The Cinematography of David Cronenberg's "The Shrouds" with DP Douglas Koch, CSC
Friday, April 25th, 2025
Director David Cronenberg and Cinematographer Douglas Koch, CSC on the set of "The Shrouds." Image courtesy of Douglas Koch, CSC.
“The Shrouds,” the 23rd feature film from maestro David Cronenberg, is a deeply personal exploration of grief through the lens of Cronenberg’s unmistakably singular vision of technological body horror.
In advance of the wide release of “The Shrouds,” Keslow Camera spoke with Director of Photography Douglas Koch, CSC, in a wide ranging conversation on the debate between film versus digital cinematography, the negative influence of artificial intelligence, the recurrent collaboration between Cronenberg and Koch, and how Keslow Camera contributed to the production of this unnerving-yet-intimate film.
by Ryan Rosenblum
[This interview contains minor spoilers for The Shrouds]
I'm a big fan of his work of David's work, so I'm very familiar with the language that he's using and the kind of vibe that you can expect, but it still doesn't prepare you for what you get with “The Shrouds.” I'm still processing the movie.
Yeah, it's definitely an unusual thing. I mean, it was very, in certain ways, obviously quite personal to David, but also very cerebral and has a lot of dialogue. Vincent Cassel, he was like, ‘holy shit,’ I think he was literally saying, ‘I don't remember the last time I was in a film where I had so many lines.’ It was pretty crazy that way, I thought, yeah.
It feels like it's almost from a different era in a sense, with the style and focus on these dialogue scenes with these different characters. It really is an extremely cerebral movie and just watching it, you're like, ‘Wow, I wish I had a fraction of the intelligence that it would take to write a script like this.’
Oh my God, I know, it's pretty crazy, very much personal to David. I remember him just saying to me, when we were prepping, he said, 'The whole part of the concept of this thing is when your partner dies, you literally wish you could just crawl into the grave with them,' It's so devastating. He said 'You see this in some times with some people in certain cultures where they literally throw themselves on the coffin at the funeral.' And you think, wow, that's pretty weird. But it's like that for many people, it's this intense thing. And so this is such an odd sort of extension of that concept, is the idea.
So much art throughout generations, dealing with grief, feels more focused on the spirit and the loss of the spiritual connection, or the personality. And then “The Shrouds” is coming around and saying, well, no, the body has got some importance too.
Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, very much so. Very much so.
You've collaborated with David once before, on “Crimes of the Future.” I believe also with his daughter, Caitlin, who is also a filmmaker. So you now have this family connection. What is that creative collaboration like? And then beyond that, how does this film contrast with your last project working together?
It's obviously really nice if you develop a working relationship with someone and get to work with them more than once on a project and get on a roll with them, one hopes. I think what was really nice about it too is that it got comfortable very quickly. Because it was during COVID the first one, “Crimes of the Future.” I was out of town on a TV series, so the interview for the gig, which I'd always imagined if such a thing had come up, I never even dreamt I would get to here, and it was a dream come true, but I always imagined it would be some sort of in-person meeting somewhere. But it ended up being a Zoom thing, which kind of made me a bit nervous that it wasn't in-person. But it went really well. And it was very funny because I'm no spring chicken, and neither is he, and although he's older than I am, it was funny because we actually did have a big sort of overlap during the eighties from the time I was a film student and just starting out while he was obviously hugely established at that time. And so when we were in our Zoom, doing this sort of Zoom interview for the first time, we were able to just crack each other up continuously for about half of this meeting. It was us just telling stories, because it turns out we knew so many people and it was just really fun and it really broke the ice and it was really good that way.
The funny thing is of course, I don't know if you know this or not, but I had actually worked with David before, but he was an actor in that case. And it was a movie I really liked that I did a long time ago. I shot for Don McKellar and it's called “Last Night.” It has Sandra Oh in it, for instance. And David plays Sandra Oh's husband in this movie and he meets a terrible end, a bloody end. So it was very funny, being on the camera, looking over and going, this is hilarious, David Cronenberg is all covered in blood. He's been shotgunned. I'm filming this. This is so funny. But of course, you know, he's an actor. I was the cinematographer on it. And so we didn't get to talk much or anything like that. So I had worked with him that one time before, and then this was an amazing opportunity.
