Which major soccer leagues are leading or following the EPL in taking production inhouse?

SVG Europe

One of the biggest news stories of last year was the announcement by the English Premier League that it would be taking its media operations business in-house. Although this does not come into force until August 2026, the move would seem to end the 20-year partnership between the Premier League and IMG, operating as Premier League Productions.

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Each league will have its own set of commercial and logistics reasons for operating the host broadcast as it does but taking a view of how other major soccer leagues are managing their domestic and international production and distribution it would seem that the EPL is no pioneer in keeping operations closer to the chest but neither is it a laggard.

Below is a breakdown of how some key leagues operate

 

Spain

Host

The host broadcast operation for the premier league LaLiga EA Sports and second division LaLiga Hypermotion for 2023/4-2026/7 season is managed by LaLiga which hires Mediapro the official production company.

In 2015 a decision was made to centralise the LaLiga AV rights marketing and commercialisation. This sets the basis and rules for how LaLiga income is distributed and also how to enhance income with improved production value. 

LaLiga domestic rights are held by Telefonica until the end of the 2026/27 season which shows five games per week via Movistar+. This covers 55 per cent of matches with DAZN airing the remaining matches in sub-licencing deal with Telefonica.

Coverage and facilities

Mediapro, based out of Barcelona, is in charge of the host production and uses its own OB facilities. This includes 380 live streamed and broadcast matches in La Liga EA Sports per year and 468 matches of LaLiga Hypermotion (462 regular season and 6 playoffs).

LaLiga EA Sports has its graphics and comms centralised with the rest of production performed on site. Eight LaLiga Hypermotion games are produced fully remotely.

Standard LaLiga EA Sports games feature 17 cameras and Hypermotion matches are covered by 13 cameras. Top matches like El Classico Barcelona v Real Madrid are covered with a 22-camera plan. All are standardised on HD 1080p.

VAR

The Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) manages VAR across La Liga and Copa del Rey cup competition and contracts the services to Mediapro. This contract runs from four years to 2027-28 and replaces Hawk-Eye which held the contract since 2019-2024. Hawk-eye does provide semi-automatic offside detection technology (SAOT) for the 2024-25-27/28 season.

 

France

Host

The French premier division is administered by the Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP). Ligue 1 is host broadcast by HBS in continuation of a longstanding partnership with the league’s rights holders. This season those rights holders changed over from Amazon and Canal+ to DAZN and BeIN Sports which sees DAZN airing eight matches per round and BeIN Sports showcasing one primetime game totally 308 matches per year. The deal for rights and host broadcaster runs until 2029.

Ligue 2 matches are exclusively broadcast by BeIN Sports which secured five years of domestic broadcasting rights ending in 2029. BeIN Sports is also producing all Ligue 2 games with HBS acting on behalf the league performing venue management, archive management and quality control.

Coverage and Facilities

HBS contracts the majority of its facilities from AMP with additional from NEP Belgium. The contribution network is provided and managed since 2019 by Orange Events. The network is fully redundant with hitless switching.  All matches are at-the-venue productions although HBS is working on hybrid remote solutions and operates an MCR which has connectivity to the stadia.

The standard match day format since the turn of the year is HD 1080P from 14 cameras ranging to 25 depending on the match and includes aerial, Steadicam and cine-style cameras.
 
VAR

Centralised in Paris and managed by LFP with HBS providing technical support.

 

 

Denmark

Host

Matchday Production. This is an inhouse entity, new for the 2024-25 season, set up by Superligaen, the company owned by the 12 clubs competing in Denmark’s top-flight football league Superliga, and production company DMC Productions. Matchday Production is an independent company shared between Superligaen A/S (49% share) and DMC (51%).

Matchday Production produces all 800 matches a year live across 3F Superliga, NordicBet Liga, Oddset Pokalen, 2^nd Division, and 3^rd Division. The domestic rights holders are TV2 and Viaplay.

Superligaen handles rights and managing relations with the broadcasters and clubs. DMC manages the technical set-up, production and operations.

Coverage and facilities

Matchday Production operates a remote production centralised in the Matchday HQ in Copenhagen. Its four control rooms are able to handle several matches simultaneously.

A standard Superliga match is covered by six cameras in 1080p with an ambition to deliver HDR in 2025.

All 55 of Denmark’s stadiums are connected to the Copenhagen MCR, via a contribution ring. The contribution ring was procured by Matchday Production to give them full control of the network. It features 10Gbit links to each stadia and 100Gbit lines to the broadcast centre.

Germany’s Broadcast Solutions helped DMC create the Copenhagen HQ and also built four vehicles and four flypacks for the on-site facilities.

The main facility is equipped with GV Kula switchers, Kayenne control surfaces and GV vision mixers, audio consoles from Lawo and a MediorNet Horizon processing platform from Riedel. EVS provides XT servers as well as its Xeebra platform to handle VAR. Net Insight’s Nimbra application enables remote contribution. Graphics is provided by Danish company TV-graphics. The network provider is Danish telco TDC.

 

Germany

Host

Sportcast, based in Cologne and a wholly owned subsidiary of the Deutsche Fußball Liga (DFL), has been host broadcaster for all matches in the Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2, as well as the Supercup, since 2006-07.

In that time it has produced over 12,500 live games, around 700 a season, led by managing director Alexander Günther, who has been there since the beginning.

Coverage

Bundesliga is produced in UHD HDR as is the Supercup. Bundesliga 2 is a 1080p production. Standard Bundesliga camera plans are 19-21 cameras ramping to 29+ for finals like Supercup including ACS and drones. Typical Bundesliga 2 matches are 11 cameras.

Alongside production of the TV base signal, Sportcast coordinates the contribution and international distribution of the live TV signal in over 200 countries. In addition, it provides weekly live games and highlights shows in English, with international graphics via satellite. To achieve this, the video signals of the Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 are broadcast via a fibre optic network operated by Sportcast connected to 36 stadiums.

Facilities

Sportcast hires OB facilities from a number of providers including TVN Live Production, Skyline, Studio Berlin, HD Broadcast, TopVision (part of TVN group) and Triofilm. As part of the provision, Sportcast hires around 30000 crew including directors per year.

Sportcast is planning to transition to remote production starting with two games per matchday in Bundesliga 2 from 2025-26 season. It has trialled technologies including Grass Valley AMPP and Evertz DreamCatcher system.

Sportcast manages the league’s Archive Media Hub itself in Cologne. This is a central content hub which ingests all feeds and delivers live, non-live, social and content for documentaries.

VAR

Based in Cologne, run by Sportec Solutions another DFL subsidiary.

 

U.S.

Host

Major League Soccer Productions with Apple have teamed to produce all MLS coverage over the ten years of Apple’s $250m a year ($2.5bn total) deal with the league starting in the 2023-24 season. MLS and Apple will produce 950 matches a year including 493 regular season games plus the entire postseason; all 77 matches in the Leagues Cup (a competition between US, Canadian and Mexican soccer leagues) and around 100 matches each for MLS Next Pro, the developmental league, and amateur academy consortium MLS Next.

