In this exclusive interview, cinematographer Drew Daniels discusses his work on Sean Baker’s latest film ‘Anora’, his approach to filmmaking, and his journey in the industry.
How did your career as a cinematographer begin?
I really didn’t even know what a DP was until I got to college. I’m not one of those people that picked up a Super 8 camera when they were eight years old and said, “this is what I’ll do.” I always had cameras around though because I grew up skateboarding. I still skate. I still watch skate videos every day. I feel like there’s such a connection between skate rats and DPs.
When I got to college, I chose film because I heard that UT had a good program. After a year or two, I got into the film school and became obsessed. I got on a grad student film and saw that’s how you get experience. The people I admired were really hungry – they would camera assist and gaff, shooting on 16 millimeter. It felt like real productions.
By complete coincidence, I got into the camera department when a classmate needed a second AC for a short film shooting out in the middle of nowhere. That’s when I really fell in love with it because I saw the DP working. I saw how important their job was to the process. Before, I had thought that the director did everything, but then I saw the DP was in charge of the lighting, the camera work, talking to the director, and the actors. I thought, “oh man, that’s the best job. I’m gonna do that job.”
Then, by pure happenstance, I met filmmaker Trey Schultz. The guy he had hired to shoot his film bailed on him last minute for the short film version of “Krisha.” That film did really well, leading to the feature version, which won at SXSW and then the John Cassavetes award. My career essentially spawned from that, starting in 2015 at Cannes.
What was it like returning to Cannes with ‘Anora’?
It feels like a perfect, idyllic, surreal experience. Our film is so loved right now. I’m getting emotional just thinking about it. I literally started crying when the lights came up after the screening. I saw Karren was really welling up as well. I was already crying at the end of the film, so I had the credits to recover. And then the clapping started, and the lights came up, and I was just so, so proud of this little film.
What makes it special, besides just being a good film, is that it has so much heart. Sean is an amazing writer, for one. But just the process of shooting the film was incredible. We all loved the film. I think every crew member was excited to be there. The PAs were all hardcore film student fans. They were so excited just to work with Sean Baker on a Sean Baker film. They didn’t care. They would have died for this film.
What made this film particularly challenging to shoot?
It was the hardest film I’ve ever worked on. Every day felt like we could have just collapsed. It felt like we were on the brink of collapse at any moment, which I feel like most films feel like that. You always feel like you’re just barely staying on the rails, but this one in particular was really hard because we actually shot this film non-union in New York City. And a good number of the department heads were all union members, so it was a little scary.
But it was the only way to make the film really. We were small, lean, and mean, and we were able to adapt. If we needed to just move to a new location, we could do that in 15 minutes, as opposed to hours. And it costs less. So, the only way to do this movie was to slim it all down to the bare bones of what we needed.
Also, I think Sean just feels more comfortable with less people around. I actually prefer it too because when you have like 50 people in a room standing around and only really six of them are actually working, it gets really suffocating. Especially for this film, where there’s a lot of intimacy, you don’t want a room full of loads of people who are just standing around and looking on at what’s happening.
Can you talk a bit more about your approach and how you like to work?
We did what needed to be done to get the film made. We didn’t have the money to do it, as people would say, “the right way.” So sometimes, we would have to do it “the DIY way.” And to me, I actually think it makes the film better because you feel the presence of… you feel the hand behind it. You feel my camera operating, you feel the mistakes. I feel like it gives it a handmade quality.
For example, I didn’t really want to lay down dolly tracks. So, we would just push the camera around on floors. Also, all the driving was a big one. If you’re on a big budget film, having your actors drive the car for real in live traffic environments, the rules become such a hassle. You have to hire cops, you have to hire everybody. The size of the movie explodes. It gets really complicated. It slows things down. So we just did it ourselves. We’d have the actors actually driving the car. You see them driving. You feel it. It feels dangerous.
For public scenes, we would just shoot from the other side of the road and we’d have our actors go into a restaurant and just interact with the people there. And then, we would have to, of course, go in there later and get some signatures and stuff. We did the billiards hall that way. We did maybe two or three restaurants that way. Sometimes what we would do is bring the camera into the place a little early before we bring in the actors, maybe 30 minutes. Just so that people kind of forget you’re there.
The camera’s usually inside the car, so there was very, very minimal lighting. I’m just pushing the film stop, as far as I could push it. Lighting as minimally as I could and crossing my fingers hoping it would work out.
Let’s talk about the visual style of ‘Anora’. How did you and Sean approach the look of the film?
Sean said it really well. This film is about power. And so, that was something to inform the cinematography. But it wasn’t always straightforward. I was trying to think of an answer to that in case someone asked me that yesterday. And I really don’t know if I have a good answer, because I could easily say, “oh, we did low angles here and then we did high angles here and that’s empowering or whatever.” But honestly, sometimes we did the opposite.
One of my favorite shots is when she gets up from the couch and walks up towards the door and she’s starting to put it together that holy shit, something’s very wrong. It’s this really low angle on her. And for some reason, the low angle with the ceiling behind her, to me she feels really vulnerable there. And maybe there’s something with the opposites of shooting a low angle instead of a high angle to show a power dynamic. I don’t know. I think it was about the composition more than anything else. It was all in the way we would frame her.
