The film Asking For It follows Joey, a young woman from a small town in the South who is sexually assaulted by an old friend. Her life then spirals out of control, and things appear hopeless until she links up with a gang of female vigilantes hell-bent on enacting their own brand of justice and accountability.
Joey (Kiersey Clemons) joins their ranks and helps them take on nefarious characters, including a group of violent frat boys, a squad of corrupt police officers and a sinister group of alt-right men’s rights activists. The film also features Vanessa Hudgens, Alexandra Shipp, Luke Hemsworth, Gabourey Sidibe and Ezra Miller.
Jendra Jarnagin
Asking for It, which was released by Paramount and is now available on all VOD platforms, was written and directed by Eamon O’Rourke. Jendra Jarnagin was cinematographer on the film, which was shot entirely on location in Guthrie, Oklahoma. With the film’s limited budget, she found creative ways to get the look she and the director wanted. Let’s find out more.
How would you describe the look of the film?
I would call the look of the film dirty, raw and edgy. We strove for a visceral experience, where we are taking the audience for a ride as our protagonist Joey is exposed to a seductive but dangerous underground culture. At times things get a little surreal, so some of the filmmaking tips into being stylized and visually bold while maintaining its anchor in reality.
How early did you get involved on this film?
I was hired shortly before preproduction began. I was actually on a solo vacation in Bali when I got an email to gauge my interest. The day after I flew home, I was on a plane to Oklahoma to begin prep, and we started shooting three weeks later. I prefer to be hired earlier in the process to start ruminating on the film, building a relationship with the director and getting a nice, deep dive into the script before the official “full steam ahead” prep period. But the circumstances in this case didn’t allow for that.
How did you work with director Eamon O’Rourke? What did he say he wanted for the look? Were you provided examples, a lookbook?
Eamon had a lookbook prepared before I interviewed, and that gave me a good sense of the tone and vibe of the film. Films we referenced were Belly, for its bold use of color and fearless visual language, as well as Natural Born Killers and True Romance. Since our prep was so abbreviated, we kept evenings sacred for one-on-one creative time. We’d spend the days fulfilling the various commitments involving other departments (location scouts, meetings, crew interviews, etc.), then nights were dedicated to creative freedom — watching clips, discussing key sequences and trying out ideas for some out-of-the-box techniques to express certain emotions and experiences Joey would face.
How was it decided to work with only one camera? And what were the benefits and challenges?
Having only one camera was strictly a financial decision, and it was not an easy decision to make. At the outset, it was obvious, being an ensemble film, that we needed two cameras. Most of the scenes involve what we nicknamed “the squad,” which was a group of seven main characters. As we began to home in on the visual style of the film, it was clear early on that we needed Steadicam for enough of the days that it made sense to have a full-time Steadicam/A camera operator.
There was no one local to fill that role (we were shooting an hour from Oklahoma City), so we flew in operator Brad Grimmett from Los Angeles; he wanted to take a break from television to do a film. So we made the choice that having full-time Steadicam was more important than a full-time second camera, so the budget that had been allocated for the B camera had to be shifted to Steadicam.
Though I still felt we needed a B camera for several days, we were only able to get it for one day — for the aftermath of the attack on the Men’s First Movement conference. That exterior scene incorporated so much action, so many characters, so many plot points and moving parts — stunts, gunfire, vehicles — that even with maximum simplification of our coverage (and rewriting the scene to be less complex), there was no way to capture all that content in one day and before sunset, so I really pushed for that second camera for that day.
Jendra Jarnagin with camera
Because it’s an action film with many characters and group scenes, working with only one camera was the most challenging aspect of shooting this movie. We really had to economize our coverage and make quite austere choices in our shot selection. We shot-listed nearly every scene in advance, aligning on the priorities and dissecting the group dynamics for each scene because we couldn’t cover each character individually. Since I was hired so close to filming, we did our shot-listing either after wrap each day or before call each morning.
How did you decide on what camera to shoot on?
