Interview by Luca Ciuti
At the bottom of the article, the interview video, with Italian and English subtitles.
Text editor Silvia Tarquini
Hi, Lawrence. How are you? Good to be here. Thank you. Thank you for being here. So we’re here with Collettivo Chiaroscuro. My name is Luca Ciuti. We have Lawrence Sher here, and we’re about to talk about the new Joker movie, Folie à Deux. So, Lawrence, how did you film this? Tell me something about this first, because I got loads of questions…
Let’s jump in. So it’s a sequel to Joker, which came out in 2019 and 2020. And what we did as far as we intended to extend the look. So we shot with the same cameras, Arri 65, some [ARRI] LFs for like a third camera. We shot very similar lenses, or we added some Hasselblads that were made by my rental house Otto Nemenz, they call them Ottoblads. But we still had this sort of mixture of lenses from Canon CP two to Nikkors to Leica Rs. A lot of that was based on finding this mixed match of vintage lenses from the Eighties and Seventies that weren’t too clean, that could solidify that look of the seventies and eighties in Gotham, and so we continued that vibe. The only big difference fundamentally, besides the internal mechanics of the movie, was we shot with the intention of IMAX. So we framed 2.20:1, but to expand to 1.90:1 in IMAX screens, and then 40 screens, it’ll expand to 1.43:1. So that was different than the first one which we shot just spherical, 1.85:1. This was spherical, but really will change aspect ratio for IMAX screens. So we did think about IMAX when we made this movie. And then the biggest difference, obviously, is there’s music in the movie, I don’t know if I’d still call it a musical, but there’s music in the movie. You’ve seen it, so you know. There’s some singing diegetically within scenes in which the actors sing and then there’s a couple of fantasy sequences in which they’re singing in a more sort of heightened area. And for that, you know, partly it’s one of the reasons why we wanted to shoot IMAX, but also it allowed opportunities for a bunch of different sort of approaches to camera movement, as well as certainly lighting as well.
What I liked was the use of diegetic lighting that turned out to be show lighting within the story. So all of a sudden you come from a real dimension, so to speak, to fantasy. But within the construct of reality. There are some fantasy sequences as such, but a lot of them are a mixture of, what is it? Is it real, is it? You kind of wonder as you’re watching the movie.
Yeah. Like anything, you know, my approach to any movie is to attack it the way an actor would attack their role. So look at it and think, okay, from a cinematography standpoint, from lighting, composition, any of the elements of the language that we use as cinematographers, how can we tell the arc of the character at the same time? So the movie begins with Arthur coming, you know, we see him now in Arkham and he’s gaunt and skinny and he’s looking very bad. His life is what you would expect, living in this terrible asylum and so we start the approach more darkly. Long, unbroken shots, kind of the mundanity of his life, day to day, sort of drugged up and living in an insane asylum for the criminally insane, which he is. Until he starts to find and be introduced to Harley, played by Lady Gaga, and then the approach to lighting sort of subtly, you know, expands based on that. So as you watch the film and without giving too much away, you’ll see some of those same things which are: some would be a little bit theatrical in the same way as the music plays in, in the sense of as you look to see when she’s introduced and the amount of light that comes into the film when she’s introduced and when she’s in the frame and when their dynamic shifts when they fall more in love and all of those things, some of the theatrics come in even to scenes that have no music at all. And so that idea of the theatrical aspect, which is, you know, for Arthur Fleck and Joker, it’s an extension of the first movie. He’s living as if he’s on stage, either as a comic or as somebody who [performs], we spend a lot of time seeing him on screens. Whether it’s like being photographed by an interviewer early in the movie or being interviewed by Patty Nolan, Steve Coogan’s character. There’s a sense that his life is part of tv, is part of his life. You know, he sees Murray Franklin in the first movie and fantasises about being on Murray Franklin. So this extension of what Arthur sees is extended in the movie, and that idea of theatrical lighting and being on stage even when he’s in a courtroom or even when he’s in a jail cell, plays into the sort of the decisions that we made from a lighting standpoint.
