ARRI ALEXA Mini LF and DNA lenses on “Caddo Lake”

“Caddo Lake” tells a complex and intriguing narrative that weaves together two stories involving mysterious happenings around the eponymous lake. Ellie (Eliza Scanlen) is searching for her missing eight-year-old stepsister, while Paris (Dylan O’Brien) is investigating why his mother drove off a bridge into the water. Both find themselves transported to different time periods as their stories converge. Directors Celine Held and Logan George recruited cinematographer and long-term collaborator Lowell A. Meyer, who speaks here about his inspirations, challenges, and creative solutions on the movie.

How did you collaborate with directors Celine Held and Logan George to create the visual language of "Caddo Lake"? 

Celine, Logan, and I have been working together for almost a decade. We’ve made six shorts, three episodes of TV, and now two features together. There’s been a tremendous amount of groundwork and runway laid over the years for where we’ve come from and where we want to go as filmmakers. This includes our visual style, which is rooted in handheld, intimate, and deeply humanistic cinematography. For “Caddo Lake,” we wanted to keep building on this aesthetic, while also allowing the lake and the communities of Karnack, Texas to inspire our framing and storytelling. This included capturing the timelessness of the lake and its flora and fauna with an unadulterated or overly stylized eye, particularly when it came to our dual narrative conceit, with the story being told from the perspectives of both Paris and Ellie. Each hero is treated equally and lensed similarly. If anything, we aimed to find connective elements, mirrored framing opportunities, and smooth transitions as we passed the story’s baton from one lead to the next.

What specific discussions or inspirations influenced your approach?

The real Caddo Lake and the town of Karnack were by far the biggest inspirations. A local photographer’s book of photos, many scenic and gator tour boat rides with local tourism ambassadors, and the 2015 documentary “Uncertain” all contributed so much to our immediate visual impressions of the lake and the story we were getting ready to film there. In general, we’re deeply inspired by humanistic filmmakers such as Andrea Arnold, Sean Baker, Jeff Nichols, and Asghar Farhadi. This movie also incorporates sci-fi elements, leading us to draw from other inspirations like director Alfonso Cuarón and the video game “The Last of Us Part II,” which I found to be one of the most cinematic experiences I've ever had.

How did you approach portraying Ellie's emotional state and determination throughout the film?

I think first and foremost that’s a testament to Eliza Scanlen’s performance as Ellie. She just brings such a doggedness and physical movement that was incredible to witness behind the lens every day on set, and translated so well on screen. Second, Celine and Logan are so good at portraying this very thing: giving their lead character a fearless and endless determination. I think like any good filmmaker, they are always trying to underline that with every toolset they wield as storytellers. A lot is built in the score and editing, of course. With the camerawork, it always came down to never letting the character leave the frame, and keeping that frame incredibly tight and trained on them, even if there was tremendous amount of physical activity in the scene. 

There’s immense tension built in the frame when you don’t cut, when the camera creeps in, and when the character is literally trying to run out of the frame but you don’t let them! The camera moves quick, they move quick, things blur and come back into focus. It’s all a very intoxicating dance. A perfect summation of this effect was the scene where Eliza comes home to a frenzied household in which her parents are looking for her missing sister. We shot it in a oner that weaves through every room of the house with Ellie and her parents. We see 360 degrees, we move through tight corridors, in and out of close-up, wide, and over-the-shoulder shots, never leaving Ellie’s point of view or letting her leave the frame. 

What factors led you to choose the ALEXA Mini LF?

It was a no-brainer. We needed the smallest and lightest camera possible for all of our handheld work, while also adhering to a 4K mandate for post. Almost every project I’ve shot since our first feature in 2019, “Topside,” which was ALEXA Mini, has been with a Mini LF. It’s become second nature to me to shoot with that sensor and body. Even little camera features, like the fact that it has a built-in microphone, were a huge asset for us and our working style. I knew it would handle the conditions of the swamp beautifully, as far as the construction of the camera was concerned, as well as the wildly varying lighting conditions we subjected the sensor to.

How did you utilize the Prime DNA and DNA LF lenses to achieve the desired look and feel of the film? What qualities of these lenses were particularly valuable?

To be honest, this was also a no-brainer. Large-format glass—at least at the start of 2021—was at a premium, and was still rapidly being developed or retrofitted for an explosion of large sensors on the market. There were only so many options for me to choose from, and even fewer that I was familiar with. In addition, I’m always a pragmatist and look for lenses that come with multiple sets, that are small and fast, and that have a bit of character, but never so much that they’re distracting from the story and from image clarity. And the final factor was focal length: Celine, Logan, and I shoot in a very specific way, leaning heavily on the 40 mm through 60 mm range as our hero focal length. We believe in keeping a subtle hand on the viewer’s “lens” into the story, trying never to go either extremely wide or extremely tight. We believe in a documentary, grounded approach, in which your focal lengths are limited to those that replicate the human eye’s perspective: always rectilinear, always as objective as possible. 

When two sets of DNAs became available two weeks before principal photography, and I saw that I could mix and match sets to get a 40 mm, 45 mm, 50 mm, 55 mm, and 60 mm all in our kit, for both an A and B-camera, it was a done deal for me. Those 5 mm increments between lenses might sound like a nominal amount to consider or fight for in most filming scenarios, but they were essential to our aesthetic style and considerations. The variety of mid-range lenses that we cobbled together made a huge difference for us when framing subjects in tight locations, as well as to help underline the difference between one close-up and another, because a lot of the film plays out in close-ups. They’re astoundingly beautiful lenses that are sharp, open very wide at select focal lengths, and have built-in character that never sacrifices their image fidelity. 

