Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.

Jeanie: I started out as an actress, very briefly, in New York. Then I was a reader for auditions, and it opened me up to the other side of the industry and casting. I found that quite fascinating, and still creative to this day. That was my start in casting in New York where I worked primarily in theater. Later on my husband and I moved out here to Los Angeles, and made my way mostly in television. That’s been the main focus of my casting career.

Kirill: What are the bigger misunderstandings or misconceptions about the role of the casting director, and what goes into it?

Jeanie: People don’t quite understand what we’re doing behind the scenes. So much of it is about personal taste, and what you respond to in an actor and in their work. The wonderful thing about it is it’s subjective. What I might respond to in an actor, someone else might not, and vice versa. I try to tell young actors to always keep that in mind. Whatever feedback you’re getting is coming from one person’s experience or perception.

Taste is a key point. People don’t realize that there’s a collaborative aspect of it. We are there at the very beginning, often before maybe even a director is on. We’re trying to take the writer’s vision and bring it to life. But part of our job is to try to expand whatever that idea may be. When they were writing it, they may have thought a specific way. But what’s so fun and maybe not as understood about what we do is that we then try to take that and stretch it as much as we can while still serving the piece and the character. You can’t become arbitrary and have it at the detriment of the story you’re telling.

Then, you’re working behind the scenes to set actors up to succeed as best possible. Sometimes that means finding a piece of film on them that other people may not have seen that can help a director or writer to see their work in a different light.

It’s so collaborative, and you’re there from the beginning. One way to see it is that you give birth to the project, and then it’s up to the rest of the creative team to go from there.

(L to R) Charles Melton as Austin Davis, Cailee Spaeny as Ashley Miller, Carey Mulligan as Lindsay Crane-Martin, Oscar Isaac as Josh Martin in episode 202 of Beef. Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: Did it feel that the recognition of your craft at the Oscars was overdue?

Jeanie: Certainly, as every other part of the creative process has been recognized up to this point. It was way overdue and very exciting. I don’t quite understand what took so long, but I’m so glad we’re there.

Kirill: What are the bigger differences between the feature film world and the episodic productions, and why do you mostly stay in the episodic world?

Jeanie: When I first started in television, there wasn’t as much streaming and cable. It was pretty much all network TV. As streaming and cable came into being. and there started to be the crossover of feature people – directors and writers and actors – into television and back and forth, the differences starting getting smaller.

The biggest difference is we have to work much faster in television than in feature films, because the schedule is so different. Once you get into casting a series, you have anywhere from eight to ten days to cast an episode, whereas in feature films you generally have months of preparation.
Another thing about casting in television is that since you don’t have that much time, you need to know that actors are going to be able to deliver in the moment. And yet another one is that no matter if you’re casting for a long term series or for a limited one, it can be eight or ten or twelve hours of screen time. You need to find actors that people are going to invest in and want to watch over a period of time. On a feature film you’re holding a much bigger screen, but for a relatively shorter period of time.

You’re looking at a longer period of time when you are casting for a series. You have a deeper development of the character in a series. A feature film may cover a large period of time or a shorter period of time, but in television, more often than not, where your character starts and where it ends can be very different. You need to know that the actor can carry all of those beats and story points over multiple episodes and/or seasons.

(L to R) Seoyeon Jang as Eunice, Charles Melton as Austin Davis, Cailee Spaeny as Ashley Miller in episode 203 of Beef. Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: Getting to “Beef”, how did it start for you?

Jeanie: Sonny [Lee Sun Jin, the creator of the show] reached out to me and wanted to know if I would be interested in talking about Season Two – to which I said “Yes, of course, I’m there. Just tell me where to show up” [laughs]. We had an initial meeting and hit it off from the beginning. We started talking about his ideas for the story for Season Two in that meeting.

Kirill: What drew you in the most on this show?

Jeanie: The tone on the show is so interesting. You have these heightened situations while still remaining grounded, real, and relatable. The challenge of walking that line for me is so interesting. He had also talked about the emotional depth that the characters were going to need to do this Season Two, and that was interesting to me as well.

Kirill: How much time did you spend on the show?

Jeanie: Several months between before they started filming through to when they finished filming.

Kirill: Who were your primary collaborators on it?

Jeanie: Sonny for sure was who I worked with most closely. I also worked with my partners over at A24 and Netflix, but in terms of exploration of the characters and the day-to-day collaboration, it was with Sonny.

(L to R) William Fichtner as Troy, Oscar Isaac as Josh Martin, Benny Blanco as self, Baron Davis as self in episode 202 of Beef.  Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: How do you usually start this? Do you start with the primary characters and then go for the supporting cast?

Jeanie: In this case, yes. We started with our regulars, and then built out from there with the larger roles.

When I started on it, we didn’t have all the scripts. A lot of it was conversations with Sonny as he was thinking about these characters and where they might go. That’s where the collaboration is also so wonderful. He has maybe an idea of a character, and then as I’m suggesting actors or as we talk about it, it may move in a slightly different direction. Or an actor may make him think of the character in a different way than he had originally thought. Or I may suggest an actor to him, and he will say that while it works for this particular part of the story, this is where I’m thinking about going with it, and I’m not sure that that actor serves that purpose. There’s so much give and take. It’s a trust that starts to build between us where both of us can push each other to think a little more outside the box.

Kirill: What are your thoughts on typecasting? How difficult is it for everybody involved to not fall into that trap?

Jeanie: It goes back again to the trust element. When you have people you’re working with that you trust and they trust you, that allows you to think outside the box and turn an expectation of a role on its head. You can cast somebody who comes with a certain preconceived idea, and you then take the audience in that direction with that actor cast in a stereotypical way – and then you turn it in a way that the audience doesn’t expect.

Sometimes casting to type that way can be good if you want to set people up on an expectation and then pull the rug out from underneath them. And sometimes you may see the actor in this stereotypical way, but you’ve also seen them do other things. I started in theater, and that’s a big part of it for me. I saw actors do so many different things. I came up watching people who trained and studied their craft. They know how to play drama, they know how to play comedy, they can do heightened, they can do naturalistic. From that basis, I try to look at actors as a whole and not as a stereotype of what they may be best known for.

It’s so hard for actors. If you’re lucky enough to land on a TV series that runs for a long time, you become known as that character. It’s great because you’ve made a living, but then you have to spend the rest of your career convincing people that you can do other things. We’re moving so quickly, and I have to remind myself that it’s too easy to say that a certain actor is not right because you think of them a certain way. Part of your job as a casting director is to try to know people’s body of work as broadly as possible, and not just the way most people know them. Part of our job is to go the extra mile and look at actors’ work that may not be as well known.

(L to R) Song Kang-ho as Dr. Kim, Youn Yuh-jung as Chairwoman Park in episode 203 of Beef. Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: Going back to the show and the South Korean part of it, is it becoming easier in this global world to keep track of the international talent and find the right people?

Jeanie: For sure. You can get on a Zoom call with an actor in another part of the world. Or you can have them make a tape and have it arrive in your email box 10 minutes later. It’s completely changed it. It’s opened up the world immensely. There’s also a tremendous amount of international television and films now available, and that has completely changed the game as well.

Kirill: You worked on “Ally McBeal” in the late ’90s, and that was absolutely my favorite show back then. Do you feel that it’s easier, if you will, to get the big name actors to do episodic productions these days compared to how it was back then?

Jeanie: Absolutely, and that is also tied to the writers and the directors who have been attracted to television. Actors are looking for good stories and good characters to play.

Going back to what I said before, if you’re a feature actor, the idea of being able to explore a character over ten hours of episodic versus two hours of a film can be exciting. If you’re working with cable or streaming, and you’re doing 10-12 episodes, you then have the whole other half of your year to do a film. When it was back in the network TV broadcast world, you were doing 22 episodes a season, and it didn’t leave much time to do anything else.

(L to R) Cailee Spaeny as Ashley Miller, Oscar Isaac as Josh Martin in episode 202 of Beef. Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: Do you want to have exceptional actors as individuals or an exceptional cast?

Jeanie: To me it’s the whole which is so important. I understand a studio and a network’s desire to have recognized names in significant roles. There’s so much product out there and you’re trying to get eyeballs to your show. So there is that desire to have somebody who can get on a talk show or somebody who has a following already.

But to me, if they don’t fit in the world and they don’t work together with the rest of the cast, it doesn’t matter how famous they may be. It has to work. People have to come back to the show. They might come to the show initially because of some name recognition of a famous actor in it. But you need them to come back, and keep watching. That’s why to me, it’s about the ensemble as a whole and not just that particular actor.

Kirill: Maybe, and correct me if I’m wrong, there’s also less appetite from the studios to bet on a completely unknown cast and give that new show a couple of years to find its legs. Maybe now it’s more about hitting it straight out the gate.

Jeanie: It depends on how big the show is. If it’s an extremely expensive show to make, there’s more pressure to have known entities in it. But there’s so many successful shows that did not have known actors before they were in the show. It really depends upon the project itself and the platform. There are places that are willing to take more chances than perhaps some others. I do think it mostly depends on the size of the show. And I actually think there is more openness than there used to be.

Kirill: Going back to “Beef” for my last question on the show. You start working on it so early in its development, and then it goes to shooting, and then to editing, and then the network decides when to air it. And then you sit down and watch it. How does it feel to go back to that story after all these long months that you’ve been away from it, so to speak?

Jeanie: It’s great. I have to watch it a couple times. The first time I might be looking at the actors that we took a chance on and I’m a little anxious as to how they did. Then the second time, I’m really in it.

Sometimes there’s a role that took a long time to cast, and you read the same scene over and over and over during the auditions, and then you finally see it, and it’s a little bit triggering. I remember the process the first time I’m watching [laughs]. It’s always exciting to see it all come together. I’m there from the very beginning. Then you have production design, costume design, makeup, props and editing bringing the rest of the piece together.

(L to R) Cailee Spaeny as Ashley Miller, Carey Mulligan as Lindsay Crane-Martin in episode 206 of Beef. Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: Some people see generative AI as an existential threat to creativity, and some see it as yet another tool to adopt and adapt and to add to their arsenal. Where do you find yourself these days?

Jeanie: I would say the former. Going back to what I was saying earlier about what casting is. It’s about personal taste. It’s about being able to see something in an actor’s audition performance. It might not be exactly right, but you see something there, and you work with it.

If we lose our humanity, especially in casting, we’re really lost. So much of it is about being able to work with an actor and to see something in there, even if they didn’t fully land it, and helping them to find it. There’s so much vulnerability that is required from an actor. The further removed we come to be from that process, the more we’re going to lose in the storytelling and our ability as an audience to connect and to see ourselves in those characters and in those performances.

Kirill: What are the key ingredients to longevity in your industry?

Jeanie: From an acting perspective, it’s about training and understanding that it’s a craft, and not just about being discovered on TikTok or having a certain look.

You need adaptability, humanity, and compassion for the people you’re working with. You need respect for the people you’re working with. You need a collaborative spirit. And you need just the right amount of ego to fight for what you feel strongly about. And you also need to understand that you’re part of a whole, and that sometimes maybe you’re not seeing the whole picture. Sometimes you’re digging in your heels for your own ego or whatever it might be – and not hearing what the director or the writer is saying isn’t working from your perspective.

You need to work well with others, and walk the right line of personal investment and passion without letting it be absolutely everything in your life. You need to have a balance in your life.

Kirill: Is there a piece of advice you would want to give to your younger self if you could jump back in time to the late ’90s?

Jeanie: Trust the process. Trust the journey. Stay true to your beliefs, and what’s important to you and your creative soul. Trust that eventually you’ll find the people who understand that and see that. And enjoy the ride.

Kirill: Out of all the travels you had for work over your career so far, what was the place that had the best food?

Jeanie: I had some amazing meals in Chicago working on “The Bear”. There were a couple different restaurants there that I only would have known about from working on the show and introductions that were made from people working on the show. That made the meals all the more special.

(L to R) Charles Melton as Austin Davis, Cailee Spaeny as Ashley Miller, Carey Mulligan as Lindsay Crane-Martin in episode 208 of Beef. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix.

And here I want to thank Jeanie Bacharach for sharing her time with me to talk about the art and craft of casting. I also want to thank Kristy Chan for making this interview happen. “Beef” is streaming on Netflix. Finally, if you want to know more about how films and TV shows are made, click here for additional in-depth interviews in this series.

Olga Mill on the sets of “Beef”.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.

Olga: I knew I wanted to do what I do today pretty early on. My family moved to New York from the Ukraine when I was five. They would take us to the theater all the time, and I also went into community theater acting programs. Later on I went to a performing arts high school in New York. The acting part of it didn’t resonate with me, but I did like the parts about making your own sets and costumes.

I remember walking home from school one day and thinking that I could be a costume designer. The more I thought about it, the more it looked like it would let me out of some of the acting stuff that didn’t resonate, and also that it appealed to a nerdier research part of myself. It also felt more practical in a way. That’s when my path started, back in high school.

It took a long time to feel confident enough to want to be in the designer role. In the film industry, if your family’s not in it, it can feel so out of reach. So at first I was thinking that I would be happy if I could just work in a costume shop. And then I wanted to be an assistant. And only when I went to graduate school at NYU that I felt ready to go for the head of department role.

Costume design of “Beef” by Olga Mill. Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: What are the misconceptions or misunderstandings about what costume design is?

Olga: The first one is that a lot of people assume that I know how to sew. It’s really important to understand the construction and design because I’m talking to tailors. But left to my own devices, it’s a skill that I don’t have. I respect it a lot, but I certainly wouldn’t be able to do it myself.

The second misconception is putting costume design in with fashion. Fashion is its own lane that I have so much respect for, but that’s not where the meat of my knowledge is. As a costume designer, you are driven by the script and the characters and not the aesthetics of fashion. I don’t mean to downplay fashion, but these are two independent avenues that often get intertwined. They are different skill sets.

Kirill: Getting to “Beef”, how did you find your way to it, or perhaps how did it find its way to you?

Olga: I feel that we met each other halfway. I was a big fan of season one, and I had worked with the production designer Grace Yun several times in the past. I got the script for the second season through my agent, and I don’t know if it was through Grace or through my past work with A24.

I met Sonny [Lee Sun Jin, the creator of the show] for a coffee, and he laid out his thoughts for season two. It’s an anthology series, and it was interesting for me because you can start from scratch with new characters. I put together some visuals and sent him, and then we went from there.

Costume sketches for “Beef”, courtesy of Olga Mill and Netflix. Left to right – Ashley, Austin, Ashley.

Kirill: What is the most interesting part of this season for you?

Olga: I’m 41 years old, and I’m a part of the millennial generation. It feels that my generation is culturally at the part of the curve where enough time has passed from your twenties and certain trends when you can look back and start to see the things that were popular in a more objective way. You need a little bit of distance, maybe 10-15 years [laughs] to be able to reflect on it.

The show deals so much with how generations are interacting with each other, and it was the chance to look at millennial culture in an anthropological way for the first time. I didn’t do that before, and it was quite humbling at times.

Costume sketches for “Beef”, courtesy of Olga Mill and Netflix. Left to right – Joshua, Chairwoman Park, Lindsay.

Kirill: There’s generational divide, cultural divide, class divide and others in the show. How did you approach this? How wide of a canvas did it give you to explore in your department?

Olga: Even though it takes place in the modern day, I do modern day projects the same way as if I’m doing a period film. It’s a different part of society for me. I didn’t grow up going to country clubs, so that was new.

We spent a lot of time at the Montecito Country Club. We spent time in Ojai. Bailey Gardner who was the assistant costume designer and I, together with Grace and Kellie Jo Tinney the set decorator would go to both those towns, have lunch and look around. The other place where I do a lot of research is Instagram. It’s amazing. You think about the characters of Josh and Lindsay and Ashley and Austin – they would be posting stuff online. So I spent a lot of time trying to find real accounts that I thought had elements that spoke to the characters. Sonny, Grace, James Laxton the cinematographer and I would send them back and forth to each other.

