Special Episode: Remembering Rodney Charters, ASC, CSC, NZSC

0:00This is Cinepod, the cinematography podcast, a program about the art, craft, and philosophy of the moving image, presented by Hot Rod cameras. We're resharing a 2017 episode of our show with a heavy heart. Rodney Charters, ASC, CSC, NZSC, passed away on September 13, 2026 at age 77. He was best known as the cinematographer behind the television series 24, as well as the shows Roswell and Shameless. Rodney also had decades of documentary and drama experience spanning New Zealand, Canada, and Hollywood. In this episode, Rodney takes us all the way back, growing up in his father's darkroom in New Plymouth and cutting his teeth as a sound recordist for the BBC.

0:49He learned to shoot on the fly as a documentarian and traveled to more than 80 countries. Rodney talks candidly about the philosophy that shaped his camera work on 24, with full scenes shot in their entirety and actors given the freedom to find their own truth. From cheap secondhand fixtures to modern LED lights, Rodney perfected the craft of lighting, no matter the budget. It's a wide-ranging, generous conversation with someone who genuinely loved this work until the end. on a personal note Rodney took a particular interest in the early days of Hot Rod cameras and we became friends I visited him on the set of one of the final episodes of 24 and we worked together on several projects including new technology for motion pictures and television I was there in 2013 when he received a lifetime achievement award from the ASC it was a wonderful evening where a thousand of his closest industry friends celebrated him thanks for everything Rodney you will be missed

1:57who's on the show this episode well I couldn't be prouder in my life that we got to talk to one of my favorite DPs on earth Rodney Charters Rodney is fantastic and we could fill three episodes with Rodney Rodney's not just an amazing DP and not only is he somebody who I think kind of created a template that is all action television and a lot of action movies today like I feel like even if you watch the Bourne movies I feel like they are a reference to the groundbreaking work that he did in like 2001 on 24 he took he takes things to another level but beyond that dude's just fascinating when I grow up I want to be Rodney Charters and without further ado Rodney Charters

2:40I'm here with cinematographer Rodney Charters Rodney thank you so much for coming on Thank you. Let's go back to the beginning of your story. While I became aware of you in the 90s with a certain horror movie, but also big time with 24, but like looking at your bios and stuff. So you're originally from New Zealand, correct? Correct. And your father was a photographer. Yeah. He was still a photographer in a small town called New Plymouth. And he and his partner had met during the war when they were both Air Force phototechs in the South Pacific, in Guida Canal and other bases throughout the country.

3:13throughout Solomon Islands, about 35 different bases. And one of the things that I grew up that kind of influenced me was an album, a scrapbook album that he had put together after the war of negatives that he had shot. The guys swimming in the pool in Hamburg Base and Guida Canal and Emerau and all the different bases that they were there. And unfortunately, as one never does when your father's getting old and you just never seem to have the time to sit down and say, hey, Deb, what did you do in the war, you know? But fortunately, one of his buddies from that time has survived, and I did do an interview with him on a C300 and double system sound and tried to make a good job of it.

4:00But the reality is that you have to make it up, and this album was the starting place for me in my intervening years. I didn't care about it. And then after he passed it, my brother said, oh, you better keep it. You need to be the archivist. And there were some 300 shots that were printed because the negatives were being very big. Some of them were 4x5 because they used the aerial plate cameras that he had access to. So some of them were quite beautiful. And he just kept the negatives and smuggled them back to New Zealand and printed them after the war, actually as part of his demob process and made this big album.

4:39So those images are part of my early childhood experience of documenting life, strange life. What are the kinds of images that you saw in there that really struck you? Well, it was about the boys. Their dark room was a tent, and they had a great struggle keeping temperatures because it was in the Pacific, in the middle of the tropics. So he said that the American supplies were always dropped on the beach at night, and they would go down and find an air conditioning unit and put a big stencil on it saying Royal New Zealand Air Force and stencil over the American markings and then tell the Americans to deliver it to them.

5:19A shipment came in for us last night. So they were quite enterprising, but they basically never wore clothes. There's just this historic picture of them, all the boys naked swimming in the lagoon or they're all building their tent darkroom with nothing on just the big planks of wood in the appropriate places to preserve modesty. And it looked like a giant Boy Scout camp. Because they were behind lines, they were with the air bases servicing. One of the tasks was to process gun camera footage. The 30-mil cannon cameras in the P-51s and so on would fire a frame every time a bullet went out of the gun.

6:01So basically you'd have this 50... They were probably about six feet long, and so they would be dunk tank developed in a processing tank that was six or eight feet high. Jesus. And one of the stories that his partner told me only recently, funnily, and, you know, 75, 80 years later, was that my father Roy made quite a lot of money and actually bought our house in this small town, this big mansion that he had to hack his way through the old forest. An old woman had died, and this place was derelict during the war. and we lived in it and it became a kind of PTSD space for members of the core of his friends who had come back damaged from the war for whatever reasons and they were to hang out in our house and I remember them as a child, as a baby and then one of them said that I saved his life because he became, my mom gave me to him to take care of me daily, you know, bottle feed, whatever.

6:59Oh, wow. And it kind of brought him back to life and he went on for, had a great career in London as a musicologist and got into the business because he ended up being the guy in London. If you wanted music for your movies in the 50s, you would go to him and he would have all the new pressings from all the record companies in the world and famous directors would go there to him and sit and listen to albums and make decisions about music that they'd like to use, classically based mostly, of course, in their movies. Anyhow, he told me this story. He said my father used to get booze in New Zealand, and the pilots would fly it up because that was the support area was out of New Zealand to the Solomons.

7:41And then he would hide it in the deep tank where they processed the gun camera, and tie it on strings and then drop it in because this is brown soup that just you couldn't see anything. And they made little hooks on the side of the tank with strings on them because no one ever found that they had hundreds of bottles of booze in these tanks. and he did quite well out of it apparently. Did you meet him again like when you were in the film business and were you able to talk about that at all? Well, my father, of course, was still working when I left New Zealand and went to the Royal College of Art in London, went to film school, but I used his camera to make the movie that got me into the college.

8:17It's a film called Film Exercise. That was my second year at an art school in Auckland and the university and that opened the door for me. and I got into the film school. Tony Scott was a year ahead of me, and Stephen Goldblatt was a year ahead of me. I mean, there were great people that went to the school. We had very little footage, camera equipment. We had a couple of old Eclair NPRs, and actually they were quite special. We had some old Aries. Like S cameras? Yeah, 16 mil. There was no 35, but Tony went on to do quite lovely work with Stephen, and other people, we made great films. I made a little documentary about a New Zealand couple that were living in London, black and white, and the New Zealand film people bought it, a television company bought it and broadcast it.

