The Prelim Podcast I Episode 6 — Joey Cicio

If you've watched a massive blockbuster over the last two decades, odds are Joey Cicio was the one framing the shot. 
From breaking into the industry and learning the craft under his mentor, the iconic master cinematographer Alan Daviau, ASC, to his groundbreaking work with Canon that triggered an industry-wide revolution in digital filmmaking with the 5D, Joey has seen it all.  He's operated on high profile major box-office hit films like Black Swan, Spider-Man 2 & 3, Iron Man 1 & 2, Die Hard,  Live Free or Die Hard and many more.  And his more recent camera operating work includes shows such as Dungeons and Dragons, Lioness and Fallout.  With an uparalleled, "Google-like" knowledge of cinematography equipment and film history, Joey joins us in the studio for this candid, insightful, and deeply endearing conversation that you won't want to miss.

Welcome a legend to the studio —Joey Cicio joins us for Episode 5 of The Prelim Podcast!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

And we're going to welcome everybody back to the prelim. Uh, thank you so much for all your feedback. We've been getting a lot of positive feedback from everybody, and it's going great. So please like, subscribe, and most importantly, share so we can bring you more great guests like we have today. Today we have Joey Sissio, DP camera operator for legendary career. Fantastic. We've been friends for almost 30 years, which is hard to believe. Yeah. Working business and not and crossing paths. And uh I just can't thank you enough for coming on to our show and doing this. This is this is wonderful for us. So Joey Sissio, welcome. Thank you.

SPEAKER_03 0:44

Thank you, Joe. To be here, Tony.

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Now now, what we usually do is uh, you know, we talk about your beginning, your career, and move forward. So tell us about your beginnings. And is it something you always wanted to do, get in the film business?

SPEAKER_03 0:57

You know, uh I had a little you know idea about it, but I was a journalism major and was thinking about um, you know, couldn't get a job in the sound department, obviously, but uh there, you know, um was thinking about just photojournalism that was so had an idea about photography and you know was didn't have my own dark room or anything, but I was wanting to pursue that. Those jobs super coveted, and uh there was only you know a few of them out there, and and I was you know trying to just get my hands on doing any type of storytelling and um worked, found um you know a small company, they were doing industrials and commercials, and they had a uh ARI 16BL as their film camera and an old ikigami, you know, uh broadcast camera. Here in LA or no, no, in in Alabama where I grew up. So just real quick, Joey, where do you come from? I I was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, and uh spent you know my first 20-something years there and lived in Dallas for a brief moment, but uh primarily Birmingham. And then you know, I was and like I had mentioned, and was doing a little bit of work uh after college, uh, you know, not journalism, but more doing commercials and and I had to learn real quick about loading film and you know, doing in in in a small market like that, you were placing lavalier mics on, you were you would do everything, you know, setting lights, help set lights, and then but if you were going to uh sort of stay in that core, you needed to learn how to load film and and oh, you gotta pull focus. And so all these things that I, you know, uh I had a couple of um folks that funny enough lived in in Alabama uh that were um uh focus pullers. And one was a guy named uh Louis Noto, and he was the focus puller on uh some movies way back. I want to say like The Deliverance, the Burt Reynolds movie, and uh and also um uh Brew Baker, which was uh a movie that was shot uh in the deep south. Um it was uh oh gosh, uh Robert Bradford and Yafet Koto and and was uh you know, great movies. So this guy knew how to pull focus, and he kind of just showed me a little bit about how that went. And so I I I learned enough not to get fired, but barely, you know, and then uh kept going on and on, and and ultimately um I knew if I was going to further the career, it was probably gonna have to go to New York or LA. New York made the most sense in being that that was a great market for also documentaries, which uh I was you know really interested in, so it was kind of you know part of that whole journalistic uh approach, uh, documentaries. But I just knew there were more projects that were coming into the region that I could get hired as, say, be camera focus buller or additional camera. And um I was meeting more people that were from LA than New York. So when it was time to make a move, it just made more sense to uh to move here. And that's been 35 years now.

SPEAKER_00 4:40

And is that where you uh had your mentor, or was your mentor uh a pretty famous one? Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.

SPEAKER_03 4:46

Well, I mean, I was super fortunate to meet some some, you know, as soon as I moved out here. I mean, I had like Louis Noto, the Sage's brothers, these were two guys that were uh, you know, just did all this amazing work back in the day. If you remember there was uh creature, uh what was it, creature from the Black Lagoon? They shot that, you know, because they lived in Birmingham, but they r worked throughout the region. So if anything that got shot in in the South, they were either hired, if not primary DPs, they were hired as uh additional photography. So they did in the heat of the night and all these seminal um classic movies that were shot there. And um so anyway, they were, you know, uh I had met those guys and they were helpful in getting me into the union. Chicago was the uh the regional office for even the Deep South. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 5:43

Did you work in Chicago? Not much.

SPEAKER_03 5:46

But that was your region.

SPEAKER_01 5:47

But that was the region. Did you get into the union in Chicago, or by the time you got here?

SPEAKER_03 5:52

No, no. I I by the time I got here, I was already in the Chicago um local. But back in the day, if you wanted to work nationwide, you had to be in the New York local, Chicago Middle America, and then the Hollywood local. So imagine you know, maintaining three local. But if you were busy, it was, you know, it wasn't it was doable. You had to. Yeah. Yeah, you had to do it. But I um you know, after moving here, uh again, you know, Tony, I was uh fortunate to meet uh folks that were sort of in their last approach on their in their careers, and guys like Dick Colleen. Dick was the camera operator uh on Blade Runner, the original Blade Runner, uh Little Big Man, did I mean incredible, super uh lovely guy, and great at and he just, you know, you're talking about passing it forward. He showed me things about the craft of camera operating that I would never would have learned any other way. And and you know, he he basically said, look, I'm telling you things that that were shown to me.

SPEAKER_00 7:05

It took years of experience and things like that.

