interview and words for RED
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When Mark Fischbach decided to adapt cult video game Iron
Lung into a feature film, he wasn’t simply making a movie. He was
testing whether a YouTube creator — one with tens of millions of subscribers
but lingering industry skepticism — could storm the gates of traditional cinema
and walk away not just intact, but empowered.
For cinematographer Philip Roy, the project represented
something equally compelling: a collision between digital-native storytelling
and classical filmmaking craft.
“I don’t think cinema was originally in his mind when
YouTube took off,” Roy says. “But in the last five years, he got hungry for
more. He wanted to elevate his game.”
Roy had first collaborated with Fischbach, aka Markiplier,
on A Heist with Markiplier, an ambitious branching narrative
project with a 300-plus page script. That was followed by In Space with
Markiplier, a 2020 Emmy-nominated interactive series that further blurred
the line between platform content and cinematic ambition. Roy co-directed this
with Markiplier and Amy Nelson, who is also a producer on Iron Lung.
By the time Iron Lung moved into
production, Fischbach was no naïve first-time director. He had already spent
years refining his storytelling voice — and, crucially, assembling a crew he
trusted.
“He was very intimate about what he knew and didn’t know,”
Roy says. “He wanted to grow beyond YouTube — not abandon it, but expand.”
A film inside a coffin
Set in a post-apocalyptic future where an event known as The
Quiet Rapture caused all known stars and habitable planets in the universe to
disappear, a convict named Simon (played by Markiplier himself) is sent to
search an ocean of blood discovered on a desolate moon, using a small submarine
nicknamed the Iron Lung.
Iron Lung began as a single camera shoot,
originally budgeted at roughly $1 million, and evolved visually and with
technical demands in line with Markiplier’s ambition.
“We started lean,” Roy says. “One camera, smaller crew. But
once the motion rig entered the conversation, everything escalated.”
Roy noted similarities with Buried a low
budget film from 2009 (DP Eduard Grau, Director Rodrigo Cortés) set in a coffin
shot and shot with two cameras in 16 days.
“I was kind of obsessed about that film doing my research
because basically this was Iron Lung albeit we’re in bigger
coffin and one that moves. Mark was cool to work with me on a lot of notes that
would simplify our shooting style to make the story feel different in the space
as the story progressed.”
The production ultimately employed a full hydraulic motion
rig to simulate the submarine’s violent movement. Three tubes of hydraulic
fluid powered the system. Multiple generators were required. Production
designer Iman Corbani and art director Travis Eisenberg built a life-sized
submersible capable of withstanding not only mechanical stress but large
quantities of stage blood. Some 300,000 litres of liquid were used in
production.
“It had to be structurally sound enough to survive a motion
rig throwing it around,” Roy says. “And it had to be waterproof.”
“We didn't have another set with fly-away walls. Nor I could
shoot with a 400mm lens from distance and create another style. We had to seal
the set off to hold the fake blood.”
Roy’s challenge was to create a visual evolution of the
story in a space barely larger than its lead actor. “We developed the visual
language in three acts,” he explains. “Act One is locked off and imprisoning.
The camera barely moves. In Act Two, we introduce subtle motion on sliders or
on Steadicam as Simon is starting to understand the ship. By Act Three, all
hell breaks loose.”
The RED Advantage
Roy first shot RED for a Ralph Lauren commercial in 2009 and
has shot nearly 40 features almost all of them on RED.
“REDs have always been the camera I’ve felt comfortable
pushing to the limit and then in taking all of that experience and applying it
to each project.”
For Iron Lung, he deployed two RED V-RAPTOR and
a RED MONSTRO, capturing everything in RAW at the full VV sensor size.
“Mark is greedy about image quality,” Roy laughs. “In a good
way.”
The choice was partly aesthetic, partly practical. With
three cameras configured in distinct builds — one V-RAPTOR inside the sub with
Fischbach, one V-RAPTOR on a Ronin for stabilized motion outside, and a compact
MONSTRO setup for Snorri-rig shots — maintaining a unified color pipeline
simplified post-production.
“I'm always willing to explore using another camera but the
versatility that I'm able to get with RED is always a significant advantage.
“Having all three REDs prepped and ready to go in their
different builds versus trying to switch out for each set up made things a lot
easier for us.”