It was trying to find real people who lived in Ojai or who were in Montecito. It’s a costume designer’s dream. They post their outfit of the day. They post the brands where they shop. I’m researching it like I’m researching the 1500s in England., to get a sense of where these people shop, and what’s important to them.

Costume design of “Beef” by Olga Mill. Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: How did you approach the differences in culture, traditions and environment for the South Korean characters?

Olga: Our window into Korea is very specifically through the lens of Chairwoman Park, who is not just Korean, but super ultra-wealthy Korea. There’s the scene where she comes in and looks at the room that Lindsay designed at the country club. Grace did such a beautiful job with that room. It’s not garish, but it’s not quite a room that amazes you. It doesn’t make you want to be in that space.

Everything about the Korean aesthetic that we were trying to represent was in opposition of what the style of that room is. It is more modern. It is more sleek. The term “quiet luxury” is overplayed, but it is there. Lindsay’s design is stuff on stuff on stuff. And the Korean aesthetic here is simpler and more refined.

Originally we looked at examples of real Korean ultra-wealthy women in that age group, and it’s a cashmere world. We did veer from that with Chairwoman Park, giving her the leather jacket. She represents modernity, but there’s elements that are unexpected to her as well. I wouldn’t say that she is the typical Korean woman of that age. There is a certain worldliness to her. But overall, just in opposition to Lindsay’s aesthetic, that was a good guiding light.

Costume design of “Beef” by Olga Mill. Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: One of the parts of the storyline that I liked was how the four main characters try to blend in in an environment that is a completely different tax bracket, an environment that has a completely different set of financial means. Joshua and Lindsay want to be seen as almost equals, but they’re not quite there with the money. And the young couple has their own aspirations, especially Ashley.

Olga: The term “hyper assimiliation” came up quite frequently. It is almost like an immigrant experience, but through class instead of countries. Take Josh for example. The way I thought of him and talked to Oscar Isaac about him is how he walks through the club. He’s clocking how people are dressed. He has to be really aware of it, and then constantly trying to mimic it – again for his own ego – to feel like he’s an equal at the club.

But I also think it’s in service to the members too. This is what I noticed in the spaces of these country clubs. Part of what the members are paying for is to feel like they’re not interacting with employees. There’s something about interacting with somebody who you know is paid to be there that doesn’t feel as good. What feels really good is when you’re interacting with somebody who you don’t feel that class divide. They know your name. They know what you like to drink. Ultimately, it’s because you don’t want to feel guilty for having more than somebody else. So it’s important for Josh to look like the club members because it feels better for everybody.

Costume design of “Beef” by Olga Mill. Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: As these main characters move up and down the class hierarchy, if you will, throughout the show’s storyline, what changes did you want to make in their costumes?

Olga: I thought about it more like mirroring each other. When Ashley becomes jealous of Eunice, she starts to dress like her. Her shirts become a little bit more silky. She starts to mimic her professional style. Then when they go to Korea and she’s with Lindsay, she’s in that dress that they’re in at the clinic which is trying to mimic this Montecito prairie aesthetic. And then at the very end when she takes over Josh’s position, she’s in a green suit the way that Josh started the show in. The way I was thinking about it was who are you trying to reflect – or whose skin do you want to put on – and not up and down.

When we first meet Austin, he’s a trainer, but we intentionally made him not wear any athletic fabrics. Everything is cotton, sun washed, and casual. And then, as he starts moving up in the club, he starts wearing moisture wicking official workout fabric.

At any given moment in the season, it was about who you are reflecting and whose life you want.

Costume design of “Beef” by Olga Mill. Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: Is there such a thing as your favorite character in this season to work with?

Olga: On a TV show the picture is so much bigger, and you have so much more space with these characters. So they all come in and out of favor, so to speak.

I thought Chairwoman Park was a very interesting character to design. Sometimes characters surprise me. You think this is what they’re going to look like. You do the research, you talk about it with the director, you make the boards, you show the pictures. And it’s not until you’re in a room with somebody until you realize that it’s something different. Her character was the one that I found the most surprising where we landed. In retrospect, it has a softer place in my heart because the process was the most unexpected.

Costume sketches for “Beef”, courtesy of Olga Mill and Netflix.

Kirill: Was there a color that you wanted to particularly emphasize, and was there a color that you didn’t want to use at all?

Olga: Not for the whole show. We did have an intentional map or color theory between Grace, James and I, which was thinking about each couple as a different season.

Color-wise, Lindsay and Josh are very autumnal. It’s purples, oranges, greens, brown, thinking of their relationship is like autumn. Things are drying up and kind of dying. In contrast, Ashley and Austin are spring. It’s all pastels and a spring palette. And then Chairwoman Park is winter. It’s icy grays and light blues. And then the club was an endless summer. That’s where the greens and yellows come in. That was a really helpful way to work to have this color plan that you’re all standing under. Then when you’re making tiny decisions – like what sock should Ashley be in – it comes to which sock feels the most like spring. You give yourself a little map for when you get lost.

Costume design of “Beef” by Olga Mill. Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: How do you see AI generative AI today?

Olga: If I’m being really honest, I feel that I don’t know enough about it to have a dogmatic point of view on it. Like with most things in history and in life, it’s not so much what the tool is – it’s what the intention behind it is. Anything can be used productively and anything can be used destructively. I hope it makes most of people’s lives more comfortable, but I don’t know if that’s the case.

It’s easier for me to understand how it makes me personally feel. It is the first time that I feel a sense of aging. You feel that it’s almost a glacier that’s moving and turning – in a zoomed out way of time and technology. I do remember the time before we had the Internet, but I was also young enough that it felt like second nature for it to be around. It wasn’t a concept I had to wrap my mind around. And this feels like the first innovation that makes me feel old, because it feels like something that’s moving. It’s something that I’m not standing on, you know?

Costume design of “Beef” by Olga Mill. Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: What are the key ingredients to longevity in this field?

Olga: It’s being a person that people want to be in a room and have a conversation with, whether that’s the director, the actors, or the producer who’s talking to you about the budget. It’s being somebody who people want to figure out problems with. Nothing is going to go as planned on any project you’re going to make. There’s going to be problems. It’s like a marriage. Who do you want to sit across the table with and figure out a problem with?

Another part of it is a real privilege, which is having the financial flexibility to be able to pick and choose which projects you want to do. It’s a recurring theme for people that are able to do it for a long time. If you can keep your overhead life expenses smaller so that you don’t have to take every project that comes up, that you can be intentional about which projects you want to take, that is super valuable as a designer.

Kirill: What was your favorite dish that you had while working on the show in South Korea?

Olga: There was this little dumpling shop right next to our office in Seoul, run by an older Korean lady making dumpling soup. It only had a few things on the menu, nothing fancy. Our first day at the office our translator took me there, and that was my favorite spot. It was delicious.

Costume design of “Beef” by Olga Mill. Courtesy of Netflix.

And here I want to thank Olga Mill for sharing her time with me to talk about the art and craft of costume design, and for sharing the supporting materials. I also want to thank Marilyn Lintel for making this interview happen. “Beef” is streaming on Netflix. Finally, if you want to know more about how films and TV shows are made, click here for additional in-depth interviews in this series.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.

Jess: I’m Jess Royal. I’m a set decorator and I did all five seasons of “Stranger Things”. My background is in law. I went to law school and practiced criminal defense. I had some faith going into it that some people are wrongly accused or overcharged, but in my case, our clients were very much guilty [laughs]. The thought of doing that for the rest of my life was quite daunting, and I felt an urge to do something creative.

I didn’t know what that was going to be right away. I found my way into film based on watching background interviews of production designers and set decorators who did period sets on movies and TV shows. I love history, and that was the best possible merge of both worlds. Fortunately, I met a production designer on an elevator, and I would not let go until I got what I wanted, and here I am now.

Kirill: What are the misconceptions or maybe misunderstandings about your role?

Jess: My mom still calls me a set designer, because that’s what the words make sense in her brain, even though a set designer is more of a draftsman who draws up the plans. Perhaps people draw a connection to interior designers that do a full design. People hear set decoration, and think about curtains or sofas or the frilly little details at the end.

The best thing about my job is doing junkyards and huge equipment. It’s doing a landscape that I can build from scratch – exteriors and interiors. It can be drapery, but it’s also every stack of newspaper or a collection of tchotchkes. You can build a backstory of where someone’s been in their life, what they’ve collected, what’s important to them.

I feel like “decoration” is the wrong word. It’s designing a whole world and a whole backstory for a character or a town, using objects, exterior and interior.

Left to right – production designer Chris Trujillo, set decorator Jess Royal, and art director Sean Brennan on the Mayor Cline’s bedroom set of “Stranger Things”. Courtesy of Jess Royal and Netflix.

Kirill: What would be the bigger change that happened in your part of the world, comparing today vs when you were starting out?

Jess: Before, we didn’t have the option to fix things in post with VFX. You had to think about everything – something like covering a transformer on a telephone pole half a mile down the road that someone would see that’s not period. Now we make a note for VFX. Sometimes it’s handy, but I also miss thinking about everything in 360. On “Stranger Things” we started with Schindler boxes to do playback on older TVs to prevent flicker on camera, and now everyone is using green screens to put it in post. It’s mostly about technology and VFX.

Kirill: Getting to “Stranger Things”, how did it start for you, and what stood out in those early days?

Jess: I worked with the production designer Chris Trujillo for a few years before the show on smaller indie movies, and we kept saying that one day we’re going to get a show or a movie that everyone’s going to watch, and we’ll really have made it in the world.

I was in Los Angeles on a vacation, about to get on a plane, and he texted that he was sending a script with a good potential for me to read and to see what I think. Originally it was called “Montauk” and that’s where we were supposed to shoot it. I read the script on the plane, and I thought that it could be so amazing. One thing led to another, and we were scouting in Wilmington for Montauk, and eventually they said that maybe we can look in Atlanta and change the setting of the show. No matter what though, I felt that it had great potential.

It felt very small at the beginning. Netflix was hesitant to give us money to do everything we wanted to do, but then it came out, and it was amazing. It felt that our lives changed, as everyone watched it within 48 hours. It was cool to grow up in those early months of the first season or two.

Jess Royal on the sets of “Stranger Things”. Courtesy of Jess Royal and Netflix.

Kirill: Was it that immediate for you after the first season dropped?

Jess: The release premiere in LA was somewhere outside of West Hollywood. I remember we were sitting on folding chairs, and how small it still felt. But it caught on so fast. I went straight from LA to a wedding in Massachusetts, and by the time I got to Massachusetts a day or two later, my brother had watched it, my mom had watched it, people at the wedding had watched it. Everyone was talking about it, or at least the people I was surrounded with, whether they were watching it for my sake or not. It felt like it was blowing up right away.

I’d already started scouting for “Ozark” at that time. My original film job was the location scout and then I became a decorator, so on some of those earlier shows I would scout and then I’d start prepping decorating. “Ozark” was fun to scout for and I was excited about doing it, and then at some point a few weeks in “Stranger Things” was immediately picked up for season two. So I had to leave “Ozark” a little bit early. I was bummed about that, but I think I made the right choice to stick with “Stranger Things” and what we had built. Merchandise and various experiences came later, but everyone hearing about the show was pretty immediate.

On the sets of the Byers’ living room of “Stranger Things”. Courtesy of Jess Royal and Netflix.

Kirill: Looking back at these 10 years and the entire story arc, why did people connect so much with this show?

Jess: It’s a multi-generational show. One of my best friends is about the age of Jonathan in the show, and he was a photographer in high school and later went to college at Pratt for photography. People his age identify with all the music of the era. They were kids in high school right at that same time. He immediately loved it, and I ended up using his photography as Jonathan’s background photography in the dark room and bedroom.

People his age who now have kids who are around the younger kids’ age in the show can watch it together as family. It transcends generations. It also lends itself well to having a pop culture – the music, the D&D aspect for all the nerds out there who love it. This game has been going strong since the ’80s, and there’s so many generations that can enjoy that aspect. You cheer for these kids and it doesn’t matter how old you are. You want to see them beat the dark forces and stay friends. Watching them grow up has been a delightful thing for a lot of people who have grown up with these kids as the show has gone on.

On the sets of “Stranger Things”. Courtesy of Jess Royal and Netflix.

Kirill: Looking at all the seasons, as it kept on expanding to the mall and the Russian subterranean base, and going to Lithuania for the Russian prison, and so much in the Upside Down – how was it to see the increased scope of your work, and how did you approach it?

Jess: It’s not just “Stranger Things”, but also film in general. There’s been a little bit of a turn in the industry, and we felt it on season five. Studios are pulling back a little bit as far as some of the money they’d spent on productions.

I would have told you that there’s no way that we could do season three for less money or with less people than we have now. But as that constrained slowly, we did season five with a little bit less resources, at least for our department. You grow with what you have. You are challenged, and you know how to do that the next time. It comes with experience. I don’t know if I could have gotten that much experience out of 10 years of doing anything else. “Stranger Things” kept on ramping up every season, and the expectations got higher and higher.

Season three was probably the hardest that we did. We built the entire mall from the ground up. Everything was dressed. All the stores had everything in them. And at the same time I’m planning the carnival. It was a multi-million dollar expenditure to get all the rides, to get all the original incandescent lighting and other things. And then season four got even bigger because we’re on different continents. If anything, season five spends a lot of time in the Upside Down, so there’s less things to do for set decoration. You take it as it comes, and if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger.

Set decoration of “Stranger Things” by Jess Royal, courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: How disruptive was Covid for your department?

Jess: Everyone shut down, so it was less disruptive than the writer’s strike was for season five. We still had some people working and building, but set decoration was out of the loop for a while. We came back to all these sets that were built, and a lot of decisions had to be made really fast to get them dressed so we could start shooting right away.

I was working from home, keeping in touch with some friends in Russia who supplied us with computers and some other things. They were still shipping technology back to the US that I was gathering. That way, when we got back in from Covid, I was ready to hit the ground running. We started going back to Lithuania to scout. When everyone stops at the same time, it doesn’t feel as oppressive. The biggest problem there was just the kids looked so much older after we came back [laughs].

Jess Royal’s dog on the set of Holly’s room on “Stranger Things”. Courtesy of Jess Royal and Netflix.

Kirill: What are your personal highlights of the fifth season of the show?

Jess: I think the production designer and art director and I all agree that the radio station was one of our crowning achievements for the whole show. It brought in so many elements. We built the exterior fully around the Palmetta area in Georgia, and the residents that were driving by were not able to figure out what it was. You have all the neon lights, and the start of the tower right there on site. There was so much research around how everything should look like – the transmitter, the copper lines for certain spaces, etc.

It was based on a real radio station in North Carolina that the Duffers grew up nearby that they were always inspired by. Chris had found it in his research on radio stations, so it synced once they saw that in his lookbook. We copied pretty much the whole layout of that station. We ended up going up there, and picking up some of their dead equipment and elements that they had at the actual radio station, and bringing it back to Atlanta. Then we made it fit within the world of “Stranger Things”, adding a livable hangout space with all the records. It was so much fun for me to select all those bumper stickers on the walls.

Then we have Holly’s room. I always loved the floral Marimekko wallpapers that you see in old references and magazines from the late ’70s to early ’80s. It was so exciting to use it there, as it ended up being my dream bedroom that I never had as a kid. It also is such a hard contrast with what happens in that bedroom. You see this happy bright colorful room, and then all of a sudden a monster is coming through the ceiling and trying to steal her. It’s that fun “Stranger Things” contrast.