9:09Oh, wow. So it was a good training ground. And then I had worked summer relief. I had to go before a board, but I worked at the BBC as a sound dubbing recordist in an old studio out at Ealing, which is still Ealing Studios. I worked there a little recently and it was kind of fun to go back and see the old recording room is gone now because literally I had a tiny space. I was the 35 mil mag recordist. Oh, wow. And I had this big mag stripe, thousand foot rolls. So that means that you're taking like quarter inch tape and dubbing it over to... Well, I didn't ever do that. I simply was the guy who pressed record and made sure that the film ran through the gate and was in sync.

9:51So if we, there was a 10-minute roll, it wasn't rock and roll, you couldn't go back. You had to keep going forward. So if you made a mistake, you'd go back and start again. But I had a punch mark, and I had to set it up on the record head, and they would do this Selson interlock system where all the machines, all the playback, 35-mil mag stripe machines would all lock to my recorder. And I was in another room on the other side of the property, and there was a mixer, and because he had the picture up. And he would push go, and my recorder would kick into gear with all the other playback decks. Old technology.

10:27So for people, because I think a lot of people who listen to this are probably from a time before editing on film, certainly. So whatever was shot in the field had to be recorded onto audio tape that looked like 35-millimeter film. No, it was transferred. They were using Nagras by then, quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape recorder. So they would record quarter inch, and then you were in a facility that would take that and then turn that into basically audio tape that looked like 35. That was exactly like 35 millimeter film so that it would run parallel through like a flatbed or whatever. Prior to time code, we had footage count that was stamped on the footage and stamped on the sound.

11:06Once it was synchronized, and I had a raw roll, and all of the sound tracks were coming back to me, and they were being recorded on my deck. so I had to just make sure that nothing happened during that process and re-sync it every time we went back to the start. At that time, the BBC did have a rock and roll system based on an old Keller flatbed, which many film people still use the Keller system. I think probably they've changed over, but Spielberg, when he's cutting films, still uses a Keller-style flatbed. And they would be just like a steam bag, a flatbed with different plates. and the 35 mil mag stripe would flow through those and they'd have a bunch of them linked together with a hard drive connection.

11:52So they would all roll together, but you could roll backwards with that. So that was the beginning to say, oh, we made a mistake. We'll roll back and we'll punch in just the way people did with multitrack. You punch in to go into record and then you start and continue your mix and you keep going that way. But where you worked, they didn't have that system. They didn't have it in Ealing, but I did do a spot at BBC Television Center where we had a rock and roll system. And in those days, much of the sound effects was spun in off discs. The BBC had a very, very elaborate disc library of 45 discs, small ones, and there'd be six...

12:28Like actual record players. That's right. And there'd be a great big pot and a needle drop, and they would cue it up and hit play and bring up the sound. So if you wanted gunfire or something... Oh, man. That's how they would do it. I wouldn't last five minutes. Well, fascinating because footsteps, they would make footsteps out of a rushing weir, a little water weir with a little bit of water tripping over a big continuous sound. But they would watch the feet and they would bring the pot up in time with the feet and they would make this sound effects. I mean, our whole world is fake and make-believe.

13:02Yeah, yeah. And, you know, cut to the present. I'm actually having a lot of fun because I'm doing a show now which takes place in a different city in a different part of the world every week. and we're all doing it in Hollywood and we're just cheating everything. So all those kind of old style techniques are coming back. Of course, we are using green screen and we're a digital shoot and we can do a lot better compositing. But all of these tricks go back to the early days when people found ways of emulating reality on a soundstage or in an actual film stage where you're doing filming and you would cheat.

13:38you know that's incredible yeah i mean the the the the playback room in this suite was fast because it had 25 35 mil max stripe machines that is as you know it says they weigh a thousand pounds each my recorder weighed a thousand pounds and it was a vertical rack that was seven feet tall and and what do they do with all these like did they archive any of that stuff no it was all junked i mean i i think you can probably get perfect tone i think was probably the company They were Swiss. They were beautifully made, beautifully made. And the Keller flatbeds was the sound-only version of the chem. Oh, okay.

14:16So you had a chem at one end playing picture, and it was into a, there had to be a plumber cone tube recording that image that made the tape, right? Because it all went to tape to go to air. Yeah, yeah. And, I mean, the amazing thing is, though, this was a show called The World Tonight or something that I was working on just briefly as an assistant. and it was an hour long and they would record it in two bursts of 30 minutes each and they would have a guy come over and take from, put it in a motorcycle, run downstairs literally and motorcycle about a mile across this complex at BBC Television Center to lace it up and make it go to air and while they were playing the first reel, we were still dubbing the second reel.

14:59That's how scary that got. It was madness. So hence the whole gram swinging thing. Those guys were so adept at popping in all that background stuff that nobody had time to find. It was fast. It was really fast. They would preset a bunch of discs and you could see them very skilled at flipping these discs back and forth, needle dropping on the exact track. They're like DJs. They're like modern day DJs. Yeah. It was really fun. That's incredible. Well, first of all, I kind of want to hear a little bit more about starting out in New Zealand and making films in New Zealand. What year about would this be?

15:31There'd be 67. Well, I left in 68. The film made it into a film festival in Sydney in 67. So mid-60s, what is the filmmaking atmosphere like in New Zealand back then? Well, there wasn't none, really. There were some people making... The government had a publicity wing called the Film Board, and you could join that. It was very similar to the Canadian Film board out of Montreal and they made tourist films. One of their alumni was a guy called Brian Brake who became a very famous time-life photographer and was a founding member of Magnum, the Stills group that's founded out of Paris. And he and my father knew each other because they would come through and photograph Taranaki for publicity.

16:23And my father and my mother, I found, I went into a museum recently and I'm standing staring at this picture and I realize this is my mom and dad walking around the Maori pass site and even more extraordinary is there's pictures of me as a child in this movie it was about Taranaki the province where New Plymouth is and that was really strangely weird but the cameramen of course they would come to my dad's studio as a kind of stopping place because he knew the best spots to film the mountain and we have a fuji style mountain which is perpetual snow but during the winter we get down to about 3 000 feet and it's it's 9 000 eight and a half thousand feet high so it was quite spectacular and where the valleys and the cows and the trees and where was the best place to shoot this my father knew because they were always traveling around doing weddings from because they're driving from a to b they would They said, we'll stop and take a picture of that particular spot.

17:21So they would tell these cinematographers. And then on this occasion, to go to a Maori burial, actually a fortification on the top of a hill with the truncated ramparts where they put up the big stakes and so on. You can still see all of that in place from 150 years ago. And my mom and dad are walking up the side of this and then walking around. And the voiceover talks about it being a par side in the mountains in the background. So he was instrumental in having liaison with these cinematographers. So, of course, he early on and his partner said, we've got to have a camera. And he made quite a lot of documentaries.