Facilities

MLS has worked in various capacities with NEP for 22 years and IMG for a decade and these are its main partners for MLS Season Pass.

IMG manage production and distribution of live match and studio who content. It oversees editorial tone, look, and feel; production enhancements; producer/director staffing; and talent logistics.

NEP Group oversees broadcast operations providing crew and overseeing all technical aspects including provision of all mobile units; build of control rooms; remote and centralised production support; commercial integrations; infrastructure and systems management.

Coverage

Every match is produced onsite with at least one NEP supplied scanner in 1080p with 5.1 Dolby audio and in both English and Spanish commentary.

In addition to carrying every game, Apple’s MLS Season Pass streaming service features MLS 360 a 6-hour long whip-around show, as well as pregame show MLS Countdown and MLS Wrap-up — all produced from the league’s production centre in New York City.

14 live matches every Saturday and some Tuesdays and Wednesdays are produced and switched from onsite mobile units. Although MLS NEXT events are produced onsite, MLS NEXT Pro events are captured onsite, backhauled to one of NEP’s connected facilities, where graphics are integrated, announcers call the events off monitors and/or via remote announce kits, and the broadcast is assembled and encoded for distribution. Highlight clips produced from remote EVS servers direct to VOD are managed on MediaBank, NEP’s MAM.

NEP also works with MLS Broadcasting to produce broadcasts for MLS linear partners Fox and Univision.

Other technical providers include Vizrt graphics, official MLS data distribution partner IMG Arena, network manager AT&T, data services leader Deltatre and data analysis company Sportec Solutions.

VAR

MLS operates video reviews from a centralised location for all matches from Hawk-Eye’s headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.

 

U.K English Football League 

Host production

IMG and Sky for five years until the end of the 2028-29 season for Sky Bet EFL, Carabao Cup and Bristol Street Motors Trophy. The EFL comprises 72 clubs over three leagues below the Premiership; Championship, League One & League Two). That totals 1698 matches per year. IMG produces all of them; 866 matches per season for Sky with the remaining balance produced by the pay-TV broadcaster for its main channel output or Sky Sports+; and 832 fixtures for distribution outside of the UK via EFL rights holders Pitch International and Relevent Sports. IMG is also producing a free-to-air terrestrial highlights programme for ITV.

Facilities and coverage

IMG produce every match from the EFL production centre at Stockley Park in West London having upgraded the cabling at all 72 stadiums to increase camera output. 6 cameras cover Championship matches (seven with the Hawk-Eye goal technology feed), four cameras in League One and two cameras in League Two.

200+ feeds on a regular matchday travel to Stockley Park over an NEP Connect backbone.

FlatBack4 Productions supplies IMG with camera operators and cameras.

Hyper Studios is the graphics supplier for IMG’s EFL output, making use of OPTA data.

Every game potentially has three to four commentators (home bias, away bias, clubs own and a neutral commentator provided by IMG).

There is no VAR in the EFL though the system has been used in League Cup semi-finals and finals.

 

Virtually untethered: V-Nova replicates game-like freedom for XR video

IBC

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Data compression specialist V-Nova is offering a solution to deliver pre-recorded volumetric content to XR headsets with ‘Hollywood-grade CGI, lifelike parallax, occlusions, reflections, and textures, at full display frame rate.’

The technology combines V-Nova’s point-cloud compression with technology from Belgium company Parallaxter which it acquired a year ago.

CEO Guido Meardi tells IBC365, “We have invented a technology that uses the same pipeline used today to produce CG and VFX content to generate and stream XR content with six degrees of freedom. We allow the user to be inside as if it’s a video game.”

Meardi is pitching volumetric production as a new era in music and XR entertainment. Fans don’t just watch—they’re part of the scene, creating an unparalleled connection to the content, he says.

That’s in contrast to most current video content made for VR or XR displays. “Stereoscopic 3D works in the cinema because your head is still and the 3D can only be right for a certain head position. But in a VR environment when you are immersed in the content and you can move your head around, you need the content to alter according to parallax (change of perspective) without lag just as we see the real world. The XR entertainment market is blocked if it cannot get around this issue.”

V-Nova’s point-cloud compression technology compressed hundreds of gigabytes of data to transform a movie into a manageable asset, ready for distribution, real-time decoding and consumption on VR platforms. It is built on V-Nova’s previous standards LCEVC MPEG-5 and SMPTE VC-6. 

PresenZ enables existing 3D assets to be turned into a volumetric experience by rendering the images from a cube of points of views rather than a single camera point.   

Users can experience 6DoF (Six Degrees of Freedom) meaning they can move within the virtual scene “as though physically present,” he says.

“The biggest benefit of 6DoF technology is that, unlike standard 360-degree VR movies, it realistically responds to the position and orientation of the VR headset, so you can get closer to objects and characters,” Meardi says. “Users can explore all angles and look around and behind objects with a more natural feeling, eliminating the motion sickness commonly associated with VR.”

He claims, “The possibilities opened by V-Nova PresenZ not only promise to rapidly unlock a latent multi-billion-dollar market among existing XR users, but also set the stage for a new XR use case with mass-market appeal. If you don't use our technology, even just a single volumetric image is several gigabytes of data.”

V-Nova Studios, its content production arm, has just debuted a music promo in the format, available via VR platform StreamVR. Weightless, features Albanian X-Factor winner Arilena Ara performing her new song. It’s believed to be the first time a music track has been released first in this format.

“We can put an audience in front of a star to experience the choreography of the performance,” says Meardi. “She's is less than half a meter from the viewer. The detail is incredible down to the pores of her skin and eyelashes.”

The song also features in Sharkarma, an upcoming shark-themed cinematic 6DoF production by V-Nova Studios.

V-Nova is working with NBCU and DreamWorks to turn IP like How to Train Your Dragon and Abominable into future content using its tech.

“It’s much easier to do if it is a 100 per cent CG library item. In that case it is very inexpensive. You re-render the asset in our format and you’re done. If the content is part CG part live action like Iron Man or Spider-man then you would you need to use AI tech to reconstruct the live action elements in 3D.”

Commercials for luxury brands are another possible revenue generator. “If you are Louis Vuitton or Cartier, Ferrari or Lamborghini you don't want to show people a video game-y looking product that may be detrimental to your brand. You want to do it at the highest level of quality or not at all.   With this technology, we can do everything that would you do for normal high-end CG productions but in immersive XR.”

Apple is building out its spatial computing content shop with new episodes, films, series, and concerts captured in Apple Immersive Video set to debut later this year, with more coming early next year. Its first scripted short film, Submerged written and directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Edward Berger, is already available. Apple teamed with The Weeknd to launch the artist’s new album and has new music series Concert for One, launching beginning with a special set from British singer-songwriter RAYE.

