Creative Impact Award Honoree Hoyte van Hoytema Talks Crafting ‘Interstellar’ Ice Planet and ‘Oppenheimer’ Trinity Test
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Hoyte van Hoytema, who captured an atomic bomb test in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” and an ice planet in “Interstellar,” is known for intimate closeups and awe-inspiring vista shots while pushing boundaries with innovative technology.
The Oscar-nominated cinematographer, also behind the lens on films such as “Tenet,” “Dunkirk” and “Spectre,” will receive Variety’s Creative Impact in Cinematography at the 26th annual SCAD Savannah Film Festival.
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Van Hoytema, a go-to for Nolan and Jordan Peele, often works in-camera rather than green screen, which means he often needs to find new ways of telling the visual story. Alberta proved the perfect location for dying planet Earth in “Interstellar.”
“Chris wanted a muted palette,” van Hoytema recalls of the 2014 Nolan project. “We planted corn and put dust in the air, (which makes) the radiant green disappear. The low-hanging clouds and dramatic skies of Alberta were just so giving for us when we were shooting there.”
The ice planet scenes were shot in Iceland, “which is a desolate place,” he says, “with a big lagoon knee-deep for miles in all directions made of melting ice. The elements there are very harsh, basic and pure.
We brought a spaceship there and shot it practically in a place where you normally couldn’t shoot. It was very beautiful. We wanted to find ways to capture that on Imax.”
Some of Peele’s “Nope,” meanwhile, took place against dark skies, posing other challenges for van Hoytema, who explored his options with existing technology. “There’s no way to photograph this, this feeling of vastness, and grandeur of the sky, which was such a big part of our story,” he says. “We kind of immediately started thinking, ‘How can we portray exactly that feeling that we have when we were out there in the field?’”
The solution?
Peele and van Hoytema combined two cameras. One used infrared light with a narrow bandwidth, and a second one with 70mm film. The infrared captured how people’s eyes responded to darkness and light at nighttime, while the film camera picked up the color and grain information they wanted for the shot. The overlaid images created the memorable nighttime visuals seen in the film.
Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” starring Cillian Murphy as physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, chronicles how he developed the atomic bomb and the campaign by Lewis Strauss, a government official played by Robert Downey Jr., to discredit him. To distinguish the two narratives, van Hoytema and Nolan used black and white cinematography. However, such stock in 70mm did not exist, so the filmmakers went to Kodak to see if they could manufacture the stock. “They came out with test rolls for us to run through our camera,” van Hoytema says. “We had to re-engineer our cameras a little bit, and we had to remake our pressure plates and our backend lab work needed to be readjusted.”
Since this story was told from Oppenheimer’s perspective, van Hoytema made sure to capture intimate shots of him. “It was very much about what was going on inside his head, what he’s thinking and what we can read in his eyes,” the cinematographer explains.
“The Trinity test was something that came together and was cobbled from the miniatures of that science experiment, under the guidance of Chris and myself, that we pushed slowly in certain directions to serve specific functions in these sequences.”
The sequence took several weeks to pull off.
“The build-up was fragmented,” van Hoytema says. “There’s a lot of cross-cutting and people doing different things before it culminates.”
He notes that there was “this immense group of people from all over the country who put their heads together, and under the guidance of Oppenheimer lead this project into that final bang.”
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