17:57I was in many of them, 8mm, Super 8. They were about, well, the back story is that when the return services came back, the airmen and so on, soldiers to New Zealand, the government allowed them to get free land in the interior, deep in the interior that was fully bush covered. But their challenge was they had to get to it. So they had to build their own roads through the bush, felling trees, selling the timber, stripping the land, and then planting grass. So that process was years in the making. But as a child, I remember carrying the detonators for the blasting in a little wooden box with shavings in it.

18:40I was the guy that they would come to. And they had one of these Husqvarna drills with an eight-foot drill bit that was the core size of a stick of gelignite. And, of course, these guys were all out of the war, so there was nothing to them, this kind of munition stuff. And we'd drill into the side of this. It was popper clay, it was called. It was kind of quasi-limestone. It was relatively soft, but you needed to blow it out to get the bulldozer in and start cutting through the cliffs. and so they would fill the trees then they come along with a bulldozer and they get to a point where they needed to blast they drill into the side they put six sticks of dynamite in I remember and then they would put in my detonator into the last stick and shove it in and it had about a foot slow fuse on it where they would flick out their bicks and they'd light it and we'd all run for cover and the thing would blow and then we'd go back in with a bulldozer that's insane I haven't found these movies I know where they are but they need to be transferred and I don't know whether they'll play anymore, but they were quite fascinating.

19:40Oh, my God, you've got to get those. Well, it got me going into, oh, because we would see them. And then my dad would get movies if there was a birthday party. There was a ballroom, a small, modest ballroom in this house, and he'd cut a projector port up the top and put glass in, put an old 16 Bell and Howell up there, and he would play movies if I had a birthday party, and all the kids would come, and he'd get the young rascals, and he'd get all these Hollywood 16-mile movies. and we'd watch them. And he was a member of the society, the film society, and they would get more obscure European films that wouldn't make it into the theater.

20:16I mean, amazingly in that time, New Zealand had the second highest standard of living in the world in the 50s and 60s, right behind America. And we had five cinemas in our town, so people went to the movies. This is all before television. Television didn't arrive in our town until the late 70s. Really? Well, no, I'm saying it would be late 60s. But I remember watching Gunsmoke with my dad and the Westerner. Yeah. But loved what was going on with all of that and thought that he was making documentaries, but he did make a little movie about me. And so I played a little kid who gets his trains coming and my legs stuck in the trestle bridge and it was danger and, you know, called The White Goat.

21:01And so that was an exposure to me of behind the scenes, in front of the camera, 16 mil bolics. So I borrowed that to make a movie. And the movie was this kind of rock video thing, early, early days, which may be online soon. I have to find out where that is. And it got me into the college in London. So then I just left and never came back, basically. But this was well before Peter Jackson. So there was really nothing going on. Yeah. And only last year did I come back to New Zealand to work. I worked on an MTV series called the Shannara Chronicles. They had me down for a couple of episodes and a bunch of other stuff.

21:42Big fantasy series. Like so, anamorphic, center extraction, beautiful, lots of fabulous wetter, enhanced prosthetic makeup. Oh, I bet. $50 ,000 heads for villains and so on and castles and werewolves. It was a lot of fun. A lot of fun. Did you get to blow up any mountains just for old time's sake? No, no, no, no, no. But of course, 24 did give me that feeling because we blew up a lot on 24. You blew up a whole lot on 24. Okay, so you're working as a re-recording mixer? It was a summer relief job. They had 54 crews in London at the BBC at the time I was there, and they'd send them all the way for the summer.

22:22They would take their summer holidays. So they would hire freelance people to come in and fill in, and that's what I did at BBC Ealing. Was that like your first big... It was my first official film job. Yeah, yeah. I was paid, and I got into the union, which at that time was very tight. You couldn't work unless you were in the union. Subsequently, Rock Videos, funnily enough, blew that out of the water because the kids just weren't going to play that game. That's happening now on YouTube. Yeah. So how do you transition from that into shooting? Well, it was just a temporary job. I did have the cards, so I worked on commercials with both Tony.

22:58I did his first commercial, bless his heart. It was a Ribena commercial. And I was the third guy on the sound crew. Another guy in our school became a mixer because nobody was available and he showed up with the Niagara from the school and they gave him that job. A lot of people get a career that way. Yeah. At this point, I guess my big question is, were you focused on you wanted to shoot or did you know what you wanted to do yet? No. I mean, I understood documentary and the concept of that. I made a quasi-drama film, but not really. And there was no clear path in the early stages of our film school as to how to get into drama.

23:36You were on the outside because we didn't have union accreditation and we were not able to get into the union. The British film school started soon after in my final year, and they were locked in a deal with the union. So if you graduated from there, you could work. So I suppose I wondered. and what happened was I made a movie for the Baha 'is about seals and crafts. They came to London and I knew them as Baha 'is and so I made a movie we shot at the Roundhouse and a bunch of stuff around London and then I took it to the States to sell it and people wanted slight changes so I had to find money to make the changes.

24:19It was 16 mil films, still cost money. So is this a documentary? It was a documentary about their being in London. And when you said you made it, you directed it? You directed it and shot it? I directed and cut it and shot it. So now I'm in America. So you kind of one-man banded your way through it. Well, yes. I mean, certainly the first film I made was absolutely that because nobody else knew. And I actually cut film 16 mil with my dad. He would do with a cement splice and lose a frame. And then they would get the finished film mag-striped, and then they would lay a track back on it. Those were the early primitive days.

24:52And I knew about double system because a very early film, I had a great tutor, not at the Royal College so much, but at the school in Auckland. And he had been also a time-life photographer. And his last great project was in China in the 50s. In 57 he was kicked out. But he spent three months photographing in China, black and white, of course. Amazing stuff. And he introduced me to the British film unit, the transport film department. and they had a film that was called Snow, which was, you can find it online. It's amazingly well cut, a montage of trains clearing snow line, lines that are covered in snow.

25:35And it's all cut to a very percussion-y drum beat. And so I realized that the bed in my rock video film wanted that kind of integration. and I talked the drummer of this band into doing various tracks for me and then we wrote music accordingly that I could then utilize in the edit and I was cutting double system but when I first started the first piece of 16 mil I cut it with a razor blade and I joined it with tape and I punched out the holes with something sharp that I could find so that we'd go through the gate on the projector. Oh wow. And hope it didn't jam. Right, and I didn't know about separate mag stripe at that point.

26:19Of course, today people don't have an understanding of the physicality that you had to do. But there were many things about cutting film when you had pulled your strips out and you would hang them on pins in a bag. And you could hold a handful of 50 shots in your hand and up against a white background, you could flick through and see the image and you knew which take you wanted and you would pull it out. Whereas now you have to go in a linear fashion through a reel to look, even in software versions. It's only in very, very recent times now with the software allowing you to look at a bin and see the head clip.

