BY IAIN BLAIR
Garrett O’Brien is a much in-demand cinematographer who loves a challenge and tackling a wide variety of projects, as evidenced by his current films;Bad Man (2025, dir. Michael Diliberti), a hardcore action-comedy, and Waltzing with Brando, a whimsical biopic about the enigmatic Hollywood legend. O’Brien, whose credits include the Hulu feature film Crush, Golden Revenge and Adolescence, says that Bad Man “feels the most unique out of anything I’ve done, like a cross between No Country For Old Men (2007, dirs. Joel & Ethan Coen, DP Sir Roger Deakins CBE BSC ASC) and Red Rocket (2021. dir. Sean Baker, DP Drew Daniels) that walks the tricky line between comedy and drama.” Set in a small Tennessee town, the story follows Deputy Sam Evans (Seann William Scott) as he teams up with a mysterious state narcotics agent (Rob Riggle) to tackle a local meth problem.
Shot in 25 days on a tight budget, the film also had “a very short prep of under a month,” he reports. “But director Michael Diliberti had done a lot of prep before we ever got on set, such as storyboarding the entire sequence for our big confrontation shootout sequence. I’ve got a lot of opinions about blocking and framing and shooting, but the work he had already done reminded me of the Coen brothers’ efficiency, and keeping the camera inside of coverage so you feel as if you’re in this moment live with them.”
“We shot it in Birmingham, Alabama, and we did 20 days of main production there and then we did two days of pickups – one with the actors in LA and then another one for inserts,” he says. He shot the film with Sony Venice 2 cameras, X-OCN codec, 2.39 aspect ratio, Super 35 capture at 5.6K resolution, with select shots on a Blackmagic Pocket 4K, and Cooke S4 lenses.
“I’m a big fan of the Sony Venice 2,” he notes. “I think it is the Goldilocks camera of the digital cinema industry, as it can do everything exceedingly well. The built-in ND is probably the best thing about it in terms of the time saved on set, as our shooting schedule was so short. And so for me, it’s all about finding ways to be efficient to get the amount of coverage that we needed to tell our story in an exciting way. I did the math, and over our 25-day shoot it saved us about six hours of swapping filters. At the same time, we wanted our film to look like an older ’90s film aesthetic – a clean 16mm and filtration that had a real point of view, and we did it all in post, to give us a lot of control.”
“We did a digital film emulation using 16mm Kodak 50D 5203 Color Negative film with a 2383 film print emulsion finish with the LUT, grain, halation and gate weave. For Digital Diffusion we used Blackmagic Pro mist which gave us a nice strong contrast that allowed us to give the film an older sort of aesthetic, but having a real punctuation to it. So, the combination of the built-in ND and then being able to shoot really low light for our big final shootout sequence and confrontation was our big whale, and to achieve that I knew that having a camera that has low light capabilities allowed us to use smaller units. And we wanted to do a hard back-lit moonlight there, which is something you don’t see as much now, but that’s also possible because of our incredible special effects coordinator, Dino Doane, who came out from LA to do that. He’s done big films like Constantine, and he was like, “You want wet downs? You want haze inside?” He was fearless about giving me what I needed.”
In terms of lights, units included the Aputure 1200D, Vortex 8, Cineo Q10, Astera Titan Tubes, Light mat 4 and Astera Pixel Bricks. All lighting rental was provided by Wavelength Rental house located in Atlanta. “They were exceptional in helping us out, and for the final sequence we used Cineos inside the house, Aputure 1200Ds in the condors for moonlight and Vortex 8s on the ground bouncing into 12x muslin for soft key light on talent,” he reports. “We had a full RGB LED lighting package, so everything was completely wireless, and all controllable. And that was another big aspect of how we were able to not only save time but save some money and have multiple lights serving multiple purposes.”
The multi-faceted O’Brien used one LUT for the entire film and created that himself. He also did the colour for the film and helped oversee all the VFX to ensure consistency between shooting and post-production for seamless visual storytelling. “Coordinating stuff with the VFX supervisor and helping with feedback on a shot before we even share it with the director makes his time more efficient,” he explains. “And I think it helps the effects artists as well because I can speak their language.”
For a DP to wear so many hats on a project is “extremely rare,” he admits, “and I don’t even do it for every project. It’s only certain sorts of projects, and a part of why it works is because I implement this look in prep. So, I work with the director and I show him examples of what kind of contrast we like or saturation. And since we were working from a film base I wanted to show Michael how we could film in a way that felt dramatic but still had a saturation to it that reminded people that it’s also a comedy. And so one of the things that I was really pleased with in production was how well – even with our limited prep time – production design and wardrobe dealt with shooting in the south in wintertime, and how well it all contributed to a palette that didn’t have any primaries. There are no greens or blues and the only reds and blues in the film are the American flags you see. Everything else is just brown and dead, which is exactly the sort of ideas that they’re talking about in the film – that this town is dead. And so it really sells that feeling of lacking colour, but at the same time allowed us to increase our saturation. So, the people and skin tones look vibrant and alive, giving the look this nice juxtaposition of what healthy can look like and what dead looks like in the same frame, and I love that.”
Directed by Bill Fishman and starring Billy Zane as Marlon Brando, Waltzing with Brando was shot on location in Tahiti in the sun-drenched South Pacific. While visually the opposite of the wintry setting in Bad Man, O’Brien shot it with the same camera and lens package. “The Sony Venice 2 can handle everything you throw at it – and can do it exceptionally well,” he stresses. “And again, we had time constraints, and I can save time as it has a nice big bucket for data and great low light capabilities, which was key because in Tahiti they do not have the sort of film infrastructure that we’re used to. So, with lighting, it’s all LED but it’s an extremely small lighting package that’s available, and my gaffer the day before shooting was building out the camera truck in the back of a van using 2x4s.”
“We did four weeks of prep there in Tahiti, then we shot for four weeks there,” he reports. “Then we did another two weeks of prep here in LA and then we shot here for nine days. I think the big difference in terms of shooting style for Waltzing with Brando compared to Bad Man is that we really wanted to use a lot of wide lens photography, especially in Tahiti to contrast with the scenes we shot in Los Angeles. So, we were putting that camera wider and closer and handheld, but in a way that’s very controlled and fun and alive and feeling like it has purpose to it. We did have a colourist for this project, and we really wanted to capture a feeling of the film being shot during that time, in the early ‘70s. Ultimately in the DI we went for a hybrid approach where it was slightly modern and slightly older, because we really wanted to pull out all the colours and the blues and greens which look muted sometimes in older films shot back then, as they didn’t quite have the saturation that we can achieve today.”
“And that was something that Bill, our director, really wanted to get across through the juxtaposition between Los Angeles, which has great warm, beautiful colours, and Tahiti when you’ve got that beautiful sun. It really blew my mind how colours render there, because you’re in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, so you have pure sunlight, and even the colour of the sky was bluer in the middle of the day. And then not only that, when your sun sets, the air is so clear that you have another sunset that happens below the horizon line. So, the sun shoots up these pink rays that are absolutely stunning. And there’s also the architecture there, where you have dark interiors, so even just spending a week there, I kept seeing silhouettes. It reminded me of a western in front of a desert landscape, but it’s the ocean this time, and we incorporated that a lot.”
Summing up, O’Brien states that, “I really enjoy doing very different kinds of projects. I certainly have my preferences of how to frame and how to look at things, but it’s all filtered through the lens of the story. And that’s why I love being a cinematographer and getting to jump from project to project and tell it from a new perspective. I come from documentaries and so for me it was always fascinating to inhabit somebody else’s world and see the world through their perspective and their lens.”
