Cinematography Style: Linus Sandgren

Cinematography Style: Linus Sandgren

INTRODUCTION

Being a cinematographer is a collaborative process. They need to work with technical crew, the director and even indirectly with the screenwriter - due to how they visually interpret the script. 

Linus Sandgren is a DP who focuses on these collaborations, especially the director, to find a mutually agreed upon look for each movie that takes the tonal and thematic aspects of the screenplay into account.

In this episode I’ll dive into his philosophical approach to shooting movies and then take a look at some examples of the gear he uses to execute his photography.   

PHILOSOPHY

Creating images in a crafted way isn’t just a matter of arriving at a location, pointing a fancy camera at the action and hoping for the best. Some of the most important and influential work that cinematographers do actually happens before then. 

In initial meetings before shooting they will be presented with a script or with a concept for the shoot. In order to execute the shoot they first need to come up with ideas for a look or visual style for the film. There are two facets to this: uncovering the tone and themes present in the screenplay, and incorporating the tone that the director envisions for the movie. 

“You need to have a great relationship with a director. I think, like, normally I try to figure out how the director works and what he likes and I like to try to adapt to that director’s style of working. My experience with directors is they also need us to have a partner to communicate and collaborate to create the visual storytelling.”

This doesn’t mean that Sandgren sees directors as having fixed styles. More often than not the tone and feeling that needs to be communicated visually will be determined by the content of the story. 

“It was sort of a 180 from La La Land to do First Man. His style of doing La La Land was very much whimsical, a musical. So, in First Man he wanted it to be very realistic and emotionally immersive.”

Just looking at the way the camera moves differently in these two films communicates two different feelings: one is smooth, theatrical, co-ordinated and flowing, while the other is rougher, more intimate and realistic. But, we’ll get more into how he practically executed those tones later on.

So, while the director’s style of working may influence the visual approach, so does the screenplay.

In pre-production Sandgren therefore asks himself two questions. One, how do you take a script and come up with a tone or themes that are pertinent to the story? Two, how do you then take those concepts and apply them practically to create the images. 

On No Time to Die he chatted with director Cary Fukanaga during prep to come up with these answers.

“Another thing that Cary then discussed with me a lot was the sort of expectations that we have on a Bond film is that it should be entertaining, it should be should be a sort of joyride for the audience that we go through a film and feel like it’s sort of one, long, big adventure. Then we start to discuss, sort of, themes and keywords which to me is really important as a cinematographer. I feel like I always start with the most simple words between me and the director. Like, for example it could be loss, or grief, or death or things that matter for the story.”

With these keywords decided upon, he can put down emotional tones or themes on a screenplay or story timeline and then breaks down how he can achieve this effect in each scene visually. 

For example, for the emotionally jarring opening scene it was important that the images were not beautiful, postcard, landscape snow images but rather that they felt a bit more ominous, eerie, dangerous and isolated by making the images more of a monochromatic blue rather than crisp whites and a beautiful sunny blue sky with warm backlight. This is a good example of how cinematography and a look can be used to subtly influence the emotional impact of a story.

He is also deliberate about how he hires crew. In the same way that the gear will impose it’s so own visual feeling on a film, so to does the crew that you hire. Every person will set up a shot differently, come with their own technical opinions, creative suggestions and style of physically operating the camera.

“Sometimes I love to operate. So I put an operator off to not work on a film because I like to operate. Like on First Man I actually operated A Camera but on La La Land I had operators. It depends on how I want to tell the story and when I feel it’s important to be closer to the actual making of the image. And sometimes it’s better to have someone else do it.”

First Man used a lot of handheld work and immersive operation of the camera. Sometimes with handheld operation it’s easier to find the right movement to tell personal stories when the camera is on your own shoulder. 

GEAR

With an understanding of the kind of tone and feeling that he needs to impart in the images, he can now go about choosing the correct gear to execute that tone.

One aspect of this is choosing the camera and lenses for a project. For example, on Don’t Look Up, he pitched the idea that the look should be rooted as a political thriller and that the comedy should come from the script and actors, rather than shooting it as a brighter comedy. 

