Killers of the Flower Moon Archives

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.

Company 3 senior colorist Yvan Lucas began working with DP Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC, on the look of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon long before the film was in production. Lucas, who has collaborated with Prieto on most of the cinematographer’s work for nearly two decades, shares Prieto’s fondness of a film-style workflow in which filmmakers do as much as possible upfront to set appropriate looks, rather than attacking the footage with digital color grading tools after the photography is complete.

Yvan Lucas

The two like to create unique show LUTs — conceptually, an idea similar to designing custom “film stocks” — that incorporate the director’s ideas and sensibilities so the cinematographer can light with an eye toward the final look and so other department heads can get an early idea how their paints and pigments will read in the final film.

While Lucas and Prieto are not alone in this way of working, they are quite vigorous about maintaining film-style protocols throughout, grading the dailies using only the LUTs and digital printer lights and even doing early passes of the final grade solely with the same tools photochemical color timers use. This makes sense when you realize that Lucas spent many years timing film in Paris on such visually striking films as Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children (for cinematographer Darius Khondji, AFC, ASC, and director Jean-Pierre Jeunet).

The ability to create LUTs that can seamlessly take colors from a specific type of camera original —film neg, LOG-C, SLOG and so forth — and push them in another direction to set a look, is a complex procedure that requires a strong eye and significant technical knowledge.

Imprecise LUTs can do more harm than good. And one limitation back when Lucas was working with Prieto on LUTs for Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman was an inability of color correctors at the time to isolate very specific hues to push in the desired direction. On that film, for example, the two were developing a custom Ektachrome-style LUT. “If you tried to just isolate reds,” Lucas offers, “you would usually end up also including skin tones.” Also, the resulting colors would often end up looking noisy.

The two had spoken about color and the limitations of digital grading technologies to really get the type of precision in a LUT that they hoped for. This got them thinking about going beyond the limitations and coming up with something that would allow them to get to the essential color information and isolate vectors more specifically. When designing one of the looks for Killers — the style of the early part of the film, which is based on the early 20th century Autochrome process — the production hired color rendering scientist Philippe Panzini. Panzini, who brought his color science expertise to the company that created Flame (Discreet Logic at the time and now Autodesk) and to many other companies since, was asked to design a box with sliders that could allow subtle shifts of colors as captured into the palette of Autochrome. Subsequently, color-rendering scientist Christophe Souchard took that design and turned it into an OFX plugin for Lucas’ FilmLight Baselight system.

Throughout the entire movie, Lucas also included a film emulation LUT based on Eastman Kodak’s 5219 500-T. This LUT helped confine everything — from the material actually shot on film to portions digitally captured with either Sony Venice or Phantom high-speed cameras — into the realm of color and contrast possible with imagery shot using that stock.

Lucas and Prieto used this plugin to create the Autochrome look at the start of the film, the ENR-style process (emulating the Technicolor photochemical process that adds contrast and slightly desaturates images) and the Technicolor imbibition process. The film combined these LUTs in different places.

While filmmakers like Scorsese and Prieto are very fond of this disciplined way of working, during the finishing stage they are always open to step out of the confines they created if doing so helps tell the story.

When it was time for final color, Lucas would work with Prieto and often Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker in one of Company 3’s New York color-grading theaters to fine-tune everything shot by shot. It was only at this stage that Lucas would introduce digital color-grading tools such as vignettes, keys, saturation, etc.

One such adjustment: During a section in the Autochrome portion of the film, there are some wide shots of an enormous tract of land that Scorsese felt should exhibit a more saturated green than the Autochrome process could have rendered. “He felt that emotionally, it was very important to see more of that green at that moment,” says Lucas, who then used keys and vignettes to isolate the vegetation and pulled back on the Autochrome just for those elements of the images.

Different cinematographers and colorists work in their own way. Some like to do a lot of the look creation up front, while others like to find it in the grading theater. “There are colorists who just start right out changing lift, gamma and gain and adding many secondaries,” Lucas says, “and they get beautiful results. But this is how Rodrigo and I like to work, and we’ve had a lot of success with it.”

The two also collaborated the same way on the film Barbie, building what they called the Techno-Barbie LUT that helped define the unique look of that film.