Every movie news site (even the dearly-departed mothership), when it covers a upcoming movie, tends to focus on “Who will be in the movie?” or “Where were the stars spotted?” or something like that, but not the most important question of all; “Who’s shooting the damn movie?”. As always, I must be the one to answer that question, with this handy guide of what our brightest and most talented cinematographers are shooting or will shoot.
Charlotte Bruus Christensen
Bruus Christensen has had a good 2016, having shot The Girl on the Train and Denzel Washington’s forthcoming awards contender Fences (her 2015 was no slouch either, between Far From the Madding Crowd and Anton Corbijn’s Life). It now appears likely that she’ll be having a good 2017 as well, considering her first confirmed project that year is Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut Molly’s Game, about Molly Bloom (played by Jessica Chastain), a former Olympic hopeful and pioneer of online poker (the film also features Idris Elba, Michael Cera, and Kevin Costner). Certainly her hiring suggests that Sorkin knows to make the visuals pop even when the script is the star.
Sofiane El Fani
El Fani first came to my attention with his gorgeous, naturally-lit work on Blue is the Warmest Color (I’ll assume the director overrode him in the matter of how to light the sex scenes, i.e. El Fani wanted them to look not-awful), and he’s since won acclaim for his work on Timbuktu. This year, he made the leap in the U.S. with Maris Curran’s Five Nights in Maine, and now he’s working on the HBO movie The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, telling the story of Lacks, who played a massive and unauthorized role in cell research when cancerous cells were removed from her and tested. The film stars Renée Elise Goldsberry (Angelica Schuyler in Hamilton) as Lacks, Oprah Winfrey as her daughter (in the present-day, of course), and Rose Byrne as a journalist trying to uncover the story of Lacks.
Frederick Elmes
Elmes has had quite a time recently shooting indie character studies (and also several episodes of The Night Of); his work on Paterson for Jim Jarmusch (his collaborator on Coffee and Cigarettes, Broken Flowers, and Night on Earth) can be widely seen starting at the very end of this year, and his work on Craig Johnson’s Daniel Clowes adaptation Wilson will be released next year. And now for something completely different. Elmes’ next film will be John Turturro’s next film, Going Places, a dramedy starring Susan Sarandon, Bobby Cannavale, Audrey Tautou… and Turturro as Jesus Quintana. I can think of no way in which this could go horribly, disastrously wrong.
Greig Fraser
Presumably due to the extended reshoots on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (which Fraser really appears to have delivered the goods on, based on the trailers), Fraser, the DoP of Zero Dark Thirty, Foxcatcher, and Killing Them Softly (and that’s just the ones produced by Megan Ellison!), has been quiet lately. But thankfully, he has recently gotten back in the saddle for the director of his other upcoming film this year, Lion. He worked on that with then-first-timer Garth Davis, and now they’re reuniting for Davis’s sophomore feature, Mary Magdalene, starring Rooney Mara as Mary, Joaquin Phoenix as Jesus, and Chiwetel Ejiofor as Peter. Some of our finest cinematographers have shot Jesus films in the past, from Michael Ballhaus to Emmanuel Lubezki and David Watkin to Caleb “The Deep D” Deschanel, so Fraser is in very good company, regardless of whether or not Davis pulls this off.
Adam Kimmel
The DoP of Jesus’s Son, Capote (he’s also worked with Bennett Miller as second-unit DoP on Foxcatcher and DoP of Miller’s hilariously bleak Quilted Northern ads), Never Let Me Go, and both of Paul Thomas Anderson’s videos for Joanna Newsom, Kimmel is something of a minor indie hero. His next film, Felt, sees him working with Concussion director Peter Landesman to tell the story of Mark “Deep Throat” Felt, starring Liam Neeson as Felt, Diane Lane as his wife, and Maika Monroe as his daughter.