Vincent Cassel and Sandrine Holt in "The Shrouds." Image courtesy of Sideshow.
So yeah, we got along and then I had some very sort of blunt questions for him in the interview because I had gone back, I'd seen all his films, but I went back and I specifically watched some that I thought might be more relevant because I'd read the script for “Crimes of the Future.” It just made it so that I could sort of zone in. And I was sort of pointing out things to him that seemed kind of obvious. I noticed, 'Oh, your films are always spherical, and at 1:85:1, you're obviously not into anamorphic.' And he was like, 'Not really, I don't like that ratio. Nor am I interested in the artifacts and qualities of anamorphic lenses. I don't care about that stuff.' And I noticed, 'Oh, no handheld in your movies.' He's like, 'No, I don't like handheld' and this kind of thing. So it was interesting. You could go sort of through and sort it out, and being able to watch a number of films, if someone has such a large canon of films, you could go through it. And so to me, that made it much easier than usual to sort of come to conclusions about what he liked and didn't like, and would probably expect in the film, and I wasn't surprised at all.
I was very nervous obviously on the first day of the shoot, but even by the end of it, it felt like it went really well because we did start with some nice sort of atmospheric scenes. Lit scenes, interior scenes, and he was very happy and he was very effusive about it and very upfront about how he was very pleased at the end of day one. So it totally caused me to relax. It was great, and then it just really drove me onwards and had me completely stoked to continue along those lines. And it worked out really well.
When we came to do this latest film, “The Shrouds,” it was very much the same and there was very little discussion ahead of time. The only thing for me being the big difference to me between “Crimes of the Future” and “The Shrouds” is that in “Crimes of the Future,” it lives in this very strange world.
I remember thinking at the time that “Crimes of the Future” reminded me a lot of “eXistenZ.”
Oh yes, yes, right. Yeah, yeah, there's a similarity, that was one of the films I watched before meeting with David. With “Crimes of the Future,” an extreme example would be "Blade Runner," where you're making a film where everything you see has been created and is under your control. There's no sort of normal real-world stuff in it. And that's a very interesting place to be. In the case of “Crimes of the Future,” we shot it in Athens, Greece. There were very few day exteriors. Just about everything is lit. If we weren't shooting in some amazing set that the production designer, Carol Spear had designed and built, we were shooting some wild bizarre graffiti laneway at night, or we were in some very distressed old building. So we were always in these amazing places.
Whereas in “The Shrouds,” what was different about that, was it was set in Toronto. It's Toronto for Toronto and it's present day. And so therefore you don't have that surreality as part of the visual language. This is taking place in a real place, sort of now. We're filming on the streets, we're in a park, it’s daytime. So you don't have those tools available to you, of control in terms of the look. It just becomes about doing other things and riffing off that. But by the second film, yeah, it was great. It really felt as if we'd been working together for years. I think David's like that too, he doesn't micromanage things. He just lets people do their thing, and if something's not going the way he wants, he'll say something about it. It's very simple like that. So he's hands off in that sense, but at the same time, very much he's the conductor of everything that's going on.
There's a strong contrast between the manufactured reality of “Crimes of the Future” and something that's more based in our world, with “The Shrouds.” “The Shrouds” has so much to say about the current era that we're living in, with technology and the autobiographical aspect, and also an almost meta-textual commentary on filmmaking in some aspects as well. One of the things that stood out to me was this moment where Karsh (Vincent Cassel) says, “We just upgraded the Shroud cams to 8K. It's fantastic resolution.” I know David recently in an interview was discussing the difference between digital cinematography and film, and how he prefers shooting digitally. Do you have any thoughts on that side of things?
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘shooting himself in the foot because of all the directors out there that are so into film.’ (Laughs) Yeah, as you can imagine, I did still spend the majority of my career shooting on film. I think film is great, but I do consider the digital cameras that we shoot with now, in many ways to be a real sort of advancement, particularly in the art of cinematography. There are so many more things that are possible with them that I find it impressive. And the removal of certain things, like even technical matters like dirt and scratches, and uneven development, if you get bad luck and you get poor processing. There are all sorts of things about film that I did always find frustrating or scary.
Director David Cronenberg and Cinematographer Douglas Koch, CSC on the set of "The Shrouds." Image courtesy of Douglas Koch, CSC.
