Rodrigo Prieto's Cinematic Odyssey

I brought a notebook up partially

'cause I'm an old reporter and I'm only comfortable

when I have a notebook in my hand.

But also because I want to go through

a little bit of a list for the person

we're about to talk to.

'Cause the movies that Rodrigo Prieto

has been the cinematographer director of photography on

are titles like Brokeback Mountain, Babel,

Argo, which was originally a Wired story

before it was a movie, just saying.

Wolf of Wall Street, three Taylor Swift videos,

and then this year,

one of the most important examinations

of kind of prejudice and culture and American history,

and then also Killers of the Flower Moon,

'cause the other one was Barbie.

[audience laughs]

These are true facts.

And those last two movies, Flower Moon, and Barbie

have made some people suggest,

and I'm gonna make fun of him about this a little bit,

that Rodrigo may be competing against himself

in the cinematography category at the Oscars.

So we'll just be fan-ish about that

for the next 20 minutes or so

and talk about color and art and maybe a little AI too,

'cause I guess it's today at Wired

and that's what people are talking about.

So join me, if you will,

in welcoming Rodrigo Prieto to the stage.

[audience applauds]

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Adam.

Thanks hi, thanks for coming up.

So I listed some of the movies,

but I want to list some of the names of directors

that you have worked with because

there's a question I wanna ask about this.

So, Spike Lee, Ang Lee, Alejandro Inarritu,

Ben Affleck, Martin Scorsese, Greta Gerwig.

I wonder if you can think about what it is like working

with these folks and how that might have changed.

Because I look at that list and think

it's four, maybe five generations of directors

of big, important movies,

and people who, at the more recent end,

grew up studying some of the early films

of the people at the older end.

So have you seen how your interactions with them

have changed, are there trends in the ways

that directors want to talk to you

about what the movies look like?

Well, I guess I started at 11 or something. [laughs]

I actually did with Stop Motions Parade and stuff, but,

not really.

I mean, I think that,

of course every director is a different universe,

just as any person is a different universe

and you have a different perspective

and a different view on things,

and also, a different approach creatively.

And as a cinematographer,

I try to get into that universe myself

because it's my responsibility

to bring that vision to the screen.

So of course I bring my own ideas and, you know,

my artistry or my craft,

but I really try to understand

the perspective of the director.

And I enjoy that enormously because I feel it makes me grow

as a person and as a cinematographer too, you know,

that instead of, okay, this is my style

and this is the way I shoot, take it or leave it.

You hire me, all right, you get Rodrigo Prieto special.

But no, I think that, in fact,

I just remembered when I shot Eight Mile

or when I was interviewing for Eight Mile,

with Curtis Hansen,

I kept interviewing and he didn't hire me, right?

Well, he did eventually, but he wasn't hiring me.

So finally, in the fourth interview, I asked him,

Okay, Curtis, you know, what's going on?

Do you want me to shoot it?

And he said, Well, this is the thing.

I've seen a lot of your movies in Mexico,

I saw Amores Perros, but I saw some of the other movies,

and they're very different.

There's you know, more stylish and you know, and pretty,

and I don't want that for 'Eight Mile,'

and I'm thinking maybe 'Amores Perros' was a fluke.

Maybe it was a director in [speaks foreign language]

[Host] He was worried

that you were gonna be too much you and not enough him?

No, no, that my style was more naturally pretty

than gritty.

And I said, Of course not.

You know, in the Eight Mile, I'd never, you know,

it requires some harshness.

So anyway, it's something that I adapt, you know,

and directors, I don't know, I think it's really,

for me, the language with a director is emotional.

And so I try to communicate in that way

and then bring techniques to match that.

You were in, the two movies that are out this year

are just visually, tonally, and story-wise,

and visually for sure super different.

And you were working on them,

there's some overlap from when you're working on them.

So what was that like, like are you,

do you just sort of head snap back and forth between,

you know, painterly amber

and wall of pink Mattel bright colors,

or what's the process like?

Well, I've always been very interested in color.

So that's just as an expressive tool.

And so that was an important facet of every movie I do,

but certainly of Barbie and Killers of Flower the Moon,

of both of them, but I was prepping Killers of Flower Moon

in Oklahoma and Bartlesville, Oklahoma,

and the height of COVID

when Greta Gerwig called me about Barbie.

