One of the pivotal scenes in 'Maestro" is an intense argument between Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) and his wife, Felicia (Carey Mulligan) in their bedroom on Thanksgiving. Cinematographer Matthew Libatique discusses how he lit the scene, collaborating with Bradley Cooper and why the scene wasn't originally intended to be a single shot.
00:00 Hi, I'm Matthew Libatique and I am the cinematographer of Maestro.
00:03 [Music]
00:10 I think you're letting your sadness get the better of you.
00:13 It has nothing to do with me, it's about you, so you should love it.
00:16 When Bradley Cooper called me to do Maestro, I really had very little knowledge of Leonard Bernstein.
00:22 I knew West Side Story, On the Waterfront.
00:24 I mean, to be honest, I knew more as a film composer than I did as a conductor.
00:29 He had such enthusiasm, Bradley had, about the project and about the man.
00:33 It wasn't hard to sort of jump on that bandwagon with him and just sort of go on the journey.
00:37 When I first worked with Bradley, it was just, I'm the DP, he's the director, we're getting to know each other.
00:42 And we hit it off right away and it was a pretty smooth transition into collaboration.
00:46 Because of the amount of time between A Star Is Born and Maestro,
00:49 I have to evolve because I think a cinematographer has to embody the personality of the director to some degree.
00:54 And as a director evolves, a cinematographer must adapt as well.
00:58 The minute he told me about it, he was excited about jumping into lensing.
01:02 He wanted to get technical, he wanted to learn more about focal lengths, optics.
01:07 We ended up shooting a multitude of tests in sort of the four years, five years prior to actually starting pre-production on the film.
01:15 What Bradley really wanted to do was sort of crack the code on the makeup, how he was going to physically transform into Lenny.
01:21 We have about a 40-minute proof of concept right now that is all the tests that we shot.
01:26 And we would shoot actual scenes.
01:28 And through this process, we were learning about the lenses that we liked, we were learning about the format that we liked.
01:33 He was getting familiar with what he wanted, he felt the film should be.
01:37 We shot Arri Alexa to RED to Sony to Arri 65.
01:42 You know, we shot monochrome cameras because we knew we wanted to do some black and white.
01:45 But it wasn't until we shot film in 35mm that one scene that we shot, Sing,
01:51 it just blew everything else out of the water in terms of the aesthetic of what we were trying to achieve.
01:55 So Bradley really responded to it, I really responded to it.
01:59 We shot some black and white with a Panavision Millennium XL2, which is what we used on the film,
02:03 with Mark II lenses, which came from Panavision, and we shot with 52-22, which is Kodak's only black and white stuff.
02:10 So that ended up becoming the thing we were going to do for a third of the movie.
02:14 And then we knew we were going to go to color.
02:16 We fell in love with the aspect ratio.
02:18 So we kept it in 1.33.
02:21 I like to think that that frame, because it's a square, is kind of an embrace to the characters,
02:25 especially the two of them as a couple.
02:26 And then when he's alone at the end of the film after Felicia passes away,
02:29 it expands out to 1.85 and that embrace is gone.
02:32 You want to be sleepless and depressed and sick.
02:35 You want to be all of those things so you can avoid fulfilling your obligation.
02:38 What obligation?
02:39 To what you've been given, to the gift you've been given.
02:42 The scene that Thanksgiving was one of the most emotional scenes in the film.
02:46 It really is the punctuation to a life lived between the two of them.
02:50 And it sort of propels them into the next phase of their life.
02:54 It's funny when you're shooting a scene, you know you're going to graduate to this emotional one
02:58 and it begins with, "Who left Snoopy in the vestibule?"
03:01 The whole thing begins that way and it's his day.
03:05 Who abandoned Snoopy in the vestibule?
03:08 What happens previous is a whole lot of stuff to get to a point where they sort of have at it.
03:13 It's basically a performance at the Kennedy Center where we're finally getting to see something
03:18 that Lenny composed that he wasn't conducting.
03:22 And they're sitting in a box and he's holding his boyfriend's hand right next to Felicia.
03:28 Felicia clocks this and I think that was the last straw.
03:31 And then the next time we see them together, it's Thanksgiving and he's late.
03:35 That leads to a conversation about their whole lives.
03:37 Very similarly to shooting a love scene, you want to give the actors as much space to work as possible.
03:44 So I guess I have the same lighting concept for love and hate.
03:47 I guess you could say that.
03:48 Wake up! Take off your glasses!
03:50 Hate in your heart! Hate in your heart!
03:53 And anger. For so many things it's hard to count. That's what drives you.
03:56 Anytime you get into a situation where it's really emotional and it's a pivotal scene in the film
04:03 and it's a scene that propels you to the next phase of the movie,
04:05 there's a certain amount of anxiety.
