Emmanuel Lubezki, a Mexican cinematographer, who was nominated eight times for the Best Cinematography at the Academy Awards and won three times in this category for Gravity (2013), Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2015). He is known for his innovative uses of natural lighting and continuous uninterrupted shots in cinematography. Lubezcki does not have a noticeable style as he usually adapts to the director and the film he is working on.
Out of all his work, Bridman stood out to me most. The director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s idea of filming the whole film within a “one shot” made it an incredibly hard task to the cinematographer, the cameraman and the post-production team.
Lubezk worked with Inarritu many years ago on his first commercial and was impressed by his adventurous spirit with filmmaking. When he first read Birdman, he was shocked because it had all of the elements of a movie that He didn’t want to do at all. He didn’t want to work in studio and didn’t want to do a comedy. He didn’t want to do in very long takes because he’d had enough while working on Gravity. But once Alejandro talked to him about all other layers that he wanted to present that were not in the script, Lubezki really got excited.
In the pre-production of Birdman, they used cloth and c-stands to build what the set was going to be like in an empty stage. They made blueprints of what the shots and what the blocking of the scenes was going to be like. They worked for a couple months doing that with a handheld camera and stand-ins. The work that had to be done in preparation was immense.
Lubezcki usually uses extremely soft, shadow-less light. He likes to light faces from the front and most of the time short-lit. In Birdman, the lighting on faces is mostly soft, highly diffused are always naturalistic. The aesthetic to this is that it blurs the line between Riggan’s hallucinations and reality, contributing to the process of him descending into madness on his pursuit to artistic success. The lighting immerses the audience into Riggan’s life, positioning them to feel Riggan’s despair.
What is truly amazing about the film’s lighting is that it’s all lit by non-movie lights. Lubezck claimed that he wanted the film to look as naturalistic as possible so they didn’t use any movie lighting. It’s all light bulbs. The lighting was from all the lights in the set.
He also manipulated color temperatures with different types of light bulbs to achieve different color temperatures, especially in the scenes filmed in theater, they used daylight fluorescents and tungsten light bulbs on different locations as Michael Keaton walks around in the theater. The variation in color temperatures really enhances the image that there are dirty, smelly, uncomfortable corners in a state of the art theater, portraying the theater naturalistically.
In this scene where Reagan bumps into the famous play critic Tabitha and attempts to ask her to write good comments on his play but gets rejected. The main light source is from the light hanging above the table, a light that is soft and diffused. The lighting is low-key with very few ambience light. For most part of the scene, they are both side lit but due to the blocking of them standing face to face with light casting from the back, it looks almost silhouette-like. A bit of chiaroscuro is used here to emphasize the importance of their topic and their underlying conflicts between a playwright and a play critic.
Lubezcki also expressed his appreciation to the cameras they used which are ALEAX and ALEXA M. He said that if it wasn’t the ALEXAs, it would have been impossible to make this film. For lenses he chose a combination of Leicas and Master Primes because he loves how Master Primes could have all these lights in the frame and the image is always clean and no bad fare.
I think Lubezcki has a special chemistry with Iñárritu, magical things happen when these two Mexican men collaborate. Here’s Lubezki’s comments on him and Iñárritu’s partnership:
“Because we are friends, we allow ourselves to disagree and sometimes to disagree loudly and go into Spanish and talk about each other’s mothers and body fluids and everything. And that happens all the time.”
“The director is the author of the movie, so in the end I’ll do whatever he wants me to do. But my job is to tell him what I see, and tell him honestly. Especially before you’re doing the shooting, you have to be absolutely sincere.”
You can tell that they have a special bond both in workplace and life. I think it’s such a convenient thing to work with your friends because the connection between the two are more than just colleagues and you can express yourself more genuinely and freely without thinking to much.