I remember thinking the stars were so beautiful but there was an unfathomable distance between them and me. That is how I think we all felt about the cyberworld in this story. You can’t put it into a cage.”

The Danish DP has enjoyed a long-standing relationship with director Thomas Vinterberg, which began when her own short films caught his attention. This led to Christensen’s first feature film, Submarino, which earned her a Danish Film Academy award for best cinematography. She also shot The Hunt and Far from the Madding Crowd for Vinterberg.

“From what I know, Zal loved The Girl on the Train (shot by Christensen for director Tate Taylor) but it was one of those processes where our agents got in touch. I was in New York having just shot Sharper (dir. Benjamin Caron) so we had our first meeting there and it was like first love. No one who meets Brit can fail to fall in love with her.”

Having shot a number of features back-to-back, Christensen wasn’t particularly looking for a TV project. Instead, it was the co-director’s passion and the story itself that convinced her to take the job.

The central character’s crime solving cyber skills might recall The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Swedish author Stieg Larsson. Christensen says their chief cinematic reference were the films of great Polish auteur Krzysztof Kieślowski, and in particular the Three Colors trilogy (1993-1994 Red, White and Blue).

“We learned a lot from Kieślowski movies and wanted to emulate that tone, something very raw yet cinematic and truthful,” she says. “It’s the way that he took simple ideas and then photographed that idea.

“In these days when you can move the camera so much, even virtually, you can have it fly through a keyhole, under a bed, through a wall; we wanted something that felt raw and which retained those happy accidents, those glitches or scratches that are evidence of something real. We wanted an analog style.”

She elaborates, “Our question to ourselves was how do we make it feel minimalist? For us, perfection was imperfection. We didn’t want to be afraid of imperfections but to embrace all the things that can go wrong and not try to fix everything in post. You really have to work hard to protect that because the instinct from your colleagues in post-production is to fix things.”

To photograph the series she selected the ARRI Alexa equipped with a set of spherical lenses from Panavision that Christensen had previously used on the three-part FX mini-series Black Narcissus — that Christensen also directed.

“The image needed to be messed up a little and these lenses added that less-than-perfect quality,” she said, explaining that Panavision’s VP of optical engineering, Dan Sasaki, “detuned the lenses to achieve a softness and vignetting to break up the digital sharpness and cleanness and push the lenses to capture a less perfect image.”

She devised LUTs for each of the three principal locations in New Jersey, Iceland and Utah. “The color contrast was important to creating an energy between scenes as we move from white ‘desert’ to ‘red desert,’” she says. “Among our first creative conversations was about how to delineate between the real world and the cyberworld.”

She approached the show “like a seven-hour movie, as one story and one journey in terms of lighting,” operating the A camera with occasional second unit work for pick-ups.

While Batmanglij and Marling swapped directorial duties on the episodes, Christensen lensed all seven over the 100-day production period.

“I love prep and being in control of what we’re doing but here I learned how to prep while shooting,” she explains. “If Zal was directing for three days than Brit would be prepping her next block of two to three days and vice versa but I was busy shooting all the time.

“So when either director came to me with a new idea that they’d thought about I had to be quick to re-evaluate. So, I learned to go and chat with the director who wasn’t directing that day in my lunch break to tap into their thoughts and to prep for the next block while shooting.”

The billionaire’s Icelandic retreat recalls the opulence of the Roy family in Succession or the forest mansion in the sci-fi feature Ex Machina. It was built on soundstages in New Jersey and presented the biggest production challenge to the DP. The budget wouldn’t allow for the build of the entire set so they built half, dressed it for half the show, and then flipped it around, dressing the other half of the hotel weeks later.

“It’s a circular hotel but we only had space to build half of it at a time so we’d shoot the one half then, with the other half of the set dressed, we’d shoot the same scenes but in the other mirrored half. We also had to connect those scenes to Iceland. We had snow on the stage to link to snow in Iceland.”

Working within a LED Volume might have solved the need to dress and redress the scale of sets but would not have delivered the analog aesthetic they desired.

While the co-creators and directors naturally sing from the same sheet, Christensen says that they were different in the way they executed things. Making her directorial debut, “Brit is a very organized with thorough prep and previz. She needed that security while Zal allowed for a more spontaneous approach. It’s not quite improvisation but he wasn’t scared of seeing what happens on the day and reacting to that.”

Although she says that the shoot during winter and under COVID conditions in Iceland was particularly tough, Christensen wouldn’t hesitate to work with the duo again.