Amazing. I noticed that when you have Harley, when she comes into the picture, in Arthur’s life, I sense that somehow the light becomes warmer. There’s an element of fire getting in. I mean, every time she’s around, there’s an element of red or an element related to fire. Of course, she’s an arsonist, so that’s part of her character. But that’s also, I think, reflected in the lighting. All those moments there, are very warm and kind of romantic, you know, in his mind, the way I see it, they’re very much in contrast with the exteriors that are very bleak and cold and unwelcoming, so to speak.
For sure, and that was by intention. So the early part, the first warmth of the movie, is when he’s walking down a cool hallway in the rain, he goes through the rain to get to her ward, which is the b ward, and at the end of the hallway, intentionally, you know, trying not to be too overt, but obviously, as somebody who’s a fan of color, a fan of [Vittorio] Storaro, a fan of people who embrace color and it’s emotional connection to people. It’s like a cold hallway with a warm light at the end. There’s something down there that’s calling to him, and that’s the first time some warm light hits his face, and it’s the first time he sees her. So, yes, it’s certainly by intention, and there are other places in which there’s red because she is dangerous and her dress is red.
At the end when she comes to the Courthouse.
Exactly. And so there’s all those elements that we talked about in the same way with all the coordination of production design and costume design. It’s funny because as somebody who works very intuitively as far as a cinematographer, I do like to create rules for myself, and I like to sort of construct a path for the lighting. An idea about each courtroom scene is a different time of day or a different type of lighting, and it balances with the context of the scene is. But sometimes, and it certainly is true with Todd Phillips and I, when you talk about it outwardly, it seems so sort of almost cerebral and a little too much. Like film school, like whatever, even though I respect all the filmmakers that do that, like as I said with Storaro. So even talking about the rationale behind it sometimes makes me feel a little embarrassed because I hope that it’s slightly more subtle than it is when we talk about it overtly. But, yes, I like to create constraints and I like to create reasons for every single lighting decision, even if they’re just for myself and even if they’re just a way for me to understand the scene a little and create boundaries, and so in every courtroom scene, there’s a reason. In every scene in which Harley and Joker are together, there’s a reason and a choice of why the color is there and what her color is versus his color and the way that they balance in the scene.
I’ve seen the use of complementary colours throughout the movie, also as a production design standpoint. So it’s not just about the lighting. I was struck by the fact that when they’re in a fantasy world and singing on stage, even the curtains in the background, there is one blue curtain.
Yeah.
So there’s always warmth, but there’s always a touch of cool, you know, coolness in it. So I guess that’s something that you guys have thought about.
Well, and the movie, as you know, now I’m seeing it and this is no different. This is an extension of the first movie is about the power struggle we have with our shadow self, and that we all have a shadow version of ourselves. Whether that’s the darkest version of ourselves, whether that’s the version of ourselves we’re most scared of, or maybe that’s the version of ourselves that’s the most real. This sort of fight between ourselves and our shadow selves and that idea of what is the shadow self-color versus what is, like, you know, the other complementary color and what those battles are. And that is shown through the wardrobe, whether it’s his red suit and his makeup versus, like, where he is when he’s in the darker place. And they fight with each other throughout the whole movie, those two forces. And so, yeah, we always like to sort of bring those into color. And for me, color is the same as light. You know, it’s one more extension of the power and the language that we have as cinematographers. It’s another really important piece of what we do. It’s like there’s camera movement, there’s lighting, but then there’s color in between the two. And so I embrace color wherever I can.
Yeah, that was amazing. I had a sense, maybe I’m wrong, but maybe I was mistaken. I almost had a sense that when he becomes his own attorney, he defends himself, his suit is redder than normal.