26:56Yeah, yeah. But you have to click it to play it. It's not quite the same because a lot of people would pull film through their fingers and you could tell what was happening. You got used to doing that. I know. When I was in film school, we had those. And I always remember the experience of turning the bin upside down to find those four frames. Yes, yes, it would drive you crazy. My daughter tells a very funny story. I let her play with the trim-trims that were in the bass, and she would make up these tiny movies that were two frames, three frames long, and play them. She has a fond memory of that.

27:31She has a movie on iTunes now, so that taught her. She was hooked. That's cool. But so many stories from that time that they no longer have any relevance to anybody. It's just there was a history of it all. Nowadays, everything's nonlinear and I'm working with LUTs and I control a camera with LUTs. I see exactly what the final image is. I record it on my desktop. I have Iris control. I mean, there isn't anything that I can't do with modern cinematography setup. Do you feel like there's anything lost because of that? or do you feel like, as I've been following your career, again, for probably at least 15, 20 years, like you've always seemed to be someone who would gravitate towards new technology when it came out and you would use it.

28:17Well, part is job preservation. Time marches on, the technology changes, and those who adopt move on. Those who don't get left behind. Yeah. It's very simple. So very early on, for some reason, I had transistors were in my blood. When I first saw valves, I made early valve systems and then got my first transistor radio. And that took me into Photoshop, version 2.1. And I stayed with Photoshop forever because it allowed me to manipulate imagery, allowed me to manipulate stills, and then subsequently and now we have Resolve. Any cinematographer who doesn't understand Resolve is losing a large part of what we have to do.

29:01We do two things. We both expose. We control the lighting. as part of that package on set. And the second thing is we should have control of our image in post. Yeah. The ability to go and sit with a timer. And only recently was I reminded of that on this lovely picture that's coming out next year called Going in Style with, shameless plug, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, and Alan Archer. Shameless plug. That's awesome that you got to work with those guys. It was an extraordinary experience. So we did this with Zach Braff last summer in New York. But six months later, I got to sit with a timer at photo cam, Costas, and he and I spent 100 or so hours going through the mover meticulously with resolve, putting in shadows where I was unable to do it, taking things back, bringing things up, tracking Morgan Freeman's face quite frequently.

29:56because in contrast to Michael Caine, who was quite a white Englishman, there was less light that wound up in Morgan's face. And he was still getting the light, but he absorbed more of it. So we had to track him and bring him out occasionally to complement the frame and allow for the comedic possibilities, even though I thought the frames were great. Zach said, we need to see him a little better than that. So we have to bring him out. A credit to the Alexa RAW system, absolutely painless. being able to bring somebody up two stops if necessary without noise. It's spectacularly powerful. And, you know, that's one of the big challenges I have with some of the other cameras out there, that they don't have that level of dynamic range.

30:39You can't go five stops down or five stops over and still bring it back to neutral. And that, for me, is the stamp of a good chipset. Yeah, well, like you always hear about in Mad Max Fury Road, how for the day-for-night stuff, they just underexposed everything, right? Yeah. It's insane, you know, and it goes against, conventional wisdom, and yet it looks beautiful. Yeah. Well, those are tools that the cinematographer should be responsible for. Mm-hmm. And right through to kissing the final print, you know, and that was, of course, on a feature, people respect that, and that was a wonderful thing about it.

31:13Other series that I did last year called The Last Ship, the production supervisor didn't allow me to even sit with the color timer. I was never present. Really? Any of that. And Michael Bay's production, okay, fine. He has his look and everything. But really, the respect that you should have allowed me to be there at those sessions. I should have been notified when they were there and so on. So I feel that's a system in this digital age which is losing touch with the realities of the importance of cinematographers. And, of course, one of the problems is with everybody being able to see what you do, there's no mystery anymore.

31:50and the cinematographer is losing control of his ability to create his look and carry that through to the end. It's so much easier now for somebody in post to say, oh, I think we'll make this brighter. This happened on the Shannara Chronicles. They devastated it. The editors got in there and the producers got in there and they really made the color that we had done on set with a dit, I might add, doing from raw, making the look on set. It never made it past editorial, and it certainly didn't make it into the final cut. So, you know, these things, obviously we work for people, but at some point, certainly in the old days when you were hired as a cinematographer, it was because they wanted your look, and there was respect there.

32:35And very seldom do you hear those kind of divisive situations where people were let go or people took over. I will let the person remain nameless, but I know a cinematographer who shot a feature for a director. The director then learned how to use Resolve and relit the whole thing in post without the cinematographer. And when the cinematographer saw it, they were, you know, not happy because like every choice they made had been, I mean, like down to the point of tracking power windows. And, you know, like in dolly shots, changing the way foreground and background interacted with one another. Absolutely.

33:11All of that's possible. and it's both a blessing and a curse. Let me ask you a little bit. I'm sure that we'll get a little bit more into your background, but I feel like your work has kind of a distinctive look and I'm sure that, you know, you'll go work on a show where there isn't a distinctive look, but even like I was looking at the reel that you posted online, so maybe that's biased because it's the stuff you chose to put forward, but I've been watching your stuff for years and I do think that there's a certain craftsmanship to it. There's a certain intentional use of overexposure in certain parts of the frame.

33:41There's always something interesting in foreground middle ground and background. There's like a full story happening And I just wonder like do you have a way that you define your own look? Or do you just want to dive in and give people what they ask for because obviously after doing it as long as you have You're just gonna make a series of decisions based on your experience that are gonna be your look Well starting out professional life when I finally did get to shoot I cut for a year I shot documentary in South America for six months. Then I cut it. And on the strength of that, the network in Toronto gave me a cutting job.

34:18So I cut for almost two years with a six plate steam bag. Wow. Original video news film where there was no negative. Then when you made a cut. Oh, just shot on reversal? Yep. Oh dear. And when you made a cut, you couldn't put it back together. So you would always cut long and gradually inch in the woods. But that really taught me a lot about having to make a commitment to time and planning because everything was cut to size and timing. I think the whole process of editorial is as important for a cinematographer to understand. It's sort of vital that you do cut your own stuff, at least to get it out of your system to a point where you say, no, I have to lose this.

35:01You can't fall in love with it. It doesn't advance the story, so with chop, it's gone. So my documentary experience I did about 20 years out of Toronto, all over the world, 80 countries. It was fun. I don't think I could do it anymore, but hauling that 200 pounds of stuff around. So you were traveling with a Steenbeck to those countries? No, no, no, no. I just cut for two years for them, but they then gave me a camera job. Oh, oh, oh. I finally got a camera job. I'm sorry, Mr. President. So for 20 years I shot for them. And it was 16 mil, Ari. I didn't have, I had an ACL. Eclair. I never had an Artone.

