This week, we talk with cinematographer Bill Kirstein about his work on ‘Happyend,’ which premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year.

Bill shares stories from his childhood, and how that rebellious spirit carries into his approach to filmmaking. We explore what draws him to projects where directors have bold visions that challenge conventional execution.

Our conversation digs into the artistic choices behind Happyend, a near-future story about friendship set against impending disaster. Bill walks us through how constraints can actually fuel creativity, and breaks down his cinematographic approach - from color palette decisions to camera positioning - that helps immerse viewers in the film’s atmospheric world.

(Photo credit: Eunhae Mary Park)

You are listening to the we need to Talk About Oscar podcast and this is our conversation with Bill Kerstein, cinematographer of Happy End.

It helps to have a frame for the story, just like the movie frame, you know, we have this set of choices and within that, let's make the best ones.

And as a result, often you make a piece of film that's more cohesive and more focused than sometimes if you have unlimited resources.

I guess, to start us off.

Were you the type of kid who'd play pranks on others to get their opinion thinking through to those others or even just for the fun of it?

That's a really interesting question.

I had some mischievous qualities, you know, like throwing water balloons off the roof, stuff like that.

I don't know how much of it was about getting response or just testing boundaries.

But, yeah, I think.

I don't know, we all have that desire to test boundaries sometimes, right?

Yeah.

Which I believe can really be said about filmmaking as well.

I couldn't agree more.

Actually, reflecting a little bit about why I love filmmaking so much, I think that's what always inspires me on a project.

When a director is really ambitious and has a creative vision and we don't know if we can achieve it.

That's what I love.

How can we figure out the solution?

How can we figure out the best way to tell the story?

And I especially like it if there's no obvious answer.

Exactly.

And fast forward to nowadays the film attend Happy End and its inclusion in the Venice Film Festival's Orizonte or Horizons section last year, and it was announced last July, its inclusion, its participation then premiered there on the 2nd of September, and in between, in the middle of it all, in August, you were included on American Cinematographer's annual Rising Star list.

And it's been a year since all this.

Not just tumultuous year, but tumultuous couple of months.

How does it feel looking back at those times, those moments?

I mean, it feels great.

It feels like a dream come true, really.

I think that sort of run of even going back the year before that, when Neo's film Opus premiered at Venice Film Festival, we had just finished shooting Happy End.

We flew to Venice the next day after we wrapped and went to the premiere of Opus.

And then so it felt just like truly.

I mean, I've wanted to tell stories and make films since I was a kid.

And so it felt like I was finally getting to the point of using all the skills that I'd spent 15 years developing to help put those stories on the screen.

With some of my best friends and watch other movies that I was a fan of, watch retrospectives, go to the beach.

I mean, it truly, I was having the time of my life.

Venice is the best.

And as for working with writer director Neo Sora on back to back films, as you just mentioned, Opus, which is first and foremost, as we know, a project as personal as it gets, and then this one societal critique, looking into the future.

And these are two very different emotional registers.

Did your approach change drastically between them?

As far as visuals go.

In many ways it did.

I mean, Opus is black and white and is a concert film.

And so we knew we were in a particular space and shooting a series of pieces of music.

I think there were a lot of things that didn't change in terms of approach.

We had also been working on Happy End for about three years before we shot Opus, so that conversation was already in progress.

But Neo and I are both attracted to long takes and to really considering and asking ourselves the reason why to do a shot.

How to tell this story best, how to pull the audience into it, or from what kind of, what perspective of distance are we seeing the story?

So I think some of our shared aesthetic instincts, things we're a fan of, applied both to Opus and to Happy End.

But then, you know, Happy End, being a narrative film, we were able to completely dive into that world of storytelling and, you know, thinking about perspective and construction and blocking for every scene.

And very early on in the film, Happy End, we learn that it takes place in the near future.

And in the vein of this, I don't expect you to remember certain moments of your life so specifically.

Sometimes I don't know what I had for breakfast just yesterday, but could you by chance compare your idea of what that might hold and the difference or evolution of your perception of this aforementioned near future when first reading the script, shooting the film, or even those three years of you guys developing it.

Its word premiere a year ago, and now it's US theatrical release.

Because as we know, the world is changing by the day.

Yes, we're asking ourselves, what does tomorrow look like?

Let alone what does 25 years or 30 years from now look like?

It was a question that we asked a lot, and I had a lot of conversations with Neo about it, because the future can be anything.

And often, I think in filmmaking, when you have some constraints, it really works to your benefit because it helps to have a frame for the story just like the movie frame.

You know, we have this set of choices, and within that, let's make the best ones.