I love the idea that when you're collaborating with a director in a visual medium like this, is the fact that you can be with them looking at a monitor together on set when there's still time to do something about it, and say, well, ‘what do you think of this?’ And they can say, ‘I think you've gone too far, it's a little too over the top. It's too dark.’ And then you can change it, as opposed to with film, there's interpretation. It's very funny, because I can see in a certain sense why there may be cinematographers out there that would pine for the old days, because to be very honest about it, the cinematographer through most of the history of cinema was sort of Merlin the Magician, in the sense that you were granted this sort of extra power, because you were, in theory, the only one who knows what this is going to look like on film.
I know in my career, there were times when were shooting film where we'd be trying to do some day-for-night thing, or some night-for-day, or you've lost the sunlight and you're trying to make it look like it's out, like it's actually sunny and bright. You're being asked to do these unusual things like say, turn night into day or something like that. And people are turning to you and they're saying to you like, ‘So this is going to work, right? Like we have this, right? We don't have to come back tomorrow, we can tear these sets up?’ So it did put this emphasis on you as the DP. You could argue, in the older days, that a director could say, wait a minute or something like that on a set. And someone else could say, no, no, no, we can't wait to go on. But if the cinematographer said, wait a minute, I'm worried about something, people would think, oh, this is in this crazy, weird, mysterious world of photography and all that kind of stuff. And maybe we better listen to this person. And so that's something now which is almost completely gone in the sense that if someone that's in command looks at a monitor and says, I think this is too dark. Well, then you can't sort of argue with that, if that's the person that you're there to make happy. And so that's a very different thing.
I think if one's just shooting something, say it's a narrative film and it's being shot on film, but the look doesn't have those requirements, for the story or the look or otherwise. If it's on film then it's just a lot of time wasted, I would argue. I mean, yeah, sure, go ahead and knock yourself out. I wouldn't walk away from a project that someone wanted to shoot on film if I liked it, but I wouldn't be the one to encourage it. I would typically not be the DP that would jump in and say, oh yeah, we have to shoot on film, unless I thought there was a very good reason for doing it. And it would be a big battle too. I mean, typically these days, I think a lot of time if you were trying to shoot something on film, you're in for a bit of a battle.
Especially today where the entire workflow has to go digital anyways, once you're done shooting. If you're making a digital intermediary and then it's going back onto analog if you're going to project it on film, then what's the point of even shooting on film in the first place, if you can just strike it onto an analog print at the end of the process?
Yeah, and that's the thing, and people like Steve Yedlin, ASC, and I'm sure there are others, the detail they go into, because it's not just the grain, they look at things like how the red emulsion layer is the deepest one down, right? So brake lights, red taillights on cars, red halo like crazy. And there's all these different halation artifacts and things like that. Once you know what they are, at least people like Mr. Yedlin can reproduce these things to a point where the difference between film and digital is almost nothing. David, like you saw that interview with him where he said, I only saw the part where he was talking about film. Someone sent it to me and he just made me laugh. I thought it was such a funny analogy. He said, ‘I love typewriters. I used to fall asleep listening to the sound of my dad typing, but I don't want to use one, and typewriters have undoubtedly written all sorts of amazing things.’ He goes, ‘I like films that were shot on film, but I like them as films and it's not because they were shot on film that I liked them.’ I thought that was a very succinct and elegant way to kind of put it.
It definitely caused a little bit of controversy online. A lot of people were saying, ‘What is he talking about? We love everything to be shot on celluloid.’ And it's like, well, I think If David Cronenberg has an opinion on it, you can probably listen to what he has to say.
People are very divided on it. I think one would have to agree and I, because I get into squabbles on this from time to time with people, and a lot of time they're much younger than I am. And one of the things that I love to point out to them is I say, ‘Hey, you'll find this all fun and this is all really cool and everything. But believe me, if you're in the middle of shooting a movie and there's serious actors in this movie and there's millions of dollars on the line, trust me, you'll lose sleep over it. It will bother you. You'll be saying to yourself, did I go too dark with this?’ My old joke is I always say, DPs and focus pullers sleep way less, you know what I mean? We lose way more sleep than anybody when we're shooting film, because we're the two people where your mistakes are not visible, truly visible until they see the dailies. By then it's too late to do anything about it.
