By ‘Our Man in LA’ Iain Blair
Over the past few years Pat Scola has become one of the most in-demand cinematographers in the business, thanks to his sensitive, inventive and luminous work in a wide range of genres.
“At high school I spent a lot of time in the darkroom, processing mostly terrible photographs”
He received the ASC Spotlight Award for outstanding cinematography in 2022 for his work on Michael Sarnoski’s Pig, the award-winning indie drama about love and loss. Then he reunited with the director on the new release A Quiet Place: Day One, a taut horror thriller that deftly balances epic scares and action with intimate drama as the third chapter and prequel to the blockbuster franchise.
Scola also shot two other new features; We Grown Now, the period coming-of-age drama directed by Minhal Baig, and Sing Sing, the prison drama directed by Greg Kwedar, both of which premiered at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival to great acclaim.
DP Pat Scola
The native New Yorker’s love of photography began in the darkroom of his high school.
“I’d cut out of classes and spent a lot of time in the darkroom there, processing mostly terrible photographs, to be honest,” he admits. “It wasn’t like I knew I was going to be a photographer. I was shit at it, but I was learning.”
“I still love doing music videos”
Later, in film school at Emerson, Boston, he began honing his craft by shooting over 50 shorts and music videos, and then got his start in the business by shooting spots for Audi, Mercedes and BMW, as well as clips for artists including The Weeknd, Alt-J, J.Cole, and Flying Lotus.
Dennis Pires, Adrienne Subia, Justin Duquette, Joel Marich, Pat Scola, Eric Macy, Danielle Carrol, Chris Feleppa
“I still love doing music videos,” says Scola who most-recently shot the Billie Eilish music video hit, What Was I Made For?, which featured in the Barbie soundtrack. After moving out to LA, he worked as a loader, and later did a lot of “behind-the-scenes jobs for a year or so, which was very useful for experience and training.”
After shooting half-a-dozen low-budget indie films, Sarnoski hired him for Pig, which Scola says was his “big break.” The pair reteamed on A Quiet Place: Day One where Scola was faced with all the usual challenges that go with a huge movie, namely, “big sets and big action scenes. But scaling up wasn’t the main challenge – it was taking an indie director and his DP and dealing with the studio world. Although the scale on it was obviously different and huge, we also needed all the intense close-ups and to feel what the characters of go through,” he notes.
Their approach was to shoot with ARRI Alexas and a set of customised Panavision lenses that were specifically created off the ones he used for the look of Pig.
While A Quiet Place: Day One is set in New York, it wasn’t possible to shoot on-location there, so the filmmakers built all their sets and shot at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden, in the UK, and on-location around in London, with interiors, streets and places that could double for New York.
“I think Michael did a great job of putting his own stamp on it, and you could still feel it’s him even inside of a franchise,” Scola adds. “You could still feel his soul in there. And that was a big thing with me too, trying to make sure I could keep the humanity that he likes to photograph inside that movie. It’s a cool one. It was definitely an experience.”
Meanwhile, Sing Sing, his new collaboration with director Greg Kwedar, is already generating a lot of early Oscar buzz for its unsentimental but moving, fact-based story of hardened jail prisoners being rehabilitated through a theatre programme.
Sing Sing
“In one of the first conversations I had with him, Greg said something really simple to me that I took really seriously and to heart,” Scola recalls. “He said, we just had to get out of the way. And I think a lot was born from that tiny little sentence of how we would approach the entire film visually.
“Prison films normally have this very particular sort of oppressive aesthetic, but this movie wasn’t about prison. It was about men inside of this place finding their humanity. And I think we wanted the look of the film to reflect the men, not the prison itself.”
To this end Scola decided to shoot Sing Sing on 16mm film instead of digital.
“Our camera and lens package came from Panavision, the format was S16 film, mainly Kodak Vision3 250D 7207, and we shot with an ARRI 416 and ARRI SR3. Lenses were Zeiss Ultra 16s, plus a Canon 11-165 T2.5 zoom,” he reports. “We didn’t want the movie to feel like it was something that we shot today, nor to have a modern aesthetic, but rather something that felt like it was made in a slightly different time.”