Yeah, there’s a little of that. When he becomes his own attorney, it’s also the first time we see him. That shot of him sitting behind the desk alone now, as an attorney, is the first time he has backlight sitting in that chair. And it’s like the most theatrical-looking of shots. So he’s on stage. Exactly. He’s now finally in the place he wants to be, which is performing on stage as Joker. And so even that, which is, I think, not super overt, but it’s hopefully people pick up on it subconsciously. It’s like that frame has a sense of theatrics in the same way as some of the fantasy scenes have with the same way backlight and powerful sort of spotlights and that kind of things.
It seems to me that when anything around him loses color is when he loses confidence in himself and he’s been more dejected and his power kind of drains out from him.
Yeah, I think that’s really like when the audience watches it, you know, I think it’s an interesting thing just to think about, not think about, let it be subconscious is those kind of decisions because I think they are there. That’s precisely right. You know, it’s like there’s a certain power he has when he’s Joker that he doesn’t have when he’s Arthur Fleck. And so, yes, when he’s Arthur, he possesses less color, and he possesses less power. Yeah, for sure.
One of the scenes I love most, lighting-wise, although it’s a simple scene, it’s when they first talk to each other in the hallway. And that seemed to me almost as if all of a sudden we are in a kind of a normal world.
Yeah.
I don’t know if that’s what you wanted to come across with, but everything else is more, how can I say? It’s more heightened in terms of senses. You got more color, you got more contrast. But in that moment when she’s sitting on this window sill back lit with a nice bounce on her face, and he looks at her completely, I think, struck by her personality, how she is. The lighting that you did there reflects that.
Yeah. I mean, in there, it’s like we wanted it to feel just completely naturalistic. That’s also the intention for a lot of the movie, even though there are some heightened moments. And there, it’s like that scene, of course, is so much about their connection. So that scene is, for the most part, about, basically close-ups all the way to, like, ECUs, you know? And so the ability of saying, well, okay, it’s a nice window-lit hallway, we cross shot it in places. We cross-shot a lot of the movie. Which, of course, for a cinematographer, as you know, is often, like, unless you’re forced into it by a director unwillingly with, like, a gun to your head, you’ll rarely shoot like cross-shoot. We would do it all the time.
And there’s so many scenes. There are scenes in the holding cell when they’re talking to each other. It’s in the trailer, you know, where she says, you know, you’re a joker. You can do anything you want, you know? And they do that little kiss with the smoke. That’s a cross-shot. That’s two cameras cross-shooting at the same time. Those close-ups are shot simultaneously. And in that hallway, it’s similar just for performance. This did start in the first Joker. And it’s been start part of Todd Phillips’, the director and I’s plan from a long time ago, which is to, as much as possible, create a situation where the lighting is environmental.
So you’re free to move.
Free to move and free to go from the biggest wide shot of the space into an ECU in the same shot. And so what I try to do with my team is light the space in such a way that I know it’ll hold up in a close-up and then work backward to the wide shot and make sure the units are hidden as best as possible. And so that one, when we start, we can go and go through whatever coverage we need to complete the scene with almost no time in between. The time it takes to change a lens. No rehearsing, no setting marks, and the dolly moves. Everything is happening in real-time. Often I have headsets and I’ll talk to the operators and I operate one camera, so that makes it easy, too so that we’re making real-time decisions in real time with the actors just based on their performance. So for us, it’s like the first take is always the first time. We’re all seeing it for the first time. And there might be that Todd and Joaquin and Gaga have a conversation, and maybe that conversation is five minutes, ten minutes, maybe that’s my opportunity to make a little tweet, from the first take, because I usually know, okay, the first takes also when they discover some things, and that’s when I can make little changes and I know about how long they’re going to talk and I go, okay, I can fix this. And then I’ll try to do little tweaks throughout the performance and the scene. But that environmental sort of like, okay, starting from a place of naturalism, starting a place from. Where are the windows? Where are the fluorescent lights in the space? And this all starts in pre-production, really in concert with the production designer having conversations all the time about where are we putting windows. Where are we putting fluorescence, where are we putting lights? So that in between, like, so even the time it takes to just switch the camera to the other side or turn a set around, that we can do very quickly by presetting lights and then just turning them on or sometimes crossfading them into life.