So that was thrilling for me because I loved Greta.

I'd met her before and love what she does,

and her energy is just amazing.

So I was really keen to work with her,

but also to do that, to go from the darkness

of this story of Killers of the Flower Moon

to Barbie and find my own thing there, you know,

as a human also my Ken-ness, if you may.

[audience laughs] You know. [laughs]

Yeah, I'm k-enough. [everyone laughs]

So that was exciting to me.

But indeed it was kind of a head snap.

And we'd do Zooms every weekend with Greta

and with Sarah Greenwood, the production designer.

Finally, I had to tell Greta, Okay, now I'm two weeks

or three weeks from shooting 'Killers of the Flower Moon,'

I think I better concentrate on this, so let's stop this.

And then when I finished in Oklahoma,

immediately, I flew to London to start prepping Barbie.

I wanna deep dive a little bit on the [coughs]

Ken-ematography for a moment, if I may.

Yeah, I stole your joke, can't help it.

I read that when you were working on Barbie,

that one of the things you wanted to do

was try to capture or recapitulate 1950s and sixties,

three color technicolor. Right.

And I think maybe I have the chronology about that wrong,

so I wanna ask about that, first of all,

how that came about, and also,

maybe just have you explain what that is

and why those colors were so vivid in a fifties,

you know, a Douglas circa romance,

a musical that people might remember from the fifties

and what's different about now

and how color is produced in film.

Like what has changed and how do you

recapture the old magic?

Well, in fact, on Killers of Flower Moon,

I did a very deep dive into the way color

is made in photography, because I had this notion

of reproducing the beginning of color photography

in the beginning of the movie.

So I started researching auto chrome, particularly,

because to me it's an import from Europe,

just as descendants of the European settlers

are the ones who are, you know, in Oklahoma

and are, you know, want the oil money.

So I thought that's a good way

of representing that part of the story.

So I really did a lot of research into that,

which included three strip technicolor,

because color and photography is actually

made out of black and white layers, you know.

So the first color photographs were literally

like three photographs in black and white

with a filter in front of the lens,

you know, red, green, blue, and then

you combine those three black and white images,

and through a process of filtration on the printing,

which I don't quite understand, [chuckles] you get color.

So to me it's kind of magical.

But three strip technicolor is similar in the sense that

it was a film camera with three pieces

of black and white film running through the camera,

simultaneously, and with a prism behind the shutter.

It would, you know, spread the light through filters,

through colored filters,

to the different black and white images,

and then that's put together in the printing process,

and that creates color. You know,

like, you can imagine what this looks like,

that's, that really lurid, vivid, like you know,

Singing in the Rain color, that doesn't,

it's not how you do color filmmaking today,

even if you're using film,

much less if you're using digital.

It's a totally different process than used today.

Very different process, but also,

one thing that I felt for Barbie, in general,

just in the design of the look of it,

was the key word for me was innocence.

And the three strip technicolor is kind of innocent

in the sense that the colors are pure.

They're not, you know, the red's red,

it's not sort of so influenced by, you know,

a little bit green and yellow, you know,

that's why it feels so saturated.

There's not all the nuance of actual color

that you see with your eyes.

So that's why it looks kind of artificial.

So Greta had talked about making Barbie Land artificial,

but authentic.

And so that, for me, three strip technicolor made sense.

And I had just used, let's call it a digital filter.

It's a LUT, a lookup table for Killers of the Flower Moon.

I used several, but one of them was three strip technicolor.

Towards the end of the movie,

there's a moment which is in the thirties,

and the movie has a whole idea of representation.

And so towards the end, the scene,

I thought we should give it the color of the thirties,

which would be three strip technicolor.

So I had already created that lookup table for that film.

So I used it as a basis for the lookup table

for Barbie, but it didn't work.

But what I did is I photographed the colors of the sets,

you know, all the different pinks and cyans and yellows

with a stand-in, or different stand-ins,

because there are many different skin tones on Barbie.

And I had to make sure that the faces looked natural,

but to enhance these other colors.

So we tweaked it, we created actually a software called PPL.

It's initials, my name Prieto, Panzini,

one of the designers, and Lucas,

the color timer of the movie.