Meanwhile, Meta is developing Hyperscape, its format for delivering photorealistic digital replicas of spaces from the physical world into Quest headsets using cloud-based processing.

Meardi says V-Nova’s tech merges the Apple and the Meta technologies.

None of this is, however, a live experience and Meardi doesn’t think that this is possible given the limitations and cost of existing camera arrays and without the computer processing power on the scale of a NASA moon landing.

“A single volumetric image is several GB of data—we make it possible to compress this data massively to stream super high quality video at 90 fps motion,” he says. “You need to playback at this display frame rate because you can be really close to the character or person and at 60fps you would see a mismatch and be nauseas. Fundamentally you need not just supreme video quality and photoreal lighting and fur and physics simulation but 6K 90fps. There’s no way real-time engines can do that.”

Consequently, the assets need to be pre-rendered. Meardi says one frame of a typical Hollywood VFX movie would take three to seven hours to render.  Of course, you’d only need to do it once but you still end up with a massive data set. V-Nova’s technology make it possible to compress and stream 25Mbps using MPEG-5 LCEVC (a standard which is based on V-Nova algorithms).

“For live capture you would need to improve massively the quality of authoring tools and translation of the asset.”

The number of cameras would also have to be reduced but AI can play a role in interpolating gaps in the image puzzle.

Other Hollywood studios are reportedly interested. The company is even talking with “a rapper who likes to smoke” (which we guess is Snoop Dogg) about an XR experience in which the rapper’s psychedelic imaginings are also depicted. “You can see what it looks like when he’s high,” Meardi muses.

“What about transforming a star into a werewolf or rejuvenating ABBA or other aged stars? I would love to talk to Michael Jackson’s family. Our technology allows you to see Michael Jackson moonwalk in front of you, on the moon.”

 

 

BTS: The Brutalist

IBC

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Cinematographer Lol Crawley finds the monumental visual language to capture an artform that is essentially static.

The American Dream is subverted in The Brutalist which starts with a shot of the Statue of Liberty upside down. It marks the arrival by boat of the film’s fictional protagonist, László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor, emigrating to begin a new life only to find the trauma of war amplified in the land of the free.

“The opening scene in many ways encapsulates the entire movie,” says Lol Crawley BSC who operated handheld camera throughout the film. “We start with a space that is dark, cramped and distressing for László as if still confined in a concentration camp cell and by the end of the scene he’s in the light and almost joyous, liberated and celebratory.”

Writer-director Brady Corbet has made two previous features, both historical movies: The Childhood of a Leader (2015), the story of a young American in France who grows up to be a fascist dictator, was set between 1918 and 1940; his follow-up, Vox Lux (2018), took place between 1999 and 2017, tracking the rise of a female American pop star against a backdrop of gun violence and the 9/11 terror attacks.

The British DoP photographed them both. “Brady always plans audacious shots. He’s very clear about how a scene should be covered but we don't have a lot of coverage even when we're not doing lengthy shots.”

The Brutalist spans the 1940s to 1980 and was shot on celluloid despite being made on a budget of less than $10m. László is played by Adrien Brody, his wife Erzsébet, trapped in Eastern Europe with their niece, by Felicity Jones and Harrison Lee Van Buren, an American industrialist, by Guy Pearce.

“The opening is an example of wanting to be very intimate and disorientated with László in order to later juxtapose that with a sort of formalism we encounter with the Van Burens,” Crawley explains. “Brady wanted this sense that we're in the bowels of a ship. We're introduced to László lying down and we follow him descending steps and encountering other people crossing the frame. We dip in and out of light and then there’s the idea of ascendance in which we get a sense of a different colour and of daylight ahead of us. I love the moment where Adrien leans into a porthole and the light overexposes his face, but the audience doesn't yet know where he is. Then we're spat out onto the deck of the ship.”

It was filmed as one single take but the final shot has been edited a little, including flipping some frames around to further disorientate the viewer. “Brady and editor David Jancso went with this idea of upsetting terra firma – the solidity and independence and freedom that America represents.”

It may be coincidental that László’s character is Hungarian but the production shot almost entirely in and around Budapest. This is partly because Budapest is an industrial city in the way Philadelphia used to be (the ship they shot on was moored in the Danube) but mainly because Hungary still has working film labs and technicians capable of processing the large format VistaVision negative.

“Brady wanted to use a camera system from the 1950s which seems to make perfect sense, but what then liberates it from being a sort of an affectation or gimmick are the two primary benefits of shooting on VistaVision,” explains Crawley. “One is that you have a higher resolution image [than 35mm] and the second clue is in the title. It is able to capture incredible landscapes.”

VistaVision is a 35mm format that passes through the camera horizontally rather than vertically to effectively double the image area and allow for greater image detail and clarity than traditional 35mm. It was famously employed by Alfred Hitchcock on classics including North by Northwest and Vertigo but had become mostly obsolete in the 1960s, as CinemaScope and 70mm rose to prominence as widescreen formats. The last American production to film entirely in VistaVision was Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks in 1961 while continuing to be used for special-effects sequences in everything from the original Star Wars movies to Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things in 2023.

Indeed, Crawley first worked with VistaVision while loading VFX plates for Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace in 1999.

“Because you have a bigger neg area your focal length never changes but your field of view does,” he explains. “That means when you're shooting architecture or wide spaces you're can be more faithful to how the human eye perceives it. You can be on a 50mm lens and still see from the cement to the sky. If it was another format, you'd be forced onto a wider angle lens which would cause some distortion in the image.”

Architecture is a theme to The Brutalist which refers to the movement of minimalist post-war designs which emphasised structural elements over decoration. In the film, László is commissioned to construct a public institute for Van Buren in memorial of his mother and he does so using cement.

“What's interesting is that half of the Institute is subterranean where light has difficulty penetrating but the upper half features twin towers that capture sunlight in a very particular way,” Crawley says. “László’s description of how the light is going to fall in this space remains incredibly moving to me.”

Brutalism is also a style of architecture that was predominantly created by immigrants. In scope and scale, Brutalist buildings are begging to be seen — but the people who designed or built them were fighting for their right to exist.

“László’s driving force is to create something in architecture that will be informed by his love of his family and his wife, but also his experience of the camp,” Crawley says. “He wants it to stands the test of time. At the very end of the movie, you find out that a lot of the spaces within the Institute are precise to the structures in which he suffered in Dachau.”

The DoP says his initial discussions with Corbet were about how to use a motion picture art form to capturing an art form that is essentially static. “We needed to find a visual language that could capture the monumental quality of moving through the spaces which László designs for the Institute.”

When László and Van Buren go to Italy to source marble for the altar that will be the centrepiece of the Institute, Crawley captures the beauty of the location at Carrara in Northern Tuscany. It’s the quarry where Michelangelo went to source raw material.

