Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with creative artists working on various aspects of movie and episodic productions, it is my pleasure to welcome Julia Swain. In this interview, she talks about the role of the cinematographer, the evolution of tools at her disposal, making plans and reacting to changes, and her thoughts on generative AI. Between all these and more, Julia takes a deep dive into her work on the recently released “The Dreadful”.
Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.
Julia: I’m a director of photography, and have never wanted to do anything else. There was definitely some exploration of different roles in filmmaking as I was discovering it. I am the daughter of two cinephiles who were constantly sharing their love of films with me so I was curious about it from childhood. My first job as a teenager was in a movie theater. I never strayed from this. I thought about editing and directing, but it was in the practice of making films in school when I was really young that I figured out that cinematography was the best fit for me.
I grew up in Southern California and I knew that Los Angeles made the most sense for a move, being such a hub for filmmakers and the industry. I did an MFA in cinematography at UCLA, and we shot non-stop. We weren’t writing papers. We weren’t studying theory. We just lived on soundstages.
After film school, I shot anything I could. I didn’t come up through crewing but that also meant I couldn’t curate the work I took too much because I had to survive. But after a little while, features started materializing, commercials took off. It’s been a really exciting journey.
Kirill: Is LA still the place to be? Is LA still the place to start one’s career in this field?
Julia: I do think Los Angeles is a valuable place to start with all the resources it has to offer but it’s not THE place to start. Production is really abundant in a lot of places all over the world. There are a lot of great hubs around the world where you can get started, full of great filmmakers. Everyone’s path is different. Everyone comes from a different place. Nowadays I’m barely in LA anyway. I am constantly flying elsewhere to shoot. But Los Angeles is getting busy again and there are some of the best crews and resources, along with the best theaters, galleries, events. You can stay so extremely busy even when not on set consuming cinema, learning, meeting great filmmakers.
Behind the scenes of “The Dreadful”, courtesy of Lionsgate
Kirill: What do you feel are the misconceptions or misunderstandings about the role of cinematographer and what cinematography is inside the industry?
Julia: One misconception is that it’s this pure focus on camera and lighting. The visual language is the fun part. In fact, it’s the easy part. Maybe this isn’t a misconception more than it is something people often forget.
The job is leading the set with the assistant director, leading and working alongside your crew. There are politics, working with your budget, the schedule. You have to know how to structure a shooting day. You have to be able to look at a shot list and know if you can make your day. You have to know how to reorganize or plan differently should a day fall behind for some reason. You have to be a great communicator and a fast, creative problem solver.
Kirill: Digital looks to continue to dominate your field. Is film a thing of the past?
Julia: I don’t think film is the past. Look at the Oscar nominations this year – a lot of amazing films continue to be shot on film. I definitely believe that we feel that impact.
I love shooting on film. I went to UCLA right as they were transitioning away from it, so all of us were shooting on digital, and all our thesis films had to be digital for the first time. But they were adamant we don’t just roll and roll, that we maintain the discipline and intention that inherently comes with shooting on film when shooting projects digitally.
Even though we’re lucky to have so many digital options, film continues to be a beloved medium and personally, I’m never disappointed when I get dailies back. It’s never not magical.
Behind the scenes of “The Dreadful”, courtesy of Lionsgate
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Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with creative artists working on various aspects of movie and episodic productions, it is my pleasure to welcome Roger Fires. In this interview, he talks about the role of the production designer, the changes that Covid brought to the industry, watching movies on the big screen, and his thoughts on generative AI. Between all these and more, Roger takes a deep dive into his work on the recently released “Psycho Killer”.
Roger Fires on the set of “Psycho Killer”, courtesy of 20th Century Studios.
Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.
Roger: My name is Roger Fires. I’m a production designer, currently residing in Vancouver, Canada, and originally from Brazil. My passion for film started at an early age. My parents weren’t wealthy, and we didn’t travel the world. The thing that we used to do as a family was to go to movies and plays. When my mom went to do groceries or to a mall, she’d drop me off to watch a play, and she’d pick me up after. That’s how my passion for film and theater started.
I started with interior design and graphic design. In the middle of taking the graphic design course, one of the workshop tasks was to create branding for a travel agency inspired by a movie that we liked. It was right around the time “The English Patient” came out, and I wanted to design something related to it. My project had the ambience from the movie, extending to the uniforms and other elements. Then, during my presentation, the teacher started asking about the texture, the fabric, the outlets, the light switches and all these other things, and that’s when I saw that it goes way deeper than just that look and the concept behind it.
