Rodrigo Pietro, the inventive DP behind the picture-perfect Barbie Land and a shady Killers of the Flower Moon, reveals secrets of his craft.
His Barbie helmer calls him an “incredibly precise technician with the soul of a deep and true artist.”
“We came up with the concept of Barbie being ‘authentically artificial,’ and every frame of the film was a way to explore that idea. I cannot wait to work with him again.”
Prieto is now in postproduction on his feature directorial debut, Pedro Páramo, an adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s 1955 novel
Influences in the cinematography community?
Néstor Almendros was a big influence. His penchant for naturalism was something I found really interesting.
In Mexican cinema at the time, cinematographers were still using lighting techniques from the ’50s and ’60s, so I felt that most movies in Mexico looked very antiquated. Néstor Almendros really spoke to me, pushing what you could do in cinematography to put the audience in the film and for an audience to believe that what they’re watching is a real story.
Also Sven Nykvist and then Vittorio Storaro was a big influence, so much more expressionistic. I’ve developed a style that’s mix of all of them. I try to have emotional cinematography, where the lighting, camerawork, lenses and textures underline the emotions of a scene and a character.
With Iñárritu, that collaboration has been very exciting. There is something in the way we sat down and invented the shots. We always imagined stuff with a sound, and it could be because he’s very musical, and I am, too. When I operate a camera, I feel it like music and sometimes hum melodies. We really focused on the rhythm of the shots and what would eventually be the edit. With Scorsese, there’s something that I’ve carried through the rest of my career: If you’re going to tackle a subject, don’t shy away from the warts and all, the extreme nature of it, the ugliness, but also the vulnerability of the characters.
Visual style of Killers of the Flower Moon?
One thing that began revealing itself was that we tried to be as true as possible. We really focused on the research. There is always an interpretation, no matter what, it’s not a documentary. We are representing the story, just as people would shoot newsreel footage about the Osage. So that led me to think that we could use the colors of the beginnings of still photography, which was around that time. I thought with the descendants of the European settlers, we can represent their world through that type of color. We emulated Autochrome, invented by the Lumière brothers. We created a lookup table [for color grading] to emulate that color for those sections of the movie. And we wanted a separate feel for the Osage when the white people aren’t around. For that, we simply kept the natural color using a lookup table.
Creating the visual style of Barbie Land
One of the first conversations we had, and I think that carried through, is that we wanted the camera to be innocent, the feeling you get when you open up a box with a toy — that sort of frontal way you see a toy. We decided the camera would always be frontal or sideways or behind, never oblique angles, with wide-angle lenses so that you feel you’re right there, and there’s nothing hidden. We decided Barbie Land would always be sunny, but always backlit, too. Because when you take a photo of a person and the sun’s on their face, it looks uncomfortable, but if the sun’s behind their head, it looks pretty, and the light on the face is soft. It’s perfect, since in Barbie Land every day is a perfect day. So when she comes down from the top of the dream house, on a perfect day, that camera follows perfectly and widens out just precisely to see her get into the car. But later in the movie, when things start malfunctioning for Barbie and the day is not perfect, the camera is doing the exact same shot, but [Barbie] falls out of frame because it didn’t know what was going to happen. That was a little bit of a joke, one of the things that came out of our design.
Music videos for Taylor Swift
I think she probably first picked me because it was a video called “The Man,” and the inspiration for the video was Wolf of Wall Street. She’s wonderful. I did some other music videos with her, “Willow” and “Cardigan,” and it was great. She really has a very keen sense of how she wants to express her music and her lyrics. Visually, she imagined it all. I was there just to bring those images and make them real. I think she’s a very good director.
Directing Pedro Páramo?
It’s an adaptation of a famous novel that is very important culturally to people in Mexico, because most everybody reads it in high school. I loved it back then. This is the third time it’s been made into a movie.
Mateo Gil, who’s a writer from Spain, had an adaptation; we worked together to give it my perspective. It was very challenging, because it spans many decades and includes ghosts. I co-shot it with a dear friend, Nico Aguilar, who has done some second-unit work for me in the past. It was a beautiful experience.