You have everything on board.
Yeah. It’s a perfect example of how technology has changed the creative process. Because even the difference between Joker 2019 and Joker Folie à Deux, we did use a majority of 10Ks, 5Ks, zips, and sort of lighting that was more tungsten-based. The reason I switched coming back and using a lot more LEDs was simply for that control. So that in a real-time shot, you think of a shot like “the Joker is me”, which is like a long push-in as he’s smoking and silhouette, and then he dances around and picks up Harley and it’s this whole sequence inside the courtroom, there’s a perfect example of crossfading spotlights and bringing lights up onto her. And none of that is happening on cues based on something pre-programmed. It’s all happening live because it’s all happening when the camera comes in and finds. And so it’s, we needed the control of a bunch of types of lighting that we can constantly crossfade and have color control over.
So you have your board operator on comms.
Oh, yeah.
You can direct him as you go along.
Exactly. So like there’s a little team, including myself, who’s sitting by the by DIT monitor. Right. And so I have both monitors for both, both cameras. And if there’s a third camera, I’ll see that as well. My gaffer’s sitting next to me. The board operator is right next to him. We all have these headphones on, the dolly grip, and the crane operator, if we’re on a crane, they also have these headphones on. The ACs all have these headphones on and it’s whisper quiet. So in real time, we’re saying: “Okay, all right, let’s push in slowly. Okay, hold on. Okay, move a little faster. Now start to come around, crossfade these lights.” And it’s just like this little coordinated effort of like seven people and including even focus pullers like, okay, I’m going to start pushing in so they know we’re starting to push. And okay, I’m going to start to stop and we’ll count down the stops. So they’re all coordinated and we’re just doing this. And for every take, we might start now from a whole different position in the set and do the same thing from another position to get a different piece of coverage. And every time it’s no rehearsals, and every time it’s in real time and it’s super, super exciting. And it means that every one of those people is like an actor on set, meaning they have to deliver every take they have to be done. It’s a dance between, its jazz, between all these performers and ourselves included from a cinematography team. And that made it one of the most fun shoots I’ve ever had.
It’s amazing, Larry. You know, one would have thought that a film like this is completely blocked out, is completely storyboarded, or something like that. I think also because of your long-standing relationship with Todd, you’re a unit. You understand each other very well, you can decide things as you go along. But this is amazing because, you know, most of these superhero movies, you always imagine, of course, it’s not a superhero movie, but I mean, comic book movie, whatever you call it, although it’s a completely different approach, you might have thought, for various reasons, you want to know everything in advance.
Well, and even when you see the final movie, it has a sense of precision.
Yes, that’s right.
It’s not like you see all these things in singular takes. They’re often cut into pieces of covering language to it. But the process by which we made it was completely improvisational. Now, with that said, Todd and I have worked together for 15 years, so we know each other very well. And what I know is we’re not going to waste a wide master, because if we do it four or five times, we’ve wasted that time on set. So what I’ve grown over time is like, okay, could I shoot a wide master and put another camera in a place that the wide master doesn’t see it, even if it’s on the other side of the line, or even if it’s, like, on a 280mm lens while the wide master is on a 35. Because then it means if Joaquin or Gaga does a great performance, we’ve captured it closer at the same time as having something wide that Todd might use for one, you know, three seconds at the top of the scene or somewhere in the middle. So it allows us to get coverage, to give the editorial options, to give Todd a way to shape the scene and give the language of the film, which is always important, and Todd is fantastic as far as using wide shots and giving the audience a real sense of geography. He’s good at using coverage, but we’re trying not to shoot coverage just to sort of plot through a specific shot where we need it. Instead, we want to give the option of using it where it’s most effective. And so because of that, we’ve created this over time. And I think this movie was kind of like the extension of all of the things we’ve been practicing for a long time, which was to create something that feels precise but is the opposite. It’s completely free, and it came also out of just the main objective, which is to give the actors the most amount of freedom and the most amount of time performing. So that, they’re not waiting on lighting, they’re not waiting on us, that we can give them the most amount of time and Todd the most amount of time to explore the scenes in every way he wants to. But it was also for our crew, and I had the best crew I’ve ever had. Super fun. This was as exciting a movie as we’ve gotten a chance to make because everyone, every take is super involved and super focused. It’s not like, you know, sometimes you light, you get everything ready and then everyone sits on an apple box and just sort of wait. This is like, everybody is like, okay, it’s time to perform. And it was. It was fun.