Derek’s bedroom at the Turnbow house was a lot of fun. He’s like my spoiled little brother growing up, and everything I was jealous of, he had it. It was a little bit of a take on Francis from “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure”. Everything that happens in that house is so “Stranger Things”, with the kids all setting traps and doing their beats to catch the Demogorgon. I like the cultural life layer more than I do the pure sci-fi stuff, because it’s given me more to do.

Set decoration of “Stranger Things” by Jess Royal, courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: Where do you find this big grandfather clock that we see in the Upside Down?

Jess: I had a lot of options from eBay and different auctions. We needed some of the elements to be replicated, so we couldn’t have anything so unique and crazy that it would be too hard or time consuming to copy it. Once I found that one clock, that was it. It was traditional enough, but also big and imposing. I shared that with the Duffers and Chris, and they all loved it. I wish I had a more interesting story [laughs], but it was one of those you know it when you see it moments. I think it was in Michigan, and we bought it off eBay on auction, and had it transported down to Atlanta.

We were all careful with it on set. We would put it into a tree or a coffin, and we didn’t want anything to break. We had a few variations of it where they built it just in case, but it held together pretty well.

On the sets of “Stranger Things” with the grandfather clock. Courtesy of Jess Royal and Netflix.

Kirill: As they go into the Upside Down, they see the mirror “images” of their houses, the school and other places. How did you approach decorating these “other world” houses?

Jess: On most seasons it came up later. Going into it, I didn’t necessarily have a plan to replicate everything.

I found Eddie’s trailer in Florida, and had it shipped up. Then we found that it had asbestos in it, and we had to take all the asbestos out. I decorated it with this whole collection of trucker hats, and a whole collection of coffee mugs, and other stuff that was all over the trailer. It was almost a small house that we were creating. Then, after we had already started shooting, we found out that they were going to have to go in the Upside Down in his trailer.

It was a little bit forgiving, because the tentacles and the vines can help cover if there’s something I cannot find as an exact replica or a duplicate. It’s also flexible because the Upside Down was created at a moment in time in 1983. While certain things have changed in the real world over the years, you can go back to that original – what it would have been in 1983 in the Upside Down. By the time season five came around, I was already planning for everything to be seen in the Upside Down, trying to find at least two if not more of everything.

We didn’t even see the Wheeler house in the Upside Down until at least season three or maybe season four. A lot of that stuff ended up being covered with vines or painted over. Then the next season I had to try and clean it up when we saw the house back again in the Rightside Up. It was a trial and error process.

Set decoration of “Stranger Things” by Jess Royal, courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: Are you by now used to walking away from these sets and spaces that you’ve decorated, spaces that have lived in your head for a full decade?

Jess: I think I handled it better than a lot of people. There are some people in other departments who came on just for season five. I saw some of them crying on the last night we were filming, and I was a little more bittersweet.

I’ve been planning for it for a long time. Originally, we were only going to do three seasons. When we were first setting up for season one, the Duffers said if people actually watch this, then we have a three season arc we’re thinking of. We’ll know what it is, and there’s an end point, and we can plan for that then. And as it got bigger and bigger, there was the push to have more content, so they expanded some storylines and we ended up going five seasons.

But mentally I’d always been prepared for three seasons. So by the time we got to season five, I was ready to move on and do other things. I would do anything with the Duffers always. They’re the best. But at least for this storyline and these characters, I felt like we watched them grow up and I liked the ending. I was OK with letting it go.

Design sketches for the “Scoops Ahoy” ice cream parlor on “Stranger Things”. Courtesy of Jess Royal and Netflix.

Kirill: Did you get to keep any piece to yourself for your personal collection?

Jess: Not anything that anybody would notice or care about. I kept a set of glasses from the Wheeler house. I have a firm “one in, one out” rule in my house. Working as a set decorator and being tempted to keep so much, I have to purge something else if I’m going to bring something into my house. There’s so much that people wanted, so I just let them have their pick, and I kept those glasses for myself.

On the sets of the Starcourt Mall of “Stranger Things”. Courtesy of Jess Royal and Netflix.

Kirill: How do you see the world of generative AI today in your industry?

Jess: It’s a hot topic. Last summer I worked on the movie “Artificial” about Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Ilya Sutskever who is one of the people who created OpenAI. I downloaded ChatGPT for that movie, because I felt that I should try and figure out how people were using it and what it was all about. But honestly, I deleted it after that movie and I have turned off every aspect of AI that you can on your phone, be it in search results or email summaries.

As far as technology goes, I’m old school. For a long time I thought that the Internet was just a trend and that it was going to go away eventually [laughs]. Obviously I was wrong on that. I still read books and I don’t like to read anything digitally. Of all people you would ask that question to, I’m hoping if there ever is a dark age again and technology falls by the wayside, I’ll be poised to do really well. I know how to use card catalogs and libraries and microfiche and all the old analog technology.

There are already actors and actresses that are being created by AI that people are embracing as real people, and it’s troubling. But there is a spot for a real physical person coming up with these concepts as a production designer or as a decorator in a lot of these productions – at least for now, until AI is so good that they can think our thoughts better than we can. As of right now, I feel like AI gets it wrong a lot of times, so there’s still definitely a need for human beings and creativity in that sense.

On the sets of the Soviet prison of “Stranger Things”. Courtesy of Jess Royal and Netflix.

Kirill: What are the key ingredients to longevity in this field?

Jess: It’s very important to start from the bottom and do it the hard way, and I believe in doing it the hard way. You can start as a PA and learn your craft watching other people do it well. I was a location scout, but I started even below that as a locations PA. I was cleaning out porta potties and honey wagons. And that was after finishing law school and practicing law, so I had to humble myself, take a step backwards, and watch other people do their jobs well. It also advised what I wanted to do specifically in the industry and how to do it well.

There was a period of time here in Atlanta when they were making so many movies and there was a need to have more crew in the union. People were saying that I don’t even have to start at the bottom. I can join the union now and start working. I think that was a missed opportunity for people to start and learn the industry from the ground up. A lot of the people I know who have left the industry now are people who went in too fast, did their thing for a couple years, and now they’ve had to go back to working in some other places.

Take your time. Be a small person observing for a while before you think yourself having made it in film.

On the sets of “Stranger Things”. Courtesy of Jess Royal and Netflix.

Kirill: What was your favorite dish that you had while you were working on “Stranger Things” in Lithuania?

Jess: The best place that we ate in Lithuania was a Mexican restaurant that was owned by a mixed couple – the wife was from Mexico City and then husband was from Vilnius in Lithuania. They opened this little adobe casa place right downtown near our hotel, and it was some of the best Mexican food I’ve ever had.

On the sets of “Stranger Things”. Courtesy of Jess Royal and Netflix.

On the sets of “Stranger Things”. Courtesy of Jess Royal and Netflix.

On the sets of “Stranger Things”. Courtesy of Jess Royal and Netflix.

And here I want to thank Jess Royal for sharing her time with me to talk about the art and craft of set decoration, and for sharing the supporting materials. I also want to thank Meghan Johnson for making this interview happen. All seasons of “Stranger Things” are streaming on Netflix. Finally, if you want to know more about how films and TV shows are made, click here for additional in-depth interviews in this series.

Charlie Cole on the set of “Cruel Hands”.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.

Charlie: My name is Charlie Cole, and I’m a cinematographer. I started out as a fine artist, I was in love with charcoal drawing, and went to undergrad in Brooklyn at Pratt Institute. And then I realized that to be a fine artist, at least what worked for me, you’re isolating yourself in the world so much. I started falling in love with the idea of working with collaborators and being inspired by other people’s art forms, which led me to picking up a camera and seeing how that fit – and I just fell in love with that.

I did freelance director / cinematographer work for a couple years, experimental poetic narrative type things, and then I applied to this grad school in LA called American Film Institute for cinematography. That’s when I started taking it more seriously as far as a craft and a career. Before it was much more of a passion and something that I felt very in tune to – but now it’s full throttle, making my job, making my life fully cinematography.

Kirill: Would you call yourself a digital native? Did you catch the tail end of the film as the medium?

Charlie: I love that term digital native, that’s really fun. I was at the transitional period where film was still very much alive, but not being taught so much. I got my hands on it a little bit, but only enough to see how beautiful it was. It was never directly accessible to me easily.

Even today, if I ever want to shoot with film, it’s quite a challenge with production to get film going. I get maybe a year to shoot a project on film. Usually it’s a short or a commercial. I love film, but I’m a digital native for sure. I definitely grew up with it, and feel very comfortable with it.

Now everything is so good that you can cheat it so easily between the two. I did a music video years ago with the director of “Cruel Hands”, and we worked with Andre Chlebak, the colorist who did “Mandy”. I could have sworn that “Mandy” was on film. I would have bet an arm and leg on it. My first question was what film stock was used, and sure enough it was digital. And if you’ve ever seen Steve Yedlin videos, he shows you how you can make anything look like anything else with the right approach of digital control or manipulation.

Cinematography of “Cruel Hands” by Charlie Cole.

Kirill: What are the misunderstandings or misconceptions about cinematography?

Charlie: I’m half French and half American. When I tell my French side of the family what a cinematographer is, they’ve never heard of it. I think in Europe there’s a lot more of the idea that the author-artist is in charge of the story and the vision, including the camera work, especially in French cinema.

Our role as cinematographer changes culture to culture and depends on each collaboration with each director. I’ve seen collaborations where the cinematographer is more of a camera technician who is helping the director’s vision come alive, and those can work beautifully. I’ve seen collaborations where the cinematographer and the director are figuring it out together. I’ve seen and been in situations where directors come from more of a theater background or they have a wonderful idea with little film experience, and they’re using you to help finesse the story through filmmaking and how to show a story through a film. It can mean so many different things.

The term that I’ve come to love is that the cinematographer is shooting what the actors cannot say. Your job is to shoot the subtext of every performance and shoot the subtext of the story. Years ago I saw “Shawshank Redemption” on a plane, and I had no headphones, so I watched it on mute. But the whole time it was clear what was happening, what the characters were going through, and what the story was going towards. That’s the job of the cinematographer – that the images say everything that can’t be said otherwise.

Cinematography of “Cruel Hands” by Charlie Cole.

Kirill: What is the most exciting recent development technology-wise, or maybe the most exciting technical thing that is on the horizon in your area?

Charlie: AI is obviously an exciting conversation – or very scary, depending on how you look at it.

The most exciting thing for me these days is that every camera is pretty excellent. I’m an Amira owner, and it’s quite large. I often find myself wanting to have a smaller camera for a trick shot or whatever, and almost anything you use looks gorgeous. It opens up a lot of doors, both financially and aesthetically. You can put the camera anywhere, and you can pretty much do anything.

I grew up in a world where I was idolizing the big chunky cameras that I would see on film sets, and I wanted to get my hands on those. And now that’s fizzling apart. Now it’s about finding a way to get the perfect image any way we can.

Kirill: Getting to “Cruel Hands”, how did you find your way to it, or maybe how did it find its way to you?

Charlie: Al Kalyk, the director of “Cruel Hands”, is one of my best friends. We went to grad school at the American Film Institute together. It’s his first feature, and we’ve been talking about it for maybe a year and a half before the funding started coming in. There were many parts of it, and then it ended up being a wonderful thing that we had been collaborating for so long.

It was a fully Australian production, and I was the only American there. He had to fight for me to be able to be a part of it, because there was pressure to have full Australian crew, tax incentives being involved and all. He really stuck his neck out to bring me on, and I couldn’t have done it with a better person. He’s been one of my best friends for a long time, and a collaborator too. We’ve done a lot of music videos and shorts together.

From the lookbook of “Cruel Hands”, courtesy of Charlie Cole.

Kirill: What discussions did you have about the visual style of this story?

Charlie: The discussions led a lot around blending early Cohen brothers and 70s western films and the boldness of that camera work with a much a more delicate look to the film. Our look – the coloring and the way the lenses were showing the world – came from a place closer to “Phantom Thread”. Our story is a balance between a mother and son who are trying to get through a tough situation , and then this husband who is chasing them down. There’s this contradiction between a western thriller and a coming of age quieter film, so the film had to find a way to mix in between the two visually.

We had a ton of references between the two of us. When he first sent me the script, I sent him this big lookbook that was what you would expect from a film like this on script. It’s independent, it’s low contrast, it’s a very wide open lens kind of aesthetic. And then Al came back to me and said that it was all wrong and that we have to start from scratch. He wanted the bold western in there, which you don’t get often these days. I loved that.

From the lookbook of “Cruel Hands”, courtesy of Charlie Cole.

Kirill: How did you approach separating the flashbacks from the main storyline?

Charlie: That’s something that got discovered in post. We didn’t shoot chronologically, but that was intended to be the earlier part of the film. Al directed the film, and he was also the editor. In the editing table he discovered that it was a lot more interesting as a back and forth jumping between the narratives.

In this film we had an approach where the first act uses only wide angle lenses, so it was shot on Leica-Rs 14-22mm. Act two was 25-50mm, and act three was 50-110mm. This turns the film into a pressure cooker where the image is getting more and more compressed as the film goes on. And then now that we have the flashbacks, you feel the world encroaching upon you, and then all of a sudden you get this escape into a wide-lenses flashback. It does a good job at releasing tension when it needs to be.

Kirill: Was there any color that you wanted to stay away from?

Charlie: For whatever reason, it didn’t feel like there was any room for purples. Our world is blue and green by nature, because it was so much in the woods. Then there was a lot of yellow and a lot of red. The father character was always represented by red. He is this encroaching threat, so the only red we ever wanted to feel in the whole film was only what was associated with him. We only feel red when we’re in the flashbacks at the house which he has a large part of, and then we feel more as he gets close – towards the end of the film when we’re more and more surrounded by the wildfires. The sky turns red and so the whole third act of the film is entirely dosed in red – which hopefully feels like a foreboding of him coming and taking over.

Lighting diagram for “Cruel Hands”, courtesy of Charlie Cole.

Kirill: Was the house a single thing, or was it split between location and set builds?

Charlie: The house was one beautiful location. But the entire floorboard scene where we find this big cavity under the house where the mother and son end up hiding underneath during the film – that was entirely built on the same property as the house. We had to have scenes where they’re crawling into it from the interior location, so we ended up building a six inch platform that covered the whole floor of additional wood that they could then break and go into. It was pretty intensive.

We were shooting with the Alexa Mini LF, which is not too big and not too small. Luckily, because that scene was a separate build, we’re in a barn at that point, so the camera was just right aligned with them. We were about five feet off the ground to give them the proper staging that they needed to climb up into it. Luckily we didn’t have to sneak a camera into a little cavity.

Kirill: What was your lighting setup? How are the lights treating you these days?

Charlie: We had a great gaffer named Dan Michaud and a great key grip named Sean Aston. It was a pretty small team all things considered. Our budget wasn’t too big on this, and the lighting was a lot of hustle. It was all LED, a lot of sky panels, a lot of little kino tubes here and there for little beats.

We were trying to primarily light from outside the windows as much as possible, because the space wasn’t very big. We had a lot of 360 situations going on in there, but we were fortunate that our location had this big cavity above us, like an A-frame. So Dan was able to sneak in a ton of little spotlights above, which helped us get this more western cinematic feeling. If the light were through the windows, it would have been so naturalistic and beautiful in its own right, but to really get that punchy high contrast effect we had to have all these little spotlights all over the place. That way you have these little moments that characters would step into.

Lighting diagram for “Cruel Hands”, courtesy of Charlie Cole.

Kirill: You said that the cameras are pretty great these days. What about the lights? Is there room for improvement there?

Charlie: Lights are so great these days. About 5-6 years ago when I was starting to do more serious work and play with a wider range of LEDs, there was a lot of difficulty with CRI [color rendition index] and the fidelity. If something says it’s red, is it actually red? All these different lights would be all the different flavors of red. Now everything is pretty wonderful. You can get battery packed lights and throw them all over the place, and it allows you to do so much.