SPEAKER_03 7:07

Exactly. So um, you know, that was and you'd meet not only camera, you know, cameramen and and um, you know, camera assistants and all these people that were just really uh important for anybody to kind of progress on. You'd meet great key grips and gaffers, and you understood and production designers and editors, directors, and you you know, early on I saw that, you know, that combination of like uh craft and uh understanding what was important, you know, really great directors often were really great editors. And so you see the the uh those two crafts combined when an editor when a director would say, you know what, I don't need that coverage here because I'm going to be he's already pre-edited the scene, and he doesn't want to get mired into overcovering a scene. And so that I saw early on was like, ah, director knew what they wanted. Knew exactly what they wanted, you know. And and you guys probably remember you would see, you know, like as a camera assistant, a director would say, Hey, on your camera, it could be A or B camera, put your hand in front of the map box for these lines. I mean, that's so he wanted to he or she wanted to edit in camera, did not want that ever to make it to uh the edit room. And that was super important that you saw that. Now to close it down. Yeah. I mean, you know, look, they pay they pay a lot of money for talent to be in front of camera. They want every frame you can give them, no matter what. And that that's understandable, but at the same time, it diminished the that precision.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

Now tell us a little more. Uh tell us Alan Davio, how he came into your life.

SPEAKER_03 9:11

Aaron Ross Powell Yeah. No, I I met Alan while still in college. There was uh I heard about this cinematographer who shot, you know, um some of Spielberg's early work, and he was going to be at a liberal arts college not too far away from where I went to school. Aaron Ross Powell As a teacher? Uh no, he was just doing a seminar on cinematography, and and so I decided to go over there. I was in Tuscaloosa at the University of Alabama and went over to um to Montevallo and uh and there Alan Davio was, who was arguably, you know, he had more knowledge of the business than just about anybody I'd ever met. I mean, he could probably tell you the film stocks that Greg Tolin used on, you know, uh any movie, you know, gone with the or um, you know, the um Wizard of Oz or whatnot. He he knew everything. And it was really fascinating to see someone who had that capacity, and plus uh just a brilliant cinematographer. And so I met him and you know, told him like, look, I was a journalism major, but you know, kind of semi-inter. I was taking some film courses, and who knows maybe if I ever make it out to LA. And he says, So, well, you know, here's my number. Give me a call if you ever do. And fast forward to uh a few years, I wound up moving there, and I called him and he says, Hey, I'm doing a commercial, please come down and visit. And very generous uh person and and introduced me to his focus puller and his um you know uh operator and and gaffer and all, and and I was there like, how the hell didn't this happen? You know, I just met this man just a few years ago and he gave me his number and you know and Alan didn't drive, right? So if you um uh you know growing up in LA and and never driving, uh that was a trick, right? But the trick was it's that if you were a loader on Alan's job, you were going to pick him up in the morning, take him to the lab and all, and it was great. And that person, I never did that, but I I met a couple of loaders that uh you know were on uh Davio projects, and they learned so much because they were sitting right next to this master during dailies. And if Alan didn't like what he was seeing, he would have them to reprint it. He did not want anybody to see the footage until it was right. Again, the idea of protecting the craft of cinematography, you know. Um with digital, the advent of digital, we get these incredible, you know, technologies that allow us, you know, 17, 18 stops of dynamic range. Um, your last brushstroke as ADP or cinematographer is, you know, lensing, you know, what lenses are you choosing, vintage, whatever it might be, but then you know, your lighting um with the correct LUTs. All these things were, you know, I think came out of the necessity of like all that was developed with the art of printing uh film, you know, at the lab. And and so to m to maintain that um that protection of the craft is still to this day, I think, something that, you know, hopefully is uh is you know a major part of like if anybody's trying to get into cinematography or into uh you know DPing that they understand that there's you know uh you can still do that, even though you're handing these massive dynamic range files that uh can be shifted in any direction, um, that there are some things that you can do to to kind of help protect the craft that that tells a story, you know. And uh Alan uh was all about that, which was um definitely a painter.

SPEAKER_00 13:30

Painter of light shaping it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 13:32

And he he he was practicing the craft as it was presented to him. So you know, he grew up here, he would visit every set, and he he understood, you know, lighting in a way that, you know, a little different now, right? And um there's a lot of post, you know, lighting, you know, CG lighting, and it has to be done that way on certain projects. But um but Alan was kind of that last line of defense, you know, that he made sure that uh a set was, you know, the lighting was designed really well.

SPEAKER_00 14:09

Did you work with him on was he just a mentor? Did you work, did he get you on?

SPEAKER_03 14:13

Yeah, no, I I did um I worked on Congo and uh and but I did the second unit. So Alan uh he was shooting the first unit, Mikhail Solomon, who was also a mentor of mine. Mikhail uh was a DP who shot uh torch song trilogies, uh The Abyss, Backdraft, Far and Away. I'd met Mikhail after that, but started pulling focus for him, and uh ultimately he uh moved me into operating. He said it's time, so get out there, and and which was great. So but I was uh doing the uh second unit for Congo, and that was uh lovely because we would work in parallel with uh main unit and the sets for Congo were amazing, and we were shooting all around LA, but also in Costa Rica, and um so I get you you got to see the process in a way that was um you know still done that way. But it's um you know Allen's approach was um all about precision, you know, and that was great to see that.

SPEAKER_01 15:22

I hate to jump around, but what what do you think your big break was?

