deep fried movies

“We always try to come up with lots of fancy adjectives to justify our choices, but, let’s face it, anamorphic just looks more like a movie, doesn’t it?”

When war breaks out on Earth, the kinship between Russian and American scientists aboard the International Space Station (including Ariana DeBose and Chris Messina) is shattered when both sides receive orders to take over the station by any means necessary. What follows is a taut chamber piece of ratcheting paranoia and betrayals, shot in 32 days in Wilmington, North Carolina partially on an I.S.S. replica originally created by NASA.

With I.S.S. now out on VOD and Paramount+, check out my interview with the movie’s cinematographer Nick Remy Matthew for Filmmaker Magazine. Matthews talks about counterintuitively shooting anamorphic in tight quarters, spending almost his entire lighting budget on Astera Titan tubes and his quixotic plan to use teeter totters to simulate zero gravity.

Here are a few glimpses of the story. Shot on Arri Alexa Minis with Hawk V-Lite anamorphics.

Matthews on figuring out how the film would handle its zero gravity effect, including the aforementioned teeter totters…

Filmmaker: Did it already have a removable roof, or did you have to essentially cut the roof off? You’re doing your zero-gravity effect with harnesses and wires, so you need to feed those lines out the top of the set.

Matthews: The journey of working out how to shoot in those sets is in and of itself a story. In some ways, we didn’t really know how shooting was going to work until we got the cast in there and, of course, like most films these days, you don’t tend to have the cast for long, certainly not for a rehearsal period. We did a variety of tests. I had a bunch of crazy ideas about attaching cameras to the cast. I really liked the look of that. I had some of the engineering guys on the lot working with the grips to make these kind of teeter totters that we could attach cameras to one side and then put the cast [on the other side], so they would move together and that gave us kind of a zero-gravity effect because [the actors and camera] were floating around together. It just looked absolutely beautiful in testing, and I thought, “Wow, we’ve really come up with something cool here.” [laughs]

Of course, one thing I didn’t really quite think enough about was how difficult it would be to get those teeter totters into the set. It was a genius idea if we were shooting out in the soundstage or in the middle of a field or something, but it was completely impractical for our sets. We did end up utilizing them a little bit because both Gabriela Cowperthwaite, the director, and I loved the look of it. It was a poor man’s way of achieving a zero-gravity effect without having cast dangling on wires, but, like I said, it was really tricky to get them into the sets. We ended up realizing very quickly in our rehearsal period that we basically had to pull the roof off of the set in order to make [creating the zero-gravity effect] practical at all. That had implications for me. I had to then get up a whole lot more greenscreen than we’d anticipated.

Filmmaker: So, these teeter totters were like a fulcrum with the actors on one side and then the camera and counterweight on the other side so they would float up and down in unison? Were you going to wheel them from room to room in the station?

Matthews: When I hear you say it, it really makes me feel like, “What the hell was I thinking?” [laughs] It was a great lesson in the philosophical conundrums of filmmaking. Sometimes you can be a little bit myopic and just see your own bit and go, “This is a real cool shot.” And it might be a cool shot for two seconds of screen time, but it took you an hour to get the right camera position. But we didn’t have an idea that [the teeter totters] would move us through the station. We always knew there would be some cable work where we’d need to pull people along to trolly them through the sets, but we thought that maybe there would be bits of dialogue, like in a shot/reverse shot situation, where people were more or less fixed on a spot hovering around their computer or something, that we could achieve that on the teeter totters. But, in the end, you’ve got so much arm coming into the shot and the cast has to stay on the node and they weren’t able to really move up and down the set at all. So, it just became very obvious very quickly that it wasn’t practical, and everything went to cables over the top, which we were trying to avoid as much as possible because we were trying to keep the amount of VFX shots down. At some point in the filmmaking process you just have to sort of own up to what the reality is.

Matthews on using Hawk V-Lite anamorphic lenses in small spaces…

Filmmaker: How did shooting in those small spaces affect your choice of camera and lens package?

Matthews: In the end I used Hawk V-Lite anamorphics and an Alexa Mini. When I’m lining up a project I’m always deeply suspicious of the instinct to use the technology, equipment or methodology that feels like it would be the easiest thing because I think, very often, it’s not the best thing. For example, in small spaces, you sort of go, “It should be spherical lenses because we need the close focus and don’t want to be using diopters on everything.” Maybe I just have some sort of desire to subvert comfort and ease in the process, because I think somehow difficulty is inextricably linked with rigorousness. When you set yourself up in a really difficult way, there’s something in the tension of that, that makes the filmmaking process really interesting. I remember going through a similar psychological process with a film I shot called Hotel Mumbai, which was about people in tight spaces and high stakes. I suggested anamorphic to the director and the producer, and they were like, “That sounds terrible.” Then I ran around Panavision with some camera assistants who were holding broomsticks [to simulate weapons], and I created two showreels of exactly the same shots—one spherical and one anamorphic—and got an editor to put them side by side and did a little split screen. I got everyone together and played the footage and after the test was over, everyone turned around and looked at me and went, “Yeah, it’s anamorphic.” I didn’t have to go through as much protesting on I.S.S., perhaps because people were sort of aware of Hotel Mumbai and how I’d used anamorphic in tight spaces. We always try to come up with lots of fancy adjectives to justify our choices, but, let’s face it, anamorphic just looks more like a movie, doesn’t it?