35:37I would have liked an Artone. I was surrounded by them, arguably the best of the 16mm cameras. They shot beautiful on your shoulder. I used to rent that on 24 when we needed to go handheld. We'd rent, I suppose, what was for Nellope, but there was the 35mm equivalent of the Artone because it just sat on your shoulder very well and had that lovely wooden handle and you could run with it and it felt great on the shoulder, basically just sat there. But I was with an Araflex, well I did have a BL for a while, dreadful 16 mil little box. Big and loud. Yeah, it didn't have a blimp, you know, it was loud, 400 foot max.

36:15The school had one, that's how I started with that. I don't know a single sound guy who ever liked the BL. No. The BL 35 is probably more what you're thinking of. You kind of, yeah, that thing was noisy. You had to be very careful, you used a lot of nose grease when you were putting it in through the gate, so I just made a little bit of fluid there. It was more silent with that. Mag chatter, having to deal with all those things. Yeah, I had an SR1, and then I had an SR2, and I had a Super 16 gate for it, which had been in the bottom of the Mediterranean. I managed to get very cheaply out of London.

36:48One of these technicians pulled one and said, do you want this? And I said, oh yeah, I want that. You're like pulling fish skeletons out of it. Well, it was a little crusty on the inside, you could tell. They'd been in the bottom of the ocean for a bit. But that was my workhorse. That and two mags carried on the plane and then a bunch of film in the back. Those are great cameras. It was a good solid workhorse camera. And various zooms, 10-100, 9557, which was a nice short wide zoom. But you taught yourself how to tell a story with a camera if you're rolling continuously and it was something you couldn't control, you would say, okay, well, this feels like a master, and I can zoom in and get a little tighter on this, but now I've got to flip over to the other side to quietly move around.

37:36And you keep rolling the whole time because you didn't want to sink because you didn't want it to retract. You were trying to do fly on the wall. Some of my greatest moments were those kind of things where there was real drama going on and tension in the room, and people just ignored you, and you just managed to get all the angles and so you could cut it together. But the training as an editor helped because I would always go crazy if people didn't give me the cutaways at the right time. I couldn't structure it. So carrying that on, that helped me a lot with 24. And I had done one story in Northern Ireland a week after Bloody Sunday where we were blindfolded and driven around by the IRA and then taken to the back of a pub at night into the back room where the divisional head of the IRA was there and we pulled his turtleneck sweater up over his face and we interviewed him.

38:27I was not shooting then. I was the sound guy on that. But that experience sort of helped me a lot when we're thinking about 24 and how do people react under terrorist conditions. Of course, sadly, it's more the norm than the rarity nowadays, and I don't think it's going to go away. They're starting 24 up again, and I don't know whether there's quite the appetite for it. At the time, it was a fundamentally an educational tool to both excite and terrorize people around the world because we sold it extraordinarily widely around the world. People liked that palpable tension, but also they came away thinking about terrorism in a different way.

39:15Well, you know, before we even get into 24, I have a couple of stock questions that I would love to ask you that I kind of ask everyone. And now that I sort of have an understanding of your background from your point of view, the big question that I ask everybody is where do you come from? Do you come from lighting? Like when I hand you a script and you read a script, do you see it in terms of the way you're going to light it or do you see it in terms of composition? So in other words, are you creating an image and then finding the composition within that lit area or are you creating a composition?

39:45And I have a theory about you, but I want to hear your opinion of that. Well, I was, of course, trained in London, so I tend to lean towards the English tradition of a lighting cameraman. So I would first say that I'm affected by light first and how you might position light to affect the tone of the story of the scene, augment, contrast, so on. and then the compositional part of it is not so high on my list because I feel that if I'm going to hire operators to compose and execute for me, then I don't feel that they're part of the team unless they're contributing. So I give them freedom to contribute.

40:30So that means I primarily control the overall finished product, but I'm eager to seek a contribution from my operators about how they feel it should be. You know, I can nudge them to say, look, lead a little more here or follow this frame. But keeping the old adage from documentary days, follow the puck. It's about what's important in the story and making sure that you are positioning the audience to see what you want them to see at the time that you want them to see it. Light is obviously a major factor in that, but composition is sometimes equally as important. But I have less control over that than I do over the lighting.

41:19Of course, I share the lighting responsibility with my gaffer. And so that's a shared experience in a normal feature environment. after being involved in prep, working with production designer, pre-formulating a plan. It all kind of hangs in the balance until you see the blocking, you see the read-through, you see the actors block it, and you're in a space provided by the production designer, augmented or taken from reality. And then it's your job to say, well, we're in a supermarket, guys. It has to feel like a supermarket. And there's only one way you light a supermarket. Unless you're near the windows, you can tend to bring hard light in and maybe it reaches the tellers in the front at their waists or at the teller machine.

42:13And you can cheat those kind of things. But generally people, I think, are thrown by light, which is supernatural, unless you're doing a fantasy and you can get away with anything. so on this Shannara series we used a lot of xenons old style xenons with mirrors and so on and cut vigorous narrow shafts of brilliant light into spaces that were not meant to have light and we just said fuck it it was great and so I like that you can do that when you shift gears tonally about what the content of the story is the genre of the story obviously horror story really thrives on not seeing everything in the frame at the same time always having a portion of the frame be dark it makes it a better product if you're using harder light and so you can always go back to the traditions of the 30s and 40s where everything was a 5k and a 10er for now and very aggressive cutting so that you could force large chunks of the frame into darkness simply by putting a cutter in and it wouldn't go anywhere.

43:30A lot of what we're obliged to shoot in modern drama involves white rooms and they are the death knell to a cinematographer's control of contrast. So you're continually trying to say, well, I can't do a 180 in this room because I need to put black up on that wall. Otherwise, I have no contrast. and it becomes very bland and flat and boring. Not that bland and flat and boring doesn't have its moments and certainly comedy leads you in that direction occasionally. But I, you know, in this movie last year, I had so much fun with Morgan Freeman's face, with Michael Caine's face and Alan Arkin. I mean, there was just, and then I had Anne Margaret, bless her heart, to deal with.

44:13Oh, wow. Who was 73 and I got a lovely, lovely voicemail back from her. I was in Kuwait for reasons. Like you do. I didn't answer the phone, and so it went to voicemail, and she left this beautiful message saying how much she loved how she was lit in the movie. It was really a question of saying, well, she's 73, and we have to be careful here, and so on. I think in the end there was a tiny bit of digital help given, but there were whole scenes where there was none, and it was all up to me, so I felt pretty good about that. We're in the business as cinematographers of creating a safe haven for the actors, an environment within which they can perform.

44:59They are assisted, even though it's subtle, by the tone of the light that they're performing in. And I think sometimes you have to be careful that you don't broadly wash everything in a way that they don't get a sense of, oh my God, if I don't hit that light, my knife will not be seen. or this dagger in this compromising moment and how do I hold it and so on. And I like older actors because they often have had stage performance. They know how to rock into a key light because they feel it on their face. And you really appreciate that with the old timers because they just have been there and they know they get it.