That’s when I started doing deeper dives. I was lucky that all my early jobs were connected to creativity. I was doing illustrations. I was doing vinyls and signage. I was doing fashion design. I was doing interior design. I was doing graphic design, with art direction and advertisement agencies. It feels like I was preparing my whole life to be a production designer, and touching every single aspect of the creative world on the way.
I had a band in Brazil for a while, traveling and doing a lot of things. After a while I wanted to go back and to follow my passion. When I was with that band, I was happier to see people wearing our shirts or doing the artwork, rather than making the music itself. That was around 2009 when I decided that I wanted to be in the movie industry as a production designer – not in Brazil, but in one of the bigger places like Los Angeles, New York or Vancouver. I remember I was talking with the father of my then-girlfriend, and he asked me what I wanted to be, what is my benchmark, who inspires me. I said the name of David Wasco, the production designer that worked with Tarantino and Wes Anderson.
We applied for the permanent residency while we were still in Brazil, then we got approved, and six months later we were moving and jumping into the industry here. I started doing graphic design on a couple of projects, and it wasn’t too long until I asked the production designer I was working with if I could work for him as an assistant art director. He told me that his art director was not coming back, and that I could be his art director. I did “Lost In Space”, got pulled into “Timeless” and a lot of other things. For me it was the matter of absorbing the knowledge and the experience, and trying to jump to the next step. There were some opportunities to make that next step, but I didn’t think that it was the right time. And then it happened at the perfect time, and that’s where I am today.
On the sets of “Psycho Killer”, production design by Roger Fires, courtesy of 20th Century Studios.
Kirill: Do you feel that the role of the production designer and what you do is well understood inside the industry? If not, what are the bigger misconceptions around it?
Roger: It’s been so many times that I have to tell people what I do. When people like the set, I am introduced as the set designer quite often.
I was just in LA, and I was talking with David Wasco who did this big exhibition about “La La Land” to educate people on the role of the production designer. There was a fantastic exhibition at the Academy Awards from the production design team of “Barbie” to show the process behind it.
We’re the first to get hired. We talk with the director to get the visual direction for the project. One of the things people don’t always realize is how early the art department gets involved in shaping the visual world of a film. There’s a lot of collaboration within the process. This partnership between the production designer and the director is not fully seen by a lot of people. The director Ilya Naishuller of “Nobody” had this funny analogy for it. He says that the production designer and the director are married, and we have a kid, and it’s beautiful. And when we’re about to shoot, I get a divorce and then he gets married to the cinematographer, but we still have a kid. And we still have to talk about the kid and what we’re going to do.
This analogy explains how intense that relationship is between the production designer and the director at the beginning of a project. When I present the pitch, it should align with the director’s vision, and then we elaborate that pitch into the project itself.
The misconception here is that I am not a set designer. Production design is about the broader approach of what the project is, from the details of the props and colors, to the relationship between actors and the set.
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Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with creative artists working on various aspects of movie and TV productions, it is my delight to welcome Fiona Crombie. In this interview, she talks the art department and the changes it’s seen in the last fifteen years, finding balance between historical accuracy and emotional authenticity, the rise of generative AI, and what advice she’d give to her younger self. Between all these and more, Fiona takes a deep dive into her Oscar-nominated work on the recently released “Hamnet”.
The initial sketch of the Henley Street house, courtesy of Fiona Crombie and Focus Features.
Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.
Fiona: I’m second generation film industry. My father was a film director in Australia. When I was little, I didn’t really understand it, but I was fascinated by his passion, his happiness, and the fact that I could see that he was engaged in something that he loved. My mother was a film executive, and as a couple they were always engaged and excited to talk about what was happening. Back in the ’80s and the ’90s my father would go off and he would disappear for months and months making films and television mini series. The way I remember it is that he was having adventures.
I definitely visited his sets. I was always drawn to looking at the production design without knowing it was production design. I thought of it as playhouses, and actors dressing up. When I was 15, I did a work experience on one of his TV mini series in the art department. I thought that I can’t ever do this, because the hours were unbelievable. I was leaving with my father at the end of a shoot day, and everybody was staying in the office. People were saying to me “Don’t do this, you’ll have no personal life”.
So I thought to myself that I won’t, and I started studying arts law, but that was terrible. I didn’t fit in at all, and I wound up in theater school. I feel that I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller, and it felt natural to be telling stories through visuals.
I was a theater designer for about 10 years, and in that time I was dipping my toe into short films and music promos, and working with some friends. One of those friends got his first feature film in 2010 and that was the first film that I made called “Snowtown”. I did production design and costume design, and that was the beginning. Since then, I haven’t stopped, other than to have children [laughs].
Construction plans of the Henley Street house, courtesy of Fiona Crombie and Focus Features.
