Robert Elswit, ASC, won a Best Cinematography Oscar and an ASC Award in 2008 for his work on Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Elswit also earned a BAFTA Award nomination and won several critics associations’ awards for his cinematography on the film, including the New York Film Critics and National Society of Film Critics Awards. Elswit has collaborated with Anderson on several of the director’s films, beginning with Hard Eight, and then including Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, and Inherent Vice (Warner Bros. Pictures).
The latter has garnered attention this awards season as has the Elswit-lensed Nightcrawler (Open Road Films), which marks the feature directorial debut of Dan Gilroy.
Elswit earned his first Oscar nomination and ASC Award nom in 2006 for his black-and-white cinematography on director George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck. On the strength of his work on that film, Elswit won an Independent Spirit Award, as well as the Los Angeles and Boston Film Critics Awards. He also lensed the Clooney starrers The Men Who Stare at Goats, Michael Clayton and Syriana.
In addition to his work with Anderson, Elswit has worked repeatedly with a number of directors on such projects as Gary Fleder’s Runaway Jury and Imposter; Redbelt and Heist, with writer/director David Mamet; Curtis Hanson’s The River Wild, Bad Influence and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle; A Dangerous Woman, Waterland and Paris Trout, directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal; and Michael Clayton, Duplicity and The Bourne Legacy for director Tony Gilroy.
Elswit’s filmography also includes Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible–Ghost Protocol, Ben Affleck’s The Town, Joel Schumacher’s 8MM, the Roger Spottiswoode-directed James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, Mike Newell’s Amazing Grace and Chuck, and Rob Reiner’s The Sure Thing. In addition, Elswit worked on Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed Rolling Stones documentary Shine a Light.
At press time, Elswit was slated to begin work on Mission Impossible: 5 which is being directed by Christopher McQuarrie.
SHOOT connected with Elswit who reflected on Nightcrawler and Inherent Vice.
SHOOT: What were the biggest creative challenges that Nightcrawler posed to you as a cinematographer?
Elswit: I had limited experience with digital media. I had not shot a feature with a digital camera. My only experience had been an 18-day shoot on a TV pilot.
Alexa was right for Nightcrawler because of the speed of the camera. It’s much faster than motion picture film in the dark. We used as little lighting as possible for night exterior work. We had a short schedule, only 24 days to shoot the film in over 40 locations. We went with ambient night lighting, storefronts, whatever DWP [The Department of Water and Power utility] provided in the area. We would just light the foreground creatively and otherwise shoot with available light.
We broke an important rule with Nightcrawler. It’s normally a big mistake to have lots of locations with a short shooting schedule and limited budget. The reason it worked for Nightcrawler is that Danny [writer/director Gilroy] and I spent an inordinate amount of time prepping the movie. Danny and I went to every single location over and over again. We spent weeks before going on location to shoot. We had a specific plan for everything we were going to shoot. We weren’t trying to figure things out during the shoot–we didn’t have the time for that. We spent almost six weeks in prep. Danny understood that was the only way we could finish. We could not fall behind during the shoot with the pressure of the bonding company coming in and shutting us down.
I fell in love with what Danny wanted to do. He was trying to capture L.A. outside the typical downtown locations. He wanted to see the valleys and the canyons, the roads that connect the Hollywood area to the [San Fernando] Valley. There are hills and valleys and a sort of emptiness to nighttime Los Angeles. The roads we drive are the connective tissue–the driveways, streets and back alleys. In Los Angeles, you’re in the car, always on your way somewhere. You feel the street lights and the car lights as you travel. We explored storefronts, strip malls, car lots–nothing that visually compelling but that was the world of this movie. The roads in the hills aren’t that well lit. We had to shoot on streets in the hills that had enough ambient lighting.
SHOOT: You shot the daytime scenes for Nightcrawler on film, though, correct?