04:08 I think the natural inclination is to think you're going to shoot a lot of coverage
04:12 and then you're going to piece together performances.
04:15 But we had Carrie Mulligan. She was like a secret weapon in the film.
04:19 And then Bradley being so able to direct and act within a scene and respond to another character.
04:27 The first thing he wanted to do was get it on his feet in a wide.
04:30 The choice of angle was really, you know, Bradley would walk through a set with a viewfinder.
04:35 We were shoved in a doorway.
04:37 He kept backing up, backing up until he was in the doorway because he wanted to get wider.
04:40 It was a 24mm lens backed up kind of outside the room looking at it.
04:44 Really it was just we wanted to see both windows for the Snoopy shot. That's how it got there.
04:48 The scene actually started with her sitting in the chair that's in front of her in the scene that's in the movie.
04:53 She sat there, he came in, sat down and it was the three people sitting in a wide shot.
04:58 And it just wasn't happening in scene one.
05:01 Something compelled her to get up in the second take and she stayed at the window.
05:07 And then the third take, she was at the window at the very beginning of the scene.
05:10 That's what you see in the film.
05:12 And it was so intense and the pacing was so real.
05:15 They're cutting each other off and responding to what each other's saying.
05:18 It felt like there was no dialogue.
05:19 We actually took a lens of Viewfinder after we shot that.
05:23 He thought he had the scene.
05:26 The tone of it, the emotional aspect of it and the performances on both ends were fantastic.
05:31 And we were sort of lensing up her side of the coverage.
05:35 And he just looked at me and said, "How are we going to do that?
05:38 How are we going to cut in their performance?"
05:40 The single shot aspect was born out of the greatness of their performances. It wasn't planned.
05:44 Your truth is a fucking lie!
05:47 It sucks up all the energy in every room and gives the rest of us zero opportunity to live or even breathe as our true selves.
05:52 And remember, when we set that shot up, there was going to be coverage.
05:57 So it wasn't like there was no fretting over this is one shot.
06:00 It's just, "Okay, here's an angle."
06:02 We're Americans. We always move the camera.
06:05 We're Americans. We always cut.
06:06 It's very rare for us to hold on a shot.
06:08 I mean, there's a handful of people who do that.
06:11 David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch are the only ones who really come to mind.
06:13 But if you go abroad, half the people do it.
06:17 You watch an Eastern European film, the camera never moves.
06:20 He walks in from the right of frame and he just stops.
06:23 He's barely in frame.
06:24 And then he sneaks into the scene and when he sits down, he's edgy on the frame.
06:28 And he wanted that.
06:29 It's sort of echoing and a little bit of a visual callback to the scene where they first met.
06:33 Both their heads are pushing out of frame.
06:36 We had a backing made by Roscoe.
06:38 Roscoe does amazing backdrops now and they photographed the surrounding area of the Dakota apartment that we wanted to replicate.
06:45 And then Snoopy was actually digitally placed in, in between the reality of the set and the reality of the backing.
06:51 The lighting of that scene was a lot coming from the windows.
06:54 I had a 20K tungsten Fresnel in each window to replicate the sunlight.
06:58 I had a SkyPanel 360, which is a big LED soft unit, underneath the 20K that was sort of lighting her window on the left of frame.
07:07 That was there so Lenny would get some light when he was standing in that position in front of the bar.
07:10 And when you look at the right side window, I had rigged moving lights above the set.
07:15 And I just used them to bounce in the right of frame.
07:18 It looks like the sun's coming in and creating a glow.
07:21 That's actually a mover from above the set that's sort of bouncing there.
07:24 And I had a little bit of reflective material to sort of give him a little edge light on his back to define him from the dark background of that bar.
07:32 And that's, that's really it.
07:34 And then smoke lifted the shadows of the scene so that I didn't have to put any real key light on Felicia.
07:41 The color correction process with Bradley and I is pretty streamlined because we don't do a whole lot but, you know, match and work on matching from cut to cut, scene to scene.
07:51 What we shoot is basically what we put on at the end.
07:54 So our dailies are more important than anything.
07:57 The fight scene turned out better than I ever would have hoped.
08:00 As a cinematographer, you want all the shots to be right to achieve the look that you envisioned and what the director's after.
08:07 I was completely blown away with the level of performance.
08:10 Just the ferocity that she had.
08:13 Frustration.
08:14 Great actors make dialogue work and make dialogue feel like they're coming out of real people.
08:21 And that's what happened in the scene.
08:22 So I'm very proud of it.
08:23 But I'm proud of them more specifically.
08:27 My only regret is we only did it three times.
08:28 I only got to hear it three times.
08:30 But now I get to hear it all the time when I play it back.