SPEAKER_03 15:28

I d you know, I I I don't I don't know if uh I never really looked like you know as a big big break. I mean I still en enjoyed doing what I'm doing, still thinking like, well, you know, the industry is changing so dramatically now there's maybe some possibilities that um you know are presented to all of us that where we can um you know go down different paths as storytellers and we have a pr you know all of us here have pretty pretty solid uh backgrounds and camera that helps in a big way. But um, you know, I think meeting Jonathan Taylor uh was that was I had a um also a mentor uh guy named David Diano, and David sadly passed away too uh way too early. But David uh, you know, I had met way back on a TV series, it was a Burt Reynolds series called uh B.L. Stryker. Uh Billy Fraker was directed the pilot. David was Billy's uh operator. Ultimately uh he said, Hey, when you get back to LA, uh let's get together, and we did. And uh David was operating second unit on uh Tim Burton's um Planet of the Apes, the one with Wahlberg. And David left to go start another project, so he brought me in and I that's how you and that's how I connected up with Louie and uh DeMarco Kevin Potter and Scotty Whitbread. But uh but yeah, um with uh with Jonathan, it's hard to believe, but that from that point forward, I think the um we did twenty seven movies and so it was this lovely family, you know. We spend more time on the film sets than we do with our family sometimes, and so uh we developed into this incredible family.

SPEAKER_00 17:38

Going around the world.

SPEAKER_03 17:39

Yeah, went around the world a few times, and uh um and you develop a shorthand and you develop understanding of ever you know, we're humans, we're we all have imperfections, and uh Jonathan uh understood he he had such a great um you know background and he he grew up in the uh the British system, which was solid. They'd always made great, great movies. I think his dad was an editor for David Lean, so he already had, again, the knowledge of uh like great directors, they know exactly what they need.

SPEAKER_00 18:21

And Jonathan was all about And he worked with some big time directors. Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. Kubrick, he was his first AC.

SPEAKER_03 18:28

Yeah, uh Jonathan pulled focus on the full metal jacket. And I think Jonathan was a focus puller on the first alien, the Ridley Scott Alien, uh way back. And so uh so yeah, JT uh he had skills. And uh but you would never the big lesson with Jonathan was he never um presented himself as that. He was just super generous, yeah, super sweet uh man and and allowed everybody to grow because he I think came from a system that um I'm gonna have to fix this. Uh he came from a system that was all about that generosity. And and you can you never know w who you're working next to, you know, people who have this potential. But if it's hammered down, you know, like this is a rigid system, and you had to have your your act together with film. You know, you didn't want uh a bad day on a, you know, with filming could be a horrible day, you know. The dark room was the last place that you didn't want the loader to have any problems there, especially when you're dealing with four or five film stocks, and there was just had to have everything dialed in. So discipline was was necessary, but I think Jonathan's approach was when it was time to film, we had rehearsed, we everybody knew their mission. And take one often was the take. You know, take two, we'd just do it just for and a great sense of humor.

SPEAKER_00 20:13

Even when mistakes did happen, some of those lines he had were was amazing. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:20

I got to meet him later on, and he was very nice, very generous. We got to go to dinner with him and Louie and Tony and Potter.

SPEAKER_00 20:29

Yeah, another another fantastic DP with that's a great character and kind and giving. Yeah. Because you there's also others that were not, and we you you were fortunate enough to work with some really great, talented DPs.

SPEAKER_03 20:45

Yeah. I mean, you know, you have to work with everyone, and you know, sometimes uh you know the head of the whole technical crafts, you know, the cinematographer, the DP, under enormous pressure and and maybe not able to handle that as eloquently as say others, but you know, you it's good to work with everyone because you you see that uh a talented cinematographer brings a lot to the story, and they may be a little shy or short on their social graces, but but at the same time, you know, the the beauty of the industry is no matter how long the project will go on, it it's done after a matter of months, right?

SPEAKER_00 21:36

So um you have to you know what were what were some of your favorite JT movies that you worked with? Um Because some they were big. They weren't.

SPEAKER_03 21:47

You know, we did um we did um you know Spider Man two and three. That was uh when you know Marvel they had the whole IP that they're in a Intellectual property was super valuable, valuable enough that, you know, Disney decided to spend a lot of money for all that. But we did Spider-Man 2 and 3. Those were seminal projects of using every format. I mean, we, of course, uh 35mm 4Perv, I think we had some anamorphic, spherical, VistaVision, you know, ILM being the VFX vendor for Spider-Man 2. Um we were going to use VistaVision for anything that was going to have to go through compositing and whatnot. And there were so many shots that were all and so we wound up using VistaVision cameras in a way that And for people that don't know what that is, will you explain what that is? Yeah, it was a process that I think Paramount started. Um they needed, you know, widescreen. Uh you either had the choice of going to anamorphic with four-perf vertical, you know, PANAVision, anamorphics, and and there was you know a bunch of other systems out there, or you could turn the film sideways, 35 millimeter, and increase your target area by another four-perf, so it was eight perf. Um, 35 millimeter, and that widescreen rectangle could fit uh and use spherical lenses. So, you know, uh lots of movies back in the day were shot in VistaVision, which is pretty amazing. Uh you know, back in the 60s, I think it was developed uh actually earlier than that. But um fast forward, those cameras were quite quite big. IMAX is also a horizontal, you know, instead of pulling down, it's you know pulling sideways. So um kind of developed out of that that same idea that you could target on uh with IMAX 65 millimeter. But uh with VistaDivision you had small lenses that were essentially built for um you know 35 millimeter still photography, and then you could pull focus with them, so you motorized it or put a you know follow focus system on them. Uh there was a guy named Greg Beaumont who took VistaVision movements, rehoused them. I think we were using Aerie 3 mags. There was a few Airy um 3,000 millimeters or 1,000 uh foot mags that we could use, but uh primarily it was like the 400-foot loads. So you only had at eight perfs at 24 frames, you only had two minutes of film. So you had to be really uh, you know, uh pay attention to what you know each take uh would require. And then uh sometimes you had you would burn 90-something feet, you have have to or uh 150 feet or whatever it was, and you're like, ah, let's just reload and let's not risk it because you could always, oh let's go back, back it up, let's go again, and then suddenly you're all kinds of cameras. Yeah, yeah. So we had all those uh different formats. And uh but yeah, so the the early Spider-Man's and then we kind of transitioned right into Iron Man one and two. And uh but there were so many other, you know, Die Hard was uh a great movie. These were like action movies that we were using you know these new tools. I did uh Tokyo Drift, the ARM car concept came out, and that's how initially we were doing post and beam with like um Mitsubishi Evo and tracking with the uh with the drift cars. And uh suddenly, you know, we had an arm car and Libra heads chasing it, and now we we could get you know get some height, swoop down, do all these lovely uh ballet moves uh that were not possible. And so that was really um that was important to be around at that time because um in a blink you would see a new piece of gear. The cameras stayed the same, but new ways to move the cameras. And that was um that was really uh uh amazing to see these people working really hard to do the engineering right. And the safety that suddenly, instead of having grips swinging, you know, um technocranes on the back of an insert car, you could actually make a very precise move safely in the confines of a you know a Porsche Cayenne or or whatever, you know.

