As the most-anticipated film of his career began playing to critics and faced down the circus of press junkets and awards screenings, Jarin Blaschke was in Toruń, Poland to survey unknown talent. EnergaCAMERIMAGE invited him to head their Cinematographers’ Debuts Competition, which features eight films that, talent-wise, does what it says on the tin. I assumed he’d be there for Nosferatu (if my allusion wasn’t clear), as we’d spoken in 2019 on occasion of The Lighthouse, but Robert Eggers’ new film was nowhere to be seen.
No harm, no foul. Blaschke is a rather opinionated interview subject who’ll take any inquiry into his craft and run with it, and devoting about half our conversation to other people’s work is an ideal way to understand his own operations. There’s some Nosferatu talk, of course; I’m glad that it’s mostly around the problems with lighting for contemporary theaters and monitors, much as I––who saw the film shortly after returning stateside––would’ve had questions on particulars.
The Film Stage: How’s your festival?
Jarin Blaschke: Oh, good. It’s a big, exhausting party. I got to pace myself. And here they just go around, funnels of booze and pour it. And that affects your sleep, too.
Are you coming from Prague?
No. I live in England, actually.
Oh, okay.
I think some places have me as living in Prague because I did. Because the movie, Nosferatu, got canceled––or fell apart––and it was such a fucking pain moving that I just stayed. Because I got my daughter into school, I brought my mom, I got the cat doctor’s papers––it was, like, this whole production. I moved so much stuff. And I was like, “I guess I just got to stay.” So then I got a commercial agent and started working to, you know, just pay my bills. And the rent’s cheaper. So I just… “Yeah. Let’s give it a shot. Let’s see what living in Europe’s like for a year.” Anyway, I live in England.
Okay, so it’s not too great a trip.
Yeah. The sun sets kind of this time there, too. Same weather, same charming… you know.
I come here every year, so I know it well.
Yeah, yeah. It’s fun. You have all the social strata of people and they’re all kind of at the same level and hanging out as a party. I mean, there’s a little bit of Cate worship. But other than that…
And you’re on this debut jury. Which I found very interesting because––you’re making this face like it’s a surprise––great cinematographers are put in this position of judging debut work, which I think has a lot of… parameters to it. I remember talking to the late, great Dick Pope about being head of the jury.
I didn’t even know he died. He did?
Yeah.
Recently?
Like, last month.
Oh, wow. I met him the last time I was here. Wow.
He was so great. And he just made the new Mike Leigh film, which I saw two weeks before his passing. I mean, Dick Pope wasn’t really a public figure, so his health wasn’t a matter of public record.
Sure.
But it was still shocking. I was very sad about it.
Yeah. He’s still going at it on a regular basis, and very vigorous when I met him just five years ago. But he was on that ––
Yeah. He was on that jury and I asked him what some metrics were. He was pretty blunt in not making excuses or concessions for first-time cinematographers because a director has entrusted them and the film is playing at this great festival. And I’m curious what your thoughts are on approaching a film for the purposes of judging it, knowing that it is a first-time DP––if there’s a certain context you put it in.
I don’t know yet; it’s my first time doing it. So I really just came because I just want to support people coming up. I mean, it took me 15 years after film school to have a movie that any significant number of people saw. You know what I mean? My first movie was a kind of a white-wall New York mumblecore. My second one was a, wow, horrible slasher film. And then I had another mumblecore. The Witch was, like, maybe my sixth or eighth movie or something. You know––it took me a minute. I had all the financial hardship, just was banging on the glass wall for long enough that: anything I can do to support younger people.
Because it’s… it’s fucking hard. [Laughs] So that’s why I’m here. I mean, I’ve only seen two of the eight so far, and I don’t know what to expect or what level of work to expect. I mean, my second movie didn’t look this good. So: good for them. Maybe I should take Dick Pope’s position and just be like, “Forget it’s a debut and just see it as work.” And maybe that’s correct.
But I’m not out in the scene. I live in England and I’m not hanging out at the club. I’m not really in LA that much, so I still feel like an outsider. Maybe I feel like an outsider because, again, it took me a minute––as in, 15 years––to be seen, so maybe I’ll always feel that way. I don’t really know how people see me or my work or any of that stuff. Maybe that’s great. [Laughs]
I would say your work has a multi-valence––the films don’t necessarily look the same project to project––and something I’m always interested in is what a cinematographer most values in the craft when they’re watching a film. Some will say that they really appreciate lighting because that seems like a place where a DP has great autonomy.
