Cinematographer Pedro Cardillo Talks Life Behind the Camera
The role of a cinematographer is one of the most misunderstood jobs in the film industry by the casual move fan. What does it mean to be the director of photography? Pedro Castillo virtually stopped by Beyond the Cinerama Dome to demystify the job. Castillo’s most recent work is the upcoming Sky TV miniseries, Inheritance, led by Gugu Mbatha-Raw which allowed Castillo to blend contemporary and period piece looks to create the larger visual language.
Castillo chatted with Beyond the Cinerama Dome about what first inspired him to pick up the camera, how the promises made in pre-production may not come to fruition, and breaks down the real role of the cinematographer. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Beyond the Cinerama Dome: I want to start with how and why you picked up your first camera, and then what makes you excited to continue picking up cameras over and over and over again?
Pedro Cardillo: Oh, that’s a good question. I was always kind of a film buff from a very early age, so I loved watching films, TV series, and cartoons. I then fell in love with comic books. Everything that’s visual has always been very appealing to me.
When I was like 14-ish, my school came up with a newspaper and I was the photographer. It was my first experience taking pictures, but with a mission. I had to do specific photographs. I went to a museum in Sao Paulo, where I'm from, and then I took the pictures for the articles there. It was kind of difficult to frame because it’s a very oddly-shaped museum, a modernist building.
That was the first time that I realized there's much more to the images I was liking to watch than just placing a camera anywhere.
courtesy of Conde+
As a kid who liked superhero comics, would you dream of doing a superhero movie one day?
I was super drawn to comic books, especially, when I first read “The Dark Knight Returns,” the Batman series from Frank Miller. I was really into that comic book world for quite a while, but because of my parents, I was watching a lot of classics like Alfred Hitchcock and Singin’ in the Rain. The Godfather was one of my dad's favorite films, so we’d watch all three every year together over a long weekend.
I always existed in those two worlds. Nowadays, I'm more drawn to cop, detective, or mafia stories. Thriller is my favorite genre. I still love Hitchcock. I love his movies and I have several books about his work.
Hitchcock's blocking for his actors is just incredible. It tells you so much.
He really is one of the true masters of film language. I think nowadays, we’re so overexposed to visual storytelling. We don't really pay attention to how the director or the cinematographer tells the story visually. I think, for me, this is the ultimate art form. This is what I really love.
What's so great about Hollywood and Hitchcock is he started doing silent films in the UK. When sound came, he was kind of a strong advocate that the camera should tell the story and do all the talking. I saw an interview where he said something like, “this is only pictures of people talking, I'm not interested in pictures of people talking.” His camera is always telling the story in a very clever way. The audience understands everything that's going on without dialogue.
As a cinematographer, you have a close collaboration with so many departments. Do you have a set series of questions that you're always asking, say, the directors and the lighting department when you start a new project?
I like to begin as a virgin, as I like to say. I don't know anything. I receive the scripts, I read the scripts. When I read the scripts, lots of stuff comes to my mind and then I do research.
It's kind of a random process. Sometimes I listen to music, and that music triggers me with some different images, and then I start to make a scrapbook of visual references. I really like to use still photography as references for lighting.
Obviously, I like film language very much. I get clips from specific camera movements or camera behavior that I want to show the director. After collecting this scrapbook, I come up with a presentation and then I show my ideas to the director.
This is like my starting point and then we start a collaborative dialogue. The director’s views of this script, what they think is important. Things I might have missed, things the director liked that I presented that they weren't expecting.
I start to build a common Bible, as I call it. Our visual Bible, our visual reference. As we build this, along the process, then the production designer talks about the colors, the textures, and the depth.
courtesy of Prime Video
I read an article where you were talking about your work on Joan. I thought it was very interesting that you said the promises made during prep must be fulfilled during shooting, and I think that’s such a succinct way of explaining what your pre-production process looks like. Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you've made a promise that you felt you weren’t able to keep?
This is a good question because I think you want to come up with your visual references for your new project. Then you need to know how to achieve them. That's why I prep so much. I was a very, very sloppy student back in my school days. I'm a real nerd when it comes to filmmaking now.
I really like to test everything. I like to test the lenses, the lighting sources, the color. I like to conduct several passes along the process so we can really know we're going to be able to fulfill those promises.