Philippe Le Sourd
Le Sourd got his start as an assistant cameraman and focus puller for Darius Khondji, before graduating into a DoP in his own right, shooting the likes of A Good Year, Seven Pounds, and most notably The Grandmaster, for which he received an Oscar nomination (he also shot Mark Romanek’s video for U2’s “Invisible”, but I have a feeling I’m the only one who cares about that). His latest project sees him working with Sofia Coppola, with her new adaptation of the novel The Beguiled, filmed by Don Siegel with Clint Eastwood back in 1971. Colin Farrell plays the Eastwood part, with the rest of the cast including Nicole Kidman, Elle Fanning, Kirsten Dunst, and The Nice Guys‘ Angourie Rice.
Jody Lee Lipes
Lipes, the DoP of Martha Marcy May Marlene and Trainwreck, has had a good year despite only shooting one film, since that one film is Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea (he did also work this year with Romanek on Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling” video, which I have to assume has a very different tone from Manchester). Next, he’ll be reuniting with his collaborator on Afterschool, Antonio Campos, on the TV movie The Sinner, starring Jessica Biel as “a young mother [who] tries to find out what’s causing her to have violent tendencies”, plus Bill Pullman and Christopher Abbott.
Seamus McGarvey
Christ, when does this guy sleep? This makes McGarvey’s seventh appearance in the series, and it sounds like an ambitious undertaking (or at least more ambitious than “Ben Affleck is the autistic Jason Bourne”). It’s The Greatest Showman, which marks the directorial debut of Michael Gracey and is a musical(!) biopic of P.T. Barnum, starring Hugh Jackman as Barnum and Michelle Williams as his wife Charity, plus Zac Efron and Rebecca Ferguson. I hope this doesn’t mean McGarvey misses out on shooting Joe Wright’s next film.
Steven Meizler
Meizler was Steven Soderbergh’s 1st assistant cameraman from Ocean’s Twelve to Behind the Candelabra, and he recently graduated to full-time DoP with The Last Five Years and the (gorgeously-shot) TV show of The Girlfriend Experience. He’ll continue to stay in the Soderbergh family with his next project, which is the entirety of the Soderbergh-produced, Scott Frank-created western Netflix series Godless. I may have to cover this one.
Sean Porter
Porter is a cinematographer who’s only broken through very recently, with his work on the acclaimed indies Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter and Green Room. His next film, 20th Century Women sees him once again working with Green Room‘s distributor, the ever-wonderful A24, as well as with Beginners director Mike Mills. He’s also taken the leap into studio films with his other upcoming project, Rock That Body, a comedy about women having to dispose of the dead body of a male stripper, starring Scarlett Johansson, Kate McKinnon, Zoe Kravitz, Ilana Glazer, and Jillian Bell.
Tobias Schliessler
Schliessler is the regular DoP of Peter Berg and Bill Condon, and his next two films will see him working for them once again. Those two are Patriots Day, Berg’s Boston Marathon movie (after he sat Deepwater Horizon out), and Beauty and the Beast, Condon’s remake of the Disney film of the story. But the most exciting project he has coming up is another Disney project, and it’s Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time. This is DuVernay’s first fiction film sans her regular DoP Bradford Young since her very first, but I have no doubt it’ll look great under her and Schliessler’s confident hands.
Masanobu Takayanagi
The DoP of The Grey, Silver Linings Playbook, and Warrior, Takayanagi hit it big in 2015, with well-received work on Black Mass and Spotlight (and also work on the instantly-forgotten, although apparently quite decent, True Story). His next film comes out next year and sees him reuniting with his Black Mass and Out of the Furnace director Scott Cooper (yeah, not my first choice either). It’s Hostiles, a western starring Christian Bale as an Army captain tasked with escorting a Cheyenne chief (Wes Studi) and his family (Adam Beach and Q’orianka Kilcher), with parts for Rosamund Pike, Ben Foster, Jesse Plemons, Rory Cochrane, Michael Parks, and Stephen Lang.