Yeah, you always have autonomy there. And I do know that I have… my ideas of blocking. I guess I have more of a role in the use of camera and blocking than most, probably; I suspect. At least with Rob. So I’m very lucky that way. I mean, again: I’ve only seen two films of the eight so far. One had strong, tasteful lighting; I believed it. It was naturalistic, but it still had shape and so forth. The camera was a little more basic. And the second film seemed like they had a lot to learn as far as the lighting, but the instincts as far as… I really loved their restraint and their unexpected use of camera and composition. And that was more aligned with my personal taste. Of these two films, I still have this dilemma. So it’s a good question. It’s the same question I’m asking myself right now.
Maybe it’s an interesting case of thinking about your own biases while you’re watching a film and it’s playing to your taste.
Yeah, totally. Yeah.
“It’s great!”
Yeah. Some people like really colorful imagery. I don’t like magenta or green onscreen, but that’s just me; Almodóvar might have a different opinion. But yeah, it’s so subjective. I guess it’s dangerous to set up a single metric of winners and losers and second-place and all this stuff, but I guess the final aim is just to get recognition to people who excel at any rate. Then maybe that’s worth it.
I mean, you talk about your early work, and you refer to one as “a white-wall mumblecore movie,” the other as a bad slasher movie. Inasmuch as you ever look back at your old work––which maybe you never do––but at least when you think about it, I wonder if you feel a connection to or understanding of the young DP who did those films.
Sure. I mean, just because of this and there’s some Nosferatu press, I’m giving a talk at the ASC in a few weeks; I had to rewatch all these films. I had to choose clips. I’m giving a talk on Thursday, and I had to… what really encapsulates the movie? And not just far as, “Oh, I really like this lighting or that moment.” It’s also like, “Well, what’s the sequence that I still think is well-designed?” Of course I’ll show the battle oner in The Northman, and then I’ll show a oner in Nosferatu. I’m not showing much of the movie; I’m not allowed. I can’t show the vampire, but I am allowed to show 10 minutes of the first act. So I picked something very safe and it went through many rounds of approvals, and that’s cool. But anyway: there’s a long oner in a village in Nosferatu, and how do these things differ? How do you treat them differently? Yes, it’s technically a oner and it has that immediacy and it has that tension, but how does it use different ways? And then I’m showing clips from Lighthouse, where I’m just like, “Where did this sort of technique begin, and how did it evolve through this career?”
It’s kind of educational, for me, to see the steps. I watched The Lighthouse right after we finished The Northman––I did an HDR grade of The Lighthouse––and after The Northman, it looked like a romper room. It was so simple. It was just like, “Oh, okay.” But maybe we’ll get tired of doing things in a really complicated way. Maybe we’ll just want to make a really, brutally simple movie. I don’t know. How much will the past come back again in a new way or not? Or how do you feel like you’re moving forward each time? Because I think that’s something that we all––many of us––are interested in: how not to repeat yourself.
I mean, you can’t see it in yourself. A good cinematographer, hopefully, is like an alchemist, right? You take this page; you take one totally different medium. It’s just black blotches on a piece of paper and you turn it into images. And it’s transmutation of some kind, right? It’s just like: you’re not there to simply illustrate what’s there. I think that’s the trap that some people can fall into: you just, like, tell the story, and in certain––or a lot––of circles, in film school, that’s kind of what’s hammered into you, is kind of this idea of illustration. But really the core of––now I’m going to get pretentious––cinema is cinematography. Yes, the story is there to make it accessible to a broader range of people, but it’s, at its essence, an image. So you’re there to make it something else or to add to it, not simply illustrate. A book illustration’s all good and well, but then there’s art, too.
And it seems like the process of watching your old films was… you’re here. You made it through, right? It was okay.
Yeah! Sure. I mean, if I had any sense I wouldn’t be here. It was not easy. My credit score finally recovered last year.
I haven’t seen Nosferatu. New York’s had its first screenings, to which I was not invited. Should I see it?
