Cinematography Style: Wally Pfister

INTRODUCTION

How is it that Wally Pfister went from shooting quote unquote ‘erotic thrillers’ to being the cinematographer responsible for bringing some of the biggest, most iconic blockbusters of the 2000s to the big screen for director Christopher Nolan?

In this edition of cinematography style let’s unpack Wally Pfister’s career by going over some of his philosophy, thoughts and ideas about filmmaking and then looking at some examples of the film gear he used to execute those ideas.  

BACKGROUND

After graduating from high school, with a keen interest in filmmaking, Pfister started at the bottom as a production assistant at a television station. He was allowed to borrow their CP-16 16mm film news cameras on weekends to shoot visual essays. After showing them to the production manager he was brought on to shoot low budget PSAs. This later developed into a full time career as a news cameraman who also shot TV documentaries for PBS.

After an encounter with Robert Altman on a series he directed, he made the decision to move to LA and enrol at the AFI to study cinematography. Some of his AFI classmates included Janusz Kamiński and Phedon Papamichael who he sometimes worked with as a grip or electrician.  

“When you come out to Hollywood, I came out here to be a cinematographer, to shoot movies. You end up shooting a lot of different things. MTV shows. And I did Animal Instinct. I did all of these erotic thrillers that were not pornography but kind of R-rated. You know, they called them erotic thrillers. Honestly that’s where I cut my teeth and learned how to light. And learned how to light fast. We shot movies in 15 days. You know, if you had a big budget one you shot it in 18 days.” 

After working on a string of B-movies, he started to gain traction shooting films such as The Hi-Line which went to Sundance and received festival acclaim. At a festival he met a director called Christopher Nolan who was looking to shoot his second feature Memento. 

This began the start of a collaborative relationship which would last many years. 

PHILOSOPHY

A core tenet of his philosophy comes from the idea that the job of the cinematographer is at the intersection between being a technician and being an artist. 

“What you have to understand is that cinematography is one part artistry and one part craftsmanship.”

Much of the early development of his skills as a craftsman happened through working on R-rated movies, where being able to light very quickly and well became an important skill to have. These practical skills are then intermingled with creative thinking about how to best visually represent each story on screen.

This process of thinking about the story begins during the planning phase in pre-production all the way when he’s first presented with a screenplay.

“My first read of the script is really just as a viewer and reacting to it as an audience member. And then the subsequent passes are just breaking it down, coming up with questions really. My process with Chris is that I just make pages and pages and pages of questions and I walk into his office and say, you know, ‘What was your thought about doing this? What do you think about doing this?’ And then really it’s easier for me to start thinking creatively after all of those sort of those logistical…and once I’m in Chris’ head and I understand how he sees it on the screen.” 

This process of collaborating with the director carries over to all heads of departments from the production designer to the editor. Pfister makes an analogy of cinematographers being kind of like a general that reports to the first in command.

Good directors will surround themselves with high calibre collaborators whose job it is to present ideas, suggestions, questions and occasional pushback to directors - who then decide whether to accept, reject or use those suggestions to inspire a new creative idea.

A cinematographic concept that he has carried into various films, especially movies such as Inception with its various, simultaneous plot threads, is the idea of providing a unique visual look for each scene. 

“One of the sort of challenges creatively was to break this into different looks. And particularly later on when the film is intercutting between the ski slopes of Calgary and, you know, a tumbling hallway and a van on a rainy street in Los Angeles it’s important to distinguish looks between those three elements.”

Not only do these different looks and locations provide a sort of global scale and greater depth to the world of the movie, but they also serve as a way of distinctly differentiating between different plot lines, dream layers or characters which more clearly solidifies the story in the minds of the audience and minimises any potential visual confusion between the different plots.

A final concept that both he and Christopher Nolan are drawn to is to try and shoot action scenes as much in camera as possible. This comes from pushing to find practical solutions to difficult shots rather than constructing those shots purely with visual effects work.

Of course certain lines in a script such as a Parisian street folding in on itself require an integration of visual effects and live action photography. For these sequences, again, communication with collaborators, such as the visual effects supervisor, are crucial. 

“There are not that many sequences that are pure CG like that. I just remember shooting the action bits and then shooting the emotional bits and then of course the main action set pieces have almost no visual effects in them. All the way back to Batman Begins I’ve been involved in the visual effects stuff in that they send me still photographs and comps and I help guide them in terms of the lighting and the colour to match our original photography.”   