Anyway, we created this software to manipulate colors,

and in fact, the black and white layers of color,

very specifically.

So we created techno Barbie instead of technicolor.

And you can do that, you're doing software

for color timing, for processing after the movie's shot.

So are you shooting digital and it only works on digital

'cause Flower Moon's on film though, right?

So does it become digital at some moment,

it turns from grains of chemical film into pixels?

That's exactly right.

We actually prepare it in pre-production.

We make these lookup tables in pre-production

so that during the process of filming,

especially in Barbie, which was with digital cameras,

you can actually onset,

look at the monitors with the lookup table.

So we saw what the image looked like through techno Barbie.

So instead of what you're actually seeing on the set,

you can look on a monitor and see

what I'll see when I go see the movie.

[Rodrigo Prieto] Exactly.

And it's different, that's weird.

[laughs] Yeah, it is, it is weird.

But on Killers of Flower Moon, it was mostly film.

We shot maybe 10% on digital.

So you can't see on set this LUT,

but you see it on the dailies.

So the dailies are digital, you know, it's film,

but you scan the film and then it becomes

digital information and editing,

all of it happens digitally.

So even though we capture on motion picture negative,

the rest of the process is digital.

That's such a, I know this is totally normal for you,

but it does seem like, that there's a moment where

the kind of, the visual,

whatever the real thing is that you have shot,

then gets captured by either a chemical processor

or a digital one, you know, the same,

roughly similar technology

to like what's in everybody's phone.

Like there's a change for what you're actually seeing.

Are you trying to, is the director trying to,

in talking to you about making it look like

what they saw on set or on location that day?

Or does it turn into, does it become the arched?

Are you trying to make it look like something else,

you know, the product,

once it gets past your eyeballs or past the monitor?

Well, it depends.

Usually I try to make it look something else,

if that's the design, if that's what we're going for.

And in the case of Barbie, for sure,

we were going for this techno Barbie look.

But on Killers of the Flower Moon,

the sequences that had to do only with the Osage people

and their rituals where Europeans or European settlers,

White people weren't involved,

then we try to use the color as naturalistic as possible.

So we shot 'em, film negative,

and then, you know, you transfer it to digital.

But trying to, that the colors are reproduced

as faithfully as our eyes see it,

because even our eyes are interpreting color in our brains,

and you know, we have our own little, you know,

cameras in our eyes and our brains.

So color is an abstraction, as you know, you know,

it's a reflection of light off of objects.

So, well, as you know, in fact,

red apple is everything except red.

It's reflecting red light, it's absorbing every other.

So anyway, everything's a lookup table in the end.

So the reason I ask this,

other than I love the technology of it,

is I wonder, you know, you're doing this for an artistic,

for an emotional impact to be thematically part of the film,

or to have an emotional impact on an audience,

do you, this is gonna sound like an insult when I say it,

do you think that people get it?

Like when you were saying, you know,

trying to build the artificial,

but authentic world of Barbie,

or the naturalistic world of Osage people without,

you know, European eyeballs on it,

that's because that's intrinsic to that story.

Does a person going to see that film know that's going on?

If they've never heard that,

they don't know that's happening,

do they feel it in some other way?

What effect are you hoping to draw

to make happen in my head when I see that,

without knowing what you just told me?

Well, to me it's like music.

I don't know if a C minor next to a F,

or whatever it is, [chuckles] what that is,

but I know that when I listen to a melody,

it makes me feel something.

So lighting is, and you know,

after all, most of what I do is lighting and color,

texture, composition,

all these are things that aren't words, right?

So it affects you in a way that I can't describe exactly,

but it certainly does.

There's no doubt that this vibration coming off the screen

affects you in one way or the other.

So it doesn't matter if anybody knows if it's techno Barbie

or you know, any of that, or auto chrome,

or you know, just, you just have a feeling

on Killers of the Flower Moon of this sort of old image,

and then you feel these natural images,

and then after a certain point in the movie,

I shifted when this house explodes

and all hell breaks loose,

I shifted the look to a much harsher, contrasty

sort of de-saturated look that emulates A and R,

which is a whole nother thing.

So, and nobody knows, nobody cares.

But what does matter to me is what you feel, you know,

'cause for sure there's a, you know,

there is a feeling to it

and hopefully it helps communicate an emotion.