Elswit: Yes, we shot daytime scenes on super 35mm with a Panavision camera. That’s because time was of the essence and I am so familiar with shooting in that world. I know the film stocks and am more efficient in that world. We could have done it with Alexa. But my level of experience with film made that the best way for me to be efficient for the daytime work. Still, I enjoyed working in digital. Alexa is very viable.
SHOOT: How did you connect with first-time feature director Dan Gilroy and get the Nightcrawler gig?
Elswit: I had done three movies with his brother Tony–Michael Clayton, the Bourne movie and Duplicity. I kind of knew Danny socially and have been close to his dad Frank, a wonderful playwright. I got to know Danny when Frank came to L.A. for a revival of The Subject Was Roses for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Tony is one of my closest friends. When he and Danny wrote the last Bourne movie, this [Nightcrawler] came up. They asked me if I would think about doing it. I said yes.
I’m also Jake Gyllenhaal’s godfather. I grew up with his family, spent most of the 1980s with the Gyllenhaals socially. I was asked if I would talk to Jake about doing Nightcrawler. I ensured him it was a great project but am not sure I was much of an influence. I think he would have done it anyway.
SHOOT: With Nightcrawler and Inherent Vice, respectively, you had the experience of working with a first-time feature director in Dan Gilroy, and continuing your long running collaboration with director Paul Thomas Anderson. Would you reflect on your experiences with both directors–parallels between the two, differences?
Elswit: Danny has a very singular point of view on how he sees the world, how he experiences it, how you convey that and how it’s supposed to look and feel. Both Tony and Paul believe what cinematographers believe–that the way the lighting of the scene is done, how it looks, the way it feels, the nature and quality of the lighting when you watch a scene is a direct way of communicating emotion. Probably only music is a little stronger. How you shoot and light a scene is really conveying an emotional message.
Paul is even more direct and adamant about that. For Paul, the content of a scene is directly connected to the way it looks. It speaks directly to what’s going on. That’s Paul’s world. We are not making pretty pictures. We are connecting to some sort of emotional content, to the characters, helping the audience to connect with the characters and the emotions.
Paul is trying to discover what the movie looks like. It’s so important for Paul to find out and almost impossible for him to talk about since there are so many intangibles. He wants to discover the film while he’s making it. He wants to see it in dailies and not find it in post. He doesn’t want to manipulate or appear to be manipulating. He wants to give the actors freedom. He wants the environment to feel a certain way, goofing around and experimenting in ways not done before. He’s going for something impossible to define. A lot of the look of Inherent Vice grew out of photography books of the 1970s and ‘80s–almost amateur photo books done of the beach. One specific book was a photo history of Laurel Canyon in the 1970s, with rock groups there, bright colors, saturated colors slightly faded. It was a lucid thing we were chasing after the whole time. Paul is trying to have life break out in front of him. He wants to discover something that’s occurring, that he hasn’t anticipated.
SHOOT: You’ve enjoyed a long, ongoing collaborative relationship with Paul Thomas Anderson. How did you connect to begin with?
Elswit: John Lyons, who produced Paul’s first film [Hard Eight] introduced us. We started talking about movies. Even though I’m 20 years older than Paul, his frame of reference was his dad, a voiceover artist and actor. Paul looked at old movies and had a reference unlike anyone his age. His frame of reference was my frame of reference. We shared the same taste in movies, they way they looked and felt. We are kindred spirits.
Paul’s love of old movies is a definite influence on his work. We did Boogie Nights, a contemporary film set in the 1970s. But when you really look at it, it’s very much an American backstage musical. The framework is the Busby Berkeley films like Gold Diggers of 1933 and 42nd Street. A bunch of kids get together to put on a show. A producer trying to put the show together, the ingenue, the leading boy, older men. These people in great Warner Brothers musicals are in Boogie Nights. Boogie Nights was more interesting and less frivolous but in many ways the framework is the same. I don’t know Paul even knew this while we were doing it. We took Gold Diggers of 1933 and made it about the porn industry in the 1970s.