I mean, it’s… I don’t want to tell you what Rob thinks are his best movies, but you can probably guess. But yeah: he thinks it’s… I mean, he’s only made four. But yeah, he’s proud of it. And I can say for myself, as far as what I did, it’s hands-down my best, for sure. That alone does not make a movie, but: you should see it, I guess, is the short answer.
I’ll take your word for it. I would like to see it.
You will. [Laughs]
It’s interesting too, because––just talking about it from a slight distance––when the first trailers had come out, which are barely representative of a film if it’s any good, I had seen some people worried about… not so much how visually dark the film looks, but how it’s increasingly difficult to see films in America in good projection conditions.
Yes.
I don’t quite know what the situation is in England, like what the chain theaters are, or if you have okay experiences with it.
I don’t want to pitch a certain company, but really the only way to see 100% of what we graded is in Dolby Vision. Because they’re calibrated, first of all, and theaters are generally not. But at least those theaters: Dolby Vision. It has just the right contrast ratio. I find HDR is too extreme. So I won’t bore you with too many numbers, but I like my highlights––top out––130 nits. Don’t need any more than that. HDR gives you a thousand or more, and I end up just printing, end up reducing the scale back down. If you want to watch a vampire movie by the pool in your sunglasses, maybe you need that thousand nits. Other than that, in a reasonable room––not with a window right behind you––I find that’s pretty good.
So yeah: you need that consistency. DCPs are all over the place. The exit sign right under the screen. You have your black levels, very milky. So, I mean, it has the magic of seeing with an audience. That’s great. But it’s difficult for me when I do a laser grade, and then I come back to an optical projection and it just breaks my heart a little bit. But I think if you have a good monitor at home, that’s pretty good too.
I have a very good set––Apple TV with the Dolby Vision, etc. I would say it’s a seal of quality.
Yeah.
There’s at least the feeling of “this is probably how it should look.”
I mean, the communal atmosphere accounts for a lot, too––that dream in the dark. But yeah: sometimes it is a choice of size versus quality. [Laughs] More or better. So it’s hard. Look: we grade it in a dark room, and if it’s not a dark room it’s going to look different. You take stills from the movie and you put it online… it’s a totally different medium again. You take something that’s in a dark room––surrounding you, large and calibrated––and then you put it with a bunch of white borders around it: yeah, it’s going to look freaking dark, of course, depending on how your monitor is set. I don’t know. I don’t know how you set your monitor.
Mostly using reference disks. If you know how a movie is supposed to look, and you just kind of keep toying with it until it looks that way.
Yeah, and I see stills of Ellen by the window with a shadow and they’ve jacked it up for some screen. Or you reprint it in a magazine, it’s a totally different color space. You got to print it way up for it to look normal. So it can be a shit show sometimes.
Many filmmakers say it’s one of the nightmares of their life, if they actually let themselves think about the myriad projection conditions that their film will be seen in.
I mean, I think it does influence a little bit, in that our night work is a little more high-contrast than it was during The Witch, because The Witch had very little money. I mean, for a first film, it was $3 million––it was really good––but we only graded it on a monitor, and then it just goes out to theaters with that same grade and it’s a totally different medium. So not only are we squashing the highlights on purpose––so it’s very gray––and then the DCP has all the light pollution, or the lens scattering light, so then your blacks are lifted, which really crushes it from the bottom and the top. We’re doing the top and the theater’s doing it from the bottom. There’s not enough contrast to see anything, so I have moved to a higher-contrast look. Just to help with, at least, shapes, if nothing else––hotlines and edges.
You mentioned doing an HDR grade for The Lighthouse. Is that for the IMAX release?
I think that was for home.
Oh, a 4K.
Yeah, IMAX is another thing because it has a silver screen.
That has difficulties, too.
Yeah, because the light falls off and whatever.
Rodrigo Prieto talked to me a bit about that––seems like a difficult balance. And The Witch was in IMAX recently.
Was it? Oh, I heard that. Yeah, I haven’t seen it. I didn’t grade for it, so I don’t know.
I was going to ask about grading that, but I guess that answers the question.
No, I think they put it through some… some robot and it came out. I think Rob’s seen it, but I personally have not.
And you trust his eye.
