A Boy. A Girl. A Dream., a new film featured at the Sundance Film Festival this past January, features some of the most impressive camerawork of the year so far. Directed by Qasim Basir, the 90-minute drama was shot as a “oner,” an industry term for a movie shot entirely in one take with no cuts. The movie takes place on the fateful 2016 election night where Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, centering on a Los Angeles club promoter (Omari Hardwick) and a visitor (Meagan Good) who come together during a fraught time and help each other discover their true passions.
The cinematographer for A Boy. A Girl. A Dream. is Steven Holleran, an L.A.-based photographer whose past notable work includes the 2016 indie film, The Land, and the Netflix documentary series, Fire Chasers. Holleran recently spoke exclusively with Film Trophies to break down the insanity of filming an entire movie in one take, his drive to push himself through new challenges and the amazing reception the film received at Sundance.
Film Trophies: Steven, you are the cinematographer on the new film A Boy. A Girl. A Dream., directed by Qasim Basir, a movie that just premiered at Sundance. First off, how would you describe the film in your own words?
Steven Holleran: A Boy. A Girl. A Dream. is the story of two strangers who meet in a nightclub in Hollywood the night of the presidential election last year and over the course of 90 minutes and in continuous time we explore their growing relationship and also how its affected by cataclysmic political change that is also happening at the same time.
FT: What is it that brought you to the film?
SH: Qasim approached me right after the inauguration with the idea to make this film as our way of contributing to the protest of what was going down, and so we met the day of the Women’s March in L.A. and both of us felt like we had to do something as artists and have our voices heard, so from that perspective I was very excited about the movie right off the bat. I think it was an interesting look at how two people can be bonded by fire, whether its literal fire or political or cultural fire, and how these big moments in history can bring people together or break them apart much more rapidly than it might happen when things are in more of a normal state.
So I was excited about that and then Qasim mentioned that he wanted to try and shoot it as a oner. That got me even more excited, because I thought it was a really nice approach to showing how these two characters are affected by the last 90 minutes of the election and showing it all in real time would give our audience a unique, out-of-body experience that was reminiscent of what a lot of people mentioned to me they went through that night. The oner opened up this whole new world of possibilities technically for me and my team to try to do something different that spoke to the narrative of the story. So between those two factors and also the fact that Qasim was a good guy to work with, it was a no-brainer for me to try to shoot the film.
FT: You used some innovative equipment for this, namely the antigravity gimbal system. What are the benefits and downsides to using this system?
SH: Yeah, so the antigravity cam system is in a prototype stage. They’re just now getting it out to owner-operators on different sets. I think Matty Libatique, famous cinematographer, used it on one of his shows recently. But I had the rig on my Netflix doc series, Fire Chasers, last year so I was testing it out in some pretty extreme fire environments in California. The rig gives you some really unique camera movement capabilities that I haven’t seen possible in a mobile body-mounted system before, so you have nine feet of vertical boom range, so you can literally move the camera from the floor to nine feet in the air seamlessly. You can do bird’s-eye shots from nine feet with the thumb controller that allows you to tilt the camera remotely. And it takes out all the z-axis vertical movement so all the footsteps that you see that sneak into gimbal shots, that’s all gone with the antigravity cam. So you can walk, you can jog, you can run in it. I’m not saying it’s comfortable to run in, but you can do it. And it creates a seamless shot that looks like you can be on a dolly or a Steadicam or even a technocrane, except it doesn’t come with the extra manpower. You don’t have all the extra gear problems and you can take it into places that you can’t take any of that other gear. On the pro side, it’s mobile, it’s lightweight, it’s flexible and you can do a lot of unique things in terms of camera movement.
I’d say on the con side, it takes practice to get good at. It’s still a system in development so there’s a lot of changes that are being made to it or need to be made. There are some size restrictions, too. It has arms that extend out past your head and so going through certain doorways becomes a bit of a challenge. You have to measure your heights and think through your blocking and it’s good to have someone with you to monitor your arm height to make sure you don’t get caught going through a doorway. But it’s all doable, so I would say those are the cons.
FT: And I believe I read it was 50 pounds you were carrying around?
SH: Yeah, fully loaded. Definitely around 50 pounds, because you have to consider there’s a camera, there’s an anamorphic lens, Anton/Bauer batteries, there’s monitors, there’s wireless transmitter systems, there’s cables, there’s the gimbal, there’s batteries for the gimbal, and then there’s the antigravity. So all of that has to go together to create this mobile, completely powered system that can send signals out to multiple monitors, so that not only I can see what’s happening but the director can see it, the producers can see it, and all that has to happen wirelessly without ever changing a battery or card, so the rig is gonna grow to a certain size and there’s nothing you can really do to change that, unless you decide that no one’s watching the feed, no one’s pulling focus except for you, and you’re operating handheld. That’s a completely different look for the movie and that’s not what we wanted, so yeah, it ends up being 50 pounds. I don’t know what the antigravity cam weighs on its own, but somewhere like 20 pounds I think? 15, 20 pounds? It’s a pretty beefy vest, like a Steadicam vest and then there’s the arms that come out and just like a Steadicam has a sled, they’d probably be in the same weight range.