The real gamble came in Act Two, when the film descends into
near-total darkness. “He kept telling me to remove lights,” Roy recalls. “I’d
sneak one back in, and he’d catch it.”
In a single-location film, overexposure can kill tension.
Reveal too much of the set, and the illusion collapses. Roy pushed the RED
sensors hard, trusting their latitude.
“Our colorist (Brandon Thomas at TBD Post in Austin) came in
because people were concerned,” he admits. “But it worked. We had zero dead
pixels. The exposure strategy held up — even in theaters.”
To soften the hyper-clean digital image, Roy introduced
vintage Minolta Rokkor lenses (hired from local rental house MPS) — glass
Fischbach became unexpectedly passionate about.
“I’ve never seen a director get that excited about lenses,”
Roy says. “Vintage glass takes the edge off digital. It gives you something
closer to film.”
Laowa Probe lenses and a 100mm macro allowed Roy to find
dimensionality inside the cramped set — capturing microscopic detail, like
oxygen shimmering in Fischbach’s eye.
“That intimacy helps the claustrophobia,” Roy explains. “It
makes the space feel both bigger and more suffocating.”
Growing Pains
“We started lean,” Roy says. “One camera, smaller crew. But
once the motion rig entered the conversation, everything escalated.”
Roy was aided by cameramen Brooks Birdsall and Matthew
McCloskey but for shots inside the Fischbach and Roy operator were effectively
screwed into a vertical, moving structure with no traditional safety rails.
“We didn’t build in all the rigging to support the lights
because originally we wanted to stay true to the video game with a single
light. I had concerns about that and eventually we did add more lights hidden
behind tubes, but then, when the set was sealed, it was tricky to control the
illumination since communication outside the set was limited.”
A live feed from Roy’s V-RAPTOR operated inside the sub went
out to the video village and both the feed and R3Ds were captured to cards.
“We didn’t have a smaller camera sending out a live feed of
the whole ship so the crew didn’t know what was going on inside other than A
and B cam. Matt was able to get a single 400mm shot through the pipes which was
cool, just very limiting.”
Beyond directing, acting and editing, Markiplier shot
pickups for nearly two years — in his garage in California, and at Roy’s
soundstage in Austin, Texas, wherever refinement was needed. Markiplier even
purchased his own V-RAPTOR for pickups and two sets of Rokkor lenses.
“He studied every department and learned everyone’s job,
sometimes as well as they knew it themselves,” Roy says. “It forces you to
level up.”
Ninety-five percent of principal photography took place at
Troublemaker Studios in Austin, Texas — the home base of filmmaker Robert
Rodriguez. For Roy, the location carried symbolic weight. As a young filmmaker,
he had been inspired by Rodriguez’s Rebel Without a Crew ethos
— scrappy, self-sufficient, rebellious.
“It felt serendipitous,” he says. “We were these
troublemakers inside Troublemaker Studios.”
From Creator to Distributor
Iron Lung’s success at the box office where it took
over $17 million on its opening weekend, demonstrates that grassroots demand
and the pulling power of a YouTube creator can achieve what marketing budgets
sometimes cannot.
“Mark knows his audience deeply,” Roy says. “His community
started calling theaters directly. They were demanding screenings.”
In Roy’s view, the most radical aspect of Iron Lung is
not its blood-soaked visuals but its proof of concept: a creator with a loyal
following can effectively become a distributor.
“That’s empowering,” he says. “It means you don’t
necessarily need legacy gatekeepers.”
Roy has begun speaking to film students again — something he
once found difficult amid post-pandemic industry contraction and labor strikes.
“Now I can tell them there’s hope,” he says. “You can make
something for a million dollars or less and still find an audience — if you
understand who that audience is.”
“Mark is completely indomitable. One of my favorite films
is Fitzcarraldo with that iconic image of a man dragging
something enormous—like an iron lung—into the unknown. I feel like we
paralleled that story in many ways. We didn’t fully know what we were doing, or
necessarily what was going to happen in theaters. We just believed in Mark
because of the relationships we’d built with him. That trust was a huge part of
understanding the whole process.”
“If you can find your audience first,” he says, “you’re not
asking permission anymore.”
And in an industry still recalibrating its power structures,
that might be the most disruptive idea of all.
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