There’s a brief video going round on Twitter, capturing the Barbie solid and crew breaking into dance on the movie’s dizzyingly pink fantasia of a set. The jubilant temper comes as no shock, given the film’s foolish, candy-colored attraction. What might be referred to as surprising, although, is the sheer presence within the clip of Rodrigo Prieto, the cinematographer finest identified for his Oscar-nominated work on the tragedies of Martin Scorsese, together with The Irishman and the upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon. Right here, he’s having a ball—letting free beside his director, Greta Gerwig.
If that picture appears at odds with Prieto’s comparatively dramatic filmography, it’s not. That is an artist with a singular skill to execute explicit visions and meet administrators the place they’re. In Barbie’s case, that meant not letting issues get too severe. “Greta’s vitality—she’s simply a lot enjoyable,” Prieto tells Vainness Honest. “I’d arrange a shot and present her, ‘Okay, Greta, so what do you suppose?’ And he or she’d be so excited. I imply—squeals of pleasure. That phrase, I believe, is essential. Capturing Barbie was joyful, and that’s due to Greta.”
Prieto first began speaking Barbie with Gerwig whereas he was nonetheless in Oklahoma, capturing Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon—a three-hour epic that depicts the sequence of horrific murders in opposition to the Osage Nation within the early twentieth century. He might be deep into researching Osage traditions and communities on the identical day he’d shuttle with Gerwig about that all-encompassing query: “How pink can we do it?” (They didn’t go for subtlety.) There’s a core high quality that unites Gerwig and Scorsese, what Prieto calls their greatest similarity: “The love of cinema. They each love motion pictures. They love watching motion pictures and love speaking about motion pictures. That keenness is contagious.”
These two critically acclaimed movies being launched the identical 12 months marks a excessive level in Prieto’s profession. The Mexico Metropolis-born cinematographer was beforehand finest identified for work on tasks by the likes of Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain) and Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Babel), earlier than Scorsese met with him a couple of decade in the past for The Wolf of Wall Road. “It was an out-of-body expertise,” Prieto says of his first encounter with the legendary director. He received the job and has lensed each one among Scorsese’s movies since—which, whereas they’ve edged towards tragedy of late, have veered between the blackly comedian (Wolf) and the contemplatively painterly (Silence).
Barbie represented the prospect to essentially change gears. The movie gave Prieto a possibility to interrupt a few of his outdated habits, to immerse himself in a very new strategy of inspiration. “We’ve been so influenced by the Dutch Masters—Caravaggio, Rembrandt, that form of very contrasty lighting to create depth—and there is a motive for it. You do this to create emotion, ambiance, depth, and I adore it,” he says. “However in Barbie, it’s the other. It’s a world that is full of sunshine and has a really, very totally different vitality to the whole lot that I’ve executed. I purposely lit it very high-key. It was acceptable for the movie, however it was a stretch for me.”
The movie’s surrealist, playful aesthetic maybe masks the exact craft and consideration that went into each design ingredient. Certainly, it’s Barbie, not Killers, that Prieto says he wouldn’t have felt able to do earlier in his profession.
One factor he needed to get used to—in a great way—was how loud the Barbie set might be. “The most important distinction is that Scorsese likes to pay attention in silence. When he’s capturing, he wants absolute quiet—particularly once we’re starting and beginning the day, he wants to consider it,” Prieto says. “He begins loosening up as soon as we begin filming, however nonetheless there’s a self-discipline and a quietness.” How does this evaluate with Gerwig? “Greta thrives within the reverse. On the set, she likes to joke round. She even likes to be distracted generally.” He concludes with fun, “So yeah, the noise is the principle distinction.”
Prieto is understood for juxtaposing totally different worlds and templates inside particular person movies. His early work with Iñárritu, throughout Amores Perros and Babel, illustrates that almost all actually; you can even see it throughout the timelines of The Irishman. That work proved central to each Killers of the Flower Moon and Barbie. After Scorsese reworked his script to increase the Indigenous perspective, Prieto emphasised that focus by making the newer scenes look distinctive, pushing for naturalistic colours and lightweight consistent with Osage traditions and nature. In Barbie, he needed to careen between the actual world and Barbie world. For the latter realm, Prieto established “a really harmless digital camera, the place the digital camera motion may be very linear, so it’s not fancy. When Barbie walks, the digital camera simply goes lateral—like in a cartoon.”
And the deeper he received into it with Gerwig, the extra snug he felt. In Barbie world, the “TechnoBarbie” palette Gerwig coined could have been dominated by one explicit shade—however inside it, there have been 1,000,000 instructions to go. “I proposed to Greta a pink referred to as Rosa Mexicano—it’s a Mexican pink, a really particular shade that to us in Mexico, we know it,” Prieto says. “So I used to be like, ‘Greta, you’ve received to incorporate Mexican pink in your film!’” Now that’s the Barbie spirit.
