By Iain Blair
Martin Scorsese and DP Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC, first teamed up on The Wolf of Wall Street and followed that with Silence and The Irishman. Now they’ve collaborated on Killers of the Flower Moon, an epic Western and crime drama that tells the tragic true story of the infamous Osage murders of the 1920s. When the Osage Native Americans strike oil on their reservation in Oklahoma, a cattle baron (Robert De Niro) plots to murder tribal members and steal their wealth, even while he persuades his nephew (Leonardo DiCaprio) to marry an Osage woman (Lily Gladstone).
Rodrigo Prieto
I spoke with Prieto about shooting the film, which earned 10 Oscar nominations — including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Cinematography — and how he collaborated with Scorsese on the look.
While this is another epic story from Marty, it’s also quite intimate. How did you collaborate on finding the right looks and tone?
You’re right in that it’s both epic in scope but also very intimate, and it took us quite a while to figure out both the looks and the focus of the story. The script was reworked quite a lot. It was the same with the look. I tested out all sorts of lenses and had different ideas about negatives and looks — even pinhole photography and infrared — all to see what felt right. We didn’t end up using many of those ideas in the movie, but they ultimately influenced other things we did do. The main idea that we ended up embracing was the visual representation of the different stories, which was most obviously manifested in the newsreel footage we shot.
Is it true you even used a vintage camera for those scenes?
Yes, we used a 1917 Bell & Howell camera that Scorsese owns. We oiled it up, got it back into mint working condition, hand-cranked that camera and shot the scenes on black-and-white negative.
Did you do a lot of research?
Yes, and a lot of the rest of the look of the film is based on the idea of how people are photographed and how they remember things. I did a lot of research on the start of color photography, and we created a LUT based on Autochrome photography, which the Lumiere brothers invented around 1903. That was one of the first techniques used to create color photography, and we emulated the feel that I had looking at what are basically black transparencies that have a very specific feel to the color.
That was the way we represented the descendants of the American immigrants, the white people and characters like Ernest (DiCaprio) and Hale (De Niro). Their part of the story has that look, but for all the Osage scenes, when they’re alone and not with white people, we photographed them on film negative. The look for that was based on 5219 stock and how that film negative looks on Vision film print. It’s a very naturalistic look. The colors are what we perceive as the colors of nature and underscore the Osage people’s connection to the land and nature.
The third look of the film is ENR-based, which we used toward the end, and it begins with the explosion of Mollie’s sister’s home. That’s when things really start unraveling and when Ernest’s guilt starts really kicking in… his confusion gets worse and worse, and she gets sicker and sicker. To illustrate all that, we transition into a much harsher look. I also used the ENR look for the last part of The Irishman. The feel of it is more desaturated in terms of color and higher contrast, and it looks a little nastier as it enhances the film grain even more. That’s the basic arc of the look of the movie.
When did you start working with colorist Yvan Lucas?
We met on Oliver Stone’s Alexander, which we color-timed in Paris at Éclair, and I fell in love with his work. We became good friends. For me it was a revelation the way he did digital color grading, which is really based on photochemical color grading in terms of his process. He basically uses printer lights, which is a very comfortable method for me. Instead of manipulating highlights and lowlights and midtones on every shot, which is essentially creating a new LUT for every shot, we just create a LUT and use printer lights. That’s why LUTs are so important to me because it’s really like your negative, even if you’re shooting digital. Since 99.9% of prints are actually digital DCPs, the LUTs become a crucial part of the feel of a movie.
How did you make all your camera and lens choices?
We shot it 35mm on ARRICAM LTs and STs, with the Sony Venice 2 for the digital scenes at dusk and night. The lenses were Panavision T Series anamorphic, and they were adapted for us by Panavision’s lens guru, Dan Sasaki. He detuned them a bit for us and also added a special coating that made the flares warmer than usual. I thought that was important because sometimes the blue flare, which is a characteristic of many anamorphics, feels too modern to me.
What were the main challenges of shooting this?
