Shot lists, storyboards, models, pre-viz: There are many different ways for a director, DP, and a camera team to plot what a movie will look like before they start shooting. But cinematographer Kristen Correll and director Megan Park have a delightfully lo-fi, surprisingly useful approach to conceptualizing the world they’re about to create.
Correll told IndieWire that, as part of starting to talk about what the film would need and how they would shoot it, she had Park read aloud the script for “My Old Ass.”
She tries to do that with all her directors, because hearing a script helps Correll locate the exact tone she will need to create with her camera.
“The way I’m reading things in my head, I might think I have it correct, but then, you hear it from the writer/director and you’re like, ‘OK, I got that wrong,’ or ‘I was spot on,’” Correll told IndieWire. Correll and Park have developed a strong shorthand throughout their collaborations, but one of the keys to unlocking the visuals of Park’s movies — often about the messy, confused feelings and desires you’re hit with on the cusp of adulthood — is understanding the tone Park wants. When the script is read, you can hear the tone.
From there, Correll will build a pre-shot list and go through each scene’s skeleton with Park, adding or augmenting ideas as they move through it. “Megan really gives me a lot of artistic input and freedom and trusts me as being her eyes,” Correll said. “She trusts me with understanding the tone. She trusts me with lensing. She trusts me across the board, which I couldn’t appreciate more, and I think that also makes our collaboration because I trust her with the decisions she’s making, and that mutual trust gets us to where we are.”
For “My Old Ass” in particular, the place that Correll and Park needed to get to was a kind of non-cloying ‘90s nostalgia — the kind of look that would be at home in a TCM marathon alongside “A League of Their Own,” “My Girl,” or even “Father of the Bride.” Even though digital was obviously the way to go for a host of logistical and financial reasons, Correll did everything from her lens choices (a set of Panavision Panaspeeds) to the color correct to bring out a visual sense of timelessness with a light touch.
That light touch involved letting a lot of light into Correll’s Sony Venice camera. She’d experimented with shooting at 5,000 ISO on a previous film and brought it to “My Old Ass” as well. “I found shooting with that ISO gave the image a little bit of a special, texture-y essence. Those [Panaspeed lenses] paired with that ISO were in this in-between [look] of not too sharp, not too soft, handled flares well, but not this blowout contemporary look,” Correll said.
Whether in the lensing, in the LUT that Correll built with Sean Coleman from Company Three, or in the choices on set on the day, Correll found that the best way to capture the tone she heard in Park’s script was not to force the ‘90s nostalgia, but just shoot “My Old Ass” to bring out the characters and the environment. “You’re allowed to have depth. You’re allowed to be a little more conventional in your framing, [you can] have very classical frames. You’re concentrating on these characters and the environment around them,” Correll said. “All of that combined is how it came to look modern, but our references were always there.”
Nailing the references and creating the look that allows “My Old Ass” to be its funny, weird, heartfelt, mushroom-tripping, potentially time-traveling self is nerve-wracking when a cinematographer has been given that much freedom. “You’re like, ‘Oh God, I hope I’m not doing this person wrong,’” Correll said. “But also I have trust in myself, and the fact that we keep coming back to make things, you know, that says something.”
Billy Wilder said that a director doesn’t need to know how to write, but hopefully, they’ll know how to read. Nailing the references and creating is a credit to Park’s willingness to do just that and Correll’s ability to translate it into a new coming-of-age classic.
“My Old Ass” is available to stream on Prime Video.
