'The Favourite' and 'American Honey' Director of Photography, Robbie Ryan, takes us behind the scenes to explain how he shot the hilarious Lisbon ball room scene with Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo for Yorgos Lanthimos' new dark comedy, 'Poor Things.'
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00:00 Hi there, I'm Robbie Ryan and I am the cinematographer on Poor Things.
00:04 The beginning of the process for Poor Things, me and Jorgis tested an awful lot of lenses.
00:21 We had one day where we tested over 50 lenses, I think, 40 or 50 lenses,
00:26 and loads of different varieties of optics.
00:29 Jorgis wanted to get something that was optically very, very impossible, unfortunately.
00:33 But it was to try and get a lens that was something like a 12mm lens that would zoom up to 150mm.
00:39 It's kind of impossible to do and we really did exhaust all avenues.
00:43 And then we ended up finding a lens that was 16.5 to 110mm zoom,
00:49 which was made by Zeiss and it's called a Master Zoom.
00:52 And it's huge, it's a really big lump of glass, but it's actually a really beautiful lens
00:56 and we ended up using that an awful lot because he wanted to try and do a lot of developing shots through a zoom.
01:02 And the whole film, if you watch it, has an awful lot of zooms in it, which is great.
01:05 So once we'd sort of decided on that, we went to choose the other lenses.
01:09 Jorgis obviously likes wide angle lenses and we used the same ones we used in the favourite,
01:14 which was the 8mm Nikkor and a 10mm.
01:18 But he was really keen on trying to get a wider wide lens as much as he could.
01:22 And we had used a 6mm on the favourite, which I thought was the widest lens you could get.
01:27 But then what he was keen on trying to do this time was to get a sort of a vignetted wide lens
01:33 to create a kind of a portal sort of feel so that you're looking into another world.
01:39 It gives that sense about it.
01:41 And what we happened upon was that there was a lens called a 4mm Optex.
01:45 It's primarily made for 16mm shooting, but when you use that lens on a 35mm format,
01:50 you get a kind of a vignette and it worked out perfect because it just created a full circle within the frame.
01:56 When we tested with it, we kind of went, that's pretty interesting.
01:58 And then every time we felt the scene needed to go a little bit further, Jorgis would go, get the 4mm.
02:04 Or as the actors used to say, if they're not getting the scene right, Jorgis would go, get the 4mm.
02:15 This is the part of the film where Bella Baxter has left her home in London
02:22 and gone on an adventure with Duncan Wedderburn, who's a cad to say the least.
02:27 After drinking herself into a drunken stupor and eating all this cake,
02:32 then she comes back and they go to have dinner, her and Duncan, in a hotel sort of restaurant.
02:40 And that scene we shot actually in a location.
02:44 We'd been kind of spoiled a little bit with having studio soundstage space to work in,
02:49 where we could put lights anywhere and it was huge.
02:52 It was the size of four football pitches.
02:54 It was in the biggest studio in Budapest, whereas the dance scene,
02:58 we had to kind of adapt and work within the limits of the location.
03:02 And that was actually quite a bigger challenge than we had expected,
03:05 because it was a difficult space to light because it was an old building.
03:08 What was beneficial was this big skylight was just above the dance floor,
03:14 so it was sort of like a lovely top soft light in a way.
03:17 We had to build a big tent around this daylight skylight.
03:21 It was great, but what I started realising, because I was a bit slow to pick it up,
03:25 I was like, is everything a bit green from that light?
03:27 And I started going a bit to the gaffer, have you gone and turned the lights green?
03:32 And they go, no, no, it's all tungsten.
03:34 And we had them all set to tungsten.
03:36 Because the stained glass looked like it was clear, but it was actually green.
03:39 I did bring that up to Jorgis, he goes, I kind of like it, it looks pretty good.
03:43 So that was another kind of happy mistake in a way.
03:45 And it kind of counterbalanced all of the lighting.
03:48 Jorgis doesn't really have lights on set,
03:54 so we had a lot of practical lights on the tables, kind of on the walls,
03:58 sconces and loads and loads of practical lights.
04:01 So there was a kind of a good ambience within the space,
04:04 and the skylight at the top was helpful in creating a little bit more light.
04:08 He doesn't want lights on set, so we'd light everything
04:12 so it's got a 360 capability of shooting anywhere you look at any moment
04:17 where he decides to move the camera.
04:19 That is totally coming from his way of filming.
04:21 And other films I've done, I would maybe bring in a light on set,
04:25 and it could be done a bit easier, but you've got to kind of put your faith
04:28 in the fact that even if it doesn't look so lit, it probably would look better,
04:33 because it's just a bit more realistic or something.
04:35 And I totally love the way he does that.