SPEAKER_00 26:45

But uh with air conditioning.

SPEAKER_01 26:47

With air conditioning in the Trevor Burrus, now Joey, I got a question for you. You know, you being one of the pioneers of the 5D as well for Iron Man, please tell us about that.

SPEAKER_03 26:57

Aaron Ross Powell Yeah. Well, we it uh that came out of like the usual you know, the mother of invention is a necessity. I mean, Canon made this 5D, you couldn't manually control exposure, there was, you know, they they didn't even make it for any kind of movie use. It was, I think the AP and the U.S. Army uh guaranteed Canon that if they could make a still camera that could also do video with a flip of the switch, they would buy like many thousands of uh these camera bodies. And yeah, so we uh destroyed a few cameras on Iron Man One. You know, sad to see a Aton A minima get run over by an M1 tank, and you lose the camera, the lens, and the film is all splayed out all over the place. It's like, well, um you do that a couple of times, and it's it's like, well, let's just not try that again. And um here comes the 5D. There was um no way to really lock it in on exposure, which was a huge problem. I'd I went by Sammy's camera here in LA and met uh a guy who's sort of worked for Canon. I think his name was Mike Nadler, who put me in contact with her Pro Products uh division guy, a guy named Jung Jinan. And Jung uh met me, you know, out. I had some carmount stuff, suction cups, and just asked, look, can we do um some just running footage? I mean, like go into the Figaro tunnel, um Second Street tunnel, or we can just see what what's going on with this uh exposure and could we potentially lock it in? And and Jung was gracious enough to meet me and we went out and did some uh um you know some test footage. Um took it to Josh Haney over at I think that was um uh e film, and they were going to do the uh digital intermediate for for Iron Man 2. And Josh uh basically we projected it in even though it wasn't 4K at that you know time um all Canon did was pixel skip to get to a 1920 by 1080, even though you were using the full sensor, which was over 5K, they didn't have a way to record that. The media wasn't fast enough, the processing going from analog to digital, so but HD was fine, and that was going to work for the AP and Army. How would it work for you know doing uh a show like Iron Man? And so um I told Jonathan what I was doing, and I said, you know, it might be a good solution. I tested just you know running it at at that time it would only do 2997. It couldn't even do 24 frames. But um so Jonathan said, hey, maybe it's worth a try. And uh Jung was talking to his uh people at Canon, and uh I guess the big carrot on the stick was Iron Man 2, and and they and Jung said, look, the possibility of them doing a firmware that would help you lock in exposure would be you know probably non-existent. And I said, like, well, at least we tried, you know. It did look pretty good, projected, but you know, as soon as you got into the tunnel, you would see the exposure change and got out, and so it was just couldn't tolerate that, you know. And um and then a week or so goes by and uh he calls, he said, so um let me ask you, do you think all the guys involved with this would sign an NDA? And I said, I'm sure they would. He says, good, because uh there's a guy coming in from Japan with the firmware. And it's like, holy macro. So we uh Maddie, you know, Livitique and uh um Dennis Stewart, who was the executive producer, and uh Jonathan and myself, and everybody signed all the people to see. Yeah, we just signed NDAs. You know, the movie was gonna start in, I think, a couple of months. I had a commercial I was shooting, and we were going down to Chile of all places, and there was this underwater sequence that we needed to do, and so I immediately went, you know, I asked John, look, can I take one with me? And he said, I don't want to know. But I said, I'm gonna sleep with the thing, and you know, and so uh I took it with me, bought an underwater housing for the 5D, and we were shooting these, you know, four-foot-long trout in this amazing river down um in gosh, where were we? Um it was way near Patagonia, and it was stunning. And so we were getting this incredible underwater footage with it. The local camera assistant, he kept saying, like, are you able to you know uh manually control? And I said, No, no, we just figured out a way to hack a little bit. You have to go in, and I was like trying to, you know, and this guy figured out that like something's different different about this camera document. But uh got back to LA and we started tooling up, and we were using it not for every shot, but you know, the first shot was pretty impressive. It was when we uh What was that shot? It was uh well, actually we took it to Monaco and Yan Yannick Sears, who was the VFX supervisor, said, look, it it would save us a ton of uh time and film that we had visit vision cameras front and back on a uh high-speed camera platform that was going through the we needed plates for the whole track. Uh the side views, you know, right, left, left, right, uh, we just put the five D's there. And he said that that was perfect because it's all a blur, and they used that for that whole, you know, Monaco sequence sequence where Mickey Rourke's character with the bull whip snapping F1 cars in half and all. But uh the first shot that we really saw the the importance of you know this little camera was uh we attached one to one of the cars that was gonna break in half and do somersaults down you know down what was meant to be the swimming pool area of Monaco. That was downy. So basically that was all green screen and and it worked, it survived it. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 33:37

Well you built a a little uh crash cam for it. You put it in a pelican case. Yeah, it was a pelican case and uh but it was also the one shot with in his helmet, the PLA.