My last feature film is called “Corpus”, and it just premiered at Fantasia last week. That film is a ’90s period film and we only used tungsten and HMI lights to keep it period-relevant. It was a challenge, or rather a burden of love. It gave us a lot of interesting images. What I noticed most with tungsten lights is that compared to LEDs they tend to punch stronger. If you’re looking at a skin tone, it seems a little bit richer and a little bit denser. It’s almost like it pierces the first layer of skin and hits a little harder. You can’t beat a nice tungsten for that beautiful close-up, but the practicality of it is a thing.

Kirill: Is it a little bit painful to not have full control over how people see it? We have so many screens in our lives after the movie is out of theaters – laptops, tablets, phones, and those tiny plane screens that you mentioned earlier.

Charlie: If I tried to fix that, I would lose my mind [laughs]. It’s impossible. The only thing I could ever do is if I’m showing it to a friend, I get to their house 10 minutes early and mess up all their TV settings. For me, the most color correct home theater setup is when I check it on a MacBook, as they are so good.

It is difficult. It is heartbreaking. But at the end of the day, there’s only so much you can do. You color it for the theater. You color one more time for a MacBook. And then beyond that you have to let the world be what the world is. Hopefully, if somebody’s watching on whatever TV they have in their house, they’re watching everything that way. That’s how they watch “Dune” and every other movie. Their level is already standardized and hopefully they’re not comparing theatrical “Dune” to your movie at home.

Cinematography of “Cruel Hands” by Charlie Cole.

Kirill: What went into the fire sequence at the end?

Charlie: Around 90% of the smoke is all practical in the film. We had a bunch of PAs who were slogging large tubes full of haze all over the fields. Then we had them stay around the area so that if the wind ever changed direction on us, we could compensate by having haze come from another way. They rocked.

We had very little fire, either one or two flame bars that we use as references. Other than that, if we had a close-up of somebody during a fire scene, we’d put the flame bar right under the camera. That way you get the heat effect, and also feel it in their eyes. That’s something that is harder to fake with VFX. Other than that it was a really great job from the VFX team. We’d put a flame bar somewhere, and they would use it as a reference to throw it all over the scene. When I look at it now, I know there was no fire there, and it just looks amazing. They did such a great job.

Cinematography of “Cruel Hands” by Charlie Cole.

Kirill: Is there such a thing as the most challenging day or sequence that you had on this production?

Charlie: We had a lot of obstacles. The story of the film turns into being surrounded by wildfires, and we had to have the feeling that the air is always full of smoke. That meant that we could never have any direct sunlight once the fires have started. So in order to get the sky light correct at our location in Australia, we could only shoot at dusk or dawn, or when it was extremely cloudy, or when the sun went behind a mountain. We were shooting in this big valley, so that limited us extremely in terms of when we could shoot any outdoor scenes during the third act of the film.

We were in Australia, so we had monsoons, we had snakes, we had venomous spiders. One day it was night shoot with Diesel La Torraca who was about 12 years old at the time, and our key grip discovered a brown snake, which is the second most venomous snake in Australia. If you get bit, you die in 30 minutes, and the nearest hospital is 30 minutes away [laughs]. So we had to have a snake wrangler come in and check the whole property. He found a whole nest of them. It’s a crazy place.

There was a scene where we’re shooting them running in the woods. We had a two camera setup. I was on one camera and Al the director was on the other camera. They have these 1.5 inch long bull ants, and if they bite you, it’s extremely painful. Al was sitting on this apple box, and one of our grips was swiping ants off of his back because they were crawling up [laughs]. It was stuff like that every day.

We also got rained into location several times. One time we were there for about four hours because we literally couldn’t leave. We were flooded in. It was a wild shoot. I’ve never experienced anything like that. But it adds to the energy of the film. You really have to fight for it. And the craziest thing is that the rest of our otherwise fully Australian crew was just used to it. I have this video of myself in the car with a camera, and I look to the right, and there’s a huge python right outside the car just going across the street. And everybody else was just taking a minute until it was gone [laughs]. It’s a special but wild place.

Cinematography of “Cruel Hands” by Charlie Cole.

Kirill: Why should people go to see this movie on the big screen in the movie theater?

Charlie: We shot the film on the Mini LF, so the film is in large format. You really get a sense of space the way we shot this film. Space is so important for this project. You feel the claustrophobia of the cabin that they’re in, and then you have the vastness of the fire that surrounds them later. It’s a cinematic film. We had this incredible composer Libby Hsieh who goes by their artist name Alvidrez, and the sound design of this film is amazing. There’s breath work and crackling of fire and haunting instrumental crackling. It’s a special soundscape.

Kirill: Where do you find yourself these days on the raging debates around generative AI?

Charlie: I’ve been going back and forth with all of it. On one hand, any tool is a wonderful thing to have at your disposal. On the other hand, it is unfortunate that this tool is frankly based off of a lot of other people’s work – and that it’s gotten so good that you can replace work.

Career wise, it is a huge disappointment that it is replacing a lot of smaller jobs. If you’re shooting a shoe commercial or a food commercial, those things are easily replaceable now with AI. And those are the bread and butter of how people stay working so we can do fun projects like this – and also how you learn new tools and how you learn your craft. That’s where you finesse your abilities, and that is going out the window.

Cinematography of “Cruel Hands” by Charlie Cole.

Kirill: What are the ingredients for longevity in this industry?

Charlie: I can only speak to what’s worked for me. Something that I’ve found to be helpful for my approach as a cinematographer is that I come from fine arts. Teachers would always say that everybody in the room can draw, and then ask “Why are you drawing?”

I see the same issue or the same thought process with a camera. Anybody knows how to expose. What makes you holding the camera or lighting the scene different from other people’s abilities to do the same thing? That goes in terms of your personal flavor, and how emotionally involved you are into the work you do, and your collaboration with your director and the actors and crewmates.

The short answer is that the key to longevity is in who you are as a person. If you’re kind, if you’re generous, and if you’re genuine, you will go far. You have to lend your heart and your eyes to everything you do.

Cinematography of “Cruel Hands” by Charlie Cole.

Kirill: Is there a piece of advice you’d want to give to your younger self?

Charlie: I’ve had a lot of good fortune with working with people that I really love and that are quite different from me. So my advice would be to make sure I continue to do that – work with as many different people who care as adamantly as you do. There’s nothing better than people who come from different backgrounds and different experiences and different desires of what the film is and could be – as long as we all put all of our heart into it every chance we get. Then we’re all going to make something special.

The other advice would be to communicate, communicate, communicate. That’s a lesson I learned over time. People speak different languages in terms of what images are. I worked with this director who I went to AFI with, and she came from a theater background, while my parents are architects. When we started working together, we started talking about wide shots and we talked for weeks about those wide shots. Then we got on to set, and in my mind the wide shot is the person defined by space, defined by the architecture. And in her mind, a wide shot was a head-to-toe shot of a person, because she works with actors.

I realized that we have been speaking in completely different languages for two or three months now [laughs], but we never thought to compare it with specific images. That’s a lesson that I’ve learned the hard way – make sure you’re on the same page before you get to set. Even though it feels like it, you never know. It’s as simple as referencing images. When I say wide, I mean this. Yes, we’re on the same page. When I say close up, I mean this. Yes, we’re on the same page. When I say cool, I mean cobalt blue and not light blue. When I say red, I mean fiery angry red and not calm red. People have so many different tastes, so locking in on that is extremely important.

As far as prep goes, one of my favorite things ever on any film set is that moment where you and the director are so in sync, that if, God forbid, one of you is in an accident or is sick and has to miss a day, the director would trust that you would run every shot and every setup the exact way that you guys had talked about. That’s where you want to be when you hop onto a film set.

Kirill: When you turn on the TV, what would be a movie that you would watch again and again, no questions asked, whenever it comes on?

Charlie: “Lord of The Rings” no doubt. I’m such a fantasy guy. I watch so many movies. I love to be entertained. I love to watch movies that transcend me.

Films that I admire are different from films that I watch. If I see a film that pushes me artistically or inspires me artistically, I try not to watch it again. So much depends on who you were when you saw it, and how you were feeling that day when you saw it. If it really affected you, watching it again would potentially ruin it or take away the magic of what you experienced. It lives in your soul and I don’t want to analyze it. Those are films by Lynne Ramsay, Lars von Trier, Gaspar Noe. They stick with me artistically, and I try not to watch them anymore.

For the films that I would watch again and again, pretty much anything science fiction or fantasy. You have to probably pull me away if it was on the TV. I watched all of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” yesterday. It was a great day [laughs].

Cinematography of “Cruel Hands” by Charlie Cole.

Kirill: Is it difficult for you to enjoy the story and not overanalyze it from the cinematography perspective?

Charlie: The better the cinematography and the better the filmmaking is, the less distracted I get from it. For sure, any of us who work in this industry are analyzing things and picking up on things all the time. If they are masters of the craft, you just forget. How impressive is it to trick people who are there to analyze into forgetting any of that? It takes a really great film for me to completely forget that I’m watching a film, and they’re few and far in between. I love those.

That being said, I still love seeing how the sausage is made. I get a big kick out of that. Maybe it means that the film is lacking in something, and then I get inspired by something else. Usually I’m noticing the good stuff.

Kirill: What was your favorite dish in Australia that you had while working on “Cruel Hands”?

Charlie: All of the food in Australia was impeccable. There was this meat pie that I loved. I was living in Los Angeles at the time, and I’d have avocado toast constantly. There was this place in Australia that I would go to almost every weekend that I could to have avocado toast, because the food there was so fresh and prepared with so much care. They also sell the Maxibon brand of ice cream, and I probably had 500 of them during the three months I was there [laughs]. It was a whole thing. They sell them at gas stations everywhere, and it was the best thing I had there. I got really obsessed with those.

And here I want to thank Charlie Cole for sharing his time with me to talk about the art and craft of cinematography, and for sharing the supporting materials. I also want to thank Jordan von Netzer for making this interview happen. “Cruel Hands” is out now streaming on Apple, YouTube and Amazon. Finally, if you want to know more about how films and TV shows are made, click here for additional in-depth interviews in this series.

I’m pleased to announce the next major release of Aurora. The two main themes of this release are:

• Expanding on the foundational work of the previous releases around color tokens, painters and shapers
• The introduction of a brand new skin, Blueprint (image above)

Among the many other new features and bug fixes in this release:

• Introduction of component shapers that replace the previously available button shapers and expand the scope to all components
• Revisited API surface of decoration painters, folding the overlay painters to be managed by decoration painters, and introducing the brand new inlay painters
• Unified visuals of tab buttons and newly added tab decorators that allow custom visuals of tabs
• New color tokens for marker-on-container and container-shadow
• New window decorators
• Alphas for color tokens under enabled states
• Additional customization options for title panes for button icons and title texts
• Improve contrast and fidelity of icon filtering

Aurora focuses on helping you make elegant and high-performing desktop applications in Compose. If you’re in the business of writing just such apps, I’d love for you to take this Aurora release for a spin.

I’m pleased to announce the next major release of Radiance. The two main themes of this release are:

• Expanding on the foundational work of the previous releases around color tokens, painters and shapers
• The introduction of a brand new skin, Blueprint (image above)

Let’s get to what’s been fixed, and what’s been added. First, I’m going to use emojis to mark different parts of it like this:

 marks an incompatible API / binary change
 marks new features
 marks bug fixes and general improvements

Theming

•  Introduction of component shapers that replace the previously available button shapers and expand the scope to all components
•  Revisit the API surface of decoration and overlay painters, folding the overlay painters to be managed by decoration painters, and introducing the brand new inlay painters
•  New marker-on-container color tokens, replacing the SEPARATOR token association kind
•  Add Blueprint skin
•  Unified visuals of tabs and newly added tab decorators that allow custom visuals of tabs, migrating the ribbon task toggle buttons to be painted by tab decorators
•  Skin-level window decorators
•  Alphas for color tokens under enabled states
•  New shadow color token, migrating all drop shadows to use it
•  Additional customization options for title panes for button icons and title texts
•  Migrate image / icon filtering to be driven by Chroma tonal palettes
•  Revisit the visuals of slider thumbs
•  Fix the visuals of highlights to properly account for offsets
•  Fix the visuals of selected password field dots
•  Fix the visuals of tree expand / collapse icons
•  Fix the visuals of indeterminate vertical progress bars
•  Fix the visuals of the ribbon under skins that use the matte decoration painter
•  Fix incorrect handling of icon alpha channels
•  Consistent width handling for tree cell renderers
•  Tweak the default insets of toolbars
•  Fix enabled state of window menu bar items

Component

•  Fix the display of the popup action icon of ribbon anchored commands with no icons
•  Use the HCT color space for color derivation in color selector command menus
•  Fix inconsistent size of ribbon task toggle buttons under skins that use the PillComponentShaper

Radiance focuses on helping you make elegant and high-performing desktop applications in Swing. If you’re in the business of writing just such apps, I’d love for you to take this Radiance release for a spin. Click here to get the instructions on how to add Radiance to your builds.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.

James: The easy part of that question is that I do have a family member that’s in this industry, and I was introduced not just to movie making and story telling, but also to what goes on under the surface of how these things are made at a quite early age.

My mother is a costume designer of motion picture films, and my childhood was spent oftentimes going to visit her on school holidays. I would fly out to see her wherever she was working in the world, and wander on to a film set, sit there and watch everything – as much as my patience of that age could bear. By no means did I think I wanted to join the industry at that young age, but it was an exposure to a world that not a lot of people knew about.

Then cut to teenage James, around my high school years I started playing with video cameras, making skateboard videos with my teenage friends, and just messing about. It was the advent of videography coming to be more accessible to people, and for me that coupled with an understanding of the larger scope of motion pictures and how they’re made. A few things synergized to me finding interest in filmmaking during my late teens and early twenties.

I went to a film school, and that’s where I got even more narrowed into cinematography in that period of my early twenties. I assisted in live loading film for a long time. I was a second AC for a long time. And during those years I would find weekends or a few weeks at a time to be a cinematographer in my own right. One of those projects did well enough to go to some film festivals. It started to get some attention from other filmmakers of similar ilk, and I started to run with it. It was a longer process than maybe I’m describing, because there’s many years of it not working before it worked – and that’s par for the course for a lot of people in this industry. There’s no fast and easy access point for most people, even for someone who had a parent in the industry. It took ten years or so before it felt like it made sense by any means.

Charles Melton as Austin Davis, Cailee Spaeny as Ashley Miller in episode 201 of “Beef”. Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: What are the misconceptions or misunderstandings about cinematography that you see from people in your life?

James: The average moviegoer probably might not know anything about the job [laughs]. We all know actors, and we all know writers, and we all know directors – and the general viewing audience probably has an overall sense of what those jobs are. After that, when you look at the credits list, there’s probably a lot of confusion as to what these roles do.

It’s a great job. In many ways, people largely think it has to do with the photography of a project, as the name of the job implies – and that’s not untrue. Of course I’m dealing with the cameras and dealing with lighting on the technical side of things.

Another part of the job that people either don’t know or don’t think about has to do with a lot of creative choices behind those technical choices. That part of the job probably isn’t even taught in film school all that much, to be perfectly honest. There’s a lot of conceptualization and long creative discussions, particularly with the director, but also with the filmmaking group in general. That can get into deep artistic conceptual conversations that have very little to do with what lenses you’re using.

It’s a discipline. At a certain point you need to be able to speak about art history. You need to know some version of film history. You need to be able to understand different cultures and how they communicate. It’s a job that can span a wide spectrum of interests.

The beauty of cinematography is we’re all unique as individuals, and we all come at this from a different perspective. My experience is not someone else’s experience, and therefore I make different creative choices as to where to put the camera, what lighting I might suggest for a certain scene, what colors those lighting choices might emphasize. It’s a great job. I get a lot out of it, and I continue to enjoy it.

