Benjamin Kasulke thinks in image, in working method, in environment. "They’re all sort of tied together in this spirit of collaboration. I feel like a project is successful, at least the production end of it is successful, if you bring together individuals that bring all these collaborative talents together and they create something that’s greater than the sum of its parts," he explains.

Spotlighted by South By Southwest Film Festival premieres of both Lynn Shelton's My Effortless Brilliance and Joe Swanberg's Nights and Weekends this year, Kasulke's work sketches beauty built of clean lines and fluidity, its implicit message of unassuming tenderness and poignance.

Well before the announcement of the IFC Festival Direct release of My Effortless Brilliance this Wednesday, Kasulke and filmmaker Barry Jenkins sat down to chat about the freedom of the digital revolution, the importance of capturing new visual stimuli and the DIY approach of translating ideas to images.

The following interview adds to Jenkins' ongoing series, the preceding pieces with cinematographers Brett Jutkiewicz and Asif Siddiky.

SM: So, just give me a little bit of background, like your training.

BK: I did four years of undergrad film school at Ithaca College in upstate New York. I graduated in 99’, and before graduating I did some time at FAMU, the Czech National Film School in a program called the 3F program that was centered on the history of Czech New Wave and the Czech model of film production.

SM: What’s it feel like to be a DP on one of these DIY, these “smaller” films? It’s not like 40 years ago where you had to be a guy who went into the camera house and worked in the equipment room, and then you got to be a loader, and then a 2nd AC and then a 1st AC, etc., whereas you can just get together with a filmmaker like Lynn Shelton and go out and make a movie.

BK: I think it’s very interesting; I meet a lot of cinematographers and directors of photography and videographers out on the festival circuit, and they’re young, and they would be young for almost any industry but they’re really young in the context of either a classic Hollywood or European DP and…it’s strange, you know, to be lucky enough to have tools that just came out at a certain time. I think that the generation that came before us — I say us, I mean people in their 20s and 30s right now — the people that came before us probably had 16mm film and that got them out into the streets and out of the studio and out of the lighting environment. And now, Panasonic with the DVX100 really changed the way you could make films, you could see what exposures were gonna look like in the world of video, but you could get a look that looked like film so you weren’t compromising visuals as much. There’s always gonna be the video/film debate, but—

SM: And where you do you fall on that debate?

BK: Where do I fall?

SM: Well yeah, you just said you can get a look that kinda “looks like film,” and I’ve actually seen My Effortless Brilliance and it doesn’t seem like a film that’s aspiring for a film look per se, it’s just using the camera to its strengths.

BK: Yeah, that film in particular really tried to marry the form of the storytelling and the spirit of the improvisation of the actors with the camera movements and the lighting choices, almost making it look like a documentary. And that works really well there, and that was the HVX200, shooting in HD.

As far as where I fall, I’m always gonna be a film person; I learned celluloid first. I love it, and I love the organic process, the mystery that happens when you expose film. The digital thing? It’s hard, you can’t discount digital because everyone’s shooting in it and it’s like, if you want to tell stories visually, explore what it is to be human in pictures, and in moving pictures, you’ve gotta work, and people work in digital and that’s the way it goes now. You can make six films a year or you can make a film every six years.

SM: I like the way you phrase that, “if you want to explore what it is to be human in pictures,” because I always think about my cinematographer, James [Laxton], the guy I work with—

BK: He’s amazing, by the way.

SM: (laughing) Oh thank you, I’ll tell him. And it’s like, you walk onto a set and I’ll sometimes have to remember that there’s an image of the scene or the film or the theme that he sees in pictures, and there’s one that I see. I found myself on set one day and I saw him there, we had already setup and were just waiting on the actors, and at that moment I felt like he wasn’t with me, you know, because I was over here with the actors and I was like, “I wonder where he is right now?” He’s looking at this image he’s about to record, and it’s true, the film is his the same as it’s mine. And so when you walk onto a set, how do you approach that dynamic?

BK:...I go into a project and we have an idea and there’s an articulate theme that’s coming through, but everyone sort of brings their own ingredients to it. And, hopefully, if everything works right, you’re surrounding yourself with an environment that’s better than anything you could come up with on your own. That’s what I hope to bring to someone as a shooter, just that I can see what they’re going for, I can see thematic elements in the stories or I can see what they’re trying to articulate and hopefully, if I’m doing my job well, I can just change the angle a little bit on their approach and maybe it adds a few more questions to what they’re exploring or maybe it gives an answer. As long as it diversifies the approach to the idea for the better I think you’re doing your job as a cinematographer.