SPEAKER_03 33:46

We put it in the helmet, really difficult to put an A minima or any film camera in these positions. So it it proved its worth and the impact it was taking. It was it well, it was built to for AP photography, like you dropped, you know, those cameras were weatherized, and you know, you could not take them underwater, but if you dropped it into a stream, you could pull it out, still firing it, it could survive that. So so they built it for torture. We tried to protect them as much as we could, and we never destroyed one. The the proof was in that pudding, in the fact that the smaller the imager, or the smaller the box, the less likely it could get hit. And so then you could bury it into vehicles and never know it was there, which was uh important. So I I I don't know if the 5D forced, because remember that was a mirrored SLR, you know, a DSLR, the mirrorless um you know, technology was coming. You know, eventually you don't need a mirror, you just need a shutter. You know, so like a FX3, you have a shutter, you know, like the sensor plane shutter, but no mirror, and it's even smaller, so you got rid of all the optics.

SPEAKER_00 35:08

One of the cool things too that you got to do is you gotta film the race. Yeah. Which with with the five D's. Which everybody thought you guys were taking stills. Yeah, we were stealing the shots. Yeah. It's crazy, right?

SPEAKER_03 35:23

The the logic was that we you know, even though they didn't particularly use any of that Formula One race, because in the story that was like, you know, every other year at Monaco, there you have people who own these these older F1 cars and they just drive and they're racing, but they're not, you know, not at that kind of speed. And um, that year that we were at Monaco, it didn't time out. So that's why they had to CG a lot of those race for the movie, even though we were shooting a lot of the practical elements. Um the footage that Kevin Potter and I, we had, you know, we were both roaming around the the um the track during the race.

SPEAKER_00 36:11

A corner, right? Oh yeah, we were everywhere.

SPEAKER_03 36:13

And and we had we were wearing these special badges from the uh automobile club of of Monte Carlo. And so Prince Albert, you know, he I think he came down to the set, but we wherever we you know uh we had the badge, you could go just about anywhere on the track except the tunnel, which was forbidden because of fire safety, and you couldn't cross the track, but just about anywhere else, which was ridiculous. And so here we were getting actual footage which helped ILM get the blur value of for their CG elements that they were gonna have to build for the movie. So it was all useful, but it was you know amazing that they thought we were shooting stills and we were actually shooting, you know.

SPEAKER_01 36:59

Now, just just to move on, I got a question because one of my favorite things I see on Instagram is the viral video of you on Black Swan with Natalie Portman, you know, and you know, you got you know a shout-out. Yeah. Shout out from Natalie at the Oscars.

SPEAKER_00 37:17

Oh man.

SPEAKER_01 37:18

Yeah, yeah. So tell us about that. That's just so so awesome.

SPEAKER_00 37:21

Not many people get not many crew members get a shout-out in an acceptance speech.

SPEAKER_03 37:29

Uh a long time, you know, to, you know, that was Natalie doing a lot of her own work, uh, and it was amazing. So I just want to make sure, you know, like I I went into training before I showed up because I last thing I want, you know, Maddie uh Libatique asked me to operate the show, and and it was a big honor to do that. And it was great that Maddie um, you know, uh entrusted me to to kind of put the camera on the shoulder and make sure that we were getting the story the best we can. And and uh so I was on the mountain bike every day nearly before before showing up. So I just wanted to make sure that like, well, this guy can't keep up with the you know, with the routine, and and um and that was uh, you know, I I really, you know, Darren Aronovsky, the director, he really studied the art form of dance, and you know, he had the Russian classical form of dance, the French, and then of course the New York uh Homri Balanchine. Uh so he became a student of it, and you know, he had given me a few DVDs to watch um Swan Lake in all of its different iterations, Russian, French, and then the American version. And and then he had a good plan as to where the camera should be for those sequences because they would have to almost match move. Um there was uh I wish I could remember John the pianist for that. That was never just playback. That was a live, you know, pianist who was playing all those elements because this guy was, you know, of course, concert level player. So if anybody was falling behind, he could retard, or if anybody was getting ahead, he could match that. And that was the saving grace. So, you know, if I was a little ahead of schedule, or if Natalie or or the whole Conga line, uh you could it all felt felt right because the music which was anchoring all the the movement of camera of the dancers was really held in place by this uh this really you know amazing uh Now did you guys use the 5D on a subway shot? We we used the the 1DX at that time, then it migrated the manual control from Iron Man. Uh you know, Canon saw the value of uh potentially uh giving it to the higher-end uh cameras. So the 1D C, I believe, C for Cinema, it was uh, or maybe it was in 1DX. But we took that. Um and the uh shots that were in the subway that's not a set, that's a working subway. And we so we got at Penn Station, we went out to uh towards Queens on the Jamaica line. And we did just two round trips and shot that whole sequence of Natalie and Mila Kunis and all that all that uh footage was done with uh the cannon. And uh we had no focus bowlers, so it was like, you know, just having to make sure that everything was working well and Natalie uh uh was lit. Maddie had a brick light he was lighting, and um I think uh sound, everything was we were hooked in on time codes, so very minimal. It was totally gorilla and stole that whole thing. So if you see another train moving, that is, you know, that was amazing. If we had had the 416, which is possibly the best handheld camera ever made, the RA416, had we had it on the train, we would have been shut down immediately because MTA was always constantly walking through and checking tickets and all that kind of stuff. So I had the camera strapped around my neck and like look like a tourist. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:41

Um so yeah, that was another still camera people didn't know like they do now.

SPEAKER_03 41:46

Yeah, they just look like a still camera and stuff. I had no clue.

SPEAKER_00 41:50

So in your experience, because you've done it kind of all, you've done second units and first units, what's your preference?

SPEAKER_03 41:56

I mean, each one, you know, as you know, I mean, you know, you guys have worked on both, and you know, the first unit um storytelling is you know, it's crucial. If it's you know, for a movie like um um Black Swan, there is no second unit. You know, you're even though there's action, but there's you know, there's no car crashing, there's none of that. And so um that's a lovely place to be for you know a camera team. Um Iron Man 2, second unit. While we were in Monaco, the main unit was in Downey. So I mean I was there, yeah. Second unit was you know, um so yeah, second unit sometimes uh can be uh a lot of fun, you know.

