The brisk barbed banter between leads Casey Affleck, Matt Damon and Hong Chau roars off the screen in action comedy caper The Instigators. Their comic timing is captured in camera rather than through the edit thanks to an intuitive approach to filming evolved by director Doug Liman and cinematographer Henry Braham BSC in their second successive picture together following Road House.
“Doug encouraged improvisation and because we have a shooting style that can evolve with the scene we can capture moments that feel spontaneous,” Braham explains.
An irreverent, action-packed and comic take on the heist genre, The Instigators is co-written by Affleck and produced by Damon and Ben Affleck’s company, Artists Equity for AppleTV+. The story is set in Boston and was intentionally filmed during winter where Braham’s photography accentuated the cloudy skies and blue-grey hues of the buddy movie about a hapless pair for whom everything goes wrong.
“Doug has got this antenna for things that don't feel truthful,” Braham says. “If it's not working in one way, he'll try something completely different and that could just literally turn the whole scene on its head. To have the flexibility to do that is important for a filmmaker like that. We always ended up with something significantly better.”
“We never put down a tripod, never put down a dolly track, nothing that would restrict the actors,” shares Liman [in the film’s production notes]. “With The Instigators, I knew we were going to be shooting very quickly and I wanted it to feel alive, unscripted. I very much let the reality influence my style.”
Braham has been developing this technique and related philosophy over a number of films including with James Gunn on Suicide Squad (2021) and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023), The Flash for director Andy Muschietti and on Road House and always with RED cameras.
“In camera technology there's been a steady progression of improvements but I've kept the same fundamental principles for every film I’ve shot over last four to five years,” he says.
For Braham, the move to large format represents a profound step forward in movie making technique. “When RED developed their first VistaVision (VV) camera it was revolutionary because the moment you have the larger negative it completely changed the type of lenses you could use. Because the negative format is large you can use wider lenses that don't look like wider lenses on screen.
“In every filmmaker's dream there's a thing called a ‘tight wide’ shot which is where you want to see everything but at the same time you want to be close and connected to what's going on.
“In the old days we used to have a wide shot or a tight shot. Now, thanks to the advent of large format digital cameras, we can have our cake and eat it, which is a tight wide shot.”
Braham shot The Instigators using RED V-RAPTOR and Leitz M 0.8 glass. Most of the film is shot single camera operated by Braham supported by A Camera 1st AC Dermot Hickey. The camera’s portability and ability to capture images even in dimly lit situations offered multiple benefits the team were able to maximise over the 36-day shoot.
“Hopefully the audience is not aware of the camera at all but feels very connected to the story,” Braham says. “A classic way of doing that is for the camera to stand back and be on longer lenses and to observe what's going on. There are brilliant examples of that in Doug's early movies, especially in his first Bourne picture (The Bourne Identity 2002).
“Now there's a new way of doing it which technology has allowed us to achieve. Large format cameras are the major step. Secondly, they put that sensor in a camera the size of a Hasselblad. RED really nailed this. The V-RAPTOR is so light it enables you to do all sorts of things that are intimate or to put the camera in places which you couldn’t fit a larger one.”
In this endeavour Braham has been aided by the bespoke designs of David Freeth, developer of the stabiliser system Stabileye. “It’s incredibly expressive,” Braham says of the remotely operated, miniature stabilised head. “It kind of allows the camera to dance with whatever's going on in front of it.
“It means you can be entirely intuitive with a handheld camera. You can be very precise about the relationship of the camera to the actors. The actors aren't bound by marks on the floor. I can always keep the camera in the right relationship to them and they will always be in the right relationship to the other actors and the set. That’s a lot harder when there's a team of people directly behind the camera worried about getting into territory that hasn't been discussed.”
He has just shot DC Studios and Warner Bros. Pictures’ Superman for James Gunn and says 90 per cent of the film was shot in this fashion. “A few years ago, we used to think a big, big movie like this had to be approached in a certain way but I don't think you need to now. Directors change their minds when they discover the freedom they get from this approach.”
He worked with regular colourist Stefan Sonnenfeld of Company 3 to grade The Instigators. “My process is to shoot material during prep and to build a colour bible of how the movie is going to look. You can talk about these things and look at bits of reference but I find it most helpful to shoot some material and build the look so that everybody from design to costume can work toward the same goal. It’s like designing your own print stock. I love that it's like starting with a blank sheet of paper. Some people don't like that because they want some rules to work with. I'm more interested in there being no rules.”
The British DP says he likes to work with the latest model of RED as soon as new sensors or features are released. “There have been all sorts of incremental improvements of RED over the years and pretty much on every movie I’ll adopt the latest version and make sure I thoroughly understand it.
“In the days of film, the cinematographer would take time to get to understand a new film stock when it came out. It’s a bit like an artist testing the canvas or wood or surface on which they will paint. Your raw materials react differently. It's the same with photography. Each time tools change I want to understand what that is. But once I’ve understood it then that knowledge goes into the background. I’ll just know, for example, the photographic range I’m working with and what a particular camera is good at.”
