year-old DP whose career has shot off like a rocket this past year-thanks in large part to the big-budget clip "I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing" (Aerosmith, from the Michael Bay-directed feature film Armageddon)-is a director’s DP. He’s attentive, communicative, and he helps them do great work. That must mean he’s easy to work with.
"Easy?" director Malcolm Venville says with a laugh. Venville, repped by bicoastal/ international Propaganda Films, has worked with Cutter twice. "Let’s say he’s a talented man," Venville comments. "And he has the right temperament. Not easy, exactly-but calm."
Cutter’s not the kind of guy who feigns interest in small cult films when big movies are the things that get him going. Growing up, it was Hollywood hits like Terminator, Blade Runner and The Thing that made him feel the "industry" was where his life was headed.
Headed, as it turns out, to the top of the heap, where he’s been shooting for such clients as McDonald’s, Nintendo, adidas, Samuel Adams, Mountain Dew and Energizer.
"I got bit by the film bug when I was about 15," says Cutter, who was born in Los Angeles but grew up in Australia. (He visited the States often to visit his mother’s family in Oklahoma, and got hooked on Apple Jacks, root beer and Disneyland.) "I remember seeing behind-the-scenes type of movies, like the making of Star Wars or movies like the Exorcist, and being fascinated by the people behind the camera instead of in front of it."
Cutter initially wanted to direct, but while attending Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles, where he majored in film, people liked the way he lensed his work. "[They] asked me to shoot theirs," he says. "At that point, I realized I enjoyed being able to focus on cinematography as opposed to spreading [myself] thin as a director."
In the real world, Cutter paid his dues, working as a camera assistant for some three years in L.A. Simultaneously, he says, he was shooting low-budget music videos with director Francis Lawrence, who is repped by Hollywood-based DNA. "We went to school together, but we didn’t know each other then," says Cutter. Slowly but surely, the clips got bigger and better. Now he works regularly with A-list musicians, from Aerosmith to Eve 6, to Ben Folds Five, Coolio, Jill Sobule, Maxwell and Natalie Cole.
The sequence of his career, he says, seems to be in sync with the times. "I think people always aspire to go to commercials from music videos, and then, ultimately, to get into movies."
He’d like to be known, he says, as a DP who "does a broad spectrum. Certain DPs have a look and are known for it, and I don’t want to be one of those guys."
Not to worry. He can shoot a lake at night, turning a black boat on black water into a mysterious, sexy spot for, of all things, an outboard engine ("Cape Canaveral," for Mercury Marine, directed by Venville via Fallon McElligott, Minneapolis). He can drop you into the nightmare of a dentist chair, as he did in "Dentist" (for McDonald’s, directed by DNA’s Lawrence via Leo Burnett Chicago; Lawrence also directed the Aerosmith clip). He can get all misty on you, as he did with a gauzy, black-and-white basketball spot for Fila ("White World," directed by Foote, Cone & Belding, New York’s Sam Gulisano, executive VP/group creative director, and produced through Santiago, New York). And he can be home-movie charming with a kick, like he was recently for adidas. In four spots directed by Noam Murro of bicoastal HKM Productions, via Leagas Delaney, San Francisco, and set to break in June, he shot bogus baby movies for genuine women’s world cup soccer players. The gag is that they showed the right stuff even as babies, like one player who keeps slapping back a toy her mother puts in her crib.
No matter the shoot, he notes, his goal is to find what he calls a spot’s "motivation," and then to make sure that the commercial sustains the integrity of that conceit. Nothing bugs him more, he says, than a music video shot by a director who "thinks it’s cool" to experiment with different lenses for the hell of it. Consistency, "from beginning to end," is why he admires DPs such as Roger Deakins (Fargo, Kundun, Dead Man Walking), whose expansive range, he says, remains true to each individual project.
He also admires the naturalistic lighting of Caleb Deschanel, who directs spots through Dark Light Pictures, West Hollywood, and has worked as a cinematographer on feature films such as The Natural and The Right Stuff. Cutter says that his preference of working with a mid-range of lenses-25, 35 and 50 millimeter-has to do "with the way I like to light, which is the closest to the way our eyes see. I find it the most honest and unless the director wants something stylized, that’s sort of the way I approach it."s
