DP Ashley Connor wrote-in with details about her work on the new Netflix movie Remarkably Bright Creatures, starring Sally Field, Alfred Molina, and Lewis Pullman. For the adaptation, she worked incredibly closely with the film’s director to bring the bond between Sally Field’s character and Marcellus from the book to the screen.
Connor is well-known for her credits on HBO’s comedy series The Chair Company, Prime Video’s Night Sky, starring Sissy Spacek and JK Simmons, and the final season of Broad City. She also worked on many feature films acclaimed in the festival cycle, including being nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline, Desiree Akhavan’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post, which won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize, and Harry Wootliff’s True Things, which was featured at the Venice Film Festival.
It’s always a daunting task to visually adapt a beloved book, but with Remarkably Bright Creatures, I quickly learned we’d be up against a uniquely difficult set of challenges. When I first read the script, I was immediately drawn to the story’s rich sense of character and place, but having not yet read the book, I was unaware of the massive fanbase it had amassed.
To do both the story and its fans justice, we were going to have to create something that honoured the heart of the book, while also creating something wholly different so that our version of the story could stand alongside whatever vision the fans had created for themselves. The trick to achieving this would lie in our treatment of Marcellus, the misanthropic octopus at the heart of the story, and how we visually handled his world and his perception of the rest of the characters.
I had already worked with the director Olivia Newman on a small indie film called First Match, and I knew how well-suited she would be for this adaptation. She brings so much love and sensitivity to her storytelling and direction of actors that I had no doubt the residents of Sowell Bay would come alive onscreen. But, our biggest character, upon whom the success of the story rested upon… the literal narrator of the movie, would not be an actor. He wouldn’t even be in the room at all. He was going to be a computer-generated octopus that wouldn’t be completed until after the entire movie was shot. While I had no worries about the talents of our visual effects team, led by Chris Ritvo, and their ability to create an emotive and realistic Marcellus, we needed to give him some flesh and blood presence in the shooting of the film itself. Marcellus’s relatability couldn’t just rely on how believable our visual effects were, we had to feel him inside the movie, in the way our camera interacted with him, how it personified him, and how it would give us access into his internal mind.
I had a phenomenal G&E department led by my Chief Lighting Technician, Mark Alexander, and my Key Grip Jon “Jovo” Jovallenos. When I first interviewed them, we spoke about the multiple looks of the film and how Tova’s world would look outside the aquarium (natural, dark, muted) versus the slightly magical feeling the audience should have within the aquarium. In Tova’s house, we framed her to be more isolated; we loved shooting her through natural internal smaller frames, like doorways and through windows. We tended to favor more colourful lighting in the aquarium, allowing the saturated environment to feel more inviting. The aquarium had to operate as a safe haven for Tova – a place where she could escape the prying eyes of the town and talk honestly about her life with her friend and confidant, Marcellus.
Our amazing art team, led by Production Designer Jennifer Morden, was tasked with building an entire working aquarium on our stage with Marcellus’s tank as its centerpiece. And so while we had full control over the space, we wanted to privilege the actor’s performances and allow entire scenes to be completed even when we needed to shoot VFX plates and Marcellus’s POV coverage. We wanted to be able to turn the camera around on Marcellus as quickly as you might on a regular actor in the scene, even though he required an underwater setup. He had to be as much part of the scene as anybody else, even though he wasn’t actually there. This created a small logistical nightmare for our camera team who had to be able to set up scenes with all our actors, have an underwater prepped camera ready to drop into the filled tank for Marcellus’s POV, and then also be able to shoot VFX plates of an empty tank while the actors changed over for the next scene.
For our main camera package, we went with the Alexa 35 with Panavision Primo primes and zooms. I’ve shot a few films on the Primos, and they’re a favourite of mine because their internal softness gives the image a unique life and shape when photographing faces. So much of the movie was about people, their connections, and how they were seeing (or not seeing) each other, and I knew those lenses would provide a little extra magic to the close-up portraiture shots we planned on employing. The first challenge we encountered was how we were going to actually get this camera package inside Marcellus’s tank – a tank that was specifically supposed to be “too small” for even an octopus.
Narratively, Marcellus was meant to be outgrowing his tank and feeling closed in by his surroundings, but every underwater housing we looked at was too big and cumbersome and designed for larger tank work or open water situations. We also really didn’t want to change camera bodies or lenses for Marcellus’s setup as it needed to feel consistent with the rest of the film. We ended up using a Hydroflex splash bag, which wasn’t perfect, but was small and lightweight and meant I could fit our camera into the tank while maintaining a buoyancy that could still be easily counterbalanced. The second part of the equation was actually more fun. I wanted to be able to operate the camera while underwater to add some life to the POV. We couldn’t get an underwater remote head, so I pitched Jovo on using an older fluid head attached to a truss that we would lower into the tank with a long arm that I could operate from above. I drew him a terrible, primitive drawing of what I saw in my mind, complete with the question, “Should we attach a broomstick?” I’m very grateful he took my request seriously.
The rig ended up being cost-effective and slightly janky, but exactly the kind of thing I love to work with most. With the long arm (which ended up not being a broomstick), I could pan and tilt from outside the tank, and though it required almost my full body weight to manipulate and stabilise, it did the trick perfectly. Additionally, we attached the truss to a jib and dolly so we could also move laterally inside the tank. Our Key Rigging Grip, Bippin Kumar Sammy, worked his magic to create an intricate ceiling grid on the stage that could fly in and out quickly and easily so that we could access the top of the tank without disturbing the lighting of the rest of the aquarium, and made it so we could efficiently move back to that space to shoot the next scene.
The last step in creating Marcellus’s world would be something that differentiated his vision from everybody else’s. We had set ourselves up to be able to shoot his coverage at the same time as the other actors and using the exact same camera and lenses, so we were confident his shots would feel grounded and intertwined with the rest of the film, but the reality was that Marcellus was meant to see the world a little differently than the humans. I tried many existing filters at Panavision Vancouver that were almost what we wanted, but in the end, Guy McVicker from Panavision Woodland Hills helped create a unique filter for us that we lovingly called “Octo-vision.” This piece fit in front of our lenses and had two levels of strength to create a unique distortion and color space that made Marcellus’s perspective sing and to make him feel real and present in our shooting – even before he ever existed at all.