I feel like when you’re making a film, or at least when I’m making a film, most of it is just about finding the themes, knowing what they are, and then I’ll look out for them. When we’re blocking or when we’re finding our frames, it’s always something that’s on my mind, rather than forcing a shot onto the scene.
You mentioned the films of Jesús Franco and Godard’s Le Mépris (1963) as references for the film. What are your influences as a cinematographer, on this film or in your career as a whole?
I only have a few. I really like what I like. I feel like that’s also important too. You shouldn’t have too many references. When you make a film, I’d rather have one good idea than a million ideas. Sean said it really well. This film is about power. And so, that was something to inform the cinematography. Our style references, it’s films we like and Sean will share with me these insane films and I’ll watch them, like weird German films or totally obscure Italian sexploitation films, and I’ll watch it and be like…“so how does this relate to Anora?” But, there’s always something there, maybe the attitude or maybe the camera has a certain sort of feeling.
How would you describe your style as a cinematographer?
I think it changes. I don’t know. It’s one of those things… It’s just taste, you know? It’s where you grew up, how you grew up, all of those decisions, all of that life experience… everything. Your personality. Your sense of humor. All of that makes your style.
The DPs that I like are Robbie Miller and Vilmos Zsigmond, and directors like Robert Altman. And I think maybe one thing that’s common with them is that there’s a humanity and there’s also a little bit of a sense of humor there. My favorite photographers are photographers that have a sense of humor. You need to see the ridiculousness in everyday life. If a photo is funny, I’m gonna like it way more than any other photos. Like just a photo, when there’s something a little funny, a little off and you could see the photographer just sort of winking at you a little bit. To me, that just makes it so much better. So, I try to find that. I think it’s totally unconscious, but it’s just still there.
I think the camera work has a playfulness to it, which is something that’s important to me. Because, I have a point of view too. Camera work that I really like is where you can feel the personality of the camera or of the operator. I think that’s super important and a lot of my favorite films have that and there’s a certain quirk or a certain sensibility that you can get from the camera work and it just makes it more fun to watch and more identifiable.
What’s your approach to lighting?
Sean’s movies look natural and so do Trey’s. I think that’s kind of my preference. I really like to put more of an emphasis on the camera work and the freedom that the actors will have. But lighting is still important. And it actually sometimes takes a lot of light to make something look unlit. Because if it’s unlit, then it can also look really terrible. Or your background to foreground and contrast ratios just don’t work. Especially when you’re shooting on film.
In Anora, a lot of the really wide stuff is all just natural light. There’s a lot of natural light in the house that looked really good. But I had to do quite a lot of lighting actually. And what you might not know is there’s a lot of shots in that big 25 minute sequence that had to be shot at night. So I had to light them to look like daytime. And I’m really proud that a lot of people probably didn’t even notice this stuff.
I try to work really fast and I’d rather work quickly and give more time to more takes. Or maybe we need an extra shot. So, if I can work quicker then it gives more time for the director to do their thing and for the actors to do their thing. I try not to get too in the way with my lighting. And the more stylized you light, the more that you have to be really specific with it. Then the more restricted you are. The more things you’re doing to shape the light, then the more the actors have to hit their marks really closely.
How do you balance control and spontaneity in your work, especially with a director like Sean Baker?
Sean’s very specific, which is something that I like to say to people, because I think people assume that Sean is just pure chaos… all handheld and totally improvised. And I think the movies feel that way. But they’re so controlled. Sean is like Wes Anderson-level control. Moving props around and moving set deck around and he’ll be like, “Can you pan like a tiny, tiny, tiny bit to the left so that you can include that little sliver of the lamp” or whatever it may be. You know he really cares a lot. It’s totally controlled chaos.
So you, as an audience member, still feel safe. It’s not purely chaotic. When you’re watching Sean’s films, it’s intriguing because you’re seeing these characters in these places you would never go in these wild existences, but you also feel that he cares about the characters. And that he won’t let anything too bad happen to them. People don’t die in Sean Baker movies.
We make our choices very deliberately. We shoot for the edit. We don’t shoot a bunch of extra coverage. We pretty much just shoot what is in the movie. I don’t like shooting coverage, and neither does he. Sometimes we have to do it if it’s just a scene with people talking. But generally, I love that about him. He’s very brave and bold. He doesn’t have to shoot a bunch of coverage. Or if we are setting up a shot and it just doesn’t look good, or it doesn’t work, he doesn’t want to shoot it. I feel like he used almost everything we shot. Just about everything. In every scene, there’s so little waste. A lot of the scenes were one shot.
Any final thoughts on ‘Anora’ and its reception?
There was so much love in the crew too! We had 30 something people from our cast and crew show up to Cannes, which is crazy! The film loader showed up, the dolly grip showed up, the Steadicam operator, who did like five or six shots in the movie, he showed up. Everybody was cheering for this movie, yeah because they really believed in it.
And I mean it was really hard sometimes on set, it can just be grueling. But ultimately everybody there’s a big family. And I think people feel that when they watch it. They know it’s a small film, and they can tell that it was made with lots of love and lots of heart. So, I like to know that it was all worth something, and to be really proud of something like this is super cool… I’m getting really emotional! I’m still kind of riding this high.
It’s so weird being here when everybody was here and nobody had seen it yet so now that everybody’s telling us how much they loved it and it feels like people are rooting for it. It feels really good. I hope Greta Gerwig liked it, that’s all I’m saying!
Revision 25th May 2024: She did in fact like it!