“The way they pour water on the marble so that you can see the veins [of the rock] in order to select the piece you want, is a wonderful ritual,” he says. “What's extraordinary is that it provides the setting for the most brutal act in the movie when Van Buren physical assaults László. Yet the landscape itself here has been physically assaulted by humans. The quarry has been mined over centuries. It reminded me of a Sebastião Salgado photo of South American open mines where hundreds of people are toiling for a pittance each day. It is inspiring and horrific at the same time.”

Driving into the site entailed going through a tunnel. “It’s like a kind of hell, going into the Earth. We thought we have to shoot this, so we quickly rigged a camera in the car and drove. It was very rudimentary. An audience might assume that everything is intended and that we had complete control but the things that are mistakes or the things that didn't come off in the way that you intend are sometimes the ones that work.”

They had two days to shoot but as soon as they turned up, fog had rolled in clouding all of the surrounding landscape. “At first, we were gutted. Now I watch it and it has to be this way. There's this beautiful dreamlike quality to it.”

An impromptu party on the site of the quarry and filmed by Corbet and Crawley as a kind of Fellini-esque handheld sequence was shot in Hungary where location manager Judy Becker had found a catacomb.

“Brady and I share a certain aesthetic,” he adds. “The films we’ve shot are like an unofficial trilogy touching on the contrast between antiquity and modernity. We like to work in low light. We like to underexpose the film. We like to push process it.  

“I realized early on in my career that sometimes your job as a DP is not about imposing. It's about recognising how not to screw something up. It’s about protecting the space because there’s a reason that you chose that space to film in the first place. So, I don't tend to use a lot of hard light hard sources. The lighting is quite soft and naturalistic. It’s really trying to light the space and give the actors the room. I don't shoot every film that way but it certainly felt like very important for this.”

“So, I'll be shown a space by Brady or Judy, such as the catacomb where that Fellini-esque dance happens, and it’s almost like casting a location. My challenge is to film that location and to keep consistency of light for the duration of the scene. I'll study the location in terms of the light and how the light is moving try not to change anything intrinsic about it.”

Crawley was aided by Hungarian Steadicam operator Attila Pfeffer who shot one of the film’s final sequences as a single long take, when Erzsébet confronts van Buren at his house during dinner.

“For a start he put the VistaVision camera on a Steadicam, which I'm not sure anyone has done before. This shot starts out Steadicam then turns into a handheld and then becomes Steadicam again because Brady wanted the camera to wobble at a particularly distressing moment for Erzsébet. Attila did this amazing thing I've never seen anyone do where he essentially took the whole Steadicam rig and handheld it before resuming smooth Steadicam mode.”

Brutal sound

For the score, Corbet turned to British experimental musician Daniel Blumberg, who has recorded three albums for Mute Records with the producer Peter Walsh, who helped create many of Scott Walker’s solo albums. Walker, the composer of Corbet’s previous two films, passed away while The Brutalist was in pre-production. The film is dedicated to him

Adds Corbet: “In the same way architecture uses slabs of concrete, Daniel and I wanted slabs of sound for the score — bars that become resounding and intoxicating, but in a measured, minimalist fashion.”

The Institute only reaches completion in the last 25 minutes of a 215-minute movie, so the soundtrack, and even the filmmaking itself needed to reflect the Brutalist method.

“We linger up close on spaces and characters, so when we finally crack wide open in Carrara, and on the construction site as the Institute takes shape, it’s what you’ve thirsted for all along — the psychological effect of finally being able to breathe.”

Blumberg asked pianist John Tilbury to create improv-style piano score that was linked to László’s interior life. For the film’s epilogue set at the Venice Biennale in 1980, Blumberg collaborated with synth-pop star Vince Clarke.

Why epic period drama movie The Brutalist was shot on VistaVision

RedShark News

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From writer-director Brady Corbet comes the story of László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect who, after surviving the Holocaust, emigrates to the United States to begin a new life while awaiting the arrival of his wife, Erzsébet, trapped in Eastern Europe with their niece following the war.

The Golden Globe winning feature starring Adrien Brody (Tóth), Felicity Jones (Erzsébet) and Guy Pearce (as industrialist and benefactor Van Buren) is likely to feature highly at the Oscars where it would deservedly be judged film of the year. Its sprawling narrative, co-written by Corbet’s wife Mona Fastvold, spans over three decades and runs 215 minutes. It was shot almost entirely on celluloid film in and around Budapest standing in for Pennsylvania, for a remarkable $10m budget.

Here RedShark News talks with editor and regular Corbet collaborator Dávid Jancsó about aspects of the production.

Editing brutally

For Jancsó, László Toth's monumental work in the film became the stylistic reference for how he thought about structuring the film's equally monumental runtime.

“The architectural motifs were also mirrored in the editing style,” he explains. "The clean, geometric precision of brutalist architecture influenced the cutting patterns, with long, unbroken shots interspersed with sharp, abrupt cuts, creating a rhythm that reflected the tensions in László’s life."

It helped that the editor has a family member who studied Bauhaus architecture. “I was already predisposed to Laszlo's artistic vision. There’s a simplicity to Brutalism and so we wanted to stay bold in our cutting all the way through to connect the architecture with our film.”

Brutalist architecture came into fashion in the 1950s, among the reconstruction projects of the post-war era and in a style that was predominantly created by immigrants. It emphasises minimalist constructions showcasing bare elements like exposed concrete or brick, over decorative design.

As Corbet puts it in the film’s production notes, “In scope and scale, Brutalist buildings are begging to be seen — but the people who designed or built them were fighting for their right to exist.”

Expansive VistaVision field of view

The Brutalist was filmed on 35mm (2-perf, 3-perf, 4-perf and 8-perf) VistaVision, a format shot horizontally for a higher resolution large screen image.

Originated at Paramount Pictures in 1954 and employed by Alfred Hitchcock on classics including North by Northwest and Vertigo, the VistaVision had become mostly obsolete in the 1960s, as CinemaScope and 70mm rose to prominence as dominant wide-screen formats. The last American production to film entirely in VistaVision was Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks in 1961. But the format was employed in international productions throughout the ‘70s and into the 2000s, on Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (1976), Shohei Imamura’s Vengeance is Mine (1979), and Kim-Jee Woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), while also being used for special-effects sequences in everything from the original Star Wars movies to Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things in 2023.

Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley BSC were drawn to VistaVision both for its mid-century origins, and its expansive field of view, which they studied prior to production by analysing a sequence from Vertigo incorporating a wide expanse of the Golden Gate Bridge.

“Its field of view is extraordinary — you could be right up against the side of a building with a 50mm lens on the camera, what you’d normally shoot a human face with, and you can see from the cement to the sky because the field of view is so immense,” says Corbet. “For architecture it’s great because you can be physically close to the structure you’re filming and experience all the details — you can see the minerality of the concrete and at the same time capture the entire building inside your frame.”