04:37 I've gone through my own other work doing that a lot more,
04:40 that something that might look not so beautiful is beautiful,
04:44 because it's just the way you film it, not necessarily the way it's lit.
04:49 You, like me, are a creature of freedom in the moment.
04:52 Bella sits down after the dance, their boat, like, exhausted,
04:55 and Duncan is absolutely in love with her at this stage.
04:57 And then she starts blinking at him, and he's like,
04:59 "Why are you blinking at me? What's going on?"
05:01 And then he looks around, and there's this older gentleman
05:04 who's looking at them, and he's doing this weird blink,
05:07 which only in a Yorgos film can be sort of--
05:10 You go, "What is going on?"
05:12 And she's blinking back going, "Well, it's only polite that I blink back."
05:15 Mark's character, Duncan, then goes straight over to the guy,
05:20 and he gets up and he starts fighting him.
05:22 So to sort of bring the absurdity to another level,
05:27 it felt at this stage, this is the time to use a formula.
05:30 And he goes, "Yeah, let's do it handheld."
05:32 So I'd never expected to be doing a handheld scene in the film
05:36 because we didn't do any up until then, and we didn't do any after.
05:39 I'm like, "What?"
05:41 So this is where Yorgos is great because he'll just kind of--
05:43 he'll sort of sense a scene needs something a bit more
05:46 because there's so much energy in that scene.
05:48 He felt, "Okay, let's get the formula and chase after Duncan fighting this guy."
05:52 And we weren't using a handheld kind of 35mm camera.
05:54 It was an ARRI ST, which is a big lump of a camera.
05:57 I was running around after Mark for the start,
06:00 and then Bella joins in the fight.
06:02 Because it's a wide lens, you have to get a lot closer.
06:04 So what happens is she just basically was right on top of me,
06:07 and she just kicks back, and her boot hits the lens.
06:11 And then Yorgos left that in the scene, and he quite likes it
06:14 because in the soundtrack you can hear her foot hit the lens.
06:18 So it just all sort of landed very nicely, and it was a lot of fun.
06:23 The film is shot on 35mm cameras, an ARRI ST.
06:28 We also shot on a VistaVision camera, a very old camera system made in the '50s.
06:33 And if you remember Alfred Hitchcock's films,
06:36 you would probably have seen VistaVision at the beginning of his titles
06:39 because it was a new format that was made by the studios
06:42 to try and get people into the cinemas because TV was beginning to come out,
06:47 and everybody was worried that people weren't going to come to the cinemas anymore.
06:50 So VistaVision was one of the first new sort of wider screen formats that came out.
06:56 That was a format Yorgos was really keen on trying out
06:59 because it was the same aspect ratio as our film, which is 1.66.
07:02 We only unfortunately got to use the VistaVision for a small part of the film
07:07 because the one that we could find was a very noisy camera,
07:10 and Yorgos doesn't really like ADR sound, which is post-sync sound.
07:15 So we only used it for a small section of the film.
07:17 It's really beautiful, and we're hoping to use it again in the future.
07:20 The 35mm stocks we used were black and white,
07:24 which we shot on black and white celluloid, 5222,
07:27 and we used 500 ASA, 5219,
07:32 and we also used Ektachrome stock, which is colour reversal film,
07:36 which is a positive film stock,
07:38 and that was used quite extensively for some of the Lisbon stuff.
07:44 We would have loved to use it in a dance scene, but it's a very slow stock.
07:48 It's like 100 ASA, so I think we shot that on 500 ASA.
07:53 We shot most of the dance on that, but the Ektachrome was really interesting,
07:57 and it kind of almost informed the rest of the colour palette for the film
08:01 because it was so colourful and contrasty a stock.
08:04 Whenever we shot with that, I think when we went to the grade,
08:07 we began to look at that sort of footage
08:09 and then bring the negative 500 colour into that kind of sphere
08:14 as much as we can and push the colour and push the contrast,
08:18 and the film is really colourful, so I think by using the Ektachrome,
08:22 that informed a bit the rest of the colour palette for the film.
08:25 When we finished the film, December 2021, we finished shooting the film,
08:33 and then the film went into quite an extensive VFX post-process,
08:39 and that took over a year, and then we didn't go into the grade
08:42 until this January, which is 2023,
08:46 so that was pretty much the first time I saw that scene.
08:50 It just so suits the Yorgos universe.
08:53 There's kind of so much going on in the film all the time,
08:56 but it's almost like a comforting part of the film where you just go,
08:59 this is just standalone, the dance is just so wonderful,
09:03 it just jumps off the screen as an enjoyable part of the film
09:07 because it's so much fun, and I enjoy it every time I see it.
09:10 (laughs)
09:11 (music)
09:16 (upbeat music)
09:18 you