The horror thriller 'Barbarian' takes shape with Zeiss optics

Director of photography Zach Kuperstein has opted for a wide selection of optics Zeiss to film 'Barbarian', a horror thriller now available on multiple streaming platforms.

Barbarian, directed by Zach Cregger, follows the sinister events that occur at 476 Barbary Street, a depressed neighborhood on the outskirts of Detroit. Tess Marshall (Georgina Campbell) encounters a suspicious stranger (Bill Skarsgård as Keith Toshko) staying at her rental house. After discovering a hidden tunnel, things go from bad to worse. Just when it looks like Tess is going to disappear without a trace, AJ Gilbride (Justin Long), an “unpretty” Hollywood celebrity, arrives on the scene to take stock of his Michigan properties, including Barbary's house.

It was not an easy task to recreate the suburbs burned from Detroit in Bulgaria, where the film was planned to be shot. Abandoned and dilapidated houses crowd either side of the hero's house, which is surprisingly well maintained. To face this bleak panorama, Kuperstein y Cregger They opted for the Sony Venice I, a camera that provided notable performance in low light conditions working at 2500 ISO. This capture system required rapid selection of lenses to adapt to the different shooting circumstances. Finally, the director of photography chose the ZEISS Supreme Primes and a CP.3 to accommodate the large format sensor and low light requirements: “I wanted fast lenses and for it to have sharpness and presence and a different feel to other work I've done,” he explains.

The camera package came from Magic Shop Rentals, in Bulgaria. However, the rental house did not have the Supreme Primes de 18 mm o 21 mm. Due to the large number of wide angle shots and scenes in the film, there was no way I could shoot the film without going beyond its Supreme Prime 25mm. After trying other targets, Kuperstein was offered the 15mm CP.3 Zeiss: “It was spot on for a 15mm, and it turned out to be really useful because we needed that light lens for shooting with the gimbal later.”

Challenges of Barbarian

In the past, Kuperstein had often chosen vintage lenses or with unusual characteristics, but in Barbarian The Supreme Primes fit his needs: “I think it's all about the close-ups, the presence of the lens, the sharpness and the cleanliness. There is nothing between the viewer and the image. In Barbarian I wanted it to be very direct and what you saw was what you got. These goals did very well.”

Kuperstein y Cregger They approached the look of the film by emphasizing the three different environments: the upstairs, the downstairs and the flashback: “The upstairs had to look like a David Fincher movie and the downstairs one like a Sam Raimi one. That meant that upstairs had very controlled and deliberate camera movement, which constantly created suspense. There is a lot of tension in the atmosphere. But down below it's fast-paced, almost ridiculous. The camera movement is exaggerated.” Subsequently, for the sequence of flashback, the filmmakers created stylized, extremely angular shots, very different from the rest of the film.

He CP.3 de 15 mm It also came in handy in unexpected ways, as Kuperstein explains: “We did some things in the underground pit with the Rialto because it was quite tight, and manual operation required quick movements.” Other notably tight spaces included working with multiple cars, especially in the flashback sequence: “The Rialto is still quite big and heavy, so balancing it with the Ronin RS 2 was a challenge. In one scene, we needed to put the camera through a narrow car window.” His team improvised a way to hold the RS 2 laterally and coordinated a delicate handover, in which the camera began motionless on a set of apple boxes before being lifted by the operator and passed through the car window to Kuperstein in inside.

Barbarian It grossed $45 million at the box office on a $4.5 million budget. With a surprising script, full of cinematic twists, Kuperstein He calls it a “horror movie for people who don't necessarily like horror movies.”

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