El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie and why we light for film.
This week I finally got to watch El Camino – which essentially serves as an epilogue to one of my all time favourite TV shows (if not my number one pick), Breaking Bad. While the film in and of itself is great and serves as a brilliant send off to the show and the characters, it was the cinematography that I paid most attention to – and arguably was what I found most impressive, and most surprising. The original show as shot on film, so you would almost assume that the natural choice for the next chapter in the series would maintain visual continuity and do the same, but El Camino goes in almost the complete opposite direction – it’s about as digital as digital cinema gets and I absolutely love it. So often I hear about DOP’s and filmmakers that swear by film, making comments such as they hate the sharpness of digital cinema cameras (often opting to soften this with filters or post production smoothing) or film just has a cinematic quality to it that isn’t matched by digital replications. This film in particular I think finally puts the nail in the coffin of that argument. Not that analogue film doesn’t have its place and doesn’t look incredible – it’s just to say that digital cinematography has not so much surpassed but rather innovated on the more analogue years now passed. There is something distinctly contemporary looking about this film – like it couldn’t have been shot at any other time but now, and this to me is so incredibly exciting. It shows that the cinema is continuing to innovate and evolve into something new and exciting – and of course it would be a film that barely even screened in cinemas that would make me think this way. For once I fully believe in digital cinematography’s capabilities of matching film, especially when the large format Alexa 65 and Arri DNA lenses are involved (also worth mentioning that my model of camera was used somewhere in this film – cool).
Beyond just the camera side of things, this film also got me thinking about the lighting choices and more broadly the reasons we light for film. All semester we’ve been talking about different approaches and reasons for lighting the way we do in filmmaking – this isn’t something which came as a revelation to me, but it is something that got me thinking. After watching El Camino I think I can finally pinpoint what I think is my favourite approach to the question of why and how we light film – and that is a hybridisation of naturalism and stylistic liberties (if I got the chance to shoot a feature film, this is what I would want it to look like). This film absolutely fits within the modern trend of naturalistic lighting, but does so in such a tasteful and stylistic way that so perfectly sets the tone of the film and above all serves story and character. Which brings me to the most important reason I think we light for film and why the DOP is such a critical member of any film crew – and that is because lighting is such a massive part of the way in which we understand a films story and character. While we’ve moved away from the very on the nose (yet still very beautiful) lighting of the film-noir era, lighting still tells us so much about characters and their motivations – whether or not we realise it. In the right hands lighting can do so very much to elevate a story, El Camino proves this. That is why we light for film.