Rodrigo Prieto, who lensed Greta Gerwig’s Barbie as well as Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, was encouraged by “the excitement that came from the audience wanting to go back to the cinema and see such a diverse example of human experience — Barbie’s not a human, but she does have human emotions, after all.”

RODRIGO PRIETO For me, great cinematography is when the imagery matches the story and expresses the emotional state of the characters.

Visual style?

PRIETO We wanted it to feel like they’re inside a box and to photograph it the way it feels when you open a box as a kid. You see the toy is presented to you, and it’s full of light, it’s innocent and it’s frontal. That dictated what we did with the camera. For most of it, we have the camera frontal to the characters or to the architecture. And if not, it was sideways or behind, but no oblique angles. And the camera moves mechanically. Also, we embraced the soundstage, inspired by movies of the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, where you see the stage, the box. And the color also. We wanted the feeling of those movies that were shot with three-strip Technicolor. But we created our own version of Technicolor for Barbie Land that enhanced the pinks and the cyan and the yellows and the greens. Greta called it Techno Barbie.

PRIETO The approach was very much based on the fact that the film itself is a representation of the story of these people, just as in the beginning of the movie, we see newsreel footage of the Osage and the subtitles the way that white audiences and the white people making these newsreels would see their story. So that was a representation. And at the end of the movie, we have a radio show, which is a different type of representation. We decided that we were going to look at the beginnings of photography, because that’s a representation, in terms of the color for the white people, because I wanted to bring a technique to create color in photography that was designed in France by the Lumière brothers. It’s an importation from Europe, just like the descendants of the European settlers would remember those times through photography. That was autochrome, in contrast with the Osage. We tried to photograph their landscape and their relationship with nature as naturally as possible in terms of color. We shot [on] film to get as much color depth as possible. And then toward the end, the radio show that I was talking about, we use the color of that era, the late ’30s, which would be Technicolor movies. We created a lookup table that emulated three-strip Technicolor. Later, I used that as a base to create Techno Barbie. It was just wonderful to do all this research in terms of color.

For Zone of Interest, you used unique multi-cam approach

LUKASZ ZAL Our film is about Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and his family, who built a beautiful life just behind the wall of the camp. They had a house and a garden and greenhouse. And he’s responsible for killing almost 1 million people. Our approach was not manipulating, just witnessing: being in his house, in the garden, with his family. We were using 10 — sometimes five, sometimes seven, sometimes two — but basically 10 cameras. When [director Jonathan Glazer] came to me for the first time, he said, “A camera is as one eye.” And of course, it was his idea to use so many cameras. There was nobody on set while we were shooting. We didn’t use any light; the film set didn’t look like a film set. It was just a house and a garden, and [the actors] were there. And in one go, within two hours or one, we had everything, all the setups, all the wide shots, portraits. The idea was just not to feel altered, not to manipulate. Because this guy had exactly the same life we are having. He’s really working hard. He was stressed. And he was reading books to his kids — and then he was going just 50 meters to the camp and sentencing people to death.

PRIETO Lukasz, were the cameras operated or was it just static cameras? In different rooms or in the same place? How did you go about that?

When we were shooting this, I was wondering, “Wow, this is amazing for actors.” They didn’t know what we are doing sometimes. And there were a lot of nonprofessional actors as well. There were no rehearsals. They were just put in the situation and we are just recording that.

[For research,] we spent a lot of time in the Auschwitz Museum, looking at pictures because the nanny was taking pictures, so we knew how it looked. But there were no references from anything, just from the reality.

ZAL At the end of Ida Pawel Pawlikowski’s Oscar-winning 2013 Polish drama, for which Zal also earned a nom, when she’s walking, there was an idea for a Steadicam shot, and we had two cameras this day because it was a very little movie. It was $1 million. But this day, we had the two cameras and the Steadicam, and it was a very long walk, and I didn’t know why, but at a certain point [the Steadicam operator] was stopping. He didn’t have enough power to walk with her for so long. And the sun was almost setting. It was getting so dark. So I just took this handheld camera and I did it handheld, and now I can’t imagine that it would be on Steadicam.

PRIETO Lukasz, I remember thinking, “Wow, how brave, the whole movie’s so static and these very controlled frames and then handheld, the freedom of that moment.” It was a great idea.

PRIETO On Killers of Flower Moon, there’s a scene where there’s a fire. William Hale [De Niro] is burning the land around his house to collect insurance money. I wouldn’t call it an accident, but we had all these fire pipes hidden under the ground and creating the fire effect for the wide shot. But the second layer of fire created this weird distortion that was unexpected. It was so much that you couldn’t see an image practically, so I asked Trevor Loomis, the focus puller, to pull focus to the distortion itself, and that’s where the image suddenly came to life. And you see these very strange, surreal figures that are shimmering. It looks almost like through water, but it’s just through the heat waves. And it was designed to be with a certain distortion, but I never imagined it would be like that. So I love it when you design something. You’re going for a look or an effect, and then something else actually happens and life takes over and it’s beautiful.