The Hoytema Humanity of Science Fiction
What do Spike Jonze, Christopher Nolan, and James Gray all have in common?
Hoyte van Hoytema.
Let’s talk about the cinematography of Her, Interstellar, and Ad Astra.
To a certain extent, I am always trying to come up with something new in my own eyes, but work methods are like tics. One gravitates towards what feels safe, so I have to constantly keep kicking my own ass and question my motives and reassure that I am not choosing the path of least resistance in my photography choices.
— Hoyte van Hoytema
These films have several parallels. They take place in their own version of the future. They explore themes of isolation and relationships. They each have incredible visuals. But three distinct stories call for three distinct looks, and Hoyte van Hoytema delivers. Being set on Earth, it’d be hard to confuse Her with the other two films, and despite both films taking place in space, Interstellar and Ad Astra are far from visual twins. For each film, van Hoytema and the director established a visual style and determined the technicalities of achieving it: use of color, choice of acquisition format, emphasis on naturalism, and innovation where necessary. These decisions make the films as marvelous as they are realistic.
First up: use of color.
My previous film [The Fighter] was quite monochromatic, so I actually loved the chance to insert color wherever we could.
— Hoyte van Hoytema on Her
Van Hoytema’s manipulation of color is most evident in Her. Bathed in shades of red and a warm atmosphere, protagonist Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) finds himself in a future that’s surprisingly utopian; a fresh breath from the many dystopian films that have inundated the theaters as of late. It’s a future that’s “soft and intimate,” perfect for falling in love (Geffner, The Way She). Theodore isn’t some smooth-talking macho man, quite the opposite. Since so much of the film is spent with Theodore, the environment embodies his character, as if we’re seeing the world through his eyes.
In a world of warmth, blue takes on a more pronounced meaning. In the classic battle between warm and cool, van Hoytema uses blue in times of isolation and stress. It speaks to the audience emotionally and subconsciously. We’re pulled out of the cozy atmosphere and reminded of the harshness of life, the coldness that comes with sadness, fear, confusion, and misunderstanding. But it’s beautiful nonetheless.
The soft pastels of Her continue through the entire film, even through the main credits. It plays a massive role in the film and van Hoytema serves that role superbly.
In the inky blackness of space, it’s more difficult to use color creatively. In Interstellar, color takes a backseat to composition, as Christopher Nolan aimed for a realistic, documentary-style approach to his film. Van Hoytema had more freedom with James Gray on Ad Astra. Throughout the film, as protagonist Maj. Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) travels towards Neptune, the light in his environment changes in sync with the distance he’s traveled. His journey begins in the unfiltered, pure white, reflected sunlight on the Moon. As Roy nears Mars, yellow gradually fills the screen, and then orange and red completely take over once he lands. “Artificial/energy-deprived light would start overpowering the natural as we progress...We wanted to make it feel like…[Mars] needs human effort and constant artificial generated energy to sustain human life…” (Desowitz). Mars is naturally orange, but van Hoytema also lit interiors orange to make this sentiment of artificiality omnipresent. These pioneers can’t survive on Mars without imported technology. The orange light seeps into their buildings as a reminder of the unforgiving atmosphere that lies just beyond their walls.
The screen returns to yellow as Roy leaves Mars, and then blue gets its foothold en route to Neptune. It’s cold, uninviting, and devoid of all humanity. Roy doesn’t know what he’ll find there. So far away from the only known civilization in the galaxy, this environment must feel detached. In combination with the backdrop of Neptune, blue is the perfect color for that.
The notable thing about Interstellar isn’t so much its use of color as it is its acquisition format. Sharing a love for film over digital, Nolan and van Hoytema shot the entire movie on film. Of course, few conversations about Interstellar go without mentioning its use of the Imax format. About a third of the film is shot in 65mm Imax, with anamorphic 35mm filling out the rest. “We wanted the approach to be grounded in reality, not have an obvious aesthetic language, so we didn’t want to [make] it too neat or slick. We wanted a rough edge to it, very spontaneous,” says van Hoytema (Giardina). Digital is often dismissed as being too clean and sharp, whereas film gives a picture more tactility and texture.
Many of Nolan’s choices for the visual style of Interstellar are in service of naturalism. It’s why he chose van Hoytema after an amicable departure from his longtime collaborator, Wally Pfister. It’s why they chose film over digital. It’s why they chose to shoot as much of the film as they could in Imax. “Imax has sent cameras to space and captured incredible imagery. We were very much inspired by that footage,” (Giardina). By matching actual Imax NASA footage, Nolan and van Hoytema make the film that much closer to reality.
Ad Astra echoes Interstellar’s roots in reality. Shot on Kodak 35mm film, van Hoytema strived to meet director Gray’s “commitment to verisimilitude,” says producer Dede Gardner. “...[It] is not fantasy, but in fact just the kind of quotidian expression of that moment probably not too far away from now,” (Olsen). While the feasibility of the climax of Interstellar is certainly debatable, the storyline of Ad Astra is more realistic. It only makes sense to pair the story with the format known for its superior representation of real life.
Van Hoytema isn’t afraid to shoot digitally if the movie calls for it, however. For the many night scenes in Her, film simply didn’t have the latitude that van Hoytema wanted. “...We chose digital specifically for those night sequences in his apartment, where the city outside the windows is so vibrant and bright. We didn’t want to do a lot of augmenting in post, and with the Alexa we could use extremely low-level light sources [for the interior] that were still controllable,” (Geffner, The Way She). What van Hoytema loses in the switch from film to digital, he makes up for in the color palette and the compositions. And for the utopian future in which Her takes place, perhaps the clarity of digital was the right way to go after all.