Kirill: What would you say are the bigger changes in your part of the world in the last 15-20 years?

James: Like so many industries at this point in 2026, we’re seeing the advent and the impact of AI, and how it can help create ideas and make story-driven choices. Rewind a few years back, and you have the conversations about visual effects around ‘2000s. Between then and now, there’s the advent of digital photography and digital cinematography. The cameras that are coming out are pretty impressive. Rewind further back, and it was different film stocks that were coming out and changing the ability to photograph under different lighting scenarios. These would probably round the top five of the bigger ones.

Carey Mulligan as Lindsay Crane-Martin in episode 201 of “Beef”. Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: Getting to the show, how did you find your way to it, or perhaps how did it find its way to you?

James: I was a big fan of Season 1 of the show. It was a great season of television, and like so many others, I enjoyed watching it as a general audience member. When I heard that Season 2 was coming up, I put my name in the hat. I didn’t have any insight or access to the people that were involved with making the first season. I didn’t know any of them. I wasn’t friends with them. It was me raising my hand and asking if anybody would be interested in having a conversation with me about it [laughs]. I was lucky that they were.

I had a general meeting with Lee Sung Jin, and from my perspective, within the first 10-15 minutes I felt that there was a real kinship between his perspective of what he was looking for and what I was hoping to give to the project as well. In those conversations I felt that what he was looking for in the cinematographer was something that I was looking for to give.

Kirill: What is the most interesting part of this season for you?

James: I love telling stories about interpersonal, intimate, loving relationships, and that’s what the show is in a very deep way. I love the writing of the show. From the very beginning, I felt it was speaking to so many parts of what the Western human existence is, including the relationships that millennials and Gen Z’s have.

And to speak selfishly about it in terms of the cinematography for a moment, it felt interesting to see that the writing wanted someone who was able to shift between genres within a certain scene. There are moments of laughter, there are moments of tension, there’s some awkwardness, there’s some love, and they all happen at the same moment in many ways. Within the same scene you can effortlessly travel from one tonality to another. It was a challenge that I was interested in accepting. It’s a palette and a canvas that I felt engaged in. It’s a kind of filmmaking that I felt inspired by as a cinematographer.

Kirill: How much time did you spend on the show during all the phases combined?

James: It was about eight months combined on pre-production and production. It’s a bit harder to define for post-production, only because there’s many weeks and months where I’m not involved in it at all, which is the edit process. I do come back at the end when I’m involved in the DI [Digital Intermediate], and that took a few months to get through. We weren’t on it every day, but maybe a couple days a week, chipping away slowly through episodes as they were being turned over by the editing.

Charles Melton as Austin Davis in episode 202 of “Beef”. Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: One of my favorite parts of the show is the California sunlight. Was the weather cooperating?

James: The weather cooperated very well. It provided us with some classic Southern California sunlight that gave the club those tonalities that we were looking for in terms of our storytelling wants and interests. On the flip side, we had some great gray days as well with stormy clouds. I’m not sure what the assistant director who scheduled the show did to deserve it, but he worked those weather patterns in perfectly. They landed on scenes where we were photographing the Chairwoman Park scenes out of Malibu, and we were hoping for the lack of sun that was in there. I guess you could say we got very lucky in that way.

All the exteriors are naturally lit with sunlight. For continuity reasons, if we lost the sun in terms of our shooting or our scene, and needed to maintain that level of sunlight for a backlight or frontlight, we would bring in our lights to keep that going. If you’re referencing the interiors of the show, and particularly the ones in Joshua’s office and the larger rooms in the club, those are all lit artificially on a soundstage in Los Angeles.

Kirill: Your other major location is Seoul. Did you want to be more corporate there, with those steel blue grays?

James: That’s not untrue. By the time we get to that part of the storytelling in Seoul, we’re looking for a different palette than what we started with in California. Seoul as a city generally, of course, is going to look different than Southern California – and then we wanted to emphasize some different colors that weren’t present in the first few episodes. We were referencing those steel blues and the wintry palette colors for the Chairwoman Park and exteriors in Malibu, and that was aesthetically applied to what we were hoping for in Seoul as well.

Seoul is such a beautiful city, and its palette is so beautiful. It was great to film there. The only thing we did with that footage later in the DI was to emphasize certain things and not to reinvent much else, because it’s such a great place as it was for us.

Charles Melton as Austin Davis, Seoyeon Jang as Eunice in episode 202 of “Beef”. Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: One of the more memorable sequences for me was the fight sequence in the last episode in the clinic. How much preparation went into that?

James: It’s one of my favorite scenes as well. For those that have seen the show, it’s a fight sequence that is shot as what we call a oner – which is one shot with no edits. As you might imagine, it’s a pretty complicated process to curate. There’s a lot at stake in terms of everyone being in the right place, the choreography of the cast, but then also the choreography of the camera and working with all those positions.

It started in Los Angeles, as he rehearsed and laid out a set on the floor of a soundstage where the cast got a general sense of the kind of space that we’re going to be traveling through would look like. They started working with the stunt team in LA for a few days prior to even flying out to start the process of filming in Seoul. Then when we got there, there was another one or two days of rehearsing the fight sequence at a facility outside of Seoul.

So you have multiple days of that process prior to the shoot day where you rehearse, go through the movements, get more precise, and fine tune some of these choices that were made more broadly otherwise.

It’s a sequence I’m really proud of. It’s quite special. It’s not a random chaotic camera moving through space. We took great pains to make sure that we were going to be in the right moment to see the right reaction from Carey, and spin around to see Charles, or spin around to see Cailee. It might feel random or natural – hopefully – but we were quite painstakingly making sure that what was working for the cast was also going to work for the camera.

Charles Melton as Austin Davis, Cailee Spaeny as Ashley Miller, Carey Mulligan as Lindsay Crane-Martin in episode 208 of “Beef”. Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: What was the most challenging day, or the most challenging sequence, or the most challenging set to work on – or maybe you already answered with this fight sequence?

James: There’s lots of challenging days, as you might imagine with the television schedule. You’re doing a lot in a condensed amount of time. A lot of our days were hard in terms of how much we needed to make sure we were capturing on any given day. That’s true for our show, much like a lot of other television shows are made in that way as well, of course.

What stands out in particular are the sequences in the clinic in Korea where the couple are separated in different cells by these partitions that are creating silhouettes between them. They can’t see one another, but they’re trying to communicate.

You have one couple who is quite fractured in their relationship at the moment. They are struggling to connect with each other at the time. And each one of them can only see the other through the silhouettes of each other, and there is no bond between them happening. And then you have the other couple where there’s this profile angle of both Oscar and Carey, and those were purposely built to where we could take a window out and photograph them live speaking to one another within the same frame. That was because we wanted to make sure these characters did connect with each other again in a visual way, and not just in terms of the story being told.

We were working with the production design team to make sure these sets were going to be built in a certain way that some of these things were possible for us. We were working with the production design team to make sure the texture of the glass was going to make the silhouette effect happen precisely the way we wanted to do it. Then of course, we’re talking to the cast to make sure that their blocking was going to work with those silhouettes. A lot of different people communicated with each other to make sure each thing was going to work for each discipline, and that took a lot of conversations, planning and effort from everybody.

Oscar Isaac as Josh Martin in episode 208 of “Beef”. Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: You mentioned earlier that one of the big recent changes, not just in this industry but everywhere, is generative AI. Without asking you to predict how it’s going to look like in the future, what are your thoughts on it today?

James: I’m sure everyone struggles with answering this question because it’s a spectrum. You have people who are fully deep diving into AI image making in a way that, perhaps, reflects their feeling that is the way images will be made forever and ever. And on the other side of the spectrum there are people who are refusing to even touch it. And then there’s everywhere in between.

Today, probably much like any advent of new technology, there are people who embrace it and there are people who are not embracing it. And I think that’s healthy. It’s hard to define what it is today. I hope it’s a time where it gives the storytellers more image-making options than they’d otherwise have. I’m not particularly afraid of it. We should be, of course, turning very lightly and we should be entering this world of AI image-making sure-footedly and not haphazardly, embracing something that might not always be giving us the best results.

I’ve seen a lot of impressive things. I don’t think people should be surprised that someone in my position would say that I’ve yet to be convinced by it. Some of the images I’ve seen from generative AI are quite beautiful, but they’re not something that I would necessarily connect to emotionally in terms of performances and texture. My world exists largely in faces. My job is largely to light spaces, light actors, and capture performances – and the images that I’ve seen so far have yet to give me the sense that it’s something that can deliver emotionally integral storytelling devices in the same way we do today.

Our version of storytelling is, of course, staged. But today, whether it’s film or digital, it’s with people and with light and with sets – whether they’re built on a soundstage or they exist in real life. Those things still evoke an emotion that I feel like I’ve yet to see with generative AI.

Matthew Kim as Woosh, Youn Yuh-jung as Chairwoman Park in episode 206 of “Beef”. Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: You’ve been in the industry for a while now. What do you feel is the secret or maybe the key ingredients to longevity in this field?

James: The answer to your question is probably already in the question. By definition, it’s perseverance in so many ways.

If you love something, and you enjoy your time, and you feel engaged with filmmaking – or any discipline for that matter – you’re going to keep doing it over and over again until someone tells you that it’s not possible anymore [laughs]. If you care about something that deeply, which I think you need to do if you’re going to enter this industry, it needs to be something that you’re fully engaged with.

If you have the perseverance and you’re going to continue no matter what, at some point it’ll be all right. That can be as short as a few years, or as long as decades if you’re willing to go about doing it. People sometimes break into their careers deep into their middle age, and that’s OK. What’s possible for some people is different for others. If you want it enough and if you keep going, it’ll work out – depends on how you define working out.

Kirill: Two last questions on your favorite things. In a hypothetical scenario where you are on a deserted island, and you can take three movies with you, what would they be?

James: Probably I need to pick some films that I can watch over and over again and not get bored of them, to still have a good time doing it and hopefully keep my spirits up. I don’t want to become a depressive maniac alone on a desert island, so it should be something uplifting.

So the most obvious answers would be some simple ones from my childhood. “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”. The first “Jurassic Park”. “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” was a great one for me. “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” is another one, and now it’s more than three [laughs] but I can keep on going. Those nostalgic classics would probably be how I would make that choice.

Kirill: What was your favorite dish that you had while you were shooting in Seoul?

James: Of course, you’re going to reference Korean barbecue, which is delicious. For me though, my favorite dish was Dak Juk – rice porridge with chicken, nothing fancy about it. It was so warming and comforting, and it took me back to that childhood comfort food in a way.

Youn Yuh-jung as Chairwoman Park in episode 208 of “Beef”. Courtesy of Netflix.

And here I want to thank James Laxton for taking the time to talk with me about the art and craft of cinematography. I also want to thank Kristy Chan for making this interview happen. The first two seasons of “Beef” are streaming now on Netflix. Finally, if you want to know more about how films and TV shows are made, click here for additional in-depth interviews in this series.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.

Julie: My name is Julie Schubert, and I’m a casting director. I’m based out of New York, but when I work, I work internationally, which is quite exciting. You get to experience a lot of different places and a lot of different people.

I wanted to be an actor ever since I was a kid, and then I went to college and I realized that I was quite bad at it [laughs]. I didn’t know what to do, but I knew that I still wanted to be in the industry in some capacity. My family is in the restaurant business, and as great as that is, that is not a place I wanted to end up. So I got a bunch of internships while I was in college, and one of them happened to be in casting – and that was the best thing for me. You get to work with actors all the time, which I love. You get to work on a lot of different projects in a lot of different worlds, which I love. And you never have to be seen, which I also love.

No one really knew what casting was at that point when I was entering the industry. It didn’t exist in any kind of conversation about what you could do, and you had to almost “happen” upon it. Now it’s a much more prevalent craft, which is fantastic. This year was the first time that casting directors were honored with Oscars for their work, which should have been done a long time ago. BAFTAs are eligible for it, Emmys are eligible for it, and you have these venues where our work is recognized for the craft that it is. There’s also a documentary called “Casting By” that I would highly recommend watching. It gives a great look at the history of it, of what casting is, the subjectivity and the art of casting. Everyone should know what that is.

Kirill: What are the most common misconceptions or misunderstandings about what casting is or isn’t?

Julie: It depends on who you are. There’s a lot of misconception among actors that casting is a gatekeeping profession – that you have to get through us to get jobs. The way I reframe it is that we actually are the best advocates for actors that there possibly could be. We are the ones that are watching what you do on stage and on film. We are having those conversations with our creatives about why you are the perfect person for the roles that we’re currently working on. That’s the biggest one which for me is about reframing that we are your advocates, we are your allies, we are partners in this, and we are not the enemy.

Rufus Sewell as Hal Wyler in episode 302 of “The Diplomat”. Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: How big of an event was it to see the new category for best achievement in casting to be added to this year’s Oscars?

Julie: It was great to see it joining the other beautiful stages like the BAFTAs and the Emmys. Recognizing the art behind it is hard because it is so subjective – but so is directing, editing or costume design. A lot of those folks who have been recognized for their work wouldn’t be recognized without the cast that they put in front of them that they get to work with.

A lot of what we do is work with those collaborators to help shape what’s on screen, telling the stories that they want to shape, because we know those actors best. We know what they’re capable of, and the kinds of stories that they can tell, and finding a way to make it cohesive and make sense. How many times do you watch something, and you say that was such a great story, but that one actor didn’t feel like they fit into it. Part of casting is to find that seamlessness where you fall into the world and you walk away from it fully believing in it.

You can imagine everyone was so elated seeing this art – that not a lot of people understand – finally getting its due. I learned from incredible casting directors like Juliet Taylor who should have won 15 Oscars already. She’s top of the top. She worked with Mike Nichols and Woody Allen, and her career spans decades. You look at so many movies on all of those lists of must-sees, and she cast them. And without her casts, they wouldn’t be what they are. People are getting their due, and it was exciting to see it.

Kirill: Do you feel that it is more interesting, exciting, challenging for you to be working on an episodic production versus working on a feature film?

Julie: I like them both, and they’re just so very different. Episodic is long-form storytelling, so you get to live in the world for such an incredibly long period of time. But within that come its own unique challenges. You do want to keep it fresh. You want to keep it interesting. You want to make sure that there’s cohesion from day one, episode one of season one, to episode eight of season 20, depending if you’re lucky enough to get that many seasons. And you want to be able to see their trajectory and the arc of it, and be able to follow it and not feel like there’s any misstep. There’s a lot more responsibility in that regard because it is such long-form.

I love the slow pace of film. You take your time. You get to think about every piece in a very specific way. And it’s finite. A lot of times with film you ultimately get your first choice, because you’re not potentially having an actor lose an opportunity later on that may be something that they’re more excited about, or the arc is different, and that’s what they’re sort of leaning in towards.

The thing that I love about “The Diplomat” in particular is because the scripts are so good and the characters are so wonderfully fleshed, we got the first choices that we wanted for each role – which is a little unheard of in the series world.

(L to R) Keri Russell as Kate Wyler, Rufus Sewell as Hal Wyler in episode 305 of “The Diplomat”. Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: For me as a viewer it feels that episodic productions are now more exciting, and also way more prestigious for actors. Going to your involvement with “House of Cards”, that was the first time I couldn’t believe that I saw all those big name actors on the small screen.

Julie: You’re not wrong, as that definitely set the tone. And we also hit a time where there was so much available that you didn’t know where to look, and things got lost in the sauce. Right now it’s a little leaner. There’s not as much content being filmed. You can pay attention to what’s out there, and let the storytelling do the work of it, and have those actors that you would expect on the big screen to be on those smaller screens. A lot of great writing is in television right now. – and it’s hard to get a movie made.

Kirill: Getting to “The Diplomat”, how did you find your way to it, or maybe how did it find its way to you?