What T-stop did you use? Did you have one in particular?
I went back and I looked at some of the camera reports. You know, generally speaking, I live in sort of a two-eight and a third. Two eight and two-thirds, depending, on if I go to the 280, which is a very popular lens for us, or the 350, I’ll go to a four two or five six. Because it’s Arri 65, it’s a large format sensor and because I can see it in real-time, I’ll sometimes make those decisions based on just the background and it might change it. So there are opportunities, and sometimes very specifically, shooting wide open, and then there are other times where I close it down so that it just looks more natural. I’m not one of those people who shoots super wide open. You know, there are certain situations, night exteriors, like when they sort of escape from [the asylum] and they dance in the rain and that whole thing where we might need a little extra stop but even there, we were probably two eight, two eight and a half.
I like that. Going back to what we said, at the beginning of the interview, I love the trick you did with searchlights.
Yeah.
You know, a spotlight on them as if they were on a theater stage. That was amazing because at first, I thought, you know, there’s a follow spot and then you go back to a wide and you kind of see all the searchlights. So this is what I meant that by not being sure at the beginning, is it fantasy or is it not?
I think that’s exactly the intent of what we were looking for, which is, all right. You know, she. They run outside of Arkham and we want it to feel authentic and also work, again, first and foremost, from a place of reality. So for us and our team, we’re sitting on the production design team. We’re going, okay, what’s a real-life building like this, a government building, you know, jail or something like that. Where would the practicals be? Around the space. And, of course, if somebody tried to escape, well, there’d be searchlights. So then it’s like, okay. The idea is like, okay, well, when can those searchlights find them? And when do they miss them? So when they first come out, we are talking to also those people that now have headsets on. And my gaffer and I are saying, okay, sweep there and miss them. And, okay, they’re coming around here. So even a shot like this is like a shot where they hide between these two cars. We’re calling the searchlights, like, searchlight one, and then when they hide, we know that if we hit searchlight four, it misses them, but goes over the top of the car and adds some blue light for the foreground. And if we send it to the background now, it silhouettes them. So we’re doing that in real-time, you know? And then when they get up, it’s like they want to be caught. They want to now be in the spotlight, that’s also her intention. And so now we’re gonna fire them all on them at some point. And then now they’re dancing in this almost like glow of overexposed.
Yeah, it’s amazing. Yeah. Very high in terms of exposure, but it works perfectly because it is magical.
This magical moment, and it’s also a magical moment for their connections. So it’s like lighting them on fire.
Exactly.
Even the final shot of that sequence. And it’s a really big, wide shot. You see these four points of the spotlight. It’s very much like. Almost like you’re seeing a play, with theatrical lighting for like what’s supposed to be a harsh world.
So you would. You mentioned you like the 280 mostly. Did you have, besides that, what lenses you mostly use?
