thefilmstage:

I’d never worked with Yorgos before, so I was really trying to get my head around it. I was more nervous at the end of that prep than I’ve been on any other film because I did not know how we were going to shoot it. Yorgos will answer your questions. You’ll get a sense of what he’s thinking. At the same time, you don’t quite know what’s going on in his head. Then what happened was, the first day of the shoot, he was there to take a still, he showed it to me, and says, “Do you want to shoot that shot?” I go, “Oh, God, this is going to be okay, because he takes pictures and that’s his viewfinder.“

From there on, I got the rhythm and I got more comfortable with what was going on. Then it was like being in a situation where you go, “Should we do that?” And he goes, “No, don’t do that.” Yorgos is a very confident DP in his own right. Across the board, what you’re saying about feeling like you’re being dropped in… in his last film, certainly, you know you’re in good hands. You’re being told, on every level, something that he wants to tell, and I think you totally get that from that film. It’s all departments. His editing is fantastic as well. What was interesting about shooting the film was the use of jump cuts — time jumps — and that wasn’t scripted like that; they discovered stuff in the edit. There’s quite a lot of dissolving going on. None of that stuff was talked about, but you can see on the shoot that he got what he wanted, and now he’s playing with it.

Cinematographer Robbie Ryan on the hungry imagination of Yorgos Lanthimos, avoiding prep & post-production, and the perfect whip pan.