By Robert Goldrich

Twice Oscar nominated for Best Cinematography (Batman Forever, The Prince of Tides) and thrice an ASC Award nominee (for the same two feature films as well as the HBO miniseries Angels In America), Stephen Goldblatt, ASC, BSC, also may very well figure in the upcoming awards season for his lensing of Get On Up, director Tate Taylor’s biopic on the iconic James Brown.

The film is Goldblatt’s second collaboration with Taylor, the first being The Help which earned four Oscar nominations in 2012, including a win for Octavia Spencer for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role. The other three noms were for Best Picture, Viola Davis for Best Leading Actress, and Jessica Chastain for Best Supporting Actress.

Goldblatt is also accomplished in television as underscored by three Emmy nominations for Outstanding Cinematography for a Miniseries or Movie–the first coming in 2001 for Conspiracy, then in 2002 for Path to War, and in 2004 for part II of the aforementioned Angels In America.

In 2007 Goldblatt received the Camerimage Lifetime Achievement Award.

Goldblatt’s filmography additionally includes some 1,000 commercials over the years though his focus now is firmly on features. At press time he was lensing The Intern, a comedy directed and written by Nancy Meyers, and with a cast that includes Anne Hathaway and Robert De Niro.

SHOOT: What drew you to Get On Up?

Goldblatt: Tate Taylor. For The Help, we were in Greenwood, Mississippi, with limited money, not enough time and a 150-page script–and we had a wonderful time together. It’s a joy working with Tate–his sensibilities, the talented people he brings together, his attitude towards filmmaking. The only source of disappointment for me on Get On Up was that we couldn’t make it happen two years earlier. We had to work hard to get financing. It’s not the sort of film that studios generally finance. I remember going off to Natchez [Mississippi] with Tate and taking a bunch of still photographs of proposed locations and mapping out ideas for those locations. We borrowed a helicopter and took more shots to give a feeling of what we had in our heads. We produced a little book and ultimately that was successful in helping Tate to get the financing he needed for the film.

SHOOT: What was the biggest creative challenge that Get On Up posed to you as a cinematographer?

Goldblatt: I suppose the elephant in the room was always the music. How do you bring that to life? How do you capture the color and feel of the period in which that music was performed. For an audience that nowadays is used to the most sophisticated lighting changes and camera movements, it would be tempting to recreate James Brown as he might be seen in 2014. But he was in fact a performer in different time eras and circumstances. At times we had to visually be spare, dark, dangerous. The music and the period in which it was performed had to be accurately depicted and that feeling and spirit conveyed.

Keeping everything of the period in which it was performed became all the more challenging because of the incredibly limited amount of time we had to pull it off. We shot the concerts as if we were at the concerts. What helped was that as a young cameraman many years ago I shot 16mm at live rock and role performances. That was exciting because you only got one crack at getting the shot. They’re not coming back for an encore. Of course with Get On Up, we could do another take but there’s a limit to that–as great as Chadwick [Boseman, the actor who portrayed James Brown] and everybody else was on stage, there is a limit to the physical capacity of any performer. Generally that first or second take is the best.

We also had to do a lot with the locations in production. We turned Natchez locations into, for instance, the Apollo Theater [in NYC’s Harlem neighborhood]. We turned Jackson, Mississippi, into Paris. We were stretched photographically. Every crew member and department was likewise stretched to make things work. There wasn’t one department that wasn’t up to its ears in work.

SHOOT: When we talked around the time The Help was released, you mentioned that some investors were concerned about Tate Taylor’s relative inexperience as a feature director. However, you had no such concern given Tate’s talent and how his filmmaking was informed by his experience as an actor and writer. Now that you’ve had the chance to work with Taylor again, how have you seen him mature since as a director?

Goldblatt: He’s far more sophisticated. When we shot The Help, he had never cut a full-length feature film. He hadn’t had the experience of working with a great editor and seeing how a movie could be shaped after the fact. He now is totally on top of that, protecting himself so we could have alternate ways of cutting the material. He is better able to see sequences being cut as we are in the middle of shooting. His expertise now helps to open your mind as a DP as to what we are doing, what we should be doing, what we’re not doing and why. Tate is wide open to the possibilities.

SHOOT: What camera did you deploy on Get On Up?

Goldblatt: This is my first digital film. I resisted shooting digitally up until this point. I didn’t feel that confident in the cameras. The whole workflow for me wasn’t mature enough. With the film workflow working well, I wasn’t in a hurry to go to digital origination.

But for me the end of film is obvious. In my other life as a still photographer, I’ve been shooting digitally for 10 years or more. I thought it was about time that I originated digitally rather than just post digitally for a movie. Even when shooting on film, you’re in a digital domain within 12 hours of wrapping a day’s work. The negative gets digitized and that’s what you’re working off of. I shot Get On Up with the Alexa. ARRI’s Alexa is head and shoulders above the other digital cameras. It provided a lot of creative leeway that I didn’t expect.

SHOOT: So with the Alexa you were able to recreate the different time periods as you chronicled James Brown’s life.

Goldblatt: Yes, but it’s much more than the cinematography–there’s Sharen Davis’ costumes, Mark Ricker’s production design and so on. There were certain colors for background that I remember from shooting The Cotton Club [directed by Francis Ford Coppola] in 1982. I am working on a restoration of The Cotton Club with Coppola. I have my stills of The Cotton Club from that time and I used those sort of colors to help us with the period look with [production designer] Mark Ricker on Get On Up.

SHOOT: What’s your next project?’

Goldblatt: I am working on something very different than Get On Up. It’s a film called The Intern being directed by Nancy Meyers. It stars Anne Hathaway and Robert De Niro. And again, I’m shooting with the Alexa.

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