Just like the soundtrack in the film,

you don't know, oh, right now these notes of this music

are making me feel this way.

I try to make cinematography invisible

and the design invisible,

but hopefully you feel it in the heart and soul.

And part of the reason that I ask is that

all of these things are, to some extent about, you know,

authorial intent, the creator's intent,

and how that then translates to

somebody watching, to an audience,

but now that there are increasingly available tools that,

because machine learning, artificial intelligence,

because there are software tools that are generative,

that can create images,

presumably with themes that either come from a prompt

or come from all of the data that they're trained on,

but have no intent

'cause the machines don't intend anything,

but can still, well I mean this to be a question,

can they still induce those kind of emotional responses?

Would you use them?

Do you think they work on their own terms,

and then would you ever consider

using them as tools yourself?

Right, I'm really not scared of technology.

Only one thing I am scared of, it's acronyms.

I never know, you know, PXTD,

but anyway, that sort of stuff.

But it's tools, you know, and indeed,

I think that the design of an artist

is essential and an artist, right, a human,

because I was thinking of, say for example,

stop motion, Pinocchio, for example.

It could have been done with a computer for sure.

That could be CG for sure, or even AI, you know,

but there is something about just kind of knowing

that this is, a human was painstakingly moving these,

which is amazing and magical.

And Barbie for example, you know,

there were many scenes that we did,

you know, really like the theater, you know,

where the sets are completely physical and you know,

you have a person moving the little dolphins like that,

and you know, people are just pulling pulleys.

But also, there are other scenes where we use LED monitors

to light the moment and make it look as if

they're in Barbie Land, you know-

[Host] The volume, the Mandalorian thing

where you have the whole screen around them

so that they're lit by whatever the effect

is gonna be put in later.

Exactly, like the 2001 sequence,

that's what we use for that.

Or, you know, or when she's driving around,

that was all in the volume.

You know, so we use both and I think either is valid.

Yeah, no, no, but I'm gonna stick to this.

Sure, those are tools that you or Greta or Martin,

first name basis obviously with all these folks,

choose to use to convey what's going on in their head,

the emotional significance,

but now there's a real possibility

that the tool can just do it without your intervention,

without any of these directors intervention.

Do I get the same effect?

I see it, I don't know if you did it

or Ken GPT did it. Right, yeah.

Is it the same?

I think that the, say AI, will be able to do, you know,

so many things and use algorithms to figure out

what will elicit a stronger emotion

and the exciting stuff and all that for sure,

but I think that there is no substitute

for the exploration by a human being of the human soul.

And I don't think, that's something that we need,

I mean, that part of storytelling, I think,

is essential as humans.

And I don't think any machine is ever gonna replace it,

although the tools will, you know,

will be used more and more, just as you were saying.

And even I've used a little bit of that,

you know, certainly in Prevas and things of that sort,

you know, it's helpful,

and just talking about de-aging for example,

you know, it's a combination,

and some characters in the movie I directed

where it's an artist creates the look,

but then the AI will figure out how that would behave

in this movement of the actor, you know, things like that.

And I think that's a great tool, you know.

So I want you to talk about this a little bit more

in the time we have left.

You have your own movie that you're directing,

that you're in post on now?

So talk about more about that

because you're using some of the tools,

as well as, I have to imagine, all of the other skills

that you have acquired over this long career.

Yeah, a little bit of everything, yes.

It's a Mexican movie called Pedro Paramo.

It's an adaptation of a famous Mexican novel.

I highly recommend it, Pedro Paramo.

And so the story takes place in different decades

and also even like different sort of ghostly,

and it's bizarre, it's surreal.

But some of the characters have to be,

you know, from the age of 20 or 1920 to,

there's sixties, seventies.

So, and most of the actors,

I try to hire kind of somewhere in the middle,

you know, and so when they're older, it's prosthetics,

but when they're younger we have to de-age.

So we are using,

and it's something that I'm in the middle of, you know,

still looking at the first test, the first results of it.

And it's promising, a little scary,

because again, it's not, you know,

it is a face of the actor

and it is their performance,

but the computer has to figure out, you know,

how, with the movement of the face and all that,

how the ears would look, you know, all these things.