I chose an ARRI Alexa Mini for portability, dynamic range and ease of use. I knew we were doing a lot of hand-held, Steadicam and shooting in cars since, structurally, it’s essentially a road trip movie. I knew our shooting style and schedule were going to be fast and furious and that in working so quickly, my lighting would sometimes be a little rough and unrefined.
So I wanted the range I could trust and knew well from an Alexa. It is also more forgiving on skin and harsh detail compared to some other cameras. When we decided to shoot anamorphic, I disqualified a large-format camera from my consideration because of the lack of lens choices. Also due to my abbreviated prep time, I didn’t have time to test anything new and wanted to stick with a camera I knew well.
Can you talk lenses?
We wanted to shoot anamorphic, partly for the wide-screen framing for our group shots and how we wanted to show off the various environments of the story, but also for the messy and imperfect aberrations that older anamorphic lenses can bring. Eamon kept saying he wanted to be able to convey a slightly surreal feeling to the look and for the visuals to be bold.
As we explored funky, old anamorphics, we both fell in love with the Cooke Xtal Express lenses. They were a great fit and a really strong choice. At first I was afraid they might be too much and scare off the director, but I showed him a test, and he loved them. Finding an available set was another story. Scheimpflüg in New York happened to have a hybrid set that was available.
They are particularly “bendy,” and the wides (35mm and 24mm) are quite extreme in their distortion. We only used those two lenses very selectively for a very specific look. Otherwise, I shot most of the movie on the 50mm. The lenses also flare very strongly. At times I thought the flares were out of hand, and it did affect how we could shoot with light sources in frame. But other times I leaned in to the look and adopted the attitude that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em when it came to the flares.
I also made use of a Lensbaby lens for the biking scene within the dissociation montage. We wanted to abstract the world around Joey as she is zoning out while riding her bike. There are a few different kinds of Lensbaby lenses, and we used the kind that you can squish (the Lensbaby Muse, loaned to me by David Mullen, ASC), so the focus can jump or flow in and out in a funky and messy way as you manipulate it. This was a very subjective mental state we were conveying in a visual way.
What about the lighting?
Lightingwise, we took an approach of raw realism. We went for the opposite of glamour or beauty lighting since revenge is an ugly business. We generally took the route of lighting “spaces not faces” since the mood and tone of our environments were a key part of the storytelling and involved a lot of moving through spaces, either via hand-held or Steadicam. I embraced imperfection and wasn’t afraid of letting things look a little rough.
Many of our scenes were moody and dark, and I used strong colors, where justified, to convey Joey’s emotional state. For example, for the scene when Joey pieces together that the unimaginable has indeed happened to her while unconscious, gaffer Jacob Keen and I chose the most disgusting-colored gel we could find for the light coming through the bathroom window — a deep greenish mustard yellow.
For Cuzzo’s Lair, a location where the women hide out with a rag-tag “family” of teenage boys, we lit with real fire barrels and augmented real candlelight and camping lanterns since they were squatting off the grid in an abandoned warehouse.
What about the Cherry Bomb montage? How did that come about?
I’m glad you asked about the Cherry Bomb. It’s a really important part of the movie that doesn’t get much play in the trailer. The Cherry Bomb is an underground nightclub/community center/safe house and was the heart and thematic center of the film.
We took the most care and specificity with the visuals and design of that club. Production designer Perry Mateson and her team did an amazing job crafting the multi-purpose space.
Joey’s introduction to the Cherry Bomb is an important turning point in the movie. She’s exposed to an exciting world of inclusive female freedom, self-expression and empowerment. It’s a visual cornucopia that just keeps building as the scene goes on. We devised that scene as a long Steadicam walk-through, introducing lots of exciting characters, activities and sub-culture communities, all while shirking the convention of a traditional male gaze. We aimed for the opposite of objectification. We used red neon signage and red architectural lights along the perimeter of the room; magenta for the womblike, soft, curtained lounge area; and greens and cyan for the dance floor. We shot the grand entrance in slow motion and alternated between Joey’s POV, all that she is observing and a medium close-up of her looking around and taking it all in.
How did you work with the colorist? Can you name them and what post house they are at? Was it all remote?