“Their passion for the story and the camaraderie they bring to set is something to be valued. It was a full on experience but I have to underline that Brit and Zal were an amazing team — which, trust me, does not always happen.”

Longtime friends and collaborators, director-screenwriter-producer Alexander Payne and editor Kevin Tent, ACE reunite for their eighth feature film, comedy-drama The Holdovers, which has been generating awards buzz.

Set in 1970, The Holdovers tells the tale of Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a curmudgeonly instructor at a New England prep school who remains on campus during Christmas break to babysit a handful of students with nowhere to go. He soon forms an unlikely bond with a brainy but damaged troublemaker, and also with the school’s head cook, a woman who just lost a son in the Vietnam War.

Since their first project together, Citizen Ruth in 1996, the duo has made Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, The Descendants (for which Tent was nominated for an Academy Award), Nebraska and Downsizing. Payne was Oscar nominated for adapting the screenplays for Election, Sideways and The Descendants (winning twice) and nominated as best director for Sideways, The Descendants and Nebraska.

A Character-Driven Period Drama

In keeping with these stories, The Holdovers is character-driven so don’t expect car chases, gunfights or explosions. “It is about people and the pain they carry in their lives and how opening oneself up to others around you can help relieve that pain and sometimes maybe even help you to grow,” describes The Rough Cut host Matt Feury, who talked with both Payne and Tent for the Avid-sponsored podcast.

Payne conceived the basic framework for the movie about a dozen years ago after watching a restoration of the 1935 French comedy Merlusse. About five years ago, he received a TV pilot out of the blue, which prompted him to call the writer, David Hemingson.

“I said, ‘Hey, you’ve written a great pilot. I don’t want to do it, but would you consider writing a story for me?’ That’s how it happened.”

The Holdovers is among the few occasions where Payne has not worked from his own script, although Tent says this made no difference to his craft approach.

“On The Descendants we really toned back the comedy because it felt a little forced, but here the tone kind of came prepackaged into the cutting room. Nothing ever seemed forced.”

Editing (Just Enough)

The Holdovers largely focuses on two or three main characters, which means that for an editor there aren’t a lot of places to hide when the director has shot long takes of dialogue and reaction.

“Sometimes it is tricky,” Tent agrees, “because Alexander gets amazing performances, but I think it is because he lets them take their time and find the lines properly.

“We try not to cut too much. It is a challenge to keep things moving, picking up the pace, but keeping the performances solid. We had some challenging scenes because we had a couple of fairly long talking scenes, and we’re trying to condense them as the film was evolving.”

He adds, “We tightened in a lot of the scenes to get to where the boys were leaving sooner. And we’re always doing that internally within scenes, dropping lines, that kind of stuff.

“But I think the screenplays really is so amazing. Just the reveal of Paul, as you dig deeper into Paul, you find out so late in the movie that he basically ran away from home, and then you find out that his dad beat them. Normally, people try to set all those things up right in the beginning, and I really appreciated the way things were slowly revealed here.”

Additionally, Tent tells A.Frame, “We’re pretty careful about not getting anything too sentimental or too sappy.”

How do they achieve that? Tent says, “It’s really a discipline in how we’re cutting the performances, I would say. So, if it doesn’t seem like it’s ringing true, then we would probably cut it out.”

Tent put it another way to Academy Conversations: “We did what we always did, … really let performances drive our decisions in the cutting room.”

Evocative Needle Drops

The film’s 1970 setting is evoked with needle drops of classic tracks by The Allman Brothers Band, The Temptations and The Swingle Singers, among others.

“Mindy Elliot, our associate editor and assistant editor, started putting music in and then we work with music editor Richard Ford, who helped us with both score and needle drops,” Tent says.

“With needle drops you can’t get too committed to anything because it costs so much money and it’s just such a back and forth with [licensing]. But in the beginning on this movie, I couldn’t really hear the music in it. Mindy suggested putting in one of the Swingle Singers’ Christmas songs and that became something dramatic that we use a lot, which was great.”

Signature Dissolves

Tent also talked about the use of dissolves, a signature Payne-Tent storytelling technique.

“We use a lot of them in The Holdovers, but we’ve always used them. It’s been part of our film language all the way back to Citizen Ruth. There’s a couple of really interesting ones in The Holdovers. I think that actually people thought were mistakes at first, and we’re like, ‘No, we did that on purpose.’”