SPEAKER_00 42:45

A lot of fun, but uh great danger as well. You've probably seen some pretty bad accidents on the set.

SPEAKER_03 42:51

Things can go, you know, go haywire real quick. I mean, you you get some really great uh teams, special effects, stunts, everybody's trying to make sure that they've removed all the unknowns as much as they can. There's still some things can go uh you know go off the mark, but for the most part, you know, we've been lucky in that uh very few accidents, uh maybe things that we knew might you know go um off the mark, so we'd always put a um put a remote head, put some, you know, whatever, but just don't have a human there. You know, we uh with the um with the Prestons or with um wireless focus, it was always great to get the camera assistant away from the camera. Sometimes you had to just operate uh the thing now with the you know clever uh you know tools like a Libra head that started to evolve and then other stuff and even the DGI stuff. Uh you

SPEAKER_00 44:03

But even even when all that is accounted for safety and all that on I I think it was Iron Man 2, you got taken out by a cable.

SPEAKER_03 44:10

Well in almost a safety zone. It was. And and uh we you know had I had another 200 feet of remote cable, I would have been out of that zone. I made sure that there was plenty of cars, you know, indie cars that could block it, but uh the cable broke on flipping the Audi on Iron Man one. Luckily it didn't go airborne because it could have hit the video village. And there was, you know, Jonathan and uh, you know, um gosh, there was a handful of people in there that uh they would never had seen what was coming, you know. So luckily it hit the cars, it slowed it down, it did brush me, scared me more than anything. But uh yeah, and uh the special effects team, I think from that point onward, um Dan Suduk, who's one of the world's best, he said we'll never use metal cable any longer. And that was a you know a wise choice. Now they use Spectra or Techline. So if it does snap, it lays down, it doesn't recoil at 200 and something miles an hour with with a certain amount of mass, and that can, you know, it's a so I don't even know if they use metal cable any longer.

SPEAKER_00 45:27

Yeah, remember in Spider-Man 3 in Cleveland, it snapped and just ripped apart, I don't know, 20 some cars. Yeah, totally and opened them. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, for sure. That was that was crazy.

SPEAKER_01 45:39

Now switching up a little bit, let's uh let's talk about Joey. What do you think about the changes in Hollywood, the changes in filmmaking that we're seeing right now in the present time?

SPEAKER_03 45:51

Yeah. Changing I mean, I I think it's probably very predictable. You know, it's not like uh the music industry, you know, they had resisted the idea of you know streaming, yeah. Streaming, digitizing their library. You know, it was like they thought of uh what was it, Napster, Sean Fan, you know, they came came with the idea that like, look, you could take your library and stream it. Record labels thought, yeah, but that's gonna just uh uh create a piracy culture. You know, everybody's gonna steal. Which they did. Which they did. But it was almost out of they forced it. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Yeah. But what they didn't understand was you know 128-bit encryption or or beyond. It was like, look, just make it, you know, like uh 15 cents a download or a quarter a download. And they would you would create a culture of like, yeah, I see value in this and I will just pay for it. And um now it's a streaming model that naturally evolved, but there was resistance. Uh Netflix, by all rights, there shouldn't even be a Netflix because the the studios should have understood that, like, hey, look, streaming is ultimately where we'll distribute content. Um COVID kind of forced it, and um you couldn't go to the cinema, you couldn't go to the theater to watch a movie for for a moment, and so uh Netflix was there to capture that that you know um audience that was kind of held hostage by a pandemic. So the irony is that you know the studios are going through all this um you know upheaval.

SPEAKER_00 47:50

And it seems like they're trying to recapture that though now with AI platform.

SPEAKER_03 47:56

Yeah, I mean, you know, AI is um something as super powerful. We don't know who I mean, any week, is it Nano Banana, is it Higgsfield, is it there are all these tools that are developing? And uh C Dance, you know, these are as I see why someone, you know, who's pretty gifted with a computer could go out and if you know how to, you know, understand how to prompt, uh do some elegant prompting, you can create some really amazing visuals from it. How does how does you know Hollywood or how does do uh technicians and artists and people in the uh in the crafts take this incredible tool and use it and utilize it? You know, it's like a film I just recently uh worked on. Stunts and VFX were starting to use uh AI tools as a pre-vis and even on set taking shots or taking just an iPhone shot to say, here's a really great place that we can put a camera and here's where we'd end up, and just go right on to uh you know VO or nano banana and and then show the shot, and it's like perfect. So that was like a mid-vis concept. We're like we're in the middle of shooting, and that's uh really powerful to be able to do that. Not replacing actors, not replacing studs. We're we're just simply we took it to use uh a more precise way to uh you know to get a shot. And so uh that's that's useful. And VFX obviously, who knows? Disney just got no one knows exactly what's gonna happen with VFX.

SPEAKER_01 49:49

The one thing I love about you, Joey, is that you're always on the cutting edge of stuff. You know, when we talk about AI, you know, I I I feel that back in the days, you know, at least when I got into the business, seeing the transition from film to HD, there was a lot of people that were like, no, no, H D, blah, blah, blah. And like listening to you, it's just awesome to hear that it's going to be an aid for filmmaking. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 50:16