I'm just saying that I think from a practical point of view a lot of the time, you know, it's a bit nerve-wracking and it makes it easier to take chances with things when you can see what you're doing. Some may argue you're not taking a chance then, but I would say, no, you are, because you can do something really weird. And the chance you're taking is our audience is going to think this is too over the top or contrived or goofy looking or whatever. But the differences between digital versus film is the risk is not in doing it. It's in the activity of producing it because you can actually not get what you want out of it. That it can turn out to be like, oh, well, this is too dark and we can't recover it. So it's tricky.
Or worst case scenario, the loader flashes the mag and then you'd lose the entire roll.
Yeah. I mean, there can be issues with digital media too. I haven't heard of it in a long time, but I remember when we first started shooting with digital cameras, because I mean, believe me, I clung on to film longer than I think a lot of other people did because, for instance, the RED One was the sort of only 35mm size sensor and when it came out, I had already done stuff on early digital cinema cameras like the Thompson Viper. I did a whole mini-series on that. So I had used some digital cameras, but of course, they were ENG-style cameras, with smaller sensors. Shallow depth of field was much more difficult to achieve, and they were recording on tape.
I remember when we first started working with RED Ones, where they were going to hard drives, you would hear horror stories of hard drives jumping or locking up. I don't think it took long to figure that out. It's just that idea of like, check the gate, we're great, start tearing the set down. You can do that with just a little bit more confidence. If you're shooting digital you know you have it. But if you gotta wait to get the film back, these days, another thing that I find frustrating, because I did do some shooting on 35mm a while back, just some pickup shots for a film. And it was done here in Toronto, and the negative was sent to Fotokem in Los Angeles, then it was laser scanned at I think Picture Shop there. Then it was sent to Picture Shop Toronto where they produce the dailies. Then those would be sent off to editorial in the States. So it was like, wow, it must've been two and a half, three days before you saw your dailies. It wasn't like the old days where the next morning you're at the lab watching them or, you show up and they hand you mini DVs or DVDs or whatever and you can watch them at your leisure. It wasn't like that. It was like, oh yeah, this took a while, you know?
Director David Cronenberg and Cinematographer Douglas Koch, CSC, with A Camera Operator Andreas Evdemon and star Jennifer Dale, on the set of "The Shrouds." Image courtesy of Douglas Koch, CSC.
The infrastructure has kind of decayed with time since so much is being shot digitally now, that there are only a few games in town. Now, not everyone's doing it anymore.
Yeah, yeah. Not to be glib about it, but it is very sort of fashionable for many people to shoot on film right now. There's no doubt. I mean, the same thing with anamorphic lenses. I think a few times over the last year, I watch like a lot of movies and shows like many of us do, and it's like, oh my God, like every second thing is anamorphic. It's like, wow, almost every second thing. If it's a comedy, it's shot on anamorphic, even though they're doing it for the artifacts, not for the aspect ratio.
There are a few things that you’ve mentioned that stood out to me as I was watching “The Shrouds.” As you can say for David's entire body of work, there’s a lot of smooth camera movements. No handheld. So I'm imagining it was a lot of dollies and Steadicam. Were there any other kind of unique ways of moving the camera?
No, it was all done that way. And I've worked for the last, I don't know, six, seven years, maybe a bit more with the same camera operator, with a fellow named Andreas Evdemon, Toronto-based. And he's a very good Steadicam owner/operator, and a camera operator. He was with me in Greece on “Crimes of the Future,” but I think we only maybe did like two Steadicam shots in that entire movie. And I think one of them hit the cutting room floor, if I'm not mistaken. Whereas on this one, I knew for sure that there would be way, way more of it. And there was. And so it was used quite a lot. And it was cases of, you can't put track down, you gotta do it on the Steadi.
And so we had two bodies, one built on the Steadicam. The other one was just the main production one. And we did use, Andreas has got a Ronin Gimbal head. It's almost like a miniature remote head. And we used that a fair bit because it's nice to just have it on a little arm, makes it very easy. It's always on this thing and if you need to suddenly go, ‘Hey, let's just go right over that bed and up to the person's face’ or ‘Let's go over the desk,’ It's just ready to go all the time and it's easy that way. In the way we did that, it's really a dolly with a short arm and then a small little head on it.
