00:00 Hi, I'm Matthew Libatique and I am the cinematographer of Maestro.
00:03 [Music]
00:10 I think you're letting your sadness get the better of you.
00:13 It has nothing to do with me, it's about you, so you should love it.
00:16 When Bradley Cooper called me to do Maestro, I really had very little knowledge of Leonard Bernstein.
00:22 I knew West Side Story, On the Waterfront.
00:24 I mean, to be honest, I knew more as a film composer than I did as a conductor.
00:29 He had such enthusiasm, Bradley had, about the project and about the man.
00:33 It wasn't hard to sort of jump on that bandwagon with him and just sort of go on the journey.
00:37 When I first worked with Bradley, it was just, I'm the DP, he's the director, we're getting to know each other.
00:42 And we hit it off right away and it was a pretty smooth transition into collaboration.
00:46 Because of the amount of time between A Star Is Born and Maestro,
00:49 I have to evolve because I think a cinematographer has to embody the personality of the director to some degree.
00:54 And as a director evolves, a cinematographer must adapt as well.
00:58 The minute he told me about it, he was excited about jumping into lensing.
01:02 He wanted to get technical, he wanted to learn more about focal lengths, optics.
01:07 We ended up shooting a multitude of tests in sort of the four years, five years prior to actually starting pre-production on the film.
01:15 What Bradley really wanted to do was sort of crack the code on the makeup, how he was going to physically transform into Lenny.
01:21 We have about a 40-minute proof of concept right now that is all the tests that we shot.
01:26 And we would shoot actual scenes.
01:28 And through this process, we were learning about the lenses that we liked, we were learning about the format that we liked.
01:33 He was getting familiar with what he wanted, he felt the film should be.
01:37 We shot Arri Alexa to RED to Sony to Arri 65.
01:42 You know, we shot monochrome cameras because we knew we wanted to do some black and white.
01:45 But it wasn't until we shot film in 35mm that one scene that we shot, Sing,
01:51 it just blew everything else out of the water in terms of the aesthetic of what we were trying to achieve.
01:55 So Bradley really responded to it, I really responded to it.
01:59 We shot some black and white with a Panavision Millennium XL2, which is what we used on the film,
02:03 with Mark II lenses, which came from Panavision, and we shot with 52-22, which is Kodak's only black and white stuff.
02:10 So that ended up becoming the thing we were going to do for a third of the movie.
02:14 And then we knew we were going to go to color.
02:16 We fell in love with the aspect ratio.
02:18 So we kept it in 1.33.
02:21 I like to think that that frame, because it's a square, is kind of an embrace to the characters,
02:25 especially the two of them as a couple.
02:26 And then when he's alone at the end of the film after Felicia passes away,
02:29 it expands out to 1.85 and that embrace is gone.
02:32 You want to be sleepless and depressed and sick.
02:35 You want to be all of those things so you can avoid fulfilling your obligation.
02:38 What obligation?
02:39 To what you've been given, to the gift you've been given.
02:42 The scene that Thanksgiving was one of the most emotional scenes in the film.
02:46 It really is the punctuation to a life lived between the two of them.
02:50 And it sort of propels them into the next phase of their life.
02:54 It's funny when you're shooting a scene, you know you're going to graduate to this emotional one
02:58 and it begins with, "Who left Snoopy in the vestibule?"
03:01 The whole thing begins that way and it's his day.
03:05 Who abandoned Snoopy in the vestibule?
03:08 What happens previous is a whole lot of stuff to get to a point where they sort of have at it.
03:13 It's basically a performance at the Kennedy Center where we're finally getting to see something
03:18 that Lenny composed that he wasn't conducting.
03:22 And they're sitting in a box and he's holding his boyfriend's hand right next to Felicia.
03:28 Felicia clocks this and I think that was the last straw.
03:31 And then the next time we see them together, it's Thanksgiving and he's late.
03:35 That leads to a conversation about their whole lives.
03:37 Very similarly to shooting a love scene, you want to give the actors as much space to work as possible.
03:44 So I guess I have the same lighting concept for love and hate.
03:47 I guess you could say that.
03:48 Wake up! Take off your glasses!
03:50 Hate in your heart! Hate in your heart!
03:53 And anger. For so many things it's hard to count. That's what drives you.
03:56 Anytime you get into a situation where it's really emotional and it's a pivotal scene in the film
04:03 and it's a scene that propels you to the next phase of the movie,
04:05 there's a certain amount of anxiety.
04:08 I think the natural inclination is to think you're going to shoot a lot of coverage
04:12 and then you're going to piece together performances.