Yeah. I think that's the way you have to look at it because the AI cannot, and not yet, but um AI is not creating these classic stories. It it may do it. Once we get into a generative AI domain, uh I you know, I don't think anybody really knows. I mean, these this is the only machine ever created by humans that can teach itself. Right? And I've been experimenting with um Google has this, you know, this pilot project that uh you know met this person who's a project director for it randomly and said, hey, you know, uh their approach is the people that need to maybe understand more about AI than anyone are the people who make films and do commercials and all these things that where AI could be utilized. Everybody thinks that, well, it's the death of all the crafts now, because now you can do a movie and agree. I don't know if that's upon us yet. I mean it's it's happening. There and you've got some directors who are trying to do some. I think uh Darren Aronofsky did like this day in 1776 shows, you know, a moment, all AI generated. And it's good, you know, but i is that where it's all going? I d I don't think so. Um maybe um but it's good that directors, creators that have you know cut their teeth on film and digital and all the things that have been evolving. Um I think that like in AI, if you want to tell, it's so clever, and you're you're actually not coding it, you are allowing it to learn. So if you tell it that give it the feel of uh of anamorphic B series, the same lenses that say we're worked on uh the first Blade Runner, and you're creating, and it could be whatever it might be, it's not a futuristic, you know, dystopian uh uh style story, it's gonna reach out and figure out what in the internet was shot with the B series and give that patina to the footage that you're about to create. That is that's crazy powerful. And and it's learning, and it's learning, and it's learning. So this project that um um I'm involved with, it's more conversational, so you can talk to the to the tool, and the next thing you know, it's outputting something. I haven't been using it to really create never before seen uh footage, just using it as a more of an editorial compositing tool for a story that's already been written. But it's really amazing what it can do. The ultimate intent is to go out and film this, but we're using it as a pre-vising, mid-vising tool.

SPEAKER_00 53:39

And so But in the future, do you see that even necessary to go out and film something that it's already produced?

SPEAKER_03 53:46

I think that's maybe there will be some technology that that you can go and just watch an AI version of an SC Notre Dame game in a way that you've never seen it before. I don't know if I want to see it. You know, I do I'd rather watch humans do what they d do. But I I at the same time, I you know, I I can't say that somebody might say, no, I'd rather see the human interaction, the emotion. Yeah, I I think that that is AI is only getting better and learning more. You know, it might get to the point where it's totally undetectable. I still feel like I can detect something. It's in that first blink. It's like this is not something's not quite right about this. And I think that that's usually our that in that blink is you're pretty correct in what you're you think you're seeing. It might get to the point where it's so good. It's improving rapidly. Right. It's amazing. And it's teaching itself. And that's the that's where that's what I was saying, that it's the only tool, it's the only machine that has been created that you come back tomorrow. And it's said like, well, I had to create a new plug-in to kind of incorporate um, you know, what you requested. And so that's a really interesting place w where we are. And and to tell stories with this, I'm not sure if anybody knows ultimately where it will land or if it will ever land. You know, it would just continue on and on. And maybe it will just surpass.

SPEAKER_00 55:35

Do you see it as a disruption or as an aid to film filmmakers?

SPEAKER_03 55:39

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr. I mean right now I I can only look at it as an aid. You know. The power is that you know will the studios take it to make uh are we about to see and we still have film, like shows like Fallout and Cinners were shot in IMAX film and all the you know all these projects that are shot in film, so we have that, we have d digital technologies that help edit and composite, and now we have AI. We should be in some kind of a golden era of filmmaking. But if algorithms are used to tell Paramount or Warner or Disney or whatever where the target audience will be next year or when they or next month, uh you know, I I don't know if if uh if it's gonna help that, because that's where things are currently anyway, that the, you know, to market a film, you gotta try to make as much money as you can. And and in that, maybe the story is I don't want to say secondary, but they're spending a lot of money to build out uh a movie like that. And so you want to um the lowest hanging fruit, the algorithm is there to find, or algorithms are there to find that. With AI, can you attain both? Can you still make this incredible seminal piece of filmmaking and also reach the a broad audience, but also make what could be a classic movie? I that's yet to be seen. So we'll we'll see.

SPEAKER_01 57:32

Now pushing on. Joey, what's your advice uh for filmmakers coming into the business? What what's your advice to getting into the business?

SPEAKER_03 57:41

Yeah, I d you know, uh all those people that that were mentors of mine probably dealt with, you know, pretty hellish things that they had seen and whatnot, you know, way back in the day. There were people sleeping on stages, you know, it was horrible, you know, and unions weren't, you know, weren't even in consistent. You know, so the so you you can't tell me that the industry wasn't throwing some really um horrible things at crews and even you know they were supplying them with drugs. Exactly. All that stuff was so any one of those people could have told me, run. Get as far away from the industry. I you know, I I don't think that's a good thing to for me to tell anybody. But definitely you should have your eyes wide open about where the industry is going. Right now, um uh if the industry is going overseas, if uh studios are trying to go overseas uh to save money, you know, whether it's Europe, North Africa, or what have you, um they're going there to to save money. And they're a great crews wherever you go now.

SPEAKER_00 59:00

Aaron Ross Powell Where before, as we talked about earlier, you went overseas many, many times, but to do the look. And not it wasn't about saving money per well, maybe some of it, but it was also location-wise.

SPEAKER_03 59:12

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 59:14

And now the digital camera has kind of opened the doorway for crews around the world. As you said, the the latitude of stops, the errors that can happen and correct it in post. It's not like it used to be in film.