SM: When James and I were doing the color work on this film, we did it ourselves—

BK: Really? That’s fantastic.

SM: Yeah, we did it ourselves, shot by shot. It was funny, we had to watch the film with no audio because of the program we were in, we had to do it all with no playback. It was so interesting to watch the film in just images, it totally reaffirmed the importance of the cinematographer. It was something I’d never done before, and then to do it with my own work. Have you ever watched your movies with no audio?

BK: I have, I’ve done some color correction myself. I love it, and I got lucky very early on in my feature shooting career in that I was fortunate enough to get a silent film, so I had this experience of living with silent images and shooting coverage for silent film. You had to know the grammar of it, you know, and usually it translated pretty well into this sort of Hollywood system. What I love now, though, is you can make a film and people have been exposed to so many different viewpoints of how a camera is placed or where a camera is placed and how a scene is covered or how two human beings would interact on camera, that idea has been challenged so many times, that you can do anything, like you don’t need to shoot coverage anymore, you can shoot whatever you want, you know. You can buy your camera for the cost of a one day rental on a 35mm shoot.

SM: I feel like James gets so bored when we shoot coverage, he’s like “Ugggggghhhhhhhhh.”

BK: (laughing) Oh, it’s rough. It comes in pieces, it’s hard for me, it’s like, “Let’s get the medium shot,” you know. It’s funny, but…that brings it back to that collaborative environment. A DP can get bored with a medium shot or shooting masters, but you have to stay--you can roll your eyes a little bit, but--you’ve got to stay open; there’s any number of things that the world around you is gonna offer up in those situations. It might be a boring medium shot, but if you keep your eyes open it might be the most miraculous shot in your film.

SM: I saw Lynn do the Q&A after My Effortless Brilliance, and she mentioned how this whole process was an experiment in collaboration and how she wanted to make a film where the whole process was geared towards the comfort of the actors. It almost seemed like it sort of put you in a technical box in that you couldn’t do certain things to infringe upon that mission statement. How was that?

BK: In particular to that film, I didn’t find it much of a limitation because my eye has certain tastes, especially with certain camera gear, and so because we were shooting HD, I knew we were shooting with a high-end prosumer camera, but I knew I wanted to shoot on the long end of the lens, which in the logistics of shooting a scene and letting actors be free it just meant that I was farther away from them and I had a lot of shallow depth of field to work with.

SM: That’s interesting, it’s something I hadn’t thought of, but, your proximity to the actors on these shoots, how does that effect what you’re doing?

BK: I feel like--especially because a lot of productions I was on this past year gravitated towards that method; I also worked with Joe Swanberg on Night And Weekends, and he and Lynn share very similar ideas about the comfort of actors and creating an actor-friendly work environment--that really translates to backing the apparatus of making a film away from the people that are creating these scenes, exploring feelings. You want to stay away from actors in some regards and let them just be, and I think that in some ways backing the camera off, backing the sound off and putting wireless mics on and not waiting for lighting tweaks and not having a camera assistant in your face with a clapper, that all feeds into just letting an actor be an actor.

SM: It’s good, what I’m getting from you is the perception of how you view the set. As a director, I know how I feel in the principle space of the set. It may be egotistical to say this, but I always feel like the center of things because people are always paying attention to what I’m doing because they always want to make sure what they’re doing is in harmony with whatever the fuck I’m trying to get across. What about you, how do you perceive your space on the set?

BK: It does depend on the production...[On My Effortless Brilliance] the crew was five people. So you couldn’t really center in on any one job, so, for me, it’s mostly like making sure everyone knows where we are at any given time and what the coverage will be. The lighting was very minimal on that film, so mostly I’m there for Lynn and the actors and to problem solve some technical things.