45:41So many modern performers today don't school themselves and those older crafts, and I think that's a shame because knowing how to help you by finding your light when I gave it to you, I actually exploded on a guy in New Zealand because local Maori boy, lovely chap and a lovely actor, but he was a little bit out of control of himself, and he was on a horse, and I put a cross light on him to give him a nice strong cross key, like 90-degree cross key, and he rode into this position and took the light and then for absolutely no reason moved his horse forward a few more steps and went completely out of it because he was grandstanding the other actor and he wanted to be the one who was in the front of the frame.

46:27Oops. And I screamed at him. I said, don't you fucking do that again to me because I put the light there for you for that moment and you have to be cognizant of it and we're a partnership here and when you do that to me, all bets are off. You went into darkness and it's nothing I can do about it. And I said, don't tell me you didn't know how to ride the horse because you backed right back into that market. And you totally had horse control. There was no question you knew what you were doing. But please, it's a deal between us. I give you light, you take it. If you don't want to take it, that's your problem.

47:02But it's just going to make us both look bad. And of course, it applies more to hard light than soft. Soft is a tricky thing because everyone's going to Kino's, LED Kino-based lighting now. and I've fallen in love with Quasar Sciences system with fluorescent tube structures put into KenoFlow fixtures because they're core-plast, they're light. You stick them anywhere and they come in all kinds of sizes. Yeah, Ilya was telling me about this. I haven't tried them out yet. They're fantastic. They're taking over. Many people make very sophisticated lighting that's LED-based, and they spend a lot of money, Ari, particularly with the sky panels and so on, and they're RGB, and that's wonderful, and they have very good color temperature control, very high CRI, but they're very heavy and they have a big ballast.

47:47And at some point you say, well, the Quasar guy's approach is to replicate a tube as efficiently as you can, give it a very high CRI, make it color switchable. And now their version's a variable color control from 2700 to 6K Kelvin and put them in whatever you want. You stick them in a fat boy that has six two-footers in it, just basically a kind of a square. You add silk or your diffusion or you don't. You can do whatever you like. And then as long as you have some good Fresnels around to augment that, if you want a sharp cut, there's nothing like a Fresnel or a Dado. It cuts very well. And Dado have a very fine light now, which is 90 watts of LED, very low power, maintained, very good color temperature, but that has a ballast.

48:35So there are other people coming to market with versions that don't have a ballast. They're a little cheaper. I personally think the best light out there, if you're just starting out, is a par, a rock and roll par. You can pick them up for nothing, secondhand rock and roll shows. They're less than$50 new. Wow. And there's a par 38 bulb, par 64 bulb in there, and you can get a fire starter all the way through to a flood. And that's a lovely light because you take a narrow beam, one of those, into any room and just hit the corner of the wall and you get beautiful refractive light. And as you pan it around the room, you can see a change in its quality.

49:14And then all you need if somebody are lighting in this, they're not moving around a lot, you just bring in some negative fill and you're off to the races, you know. And the beauty of the modern cameras is you can see exactly what you're doing. You actually see exactly what you're doing. Okay, guys, can you change to 2 ,700 Kelvin on the camera for me? Oh, okay. Now take it to 6 ,000. Let me have a look at that, you know. Oh, interesting. Now, can we change the color on the LEDs? Well, flick those over. And ultimately, all of that will be on the palm of your hand and your laptop, or your phone, rather.

49:48You can control it personally. But right now, I have a board controller who runs around behind me with a laptop and does all of that. We have 500 or 600 lights that are under digital control. Because I'm a giant horror nerd, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about working with Mick Garris on Sleepwalkers. I think, to my knowledge, that's maybe the first horror movie that ever used CGI. That was one of the first theatrical features you had shot, correct? Yes, I had done a couple before that. But we had done Psycho 4 prequel together. Mick Garris picked me up to do that. And it was wonderful to be based out of Toronto.

50:31and then gradually more and more Americans would come up and they would hear about you and then they would ask you to go do things. And we went to Orlando to shoot that. Wait a minute. So this is crazy because I'm from Orlando, Florida. So I was in high school when they were building Universal Studios Florida and I remember driving down I-4 and seeing the Psycho House and being like, holy shit, there it is. Movies are coming to Orlando. For the longest time we had this mistaken belief that Orlando was going to be a mecca for filmmaking and in fact, Universal had basically funded a film school.

51:04I went to two different film schools, and the first one I went to, they had funded. Just to get a crew base, just to have grips who knew how to open up a C-stand. That's still a problem to this day when you run out of crew. It didn't occur to me that Psycho 4 was the one that was shot in Orlando. Yeah, it was Psycho 4, and we were in a big new stage there. It was a beautiful stage, and they brought, they trucked the Psycho House in for us from storage and reassembled it in the stage. It was up there forever. We shot there. I shot a student film that used the same glass. Well, we did use the exterior as well, but you remember, because you know it, the proximity to the rock concert or some cafe was ridiculously close.

51:43Hard rock. Hard rock was right there. Yeah, yeah. And it was very, very difficult to frame around that. This is pre-digital, so we couldn't do cropping and reframing and so on. So we had a bit of a struggle lighting it and everything. But yeah, that was it, and we set it on fire. We set it on fire. You kind of shot the first big movie that got shot in Orlando under that regime. I mean, other movies have been made there. That was wonderful. I'm sorry. I should have known. It didn't even occur to me that Four was the one that they had built that for. Yeah. It's released on a compilation, I think, now.

52:18It's actually not a bad movie. No, it's not. I remember seeking it out at the time. I already got a couple of images on it in my reel. Oh, yeah, because you got Anthony Perkins on there. That's right. But I mean, I remember when it came out, going out of my way to see it, because I don't think it got like a humongous distribution. No, no, no, it didn't. And it primarily was like a television movie. Yeah. But we did the right thing by it. And so Mick got Sleepwalkers after that. Yeah. And we shot that at Warner Brothers, the old Warner Brothers. Although many things haven't changed. The city square, we had 100 cats running through the city square, which was done by second unit DP and director.

52:58I'm glad I didn't have to deal with the cats at that level. Oh, dear. But we had 50 or so at a time outside the house. Now long gone. I think it was the old Walton House. And we shot there and then we shot on stages, of course, for a big build. That was the last time I used an arc, because the lighting crew, lovely guys I got from Kovacs, Laszlo Kovacs team. Oh, wow. Both grip and electric came to me intact, because I didn't know anybody. Did you know Laszlo? I didn't, but I went out to meet him. He was shooting in Griffith Park, one doing night work, towing some vehicle in the night. And he was just lovely.

