When Maggie Gyllenhaal started prep on “The Lost Daughter,” one of the first things she and cinematographer Hélène Louvart talked about in their early Zoom conversation was light. What the light looks like in the first scene of the movie — the color of light, its clarity or gauziness or texture, how it plays with lens choice and framing — is as much a storytelling tool to guide viewers toward the film‘s emotional reality as the dialogue.
For her second film, “The Bride!”, Gyllenhaal employed many different kinds of light, real and fantastical, to play with. But she needed to find a cinematographer who understood the relationship between Christian Bale’s still-kicking, still-lonely Frank(enstein’s Monster) and Jessie Buckley’s The Bride, in her first life, a ‘30s mob mole named Ida, but now reinvigorated into something else entirely and haunted by Mary Shelley (also Jessie Buckley) herself.
“I was speed-dating DPs. I met so many DPs who were so incredible, and so interesting, and so talented, and fancy,” Gyllenhaal told IndieWire on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast. She wanted a partner in crime who would understand how to use cinematic tools to weave the audience through the tiny shifts in the tapestry of the characters’ emotional language. And she found her answer in cinematographer Lawrence Sher.
“He and I were totally on the same page,” Gyllenhaal said. “He understood, in the most complicated way, the emotional trip through the movie.”
The emotional trip through the movie, at least in terms of its visual language, is one that treats the world of “The Bride!” as both iconic, heightened, and expressive, like the panels of graphic novels, and also grounded in something very real. That sometimes meant a back-and-forth between DP and director about how to visually capture the spaces in the film.
‘The Bride!’©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection
“[Sher] became a major teacher and one of the most exciting things about working with him was disagreeing with him and knowing that I had a point of view,” Gyllenhaal said. “I really love the magic and the value of very long lenses. They’re not for always, but in this move that’s full of magic and full of a kind of mind connection between people, I often found I was pushing him towards longer lenses.”
Another way Sher and Gyllenhaal worked to imbue a bit of magic into “The Bride!” was through their use of IMAX. The most fantastical parts of the movie retain some of their power because Sher and Gyllenhaal subtly manipulate aspect ratio changes and a vertical growth across the film.
‘The Bride!’©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection
“I had barely consumed anything in IMAX. I know I was in ‘The Dark Knight,’ one of the first of its kind to dramatically use IMAX. And I think I’d seen something at the Museum of Natural History about rock climbing in IMAX. But I think that’s it,” Gyllenhaal said. “Learning these tools, not only on the job, but learning and digesting them in my own way — what I’ve been told by the people who I got to know really well at IMAX is that the way that we use it is different than it’s ever been used before.”
How “The Bride!” uses IMAX is sometimes a slow change — it has a native 2:39:1 aspect ratio for a kind of epic, sweeping feeling. But if you see it in one of the 40 1:43:1 IMAX theaters around the world, “The Bride!” find ways to grow into itself. It changes to a 1:90:1 aspect ratio and to a 1:43:1 aspect ratio. It shifts between 2:39:1, 1:90:1, and 1:43:1, and sometimes the aspect ratio changes across three cuts.
“That’s new,” Gyllenhaal said. “It’s amazing what it does because the movie’s about bringing people back from the dead. There’s magic in it. And actually, in an IMAX theater with those vertical grows, it creates a feeling of magic.”
“The Bride!” is now in theaters. The full Filmmaker Toolkit interview with Maggie Gyllenhaal launches on podcast platforms Wednesday, March 11.