Julie: I interviewed for it. I auditioned for it like actors auditioned for jobs. I read the script, and it was one of the best scripts I’ve read in such a long time. I was desperate to work on it, and I made a complete fool of myself in the meeting. I told Debora Cahn that I would quite literally gnaw off my right arm to work with her on it, and I don’t know why she found that endearing [laughs]. I think I would find it psychotic, but she hired me, and it’s been amazing ever since. I feel so lucky.

Kirill: What is the importance of the first season on a show?

Julie: It’s very important. You’re setting up the world. You are creating the universe that people are going to either love or hate – but you want them to talk about it.

Specifically in “The Diplomat”, you have these interesting characters, and you need to put those pieces together in a way that tells the story – that Debora will be able to use those actors to tell the story, hopefully two, three, four seasons later. The relationships feel authentic. The chemistry is there, and it is cohesive in the way that you need it to be cohesive.

There was a lot of discussion. It was a lot of watching tapes and collaborating with the studio and finding our way forward. I will say that in that initial stage Debora, Janice Williams the producer and I were very much aligned in what our creative vision was for this particular piece. And we’re lucky to have partners in Netflix, and they were supportive of where we wanted to go with it. Then when you went out to the actors, everybody was saying that it was the best thing I’ve read in a long time. Sounds good. Let’s do it. A lot of stars aligned for this one in a great way.

(L to R) Keri Russell as Kate Wyler, Allison Janney as Grace Penn in episode 303 of “The Diplomat”. Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: How much time are we talking about on the first season? Are we talking about weeks? Are we talking about months of your involvement?

Julie: Months. Generally, when you work on a new series, you get around 10 weeks total to work on that first episode, setting up that world, figuring it out. On “The Diplomat” we had a little extra time. I came on for 3-4 weeks prior to the 10 weeks of casting to figure out who Kate Wyler was. Where were we going to land on Kate Wyler? And also, who was Hal Wyler? What was that pair going to look like? That’s what we circled for 4 weeks as we were figuring out those pieces. Then we took a little break for the holidays, and then we came back in January. And 10 weeks later we had a full cast and we were ready to go.

Kirill: Who are your primary collaborators?

Julie: Showrunners and producers, and especially in the first episode the directors – and also your studio network. Netflix was a really big collaborator as well. What I love about Netflix is that they are so supportive of their creatives. They’re hiring you because they trust you, and they trust your story and your vision. But it is their platform, so it was important for them to be behind it as well.

Kirill: Do you want to hire exceptional individuals or do you want to hire an exceptional ensemble?

Julie: That’s a good question because it’s so specific to each project? I want both. I want all the stars to align and I want everything. It depends on the project. It depends on the team and how much you are all creatively aligned. It happened perfectly on “The Diplomat”. It doesn’t happen on every project that you work on, but for the most part, I’m really proud of the work that I’ve done throughout my career, and there are elements of everything that resonate well.

Kirill: What are your thoughts on typecasting? Sometimes I see an actor, and I say “this guy always plays the bad guys”. Or “this lady always plays the romantic interest”. How difficult is it for you to handle this when you are looking for people to fill particular roles?

Julie: I try really hard not to typecast. What actor wants to play the same role over and over and over and over again? Maybe a couple?

In general, actors do like to stretch, at least the actors that I work with. If you look at my body of work, most of the stuff that I do is character-driven fleshed-out characters. It’s quite rare that I get to do anything that doesn’t have that element to it. So when you have something that is so character-driven, you’re working with actors that are exceptionally skilled in the art of acting. And those actors don’t necessarily want to do the same things over and over. They want to have a diversified career. Because of that I can trust them to work in different places.

I’ve cast Rufus Sewell twice now – in “Kaleidoscope” and then in “The Diplomat”. And what he does in both is very different. He’s so capable, as you can see him in all of these other things that he does where they’re all so interesting. It depends on the role. It depends on the actor. Also in “The Diplomat” you have Rory Kinnear who’s playing the prime minister, and he also played a prime minister in “Black Mirror” in its very first episode.

Kirill: That one was quite difficult to watch.

Julie: Indeed, and it set the tone for that entire series. Going back to it, it’s two very different prime ministers. One part of the conversation with Rory around this question – does he want to do a prime minister again? When you read the material, and you see what’s in front of you, and how it shapes, you couldn’t say no to it, because it was so different. You weren’t going to have those parallels. That’s also part of the conversation – trying not to repeat, because everybody wants something different, everyone wants something unique, and everyone wants something interesting.

It’s the same for Allison Janney and In the same way that we have Allison Janney and Bradley Whitford. Everyone was talking about C.J. and “The West Wing”, but what they’re doing here is so different from what they were doing there. But there is excitement about the idea that you’re getting to have that pairing again.

There’s a lot of different elements to it, but we try really hard not to typecast, if we can.

(L to R) Allison Janney as Grace Penn, Bradley Whitford as Todd Penn in episode 306 of “The Diplomat”. Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: Is there such a thing as your favorite season on the show, or are they all your babies, so to speak?

Julie: They’re all my babies. But I will say, this is one of those unique shows that I think gets better and better each season. It’s such a rare thing. I loved the first season. And then the second season came out, and it was fantastic. And then the third season came out, and as I was reading the scripts, I couldn’t believe that it’s gotten even better. And now wait till the fourth season, because the fourth season is pretty awesome. It’s so exciting, because it’s getting better and better as it goes.

Kirill: How different is your job today from 20 years ago?

Julie: Very much so. Twenty years ago I was taking VHS tapes, and putting them in two different machines, and trying to record things, and then FedEx’ing them to people in Los Angeles, because all of the creatives lived in Los Angeles at the time. And if you didn’t catch the deadline for FedEx, they wouldn’t get the tape, and your people wouldn’t get cast, and it was terrible.

I don’t think the creative conversations have changed, but the technology has certainly shifted in a way that allows for faster consideration of things, and for actors to have the ability to be wherever they are, whenever they want to be, and still be considered and not lose out on opportunities.

Kirill: I’m not sure how scientifically accurate it is, but I’ve heard a number of times that an average person can hold about 500 names in their memory. How many names do you hold in your head?

Julie: I feel like I have way more than 500. It’s my specialized skill. I don’t know if I could give you an actual count, but if that’s the average, I will exceed the average. That’s my job. I have to remember names. I have to remember faces. I have to remember performances. To be fair though, that also means that I forget a lot of my daily life, because my brain is fully consumed by my job.

Kirill: Do you keep track of everybody’s whereabouts and schedules?

Julie: Yes and no. I read the trades every day, because that gives you an idea of what actors are doing, who’s active, where they are. If I’m working on an international project, I make it a point of knowing where everybody is in that particular market. But I can’t say that I keep up to date with the availability of actors in different parts of the world, unless I’m working on something in those markets. I can always call agents and actors and managers and check their availability if I’m unsure about something.

Kirill: Generative AI is on everybody’s mind lately. How do you see it today for your specific part of the industry and for the industry in general?

Julie: It’s really hard for AI to replace human emotion and human conversation. I know there are going to be certain industries that will be hit hard with it. Right now, I don’t see how casting can be affected by it – unless they want to take the human element out of things.

The reason you hire casting directors is not only for their taste and for their eye, but for their depth of knowledge, and their ability to marry actors with the right roles in a way that the creatives are going to be able to tell the stories that they want to tell. AI can spit out a bunch of names, but they’re not going to tell you why that one is the right role. They’re not going to advocate for that person to get that role.

Going back to “House of Cards”, Rachel Brosnahan was hired for that role that ended up expanding. You put that in AI, it’ll spit out a bunch of names, but it won’t be able to tell you why Rachel was the one that we should have hired. That was me. That was the conversations that I had with the creatives, and the explanation and the body of work and auditions that she put in and all of that work to get her that job.

She’s incredibly talented, and she’d have an amazing career even without that job. But that job gave her the stepping stone to be able to do what she does now – to be in “Superman”, to do “Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”, to do everything that she does, all the advocacy work. It was because someone advocated for her and was passionate about her. That’s what we’re seeing as cast writers do in all aspects of their work, and AI can’t do that. Maybe I’m being optimistic, but that’s what I’m hoping for.

Rory Kinnear as Nicol Trowbridge in episode 102 of “The Diplomat”. Courtesy of Netflix.

Kirill: What do you feel is the secret or the key ingredients to longevity in your part of this industry?

Julie: You really have to have attention to detail. You have to have a real love of actors and knowledge of capability. You have to show up. You have to stand behind your word. And you have to be consistent.

There’s going to be ups and downs in every industry. We’re going to have strikes. There’s going to be an abundance of work, and then there’s going to be a dearth of work. You’re going to have to roll with the punches, and find ways to stay creative, and not burn out and not flame out. Also, it’s helpful to have hobbies outside of this business. This should not be your end-all be-all, the only thing that you have to love.

Kirill: If you had a time machine and you could go back 20 years or so, and give your younger self a piece of advice, what would that be?

Julie: I would say don’t stress out so much. I was a very anxious, very intense person who desperately wanted to prove themselves, and I was always afraid that I wasn’t doing enough. That drive was important to get me where I am today, but it would have been a lot more fun had I just chilled out a little bit.

Kirill: You mentioned that your job took you all over the world. If you had to choose one dish that is your favorite from anywhere in the world, what would it be?

Julie: There was one, around 20 years ago, and I still dream of this dish in San Gimignano in Italy. It was a combination of Italian and Austrian, and it was the best dish I’ve ever had in my entire life. And I can’t find a recipe for it, and it breaks my heart. The fact that I still dream about this dish after 20 years is ridiculous, and I have no idea how to recreate it. It was a fusion, it was savory, there was a pasta element to it, and I would love for you to figure it out and send it to me.

(L to R) Keri Russell as Kate Wyler, Ato Essandoh as Stuart Heyford in episode 103 of “The Diplomat”. Courtesy of Netflix.

And here I want to thank Julie Schubert for taking the time to talk with me about the art and craft of casting. I also want to thank Kristy Chan for making this interview happen. The first three seasons of “The Diplomat” are streaming now on Netflix. Finally, if you want to know more about how films and TV shows are made, click here for additional in-depth interviews in this series.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.

Brendan: The path that took me here is not a straightforward one, and I think that’s probably true for most people. Going back to high school, I always knew I wanted to make films but I didn’t necessarily think it was possible for quite some time.

At that time my understanding of filmmaking was limited. I didn’t know how many people it took to make a show, what they all did etc. I only really knew about directors and actors. What I did know was that I was always drawn to visual storytelling. I was constantly taking photographs, drawing, and exploring other types of art.

Eventually, I went to film school and studied cinematography full time for a year. I became completely hooked and fell in love with cinema and kept pushing to build my career.

From there, I decided I only wanted to shoot and not work my way through the camera department on set. It was a decision that was right for me however it did mean it took many more years trying to get onto a bigger film set. But like everything you keep pushing and building steps by step. And with some lucky opportunities every now and then I was able to start shooting shows that helped me get to where I am today.

Kirill: Looking at these first 15 or so years in the industry, what are the bigger changes you’ve seen so far?

Brendan: Oh between today and 15 years ago there’s a big shift in filmmaking and in many different areas of the industry. I think the most obvious is the rise of streaming over that time. They are just dominating now. But before them y really had big features, network television and of course independent films. Starting out I was doing independents. It was little projects either on 16mm or on digital, and of course another thing that has drastically changed over that time is digital technology. You can shoot fantastic images on digital cameras now, and we’ve seen huge changes in lighting. You have consoles and LED lights that are fully programmable and that has changed the way that I work more than anything else I think.

Cinematography of “Star City” by Brendan Uegama, courtesy of Apple TV.

Kirill: Would you want to turn back the clock and go back to the old film world?

Brendan: Many parts of me would love that but there’s a lot of good things about both film and digital filmmaking. I do love the process of film, trusting your instincts like that, the workflow on set. But digital allows so much other creativity and freedom. There are pros and cons of both.

It’s pretty unbelievable to look at what we have access to today when it comes to digital cameras. Your main camera can do high speed, be extremely sensitive in low light and small enough to put in configurations that you couldn’t before. And you can get quality images out of cameras the size of smartphones. That kind of flexibility is fantastic.

Kirill: What do you feel are the bigger misunderstandings or misconceptions about the role of the cinematographer?

Brendan: I think one of the biggest misconceptions about the role of the cinematographer is that it’s simply about making things look beautiful. Yes we care a lot about images but the job is really about storytelling and emotion.

A cinematographer is constantly trying to understand what the audience should feel in a moment and then using all the tools we have to support that. Sometimes that means creating something beautiful, and sometimes it means doing the opposite. The most important thing is that the image serves the story.

For me it also means being very involved in as many aspects of production. I want to understand the entire world we are creating so that I can contribute to the storytelling as much as possible. The more I understand the more I can offer the director.

Cinematography of “Star City” by Brendan Uegama, courtesy of Apple TV.

Kirill: Getting to “Star City”, how did it start for you?

Brendan: I was working on a different show with the director Nick Murphy, and one day he came to me on set and told me about his next project, Star City. He said he thought I would be great for it and that he was going to put me forward for it if I was interested.

I read the pilot and I loved it right away as it just hit on so many levels for me. Yes I loved the space exploration element but what really did it was everything beyond that. The espionage, the politics, and most importantly the human side of the story. These were characters living under the immense pressure of an oppressive system, yet they’re still driven by ambition and a belief in something bigger than themselves. They were trying to achieve things they had dreamed about and that they believed could change the world. That universal human struggle was what really resonated with me.

I saw it as much more than a story about space and cosmonauts. It was about people, their sacrifices, their hopes, and what they were willing to endure to achieve something extraordinary.

When I met with the showrunners Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi, I was already deeply excited about the project and knew I wanted to be part of it. The lovely thing about this show was that we all came together with a shared passion for the story, the characters, the period, and the desire to tell it in a way that felt truthful and grounded. That made this project incredibly special.

Kirill: How do you maintain consistent visuals with multiple directors and another cinematographer on the same season?

Brendan: So I shot the pilot block and block 3 while Cort Fey shot block 2 and 4. Initially figuring out this show’s approach took months in prep exploring ideas with the whole creative team. There is so much that goes into defining a show’s visual language and everyone involved had the same goal which was to make the best show possible. That commitment goes to anyone who joined the team later.

So to maintain consistency between all directors becomes easy when we are all after the same vision. I just shared as much as I could and explained our ideas for how we came to terms with our visual language.

Cinematography of “Star City” by Brendan Uegama, courtesy of Apple TV.

Kirill: Did you have any particular visual references or inspirations around the discussions on the look of the show?

Brendan: We shot the show in Lithuania starting in February 2025. I found out I was going to be part of the project around September or October 2024, so I’d been thinking about this for a while before starting official prep. During that time I was doing as much research as I could to try and understand that world. Naturally everything started to come together as we started to scout locations.

I did watch some past Soviet films, but my research went more into still photography of the time, around the late 60’s and 70’s. I leaned into photographs that showed me daily life of regular people in the Soviet Union. What people looked like, how they lived, dressed, what the world felt like, what textures I could grab out of there, what the light looked like. When it came time to go to camera there was one thing that we wanted to make sure to do, which was to not have our show feel overly constructed by us filmmakers and more like the scenes were found. We wanted it to feel like we walked into a real space with real people in it, mid conversation and the light was coming from the sources you can see. A lot of this idea was inspired by a lot of this photography.

And of course we built the sets that we wanted and I lit it the way I wanted so that the light felt natural to the space we were in. That’s why my primary inspiration was the photographs of that time rather than the films. Some of the soviet movies that I had watched from that time are so beautifully made but in a different direction than we wanted to go.

I found this photographer named Martin Manhoff who was an American diplomat in Moscow around that time, and he documented a lot with still cameras and movie cameras. His stills and footage opened up a world that I hadn’t seen and it gave me a lot of inspiration for this show.

Cinematography of “Star City” by Brendan Uegama, courtesy of Apple TV.