53:40He said, Doc, take them all. You know, I don't have a movie coming up. You know, just use the boys. And so I got a great team. And they were really lovely and they cracked up some old arcs for me. Nice. White flame arcs to use in the interior of the house. It broke out into a garden at the back of the house and we just needed more punch for daylight. So on Sleepwalkers, again, that was one of the first horror movies I remember that utilized CGI. Today you would just shoot a bunch of plates and figure it out later, but back then I assume it was a lot more complicated. It was a big deal. Mick wanted all these shots to be moving transitions.

54:16Well, the car would change. It changed shape. And it was great. We used a track-based system based on a peewee. the peewee was dragged along by a tooth belt that was under motion control and so we could repeat it and the head was a motion control head I don't know whose head it was but we basically put it through its move and then lock it and then we'd play back accurately after that so it would just repeat the same identical move repeat the same move so we would do it with the first car put the other car in and do it with the second car and then they'd make the transition wherever they wanted to have it creep into changing its shape and its color And you also, there's like that one iconic shot where like the face turns into the cat face.

54:58Yes. It's kind of an early morph for a movie. It was. We did that on stage. It wasn't as successful. The background plates were, we shot out on Potrero Road, Happy Valley. It was supposed to be Virginia or somewhere, I forget right now. I always think botanists must watch movies and be like, that plant wouldn't be in Virginia. Oh. I know. Well, they're so brazen about it. There's a series called Roadies on right now, and they shot downtown in the Bonaventure Hotel with the elevators on the outside. It's so distinctive. It's so distinctive, and they're supposed to be in Denver. I feel like I could spend a whole day just asking you about 24 because 24, I feel strongly that 24, and specifically the cinematography in 24, kind of changed television.

55:46I first heard of 24 because I knew Krishna Rao. Do you know Krishna? Yeah. And Krishna told me he had done A camera or B camera, I think, on the first ever episode. And I don't believe you shot the pilot or did you? I didn't shoot the pilot. Peter Levy shot the pilot with Stephen Hopkins. But Krishna - Peter didn't want to do the series, funnily enough. But do you come on right after the pilot? Yeah, I did episode two. And we had to reshoot some of episode one because of 9-11. Yeah. It went to air right after. Yeah, I remember. there being kind of like the thought of 24 might not last a season because it's too close.

56:22Yeah. And somehow it managed to actually kind of balance on the zeitgeist. But as a piece of cinematography, I feel like it, like so many shows, I feel like it's hard to watch any kind of action television show or any kind of drama show even. Like unless it's something that's like a courtroom drama, I feel like it steals a little bit from 24. Well, we were honored by being emulated substantially. And in fact, I think even in one of the early Bourne movies, there's a guy standing very pronounced in a frame with 24 jacket on. Oh, really? Yeah. And I always thought that they kind of cribbed us a little bit.

56:59And I'm glad to see that Greengrass is back, and I'm excited to go see the new one to see whether they themselves have taken this genre in another direction or enhanced it more. But my documentary background was a huge contributor. We wanted, Kiefer is an intense actor, and we wanted to be in his face the whole time. I was blessed with a really, really good camera operator, Guy Skinner, who was a camera, and Jay Heron did B. And both of them contributed to that look, both in the way we approached the scenes. But the real person who set the tone for the movie was Stephen Hopkins, who did the pilot, and he did 12 of the first 24.

57:40and he was the one that said we shoot every scene in its entirety, figure it out, wherever you have to get the camera, go there. And we eventually made the floor dolly, the rolling butt dollies, key grip at the time. I made the mistake of Googling butt dolly once because somebody was talking about one of them and I was like, yeah, I should never. Don't Google butt dolly. Yeah, you're right. What do they call them? Anyhow, there's various versions of them out there. But we're still using them today. You know, once you go handheld, it's a really powerful tool to move, float around chairs. You can run after Kiefer into a room, and he can sit at a table, and you squat down, and the boys shove a butt dully under you, and then you're free to roll around and keep the motion going.

58:29Yeah. To contain the overs and so on. Well, while Guy was doing that on a 27mm, Jay was back on a 420mm on the 3-to-1 Panoflex lens, the widow maker, on 30 feet of track, 40 feet back, all the way in at 420, getting the same size image on the face, and he would just kiss Guy's map box. So my whole time was watching the monitors and saying, Guy, you've got to give him another inch. So Guy would give him another inch so that they can both continue to shoot. And they would cross axis together and float around, and we would shoot two takes that way in one direction. We'd flip the whole scene and shoot two takes in the other direction.

59:11And then the editors just fell into line with cutting, not worrying about the line at all. And that was one of the biggest things that Stephen was adamant about. Continuous takes. Let the actors have the motion and the intent and the intensity. We don't break that up by cutting in and getting different angles. If you can be there and you get the moment, then fine. Otherwise, that's the scene. How much of a purist was he? like if you're like, well, we just need an insert of this pencil on the table. We were obliged sometimes because of StoryPoint. I mean, I ended up doing an insert which got us into trouble and also created the fan phone.

59:48It was a phone, and the mother of this boy had just shot his boyfriend, and she was lying in a pool of blood in their living room hallway just on the entrance, and the phone went off, and they wanted to see mother come up on the screen. It was like really the hammer at home, right? pool of blood mother and I got I was just for some reason I got assigned to shoot it because nobody wants to do this insert and we didn't take the number off and we couldn't because it was the only way to have it be dead and then suddenly come to life with this so the number is on there the next week well that was a bit a while a few months later we the shows go to air and it is and the phone goes off and the prop guy and he said hello the guy said is that is that 24 and he said yeah but how did you get this number oh no he said it's it's on the show oh no and he shut down immediately went to message boards wrote about it and it sort of went crazy oh the phone wouldn't stop ringing sprint said hey okay we'll pick up the tab but let's say it's a sprint fan phone so they said they got their money's worth out of that anyhow over the course of a couple years, they went to millions of calls, literally.

1:01:01And you could take the phone at lunchtime and switch it on. It would start vibrating instantly. And people were continuously calling. In fact, one girl, we flew her in because every waking moment she speed dialed the number. And she got through in the end three times and we let her talk to Kiefer. And then she got the third time and said, hey, well, you've got to bring this kid out. So she came and spent a day on set. See kids, obsessive compulsive disorder can pay off. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it was amazing. But in a 20-minute period, I spoke to people on four continents. Wow. Because around the clock, people were watching the show and huge fans, and they knew about this number, so they would just dial from whatever country.

1:01:38Well, and also, by then, you've got the internet, so I'm sure it's being shared on the internet everywhere. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And so that was kind of fun, but we digress. Well, let me ask you, and I think this is somewhat more of a stock question, but I think that it leads to a really useful conversation. So somebody hands you a script and says, I want you to shoot this film, or I want you to consider shooting this film. You read the script. What is the process by which you turn that into a shooting plan for you? How do you come up with the rules, long lens at this point in the story, wide lens on this part?

