
January 13, 2021
Tami Reiker, ASC focuses on how to make beautiful, authentic performances while maintaining the director's vision. Her most recent film, One Night in Miami, is full of amazing performances. Directed by Academy Award winning actress Regina King, One Night in Miami is based on real events, when Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Sam Cooke…

January 10, 2021
Cinematographer Jake Swantko spoke with us last year at the Sundance Film Festival after the premiere of The Dissident, the documentary he shot with director Bryan Fogel. Jake and Bryan had previously collaborated on the Oscar-winning film, Icarus. The Dissident explores the assassination and international coverup of outspoken…

January 6, 2021
In our first-ever Best Of compilation episode, we have a dozen clips of listener favorites from 2020 and some of our selects as well. Cinematographer Bradford Young goes deep into his filmmaking philosophy and influences, such as on Selma; Kira Kelly talks about making the documentary 13th with director Ava DuVernay; Greig…

December 31, 2020
Erik Messerschmidt, ASC believes that cinematographers get too much credit for how a movie looks and not enough for how the story is told. When you break a scene apart and assemble a sequence, the cinematographer has a huge part to play in the process of deciding when to move the camera, what lenses are used, how it flows and…

December 23, 2020
Director Bruce Van Dusen has had a long career making commercials, which is extremely rare. He's discovered that making a good commercial is finding a balance between art and commerce, and the end product must be exactly what the client wants while getting the viewer to pay attention. Working in commercials doesn't necessarily…

December 16, 2020
Frederick Wiseman has proven that, in his words, “if you hang around long enough, you can collect enough material and cut a dramatic narrative film out of real life.” A Frederick Wiseman documentary has a very specific style- there is no narration, no identifying lower-third captions, no interviews and no camera movement. The…

December 9, 2020
Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, ASC, BSC, DFF thinks most cinematographers start out hoping and praying that the right script would come along that will spark a great film. His most recent project, the HBO series The Undoing, features New York as a central character in the story and explores the upper echelons of wealth.…

December 2, 2020
When Charlotte Bruus Christensen was approached to direct the three part series Black Narcissus, she was doubtful at first. The original 1947 film won an Academy Award for Best Cinematography, and she was very aware of the film and did not want to remake it. But when producer and writer Amanda Coe suggested she read the…

November 25, 2020
We continue our conversation with Oscar winning cinematographer Wally Pfister- don't miss Part 1. When much of the film world was going digital, Christopher Nolan and Wally began to experiment with large-format IMAX cameras. They had used the IMAX format for some of the visual tricks on The Prestige, and Wally was excited to…

November 19, 2020
Wally Pfister grew up loving movies, and couldn't wait to become a filmmaker. The son of an ABC news journalist, Wally got his start as a news production assistant in Los Angeles, and he worked his way up to become a news cameraman. He attended American Film Institute, where he met fellow filmmakers Janusz Kaminski and Phedon…