Talking about Cinematography: BAFTA Sessions 2019

Filmmaking is more than just pressing record – cinematographers consider lighting techniques, lens choices and camera placement to bring a story to life. Interested in finding out how all these decisions are made? Learn about the process of cinematography from pre-production to shoot with BAFTA-winning cinematographer Linus Sandgren, as he discusses tackling his latest project, First Man.

Sandgren first worked with First Man’s director Damien Chazelle on the BAFTA-winning film La La Land. He recalled that “the first time Damien mentioned the film, he actually right away mentioned that he wanted to do a documentary style.” While there are plenty of popular films set in space, Sandgren explains that Chazelle’s aim was to do something different, subverting the usual supernatural, science fiction style. Sandgren reflected that approaching storytelling about outer space with realism had “never really been done before.”

The greatest challenge Sandgren experienced working on First Man was realistically replicating an environment that very few people have ventured to: space. He had to figure out “how can you actually go to the moon for real with actors? It was all rooted in that [documentary] style… we started to watch, and look at a lot of pictures – there’s a lot footage, a lot of photography. What we started to realise with that as well, is actually a lot of beautiful documentary footage, especially stills, were perhaps accidentally taken by the astronauts [and] are stunning and visually poetic.” Using real footage as a visual reference, the team captured footage that was visually both realistic and beautiful.

A major decision for a cinematographer is which camera to capture the action with. Sandgren used a range of camera types to suit the different environments in the film: “It’s a process in pre-production, of how you figure these thing out and why you do what you do. We ended up shooting basically the beginning of the film, when we’re emotionally connected more intimately in 16[mm], then we travelled into 35mm in the Houston sequence, but we maintained the graininess at NASA and the contrast but at home it was a softer look.”

He shared how he filmed the scenes at home: “In the domestic scenes, it was more the handheld and intimacy with [the actors], we thought about it as then they’re emotionally open, we could be closer to them.”

Sandgren contrasted the raw and authentic film captured in the domestic scenes by shooting with IMAX for the moon scenes which are “much cleaner and crisper.” It was his first time shooting with IMAX, which came with challenges such as: “you roll a thousand foot mag that normally in a 35 camera would be ten minutes, that would be 3 minutes in an IMAX camera so it’s very short amount of footage to shoot on, and they’re quite noisy so it’s tricky to shoot with sound.”

Why are these camera choices so important? For Lindgren, these decisions aren’t necessarily technical, but instead are about creating atmosphere and emotion. He said: “To me, cinematography is an emotional tool for the storytelling, it’s like the music. You have what’s going on, but then how you view it is emotional… if I have the wrong camera, this may not respond to everybody even, or be technically correct or anything, but if I don’t [make] decisions for the emotion… say if we’d have shot the domestic scenes in the beginning in IMAX, for me that would have felt very weird emotionally in this film.”

As Sandgren mentioned, cinematography and music share the ability to shape audiences’ emotions, and often work harmoniously together to achieve this. When Sandgren worked with Chazelle on both La La Land and First Man, the music was already prepared, providing him with a greater understanding of the film’s mood. “The music of the film, the score, and the cinematography is so connected… to me it’s really inspiring,” he reflected. The film’s composer, Justin Hurwitz, had prepared the score before anything was filmed; an unusual practice, but something that really helped Lindgren: “He had the music so I could listen to the songs, they were recorded with vocals and everything… it was really great to understand the tone of the film.”

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