SPEAKER_03 59:29

Right, right. I think that, you know, um mummy four is being shot currently or prepping for uh um, you know, I think Morocco. They'll shoot the majority of it there. And maybe if they have some stage work, then maybe they'll do uh the stage work in London. I'm not sure. But um but and there are great crews in Morocco. There's in it makes sense that they would go there. You've got the vast you know, Sahara look, you've got the Atlas Mount, you've got everything you need there. Plus, you you've got some really talented, uh experienced uh camera teams, lighting, whatnot. They'll take the core teams, most likely out of the U.K. uh. No different than when if we went to China for Mummy 3 or Canada, China, and you take the core team because that's the common uh DNA for the whole project. But uh but now it's more of a money decision because for every American that you have on a an American studio movie, you have to pay the fringes, where when you go to out of the UK, you don't have to pay uh the health and welfare, you maybe rates are similar, but you know, just that alone um starts to become a cost to have that that the studio um has to deal with. On the other hand, though, Jonah Nolan is doing fallout uh here in LA, and the story takes place in LA. He's got fairly young kids, he wants to roll out of bed and you know, and be there with his family, and so he he showed Amazon, that's the studio, the sense to you know, take advantage of the film incentives that California offers. If California took the the uh cap off the uh off the incentives for a few years, uh it'd be really interesting to see, would it bring back the hundred, two hundred million dollar movies? Uh I don't even know if if 200 million or 150 million dollar movies are gonna exist in 10 years. You know, we're we're in a really interesting time. I don't want to say it's the death of the industry as we know it, but you know, i it's challenging. So I think that anybody coming into the industry that wants to have a career. Have a career, I think I would look at uh uh where things are going in the digital distribution world. One of the most powerful folks that is in media right now is what, Mr. Beast. He bought 20-something Airy, brand new Airy cameras. That guy has, you know, if uh uh the amount of subscribers, a half a billion? That's crazy. You know, what filmmaker has that kind of penetration into a global enterprise? So will Hollywood style storytelling migrate towards that? You know, we talk about verticals and you know, or uh you know, it's everything you have to know everything. I think the audience now is this. Yeah, exactly. They're scrolling through you know hours of content, maybe not learning one thing, but you know, it's just I don't know how long that's gonna last. That's it. I I don't know. That's good with that.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:22

Well guys, I think well before we wrap it up, we gotta go do what's your favorite word on set.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:29

Wow. I you know that's a good um I I you know I have to say action because um you know that's when everybody is you know performs. Everybody, you know, so your turn.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:44

Um no, my least favorite word on set. What's your least favorite word? Um, I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:52

There's there's a lot of them.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:56

Well, I mean, you're you can say anything because it's not broadcast TV.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:01

Yeah, no, no, I I I I don't know if there's you got me on that. I'm sorry, I'd I should I should Hot Dogs at Crafty or Lasagna for lunch. Yeah, Marx sequence. Uh yeah, the round wheels of death are are arriving soon, which are pizzas, so knowing that you're into your 14th hour and you know, so it yeah. I mean, yeah. We're going into grace. I I hate that really. I mean, it's like, hey, look, you know, the the grace period is is that we know we're gonna bump into lunch.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:40

And lunch is getting colder.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:41

And lunch is getting colder, and 30 minutes later we're into 30 minutes of meal penalty, and we just keep on plowing and you know cold chicken. Yeah. Tony Scott removed that equation. He said, guys, we're just gonna go 10 hours and but we'll have like no boo serving sushi to everyone. Or you know, it was just uh he just got rid of the the whole French hour thing was kind of nice, but he tried to limit the amount of hours.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:07

Aaron Powell Now before we wrap it up, I mean, in your career, what are some of your favorite projects that you worked on, not just with JT, but overall, because your resume is amazing.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:17

Well there you know, of course, um you know, Black Swan was fantastic. I you know, we talked earlier about uh Field of Dreams. Oh, yeah. That was a little non-union movie that I had just moved here to LA. Uh a friend that who was a camera assistant got called to go and do some extra camera, and he said, Look, it's nonunion, I really don't want to do it, but are you interested? And I said, Sure, you know, and so I jumped on a plane heading to, you know, Dubuque, Iowa, and out in the middle of this, you know, cornfield. I actually there was a drought going on that summer, I think that was in eighty eight, I believe. So the Mississippi River. Was like 25 feet below normal barges were on sandbars. It was horrible. The only green corn in the area was right around the farmhouse. And the small little movie, and you know, working with uh we used to go to a little, you know, club on the east uh Dubuque side of the Mississippi and Ray Leota and all, you know, just a bunch of young kids, all of us were super young, and and um making this a little baseball movie.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:31

And when when you were working on that, did you get a sense that it was gonna be something or it just was another project?

SPEAKER_03 1:06:38

No, you had to hope, you know, like look, it was a you know, it was a contemporary piece, but then you had this, you know, the 1920, was it the uh the White Sox of 1920 that come out of the corporate? It was something kind of magical about it. And Phil Alden Robinson, the director, was uh just such a lovely guy. I think uh John Linley was the DP, great small little movie, right? But a great team of of crew and cast and uh um yeah, so I think everybody knew there was something kind of special, but no one knew it was going to you know do what it did. But um I mean I I love that movie.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:20

Like you said, it's magical.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:21

Yeah, it was you know we've only touched the surface on your career, Joey, and the hour went by so quick. We're gonna have to have you back. We have so many more stories, so many you know, we never even dove into whether you prefer f firsting or operating or the excitement of when they do say action as an operator. Or I remember the days where when digital came out, you used to complain so much, just get me an eyepiece.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:48

It was uh yeah, it was just like you know, a tool that could not be used, you know. But I would they uh they evolved and uh yeah, but it was yeah, especially after using a 416 or a 235, so everything just wrapped around the body the way it was meant to to work. And then here comes a box with a sensor and a lens mount, and just nothing was ergonomic, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:15

So I remember those days. He was not a happy guy.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:18

No, no, I mean I don't know all the time about it. Was anybody happy? No, but because we knew it we were in the evolutionary stage. It was just basically hurry up and get this technology out there, we'll work it out along the way, and we'll learn a lot. Um so we were all beta testing, you know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:40

Well, Joey, thank you so much. We appreciate you, we love you. This is this is such an honor.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:46

Great pleasure being with uh with you guys.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:50

We gotta have you back.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:51

Yeah, and more importantly, before we have you back, we want everybody to like and subscribe and yes, please like and subscribe.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:58

You can follow us at uh the prelim, at Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, all our social medias, and at the at the prelim at thegmail.com if you want to get on the show. So thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:11

And of course, we want to shout out to the Pod Place LA for hosting us and having Joey here. And more importantly, Joey, we're gonna see you on the set next time. It's been wonderful having you, man. Thank you so much for for coming, Joey.