Cinematography Salon

The Invite, Olivia Wilde's comedy for A24, plays out almost entirely inside one San Francisco apartment, where a couple played by Wilde and Seth Rogen host an evening that goes sideways with visitors played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton. Adam Newport-Berra, ASC photographed it on 35mm, in story order, on a Los Angeles soundstage with a single day of exteriors in San Francisco. The brief he set himself was that one enclosed space should feel, in his words, like a landscape, and never like a set.
The first plan was to light it practically, in the spirit of Husbands and Wives, and let the actors move in and out of shadow. A test with the cast said otherwise. Nobody liked the dailies, and Newport-Berra got some phone calls afterward. What replaced it was hard ceilings, because an open set lit from above reads as a set, with the light built into the ceilings. Key grip Adam Kolegas fabricated low-profile softboxes, tube fixtures wrapped in muslin and skirted, light enough to hang from putty knives slid into the stretch-canvas ceiling and quick enough to pop off in ten minutes when the camera needed to tilt up. Gaffer Len Levine ran them by remote. Doorway moldings that dropped a foot below the ceiling hid the boxes behind them, and six to eight more lights sat on the floor for nearly every setup. With production designer Jade Healy and costume designer Arianne Phillips, the walls, the wood, and the hosts' clothes were kept dark so the faces would carry the light; the visitors' wardrobe was made to stand apart from the room. Every shot in the film, he says, is very lit.
There was no shot list on set. Newport-Berra wrote one for the whole film, in a Google Doc, and says he never looked at it once. Prep was a wall of two hundred reference frames, and each morning he walked the set before anyone else arrived, photographing angles on his iPhone with his crew standing in for the cast. Wilde, who stepped into the role of Angela after an actor dropped out, ran each scene with the cast, then handed it to a stand-in and watched from outside while she and Newport-Berra picked frames. The camera stayed on the dolly and mostly locked off; there is no handheld in the film. The tools were lens, height, and eyeline. Norton is held slightly low on a 35mm, almost heroic. Cruz moves on Steadicam on a longer lens. Rogen and Wilde are pinned flat against a wall with too much headroom. For the couple's first argument the rule was cat and mouse: never on the same level, never in the same frame, together only in mirrors and window glass, until the scene lands on a head-on two-shot. The last shot of the film, a move through the building's shaftway that Healy had designed the set around, went at four in the morning on the final night on stage.

CREDITS
Adam Newport-Berra, ASC
Instagram · Website · IMDb
Jared Levy, host
Instagram · Website · IMDb
David Kruta, producer
Instagram · Website · IMDb
Topher Hammond, producer
Instagram
MUSIC
Original music by One Wave.
THE SALON
Episode page and full gallery: https://cinematographysalon.com/podcast/adam-newport-berra-asc-the-invite
Newsletter and events: cinematographysalon.com
Instagram: @cinematographysalon
PRESENTING SPONSOR
This episode is made possible by Fujifilm — home of GFX ETERNA 55, the large format, IMAX®-Certified digital camera, and FUJINON cinema lenses. https://fujifilm-x.com
SUPPORT THE SALON
The podcast, the writing, and both Resources tools are free. No paywall, no membership, no login. That is on purpose: learning to light a scene should not depend on what you can afford. Sponsors cover part of it and readers cover the rest. If you want to chip in, it starts at the price of a coffee a month at https://cinematographysalon.com/support. If your company wants to reach working cinematographers, get in touch at https://cinematographysalon.com/sponsors.

Gustav Danielsson, FSF got the job by text message. "Do you wanna shoot a sequel to Game of Thrones?" arrived from director Owen Harris, who had made San Junipero with him, and it landed while Danielsson was at home rewatching the original series with his kids and buying them the board games. He cut short a show in Sweden to take it. The result, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, is HBO's return to Westeros at a fraction of the usual scale, and it earned him a 2026 Emmy nomination for cinematography.
He and host Jared Levy work through how you make a two-hander feel as large as a war on a budget that rules out burning cities. Night scenes pushed into the half hour of real dusk, the same trick he used on San Junipero because South African nights go completely black. An Alexa Mini LF shot at 3:2 and squeezed to 2:1 on Panavision Ultra Panatars, whose 1.3x squeeze fills almost the whole sensor, with faster Panavision VA spherical primes held back for the scenes a single double-wick candle had to carry on its own. Every flashback on one de-tuned Panavision T Series lens built for Super 35 and run on a larger sensor, so the image falls apart at the edges on purpose. Firelight from a bank of up to 48 photo flood bulbs that gaffer Seamus Lynch built and named the Dalek, programmed against video of a real fire. And the afternoon an oven on set caught fire for real, which Danielsson spent a few seconds trying to dim.
CREDITS
Gustav Danielsson, FSF
Instagram · Website · IMDb
Jared Levy, host
Instagram · Website · IMDb
David Kruta, producer
Instagram · Website · IMDb
Topher Hammond, producer
Instagram
MUSIC
Original music by One Wave.
THE SALON
Episode page and full gallery: https://cinematographysalon.com/podcast/gustav-danielsson-fsf-a-knight-of-the-seven-kingdoms
Newsletter and events: cinematographysalon.com
Instagram: @cinematographysalon
PRESENTING SPONSOR
This episode is made possible by Fujifilm — home of GFX ETERNA 55, the large format, IMAX®-Certified digital camera, and FUJINON cinema lenses. https://fujifilm-x.com
SUPPORT THE SALON
The podcast, the writing, and both Resources tools are free. No paywall, no membership, no login. That is on purpose: learning to light a scene should not depend on what you can afford. Sponsors cover part of it and readers cover the rest. If you want to chip in, it starts at the price of a coffee a month at https://cinematographysalon.com/support. If your company wants to reach working cinematographers, get in touch at https://cinematographysalon.com/sponsors.

