Oscar-Nominated Cinematographers on Using Classic Techniques and Old Tech for a Modern Feel

variety.com:

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor It’s ironic that a quarter of the way into the 21st century, when studios have seemingly accepted home streaming as their primary means of movie distribution, DP Lol Crawley has earned an Oscar nomination for “The Brutalist,” shot on VistaVision, a widescreen film process developed by Paramount Pictures in 1954 to help lure viewers away from their living room TVs and into the theaters.

Used for such films as John Ford’s “The Searchers,” Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” VistaVision was designed as a competitor to 20th Century Fox’s Cinema- Scope, which employed an anamorphic lens to compress a widescreen image on to standard 35mm film stock. “As opposed to pulling the film down vertically in a motion picture camera, it’s actually pulling it horizontally across eight perforations at a time,” explains Crawley. “So you end up with a bigger format, and that means that you’re not forced to shoot on wider angle lenses for a wider field of view.” For his Oscar-nominated work on Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two,” cinematographer Greig Fraser used modern digital cameras (Arri’s Alexa Mini LF and Alexa 65) that are certified to be used for a more recent large format exhibition process, Imax.

But he used old-fashioned natural light to make the sci-fi epic’s most challenging sequence — a wild sandworm ride, shot over the course of 44 days — feel organic and real. “You’ll watch a film, and you’ll rarely see somebody front-lit,” says Fraser, who won an Oscar for the first “Dune” in 2022. “You’ll mostly see people backlit, which is a little bit magical, but we do it and we get away with it.