Now, on a larger crew, I work with a lot of first time directors, and I think a lot of time is spent teaching film grammar on the fly, you know, and teaching about crossing the line and suturing someone into a scene with over the shoulder shots and…how to get enough coverage for a scene to present a good package to the editor at the end of a shooting day and to empower a director to, instead of covering the scene the way anybody would cover a scene, to make that film their own. So there’s that but then there’s also sort of dealing with technical crews and sort of keeping communication lines open. A lot of times on lower budget things it’s a lot of line producing during the day; you’re contending with equipment rentals and crews and things that haven’t shown up, so…I don’t see myself as solely a technical person or solely an emotional contributor to the final project, but it’s more of a bridge between the two. You see it in a lot of DPs, a lot of people that are very easy-going and can relate to emotions but can also tell you what a film stock will look like. It’s a nice place to be.

SM: It’s a GREAT place to be; it’s where I want to be as a director. You know, this new DIY movement, it’s always happened, it’s just that now instead of going out to raise a 100,000 dollars to shoot your film on 35mm, you’re raising 5,000 dollars—

BK: And that’s to feed everybody!

SM: Yeah, exactly, and it’s cool because I remember reading books like Masters of Light or reading American Cinematographer, reading about these DPs coercing these huge crews of crafts people and all these lights, and here you can go out as a cinematographer and you’ve got just five people on a crew—

BK: And you shoot with like a china ball.

SM: Exactly, just a china ball, you know. But it’s valid.

BK: I hope it’s valid, it feels valid when you’re shooting it because it’s just as much work!

SM: Yes, so as a shooter of today, what do you think of that?

BK: Of the change of the mechanics of it?

SM: Yeah.

BK: It’s strange, when I first started I had a pretty high profile silent film that was still a hefty crew and then I went into a 35mm pretty standard narrative indie film situation, small, small budget but a pretty hefty crew. And then I started getting into this stuff with no crew. And it’s amazing how fast you can work, it’s amazing how you can fix things with imagination and some creativity.

I do personally have my fears that…I’m young for a DP, and I might not have the same experience that a young DP would have in the Hollywood system in the 70s when some more independent type work was being made. It does kind of scare me a little bit because I’m coming out of Seattle and like, nobody thinks about films from Seattle. I don’t ever get the job where you have the huge crane and you’re lighting five city blocks in the middle of the night. I would love to try something like that, but at the same time there’s a lot to be said for creating a collaborative situation and really making something personal.

SM: I remember reading Christopher Doyle and one of the things he says pretty consistently in all the interviews I read of him circa 1998 onward, he says, “There [are] these little cameras out there, and my advice to cinematographers is to go out and shoot, it doesn’t matter what you shoot on; just go out and shoot.” And so I was really interested in seeing My Effortless Brilliance because Nat [Sanders, editor of Medicine For Melancholy] had seen it and he said it looked amazing. He was like, “The photography is stunning,” and then he qualified it, he said, “And it’s weird because it’s just shot clean with the HVX.”

BK: Yeah, there’s no lens adapters.

SM: And so I was really curious to see it because there is a 24p sort of look that I’ve gotten used to, but then when I watched this film it didn’t feel like that—

BK: I’m glad you got that, that’s really what I was I was going for. I didn’t want it to look like the 24p look that you see, mostly in the indie festival films; I don’t want to drop the m-word, but, you know...I think people are gonna look back at a certain strata of films from about 2005 to now in about ten years and be like, “That was those films. That was a bookmark.” For better or for worse, that’s what they’re gonna be. I wanted to be able to use the tools that we had but create something that was gonna hold up in a different way. I learned quite a bit from an amazing cinematographer and filmmaker named James Longley, he’s a documentary filmmaker, his last film—

SM: Iraq In Fragments—

BK: Yeah.

SM: Which is amazing. I saw it in theaters, he’s great. But what camera did he shoot that with?

BK: The DVX100.

SM: Wow.

BK: Yeah, and now he’s doing his latest film with the HVX200. And he just knows it, he knows the craft and he learned really well. He just taught me, it was amazing, like a half-hour conversation, three tricks, and it’s almost like a whole different camera.

SM: I’m glad you said that because when I saw My Effortless Brilliance I felt the same way. It’s like, even in Hollywood where they’re shooting 35mm, everybody’s using the same film stocks, but they’re figuring a way to really manipulate and coerce it to a point where it becomes specific to the project—

BK: Or to the cinematographer at this point.

SM: Exactly.

BK: You can see it’s a [Janusz] Kaminski movie in like three shots, he’s got his lenses and you know what they are!