The drawbacks of shooting in VistaVision included very few cameras left in existence — Paul Thomas Anderson used some on his forthcoming feature The Battle of Baktan Cross after The Brutalist wrapped production — not to mention the overwhelming bulk and weight of the remaining cameras.

“It’s a large format, and quite finnicky, which requires technicians who know how to work with it,” says Corbet. “There’s still a culture of shooting on film in Hungary, unlike much of the rest of the world. For us this was a big coup and one of the major reasons why I wanted to film in Hungary again.”

For scenes in the quarries of Carrara, Tuscany, where László and Van Buren travel to source marble, the filmmakers wanted to bring to life the devastating reach of capitalism into every corner of the globe.

“Carrara for me is indicative of the way capitalism has been so harmful to the planet, so the landscape mirrors the characters’ interiority,” Corbet explains. “The whole movie is about my characters’ interiority, which is manifested in the spaces László is creating in the movie, and the spaces he inhabits.”

Processing, postproduction and digital

Not quite all of The Brutalist was shot on VistaVision. An aerial shot of a train crash was captured digitally on Alexa processed with grain to blend into the film’s aesthetic. Parts of the epilogue were shot on Betacam to achieve an authentic 1980s look. All the material was scanned directly to 4K (and 6K for VistaVision) using a DFT Scanity scanner, resulting in an 700TB of data. The film was developed and scanned at the Budapest NFI FilmLab, with the digital dailies processed through Post Office Films, a post-production company Jancsó co-founded over a decade ago.

“When I started out editing I got really tired of having to cut in basements so I banded together with a couple of other editors and we formed a post-production company that now has expanded into dailies and DI,” Jancsó explains “It's become an institution in Hungary. And being a partial owner of it, we could get away with a lot more. I have very good relationships with the film lab here so we got an extremely good deal from them. I mean, they actually asked us not to ever mention the great deal that they gave us for this film because we got everything that you would for a 200 million dollar film budget.”

Jancsó’s deep knowledge of celluloid filmmaking helped Corbet and Crawley develop peace of mind during the film’s 18-month postproduction process.

 “Very few people are as dialled into the analogue postproduction process as David is,” commends Corbet. “David handled everything with expert gloves.”

All of editorial was performed in 4K. Finishing colorist Máté Ternyik applied a 'best light’ grade to the dailies, ensuring a high-quality visual reference during editing.  While the various formats were initially ingested at their native resolutions and aspect ratios, the final film was standardised to a 1.66:1 aspect ratio through a combination of aspect ratio adjustments and matte applications. However, the film’s release was not limited to digital formats. It was also recorded back to 65mm and 35mm film, with tailored masking applied for each specific output format.

Pivotal conversation

For all the beautiful landscapes, and careful positioning of the camera to capture the scope of the architecture, the centrepiece of the story is a monologue from Van Buren to László over a post-dinner brandy. On screen the scene last about 10 minutes.

“That was the scene we went back to the most because that is the pivotal moment of the film. That is what gives you all the clues of what Van Buren is like,” Jancsó says. “It tells you why he's creating this institute, what’s the driving force behind these two characters, and it’s also why we've made this film. Whenever we touched a part of the film, we always went back to see what are the implications of that scene were compared to what comes before or what comes after.”

The previous dinner party scene shows László being grilled for his experiences in the war by guests who couldn’t be more unwittingly gauche if they’d tried.  “Very few people notice that the music we play in the background is by Wagner who, of course, is a totemic composer for the Nazis. Just having that music under László’s dialogue talking about his plight in in the Holocaust, while everyone else is oblivious to any sensitivities they are inflicting, felt pivotal for us too.”

Intermission

If you see this film in the cinema there will be a 15-minute intermission created to give breathing space and to hark back to theatre screening of the ‘50s and ‘60s. It’s a screened intermission too, in which the film still rolls (albeit blank) without the curtains closing.

“We knew the film was going to be long and since Brady and I are hardcore moviegoers we know it's good to allow the audience time to go out,” Jancsó says. “In my case, to have a cigarette. The length of the intermission was a question up until the very end. We discussed, five minutes, seven minutes, 10 minutes and ultimately landed with 15 primarily because that’s the length of a film reel. But we wanted to create an event out of this too. There was talk of having live music for the premiere during the intermission but that never happened. Editorially, the intermission marks a division between two parts of Laszlo's life.”

The film does not use on-screen titles for dates or places so viewers should listen out to auditory cues for changes in time period.

“If you pay attention, a radio that you hear in the background indicates an amount of time has passed. But we didn't want to overdo this either. We were trying to retain the mystery, for you to lean forward and keep being engaged. You should be asking what just happened? and where are we? If certain time has passed, you will find your cue of where we are and even if you don't, there's a scene right after where you will. Even if this approach disengages you for a second, you will be pulled back in. We trust the audience to understand.

“We knew we were making a long film and were very conscious of the pacing of the whole film. The music [by British experimentalist Daniel Blumberg] was recorded prior to filming and was played back on set. So, we’d already sort of choreographed scenes to the music.”

The film ends in an epilogue set in 1980. To create the sound of this new era, Blumberg travelled to New York to collaborate with Vince Clarke of ’80s synthpop fame (Depeche Mode, Yaz, Erasure). Peter Walsh mixed the score and co-produced with Blumberg.

 

Cine literate layers

Consciously or not the film's ambitious, single-minded protagonist and narrative arc has echoes of Citizen Kane though this was one of many references for the cinephile filmmakers.

“Brady is extremely literate in film history and I’m also a film buff. I come from a filmmaker background too. That intrinsically affected how we were going to treat this film.”

Jancsó is the son of lauded filmmaker Miklós Jancsó, who achieved international prominence in the 1960s for his historical allegories featuring long-sequence shots; his mother, Zsuzsa Csákány, edited 1981’s Best Foreign Language Oscar-winning film Mephisto.  
 
“We took from the nouvelle vague and Italian realism (Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist, “with memories and flashbacks woven seamlessly into the present”) and Citizen Kane, The Godfather (“the ability to slowly build tension within quiet, emotionally charged scenes”) and even JFK. We tried to be cognisant about these elements in the film but also allowed the film to breathe on its own.”

Subtle and sensitive use of AI

Much of the film’s dialogue is in Hungarian, the filmmakers went to great lengths to make it as accurate to a native speaker as possible. This included judicious use of AI from the Ukrainian specialist Respeecher.

Jancsó explains, “I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce. Even with Adrien's Hungarian background - (Brody’s mother is a Hungarian refugee who emigrated to the U.S in 1956) - it's not that simple. It’s an extremely unique language. We coached [Brody and Felicity Jones] and they did a fabulous job but we also wanted to perfect it so that not even locals will spot any difference.”