FT: And what type of camera did you use for the shoot?
SH: So we went in a pretty radical, untraditional route when it came to choosing a camera and we used a prosumer Sony mirrorless 4K camera. It’s Sony a7SII. It’s a tiny little body. It looks like a mini DSLR, but it has a full-frame sensor and it shoots 4K, an S-Log2 or S-Log3, it’s kind of a Sony RAW format. We chose that camera for a number of factors. It was lightweight. It weighs less than a pound. The next camera comparable weighs many pounds more. It’s really small so that gave us a lot of room with the Movi gimbal to fit other things in that cage. It can see in the dark. It has really good low-light capabilities and I happen to be shooting in some dark situations. I wanted to take advantage of that. And then powering it and running a feed out of it for 90 minutes straight was a lot easier than it would have been trying to do that on another camera, and powering that for two hours is also much more challenging. So it really lends itself well to a movie of this type. So that was our camera of choice. I actually own one. They’re $2,500 you can buy them for, so they’re not your normal cinema camera.
FT: Is there a scene in the movie you found most challenging? I mean, you’re shooting in a nightclub, a bar, a taxi, a rooftop, lots of different places where anything could go wrong.
SH: Yeah, so I’d say they were all really challenging, but there was one scene and it was the last scene in the movie, that I thought was the most challenging to shoot because what happened was, we have our picture car with our actors in it and our camera in it landing at a diner, and as the actors get out the camera’s getting out and it’s all happening in real time and they walk into this diner and sit down at a booth and they have this final 15-minute dialogue scene as Trump’s winning the election. And what was supposed to happen was the car lands, my other operator gets out of the car with the gimbal and hands it to me and I should have already been there 15 minutes beforehand to get my antigravity cam on so we could mount to the Movi while the shot was rolling and I could continue the shot into the diner, but leaving the previous location, the picture car left before we did, which is just inherent to taking a Movi off of your body and stripping the antigravity cam off. That amount of time to do that and get in the car that was following the picture car meant that we were behind them, so we only ended up landing at the diner set, like, 45 seconds before them and I didn’t have enough time to get the rig on. So when the picture car lands, the operator gets out of the car and I just grab it. And what ensued was 15 minutes of arming a 35-pound camera, which is not possible. To even do a one-minute shot with the Movi, any operator will tell you that’s about as far as you can get before you’re just burned out. You can imagine trying to hold a 35-pound dumbbell in front of you for a couple minutes. There’s only so much the human body can put up with at a time.
So I’m doing this shot, I’m a good minute and a half, two minutes in and my arms are cramping up, my back’s going out, and I have to hold this camera completely steady in a two-shot, as these actors are talking across a booth, and so what happened was, Qasim and my assistant, Dennis, they end up helping me, so they grab one of the arms and so for the next 10 minutes or so, we switch arms like a bird might when they’re standing on a branch in the winter and they put one foot up and then they switch it and put another foot down. It was like that so that I could rest an arm. And then at the end there’s this minute walk-out, where I just pull away from the actors and pan up to the moon. I had to do that, just get my way through it, so by the time we finished that scene I was broken. But it was really cool because it was one of those moments where everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong, so we had this great moment of collaboration where the three of us just muscled the football over the finish line.
FT: How many takes did you have to do before you and Qasim got it just right?
SH: We only had a day to shoot the movie. Our actors came in the day before and we had our locations for one night and that was all that we could do as a production, so half the day was pre-light, and the second half of the day was nighttime, was for shooting the film. So we estimated we only had time for two takes, and we had a couple false starts, where we knew a few minutes or 15 minutes in we’d have to start over because someone parked a car in our shot or a neighbor was angry. So there’s only one take of the movie. There’s nothing else. That’s all we got. So we finish at the diner and cut the camera and Qasim and I look at each other and it’s 2:30 or 3 in the morning, the diner curfew was 2:15 so we couldn’t go back into the diner to shoot in there again, so there’s no resetting to the beginning. All of our extras at all the party scene, they had all gone home. We had shot with them 80 minutes prior, so all those sets were basically striked.
FT: Let’s talk about your past work for a bit. For The Land, directed by Steven Caple Jr. which came out in 2016, you were filming while riding on a skateboard. In Fire Chasers, the documentary series about forest fires, you donned a fire suit and went right in. And now we have this where you’re filming it all in one take. What is it about taking these risks artistically that really appeals to you?