Kirill: What were your considerations around the colors of the show?

Brendan: I wanted the color of the lighting to be realistic. Whenever possible, I didn’t use LED lights unless needed. Instead, we went for the old incandescent lights and a lot of fluorescents. They both gave either the warmth that felt truthful to the environment and the ugly spiky cast from the fluros that just felt right. For daylight I pushed for cooler tones. The story takes place in winter time, and it was cold in Lithuania, and those winters in Moscow would have been extremely cold as well. I didn’t want to feel any extra warmth in there, so I leaned into that coldness .

For the night exteriors, I lit almost entirely with practical sources. Our art department would provide a bunch of street lights for us and I’d use both sodium and blue-green mercury vapor lights. I loved the mixed color temperatures instead of correcting them which allows them to feel harsher and dirtier and less polished. That visual imperfection became an important part of the show’s atmosphere.

Cinematography of “Star City” by Brendan Uegama, courtesy of Apple TV.

Kirill: You mentioned the oppressing hand of the government that is present throughout the story. What was your thinking around translating that oppression into what we see on screen?

Brendan: Lyudmilla sits at the center of the story, and in many ways she embodies the oppressive nature of the Soviet state. The authoritarian way is felt strongly by most characters living in Star City. We needed to visually express that without calling attention to itself.

We looked for specific moments where the camera could quietly suggest that someone was always watching or that there was an unseen presence just beyond the frame. Whether it was a figure in the background or a subtle point of view, we wanted the audience to feel that surveillance was constant. Because of that we would sometimes let the camera observe from a distance more, allowing the feeling of being watched to become part of the visual language.

So sometimes you’ll see part of a scene happen from more of a distance, or looking at characters through crowds or behind foreground elements, or framing scenes as though we were catching something we weren’t meant to see. Those choices created the sense that an unseen presence could be there or not.

Kirill: What is the split between VFX and in-camera shots?

Brendan: Well my preference is always capturing as much as possible in camera. Star City is a period piece set in a different country, and of course with a fair amount of space work. So yes we had a good amount of VFX.

We would always try to build the shots or sets to look right and complete from the start, and we were lucky to have an amazing production design team that could help us with so much of what was needed to be seen in camera. Whenever we felt we couldn’t go any further with what we could build and photograph, then we would rely on our great VFX team for it.
There is the obvious .. for example the space walk and the surface of the moon that had visual effects. And each shot had to be planned specifically to work seamlessly. But also there are many that don’t seem or look like visual shots that are.

For example, the Security Division building where Lyudmilla and Irina work. The location we used for the lobby area is in Vilnius city, and out the front glass doors you see a busy street with store fronts on the other side. But for us it was supposed to be in the middle of the complex of Star City, which is a secretive area in the middle of the forest. So we put up a large green screen outside the glass doors. We then went to Vingis park and shot some plate shots to comp in as the view.

But like everything it starts from the script. You then start scouting and finding the right locations to tell that story and if they don’t all marry together you sometimes need to cheat them together.

Cinematography of “Star City” by Brendan Uegama, courtesy of Apple TV.

Kirill: What went into the decision to go with anamorphic lenses with soft edges around the image?

Brendan: Lensing is always one of my most essential creative decisions in prep because it informs much more than just the glass. Once I find the right lenses it not only helps me understand how I’m going to photograph the show but also starts defining my visual process for everything.

We prepped out of ARRI Berlin, and I worked closely with Christoph Hoffsten who is a lens guru. I made several trips down there because I knew finding the right lenses was going to define the visual language of the show, so it was very important to test test test. We always knew we wanted to shoot anamorphic. Director Nick Murphy and I are both big fans of the format and we knew we didn’t want a polished overly clean image.

I soon enough figured out I didn’t want one consistent set of lenses. I didn’t want the glass to feel like one unified set. I wanted it to feel like it was pieced together with mixed matched glass that was imperfect in all ways.

So early on I had an idea that I would build a large set out of multiple primes from different manufacturers. I found around eight to ten different manufacturers to make up our lens set, and I gravitated towards lenses that felt like they fell apart in certain areas where the edges were blurrier or they breathed a lot.

Those imperfect qualities that traditionally wouldn’t be considered good quality by today’s lens standards were actually the things I was most drawn to. I wanted those characteristics to become part of the storytelling. They helped create this imperfect, “ugly beautiful” world we were trying to build, and they influenced the emotional feeling of every frame.

Every time I went down to Arri and worked with Christoph, we would spend the day testing numerous lenses. We’d put them on the camera, live with them for a bit, and ask ourselves how they made us feel. The ones that didn’t have the right character went into one pile. The ones that surprised us or had something unique went into another. Over the course of about a month, we slowly assembled this completely hand-picked set of lenses that felt unlike anything you could pull off a shelf.

The lenses themselves informed so much. How we framed scenes, how we photographed faces, how the world felt emotionally. They became a huge part of creating this “ugly beautiful” aesthetic that defined the series.

Cinematography of “Star City” by Brendan Uegama, courtesy of Apple TV.

Kirill: Was there anything particularly complicated or challenging around filming for zero gravity?

Brendan: Zero gravity has a lot of challenges. And it’s a very time consuming thing to do. We came out of it realizing it takes on average a couple hours from rehearsal of a shot to “moving on” to do a proper shot of someone floating through space in any significant way. We have multiple ways of dealing with zero gravity. You have actors on cables suspended from above, you have teeter-totter versions, and then you have your actors faking it a little bit if we’re tight enough.

Every shot had different requirements depending on the relationship between the camera, the actors, and the ship itself. We would storyboard it to know what the shot was, then had to figure out what the best orientation of the ship is best in. Is it upright or on its side or completely upside down? What wall, ceiling or floor panel needed to come out to get the crane in? And if the camera needed to travel from what appears to be the ceiling down to the floor, we might have to flip the entire set so we could achieve that move more naturally.

Every decision affected the physical configuration of the set, the camera, and how the actors would move. Within a single sequence, we might use several different orientations of the ship. That meant we’d often shoot part of the scene one day, then return days later after the construction team had changed the set for us to work better for the next shot.

And of course, making sure the actors knew the shot, felt comfortable with the rig they were in was essential. They needed to feel secure enough that they could hopefully forget about the mechanics of it. So we would first rehearse the action with a stunt performer in the rig so we could work out the movement, timing, and camera approach and the actors could see how it was going to work before they went on the wires. Then we would set up while the actors were being harnessed.

That was the process and every shot required a lot of coordination between performance, safety, camera, lighting, and stunts. It’s what made the work great but also why these sequences were so time consuming.

Kirill: Perhaps you just answered my next question, but I’ll ask it to make sure. What was the most challenging day or sequence or set that you’ve had on this show?

Brendan: Oh that’s a hard one to answer. This isn’t quite the right answer for your question but here’s something that comes to mind. So we had coined this term “ugly beautiful” for us, which really meant embracing imperfections as part of the beauty. The flaws within those imperfections were what made the images feel honest to us.

We built this idea into the photography from the very beginning. Sometimes during the process of shooting, we would find ourselves setting something up and realize that even though the image was nice looking, it wasn’t necessarily right for this world. Those were the moments where we had to challenge ourselves and step away from it, even if what we had created was technically a great image and we would lose time, we would sometimes start over completely because the goal was never just to make something beautiful. It was about making something that felt authentic to this world and stripping away today’s idea of perfect imagery.

Having said that, on a technical level all the space work was the most challenging I think. Perhaps the greatest challenge was the spacewalk that Anastasia does in the first episode along the outside the ship.

Cinematography of “Star City” by Brendan Uegama, courtesy of Apple TV.

Kirill: How do you see the generative AI tools today?

Brendan: It’s a hard question to answer. I’m not an advocate for AI at all. But it’s obviously here to stay and it will impact all aspects of our industry and every industry in the world. For filmmakers, the biggest threat right now is towards VFX artists and performers’ voices I think. But who knows what the future holds for cinematography.

I’m optimistic that audiences are always going to want to watch a project that is made by people with human mistakes in them. Maybe there’s a bump by the camera operator. Maybe the pan over is a beat too late or skies are burnt out, etc. Sometimes those mistakes are what gives a scene that special something. If everything is too perfect, then it’s boring. A lot of shows that are made today are falling into this “perfect” look. But I feel the imperfections are interesting, and we should always look for them and embrace them when they work.

We’ll see what happens in the future with AI, but right now I’m trying to be as optimistic as possible with it, and not think about it too much as being a big destructor for what I do. It hasn’t affected my job yet too much that I can tell [laughs].

At a more general level, if you’re a creative person of any kind, the more that you rely on AI, the worse it’s going to be in the long run. I hope that people try to keep their brain fired all the time and don’t rely on the quick answer that AI always can give you without any thought. Spend a little extra time brainstorming and driving yourself mad trying to figure it out!

Cinematography of “Star City” by Brendan Uegama, courtesy of Apple TV.

Kirill: What piece of advice would you give to your younger self if you could go back in time to around 2010 when you were starting out in the industry?

Brendan: I think the biggest thing is I would tell myself to always trust my gut. Try not to compare my path to others. Don’t listen to the nonsense. Stay inspired. Travel the world. See new cultures, new places and experience new things. Because all of those experiences become part of who you are as a person and therefore as a cinematographer.

Kirill: What would be the three movies that you’d take to a deserted island?

Brendan: If I was on a deserted island I should probably have more uplifting films. But I’d start with these 3 that are anything but that. First would be “Apocalypse Now”. The second is “The Banishment”. And then Kurosawa’s “Ran”.

Kirill: My last question is about your favorite food you had while you were working on this show in Lithuania.

Brendan: There were so many amazing restaurants in Vilnius. I loved the culinary scene. My favorite restaurant by far was an Italian restaurant called Le Travi. A very small menu that changed weekly, a great environment and right near my apartment. I ate there often. But also a standout for me would be a small place that served chebureki, which is not a Lithuanian dish per se – meat seasoned with oregano and other spices, folded with cheese in puff pastry with air inside of it. It was just a simple restaurant but the flavors in this dish were phenomenal.

And here I want to thank Brendan Uegama for taking the time to talk with me about the art and craft of cinematography. I also want to thank Lauren Fein Goldberg for making this interview happen. The first season of “Star City” is streaming now on Apple TV. Finally, if you want to know more about how films and TV shows are made, click here for additional in-depth interviews in this series.

Cinematographer Lowell A. Meyer on the sets of “Tuner”.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.

Lowell: My name is Lowell A. Meyer. I am a cinematographer, and I was born and raised in New York City. I discovered my love for photography around middle school. I was lucky in that my dad happened to be a hobbyist. He had like a photo camera, and he had a video VHS camera that he didn’t use because he was working all the time. I found them sitting on the shelves, and asked him about that. He taught me how to use it, and I got into it through making little short films with friends. Sometimes in school they ask you if you want to write an essay or if you want to make a short video instead. For me, it was so obvious that making the short video would be a lot more fun. I would travel around New York City skateboarding, and I would bring this camera with me or film my friends skateboarding.

When it came time to set my sights on colleges and what I might want to study if I were to go, my parents were great and they encouraged me to follow my passions. Right around that time I started to discover a love for films. Nobody in my family is in the film industry, but I was a part of the generation that grew up with DVDs that had behind-the-scenes featurettes in them. You went to the DVD home screen and it would show you a little bit of the making of the film. I started watching those and developing a love for cinema alongside a friend of mine, Eric.

It sounded like a lot of fun. I didn’t realize people made movies, and that they made money making movies, and that that’s a career path. I started to investigate that path, and I also started making more serious short films, either directing or shooting. I saw people doing this for a living, and I told myself that maybe I should try that as well.

Every experience I’ve had since then, like going to film school and moving to LA, reinforced that this is what I love doing. I can’t see a world where I do something else. It’s such a fun experience to be on a film set with so many people who are usually wonderful, creative and collaborative, and also have a similar love for cinema. It encourages like-minded cinema lovers to work together, and problem solve, and make something that we’re all hopefully very proud of.

Kirill: Where did you find yourself in the overall transition of the industry from film to digital?

Lowell: It would be wrong of me to say that I was a generation that grew up with film. I was a generation that grew up with video. By the time I gained access to film and film cameras, RED One and ARRI Alexa came out. As I was shooting 16mm short films in college, everyone else was looking to see what those digital cameras were about. I wasn’t caught off-guard. I didn’t need to change all my ways of thinking. I was learning about film at the same time as I was learning about digital and video.

It feels like I’ve always had a lot of formats at my disposal, and that includes the iPhone. It was all happening at the same time – iPhone, RED One, Alexa, 5D and 7D. I was shooting with P2 cards and tape transfer decks to get the footage. I was interested in all of these formats at the same time.

Film was a desirable thing for me to use, but at the same time it was also not straightforward, and not easy, and not always encouraged, and not the most exciting thing. It was always talked about and glorified, but at the same time, “Black Swan” came out and Matthew Libatique was shooting some scenes on 16mm and some scenes with a 7D. I felt like I was at the advent of something. I bought a second hand Canon 5D Mark II in college because I wanted to do photo and video, and that was an empowering tool. It got me some of my first DP jobs.

Going to film always felt like a luxury, and not something that I was missing. At that point, the most experience I’d had with film was still photography. I loved 35mm still photography. Since then I’ve shot some more film, but not a tremendous amount. It’s not my go-to tool. I am a bit more digitally minded, and the directors I work with embrace that as well.

Kirill: Speaking of the advent of the digital cameras and the iPhones, it feels that the equipment today is more affordable than it used to be. There was a conversation a few years ago about how this would dramatically lower the barrier to entry for new filmmakers, and that we would be inundated with a whole new explosion of stories. But it also feels that there is another, more artistic barrier, if you will. Just because you have a camera in your pocket doesn’t mean that you become an amazing storyteller.

Lowell: That’s spot on. People come up with excuses for everything. If people don’t have success in their lives, they point at things to blame. They say they don’t have the best gear, or they don’t have the best crew, or that it was raining that day, or what have you. Great gear still costs money, but it is certainly more accessible today. It’s amazing what you can get for just a few hundred or thousand dollars.

In some ways, lack of access to professional gear was holding back some people in some ways. It’s amazing that we have all this gear. It allows people with that passion and that innate ability to rise to the occasion in a way that maybe they couldn’t in the past. But it takes a lot more than just technical know-how and access to gear. It takes resilience, chutzpah, naivete, willpower and sheer determination to never say “No”, to say that this is the only thing you will ever do in your life – and then backing that up with novel ideas, understanding the medium, understanding storytelling, understanding what audiences expect and what they don’t expect and how to subvert expectations.

It’s obviously a huge conversation beyond gear. Now we’re entering a world where maybe you don’t even need a crew or any camera gear at all. We’re entering a world where, as long as they have access to the Internet and a keyboard, anyone could potentially make a Hollywood film with AI technology and tools. That will continue to prove your theory correct. If everyone has access to AI software and can make Hollywood grade imagery and scenes – do they make something that stands the test of time with that? I don’t think that’s possible.

It’s not possible for every human on planet Earth to be the best filmmaker, and for their films to be novel and touch everyone. There will always be a small percentage of the population that makes really great art. The beauty of the day and age we live in now is that a small percentage can come from anywhere. In the past, it might have been only the rich and the elite, and the children of the rich and the elite. And now it can come from anywhere. That’s the gift we’ve been given.

Kirill: What do you feel are the misconceptions or misunderstandings about what a cinematographer does?

Lowell: People think that the cinematographer is there to light and shoot the most beautiful shots and scenes. There’s some truth to that, but I would say that the most important role of the cinematographer is to do that in accordance with the vision of the director and the story they’re telling. That doesn’t always mean beautiful. It’s always tailored to the director.