Calling back to what we were discussing a little bit earlier, there are so many dialogue scenes. And so it's about really capturing these performances and the blocking within these two character scenes, scenes with maybe three characters at the most. There are also a lot of gorgeous close-ups, where there’s a nice fall-off in the background, and the way that it captures the texture of the skin of the actors and the tone of everything is quite stunning. What lenses did you go with?
On both films I did with David, we used the same lenses, which were the Zeiss Master Primes. There were a few reasons for choosing them. Really sort of the main one being that a lot of the time I like to, and David likes to have frames where the people might be in the edges of the frame with unusual compositions. And so I do find that it's fun to play with stylish lenses, like certain anamorphic families, but in those cases, you have like the football of sharpness, the ellipse of sharpness, and in the middle and the edges it can be very treacherous and so in storytelling and drama a lot of time, unless the director is really into it, I wouldn't want to play with that kind of thing. I want a nice even flat field of focus, and I know that if I have to, or want to shoot at T1.3 or T2 with these lenses, I know that they're going to look great. And I know that they're going to hold up on a big screen, all the way up to a cinema screen, they're gonna look good. And you can't say that about a lot of other lenses. And I think David just really likes that. He's not into the sort of qualities of different lenses and those things. He would probably only care if it was affecting the way things or people were looking.
For instance, almost the entire movie was shot on one lens. It wasn't some sort of manifesto or anything like that at all. It's just the look that he seems to embrace and I'd seen him do quite a lot and I just jumped right on and fell in love with it. It was more this sort of closer and wider feel, particularly when one's coming in to do close-ups. I found I love this because you can get intimate with them. It physically and emotionally feels like you're right in front of the person, like you're close to them. But at the same time, what's neat about it is, you feel like you can feel more of their body language, and you can see more of the space around them. Everything doesn't just turn into mush, you know? And as I said, it wasn't some hard and fast rule, we wouldn't force it. If we ran into, I couldn't say what the percentage was, but if we ran into a shot for some reason, we would in a second say, okay, quick, yeah, go get the 40mm, we'll use that, or maybe we need something wider, you know, that kind of thing. It's just a neat thing in that I think it adds to the consistency of the look throughout.
Which focal length did you use the most?
27mm, on Super 35, right on the Alexa 35. And yeah, I just think it's a great focal length. You figure out fairly quickly how close is too close, and it's a fun way to do that.
Vincent Cassel and Guy Pearce in "The Shrouds." Image courtesy of Sideshow.
In “The Shrouds,” you're playing a lot with deeper focus than is the contemporary trend right now. To your point, talking about how so much is shot anamorphic and we're getting this background that's almost not present at all, to the point where it could have been shot anywhere. There's a scene where the construction crew is coming to fix the cemetery after it's been vandalized and destroyed. We're looking through the window as they're in the restaurant, and you have this deep focus where we’re seeing all the activity happening outside the window. And so you are willing to go into that realm, while nowadays I think that there's a trend in younger DPs and with rising filmmakers where they’re like, ‘We need to shoot it wide open. Everything needs to be wide open.’
That's another huge style thing. I mean, I'll admit it right off; It's very decadent. Shallow focus is very seductive. It's frequently very beautiful. My main reason for embracing it as I do a lot of time is to deemphasize cluttered backgrounds. My trick is I tend to use it more in mediums and medium-wides. And as they're getting closer, if I can, unless I painted myself into a corner or something silly, usually the NDs come out when we get in tighter. And I'll use more stops on the tighter stuff for every sort of reason. But sometimes narratively, you're right, you wanna see what's going on outside the window and inside simultaneously. You get so used to shooting wide open, or near wide open, all the time and trying to figure out ways to show it up. And then suddenly a director turns in and says, well, is there any way both the actors could be in focus? And you stop and go, at least I do, ‘Yes, of course.’ That's completely reasonable because, throughout the entire history of cinema, that was one of the big things that DPs and focus pullers did. And I used to own one of the Samuelson circular slide rule depth of field calculators, for calculating splits. You'd figure it out, they'd compose something and you were the assistant and you would say, well, to hold the guy in the foreground and the person in the background, the girl back there, you need a T5, T6 or a T8 or whatever it is. And then the DP would either, you know, bang their head into the wall, or say, sure, whatever.