James Laxton, ASC came to Beef for its second season as the one new voice in a room that had already made something people loved. His job, as he saw it, was to carry forward what Beef is at the level of shot structure, whose shoulder the camera sits over, whose scene it is, how far back the wide holds, while telling a different story than Season 1.
He and host Jared Levy get into the season's organizing idea: four couples as four seasons, spring to winter, an ensemble led by Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Charles Melton, and Cailee Spaeny, and a color language built with the production designer, Grace, to track love across a lifetime. Laxton talks through shooting large format, 65mm, for the weight it gives a face, the episode-eight silhouettes he is proudest of, and the night he calls "impending doom," a car fight shot at the end of an already full day, where the thing he feared most was not the lighting but letting the actors down.
CREDITS
James Laxton, ASC
Instagram · Website · IMDb
Jared Levy, host
Instagram · Website · IMDb
David Kruta, producer
Instagram · Website · IMDb
Topher Hammond, producer
Instagram
MUSIC
Original music by One Wave.
THE SALON
Episode page and full gallery: https://cinematographysalon.com/podcast/james-laxton-asc-beef-season-2
Newsletter and events: cinematographysalon.com
Instagram: @cinematographysalon
PRESENTING SPONSOR
This episode is made possible by Fujifilm — home of the GFX Eterna 55, the large format, IMAX-certified cinema camera, and FUJINON cinema lenses. https://fujifilm-x.com
SUPPORT THE SALON
The podcast, the writing, and both Resources tools are free. No paywall, no membership, no login. That is on purpose: learning to light a scene should not depend on what you can afford. Sponsors cover part of it and readers cover the rest. If you want to chip in, it starts at the price of a coffee a month at https://cinematographysalon.com/support. If your company wants to reach working cinematographers, get in touch at https://cinematographysalon.com/sponsors.

When Tari Segal, ASC, took over the Las Vegas block of Margo's Got Money Troubles, the A24 series for Apple TV adapted by David E. Kelley from Rufi Thorpe's novel, she had three days and a working casino floor on which to extend a look someone else had established. It is the episode that earned her an ASC Award nomination, and in this conversation with host Jared Levy she is candid that the shoot ran closer to triage than choreography.
She walks through the problems in order. Faking a dead chandelier with PAR cans on the floor of a heavily tinted steakhouse when the circuit blew near sunrise. Building a full WrestleCon arena in a day and a half for Nicole Kidman's first day on the show. Putting Margo full frame through the then new ARRI Hero lenses so the world melts around her during the OnlyFans sequences. Negotiating a single 30 minute rotation of the High Roller observation wheel, its camera synced to a second unit shooting Nick Offerman a block below.
It is an hour on solving the unsolvable to a television schedule, and on the crew that made it fun, espresso martinis after wrap included.
CREDITS
Tari Segal, ASC
Instagram · Website · IMDb
Jared Levy, host
Instagram · Website · IMDb
David Kruta, producer
Instagram · Website · IMDb
Topher Hammond, producer
Instagram
MUSIC
Original music by One Wave.
THE SALON
Episode page and full gallery: https://cinematographysalon.com/podcast/tari-segal-asc-margos-got-money-troubles
Newsletter and events: cinematographysalon.com
Instagram: @cinematographysalon
SUPPORT THE SALON
The podcast, the writing, and both Resources tools are free. No paywall, no membership, no login. That is on purpose: learning to light a scene should not depend on what you can afford. Sponsors cover part of it and readers cover the rest. If you want to chip in, it starts at the price of a coffee a month at https://cinematographysalon.com/support. If your company wants to reach working cinematographers, get in touch at https://cinematographysalon.com/sponsors.

Against the backdrop of industry upheaval and the rise of AI, Nicholas Lam joins hosts Ava Benjamin Shorr and David Kruta to explore what it means to future-proof creativity. Lam critiques performative diversity initiatives, warns against chasing trends, and makes a case for human, low-fi storytelling as the antidote to algorithmic content. Taking a personal turn, Lam recounts losing his home in the Los Angeles fires of January 2025, and shares how the filmmaking community rallied to support him, reshaping his priorities and reinforcing the importance of showing up for others. That experience reframes his view of work, stripping away the false urgency of the industry and grounding him in relationships over accolades.
Nicholas Lam’s Instagram | Website
Ava Benjamin Shorr’s Instagram | Website
David Kruta’s Instagram | Website
This episode is sponsored by Fujifilm, Sandisk and TCP Insurance.