I’m really a fan of the way you marry technology with practical tactile imagery, particularly in the way you did with “The Batman” and the way you always speak to some of these things as just tools in the arsenal to tell the story, but I assume you guys didn’t use any of The Volume technology on this film?
No, we did not use it in this film, and we did not find a use for it. And this is one of the great things about The Volume is when used in the right way, I think it’s seamless and I think it’s an amazing tool. But it’s like blue screen, or green screen or any VFX, or even camera techniques, like handheld: when used gratuitously or for the sake of it, it stands out and it becomes obvious.
When used for the right effect, it delves seamlessly and creates drama that the audience doesn’t think about. And for this film, we didn’t find a need for it. We used different technologies. We use LED lighting hat’s color changeable. So we created different color in the lighting, at times, but we, we never had to use the video walls, no.
Roger Deakins famously praised your lighting on Matt Reeves’ “The Batman,” and in the same way, especially that marriage of new technology and classic filmmaking techniques. Presumably that’s something you’re going to be working on soon or next?
You know, it’s probably something you’re going to need to chat with Matt Reeves about. I talk to Matt quite regularly and that’s at probably more of a question for him because I’m really—given my role, until something is kind of confirmed or locked in, it’s hard for me to talk about anything that’s in the works. My recommendation is to talk to Matt because he’s the holder of all that information. But listen, Matt Reeves and “The Batman Part II” is going to be amazing. I’m positive, given the ideas that we had at the end of Part One.
Do you know at least what you are shooting next? That or something else? Like when that ‘Mandalorian’ movie was announced, I thought, huh, “I wonder if Greig might be involved in that.“
There are a few things going on at the moment that have kind of stopped me from looking at those kind things. There are few things brewing, that I’m sort of working on, but I can’t really talk about them at the moment.
You’re obviously an Academy Award winner, and you know, I think people like Roger Deakins rate you as one of the greatest cinematographers working in the world today. But I look at your filmography CV, and while it’s obviously super impressive, it’s arguably not as robust as some of your modern colleagues. Is it fair to say you work less than some of your contemporaries and is it a quality over quantity type thing?
Sure. But you know, I do a lot of other things though, rather than just films. I DP a lot of commercials; I’m doing a lot of work in [the 3D creation tool] Unreal Engine. And I would like to think of myself as—not necessarily a jack of all trades because that can imply something else—but I would like to think of myself, not as a full-time director of photography.
I like to think of myself as somebody who’s specialized in cinematography but that can wear many different hats and work in many different mediums. So yeah, I play in different mediums, so I think that’s part of the reason why maybe my CV is not as full as other film DPS perhaps. I don’t get excited about that many things and so the things I work on, I do get super excited about. So, I kind of wait until I get super excited about something, and then I’m all in. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m working all the time on films. It could be that I’m working on other mediums as well.
I sort of love the high-and-low approach, too. Like the Volume and cutting-edge technology, then grounded gritty things like “The Batman” and “Dune,” and then something like Gareth Edwards’ “The Creator,” where it seems like he eschewed a lot of the traditional ways of shooting a VFX-heavy movie.
Oh yeah, that movie was a massive challenge, and you think about when it came out as well—it came out at a not dissimilar time to “Oppenheimer,” and from a technical standpoint, they had very similar sort of budgets, but very different techniques on how they were shot. And again, I’m not a proponent of any one type of shooting. I like to think of myself as somebody that’s nimble enough to be able to go from, from film to digital to small stuff, to VFX, and everything in between. But that was something we talked about at length during “Rogue One,” like, “let’s make a film that relies heavily on the production design occurring in post-production,” where we shoot the best and most amazing images that we can, and we try and give ourselves the least amount of limitations when it comes to the camera and technical side of that film, and we invent the world more in post-production.
So that was a great exercise: making sure that we had very few limitations when it came to the shots that we were creating and the locations. I think Gareth kept saying, ‘Well, if we have a small enough crew, we can go anywhere in the world and do anything. But the bigger the crew, the more limited we are about unit moves and about set builds.’
So, we tried to keep the crew really small, almost like a documentary crew, and get the camera almost like a documentary camera. That was the kind of the vibe and what we were pushing for on that movie, which was not dissimilar to the way we did some of “Dune: Part Two,” where we downsized even on a big shoot day and did some intimate scenes with Paul and Chani, or Stilgar or Jessica and Paul. We tried to create those little times where if we were talking characters intimately, we would create a small, intimate little set, not dissimilar to what we did on “The Creator.”
Two quick questions before I go. “Dune Messiah,” presumably that’s something you want to work on if/when that happens. And I get the feeling maybe “Batman: Part Two” is…not quite there yet for its 2025 release date. Cause you’d have to be shooting soon, right?
The short answer for ‘Batman’ is, I don’t know. And I don’t really have the knowledge to know about release states and that kind of stuff. And I’m not even sure I’m authorized to talk about any of it, to be honest.
In terms of “Dune Messiah,” yeah, absolutely. Of course. I love working with Denis, and I love these actors, and I love the story. So, listen, if and when “Dune Messiah” happens for Denis, then, if Denis wants me, I’ll be there immediately with the bags packed.
Cool. I just want to say I love the behind-the-scenes videos for “The Batman,” where you guys revealed how these scenes—that you never in a million years would have thought would have been shot in the volume— were done. So, I hope you do something similar for “Dune” and particularly for some of the sandworm scenes.
Well, actually, that’s why I was really pumped to work on the book with Josh Brolin, the “Dune: Exposures” book that was my photography in Josh’s words because I wanted to release something. I wanted to create something that was a look at the world that wasn’t standard unit photography or wasn’t the standard thing that you might see behind the scenes. It’s my kind of recollection of that movie; it’s the beauty and the artistry, it’s the intimacy, it’s the lunacy, it’s the absurdness of a film set. For me and Josh, I think it’s a good summation of how we see a a movie in an abstract kind of way. You should check it out, I think you’ll like the kind of way that it tells that story.
“Dune: Part Two” is in theaters now.