When you’re shooting coverage, a lot of times when your coverage is more simple and elegant, you're not doing a lot of cutting around. It might be necessary cause you don't want to be racking back and forth, and flipping it back and forth and everything. And it is nice. I've done this a little bit myself, like slanted focus planes with tilt-shift lenses, where you can shift the plane of focus. Again, that's very restrictive a lot of the time, but at least if the actors aren't moving around or aren't moving much, you can still have your cake and eat it too in a sense. You can have the actor's eyes in focus at least, and watch both actors simultaneously without racking, but you can also have large areas of softness behind it in front. So you can get a neat mix, but it's tricky. It doesn't allow much for people to move around. So yeah, that's a funny thing. There's a time for that. I wouldn't be surprised if, sometime in the next couple of years, where suddenly there's a rebellion against shallow focus. And the next thing you know, everything's becoming really deep focus. For example, A Complete Unknown, where I believe it's shot on a Venice 2, and they're using a really high ISO.
Something like 12,800, I believe.
Yeah, and they're stopping the lenses down like crazy and they're shooting some of these night scenes at like a T8. And it opens up this whole thing. It's one irony that the increasing sensitivity to cameras actually makes things like super serious deep focus very possible. And in a lot of instances, not really that inconvenient. Whereas it sure, at 100 ISO or ASA as we used to say, back in the days when it was all Eastman 5247 or whatever, we just had 100ASA. And maybe you could try pushing it, but you know that if you push it you don't gain much shadow detail. That was hard. Lighting things at 100 ISO and lighting things to a T8, that's a huge amount of light. It's crazy.
I think that that's kind of why the trend is going towards everything wide open, because it's easier. You don't have to bring in as many lights and you can work with what is naturally available. In a film like “The Shrouds,” there are so many of these moving masters, these scenes where you’re not cutting into coverage. There isn’t a medium and a close-up of each character, getting chopped up into ‘shot-reverse-shot.’ It's just two characters on opposite sides of the frame having a conversation. So you want to be able to have room for them to play.
It's funny, there was one scene that takes place in Karsh's apartment, which was the only set that was done on a stage. It was this beautiful condo, done in a really serious Japanese style. We're in there day, night, all sorts of different setups. But there was one scene I remember where Karsh's sister-in-law comes in. It's the one scene that leads up to them making love in the apartment. That scene has got to be five or six pages of dialogue before it ends. But if you see how it was shot, once they come in, there are maybe only four to six setups after that. And it goes on for quite a bit because you're in wider too, then someone walks away and walks himself up into his own big closeup in the foreground, then he turns around, then it becomes her shot. So there's not as much coverage as one might think, but what I find neat about it is that it doesn't feel like anything is missing. So I think that's part of the trick of it is making sure that it stays interesting and perhaps cuttable at the right points. And, David's a real master of that. He knows how to do it in the simplest possible way.
Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger in "The Shrouds." Image courtesy of Sideshow.
On the note of Karsh’s apartment, because it's one of the main locations in the film, and with what you just shared that it was the only construction on a stage. I was observing while watching it, the practical lighting that's built into that set, particularly where there’s this koi pond that is lined with LED strips. What was the process like, developing the look for all of those practicals with the art department?
Carol Spier, the production designer, she's super duper aware of that stuff. So that was no problem at all. And it was just us, through time, playing with it. There were things like the entrance hall coming in. There were little places where you looked at it at a design stage when they were showing us the drawings, like there's going to be a little bit of a dead spot there. If I'm not mistaken, there was a little bit of a skylight in there partway down the little hallway that leads from the front door. I seem to remember that we were talking to Carol saying, ‘Oh, is there anything we can do in here?’ And she said, ‘I could put a little skylight thing in there for you.’ And we're like, ‘Oh, perfect.’ There were little additions like that, that sort of came in at that stage of things.
That's the thing is, yeah, you can't just have any lamps anywhere when something is as designed as that apartment was. It sort of has to fit. So she was showing us what she was planning to do. And then we had to hide some of our own stuff in these coves, sort of like inset displays that have different Asian sculptures in them. In those, we were able to hide various fixtures and things like that. Sometimes we would even light from them if you couldn't see around the corner inside the little alcove, we could put a little two-foot astera tube. It was channeled to come out to support that light. So if the actor walks past it, they would pick it up. So it was great that they were like that, that there was depth within the depth so that they gave you the ability to hide things in there rather easily. The ceilings could pop up so we could, if it was out of frame, we could pop these sort of ceiling panels, it was designed that way and we could get little light tubes up in there.