Shooting on Caddo Lake sounds like it had its difficulties. Can you describe some of the challenges you faced during production?

There were many days that were like any other set, filming a driving scene or a living room scene. But more often than not we were either on a crew boat, on a picture boat, in the muck of a swamp, or physically in the water up to our waists with a camera. Those were conditions I personally had never been placed in before as a cinematographer, and were wholly unique to this film and these filmmakers. And I loved it! 

Before filming, I remember thinking: “Holy cow, how am I going to find a crew willing to subject themselves to the filming conditions required by this story?” I called only a very special and specific set of people and told them: “This is going to be the hardest film you’ve ever worked on. Are you sure that you’re willing to follow me on this journey?” They all whole-heartedly agreed. And it was my great pleasure when the filming turned out to be one of the most joyful and fulfilling experiences, with crew members saying to me, “You said this was going to be the hardest film I’ve ever worked on, but you didn’t mention it would also be the most fun!” 

I have to take a moment to thank my camera team for hauling so much gear on and off boats, through mud and water in the middle of the night, to get the shots that Celine, Logan, and I envisioned. My B-camera operator and second unit DP Andrew R. Gerety; first ACs Bryan DeLorenzo and Anton Miasnikov; second ACs Derrick “Gooch” Gutierrez and Jack Khorram; loader Kiera Schmidt; and camera utility Miles Labat. Everyone went above and beyond every day, sporting waders, transporting block batteries in water-proof Yeti bags, pulling focus on moving boats as water sprayed us, getting the gear safely from one wet environment to another, often via jet skis and flat-bottom boats. It was incredible to behold. I am so grateful that I got the team I did; it’s the only way that challenging and unique movies like this get made safely and smoothly.

Could you go into more detail about the big ‘oner’ shot? We heard you were called a “ballerina” for pulling it off!

This is the point in the movie where everything starts to change for Ellie and we wanted this to be a propulsive one-shot. After finding our location and starting to rehearse it with just the three of us and my iPhone, we ended up needing to make some alterations to the house in order to make it work. Our production designer Debbie De Villa, who was another invaluable collaborator, expanded some walls and made a window from the kitchen to the dining room to create sight lines and help over-the-shoulder moments work out for the shot. 

I knew that I would have limited control from a lighting standpoint, at least from the interior, since we saw almost every corner of the house in the shot. I had very specific and hidden ways of controlling the light: one was a large HMI coming through the front door’s pane of glass. This was my narrative time stamp for that exact moment in the film, which we would return to later as Ellie again; it caused some beautiful rainbow fragments of light that felt narratively justified, as this is when Ellie’s storyline is fractured. Then we had some hidden tubes obstructed by walls to help boost shadows on Lauren Ambrose (Celeste) in the kitchen. I put ND 0.6 on the windows and lit through them with small HMIs and an ARRI SkyPanel 360-C to boost the interior. The rest of my exposure and lighting was handled via a variable ND filter that was remotely controlled by my B-camera first AC Anton Miasnikov, while my A-camera first AC pulled focus. Since I operated, I gave Anton the control to ramp the filter open as the shot starts outside on the sunlit back porch and moves into the darker interior of the house. It meant that we had to shoot at EI 2000 to accommodate the filter’s stop loss, but I wasn’t worried, given the latitude and low noise floor of the Mini LF. 

Once the stage was set from a blocking and lighting perspective, then came the “ballerina” movements that Lauren Ambrose would later attribute to me and my camerawork when we wrapped the shot. Most oners have a dance choreography element to them; this one was no different. But what she was specifically referring to was that twice in the shot I had to squeeze through an unbelievably narrow hallway between the rooms. A smaller-framed person like Eliza Scanlen can easily pass through it, but not me and my wide shoulders with a camera body on them. A few times I got snagged on doorknobs and door jams. I quickly figured out that in order to go through at the same speed as Eliza, I had to actually rotate my shoulders perpendicular to my path of travel, while still keeping the camera pointed forward. I had to make this shoulder switch happen seamlessly, and it required me taking my right hand off the camera’s handles and operating one-handed while walking sideways for those two moments in the shot. It was incredibly challenging and counter-intuitive, but well worth the effort, as that narrowness truly brings the shot to life. 

How did color play a role in shaping the visual storytelling of "Caddo Lake"? 

The color grade was a massive part of the process for me as cinematographer. This movie required us to take a hands-off approach from a lighting standpoint for our day and boat work, in order to accomplish the ambitious schedule and just to access the really remote places where we filmed. We obviously lit the scenes that we could or that required it, but a lot of the scenes were unlit, or only supplemented by what we could carry in our hands onto a swampy island surrounded by lake water, such as a bounce or a solid floppy. 

Much of the film is temporal, requiring the viewer to track the time of day and the weather conditions. We captured such wonderful natural images, sunsets, and water reflections, on set, but no doubt—just like most films—we needed some massaging in order to maximize the beauty and storytelling within the visual palette. Our colorist Nat Jencks, who colored our previous film “Topside,” did a stupendous job and really made the finished film shine. He did such a good job of taming the natural elements, bringing contrast back into images, bringing out the lush greens of the flora, and really helped integrate a lot of the VFX elements into a place where they felt more baked into the footage. 

As for the palette, we wanted everything to feel real, grounded, and lived in. That often meant dialing down any loud pops of color in wardrobe and set design, so that everything felt like it had a layer of ageing and character. Any very saturated colors were reserved for specific story elements, like Anna’s life jacket, or trying to make something pop from the background, like Ellie’s boat on the lake. We wanted all of the timelines and elements to feel like they could occupy the same place and time, which often meant finding similar tones and colors in all of the locations and weaving them into one another in a way that was consistent with the work of our production designer, costumer, and hair and makeup teams.