Tent explains to A.Frame, “[W]e’re doing the same things that we’ve always done. But people think the dissolves now are because we’re trying to make it a ’70s film, but not really. We always used them.”

But unlike Sideways, he notes, “there was not a lot of predesigned dissolves.” Instead, “they were all made up in post. But they’re very effective, and I think they smooth out cuts and stuff like that.”

READ MORE: ‘The Holdovers’ Editor Kevin Tent Talks Being in the Cutting Room With Alexander Payne (A.Frame)

Seventies (Re)Immersion

With Jami Philbrick at Moviefone, Payne elaborates on the 1970s setting: “I don’t remember exactly the moment, but connecting the dots, I thought it would be neat for the movie, to just give it something special. Nebraska’s in black and white, which just gives it something a little special formally. I just thought, ‘Well, wouldn’t it give this movie something special if we make it look and sound like a movie made in 1970.’

“But what it did, especially as my first period film, was give us the idea that we’re pretending that we’re working in 1970 making a low-budget contemporary film at that point. I think that helped our sense of aesthetic, that the sets and the costumes look as lived in, grimy and old as they would’ve been had we been making just a low budget contemporary movie back then.”

He adds, “I always put a lot of thought into the movies in terms of what car the protagonist drives. It’s always an important thing to think about. It tells you as much about the character as their apartment does. The good ones, I think, were Paul Giamatti’s red Saab in Sideways. Then the best one is Matthew Broderick’s Ford Festiva, a little teeny tiny pathetic Ford Festiva in Election.”

READ MORE: Director Alexander Payne and Editor Kevin Tent Talk ‘The Holdovers’ (Moviefone)

Seventies movies were formative for the 62-year old filmmaker, as he recounts to Jake Coyle reporting for AP News. Payne screened several classics for crew and cast including The Graduate, The Last Detail, Paper Moon, Harold and Maude and Klute.

“We weren’t trying to consciously emulate the look and feel of any single one of those films but we all wanted to splash around in the films of our contemporaries, had we been making a movie then.

“My birthday parties, we’d go see Chinatown or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But that’s the period when I was a teenager and a sense of taste was being imprinted on me. And what I was told was a commercial American feature film. Now they’re considered art films or whatever, the last golden age. Well, you never know when you’re living in a golden age.”

READ MORE: Alexander Payne on the inspirations of ‘The Holdovers’ and the movies that shaped him (AP News)

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Chloe Domont’s thriller Fair Play provoked a Sundance bidding war that Netflix won for $20m and put the writer and director in the spotlight.

It’s the sort of triumph she is still wary of, in terms of how it impacts her own relationships, and was built on strength through adversity in what calls the “toxic link” between female empowerment and male fragility.

“What I really want to explore with this film is why is it that a woman being big, makes a man feel small?” she told Maggie McGrath in a video conversation. “Like why are those two things so closely linked? And I think it’s a systemic societal problem. I think that it’s the way society raises boys to believe that masculinity is an identity and that they have to fit in the box, that success is a zero sum game. And it’s not.”

According to Moviemaker, the film mines a specific type of male dread that manifests itself in an obsession with being “alpha,” fueled by a thriving podcast and YouTube industry. 

Fair Play tells the story of two young employees at a cutthroat hedge fund, desperate for promotions. They’re secretly engaged, because company policy prohibits interoffice relationships. But things get nasty when Emily (Bridgerton’s Phoebe Dynevor) begins to far outperform Luke (Alden Ehrenreich, Solo: A Star Wars Story). 

Domont had earned a BFA Degree in Film & Television from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and by 2017, was earning steady TV directing jobs on high-profile projects like HBO’s Ballers, CBS’s Clarice and Showtime’s Billions. 

The idea for Fair Play was “burning inside of me” she told McGrath as a result of her own experiences. “I had this feeling as my career was starting to take off, where my successes didn’t feel like a win, [but] like a loss because of the kinds of men I was dating. These were men who adored me for my strengths, or my ambition, but at the same time, they still couldn’t help but feel threatened by the very same things that they adored me for because of the way that they were raised.

“It just made me realize how much hold these ingrained power dynamics still have over us. So I wanted to put that on screen and be as ruthless with it as … the nature of the subject matter itself.”

Domont’s favorite scene sums this feeling up and was the first thing that came to mind when she started writing the script. This is the scene when Emily gets a promotion but her first reaction isn’t excitement; it’s fear. 