I think when we're in locations or more sort of ordinary kinds of places, usually the strategy is, you ask them to bring in set dec and all that. Bring us a bunch of different lights, more than we think we need, or pre-dress it with more than you need and we'll come and say, ‘Okay, let's, let's just keep that one over there and that one and get rid of these others,’ and you can just pick and choose. It's nice to have a little choice. Sometimes, of course, it is important to see this stuff because you still do run into things where the art department will find a light that they just love the way it looks, but you look at it and you go, ‘Wow, this has got some strange, weird, know, little six inch T5 fluorescent tube,’ with really ghastly color, or sometimes even LEDs can have extremely poor color rendering, they could be very cheap, the light fixture itself looks amazing, but the actual light emitter inside it is sketchy and not so good when you look at it in camera.
A Camera Operator Andreas Evdemon on the set of "The Shrouds." Image courtesy of Douglas Koch, CSC.
You mentioned your A camera operator. Is there anybody else who was extremely invaluable in the camera department, that you want to highlight their contributions?
The whole team was great. Andreas is a frequent collaborator of mine. In the camera department, there's my focus puller, Paul Steves, who did an amazing job. I've done about four films and a couple of series with him. Our second assistant, her name is Alicia McDonald, and our camera utility guy, Ben Lee, and our DIT, Jeff Sheevan. The team was great and I was familiar with all of them. I knew them all quite well. And we'd done a bunch of stuff together. So it was really good that way. There weren't any new faces in the camera department. My gaffer who we call Fast Eddy, Eddy Mikulich, we go back decades and we've done tons of stuff together. His guys were great, and then Mark Manchester was our key grip. He was really wonderful.
That's something I hear a lot is that it's a sign of a good team when it's always the same people coming back to work together every time.
Yeah, that's right. I guess if someone like me is a nuisance and it's busy, they'll stay away. (Laughs) They can go work for somebody else. You feel good too because you figure, people want to work, but they probably wouldn't come back if they weren't happy about it. We all got along well, so it was good. David's shoots are a pleasure anyway. They're never tense. It's a great vibe on the set all the time.
What's your background with Keslow Camera?
It's very funny because I get down to California a fair bit. Well, unfortunately, I used to until COVID hit, and then a whole chain of events has slowed that down. But I used to work in the States, particularly in Los Angeles, quite a lot in commercials. I'm in Local 600 and, you know, on the industry experience roster, whatever. And it was funny because I had always defaulted to Clairmont Camera down there because I knew them from Toronto and Vancouver. And from LA, of course, and from all their ads in American Cinematographer. And they had a lot of really cool gizmos we used to use in what I like to call the stylish 90s, on commercials and stuff. And so I just sort of defaulted to them when I would shoot in LA. And then one day I was working with a new focus puller down there. And he said to me, ‘Oh, have you ever heard of this place, Keslow Camera?’ And I go ‘no.’ He says, ‘Well, come by, I'm prepping another job.’ So I went over and it must've been the original location. Cause I remember it being not very big at all. It was a very small place. And we went in there and the service was excellent. Then just from that point on, as I was working with the same focus puller, we would just work with Keslow every time I was in LA.
There was a gap where I wasn't down there for a while. I came back, working with the same focus puller and he says, 'Meet me at Keslow.' And then just as he's about to hang up, he says, ‘Oh, oh, oh, I forgot to tell you, they've moved. They have a new place. Don't go to the old place.’ I arrived at your new place and I walked in. It was like, oh my God, it's like the Boeing facility or something. It was just gigantic. I couldn't believe how big and impressive it was. I walked in and it was just great. So yeah, I'd done lots of stuff with Keslow there in LA. To be very honest, in commercial work here in Toronto, we DPs do not necessarily have a huge influence on where the gear will come from. But when it comes to movies and series, we usually have a bit more input. And so Keslow was extremely helpful at making sure that we got to work together on “The Shrouds,” which was nice.
Were there any specific challenges on set that Keslow was able to alleviate in terms of the service or just responsiveness?