Kirill: When you look at these 15 years doing production design, what are the bigger changes in the art department?
Fiona: One of the things is time – trying to make films quickly and trying to compress that pre-production process. The whole thing with filmmaking is about tension – and not tension necessarily in a bad way. It’s trying to jam things into short windows, and trying to do things as economically as possible. Sometimes that makes it quite hard, where once upon a time there might be more people, they’re trying to do it with less people.
There’s the whole question of AI and its involvement. Will that mean that we don’t have the time for thinking and contemplation, because productions will realize that you can generate quickly. That’s something that is starting to creep into my working mind. Today we’re sitting at a table, mulling over something and coming up with five or six things. Is there an expectation that we’ll make a hundred things instead with AI?
3D printing is an absolute game changer. It’s been amazing for prop making, for set construction, and for model making. It’s been great for us.
White cardboard model of the Henley Street house, courtesy of Fiona Crombie and Focus Features.
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Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with creative artists working on various aspects of movie and episodic productions, it is my delight to welcome Richard Bullock. In this interview, he talks about the changes in the art department in the last few decades, what makes a great artist, the popularity of the spy genre in British storytelling, productions that he considers to be the golden standard of production design, and his thoughts on generative AI. Between all these and more, Richard dives deep into his work on the upcoming “The Day of the Jackal”, a contemporary reimagining of the classic ’70s story.
Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.
Richard: My path into the art department and production designing is quite an unusual one. I studied art up to A level, and then at university I studied English literature and history of ideas. I’d always loved films and TV, and the English literature side of things took me towards cinema studies. Looking at films academically made me start to think about them as not just something on a screen, but something that gets made – how they get written, how they get directed, etc. I never really thought seriously about the process of filmmaking before that point.
Then I realized that there was a film industry in the UK, and it was something that you could possibly get involved with. I started off doing short films with a couple of friends, and then we decided to make a little science fiction movie. I went back to my limited art background. I’d kept on drawing and painting, and I designed some sets for it. I loved the experience and found it exciting. That’s when I started to realize that maybe that was my thing, combining the narrative disciplines that I had learned about in literature studies with my love of film and the visual side of storytelling.
Production design combines those things in an exciting way that I hadn’t realized existed. The average viewer doesn’t really think about production design, and that’s probably a good thing. Production design succeeds if the audience is unaware of it. But when you scratch the surface, you realize it’s a whole discipline and art form with history. That was quite exciting to me.
That was in mid ’90s, and I started assisting a production designer who was making high-end commercials and advertising films being made in the UK. That was a massive eye-opener. You realize the degree to which an environment could be manufactured and the amount of effects that could be involved. On commercials you had quite a high turnover of projects, and so it was very good training. One day you work on a Pirelli tire commercial that involves someone running down a mountain and across a dam and through a tunnel. And then you work on a beer commercial that is set in a stately home.
I started by making coffee, taking location photos, researching reference and other stuff as an assistant, then moved to doing small technical drawings and making models. It was a roots up learning process that went over a number of years in the art department. I did some films, and it was exciting to suddenly be working on long form narrative productions as a standby art director. Then I got the opportunity to start designing commercials and music videos myself, and I did that for a while. As I was making them, I realized that while the commercials are interesting, they were not what I set out to do. So I made the decision to step away from them, and do more films and television as an art director. Eventually I got the opportunity to start designing lower budget films, and it kept on going.
I love that all the different crafts and disciplines combine in the art department. You have special effects, vehicles, set decoration and other elements that create the physical world of the film that goes in front of the camera. You speak to costume, make-up and other departments, and of course the director and the cinematographer. You have all the different things that come into making a film. All these disparate elements of the production come together to create something, and if it’s successful, it feels as if it has one voice. That is so exciting.
Design render for “The Day of the Jackal”, courtesy of Richard Bullock.
Kirill: What do you feel are the biggest misconceptions about the art department and about your role?
Richard: Audiences often imagine that the action takes place in an environment that is simply found. People probably don’t appreciate the amount of forethought that goes into it. Even if it is simply a found environment, which environment is found – as opposed to all the other options? I suspect that a lot of the time people aren’t quite aware that they’re looking at a set. I’ve done things where we filmed an exterior up a mountain in France, and then the interior on a soundstage in Wales – and people have been astonished when I’ve said that.
If you know the tricks of the industry, that would have been fairly obvious. When you’re in it, it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of what is quite magical about what we do. And for sure, that’s part of the pleasure of it. We’re making illusions, and when an illusion works, it’s really satisfying.
Design render for “The Day of the Jackal”, courtesy of Richard Bullock.
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