We are at the service and support of the director and their vision. Different directors have different needs, different ways of processing a scene and a script, and different ways of even creating a scene. Some directors don’t think in terms of camera movements and shots, and for some directors that is all they think about. Cinematographers have a tremendous impact on the ultimate product that gets made.

The misconception is that all we do is these beautiful visuals. But the reality of it is that we refine a director’s process, create a comfortable space for the actors to play, tailor a crew to a director’s strong suits and what they need, and fill in where they might have blind spots or weaknesses. We’re protectors of the director and their vision. We collaborate with the producers, the actors, and the production designer. A cinematographer does a tremendous amount of things before a shot even gets shot. Sometimes, the actual lighting and shot and frame is the last thing you do. There’s so much that comes before it – prep, pre-vis, and just gaming out how the movie will work and the shoot will be.

The more I’ve done it, the more I’ve realized how big and complicated this job is. It involves managing directors’ emotions, managing actors’ emotions, managing producers’ anxieties, etc.

Kirill: Is it a little miracle that any movie gets made?

Lowell: There’s so many people working on it to ensure it gets made. But the smaller the crew and the smaller the budget, the more it is a miracle.

Kirill: Is there anything that you are excited about today in terms of advancements in camera bodies, lenses, and lighting equipment – something that is emerging or on the horizon?

Lowell: I can’t think of anything that is upcoming or hasn’t been released yet that is exciting for me. But I would say, in terms of the day and age we live in, I’m grateful and excited for the tools available to me.

I can move so fast on a set because we have wireless, dimmable, color changeable lights that run on batteries. We were talking about camera technology changing, but lighting technology has changed far more drastically since when I was in film school. That has been an exciting evolution. It’s sometimes hard to keep up with everything that’s available, but you have the benefit of this collaborative art form. I might know a few tricks. The gaffer I’m working with on the given project knows a few tricks. The key grip knows a few tricks. Everybody contributes their little know-how and things they own and things they’ve had for years.

I’m really impressed with what we can do from a lighting perspective, and when you pair that with the cameras and lenses we have nowadays, it’s a completely different way to make movies. It allows us to do things at the speed and cost that were simply not achievable 10-15 years ago.

Kirill: How did “Tuner” start for you? How did it find its way to you, or how did you find your way to it?

Lowell: I had met the director, Daniel Roher, on another film we worked on together called “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist”. He was writing “Tuner”, and trying to get financing and casting for it, and about a week into us working together on that documentary he told me that he wanted me to shoot “Tuner”. I was excited, but at the time I had a conflict. It worried me to be getting this great opportunity, but to not be available.

But then things shifted in my schedule, and when he got financing, a window opened up and I immediately called him. I asked him if he already found someone else, and he said that they were going to start interviews soon, but if I’m available, let’s do it. I met with the producers, and that went great. Before I knew it, I was on a plane to Toronto to start our prep.

Kirill: You are from New York and this movie is in New York, but it’s shot in Toronto. How did it go for you?

Lowell: We had a lot of interior scenes, and Toronto is often faked for New York. If we are in a concert hall, who’s to say where that concert hall is? There was nothing specific about it besides its beauty. Sometimes we had little exterior portions where you’d be able to see out of a window of a cafe, and we wanted that to feel New York’y.

If you’re enthralled in the movie, and you’re engaged, and you’re liking the plot and the characters, your detective brain is inactivated. You’re not trying to pick it apart. And if you’re not engaged, and you hate the movie, and you start looking at everything but the characters, then maybe you’d be able to see a few “cheats”. I think we did a pretty good job. The locations department was one of the hardest working departments on the film. They had a tremendous amount to find and to make work for the script.

The thing we had to our benefit was that a lot of the movie takes place in mansions, music rooms, recital halls, apartments and houses. It wasn’t the hardest thing to fake. Like you said, I’m from New York, and I wanted it to feel authentic. I know what New York feels like and I could help a little bit.

We also filmed in New York for three days. We had a big walk-and-talk scene in the middle of the movie that we wanted to shoot in New York. And then we had to make sure that what we picked would match the exteriors of the other places in Toronto. If we were trying to make the movie in Cairo, Egypt, then we’d have a problem. But New York City and Toronto are not crazy far apart, and that helped us out with that match.

Kirill: What was the location for the Shafitz Hall? How much time did you get in there to make all the scenes?

Lowell: That was one of what I call “the big kahuna” locations. We identified early on that it was a big set piece of the film. That was the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. It’s a beautiful space, and it’s also an active space that has a lot of bookings, so we had to work around their schedule.

We had two days at the start of the shoot, and then we had to leave and come back on Halloween. Halloween day was the day of the big recital, whereas the first two days were meeting Ruthie for the first time, walking through the spaces and tuning pianos. It was a difficult place to load in and out of. There were a lot of elevators. It’s a busy place. It came with caveats for us as a production. We had to ask ourselves if it was worth the expense. But it was so beautiful, and they gave us so much control over the lights.

It’s a little indie movie, and you have to put as much production value on screen as you can. That place felt like the most beautiful option that we had in front of us. When you work on a movie, you realize that there are some uncontrollable variables that are worth building everything else around, because it’s so valuable and it’s so worth it.

Kirill: How many different pianos did you end up shooting in those big mansions and halls? How many different mansions did you have access to?

Lowell: We had the rainbow piano. We had the one in the music recording studio. We had the big Yamaha that he tunes in the mansion. We had the music school. We had the recital piano. We had Harry’s piano. We had one that we bought and drilled holes into, so that we could get shots inside of the piano and get all of these inner workings. There were a few more, so probably close to a dozen.

We had two hero mansions. The movie has a lot of musical montages that track the passage of time – him trying to make money, how things are happening with Ruthie, etc. That meant that the script called for a lot of locations, and we were trying to find locations that could double as another location. We would try to find a mansion where maybe they added an additional wing or an additional set of rooms that felt completely different. Then you do the main space as mansion A, the rest of it as mansion B, and the basement as mansion C.

There’s the hero cafe where Dustin and Leo eat burgers in front of a big mural. We then doubled that cafe for the date night in the montage where Leo and Havana are in front of those red neon lights. And then we tripled it looking the other way when Leo is sad and he’s eating a burrito by himself. It was one of these creative games with the first AD Simon Board, the location manager Tristan Plant, the production designer Peter Cosco, me and the director Daniel Roher.

We’d call certain scenes floaters. We had the marquee scenes – Shafitz Hall or Ruthie’s apartment. We know what we’re doing there, we know that it’s going to be a full day. But then we have a scene that takes a third of a day, and we could put it anywhere. So if there’s an extra third of a day opening in the schedule, let’s try to find a roti shop near there. Daniel was flexible with locations, and open to the scene being different than what was scripted, or taking place in a different place that was scripted – if it helped our schedule and didn’t take away from the creative. It was a little bit of a game of Tetris in terms of the schedule and the locations.

Then we would do our best to be creative, and be open-minded, and find a new angle that could sell as one of these montage beats. One of the best parts of the movie is that it does build a world, and you really feel like you’re traveling around to all these places. That felt like an important thing, and we didn’t want to cut down locations. We wanted to keep adding more so that the movie felt full and rich.

Kirill: The story is very much about the auditory world of the main character, his hearing problems and his hearing abilities. You go inside the pianos as you mentioned, and you also go inside the safes. Was it super zoomed shots, or did your prop department build models of those gears?

Lowell: We considered the idea of blowing up miniatures to maxatures, and making bigger scale versions. But in reality, we didn’t have the budget or the R&D department to do that, and I don’t know if it would have looked great, to be honest.

I like to do camera tests and lens tests in advance. The movie script called for a lot of inserts, as well as the auditory visual clues and cues that you referenced. The director boarded a lot of the movie and it had inserts all over it. So it was clear to me that part of my role was going to be figuring out how to shoot the inner workings of safes and pianos.

My first lens tests were with macro lenses. There’s a popular probe lens on the market that people use, and I compared that to traditional macro lenses. I started asking myself if I could do it without asking anybody else for help and without any CGI. CGI wasn’t an option for our budget, and it was on me to figure it out.

There’s this ARRI Master Prime 100mm macro lens that I would put a doubler and a macro tube on, and that gave us extremely tight shots. And then, the art department cut open locks and gave me the exposed insides – lock tumblers, fences and gates. We would mount that on a C stand, and then get lots of angles with the camera. I also used that probe lens, sometimes with a doubler as well. We bought an old piano, bored a hole in it, and shoved that probe inside of it.

The schedule was tight, and we had a lot of locations that were prioritized. We had an insert unit day tacked on at the end of our shoot because inserts were so important, and we did around a hundred inserts on that day. And then, while the edit was being cut, I shot additional lock inserts. They shipped locks from Toronto to LA in a box, and I shot them.

Kirill: Do you know enough now about locks to be able to get into a safe yourself?

Lowell: I know essentially how people do it, but I don’t know if I have the patience or interest to even begin or try.

Kirill: How much time did you spend shooting inside and outside of their van?

Lowell: When we did our New York shoot, one day was with the actors and then two days were just me in a van with Daniel filming New York City street life. We were driving past Yankee stadium, driving down the George Washington bridge, and lots of other places. There was a lot of shooting from the inside looking out of the van. We also did the most amount of New York city driving plates I’ve ever done and commissioned. We had a weekend long New York plate unit before we even started principal photography.

We did a volume stage on day seven of the shoot with a tuner van. We had so many driving scenes and driving locations, and a lot of them are in montage. There’s only a few meaty dialogue scenes, so we knew that it would be advantageous to do that all in one day if we could all in a volume stage. We shot 10 or 11 scenes on the volume stage that day. That felt to be an important connective tissue to ground it in New York, to see the world through the eyes of this guy who’s driving in his van a tremendous amount of the day.

Kirill: Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it felt that you were leaning into the golden yellows for the internal scenes.

Lowell: I don’t know if that was a consistent choice. If it’s an interior night scene, in general a warm color palette is great for skin tones. It made sense for Harry’s house, especially for Shiva. I wouldn’t say that it was ubiquitous.

This movie has a lot of different tones and genres and gear changes in it. When Lior’s character goes into the warehouse for the first time, it’s cold fluorescent lights. It’s not exactly cozy. It’s a weird, odd in-between space. When they go to that Korean drug house, that space has chaotic lighting. It has a cool blue fish tank, and some work lights, and a random light bulb, and some fluorescents. It’s a weird space where the person occupying it – if there is one – doesn’t care about how it looks. It’s just a drug paraphernalia place.

Going back to the warmth that you were talking about, it made sense for Ruthie’s apartment, for Harry’s place, for other places that felt safe and comforting for Niki. We associate tungsten light bulbs and household lights with cozy spaces. It’s a comforting association.

Kirill: What was the most challenging sequence for you to work on?

Lowell: On one hand, the whole movie was a complete joy, and the opposite of a challenge. And on the other hand, every day was a challenge because every day ended with the feeling that you were never going to come back to that space. The Royal Conservatory Hall with the big symphony orchestra piece at the end was challenging. We had three cameras, and they were all moving and sweeping the space. Everybody on set was enthralled that day. Everybody was in awe of what we were capturing, and of Havana’s performance, and of the music coming to life. It was stunning and fun, and a special day.

But as we were getting ready to go into that day, we all knew that it had high stakes. We had to nail it. It had to work. Everybody had to be prepared.

The drughouse sequence was probably one of the more challenging ones. We only had two days for it while we wanted three. There’s a fish tank that is exploding. We have three cameras on it, and if it doesn’t work, it would be an impossible amount of time to reset that we simply don’t have. Someone’s killed in the scene. Fish are flopping on the ground. Our character has to run outside and throw up and speed off. There were a lot of elements and characters. You’re shooting 360. There’s a lot of group dynamics in the scene. It felt like a lot to take on. Luckily, we got everything we needed, but it was by the skin of our teeth.

Kirill: In your head, do you feel Niki and Ruthie get back together or not?

Lowell: I don’t think about it because the movie just ends. In my mind, I don’t think that’s what the movie is hinged around. Because of that, if the movie kept going, I don’t think they would get together.

It’s a sweet gesture. It lands the plane because what they’ve done for each other has helped each other achieve something. Niki has helped Ruthie to feel inspired, to pursue her dreams and get to this maestro, and he helped her along the way improve her piece. And she ultimately helped him realize that it’s okay to keep playing the piano and not all is lost. In that way, that’s how the movie leaves me feeling. These two people touched each other, and that’s what love is about. And if that’s where it ends, that’s where it ends, and their stories will keep going.

Cinematographer Lowell A. Meyer on the sets of “Tuner”.

Kirill: Do you want people to watch this movie on the biggest screen possible? What would be your pitch to get people in the movie theater?

Lowell: Any movie worth its weight is better on the big screen. When you watch a movie at home, the movie is on your time, and you are the controller of if the movie keeps running. When you watch a movie in the theater, you’re on the movie’s time, and the movie’s going to keep going and you have to be there. It’s an event. It’s a time and a place and a date. You can bring your friends, but that movie isn’t waiting for you. You have to go meet it. You’re immersed and engrossed, and hopefully you’re not on your phone.

Also, for a movie like this where sound and music is half – if not more than half – of the picture, movie theaters also provide incredible sound systems. Maybe people have a big screen TV at home, but I doubt they have the best sound system at home. You’d be doing yourself a disservice if you left it to streaming or to those tiny airplane screens. That’s great if people will watch it later on, but if you have the chance and you have the means, definitely go see it and hear it on a big screen.

Kirill: How do you see generative AI today? Where do you find yourself on the spectrum between it being the impending end of human creativity and it being yet another tool at your disposal?

Lowell: It’s somewhere in between. It’s already being used as a tool in Hollywood, and a lot of people want to embrace it as a tool. You hear about studio heads, producers, directors, VFX departments all wanting it. I just heard a makeup artist talking about her latest movie, and how she was able to pre-vis with the director to put different looks on actors to go alongside specific costumes, and she said that she was astounded by how helpful that process was.

I don’t want anybody to lose their livelihoods to AI. I would hope that people could understand the difference between a tool and a human, and that they each provide their own wonderful contributions. But I fear that it won’t stop at a tool. These tools are only getting better and better by the second, and it’s not going to take much in Hollywood for producers and directors to feel empowered to make whole movies with these tools.

It soon will be the case where a whole movie can be done with the AI tools. That would open a whole set of new questions. Do they make better movies? Do they make movies that are as good? Do they save lots of money? It will become a market consideration. Do the people using these tools get rewarded for using them? And if they do get rewarded by audiences and by shareholders and profit margins, then unfortunately these will be industry swaying shifts. That does worry me, and it’s fair to say that that is a huge concern for everyone in the film industry.

The best case scenario is that it’s something where it’s relegated as its own thing like animation, but I don’t know. I would like to think that audiences would care about films and want to see them made for real with your real humans and real cameras – but it’s just nothing certain. The film industry hasn’t done a good job at staying incredibly relevant and incredibly profitable. And as it’s losing that hold on cultural relevancy, a tool like AI now seems to give a shot of revitalization for an industry that is struggling. We’ll see where it goes. It’s not looking incredibly hopeful, but it’s also not looking incredibly like a guarantee either.

Kirill: What would be a piece of advice that you would give to your younger self when you were starting off?

Lowell: My advice to my younger self would be to believe in yourself, to work hard, to work with like-minded people who lift me up, and to follow the fun. Make your film family, and try for big bold things. Don’t just settle. I think I’ve followed most of those things. I wouldn’t necessarily change my path, but that’s probably what I would say if I was trying to encourage myself. It’s all going to work out.

Cinematographer Lowell A. Meyer on the sets of “Tuner”.

And here I want to thank Lowell A. Meyer for taking the time to talk with me about the art and craft of cinematography. I also want to thank Jordan von Netzer for making this interview happen. “Tuner” is playing in theaters now. Finally, if you want to know more about how films and TV shows are made, click here for additional in-depth interviews in this series.