“When shooting Sing Sing, we just had to get out of the way”
Sing Sing was filmed on-location in upstate New York over a four-week period, and Scola and his team spent the first day filming exteriors of the infamous Sing Sing prison, on the bank of the Hudson River, around 30 miles north Manhattan.
“Because Sing Sing is still a functioning prison, we couldn’t shoot interiors there,” notes the DP. So, the filmmaking team began searching for a decommissioned prison, and ended-up shooting interiors at Downstate Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison, which was now sitting idle. Like Sing Sing, Downstate is located not far from the bucolic Hudson River, near a town called Beacon.
Sing Sing
“If you didn’t know it was a prison, you’d think, ‘It’s such a beautiful place’”, says Scola, “But that’s part of the heartbreaking horror of these places. They’re meant not just to take men away from society, but they’re meant to wound, as well. It feels like real darkness. And we didn’t want to hide that in the film. It became an extension of the place we occupied, and I’m glad we showed it that way.”
“We had a really small crew, including 1st AC Eric Macey, 2nd AC Chris Feleppa, loader Danielle Carroll, gaffer Joel Marich, best electric Adrienne Subia, key grip Justin Duquette and best grip Dennis Pires,” he says.
“It was really apparent from very early-on, that this was how we were going to approach the movie. Anything big in lighting was just never going to happen. When I’m shooting on digital, I think it requires a lot more work for me to shape, to control and to really be specific about how light falls on that sensor. That might be a ‘me’ problem, not a digital problem, as I tinker a lot more in digital and I require a lot more to get it to the place that I want. I feel like people don’t talk about this enough. Film, however, is such a forgiving medium. I’ll just be honest, it can be lit worse but it will look better.”
Director of Photography Pat Scola and Director Michael Sarnoski in A Quiet Place: Day One from Paramount Pictures.
Scola’s lighting package was equally streamlined and very small. “For most of the film we used a mix of 4×8 LiteTiles, LiteMats, ARRI SkyPanels, Creamsource Vortex’s, Astera Titan and Helios tubes,” he explains.
“We basically used a combination of a few SkyPanels and a 4×8 LiteTile box for all the actual prison stuff, because really what we were doing was lighting the windows. Fundamentally, we were using the window light, but trying to maintain the exposure from outside. So we just had to balance the inside to bring up those levels. That was the general approach. It’s a simple one, but it’s effective if you do it right.”
“Film is such a forgiving medium”
The team also shot all the stage scenes at Beacon High School, utilising an actual theatre space.
“The stage work was obviously a little bit different from the prison scenes,” he notes. “We utilised a lot of the existing lighting fixtures that Beacon High Schools had already hung for their own theatre shows. We even employed a high school student to run their board for us. We gave her a walkie-talkie, and Joel, our gaffer, was amazing at totally bringing her into the fold and working with her. We also hung some of our own fixtures inside the high school, but again, it was minimal because we didn’t have a huge staff to do a ton of work. So we hung a couple of SkyPanels, plus Titans and LiteMats. That’s what we used in the theatre for the most part, with the existing spotlights and stuff, and it was that simple.”
Director of Photography Pat Scola in A Quiet Place: Day One from Paramount Pictures.
After the hectic pace of the last few years, Scola is currently taking some time off before he starts his next project, The Death Of Robin Hood, which will mark his third collaboration with Michael Sarnoski.
“Michael and I have a great way of collaborating, and despite all the stresses we were up against on A Quiet Place: Day One, I think we came out of it as better collaborators and filmmakers.
“Also, Michael is beyond a collaborator, he’s a dear friend too, and I’m really looking forward to our next production together and seeing him stretch his legs again. It’s a period piece, we’ll be shooting it abroad somewhere, and we’ll start it later this year. We have Hugh Jackman and Jody Comer attached, but at this point I can’t say too much more about it, except I’m very excited about it.”
