Cinematography of "The Burbs" by Jonathan Furmanski, courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with creative artists working on various aspects of movie and episodic productions, it is my pleasure to welcome Jonathan Furmanski. In this interview, he talks about the transition of the industry from film to digital, role of the cinematographer, the evolution of tools at his disposal, key ingredient to longevity in the industry, and his thoughts on generative AI. Between all these and more, Jonathan takes a deep dive into his work on the recently released “The Burbs”.

Jonathan Furmanski on the sets of “The Burbs”, courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.

Jonathan: When I was twelve, I told my parents that I wanted to work in movies, and honestly, I can’t say I was serious I was when I said this. I think I said it only because I loved going to the movies. I was a kid who grew up on “Star Wars” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, and I wanted to be involved in that. I didn’t have any idea what that meant or what position I would have, and my parents didn’t take it seriously.

But then, seven years later, I got into film school and that’s where I almost accidentally discovered cinematography. I had no ambitions towards cinematography, but when you get there you learn the basics of what a camera is, what a lens is, how film stock works, etc. I was fascinated by all of it. I devoured as much as I possibly could about all of the technical and creative aspects of being a cinematographer. My friends noticed I was always talking about and thinking about this stuff, and they started asking me to shoot their student films.

So I never really had to make the choice. The choice was made for me, but I don’t say that regretfully or anything close to that. I feel it’s almost like we found each other – cameras and me.

After college I spent a brief amount of time working as an electrician, and then several years working as a camera assistant. Then a documentary opportunity fell in my lap. I had no ambitions towards documentaries, but it turned out that I really loved that experience. It led to another documentary, and I spent about 10 years working almost exclusively on documentaries. Then off of one of those documentaries, a scripted comedy show with a small budget fell in my lap. That led to another thing and another thing, and I ended up doing scripted comedy for a long time. I still do, and I’m lucky enough to be able to dip my toe back into documentaries every now and then.

Kirill: How was the transition from film to digital for you?

Jonathan: This transition happened at almost the same time when I went from working as a camera assistant, which was mostly on 35mm film, to working in documentaries. We started seeing these new digital cameras coming on the market, and people started shooting video on DSLRs.

In documentaries at the time you had a choice between Super 16 or Digital Betacam, and all of a sudden there were all these options that were inherently more cinematic. Some of them were 24 frames per second, and in the case of the Canon 5D you had access to a full frame sensor – all of these technical attributes that were out of reach for most documentaries. So when I shifted over into docs, I fell into all of the digital stuff at the same time. And by the time I got back into scripted, the industry had shifted over and it wasn’t even a question. By the time I was doing “Delocated” or “Inside Amy Schumer”, nobody was even thinking about shooting those shows on film.

Cinematography of “The Burbs” by Jonathan Furmanski, courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Kirill: What other big shifts have you seen in the last 30 years or so?

Jonathan: Certainly number one is the Internet and everything that comes with that, whether it’s social media or streaming platforms. That has had an enormous impact on the industry in terms of the amount of work that’s available, and the amount of jobs and the kinds of jobs that people want to do. And it has also, overtly or inadvertently, educated the public on what cinematography is.

Not that people were ignorant before, but when you have things like Instagram or YouTube and all of the streaming stuff, it becomes a much bigger part of the conversation, because people have a deeper understanding of it. Even if it was just for their Instagram account, they’re still thinking about framing and light. So now they’re taking that to their movie and TV watching experience. That’s great! It means that there is a greater appreciation for what people like me do.

Another sea change, at least in terms of the way we work day to day on set, is the advent of LEDs. LED technology has brought a flexibility and a speed that are impossible to ignore. We experienced it on “The Burbs” – as I’m sure everyone experiences on every show these days – where you can be making adjustments as you’re slating the shot and nobody knows anything about it. You’re not telling the AD that you need a minute. People in the video village aren’t seeing anything change. You can make these subtle changes that can happen over the course of a couple seconds. It’s all happening invisibly. They’re about to say “Action!” and you didn’t realize that the actor’s shirt was going to be so yellow, and you can adjust the lighting on the fly.

On top of that, the lights are lighter, they’re cheaper, they’re more versatile. They work better in inclement weather. We’re still using giant 18Ks and 20Ks, but LEDs have fundamentally changed the way that we work on set.

Kirill: There was a period of time about 10 years ago as smartphones were becoming ubiquitous and they were getting better and better at taking videos where people started saying that it was going to democratize filmmaking and storytelling. The promise, so to speak, was that when everybody has a great camera in their pocket, it was going to open the floodgates to millions of new filmmakers making their own movies on their phones. But that didn’t really materialize. It’s still difficult to make these stories. It still takes a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of effort to make a full length story.