Yeah, there’s like five. There’s like five hero lens. There’s like a 58 Nikkor, which is very fast, like a 1.2 close focus, like ten inches. That lens is like the hero lens for anything where we’re going intimate and close to him. So if you think about, there’s, like, interview stuff with Patty Nolan where we’re moving in close, and he’s really sort of like where we want to connect with him or her emotionally, that’s usually that 58. W ide shots are like a 35 Canon, CP 2. There’s an 80 DNA, which we used a lot for sort of, like, longer than the 58 for close-ups and stuff, but still intimate. There was a macro 90 Leica. And then we would go to the 150 Ottoblad, which was like a Hasselblad lens, and then the 280. And then there’s, like, a vintage, like a Signature, I guess it’s an ARRI Rental vintage 765 350, which was closer focused than the 280. So sometimes we’d use the 350. So, like, in the visiting room, when she puts the lipstick on, on the glass and he smiles. That’s a 280 on him and a 350 on her.
Adoro quella scena. All’inizio ho pensato: l’hanno fatto per davvero o l’hanno dipinto dopo?
È al 100% reale. Il ciak che è nel film penso sia il primo che abbiamo fatto. L’abbiamo fatto solo tre volte. Ogni volta dovevamo ripulire il vetro, ed era come ripristinare il set da capo, perché, essendo rossetto, non era velocissimo da pulire. Ricordo che mentre stavamo allineando − ovviamente l’abbiamo fatto alla prima ripresa − Todd, Joaquin e Gaga stavano cercando di capire dove farlo esattamente. Siamo riusciti alla prima ripresa. Lo ha fatto lei. Perché lei ha applicato il rossetto e Joaquin si è spostato. Ricordo che nel daily si poteva sentire il mio “oh!”, come a dire: “Ha funzionato!”. Poi l’abbiamo fatto altre due volte. Ma credo proprio che il ciak che è nel film sia il primo. Ero convinto che avrebbe richiesto molto tempo e invece è stato più facile di quanto si potesse pensare. L’unica cosa che abbiamo fatto a seguire è stata solo un piccolo intervento per migliorare un po’ il rosso. Perché quando Gaga l’ha messo sul vetro era un po’ pallido, non aveva quell’intensità. Ma era una cosa minore, semplice da migliorare.
Oh, I love that. I thought at the beginning, I thought, did they do it for real or di they paint it after?
No, 100% for real. And, in fact, the take that’s in the movie, I think it’s take one, maybe. We only did it three times. And I remember, because, each time we put it on, it was like a reset, and it wasn’t that fast to reset the glass, cause it’s lipstick. So I remember while we were lining it up, of course, we just did it on the first take, but I remember Todd and Joaquin and Gaga were sort of figuring out where on the thing could be. But the first take, we did it. We just tried it. So she did it. Cause, it happens at the end of the scene, and she put it on, and Joaquin sort of moved over, and I went oh, and I remember because you could hear it even on the dailies, everyone sort of was like, oh, like, it works. Yeah. And it was like, okay. And I think we did it two more times. But I think the take that’s in the movie is take one. And I remember thinking, this is gonna take a long time. Yeah, yeah. And, no, it was easier than you would think. Yeah. And then the only thing that we did, which is simple, is, like, a tiny bit in the DI to just enhance the red. Because when it went on the thing, it’s a little bit pale and didn’t quite have that. But that’s a minor thing that we can do.
Who did you color this with?
With Jill Bogdanovich at Company 3. They’ve done many movies going way, way back, and they did Joker and many others, so to maintain the look.
Yeah, the look is amazing. The color is great.
Yeah. Well, she knows we both like color a lot, so. It’s like the same reason with our whole crew and myself and Todd. It’s like when you work with people for a long time, there’s a secondhand, you know, language that you don’t even have to speak anymore.
Fantastic. So thank you so much. I think. Is there anything we missed?
I’m trying to think.
I mean, I can go on all day because, you know, it’s always so much fun. How long was the shoot?
The shoot was for Todd and me the longest shoot we’ve had, which was 75 days. We shot in Los Angeles and New York. There’s some stages that Mark Friedberg, the production designer, built that were spectacular and sets that feel 100% real and as if we shot them on location, but, you know, having the full control of being able to be on stage and shoot in the way that we wanted to shoot. So there’s Arkham, big sets in Arkham, in the courtroom that are built on stage.