Yeah. This is long enough ago, I don’t remember if he liked it or not or if there was anything he could do about it. But I think, just, that was a very low-contrast movie, which inherently is going to have issues in different formats outside of a calibrated monitor at your home, or in a perfect… I don’t even know if that went to Dolby Vision, but probably not.
There were different iterations of Nosferatu, or different attempts to make the film, over the years. And I’m always curious with project that have been brewing for a long time: could you identify things that carried over directly from the first conception of it? If there’s a particular image from the first meetings about it that made it all the way to the final movie?
I don’t know, because Studio 8 wasn’t going for it back in 2015 or whatever. Or ’16… or ’17 [Laughs]. It wasn’t moving, so Rob got permission to move onto something else so he could make something else. And that was The Lighthouse. And then once The Lighthouse happened, then The Lighthouse rolled right into The Northman. So really there’s a long break, and honestly I don’t remember what the initial ideas were for Nosferatu. I do remember, at some point in those eight years or whatever, I was trying to think of, “What should this look like?” It might have been around the time of The Lighthouse; that was very photographically influenced with that look of chromatic film, and it kind of looks like a movie from 1930. It doesn’t really look like a movie from 1890 because that would be ridiculous. But, to me, it feels like 1930.
Anyway, I was still going on that photographic train, and Nosferatu, I was thinking about early photography which––after about three days––you realize is ridiculous. Because, what, are we gonna make it look like Henry Fox Talbot, salted paper negative? It’s stupid. So I was trying to figure out what that is. But Rob was very clear: it’s romantic. So it really becomes painting. And you’ll never be able to make a painting with a photograph, but at least it got me more in the color space of: it’s a color image, and as far as the… is it just color? Maybe. I mean, it might have influenced the 1.66––just to have a little more scope. I think Rob is really… if it were up to him, he’d shoot everything 1.33, so that probably influenced a little more. We hope to do it again; we will do it again. So it just kind of became a romantic look, which: half of it’s done with production design and costume anyway.
The trailer looked romantic. I can say the trailer was good.
Yeah, I think so. A little bit. I mean, really, is the palette that different than The Northman? It’s still the same. I have similar tastes. It’s still going to be 15% desaturated; it’s going to be, “Flame looks like this.” Our moonlight’s a little more blue this time. Last time it was a little dirtier. But I think it looks like the same people making it.
For The Lighthouse, you got a Best Cinematography Oscar nom.
I did?
It would be great if I was the person to inform you.
Oh, shit. I was fishing.
But I’m curious how your career changed or didn’t change after what is arguably the highest––or at least most-public––honor a cinematographer can receive. In terms of offers or ––
Well, I don’t know. Because we went right into The Northman. So that whole circus happened. Great fun; not real life. That whole circus happened, like, during prep on The Northman. And then I went back to Belfast and had another… six months of prep after that. And then we shot the thing. And then I’m exhausted. And it’s the next year and I’m taking two seasons off. So I imagine the momentum has its limits. So I probably fell out of that––I don’t know––and then we were supposed to go right from finishing The Northman right into Nosferatu, so if there would have been any offers I’m unaware of them, because I was unavailable.
Well, it’s great that you kept working.
Yeah, yeah. Rob had stuff to do. So I’m sure I came out the other side of any moment, and they’re onto the next award season and so on.
They are setting up Academy screenings for Nosferatu.
They seem to believe in it.
A friend of mine works in the AMPAS parking lot and he said the screening brought a lot of excitement.
Cool.
It’s like when people check on the Presidential election by the betting market––that’s the Oscar version of it. What are people filling the parking lots for?
I mean, all these markers are just like stickers in grade school or something. Okay, so first you get in the union, so now you can do bigger movies or more quote-unquote “legit” movies. And then it’s, “Oh, I got an agent! Wow.” And then whatever––any sort of awards or nominations––then ASC, BSC. You have all these award stickers that you can… have it mean as much as you like.
I wish you nothing but the best with it.
Thank you.
I hope for more stickers.
Yeah, sure. [Laughs] More shiny stickers,
And I hope the rest of the festival’s good––the viewings go well and the awards go well.
Yeah, and we’re not driven into the ground. We’ll be all right.
Nosferatu opens on December 25.