So it's kind of guessing from my perspective,

but also the computer is guessing, you know,

but it's, I don't know, I find it exciting and interesting

to, you know, apply all these tools.

[Host] Does it look the way you want it to look?

[Rodrigo Prieto] I've only seen one shot [laughs]

and that one looks good, yes.

[laughs] Well, it must be so different though.

We just spent this time talking about how

you've worked so diligently to transmit

the visual intelligence and emotional intelligence

of other directors, so how has it been for you when like,

there was nobody, like they were all looking at you?

[laughs] Yes, it is true, it's happened to me.

'Cause I've also half shot it with another DP,

I collaborated with another DP to shoot it.

But it is the kind of thing where you finish a shot

and you know, and cut,

and then you look to see what the director thinks, right?

Oh no, oh, I have to decide if this works or not.

But I expected it to be more challenging,

I mean, certainly very challenging, especially, you know,

the production, the time, all these things.

But I've always been very interested

in actors and in acting,

and so I found it easier than I expected

to know what I liked or not from a performance,

and being able to guide an actor.

And of course I've seen, you know,

all the directors I've worked with talk with actors

and what, you know, what causes certain reactions,

and of course every actor is also different,

but yeah, I was able to navigate it sort of well, I think.

Can you think of specific examples from

what you would pull from a given director you've worked with

and how you went to an actor?

Like who did what that you thought,

Oh, I'm totally gonna use that to get somebody to cry.

[laughs] Yeah, cry!

Okay, now cry, now! Shouting at them

next to the kid, does that work?

I always assumed it would. It's like Yoda, come on!

No, it's funny, I just showed a cut of my film to Scorsese

[laughs] and- Can you imagine

showing a movie that you just, I just made a movie,

here it is, Martin Scorsese, would you mind taking a look?

Yeah exactly, it was pretty intimidating, but,

and also it's in Spanish and all that with subtitles,

but he got it, he understood everything.

That was a very good step.

'Cause it's a complicated movie.

But anyway, at the end,

I forgot to mention it in the beginning,

but at the end I went, I hope you don't mind

all the shots that are homages,

oh, I don't dunno how you pronounce it, homages?

Yeah, yeah. Homages to you.

And he goes, Like what?

[Host] So, oh no! [laughs]

Oh, okay, so now I have to say which shots, right?

[Host] Oh no.

Is it worse if he notices or doesn't?

I don't know which is the, it's like,

No, that was, I was, that was, you were,

you didn't, you know, well I'll go back to the, exactly.

No one thing from Scorsese is that

besides his cinematic language, which I love,

I mean the way he uses a camera,

also the way he works with actors is very close

in the sense that he's not the director

that'll tell an actor, do this, do that,

he'll listen and he'll adapt to what the actors are feeling,

what they want to do, what they want to try.

Anything an actor wants to try,

you can bet we're gonna do it.

And I think that's brought some very interesting

results to all his movies, you know,

improvisations or things like that.

So I really try to incorporate that

and yeah, work very, very closely with actors,

and just as I do with directors,

I think the key word for me is listen.

And so I try to listen to the actors.

Is there a palette that you were working with,

a color spectrum for emotion and theme in this,

the way that you would on another movie?

What should I be looking for when I see it?

On Pedro Paramo?

Strangely, it's a little more simple,

maybe than another movies,

maybe because I had to concentrate on directing.

But there are two looks, because there are two eras,

one is this character Juan Preciado,

who goes to the town where he was born, his mother's dying,

he says, Go back there and go find your father,

who he hasn't met, really, and get what's yours.

That's the premise.

So he goes there and he finds this ghost town basically,

and his father's dead.

And it turns out everybody's dead, including him.

Ooh, spoiler. [laughs]

So that's one story. Damn it, man.

No, no, it's good, it's all good, it's all good.

And then, you'll still enjoy it.

Then there's a, [laughs]

there's a story of his father, of Pedro Paramo.

So what I did is this story of the man

who goes to look for his father is kind of a devoid of color

because it's a ghost town, basically, or some colors.

And Pedro Paramo's story is very naturalistic,

like the Osage. [chuckles]

All right, Rodrigo, thank you for doing this.

I really appreciate it, and thank you for your movies too.

[Rodrigo Prieto] My pleasure.

Thank you all. [audience applauds]