So, to ratchet up the tension of a thriller he used camera movement, mainly working off a dolly, and also a stylistic trademark of the director Adam McKay - zooms.

“When things sort of hit the fan and got even more suspenseful in dialogue scenes we could dolly to create tension with the dolly moves. But also we went a lot to longer zooms. For practical reasons we didn’t go to anamorphic zooms, we went for spherical zooms.”

Due to the extra glass needed in anamorphic lenses they usually let in less light, while spherical zooms have a faster stop which means they let in more light and can be shot on darker lit sets. This is particularly true for the long focal lengths they were shooting at - such as 300mm. 

He selected Fujinon Premier Cabrio zooms like the 25-300mm, which has a stop of T/ 3.85 at the long end of the zoom. 

Since they were shooting on film which has a slower EI than the native EI of most digital cameras, they needed faster lenses to be able to shoot in low light scenarios.

Sandgren also rented an Aaton Penelope which he always had on standby with a 40mm spherical Macro Kowa lens. He used this setup for moments where the characters felt really nervous or tense by pushing in inches from their eyes to visually communicate a feeling of internal, existential terror that the characters were going through in that moment.

While he has used the digital Alexa on some of his commercial work, he likes using 35mm film on features when presented with the option. 

Some other 35mm film cameras that he’s used include: the Arriflex 235, the 435, the Arricam LT, and Panaflex XL2 from Panavision. 

These have been paired with lenses like: Hawk V-Lite 1.3x Anamorphics, Canon K35s, Atlas Orion Anamorphics, the Camtec Modded Vintage version of the Zeiss Ultra Primes, and anamorphic glass from Panavision such as the C, E and G-Series. He alternates between anamorphic and spherical lenses for both aesthetic as well as practical reasons.

He has used a variety of film stocks, including Fujifilm Eterna Vivid stocks before they were discontinued, but now selects from the Kodak motion picture stocks which are still available for use. 

He doesn’t stick to a single stock and often chooses a range of stocks for different scenarios that include: fine grain daylight stocks for bright exteriors, like 50D, more sensitive daylight stocks, like 250D, and high sensitivity tungsten stocks, like 500T, for interiors and night scenes. 

His preference for film is also due to the different gauges or formats that it comes in. He can select different formats  to communicate different tones or differentiate time periods or locations in a movie. 

For example, on First Man he used lower gauge, higher grain 16mm film for scenes inside the spacecraft to create a more realistic documentary-like 60s and 70s feel that was more raw and authentic. He then switched to 35mm, with a more normal grain and increased contrast, when the story moved to the NASA industrial world and for scenes inside his home. To create an extreme contrast between the spaceship interiors and the more surrealistic moments of actually being on the moon, he turned to the super crisp, large format 70mm Imax. 

Constructing a realistic feeling sun required coming up with a strong, single light source. He got Attitude Specialty Lighting who make 100K softsuns to construct two custom, high output 200K softsuns to provide a large area source that mimicked hard sunlight.

He often uses strong single directional sources of light, such as HMIs or tungsten units that he’ll gel to get to a daylight colour temperature. He then fills in little pockets of light and creates colour contrast in interiors by using practical sources built in, or placed on the set, that you can see in the shot.

But, his approach to lighting and the gear involved changes depending on each story. This could mean using a wall of LED screens with projected NASA archival footage to create in-camera space backgrounds with more realistic light and reflections. 

Or he may go in the opposite direction of realism, into a world where the lighting is determined by emotion and classical Hollywood tropes. This was done in La La Land by setting up an overhead blanket light at 4000K, hitting the walls with colourful practical fixtures and then rigging a tungsten spotlight to a dimmer which he could bring up or dim down to isolate characters in a nostalgic moment of focus.  

These evoke different tones, one which is concerned with realism and the other plays into visualising abstract emotion.  

CONCLUSION

These examples go to show that Sandgren’s style cannot be limited to a singular look, technique or gear preference. Each project requires a different feeling and each director he works with has different sensibilities and interpretations of the script. 

It’s his job to find a collaborative balance where the tone and themes in each scene are established, and then use that as a jumping off point to create visuals which represent a feeling.