A challenge in filming Her was figuring out how to make Los Angeles look futuristic but not distracting. The innovative masterminds Jonze, van Hoytema, and production designer K.K. Barrett discovered what they were looking for in the sprawling green metropolis of Pudong, a district of Shanghai. They combined the skylines of Pudong and L.A. to make L.A. look more built up. By matching the city density of L.A. with Pudong, van Hoytema could film Theodore walking among both cities and still make it feel like it was the same place.
That’s where you need strong direction, merging two cities like that. It’s a big puzzle. We’d find this office in [the] middle of L.A. and that felt right, and then a square in Shanghai that made you feel how big that city has become and that felt right, and then an interior in L.A. And we’d have to take all of those locations and make them work in the same scene.
— Hoyte van Hoytema (Zeitchik)
And they truly make it work. In the following four pictures, the film bounces between the Lujiazui Circular Pedestrian Bridge, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, an augmented L.A.-Pudong hybrid skyline, and a CGI art installation in front of the Pacific Design Center. All without ever feeling like you’ve left L.A. (kaptainkristian).
With Interstellar, van Hoytema had to reconcile Imax with handheld camera movement. Imax cameras are massive. They aren’t designed for handheld use. But that didn’t stop him. “I was very determined to do things with it that normally aren’t done... It’s a giant box with a lens, but we found that with a bit of re-engineering, it actually becomes manageable.” The crew worked with Imax and Panavision to make the camera more ergonomic for handheld use. It’s still a significant weight on the shoulder (70-80 pounds), but the resulting image makes it worth the workout. “They’re like big-format still portraits,” van Hoytema states (Giardina).
Taking full advantage of the visceral experience that Imax provides, van Hoytema also hard-mounted the camera to the spacecraft and the actors like “Imax GoPros.” On the spacecraft, he imposed a jitter onto the camera to show the sheer G-force and speed required to escape planetary gravity (Stasukevich). Cross-cutting these GoPro angles with extreme wides of the spacecraft in relation to Earth makes the audience feel both the insignificance of the human race and the monumental human achievement of venturing into outer space.
Mounting the camera onto the astronauts’ helmets allows us to immerse ourselves in these foreign environments. We can float around in zero-G. We can experience the thrill of standing on another planet. Yes, it’s only a fraction of the real experience, but for almost all of us, it’ll be the closest we’ll ever get.
Ad Astra features an exhilarating chase sequence on the Moon. Space pirates hijack Major McBride’s convoy, covering a vast distance along the way. Filming this sequence by conventional standards simply wouldn’t cut it. First, they tackled the effect that gravity would have on the chase. The Moon’s gravity is just a sixth of Earth’s; the movement of the rovers needed to reflect this. Comparing his footage to Apollo mission footage, van Hoytema shot the entire sequence between 32 and 36 frames-per-second. The slow motion created the sluggish movement he observed in the Apollo footage and also created tension where sheer speed couldn’t.
Then, van Hoytema had to make it look like the Moon. The sequence couldn’t be shot on a soundstage because of potential double shadows and soft light. Doing it in CGI would have been boring. So they filmed it in Death Valley. To make it look like the Moon, van Hoytema secured two decommissioned 3D rigs from Kavon Elhami, who runs a camera house in L.A. Van Hoytema mounted two cameras onto the rigs: a 35mm film camera and an Alexa XT with infrared capabilities. Instead of shooting in parallax, he aligned both cameras to shoot the same image. From the 35mm film camera, he recorded the texture and color of the scene. From the infrared Alexa, which is only sensitive to specific wavelengths of light, he recorded the daylight sky in black and the ground in white. Compositing the two images results in the realistic space raid seen in the film.
It’s in innovations like these where van Hoytema’s creativity shines. He’s an engineer and an artist, finding ways through or around problems to serve the story at hand. These films are as much van Hoytema’s style as they are their respective director’s style, and they’re full of references and inspiration from others’ works. Whether it’s pulling from the portfolio of Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi or reviewing the 1989 space documentary For All Mankind, van Hoytema is a student before he’s a practitioner of the craft, infusing his work with gems extracted from the genius of his fellow artists. He’s unafraid of trying something new and doesn’t worry about trifling imperfections. In fact, he uses them to his advantage:
Hoyte understands how imperfection allows art to form…These are the things that make a film memorable, that allow you to recall it days, months and — dare I say it? — years later. It’s what you hope for, and that’s what Hoyte gave to me.
— James Gray
What’s a good way to tell whether you’ve done a good job on a project? Being asked to return for another project. While Ad Astra is a recent movie and van Hoytema’s first collaboration with James Gray, he’s since signed onto other projects with Christopher Nolan and Spike Jonze. With Nolan, he went on to photograph Dunkirk and, most recently, Tenet.
With Jonze, van Hoytema photographed “Apple Homepod: Welcome Home,” a dance-fused advertisement starring FKA Twigs about the Apple Homepod. It was another opportunity for van Hoytema to experiment with color and a rare chance to work with a modular set.
One of the best ads I’ve ever seen.
This has been Hoyte van Hoytema.
Award winner. Collaborator. Director of Photography.
I look forward to what he makes next.
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