“That walk home and the dread and the silence of when she gets in there to tell him about it. The way we shot it, too, is I wanted her to feel very small in the frame. So there’s a couple shots that are over his shoulder and he’s very dominant in the frame. She’s very small in the frame and looking away and afraid to even look at him. And I just felt like that encompassed what I was trying to explore.”

She elaborates on this with McGrath, saying that while there may be some progress in American corporate culture as a result of #metoo, she also feels there’s a slow erosion of women’s careers. 

“It might not be blunt force trauma, but it’s a death of 1,000 paper cuts. This kind of bad behavior was ignored, and then normalized. And then the scary part is usually after that, it’s escalated. So that’s why it’s so important that those little tiny breadcrumbs you are constantly leaving. It’s like a snowball that it constantly builds.”

Domont hopes that her film raises questions about how the link between female empowerment and male fragility might be dismantled.

“How can we demystify the role that men are raised into thinking they’re supposed to fill? How can women embrace their successes without fearing that it’ll hurt them on some level? And how can we love and trust one another, in a world that’s so dependent on the very power dynamics that get in the way of that of that love, and trust and respect?”

READ MORE: Fair Play Writer-Director Chloe Domont on the Making of Her Office-Romance Disaster Movie (Moviemaker)

Much of the tension in the on screen relationship is attributed to Domont’s work with editor Franklin Peterson, whose credits include episodes of Homecoming, Calls and Gaslit.

“Even talking to Menno [Mans], my DP, we were constantly reminding each other, ‘Pressure cooker, pressure cooker,’” Domont told Peter Tonguette of Cinemontage. “We wanted to build up this ballooning tension — this balloon that just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and you know it’s going to burst at some point, you just don’t know what or when. The idea was building up this tension of this couple who can’t escape each other, really.”

Peterson explained that his first thought was to start off the film like a straight drama: “You sell the characters as if they are a couple you are going to just really root for, and then you pull the rug out slowly from underneath them. [But] Chloe said, ‘No, I don’t want to do that. I want, from the very first shot, to keep you unsettled.’”

He also explained that test screenings were “wildly” helpful. “It’s an R-rated movie for people who want to see an R-rated movie about a toxic relationship, or are willing to go on this ride with us. Once you enter that realm, you’re now asking, ‘How do we make this the best version of that movie for that group of people?’”

READ MORE: Franklin Peterson and Chloe Domont Talk Editing on Netflix Thriller ‘Fair Play’ (Cinemontage)

One of the most difficult scenes Peterson cut was the final scene with Campbell and Emily. It carries with it a delicate balance between what the characters say vs. what they mean. That balance has to also contend with an overall tension keeping the audience unsure what will happen.

As he explained to Filmmaker, “The coverage isn’t complex but to modulate the performances, guide the pace, and accommodate new lines meant we went through dozens upon dozens of versions. We would test the movie with a version of the scene we thought worked, only to realize that while solving one issue, we created another. It’s an example of how the hardest editing work will never show on the screen.”

One thing that never changed was the story’s ending. Domont knew what she wanted to say, and was never tempted to let her characters off with a pat resolution.

“I don’t write one word until I know what the ending is,” she told Moviemaker. “That ending is where the story and the genre come together, in one final punch.”

“It’s working within the thriller genre, which uses violence as a means to solve conflict,” says Domont. “So that was important.” 

To watch Fair Play, you would think it was shot entirely in Manhattan, where the story takes place, taking over the city’s many real hedge-fund offices and overpriced apartments, restaurants and bars. 

In fact, the production was based in Belgrade, Serbia — where Fair Play executive producers Rian Johnson and Ram Bergman had recently made much of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.

READ MORE: “I Use Split Screens as a Tool for Ensuring Any Performance Can Be Used”: Editor Franklin Peterson on Fair Play (Filmmaker)

Domont told Moviemaker, “Ram was advocating for us building there, because he was like, ‘This is the way to build a set the way you want. This is a way to put the most amount of money on the screen. And the crews are excellent.’ So that was what we did. We built all the sets in Serbia. And then we shot all the exteriors in New York, because the movie does not work if you don’t shoot the exteriors in New York.”

She took full advantage of being able to have sets designed to her specifications. 

“I intended for it to be kind of a claustrophobic film, in the sense that the characters are trapped between their home life and the workspace, and they go from one enclosed space to another and they can never escape each other,” she explains. “And because we’re in these same spaces for so long, I wanted to build them. And it was very important for me to build them. I had a very specific idea for how those spaces should be and feel, to feel claustrophobic in different ways.”