I shot my first feature in Rio over ten years ago. It was all about a Brazilian rock band that came from the favelas, the poor part of the city. When I started the process, I said to the director and the production designer, I said, I think we should lose that sunny, golden tropical look of Rio that everybody thinks about because those guys, they live in a very tough part of the city. They work to collect a minimal amount of money. They had a very political voice educating against inequalities and everything, so let's go for a black and white instead of doing City of God colorful.
Everybody loved the black and white idea, but then the distribution guy said, we can't sell a black and white film. I started to do some research, and then I said, how do I drain the colors to only retain a little bit?
I came up with a very interesting process based on what they used to do when they shot on film. It’s called Bleach Bypass. When you're developing the negative, you skip the bleach. When you do that, you retain lots of silver in the film. So what's happened? The image has less color because the silver is kind of masking everything. It's kind of subdued and very contrasty. The highlights are really high. The blacks are really, really black, so it still has some color to it.
Saving Private Ryan is a very famous example. Steven Spielberg wanted to give a gritty look to the Second World War film. Janusz Kamiński, the cinematographer, they went with the bleach bypass. When you watch the film, you see the greens are kind of grayish. The skies are whitewashed. They are not so perfect blue, so it gives an edge.
courtesy of Imagem Filmes
Since I wasn't shooting on film, I had to translate that into a digital process. That was a really tricky one because my prep was very short. I did just one test before we started shooting. My first two days, I was going totally mental. I was going crazy because I was looking at the image and I said, I'm not there yet.
I was driving everybody insane. I was taking pictures of the set, grabbing frames, and realized that there's a lot I'd have to change. By day four, things were back on track. I was back to sleeping the whole night, but I started having nightmares that my bleach bypass would look horrible. In the end, the look was very successful. Everybody was very pleased. The band was very pleased, and that film had a very nice career.
Casual moviegoers don't fully understand the role of a cinematographer and the impact of switching lenses and the importance of different lenses for different looks. Can you talk a little about how that basic decision makes such an impact on the viewer, when they may not even realize it?
The cinematographer is originally the first person with the camera. The first person who got a camera and made it work was the cinematographer. Over 100 years ago, they realized that besides documenting reality, those cameras could tell stories, and then everybody came on board.
The cinematographer is the eye. The cinematographer is kind of a translator. I translate the director's idea into images. The more knowledge the director has about photography the better it is, because our communication is going to go deeper and deeper. We’re still communicating about how we want the audience to feel, how do we want the audience to perceive the scene so as to absorb the mood of the character's journey?
The camera is what's going to capture this story, and the camera is not faithful to reality. We see in 3D, but the cameras are 2D that create the sensation of 3D. When you’re grabbing this image via the camera to later project to the audience, the camera is going to distort the image in a way. It can be very subtle or it can be very expressive.
courtesy of Conde+
That's one of our roles. What do I want to do to the audience? We want them to be really attached to the main character's journey. We want the camera to be close to the character. That means we don't want to use long lenses because long lenses mean the camera has to be far away.
That means we’re probably talking of a more organic approach. The camera's likely going to be handheld. It's going to be following or leading the actor because that's what you want. We want to connect the audience to the character. All of those decisions have a profound impact on everything around the actor.
If you want a magnified emotion, you want to do a closeup. Imagine back in the good old film days, with the old guys doing this close-up. The old 70mm massive screens that were the size of a building. The actor, if he blinks, it's so powerful.
My last question is what's coming out next. What are you working on? Anything you can talk about?
I just finished an incredible TV drama for Sky called Inheritance. We shot half of it in England and half of it in Jamaica. It's a very interesting story about a personal journey of a mixed-race Englishwoman who goes back to Jamaica. There's also a horror element to it, because there’s a witch in the past whose spirit is unleashed in the present. It's a really genre-bending TV drama.
It's period, it's contemporary, it's horror, it's drama, it's amazing.
That must have been so fun for you behind the camera!
Oh, it was great. One day we were lighting scenes with candles, and then we had another scene in Jamaica where we were burning the cane fields before the crop. Two hundred extras on a night scene lit by massive cranes and the cane fields burning.
Then, some weeks later, we're shooting on this huge plantation from the 1800s in Jamaica. Period then contemporary. It was a really fun, really crazy project for us.
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