The colorist was Taylor Mahony at LA’s Tunnel Post. Before we shot (prior to the pandemic), I got to view my camera and lens tests with Taylor in-person, discuss our intended look and create a few variations of a show LUT.
Jendra Jarnagin
Final grading was mostly done remotely because of the pandemic, though I did get to review the result in-person at their DI theater to QC it before our Tribeca screening. We had originally planned for me to supervise in-person, but just as we were due to turn it in for Tribeca, Los Angeles had a really bad COVID spike, and no one was comfortable doing it in-person.
We used Sohonet ClearView Flex remote-viewing software to do a supervised session with me, Eamon and producer Luke Daniels, each in our respective homes, while Taylor was in the DI theater.
I had my home LG C9 65-inch 4K TV set up to a custom profile I got from cinematographer Steve Yedlin’s website. I also had an iPad Pro going since that seems to be the common denominator of display devices, but I simultaneously wanted to see it large for impact and detail. Watching it in the theater after we were done, I was mostly looking at noise since we have a lot of really dark scenes. I also looked at matte edges since our driving scenes were shot on greenscreen. I couldn’t judge those things over the livestream because of the compression when we had our supervised sessions.
Are there some scenes that stick out?
My favorite sequence, along with the introduction to the Cherry Bomb nightclub, is the dissociation montage, which I referred to earlier. The biggest challenge when I read the script, and what Eamon and I spent the most time exploring in prep, is “how do we convey her inner emotional state after being sexually assaulted?” How do we show those messy, complicated jumble of feelings? How do we express the emotional impact and aftermath to the audience, and how it continues to affect her, even when she is just trying to move on with her life?
We knew it needed to be a montage and that it wasn’t about plot or dialogue; it was about feeling. We dissected all the complicated emotions and involved Kiersey in the conversation. Not only was it her character’s sequence, but Kiersey was also a producer on the project.
We shot this section with a panoply of bold cinematic techniques, all carefully chosen to express specific messy feelings. We used jump cuts of her in bed tossing and turning; fast motion of her being planted in one spot at work while the world orbits around her in a blur; and quick, repetitive cycling match-cuts — using a really distorted, in-your-face, wide-angle close-up — of her in different environments, with her clothes changing rapidly while she stares blankly ahead.
Looking back on the film, would you have done anything different?
Nearly anything I could have done differently all amounted to time and budget that we didn’t have. Of course, that’s the reality of low-budget filmmaking — a huge part of our job is doing the best we can with what we have. There is no point in lamenting what you wish you could have had and didn’t. So, in making peace with that, I’m pretty proud of the work we did with limited resources.
The one mistake I learned the hard way was not to shoot vintage anamorphics wide-open for a wide shot. I knew from testing to avoid doing t
Jendra Jarnagin on set
hat because the image starts to fall apart. There was one faraway, quite dark night exterior establishing shot in which I was really skirting the edge of underexposure, and I made the judgment call to open the lens all the way for any extra brightness I could squeeze out of the scene. I knew I was living dangerously, but I had to embrace the idea of being bold on this movie.
The lesson I learned in this instance was that I should have bracketed the exposure and shot a take at the stop that I knew the lens could handle optically. On the big screen, it’s just way too mushy. Letting it be too dark would have been a better choice.
Do you feel the opportunities for female DPs are increasing?
Absolutely. I’ve been a DP for over 25 years, and I have witnessed an exponential growth in the interest and willingness to consider a female DP. It used to be a real struggle to be taken seriously. There’s still more of a glass ceiling than people realize in moving beyond the low-budget world. Because there has been such growth in a relatively short period of time (the past five years or so), many people falsely believe that it’s not an issue anymore.
We went from 2% of released films being shot by women to 4% to 6% — (with perhaps higher growth in areas of the industry besides released films). When you think the number of working DPs at that level has tripled, of course people have noticed a big difference and that might seem like we are approaching equality. But we still have a long, long way to go before parity, or at least before gender bias is a thing of the past.
I’m hoping that since The Power of the Dog DP Ari Wegner, ACS, was the second woman nominated for a cinematography Oscar, the idea of women excelling in this field stops being viewed as a rarity.