1:02:11Like, what's your process? Well, you're a collaborator. You work for the director. I think that's fundamental, and there are many people who come into this business wanting to grandstand themselves into a career as a cinematographer. The reality is you work for somebody else. Yeah. You work for the project, and primarily you work for the director. And if you have simpatico with the director, then you evolve towards what your plan will be together. Usually, I mean, Zach was the last good project that I did. I had proper prep. He's a shooter. He's an actor. He's a director. And he has his own movie, and he goes out with his Alpha 7, and he shoots.

1:02:51and so I'm like right there saying okay do you is this in our approach are we longer lenses are we anamorphic are we Panavision versus Arri we tested everything and we said no I like we all both like the look of the G series anamorphics so that's what we went with and then gradually through the production designer I had this fantastic uh woman in New York called Ann Ross who's a very famous production designer. She did Lost in Translation. She does massive million-dollar commercials all the time. And her struggle was getting down to our budget from$150 a square foot down to$50. But her taste was impeccable.

1:03:31So fundamentally, if you're making movies and you don't have good taste, you probably won't succeed. That's fundamental. So how you acquire taste is a broad classic arts education. you need to understand who the greats were that came before you, who the great painters were, the great sculptors. You need to be a fan of architecture, of architectural space, of lighting architecture, of placing people inside space that mood creates its own values for the telling of the story and how you augment that by is it darker, is it lighter, is it green, is it blue, is it yellow, is it gold? And a lot of those things come to you from costume and from the production designer who will work with you on a color palette and work with the director.

1:04:19And you all collectively discover what it might be. So you, the cinematographer, only have the responsibility of recording the final product technically so that it becomes the thing they put in the vault. That's what Warner Brothers wants, and you're charged with that responsibility. But what you actually photograph is a contribution of many creative people around and being directed by the director because it's his movie. Does that kind of help a little? Definitely. Totally. But if you're to be given a script before you've even talked to the director, when you're reading the script, are you seeing how you think it would be filmed?

1:04:56When you go to talk to a director, do you pitch them like, here's my idea? And surely you must have worked with some directors who aren't as camera savvy as Zach Braff. There are two ways to go. One is a gut reaction to the script. And if you're positive about it and you want to be involved in it, you probably have a good strong sense of the way you'd like to see it. But that can be definitely modified by discussions with what the aims of the director are and then who you cast and where their faces in time and space. Are you going to need to help them get through with the lighting or can you be aggressive about the lighting?

1:05:35Can you take them to the edge? A young female with a hard edge, raking with an extremely overexposed edge, which would not be appropriate for someone in their 90s. So all of those kind of things are there. Is this predominantly softly lit? There was an era in film where everything was soft. But I think there's a return to more harder light these days. As we're getting back Fresnels and we've left the kind of soft washes away, the idea of cutting sharply and using hard light and negative fill is coming back. there are an enormous number of extremely talented cinematographers shooting television these days probably more better shot video or imagery is shot for television than for most movies the movies tend to be extravagant yeah transformer like and we all know how that looks and how you get there and there's hundreds of giant lights and so on but some of the small pictures like joy It was a beautiful 16 millimeter, totally doable by a small group of people.

1:06:40I had fun. Kuwait, I was in there because a friend of mine called me up. I'd known him for years. We met through an internet connection at NAB. He'd done business degree in Georgetown. He's a member of the royal family in Kuwait and, you know, he has money. But he has a production company and he's doing a 40-day shoot for a series which he's running on a streaming service called tele.com. And it's quite lovely. It's subtitled, and he had me go because he said, look, I'm spending too much money. I don't understand quite how we do this. He had a great director, good cinematographers, but the guys had two Alexas and a box of Cook Primes.

1:07:18That was it. Tiny amount of lighting. They were shooting on the street because available light, they could get away with it with the Alexa. They were shooting in people's homes. They didn't build any sets. They stole most of their locations. It's a great story about young Kuwaitis dying and possibly it's linked to the invasion by Saddam back in that period. And all the issues there. And he cast two people, both with a very large following on the Internet, three and a half million people for one of them and another half a million for the younger girls, only 14. And he's making that his approach.

1:07:54And his problem was he didn't have a first AD who understood how we do it in America or we do it in England, how modern filmmaking needs to be run like a military campaign. Otherwise, stuff falls through the cracks and it can get expensive. But their final result was A-plus film school for 40 days of shooting. And they've got a series out of it. Nice. Anybody can do this. It didn't cost them a lot of money to do this. No, you can't. It's amazing. Yeah. And I'm excited by the fact that the internet now is spawning amazingly great material that people are just saying, look, we can do this. We just have to have a good story, fundamental.

1:08:30You've got to have a good story. And then you have to cast it well and get a good actor, a good director, and a good team behind you. But everybody in the world now can go online and learn this technology. It's not a surprise. You just have to pick up a 5D or Alpha 7 now, buy yourself a camera like that and get some nice old primes, some old contacts lenses or old Leicas and you're in pig heaven. You can make that look as good as you're going to get out of a Panifex package. It's amazing. Yeah. And you can do it for nothing. Editorial, Apple gives you the product, the cut. Yeah. You know, probably better now to be cutting on Premiere.

1:09:09Premiere Resolve, people are cutting it. You can edit in the free version. You can finish your color completely. But you can even edit in Resolve now. They've put an NLE in there. Oh, yeah, they have. But there's no better time than say, I want to be a cinematographer. I want to make movies. Because you can see exactly what you're doing as you're doing it. And you can make changes. So you should practice a lot. It's like the actor sitting in front of a mirror playing with facial expression, playing with lens angles. Or not lens angles, but with putting up a light and seeing how it affects them.

1:09:39That's the important thing to do with a camera. What if I go to a very high ISO and I open the lens up wide and I shoot at night on the street? How does that look? Is there another way to make that look? You see it right there. We do a push record. If you don't like it, you don't record it, right? But anyone can train themselves. I went to film school. And, yes, there are associations that you make at film schools. They'll be very helpful for you throughout your career. But once you get employed, you make those connections as well. So you don't have to go to film school to get to there. Everything is available online.

1:10:12There's thousands of sites that will teach you how to do anything you Google. Trust me, it's all there. And the kits are so cheap now. Yeah, that's a great place for us to leave it. Rodney Charters, I could talk to you all day. Thank you so much, Rodney. I can't thank you enough for talking to us. Okay, thanks. This has been CinePod, the cinematography podcast presented by Hot Rod Cameras. Find your next camera, lens, or accessory at hotrodcameras.com. watch and subscribe to our show on youtube or listen on apple podcasts spotify or wherever you get your podcasts follow and interact with us on instagram threads facebook blue sky and linkedin but not not x don't do that thanks for tuning in