04:15 But we had Carrie Mulligan. She was like a secret weapon in the film.
04:19 And then Bradley being so able to direct and act within a scene and respond to another character.
04:27 The first thing he wanted to do was get it on his feet in a wide.
04:30 The choice of angle was really, you know, Bradley would walk through a set with a viewfinder.
04:35 We were shoved in a doorway.
04:37 He kept backing up, backing up until he was in the doorway because he wanted to get wider.
04:40 It was a 24mm lens backed up kind of outside the room looking at it.
04:44 Really it was just we wanted to see both windows for the Snoopy shot. That's how it got there.
04:48 The scene actually started with her sitting in the chair that's in front of her in the scene that's in the movie.
04:53 She sat there, he came in, sat down and it was the three people sitting in a wide shot.
04:58 And it just wasn't happening in scene one.
05:01 Something compelled her to get up in the second take and she stayed at the window.
05:07 And then the third take, she was at the window at the very beginning of the scene.
05:10 That's what you see in the film.
05:12 And it was so intense and the pacing was so real.
05:15 They're cutting each other off and responding to what each other's saying.
05:18 It felt like there was no dialogue.
05:19 We actually took a lens of Viewfinder after we shot that.
05:23 He thought he had the scene.
05:26 The tone of it, the emotional aspect of it and the performances on both ends were fantastic.
05:31 And we were sort of lensing up her side of the coverage.
05:35 And he just looked at me and said, "How are we going to do that?
05:38 How are we going to cut in their performance?"
05:40 The single shot aspect was born out of the greatness of their performances. It wasn't planned.
05:44 Your truth is a fucking lie!
05:47 It sucks up all the energy in every room and gives the rest of us zero opportunity to live or even breathe as our true selves.
05:52 And remember, when we set that shot up, there was going to be coverage.
05:57 So it wasn't like there was no fretting over this is one shot.
06:00 It's just, "Okay, here's an angle."
06:02 We're Americans. We always move the camera.
06:05 We're Americans. We always cut.
06:06 It's very rare for us to hold on a shot.
06:08 I mean, there's a handful of people who do that.
06:11 David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch are the only ones who really come to mind.
06:13 But if you go abroad, half the people do it.
06:17 You watch an Eastern European film, the camera never moves.
06:20 He walks in from the right of frame and he just stops.
06:23 He's barely in frame.
06:24 And then he sneaks into the scene and when he sits down, he's edgy on the frame.
06:28 And he wanted that.
06:29 It's sort of echoing and a little bit of a visual callback to the scene where they first met.
06:33 Both their heads are pushing out of frame.
06:36 We had a backing made by Roscoe.
06:38 Roscoe does amazing backdrops now and they photographed the surrounding area of the Dakota apartment that we wanted to replicate.
06:45 And then Snoopy was actually digitally placed in, in between the reality of the set and the reality of the backing.
06:51 The lighting of that scene was a lot coming from the windows.
06:54 I had a 20K tungsten Fresnel in each window to replicate the sunlight.
06:58 I had a SkyPanel 360, which is a big LED soft unit, underneath the 20K that was sort of lighting her window on the left of frame.
07:07 That was there so Lenny would get some light when he was standing in that position in front of the bar.
07:10 And when you look at the right side window, I had rigged moving lights above the set.
07:15 And I just used them to bounce in the right of frame.
07:18 It looks like the sun's coming in and creating a glow.
07:21 That's actually a mover from above the set that's sort of bouncing there.
07:24 And I had a little bit of reflective material to sort of give him a little edge light on his back to define him from the dark background of that bar.
07:32 And that's, that's really it.
07:34 And then smoke lifted the shadows of the scene so that I didn't have to put any real key light on Felicia.
07:41 The color correction process with Bradley and I is pretty streamlined because we don't do a whole lot but, you know, match and work on matching from cut to cut, scene to scene.
07:51 What we shoot is basically what we put on at the end.
07:54 So our dailies are more important than anything.
07:57 The fight scene turned out better than I ever would have hoped.
08:00 As a cinematographer, you want all the shots to be right to achieve the look that you envisioned and what the director's after.
08:07 I was completely blown away with the level of performance.
08:10 Just the ferocity that she had.
08:13 Frustration.
08:14 Great actors make dialogue work and make dialogue feel like they're coming out of real people.
08:21 And that's what happened in the scene.
08:22 So I'm very proud of it.
08:23 But I'm proud of them more specifically.
08:27 My only regret is we only did it three times.
08:28 I only got to hear it three times.
08:30 But now I get to hear it all the time when I play it back.
08:33 [Music]
08:42 [BLANK_AUDIO]
