Cinematography Style: Rob Hardy

INTRODUCTION

Rather than dissecting a movie into its various parts, Rob Hardy’s approach to cinematography is to craft an environment on set for the actors which gets as close to the world of the film that is being shot, through both his selection and application of technical gear, as well as his broader philosophy.

Let’s unpack this a bit further by looking at the work of Rob Hardy in this edition of cinematography style. 

PHILOSOPHY

One of the ideas at the core of Rob Hardy’s cinematography is to translate the psychological feelings and thoughts of the characters onto the screen using images.

An example of this can be found in his early feature work on Boy A where Hardy and the director decided to play out a scene in a single take with a Steadicam rather than getting traditional dialogue coverage of it. For him, it made sense for the camera to slowly move around the action, experiencing the moment in real time, in a way which represented how the protagonist's own mind was circling the scenario, surrounded by characters, as he tried to prevent his past from catching up to him.

Or, in Shadow Dancer, where they decided on the perspective of the camera taking on that of the central protagonist and representing how much pressure she was under through either the proximity or detachment of the camera. 

Or, how the camera in Civil War takes on an on-the-ground perspective that moves with characters when shooting action scenes - in a photojournalistic style reminiscent of how the characters themselves are experiencing the moment. 

These are just some examples of him using the camera to translate a psychological moment, feeling or idea onto the screen.

As he likes taking the story and the underlying emotions in the screenplay into account first when coming up with a visual approach, Hardy, unlike many other DPs, doesn't like to use other movies as references for the look.

When working with a frequent collaborator such as director Alex Garland, conversation around the story will be the basis for the look and they’ll usually avoid visual references altogether.  

Or, in cases where he does want to communicate a visual reference, such as for the Grand Palais sequence in Mission: Impossible, he’ll instead draw from the world of art, in this case Olafur Elliason’s gallery installation piece ‘The Weather Project’.

An important aspect of filmmaking which isn’t necessarily seen on screen is creating an environment on set which suits the kind of work that is being done. Whether that’s honing in on a focused energy from crew for a technical long take, a more lighthearted, jovial mood for a comedy, or a more serious atmosphere for dramatic scripts. The biggest contributing factor to curating this energy around the camera is through choosing the HODs of the various departments on the set, such as the gaffer or key grip, and the team that they bring onto the set.  

“It’s easy for someone to walk onto set and do something at absolutely the wrong time. Having a sense of awareness is very, very important. Everybody learns that through doing jobs together and the more jobs you do together obviously the tighter of a team you become. So, I’ll always push to work with specific people.”

Creating an environment that is conducive to the kind of energy in the story, applies not only to crew, but also to creating the right feeling with of course, the set design, and also, for the DP, the lighting.

Rather than taking a more old school approach of breaking scenes into the specific shots that will be covered, then giving actors specific marks and lighting those exact points that they will land on with a precise kind of light, Hardy likes to instead light the entirety of the space that the scene will take place in.

This gives the actors the freedom and room to move wherever best suits their performance in that space. It also makes it easy for the filmmakers to make adjustments or implement new ideas on the fly without having to spend lots of time re-lighting specific marks. If you go in with the philosophy of lighting the entire space it makes it much easier to quickly reposition the camera anywhere within that environment.    

“If you light a room, if you light a space, and you give it a feeling, that when the actors walk into that space they’re like, ‘Oh my God.’ It exists, you know. It doesn’t exist as a series of shots or an abstract sequence, it exists as a space. It’s a playground then for the director and the actors to really exploit that space.”

GEAR

One continuous thread across his lighting is his persistent use of tungsten lights. These are a bit old school and generally aren’t used today as often by cinematographers as they create a lot of heat, aren’t bi-colour or RGB, change to a warmer temperature when dimmed and require large amounts of power to run. However, they are favoured for their high quality output of warm 3,200K light.

A popular choice for a high output fixture these days is an HMI, while various LEDs are often used for fill, practicals or a soft, ambient lift.

However, Hardy likes using tungsten fixtures instead, such as: a massive 24K, Wendy lights, Dinos, or Par Cans. 

Most DPs light studio sets these days with overhead LED panels and LED practicals which are embedded directly into the set. On movies like Ex Machina he instead decided to use a huge amount of tungsten bulbs as practicals, 15,000 in fact, which were built into floors, ceilings and walls behind a diffused perspex.

When these 3,200K lights are shot with a 5,600K colour balance on the camera, or a daylight film stock, they will have a beautiful warmth. Because there are so many bulbs, which are spread over a larger surface area and hidden behind diffusion, rather than lighting from a direct, single source, the light has a beautiful, soft, diffused quality to it.  

If a cooler look is desired from these warm, tungsten lights, he would then either balance the colour temperature in camera by changing it to record at a neutral base such as 3,200K, or a slightly warmer base such as 4,300K. 

Or, he sometimes balances the lights themselves, cooling them down to a daylight colour temperature by adding a blue CTB gel in front of the light. 

Even his recently released studio work, such as Devs, uses the same idea of lighting with loads of tungsten fixtures. In this case, a combination of ceiling and floor mounted tungsten bulbs, such as nine lights and par cans, were reflected off the textured, gold tiled set walls. 

These were run through a board that could dim various lights up and down to create shimmering, golden reflections.

After only shooting on film for the first half of his career, he finally had to make the move into working with a digital cinema camera in 2015 on Ex Machina. Instead of going with far and away the most popular high end camera manufacturer of the time, Arri, he made the unusual call to shoot on the Sony F65. 

Hardy often talks about wanting the camera to see and represent what he sees with his own eye, and, for him, the F65’s true reproduction of colour stuck out as the best way of capturing the movie.

He continued shooting on Sony cameras, using the larger F65 for studio mode shots and the lighter F55 for Steadicam or shots which needed a lighter build. He later replaced this with the newer Sony Venice upon its release.

He has also paired these Sony cameras with other cameras which are always chosen for a specific purpose. Whether that be shooting at higher resolutions with the Red Weapon Dragon, or handing out the light DJI 4-D with its in-built 4-axis gimbal to loads of on the ground operators to get stabilised, documentary style coverage of action scenes.

He often pairs his camera selection with older anamorphic lenses - which have optical imperfections and a bit more character than super sharp, optically perfect, modern lenses.

Sometimes those are Panavision anamorphics, such as the C-series or E-Series, and other times, such as on Ex Machina he chose the vintage Xtal Express anamorphics - which have lots of distortion and falloff towards the edges of the frame.

“We shot the film anamorphically and we settled on these old Cooke Xtal Express lenses. They’re basically like old, rehouse Cooke Speed Panchro spherical lenses. So, the reason I picked them was that it became about personality. If you choose a 32mm for a certain scene, it’s not because you want to go wider, its because you want that feeling of this 32mm which is off the scale in terms of its personality.”

He favours wide to mid focal length anamorphics - most often using a 35mm, 40mm or 50mm. 

When shooting digitally, like most DPs, he likes using a light diffusion filter - like this BTS photo which shows him using a 1/8th Black Pro Mist filter. This filter takes the edge off digital images, blooms highlights in a subtle, filmic way and washes out the mid tones a bit.

CONCLUSION

Whether it’s his method of lighting the entire space of the set, curating the crew that is there, or selecting the camera package and LUT which will provide colour which is true to his eye - his method is always on getting the set to feel as close to the world of the film as possible.

From there it’s then a matter of bottling that feeling, so that what is captured by the camera mimics the tone of the story and impacts the audience in a real way.