- Nightcrawler
Robert Elswit has been getting a lot of attention lately for his work on Dan Gilroy’s satirical thriller Nightcrawler and Paul Thomas Anderson’s upcoming Inherent Vice. This attention is deserved, though it hardly represents a breakthrough for the 64-year-old cinematographer, who won an Academy Award in 2008 for Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. (Barring The Master, he’s shot all of Anderson’s movies—the director regularly credits him with determining the films’ style.) Still, the sheer number of interviews with Elswit that have appeared online in the past several weeks confirm that he’s attained a level of popular recognition that few in his profession achieve. Like Gordon Willis, Nestor Almendros, or Harris Savides, Elswit has the power to raise the overall quality of any film he works on, employing a distinctive yet adaptable style that enhances whatever mood his collaborators wish to generate. His style is so integral to Nightcrawler that he practically qualifies as the film’s coauthor.
- Magnolia
Nightcrawler gives Elswit a chance to showcase both his menacing side and romantic side. In turn, Elswit’s nighttime photography communicates the danger of the protagonist’s work (videotaping violent crime scenes for TV news) as well as the thrill he gets from it. This is in keeping with the film’s purposely slippery point-of-view, which veers between an objective critique of sensationalistic journalism and a subjective portrait of Jake Gyllenhaal’s antihero. Ultimately the film’s most impressive technical achievement might be that it’s nearly impossible to determine where Gilroy’s work ends and Elswit’s begins.
- Heist