Tweaks were needed to enhance specific letters of their vocal sounds. “If you’re coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp. We first tried to ADR these harder elements with the actors. Then we tried to ADR them completely with other actors but that just didn’t work. So we looked for other options of how to enhance it.”

Brody and Jones were fully onboard with the process guided by Respeecher which started with recording their voices to drive the AI Hungarian delivery. Jancsó also fed his voice into the AI model to finesse the tricky dialect.

“Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there. We were very careful about keeping their performances. It's mainly just replacing letters here and there. You can do this in ProTools yourself, but we had so much dialogue in Hungarian that we really needed to speed up the process otherwise we'd still be in post.”

GenAI is also used right at the end of the film in a sequence at the Venice Biennale to conjure a series of architectural drawings and finished buildings in the style of the fictional architect.  The overall effect is so impressive you might find yourself headed to Wikipedia to double check that László Tóth existed.

“It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn't be,” he acknowledges. “We should be having a very open discussion about what tools AI can provide us with. There’s nothing in the film using AI that hasn't been done before. It just makes the process a lot faster. We use AI to create these tiny little details that we didn't have the money or the time to shoot.”

Architecture and filmmaking compared

The film is about many things, including building a building, but it’s also a movie about making a movie, according to Corbet. “Architecture and filmmaking have a lot in common because it takes roughly the same amount of people to construct a building or make a movie. The Brutalist for me was a way of talking about the more bureaucratic aspect of the artistic process.”

Jancsó concurs, adding, “This is a story of a struggling artist, which you could say is Brady's story too, especially with his experiences on [2018’s musical drama] Vox Lux. He and Mona succeeded in creating a universal character. This is not necessarily just an American story, it's a global story. This is not just an American epic, this happens to immigrants in Europe and Asia in Africa and Australia. It’s about what it is to be an immigrant and what it is to try to be a part of a society that just does not accept you.”

A life-and-death crisis plays out in real time in historical thriller September 5

interview and words written for RED 

article here

On September 5, 1972, details began to emerge that 11 Israeli athletes had been taken hostage while participating at the Olympic Games in Munich. Over the next 22 hours events unfolded that shocked the world, all of it televised live by an ABC Sports team more familiar with calling the play-by-play shots on sports.

A new film, September 5, dramatizes the crisis from the point of view of the broadcast crew who covered the tragedy happening just a few metres away from inside the cramped broadcast control room.

“Our first question was how can we make an audience in a movie theater feel like they are glued to television as people were back in then, watching live and not knowing what's going to happen?” posed Markus Förderer, ASC, BVK. “How can we recreate that real-time journalistic immediacy to keep people hooked.”

Förderer, whose credits include Constellation and Red Notice, previously worked with director Tim Fehlbaum on The Colony and Hell.

“We talked about how we would shoot the action if we were a documentary crew in the control room at the time. In the same way that the ABC crew suddenly get pulled out of the sports world to document world history, we thought a documentary crew would go handheld, probably 16mm, and would just follow the story wherever it took them.”

From this basic idea they tested 35mm and 16mm and compared results to the RED V-RAPTOR, a camera Förderer had used to shoot the AppleTV+ sci-fi series Constellation.

“On Constellation we had some extreme dark scenes filmed in northern Finland where the sun never comes over the horizon. I knew from that experience how sensitive V-RAPTOR is in the blacks and also our set in September 5 would be dark and illuminated largely by television screens. The TV monitors are the window to the outside world for our characters and our audience even if the actual events are happening within yards of the ABC Media Center.

Since the ABC News team mostly experienced events through TV monitors in the control room the DP wanted to make the screens a key light source. “We purposefully had all the characters wear glasses so we'd see the monitors reflecting back from their eyes. If we’d shot film, we would have been forced to add a lot more artificial movie lights to help expose the scene and we didn't want that look.”

“The main reason we went digital was because RED’s V-RAPTOR could shoot at this extreme high 3200 ISO and give us some grain that we wanted for that filmic feel. We added additional grain on top in post but the original image gave us a great start.”

Reviewers have compared the look to films from the seventies which Förderer takes as a compliment but disagrees with the sentiment. “Films in the ’70s, with obvious exception of The Godfather, tended to be over lit with tungsten simply to achieve decent exposure. Here, I wanted to create a hybrid approach of something that feels familiar to the period but is also contemporary, fresh and modern. That's where digital came in.”

Förderer chose Zoomar zoom from the seventies and tuned Apollo anamorphic lenses paired with the 8K VV sensor to create the desired look. Scenes in the control room and in the ABC Media Center were shot at 6K because Förderer felt the full VV sensor lent too shallow a depth of field. “For our purposes that made the image too pretty,” he says. “I wanted a certain harshness. We shot half of the time with spherical Super 35 lenses switching to anamorphic whenever the story gets particularly tense. This felt closer to 16mm.”

“It's such a big story, that in reality was watched by 900 million people around the globe, so I didn't want it to feel like true 16mm. However, whenever the story gets really tense we switched to anamorphic and used the full height of the sensor in 8K anamorphic mode. When we recreated some of the archival shots we switched to the true Super 16mm sensor format.”

While original footage was available to the production, almost everything on the television screens in the movie, save for some shots of ABC host Jim McKay, was recreated by the production.

“One reason was because we decided not to show any of the real hostages out of respect for their families,” Förderer explains. “Even the opening swimming race featuring Mark Spitz was recreated in the actual Olympic pool in Munich. While preserved as a historic site it has also been modernized, so we had to take particular care over camera placement.”

Some of the archival pieces were shot on RED HELIUM using Super 35mm lenses in a Super 16 crop which the HELIUM’s smaller sensor helped capture.

“We shot with the highest ISO and used the highest compression ratio in order to soften the image in camera as much as possible. RED has these amazing compression algorithms which are usually invisible when you compress the image. Usually if you shoot the full 8K sensor with high compression you get away with it because you down sample from 8K to 4K, but we wanted a really small sensor crop on HELIUM so the resolution was around 2K and then we pushed it with high ISO and used the highest compression to take a lot of detail out. It looked quite analog in a way which is what we wanted.”

Applying a LUT in camera further distorted the colors to appear like an authentic analog TV picture. Some of those archive shots were fed live onto the monitor wall in the newsroom gallery so the actors could better react to events.

“With our A camera V-RAPTOR and anamorphic lens we covered the actors in the gallery and when we pan to the monitor in a close-up or a zoom we see ‘live’ on screen the interviews and presentation in the TV studio.”

They discussed shooting the entire 90-minute feature as a single uninterrupted take or as a series of long takes joined by seamless cuts like Birdman.

“The film’s theme is also about media and therefore the importance of editing so the approach we took was to shoot long takes always knowing it would be tightened up in the edit,” he says. “I think that's what makes September 5 unique. Hopefully, you feel an energy from the camera.