Jonathan: It’s all about collaboration. Collaboration is an inherent part of the process, and an extremely important part of the process – whether you have five people on the crew or five hundred. You might be making a video about your cat, and you can do that by yourself and you might be able to make something great. But a bigger story needs multiple people working on it. It grows to having a script, and props, and cars that people are driving, and coverage, and sound – and all of these things that need to be at a very high level.

You need people with a better understanding and appreciation of cinematography – and filmmaking in general – to deliver something that is high end. That is something that is extremely difficult to do by yourself on your iPhone. It’s not impossible, but the crew is what enables you to do great things.

Kirill: What do you feel are the bigger misconceptions about the job of the cinematographer?

Jonathan: A lot of people might think that cinematography is about moving the camera around. There’s probably another level where people think it’s about the camera and coordination with the lighting people. Even though those are two big parts of the job, the missing component is this idea of developing visual language and what that means. It’s hard to put it into words.

You can pick five people to shoot the same scene and they will do it five different ways. That’s where you start to see what visual language is. It can be something as simple as shooting a closeup of a person. It can be a wide lens close, or a long lens far away. It can be off to the side a little bit. It can be right on the eye line, or a bit underneath it. There are a lot of small and subtle choices that have a big impact on the audience’s experience. It’s not a secret sauce or anything grand like that, but that’s what it is. It’s these small changes that are personal to you that create the language that everyone experiences when they watch the show.

Kirill: How did you find your way to the show, or maybe how did this show find its way to you?

Jonathan: Celeste Hughey was our showrunner, and we worked together before – but we had never met. I was the DP and she was the writer on some other shows. Her work happens before my work even starts, so we had worked together, but we hadn’t actually worked together. We have a lot of people in common, and it was probably through the shared awareness of other work that I had done on “Search Party” and “I Love That for You” that they reached out and asked me to present a pitch.

Cinematography of “The Burbs” by Jonathan Furmanski, courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Kirill: How many scripts were ready by the time you joined the production?

Jonathan: When I signed on for the job, the pilot script was the only script that existed, and there were outlines for the next 4-5 episodes, just a few pages each of where the story might go. When I asked Celeste about her thinking of where the story was going, she gave me a few sentences on what she thought the last couple episodes were going to be.

We really didn’t know until the scripts started rolling in. As always happens, things changed a lot. Even the pilot script was rewritten several times – not from the ground up, but in some ways as we got closer to shooting. The script for the finale was there around the time we were shooting episode five or six, and it wasn’t because people were being secretive. They were still cracking the code, so to speak.

Kirill: I did not watch the movie from 1989, but what I read about it said that it was a commentary on Hitchcock’s “Rear Window”. Did you have any stylistic references to it in the show?

Jonathan: No. But then, Hitchcock was such a powerhouse of filmmaking, and there’s no way that his impact isn’t there with me, even if it’s subconscious.

You should watch the original movie! It’s fun, and it’s quite different from our show. It’s the same basic story, but it’s a deeper screwball satire of suburban life, and what it means to live in a closed world and then have it disrupted by some new people arriving. Our story was something that was maybe a little bit less silly. It’s still fun and still funny. But we wanted to lean into some more serious topics, and be a little bit more 2026, a little more of the current cultural environment.

The two movies that we talked about a lot in prep were “Nope” by Jordan Peele and “Don’t Worry Darling” by Olivia Wilde. The latter is a hyper-realistic version of suburban life. It’s a hyper-colorful, pristine approach. And then on “Nope” you can almost feel the dirt as they’re walking on the ranch. It’s still colorful and vibrant, but a lot softer in its contrast and its colorfulness, and a lot more measured in how it approaches everything.

We were trying to take those two ideas and marry them together, to have something that did feel a little bit like “The Stepford Wives”, but also something that felt tactile. We wanted the viewer to feel that you could reach out and touch the wallpaper in the houses, to feel the blades of grass between your toes in the front yards.

Kirill: My understanding is that you shot pretty much everything on the studio back lot. Was the weather cooperating?

Jonathan: For the most part we got lucky that we had days that were sunny but not too hot. We started shooting around late February or early March. There were some days that we got rained out, and we had to go down to the stages. That was one of the big advantages of shooting at Universal Studios – being able to improvise quickly. If something wasn’t quite right – if something needed to be done on the back lot, if the weather was inclement – we could slide down the hill and go onto our stages. It was an efficient way to work.