SH: For me it’s less about risks and more about visual immersion and adaptation. When I shoot I’m looking for ways to take viewers on a journey and insert them into the action. It’s the reverse of voyeurism. With The Land I wanted the viewers to feel like he or she was actually on a board to give them the euphoria and sense of freedom you get when riding a board. I couldn’t do that from a tripod on the side of the road. So I accepted the challenge of riding on my skateboard while operating a cinema camera in order to create the types of visuals that, to me, felt like skateboarding. With Fire Chasers, I quickly realized it was hard to communicate the scale and size of fire on camera. A lot of that has to do with billowing smoke which reduces the viewer’s ability to get a sense of scope and scale. A lot of the times a 100-foot flame length can look a lot like a campfire in camera. I would review dailies and realize that the fire did not look nearly as threatening as it was in person. This prompted me to push the camera closer to the fire and to frame it alongside firefighters, trucks and houses to create scale for the viewer. When it came to A Boy. A Girl. A Dream., we wanted the last 90 minutes of the election to play out in real time. The real time element was a catalyst for our story and our two main characters. I chose to shoot the film stabilized because I wanted it to have that out-of-body feeling that the actual election night had. At the end of the day, all my decisions are story-based. I try to create visuals that are authentic to the story, and a lot of the time the solutions to finding that authenticity take you far off the cinematography map into uncharted territory.
FT: It seems like you often get involved with projects that have a strong social message to them, whether it be environmental issues or poverty or now this story about people coming together after such a divisive election. In other words, narratives that make people think about our world. Is that something you intentionally set out to do?
SH: I’ve always been drawn to stories about the age-old fight of good vs. evil. Whether it’s the collapse of our environment at the hands of big industry or a group of teenagers trying to overcome poverty, these are all stories of underdog characters. I’m interested in what it takes to overcome the odds and witnessing the journey of characters who succeed or give it their absolute best in the face of the impossible. It’s taken years to understand that this is a driving force behind my work but I can definitively say now that this is a motivating factor in the stories I choose and the way I shoot.
FT: Film Trophies is primarily an awards-centric site and we’re in the thick of Oscar season so I wanted to ask. We have Blade Runner 2049, Darkest Hour, Dunkirk, Mudbound and The Shape of Water nominated for Best Cinematography this year. I wanted to know if you’ve seen any of the nominees and whether you were particularly impressed or inspired by anyone’s work?
SH: All the nominees have created inspiring work this year but Roger Deakins’ Blade Runner 2049 is a film unlike anything I have ever seen. His approach to light, layers, and composition, for instance the roof scene of Ryan Gosling and his artificial partner on a rainy night in futuristic Los Angeles, is on a level all on its own. I’ve returned to that film a number of times just to watch its perfect symbiosis of cinematography and story.
FT: Speaking of awards you actually have a pretty cool award yourself. I read that you actually won an award from the EPA, the Environmental Justice Award, for your documentary, Fading Into the Blue. What was that experience like and what did it mean for you to receive that award from the EPA?
SH: Making Fading Into the Blue was a very personal and formative journey for me as a young, first-time filmmaker. I was living in very remote island and coastal locations working with people who had no experience with cameras and English. As a novice filmmaker, I suffered through many bouts of self-doubt, exhaustion, and cultural barriers to create the film. To have the EPA notice my work was an honor and a special way to cap off a year long adventure into documentary filmmaking.
FT: I just wanna circle back to A Boy. A Girl. A Dream. Did you go the premiere at Sundance last month? The film seems to have had a pretty good response. What’s been your experience with how people have reacted to it? And do you know if it’s being submitted to other film festivals or if there’s a planned release at all?
SH: I was overwhelmed at the Sundance premiere by the outpouring of excitement, awe and support for the film and the way we made it. The day we shot the movie, we had no idea how long it was going to be, nor how it would turn out as a film. It was an experiment in fusing real-time performance art with cinema. To stand up in front of a cheering crowd and hear many people it made laugh and cry was a special moment in my career. As an artist I’m always searching for ways to create emotion and feeling for the audience and I felt like I accomplished that with A Boy. A Girl. A Dream. It’s currently set to screen next at the San Francisco Film Festival and the producers are in talks for a sale and distribution, although I don’t know where yet.
FT: And finally, what are you working on next?
SH: I’m currently in the midst of directing a documentary film called Wanderjahr for IBM’s Watson Foundation. Wanderjahr is an ancient German word for a coming of age journey, and in this film I follow five new college grads who have each designed a unique project based around a passion they have. Funded by IBM, they are traveling around the world alone for a year on a modern-day rite of passage that will challenge them immensely as they work towards new levels of self-discovery. IBM and I plan to release it late this fall.