“For example, when Peter Sarsgaard’s character (ABC Sports President Roone Arledge) storms into the control room with a piece of information, I whip pan to John Magaro's character (ABC Sports producer Geoffrey Mason) then zoom in on the television screen to show what happens there. We knew we wanted to hit certain moments like that as precisely as possible but it was also important to Tim and I that it feels nonchalant. We pan into it, tag it for a beat and then the next character wipes through the frame that takes you to the next beat. We always knew shots were going to be tightened up and fast paced in editing, but the longer takes in which we never linger on one moment for too long, still impart an energy which you wouldn’t get if we’d set up and composed each shot for coverage.”

At Bavaria Studios in Munich, they built sets that faithfully recreated the claustrophobic space of the original ABC Newsroom facility. “It was important to us not to cheat. We didn't want to have floating studio walls where we could have had more space for the camera. It needed to be confined and claustrophobic.”

In a further attempt to capture the freshness of a live event, there were no rehearsals. Förderer and B-cam / Steadicam operator Stefan Sosna positioned themselves in the room as if they had only one chance to record.

“We did do several takes and sometimes we’d make a short pickup of somebody pushing a button or grabbing a microphone but the scene was always captured as a oner with two cameras.

”At the end of each scene, when we thought we had it, Tim would do what he called ‘wild style’ in which the actors could move or perform any way they wanted. The same goes for the cameras. We could go in for a close-up of an eye in the middle of the scene, or just be really bold, because we knew we already have the scene in the can. That created some interesting moments for editor Hansjörg Weißbrich to fold in. It’s how we were able to create shots that you couldn’t necessarily conceive with storyboarding.”

The lighting tone for each scene varies according to the mood of the story and is driven by the content on the monitors. As the news team count down the clock to go live on air Förderer timed certain lights in the background to turn off then raised the tension further by increasing the strobing frequencies of the television screens.

“On most Hollywood movies depicting TV screens you’d spend a lot of time and effort to sync the TV image with the camera to reduce flicker. Here, we embraced that.”

Forderer’s inspiration was the documentary film Apollo 11 which features rows of monitors in NASA’s command center “flickering like crazy and creating this sensation of urgency and high adrenaline which is exactly what we wanted.

“We synched the camera shutter with the screen to allow a certain level of flicker and had an additional row of LED lights above the TV wall to push more light into the actor's eyes. The color of these lights was synched to match the content on the TV wall.”

From neuroscience studies he learned how different light pulses can impact people in different ways causing a state of heightened alertness. In pre-production, Förderer tested flicker frequencies with an Astera tube.

“I didn’t want to make the audience feel sick but we did pre-program different frequencies,” he explains. “Whenever the tension is low in the control room we have a little bit of flicker to get the audience used to the effect. When the tension is high, such as when a masked man is shown on screen for the first time, we dynamically ramp up from 25 hertz to 50 hertz. If you go too fast, it disappears and you don't see it. If it's too slow, it's very obvious and annoying. Get it right and it’s almost like when you hear drums, it affects your heartbeat, especially if you watch it on a big screen in a dark room.

“That’s what I find so fascinating about my work as a cinematographer. Working with light is so invisible and immaterial to the audience because hopefully they’re immersed in the story and don’t pay attention to the lighting. But subliminally it does have an emotional effect.

“On this set the strobing was so extreme I had producers coming up to me and asking, ‘Markus, what's going on, are your lights broken?’ I said, ‘Trust me it's going to make sense. Just watch my monitor. Don’t use your naked eyes.’”

For a scene showing how ABC’s secretly shot 16mm footage of the terrorists was developed, Förderer visited FotoKem in Burbank who generously permitted him to shoot the scene there.

“We wanted to create this sensation of a pitch-black environment in the dark room. FotoKem were gracious enough to let me film there but they said it had to be me alone, no crew, and no film lights. At the time they were developing Oppenheimer IMAX prints and couldn’t let anything risk that. So, I brought two little battery powered LED lights with magnets that I could attach and dim down. We dialled in this special dark green -yellow color that they use in labs sometimes when they change the film. And then used the V-RAPTOR at the edge of exposure to create this sensation of no light. You can just feel them handling the film. It intercut seamlessly with inserts of our actor’s hands shot in Munich. It was great to have FotoKem involved for this scene so it feels like the processing was done by professionals.”

 

Ed Lachman, ASC

British Cinematographer 

Three time Oscar nominated and recipient of the 2024 Camerimage Lifetime Achievement Award, Ed Lachman talks to British Cinematographer about an extraordinary career.

article here

If filmmaking is a never-ending education, as Ed Lachman believes, then he is a professor. His extraordinary career overlaps and intersects with so many filmmaking greats – and he has extended the artform with defining work himself.

When Lachman mentions Robert Altman, Bernado Bertolucci, Paul Schrader, Nic Roeg, Werner Herzog, Dennis Hopper, Wim Wenders or Steven Soderbergh, these are filmmakers he has worked with. For many DPs, Vittorio Storaro, Sven Nykvist and Robby Müller are three of the greatest cinematographers to have lived. Lachman actually learned at their feet.

“The greatest film school I could have ever gone to was the opportunity to work with Sven, Robby and Vittorio,” he says.

When he quotes Jean-Luc Godard, know that the revolutionary auteur invited Lachman to collaborate with him (on Passion, 1982).

“For Godard, images were always about the idea behind the image, rather than just some abstract aesthetic concept,” Lachman says. “Once you can start thinking about what they represent, you will create images that transcend their own clichés.”

All those filmmakers share an indie pedigree and they all either helped birth or were influenced by groundbreaking European film-art movements of the 1960s and ‘70s.

What was it that attracted a New York native to seek out artists across the Atlantic? The same approach to storytelling that kept him within their orbit.

“I was studying painting and art history at Ohio University and discovered Dadaists and German Expressionism which dealt with the psychology of the subject matter to express an idea,” Lachman relates. “It was a natural progression for me to want to look to Europe.”

In the wake of neorealists Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, young turks like Bertolucci, Herzog and Wenders proved inspirational in their freedom to explore ideas, styles and period.

Lachman says, “Hollywood had a system of how to create images to be used in the editing room. That’s not a pejorative. It’s just that that was the form. But in Europe each filmmaker found their own language to tell the stories that were personal to them.”

By extension, the cinematographer and director were co-authors of the film in a way that American cinema at that time was not. “For the directors I was attracted to filmmaking was more of a complete process inclusive of writing, shooting and editing. It wasn't compartmentalised like making a car on an assembly line.”

In the early 1970s American independent film was about to have its renaissance but Lachman went to the source.

“I really learned about American Cinema through the French Nouvelle Vague because [fabled film journal] Cahiers du cinéma was referencing Sam Fuller, Nicholas Ray and other American auteur voices.” Lachman worked with on Ray’s final film Lightning Over Water in 1980 with co-directed by Wenders.

