Two-time Academy Award-nominated cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth has been a part of quite a few memorable projects. After shooting music videos for Nine Inch Nails, George Michael, Taylor Swift, and David Bowie, and collaborating with director David Fincher on several projects, Cronenweth is now venturing into television for the first time, collaborating with Mark Romanek on the latest Amazon Prime sci-fi series “Tales from the Loop.” In a nearly half-hour-long interview, Cronenweth discussed what makes for a good filmmaking collaboration and why David Fincher doesn’t bring his film crew over to TV.
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Speaking with Hollywood News, Cronenweth spoke about collaborating with filmmakers, Cronenweth said that it helps make the process easier when you already know the director. “If you find a partnership that works, and you guys share similar aesthetics and you can communicate with one another and achieve that,” Cronenweth explained, “I think you’ve already solved half the dilemma, and now you can just tackle the challenges that come naturally in any kind of project.” When it comes to David Fincher, Cronenweth talked about the director’s signature style of shooting many takes per scene, saying “he’s a very didactic as a director and he wants to get a range of performances for each of the parts of any particular scene,” Cronenweth said. “So we’ll do it enough times so that he feels comfortable and he can build his cut around them. On ‘Fight Club’ we did a lot of takes but there were a lot of short scenes with a lot of cadence. On something like ‘Gone Girl’ we did 12 takes and moved on. [David Fincher] likes camera movement and actor movement to fit into a certain range, so repetitive muscle memory helps us get those things so you need to do many takes to get everyone into that rhythm and after that, it’s just a matter of getting the words.”
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Speaking of why he took so long to get into TV, Cronenweth said that he simply hadn’t found the right project, or things felt apart. While frequent collaborator David Fincher has dipped his toes in TV before, with “House of Cards” and “Mindhunter,” Cronenweth hasn’t worked on those shows. “Fincher never wanted his film crew to do the TV shows because he wanted to do movies in between and didn’t want us locked up for that long of a commitment, so that wasn’t an option.”
You can listen to the rest of the interview below.