SM: Yes, and I feel like people assume that because these DIY movies are all being made on the same camera, mainly the HVX, the DVX, etc., that they all look the same, but they don’t, they don’t have to. And I was glad I saw My Effortless Brilliance because it definitely differentiates itself from that “out of the box presets” look.

What do you do for inspiration? I know James keeps a running log of stills he finds on the internet, he keeps them in a folder on his computer. Sometimes I go over to his place, and it’s great, because I can actually go over to this guy’s house and we can sit down and have a cup of coffee; which we do, every Thursday we have Americano Thursday and we just talk about imagery. Do you have photographers or painters you admire?

BK: I do, I learn a lot from other photographers. Anytime I can find books of prints on sale, I really love Robert Frank, Bruce Davidson, a lot of the American street photographers working with available light. And I was drawn to that before but now I see why: I don’t get these projects where you can create artificial studio environments, so you can see what these people did with the light they had.

I actually get a lot of inspiration from comic books—

SM: Really?

BK: Yeah, just the graphic grammar of comic books. Of course the storyboard analogy is there, but just in terms of creating ideas in colors and shading and expressing an idea in one frame, having to be very efficient with perspective and composition. I find that triggers things in me, and I don’t even read a lot of comic books, I just grew up on them and I’ll go back to them. They’re nostalgic for me now, but I still love them.

Then I try and shoot stills a lot, but I never do it as much as I want to. I always bring the camera to set and have it on my neck but it never pans out. Seeing a lot of films of course and traveling a lot. But lately I’ve mostly been gravitating towards the American photographers of the 70s…that work is just a really inspiring place to be.

SM: I did an interview with Godfrey Reggio of the Qatsi trilogy. He’s a really interesting guy because he’s almost obsessed with the idea of the image, and just the over, hyper saturation of imagery in people’s lives today. And he almost feels like it’s tough for filmmakers to compete because there’s so much visual stimulus in people’s everyday lives now. Are you aware of that?

BK: I think about it all the time. It’s interesting you say that, when you mention that, in visual landscapes I think about, I live in Seattle, you live in San Francisco and those are both cities that are changing but they’re kind of morphing into one global city. You can look around the outskirts of Seattle, and I’m sure it looks like the outskirts of Oakland, and I’m sure that looks like the outskirts of Los Angeles. It’s very, you know…you are saturated with visuals. What’s scary at least for me in the American West, and I only say that because that’s where I live now, is that that imagery starts to repeat itself very quickly, I mean a Wal-Mart is a Wal-Mart is a Wal-Mart.

[Werner] Herzog has a great quote about civilization needing new images and having a need for new images to help it articulate what it is, to help people articulate what they’re state of being is and I totally agree with that. I just saw Paranoid Park, and we were talking about Christopher Doyle earlier. There’s a shot in that movie, it’s just a boy in the shower, and it takes you to another world, just the way that he sees that. And how many shower commercials do you see, how many shampoo commercials? You could stay up all night trying to count how many shampoo commercials you’ve seen since you started watching television. He took the same idea and totally bared the soul of this character.

SM: I’ll ask one last question. During the Q&A, Lynn mentioned that there were certain points during the shooting of My Effortless Brilliance when you just went out and recorded nature. When you’re doing that-- because I keep wanting to come back to the experience of the cinematographer outside the director--so when you’re out there and you’re doing things like that, imagery that you know will end up in the film somehow, but at that point you’re in a way the sole author of that imagery, what’s that like for you?

BK: That to me is almost like an ideal state. I love the collaborative aspect, but…I love getting to the point where someone has given me everything they can and it’s kind of like they push the little baby bird out of the nest.

Barry laughs.

BK: With Lynn’s film, it was like, “I know these themes that she’s working with, I’m hearing all of these conversations that are leading into the scenes as we shoot them.” And just to kind of pick up a camera and walk along a river in Eastern Washington and then find two ants working on a log and not really getting along, finding that and shooting that…you just know, that’s it, you have this feeling. Or just losing focus of the world around you through the camera’s eye. That’s an ideal situation for me. I feel like, if my career in the film world goes the way that I want it to, I’ll be able to shoot my own work and live in that state and surround myself with great collaborators, that’ll help me raise the bar on what I’m doing.

For more information on the film, visit the film's site at www.lynnshelton.net/meb/.