It's funny because before this, because I knew that you would be curious about this kind of thing, I did interrogate my operator and my focus puller to ask them, ‘Hey, jog my memory here, how was the prep? Was it smooth? Was there anyone in particular that stood out as super helpful to us?’ So I was asking around, and in this case, no news is good news. I remember it as being extremely smooth. And then during the shoot, this is the other thing too, the gear was all like highly reliable and in great shape. So therefore I don't recall any kind of emergency calls or anything like that, which is another thing you want to hear is reliability. Reliability is a big thing, and that the gear was in great shape.
Jim Teevan (Director of Business Development, Toronto), who I know really well from the Toronto office. He was my focus puller on a number of series that I did years before he went to work for Keslow. So I've known him for quite a while. I knew him as a second and then as a first, and then I've known him at Keslow and he's an extremely helpful fellow and has helped me out in all sorts of things beyond just “The Shrouds.” Jim is very, very helpful and indulges me; I am one of these people who's always sort of experimenting and tinkering. I'm the guy that says, ‘Hey, can I come in and put a lens on one of your cameras and check it out?’ He’s always super helpful in that way.
Still from "The Shrouds." Image courtesy of Sideshow.
“The Shrouds” has so much to say about the place of technology in our lives, especially with artificial intelligence. There's a strong undercurrent in the film itself about artificial intelligence and the danger of over-reliance on it, that maybe it's not trustworthy. If you were speaking to an aspiring DP aiming to enter the film world today, what advice would you give them about staying inspired and creative in this current moment when so many doomsayers are pushing towards generative AI?
Yeah, you know, it's very weird. It's funny you asked this because there are days with myself and some of my other friends in the business where we'll look at each other and say, 'Thank God, we're not just starting out, huh? Like, aren't you happy that we're in the peak/twilight years of our careers?' What a weird time. It's a little bit distressing. I find the technology of cinematography, like the cameras, the lighting, the lenses, all that kind of stuff, the color grading tech, all of these tools are becoming so much more powerful and so much more interesting. And then you have people coming in and saying, ‘Who cares? We're just going to generate in AI. You'll all be out of a job.’ I do mentor people sometimes, we do it through the union, or the CSC, Canadian Society of Cinematographers. And so I’m working with younger people and, it's funny, I find they haven't brought AI up much and neither have I. Now that you mention it, I'm kind of surprised that they don't, but it doesn’t seem like their enthusiasm for cinematography has in any way dampened. But in terms of what I would say to them, yeah, I don't know. It's so weird. I mean, good luck! (Laughs) It's a very weird thing because I don't in any way pretend to be any kind of Nostradamus about it myself. It also freaks me out, as I'm sure it does a lot of people, when people say to you, ‘Oh, and guess what? It's far, far more advanced than you think it is.’ When you talk about the idea of commercials, music videos, feature films, TV, and saying, ‘Oh yes, all of this will be created on a computer.’ There's no need to use actors, or go onto a stage, or be in a location, or employ cinematographers, grips, or sound mixers, we don't need any of these people anymore. I mean, if that's the reality of it, you sort of go, ‘Oh, I hope it doesn't happen to us.’
It's one thing talking to young people, or mentoring them, and dealing with AI, cause that is a rather giant sort of thing looming over it all. But in a general sense of cinematography, if one ignores AI, the big elephant in the room. I tell them what I talked about some time ago, as I consider myself a real open book. If anything else, if you ask me, I'll answer you, I'll tell you what I know, and I won't hold back. To ask the question, ‘How did you do such and such a thing or whatever?’ It's like, ‘Oh, I'll tell you, I won't I won't keep secrets from you.’ And you can learn from that. Because a lot of time, it's knowing what the question to ask is, that will give you the right answer. So if you know how to ask it in the right way, a lot of time you'll be able to tease more information out of the person by the question you've asked. So I encourage that, and also just share wisdom about things they may not have tons of experience with, like working with like more serious actors, like here's a few little pointers and things like that. And what do you do? Because everybody's career is a whole series of mistakes a lot of the time, right? That you hopefully learn from. Sometimes it's nice to be able to tell someone, 'You will probably make this mistake yourself.' At the end of the day, you have to be enthusiastic. I never worried really, when I was younger, because I was so fanatical about this, about light and color and lenses and cinematography. But that's the thing, you have to be fanatical about it. You can't be half-measured about it. [x]