During college Lachman made films in Super 8 and 16mm—"simple portraits of people I met. As I was shooting them, I was always thinking about various artists and their different schools of painting.”

In 1972 while editing his post-graduate film (about a therapeutic community for drug addicts) at a suite also used by the brothers Maysles he impressed the documentarians enough to get invited to shoot camera for them. Lachman attributes the experience they gave him of treating even narrative films as docs; “No performances are exactly the same.”

Filmmakers like Herzog and Wenders whose work has constantly blurred the boundaries between real and realism agreed. Herzog become friends after meeting at a screening of the director’s 1968 film Signs of Life in Berlin. A little later “without looking at a frame of my films” Herzog hired Lachman to work alongside German DP Thomas Mauch. In short succession he worked on Herzog’s How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck (1975), Stroszek (1976), La Soufrière (1976), and Huie’s Sermon (1980).

He is indebted to Herzog for an introduction to Wenders “a librarian of imagery” through whom Lachman got to meet Müller. “I befriended Robby and his entire crew when I helped them on American Friend (1976) and they ended up staying in my New York loft – where we also shot the hospital scene.” Lachman lives there still. “It was an honour to operate for Robby but more importantly to learn and to be inspired by him,” he says.

He operated for Müller on They All Laughed (1981) directed by Peter Bogdanovich, and Body Rock (1984) and shot Wenders doc Tokyo-Ga about Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu.

When Bertolucci came to New York to shoot La Luna in 1979 “he was generous enough to ask me to assist him and Vittorio.”

Years previously in New York, Lachman had been wowed by Bertolucci’s 1964 drama Prima della rivoluzione, without fully comprehending its politics.

“It’s about a young man who couldn't resolve his leftist beliefs and I didn’t understand the social context of bourgeois middle class or what that conflict was about. I wasn't part of that world.”

His films seem to have become increasingly political since. Think Mira Nair’s interracial romance Mississippi Masala (1991), Steven Soderbergh’s whistleblower drama Erin Brockovich (2000), and another true life environmental cover-up in Dark Waters (2019). His black and white depiction of General Pinochet and Margaret Thatcher as vampires in Pablo Larraín’s satire El Conde (2023) won Lachman a third Oscar nomination.

“I think all films are political. Even if its conservative. As it happens, I work with filmmakers that have the intellect and interest to look at society through their art. It’s just more interesting to work with people that are questioning the values that surround us and who use their work to express their ideas with it.”

A student of cultural history he notes that when social economic conditions are uprooted new artistic movements emerge as with New German Cinema’s response to the Cold War. Does that mean there might be a cultural eruption in response to the rise of the far right?

“There will always be a reaction when the economic and social conditions are there,” Lachman says. “If you look at where films are being made now that seem to have a conscience you can see lots of interesting work from India.”

While he is drawn to the political subtext of projects he is equally taken by the way directors choose to visualise those stories. Larraín, for example, presented Chile’s dark history as a gothic noir featuring vampires “a mash-up I felt impelled to help create.”

He says, “Some directors have a strong visual sense and some don't but it's the ones with the strongest visuals I've been lucky enough to work with. I plug into their world and try to implement something of myself.”

Lachman’s commercial breakthrough as solo cinematographer was for Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) introducing German expression into Madonna’s feature debut.

“New York was kind of depressed. It was being gentrified. The housing was pretty rough. So I thought about a heightened reality that was foreboding and dangerous. I was influenced by how Adam Holender had presented an impression of the city in Midnight Cowboy and thought the feeling of the downtown streets could be a stylized German expressionist vernacular for Madonna while Rosanna Arquette’s world was a pastel mundane suburban environment.”

He says, “A cinematographer is like another actor. You're giving a performance, to a degree.  You're reacting to what's in front of you. That's why I think a lot of directors want to be on the camera because they're the first audience. I certainly like to be operating because I like the immediacy of the moment in telling a story visually.”

Above anything, though, it's the passion of the director that excites Lachman. “Their passion in why they want to tell this story and also their passion for finding a visual language to tell the story. It's not about close-up, medium, long shot and coverage of dialogue.

“When I read the script, I develop many visual ideas of how to approach a story. At home I have a library of hundreds of photography and art books filled with images that I find inspiring. Each painter has their own aesthetic about why and what they paint. It should be the same criteria for a film director.”

Oscar-nominated for his camera work on Far From Heaven and Carol, Lachman says Haynes is one of the most prepared directors. “He has an extensive shot list but is always open to responding to the immediacy of the moment. When we research a film, he creates a ‘look-book’ illustrating the cultural history, politics, demographics, art, fashion as well as the cinematic language of the film’s time period that provides the emotional structure of the film for me.”

Lachman has been in the director’s chair himself on projects including Ken Park (2002) which he co-directed with Larry Clark from a Harmony Korine script.

“There are certain projects I like to direct because I feel I have more control over the image but I'm very happy to be just a cinematographer. Then I can just be in that world and not have to deal with everybody else's problems. Plus, we have a crew to help us. When you're a director, everybody comes to you to solve the problem.”

Each craft also requires a different mentality he says. “Put it this way, cinematographers may know how to tell the story but do they have a story to tell? That to me is the difference between a director and a cinematographer. Directors have to have a burning passion to tell the story.”

“When you're a cinematographer you know how to tell the story and you have to come up with a solution to tell the story. You have a crew to help you solve the problem. There are many ways to tell the story. It's a different mindset.”

Songs for Drella, a 1990 concert film Lachman directed and photographed with Lou Reed and John Cale, was an attempt to immerse the viewer in their performance.

“When I first met Lou he said, ‘I don’t want any fucking camera between me and the audience. They paid for the show and want to see my performance.’ I went home wondering how I could possibly shoot the concert without cameras obstructing the audience.

“I came back the next day and proposed to shoot their rehearsals for two days without an audience with just my camera on stage creating an intimacy of the camera’s movements to the music, and one day with the audience and cameras off stage. They agreed. Lou’s challenge to me resulted in the viewer being closer to Lou and John’s performance.” 

In his 77th year Lachman is still going strong, having completed Maria with Larrain with another biopic (of Peggy Lee) in development for Haynes. At MoMa he’s helped curate a retrospective of photographer Robert Frank, an influential force and a friend.

“He imbued every image with his own personal experience and demonstrated how one can impart poetry, psychology and vision in images. Frank showed us how to instil realistic or found images with the experience and subjectivity of the photographer.”

Lachman is not concerned that the sugar rush of AI and virtual cine technologies will damage the future of the craft. “Film has the ability for us to experience what is seen and hidden at the same time. It can reveal the depth of our own reality and open us to a fuller sense of ourselves. Cinema is little over a century old it will always evolve new visual grammar as filmmakers explore new languages to tell their stories.

“It doesn't matter if we do it on an iPhone, or in 8K or Super 8. We will always need people to understand the world that we are living in and tell stories in a way that we can all relate to.”