Spring cinematographer and co-director Aaron Moorhead

Interviews

 

Spring is the rarest of horror film breeds – a genre effort that would function perfectly well shorn of all its macabre elements. It’s one of the few horror films I’d describe as thematically beautiful – a meditation on love and chemical attraction, faith and skepticism, science and magic. The film’s horror comes not from the Lovecraftian creature that belatedly makes its bow, but rather from the shared existential inevitabilities of the human condition.

Aaron Moorhead – who co-directed, co-edited, produced and served as cinematographer – talked to Deep Fried Movies about the making of the genre-bending Spring. He was joined by crew member Will Sampson, who, in keeping with Moorhead’s multi-hyphenate job description, served as 1^st Assistant Camera, Steadicam and drone operator, and scorpion wrangler.

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Deep Fried Interview: Bad Turn Worse cinematographer Jeff Bierman

Interviews

The quote above slips out of the mouth of teenage bookworm Sue (Mackenzie Davis) in the first post-credits scene of the new Texas-set neo noir Bad Turn Worse. It’s followed by a 1990s-era Tarantino-ish digression on the semantics of biscuits and gravy at the fast food joint Whataburger.

Considering my affection for Thompson’s misanthropic crime novels and Whataburger’s buttery goodness, Bad Turn Worse pretty much had me at “biscuit and gravy.” However, the film took a circuitous route getting there. The Whataburger scene was shot in Los Angeles nearly a year after principal photography wrapped in Texas, part of a series of pick-ups that shaped the film into its final form.

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Bad Turn Worse (2014), cinematographer interview, cooke, DIY Lighting Fixtures, Frame Grabs, Jeff Bierman, Jim Thompson, Neo Noir, Red Epic, zeiss

Deep Fried Interview: Cheap Thrills cinematographer Andrew Wheeler

Cinematography

There’s an axiom in movie production that goes like this – you can do something fast, you can do it cheap or you can do it well. Any two are possible simultaneously, but only at the expense of the third. So if you want something done fast and cheap, you will sacrifice quality. If you want something done inexpensively and done well, it will not be fast.

Cheap Thrills defies that conventional wisdom.

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Alexa, Andrew Wheeler, Cheap Thrills, EL Katz, zeiss

Deep Fried Interview: Short Term 12 cinematographer Brett Pawlak

Cinematography

The title of director Destin Cretton’s Short Term 12 refers to a temporary care facility for adolescents with nowhere else to go. For those kids – and for the staff, barely more than kids themselves – Short Term 12 is at various times a solace and a prison. A respite from an outside world that has abused them and an excuse to delay re-engaging with reality. A place of isolation and a fishbowl of perpetual observation.

The task of visually expressing those dichotomies – all while staying within the parameters of Cretton’s non-intrusive, naturalistic aesthetic – fell on cinematographer Brett Pawlak, who talked with Deep Fried Movies about the challenges of making one of our favorite films of the year.

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Arri Alexa, cooke, Red Epic, short term 12, zeiss