Cinematography of “The Burbs” by Jonathan Furmanski, courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Kirill: I liked what you did for the Victorian mansion which is this mysterious place in the show, leaning into high and low angles, and tilting the camera. Did you want to visually separate it from the sunnier, more familiar visuals of the rest of those suburban houses?

Jonathan: We wanted the Victorian to feel like not just a different experience from the rest of the houses on the street, but also to be trapped in time. It’s not a dirty place, because the first time we see it, it’s ready to be shown at an open house. We wanted the Victorian to feel like a whole other space, from the beginning of the season when they walk in for the first time to the end of the season where people are more settled in.

One of the things we did is we used atmosphere in the Victorian house, but in no other house. Everyone else’s house felt cleaner and a little bit more of the classic suburban vibe – but then the Victorian felt a little bit more gothic and atmospheric.

Kirill: What were your lighting setups for the night sequences in that cul-de-sac?

Jonathan: This was not a job where we had a lot of luxury of time, and to some extent, you have to move quickly on every job. This one had us moving at top speed all the time, and we needed to come up with a lighting plan that enabled us to shoot in any direction without moving huge things around.

So we ended up putting two large lighting lifts on either end of the cul-de-sac with giant moonlights. For shooting one direction we turned one of them off, for shooting the other direction we turned the other one off. Sometimes we would use both, one as our backlight and the other as our frontal fill. That gave us the base level of illumination for the whole cul-de-sac quickly and easily. And on top of that we had all those little lights that the houses had – porch lights, walkway lights, street lights. They have not just the depth, but also suggestion of life. That way we could establish whether people were home or not. We could create a lot of color contrast between the warm light coming from the houses and the blue moonlight coming from up high. It gave us this nice, rich, colorful canvas that was easy to pivot.

Kirill: Are digital camera bodies and sensors good enough to capture everything that you want them to capture?

Jonathan: The digital cameras are so good these days in terms of sensitivity and dynamic range. If you got real forensic about it, I’m sure you could find places where film is superior to digital – or even maybe in the other direction.

I haven’t done a big project on film in a long time. I think the big difference in working on a film project versus a digital project is that film is a physical thing. There’s a limited amount of time that you can shoot before you have to stop and put another magazine on. This and other small aspects of film have a ripple effect through how everything is done. With digital, you can roll for an hour if you want. Some directors like to work one way and others like to work the other way. That has more of an impact for me than the look.

Without, again, getting super forensic about it, you can get a look with film and a look with digital that are nearly identical. If you read any of Steve Yedlin’s articles, he’s basically proven that you can make one look like the other, that you can go in either direction. It’s really just about how much work you want to put into the color pipeline. So I don’t ever see digital as a limitation from a capture standpoint.

I do sometimes wish that we had that ten minute limit on how long we could roll before we had to stop. Sometimes you want to take a break and to make a small adjustment while they’re reloading the camera. With digital, you sometimes don’t have the option to do that. You’re rolling, and that’s fine too. The schedule is so tight, and we’re probably better served by having the ability to just go.

Kirill: Going back to the show, what was the most challenging part of it for you?

Jonathan: It was probably the fact that I was the only cinematographer on the show. This was not the first time I was the only DP on a show, but those other shows had more prep days and sometimes even small breaks of one or two days here and there where the production would give the whole team a chance to catch up, go scout, have meetings and talk about what’s coming.

On this, we had none of that, and that was fine. But it meant that often I felt like I was a little bit behind in the information process. I had an amazing crew. Our production team was on top of everything. Every other department was outstanding. I never felt out in the wind. It was more about now knowing 100% how we’re tackling this thing next week. It was a challenge of time management.

The toughest episode for me was Episode Four, because so much of it is daytime outside on the cul-de-sac. The entire episode was shot in nine days, and it took four or five days to shoot that block party sequence on the back lot while making everything feel consistent. It takes place over one afternoon, and that’s one of the hardest things for a cinematographer to deal with. There’s only so much you can do about the sunlight, and you have to be smart about timing. We were sitting down with the director and the AD of that episode, and talking about the most advantageous way to shoot it in a specific order. And then you rely on the crew and let them take care of filling in the details.

Cinematography of “The Burbs” by Jonathan Furmanski, courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Kirill: You’ve been in the industry for a while. What do you feel are the key ingredients to longevity, to staying in the industry and not getting frustrated by it to the point of leaving it for good?

Jonathan: We all get frustrated by the industry for one reason or another all the time, and that’s OK. What keeps me around – and what probably keeps most of the people that I like working with around – is that we love doing it. It’s a real joy to be on set every day. I feel so lucky that I’m in the position that I’m in, not just that I’m a cinematographer, but that I’ve had the career that I’ve had. And hopefully I will continue to be here for however long.

