Greig Fraser on the Crafty, Invisible Art of Cinematography

Zero Dark Thirty DP Greig Fraser talks extensively to The Credits about everything from shooting digital for the first time to storyboarding to the stealthy art of cinematography.

He says about his job, "You first and foremost need to be honest with the script because you don’t want to do anything to screw up the basic fundamentals of the story. You don’t want to create anything overly dramatic when you don’t need to, and you don’t want to create anything less dramatic than necessary, either. It’s about walking a very fine line of being true to the subject and source material, and also having enough confidence in what you’re doing to realize that if you don’t do anything fancy with the camera right now, it’s actually going to improve the story. Or, if there’s a time when you feel like you can be more dramatic with the camera, like during the scene taking down the character of the courier Faraj in the park, or the raid at the end—you add those little visual flourishes. When you’re making a film, from every department, from the cinematography to the editing to the production design, you’re just trying to bring out the underlying flavors of the original ingredients [the script], that’s the fine line that we walk as technicians. If it becomes all about us, then suddenly we’ve got a very fancy looking peacock, when instead what you really want to have is a very solid film that basically make its techniques invisible."

Read the full interview here.