You really feel the beauty of these landscapes. Were you using a lot of natural light making this movie?

The approach that we talked about was to be as ultra-naturalistic as we could be. Not to sound too weird, but to respect nature and to respect the landscapes that we were afforded to shoot in. As opposed to trying to overly stylize things or overly complicate things, let this beauty speak for itself. The less that we could affect it, the less artificial light, I think is just a general approach of not putting anything between the audience and the film. If you start becoming too self-aware of lighting or things that don’t feel realistic, then I think you get sucked out of the movie. Ultimately, it was really something that was for contrast — here’s the Predator’s futuristic technology and weaponry against the primal and barebones nature of Naru’s character and her journey. 

What about for the nighttime photography? Are the torches usually the main source of light? 

When we did the night stuff with the torches, there were a couple things. For the most part, I definitely tried to light them with the torches. The two things we did is for some of the night stuff, because we had other night sequences where there weren’t going to be torches — I really wanted torches in blackness, but then the more I thought about it and was thinking about the end fight and these other sequences where there isn’t torch light, there has to be some kind of source. At that point, it’s obviously going to be moonlight. I wanted to always be hinting at that, but I didn’t want big shafts of blue moonlight crashing through the trees. 

I tried to just put very soft, low underexposed amounts of blue, and then we had atmosphere always in all our exteriors whenever we could. I was trying to just get that smoke to be slightly lit in the background, so there was a little bit of contrast of the warmth and then the moonlight. And then also, when you got to the strict moonlight scenes, you’re not like, “Oh, where’d this all of a sudden come from?”

It goes back to what you were saying earlier about being naturalistic, but with nighttime, you can only be so naturalistic without adding too much artifice, right?

Yeah, it’s funny. I think you’ll talk to a lot of the cinematographers, and it is that struggle. Night can mean many things to many different people, but yes, as naturalistic as all the day exterior stuff is and can be because you can embrace the daylight and you really can just work with that. You’re starting from scratch when it comes to night work. So yes, you end up with softboxes and Condors. You think back to, “Well, what’s the motivation and why is everything supposed to be naturalistic and what are you trying to do?”

With digital and film, how have you found that both of them compare when trying to capture both naturalistic beauty and nighttime sequences? 

I think you can do the same. You could have done the same thing on film, you can rate film at, and maybe not as much as some of these sensors that can get up to 2,500 and dig in there, but you could take your average 500 stock, you could push it a stop so you could be shooting in 1,000 ISO. You could have done the same thing, but I think digitally, it allows you to do it and it allows you to not be afraid to do it. I think that was always the thing that certainly held me back is the fear that “Oh, this isn’t going to read,” you know what I mean?

Digital, yes, you can immediately see it. I think that allows you to go, “I don’t need a backlight here,” or “All I need is let me light up the smoke in the background as opposed to backlighting the whole thing and that’ll give me the depth that I need.” Digital affords you, I think, to do that because what you see is what you get, and you can really, really push things and push how far you can go. You’ll find these beautiful images much quicker than you could on film. 

For me, it was always the fear of whether I was underexposing and or is there just too much black in the frame? Now, you look at an image. Some of my favorite images of the people with the torches, I think you might previously on film have feared, “Well, all you’re seeing is this tiny little bit.” Any number of things. Ultimately, you can sign off really quickly on something that’s beautiful and go, “This is great, let’s shoot it.”

When digital cameras started to dominate movies, there were a lot of issues still be worked on, but do you remember when you first thought, “This is finally working just right”?

I remember shooting a film in 2011. It was right when the ALEXA had just come out and that was the first time where I felt like, “Oh, wow, these are really beautiful images” that weren’t lacking that cinematic quality that the previous cameras, the early Sonys. I forget what else had come out before that, maybe the RED was out.

With that yellow tint?

Yeah. For me, it was the first iteration of the ALEXA where I was like, “Oh.” Now, having said that, when I got that digital negative into coloring it was like, “Oh.” It didn’t quite hold up as well, because it was only 2K at that point, I think. It wasn’t holding up as well. Still, it was amazing, but I think it was probably not for another few years when ALEXA finally was able to do 2.8K raw and stuff. And then it was like, “Okay, this is kind of there.” Then as soon as — essentially when Roger Deakins was like, “Okay, I’m shooting everything on the ALEXA,” I was like, “Well, if it’s good enough for Roger, it’s good enough for everybody else.”