GEAR

“The important thing is that we’re not treated like technicians, we’re not treated as anything else but the visual storytellers of the film. And in that people should not be dictating what kind of equipment we use to capture our films. We should be the ones, with our expertise, that are able to choose the tools that we want to choose.”

When looking at his films, particularly his large budget work with Christopher Nolan, they maintain quite a similar overall look, while the visual nuances in the storytelling, like framing, lighting, lens selection and camera movement change based on each story's requirements.

I’d describe his look on Nolan films as being bound by three things. One, being shot largely on 35mm film. Two, utilising a combination of the anamorphic film format and the taller, higher resolution, large, Imax format. And, three, lighting and exposing the negative with a rich level of contrast, colour and saturation.

Pfister shot all of his high end work exclusively on film, even his later movies which were shot after Arri had released their digital Alexa camera. This choice was primarily down to the look of film, but also took into account the way in which film is worked with on set.

“Chris and I are real film guys. The fact that 35 is closer to 8K and there’s no digital 8K camera but it’s also the physical depth of the layers on film that give it the contrast that give it the colour saturation. And, it’s the simplicity of it for Chris and I. All we really have to plug into that film camera is a battery and we have to load a magazine of film on there.” 

Most of his high end work was done in the anamorphic format with Panavision anamorphics, such as the Primos, E- and C-Series, and with 35mm Panaflex cameras like the Millenium XL and the Platinum.

In his early work with Nolan on Memento and Insomnia they almost exclusively used the longer 75mm anamorphic focal length lenses. However, for his later films that included more blockbuster action that needed to be captured in wider shots he preferred to shoot on wider 35, 40 and 50mm anamorphic focal lengths with the camera physically closer to the characters and action. 

Even if they’re shooting with a single camera at a time, Pfister often likes to have multiple cameras on standby built in different configurations - which saves on the time of building cameras. For example, on Batman Begins they carried one Panaflex Platinum in a studio build and two Panaflex Millennium XLs - one for Steadicam and one for handheld.

He’s also used specialist cameras like a Arriflex 435 or a Photo-Sonics 4C to shoot slow motion film at higher frame rates. 

From The Dark Knight onwards this 35mm anamorphic look was mixed with Imax for certain set pieces. This granted them a higher resolution and a larger than life format. 

“I take credit for making it happen but it was actually the brainchild of Chris Nolan to shoot on Imax. I put a lot of effort early on in pre-production on The Dark Knight to figuring out what it was all about and what it meant to shoot with Imax cameras.”

This included finding technical ways to move the huge camera, such as with an enormous Steadicam Imax rig. More creatively it also meant thinking about framing. Unusually, they made the decision to cut between footage shot with the different native aspect ratios of the anamorphic and the much taller Imax format. 

Pfister found that as long as he kept the focus of the framing in the Imax shots more towards the centre, giving more headroom to characters, it transitioned smoother when a cut was made between the two formats as the eyes of the audience were in the same place.

 The third part of Pfister and Nolan’s look comes from a rich looking negative. One part of this is down to how Pfister likes to expose the film. He regularly rated his films at a lower ISO and then did what was called ‘printing down or timing down’. 

For example, he would take a 500T film stock from Kodak that was recommended to be shot at 500 ISO and instead rate it on his light metre and shoot it at 400 ISO. The film would then be developed regularly at 500 ISO. This meant that he overexposed the film slightly and then in the DI or colour grade brought the exposure down by the same amount to produce a rich, deeper looking negative with nice contrast and saturation.

Another reason for the contrast in his images of course comes from his lighting. He often positions his lights so that his key light on his character comes from the side. Side lighting a character produces shadow on one side of the face, while the other side is exposed brighter.

He also often hits characters with strong sources of backlight so that a highlight around the back of their hair forms that separates them from a darker background. He regularly combines these techniques of side light and back light to produce a negative with strong contrast.

CONCLUSION

Pfister’s career developed slowly, learning the ropes and how to light quickly on B-movies to eventually shooting some of the biggest films in the world. His style is informed by him prioritising collaboration, maintaining a core, Hollywood look that was flexible depending on the story and shooting visceral, in camera action sequences.

All of this, while operating at the intersection between technology and creativity.