Not to sound corny, but it is a bit of magic. There’s a lot that happens to make a show, and a lot of it is wizardry. It’s a fun thing to have a front row seat to – not the least of which is just watching actors do their thing. It is so enjoyable, especially on a show like “The Burbs”, where you have so many talented and funny people. That makes it all worthwhile.

I’ve always felt that while the film business rewards talent, it rewards tenacity even more. I think tenacious people are the people who make it and stay where they are. You do need to have talent no matter where you are on the team, but you also need to be willing to weather the tides. The last five years have not been great with the pandemic and then the strikes. It has taken a lot of fortitude on the part of a lot of people to stick around and stick with it, and I’m fortunate enough to be one of those people. Ultimately, that’s what it takes.

Kirill: Given how much goes into every production, do you see it as a little miracle, so to speak, when it all aligns and gets to that phase where it is all done and released to the audiences?

Jonathan: I’m always reminded that it’s a business when all is said and done. I do like the word “magic”, because I think even though I totally understand the whole process, there is still something mysterious about it to me.

I don’t know that I would call any show a miracle, but there are a lot of little miracles that happen along the way. It’s a little miracle that we got the cast that we did. It’s a little miracle that we got the production designer that we did. It’s a little miracle that I was on the job at all. It’s the opposite of death by a thousand cuts. It’s magic by a thousand tiny miracles, if you will. That’s what my experience feels like.

Kirill: What do you know now that you wish you knew back when you were starting out? If you had a time machine to jump back in time to give a piece of advice to your younger self, what would it be?

Jonathan: It would be to not take yourself so seriously. You’re only 25 and you don’t have that much to say just yet. Just do your thing and enjoy what this is. I feel lucky to be where I am and where I have been, and I would have told myself that you’re going to feel that way a couple decades from now. When I was 25, everything seemed so important. Every decision, every job, every scene. It felt like the entire rest of my career was balancing on every shot that I was about to do. And of course, that’s not true.

As a companion to not taking yourself so seriously, I would have probably encouraged myself to be more risky. Those times that I have subsequently done that in my career have been rewarding and enlightening. Sometimes it worked a lot better than I thought I was going to. And sometimes it was not what I wanted at all, but now I’ve learned and won’t do that again. So I would have encouraged myself to take more risks and be a little bit less serious.

Cinematography of “The Burbs” by Jonathan Furmanski, courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Kirill: Without asking you to predict the future, how do you see generative AI today?

Jonathan: I see it a bit more as a tool than a threat. There are a lot of conversations about AI generated images and videos, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of picking it apart and making fun of an image of a person with six fingers, or something else that the AI hasn’t quite figured out yet. But it’s still creating something out of nothing, and that is impressive. Even if it is inaccurate or just doing what it is told to do, despite all its shortcomings, I’m impressed.

I suppose that means that in 10 years it will probably start to impact people like me – people who do what I do – in a way that’s probably not going to be all great. Maybe it is going to be disastrous, in fact, for cinematographers and other creative people. But we don’t know.

I wasn’t alive back then, but people had similar conversations about TV being the death of film, or video being the death of radio. These things come up all the time and people adapt. It will change how we work and how we create. But the audiences are always going to be looking for these human heartfelt stories, whether they’re comedies or dramas or whatever. It’s hard to imagine – at least for a little long while – a computer being able to replace that.

Kirill: What would you consider to be your favorite productions, movies or TV shows, from the cinematography perspective?

Jonathan: There are a lot of extremely talented people who are working in cinematography these days. Almost everything is looking way better now than what we grew up on.

There are a few names that if I hear they’re involved, I want to watch that. Hoyte van Hoytema, Linus Sandgren, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, Bradford Young are always interesting. There’s a lot of talented people, and these names and people like them are pushing the envelope at the same time. They all insist on shooting on film, which is interesting. I always look forward to seeing what they do.

Kirill: What was the most memorable food that you had while working on “The Burbs”?

Jonathan: Maybe not food, but a snack. While I was working on this show, I got addicted to the little paper thin seaweed snacks. I ate them religiously. People would bring them to my little station, and it became sort of a theme.

Jonathan Furmanski on the sets of “The Burbs”, courtesy of Universal Pictures.

And here I want to thank Jonathan Furmanski for taking the time to talk with me about the art and craft of cinematography. I also want to thank Holden Schlanger for making this interview happen. “The Burbs” is out now streaming on Peacock. Finally, if you want to know more about how films and TV shows are made, click here for additional in-depth interviews in this series.