The main challenge was learning about the Osage culture, about Oklahoma at that time and the attitudes of whites to the Osage… and then finding ways to represent all that visually. Scorsese designed a lot of shots to give that sense you mentioned — a big story but also an intimate look at way the characters are living in the moment. So when we introduce Ernest and he gets out of the train, we do this big, swooping shot of the station that starts wide on a crane and then swoops in on Ernest. That’s Scorsese’s grammar, how he expresses himself, and I find that endlessly fascinating and so enjoyable to execute his ideas.
Basically, he designs the shots to give audiences all the information they need; you see the station and the town name, Fairfax, and then the character he’s introducing. Then there’s a drone shot that starts with the car — we see Ernest driving with Henry Roan (William Belleau). It’s a red car on a green background, the same color contrast that many photographers used with Autochrome, so it’s a very conscious choice and design. Then we pull away and see the landscape with the oil. Again, it’s a way of looking at both the macro story and the intimate one.
What about dealing with all the VFX?
I’ve worked with VFX supervisor Pablo Helman before on other films, and the big challenge here was dealing with all the set extensions. We shot in Fairfax and all around the area, but the main street in Pawhuska, where we also shot, was better because it had more older buildings. We had bluescreen at the end of both streets, and Pablo extended both. That was a challenge in terms of the light and the bluescreen shadows. We also had to do extensions for the drone shots of Fairfax and the surrounding area, but most of the VFX involved clean-up and removing modern things. It helped a lot that not only were we shooting in the real locations, but that many of them hadn’t really changed. We didn’t have to do much work, and we didn’t need tons of crazy, spectacular VFX.
Tell us about the DI.
All the careful work we did with the LUTs in prep was essential, as Scorsese and his editor Thelma Schoonmaker [ACE] spent many months cutting all the material so they could get used to the look. It was crucial that the dailies they were editing with were as close as possible to what I intended. Yvan also supervised the dailies workflow.
We adjusted stuff in the DI, but it wasn’t a big departure from the dailies. We matched all the shots for continuity. The way we work is that Yvan does his pass first to match it all, and then if I want the scene to be darker, there’s an offset for everything since it already matches. That makes the DI work pretty simple. It also gives us time to do a window here, a window there.
For this film I was going for a higher level of contrast than in the others I’ve done with Scorsese. We really wanted to represent the darkness that’s happening in the story. The lighting helped us do that. The chiaroscuro was much stronger than in the other films, especially toward the end. But sometimes I did the opposite, like in the courtroom scene. The set was very light in color, and it was bright, overexposed, harsh light to underscore the inner turmoil. Sometimes you have to use ugly shots and ugly lighting to support the emotions of the story.
Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.
How early on did you integrate post and any VFX?
That was very complicated, and we studied every tennis movie we could get our hands on and planned it all out in terms of the shots. Where are you on the court? What lenses do you use? How do you make it feel like you are part of the action but not a voyeur? So all the previz was crucial to that, and we used that as proof of concept to show the studio how we’d shoot all the big tennis sequences. All the VFX had to make all that stuff seamless, and then when COVID hit, we needed even more VFX work in terms of creating extras and crowds. We literally shot the final scene with just 100 extras in the stadium before COVID shut us down, and the stadium seats over 7,000, so it took a lot of VFX work to fill it up in post.
How did you work together, and what were the main editing challenges?
What was the most difficult VFX shot and why?
Is this the first time you’ve used it on a feature film?
When we went digital, and when film stocks got reduced to a core number, we lost options. But with this process, you can shoot with any of the leading cameras you want, whichever one suits the project, and then the world opens up again. You can choose whatever stock you want to print it onto — negative stocks, print stocks, 35mm, 60mm. So you effectively go back to film. Now some may say it’s creating a faux grain, along with film problems like a bit of gate weave and noise, but it also creates this analog feel that film lovers have always loved about film.
This was your first time working with Denis. How did you get involved in this?
Do you prepare your cart differently depending on the project?
How do you like the DP to describe the look they want?
I find inspiration from many things, especially people like Barron Claiborne, Gregory Crewdson, Gordon Parks. And from Instagram, to be honest.
What are some of your best practices that you can share?
Motion Picture, Limited Series, or Pilot Made for Television
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