And as a result, often you make a piece of film that's more cohesive and more focused than sometimes if you have unlimited resources.

So in this case, because imagining the future could take any form, but we were still an independently financed, relatively low budget film, Neo, I think, brilliantly found a solution that also fit with the story, which is a story about the relationship changing between the two main characters, these boys coming of age in the face of an impending earthquake.

And so the focus was really on them.

It wasn't the theatrics of science fiction that you could have in another film.

But I always, I try to make everything make sense for myself in the, in the world around the story, even stuff we don't see.

And one way that Neo really helped me was he said, if this isn't a sci fi world that's full of flying cars and chips implanted in people's brains, what if this world is much like our own now, if things didn't continue to change that much, if they just got dingier.

And in a way, I felt like that was such a brilliant insight because we're not necessarily on a path towards singularity or any other.

Who knows what the future holds.

And it could be that this kind of stagnation is just as realistic as exponential growth.

And so with that sort of like the cracks starting to show, it felt like the right choice for this story about earthquake in a friendship.

And so I use that as a jumping off point to start imagining, okay, maybe power and resources are even more of an issue in this near future.

And so let's never have the overhead lights on.

And so we were able to take really abstract concepts and eventually reduce them to specific cinematographic choices.

And I'm really proud of how that choice helps to create a consistent look throughout the film that really subconsciously tells you the story.

And then on top of that, thinking about the quality of the air 30 years from now in Tokyo, is it denser, is it thicker, is it more polluted?

What would that do to the color?

And I know having been in New York through wildfires and other places like, the quality of the air changes and the way it looks changes.

And so I talked even before we started shooting with Tim Massick, our colorist, about can we create a LUT that has this density and this grit of that future air?

And so we ended up finding something that was a little bit warmer and a little dirtier as our kind of base look for the film.

And it's wholly different what it says about the story and the Film and how you can or cannot anticipate certain things and what that means for our real world.

But now, seeing the film pretty much a year ago and rewatching it just yesterday, it's just one of those stories and films that just gets more and more timely by the day.

And of course, there is something we've already alluded to.

There is rebellion happening in front of the camera with these students.

But to me, there is also something about rebelling behind the camera.

And you mentioning choices.

Did you find yourself making visual choices that subvert authority or push back against the surveillance state depicted in the film?

That's such an interesting question.

I like that.

I think, well, we depict the surveillance state quite specifically through the use of these high angle shots for which we used a much wider angle lens and a much cleaner look.

And then that was treated through visual effects later to kind of become this, the Panopti system that you see on screen.

I think that there were things we subtly did that push against and rebel against the conventions of filmmaking or like the way you might assume to shoot something.

But I think for the most part, our visual choices were driven by thinking about the perspective of the film and as the characters looking back on these formative times from a time further in their future.

So we were thinking, for ko and Yuta, 30 years from now, when they remember this time in their friendship, what is that experience like?

And without ever saying that in the film, how can we represent that feeling for the audience of when you reflect back on your childhood and you're like, oh, that was the day that I went to this place and everything changed.

We took a few different approaches to that question.

One was to shoot on longer lenses for almost the entire film.

We were always looking at 50 millimeters or above for almost everything.

And then combining that with a deep depth of field.

O is shooting between a T4 and T11 so that you could really have a sense of looking at something from a distance, but being fully immersed in the texture of that world, putting the characters in the scene rather than separating them from it.

And then combining the vintage lenses that we used with the Sony Venice 2 sensor.

So kind of mashing up the most contemporary technology with older technology to kind of create this feeling of a memory of the future.

It made sense when we first started thinking about it.

And since then I've tried to think of better ways to talk about it.

If you imagine looking through a pair of binoculars, you can see something that's far away, but you also sense that you can't touch it.

And I think the longer lenses combined with the deep depth of field give you that same feeling of memory subconsciously.

The way we look at our own past, like, it's right there.

I can see it, but I can't touch it anymore.

And so that was all supposed to be going on.

As an audience member, you're never supposed to be aware of those things.

You're supposed to be immersed in the story.

But that was some of the subtle emotion that we were trying to achieve through those choices.

This is exactly what I love about cinematography.

How the technical idea of it all can meet with the artistry.

It's incredible.

But another thing we just can't not talk about are the earthquakes.

Because those aren't like, I don't know, five to ten minute sequences, but yet they have to be visceral and they have to justify the constant fear.

When you're simulating those moments with the set shaking, the camera shaking, are you calibrating the camera movement to match the set that's also shaking, or vice versa?

What were the roles there?

This is such a great question and obviously such an important part of the film, like a huge consideration.

And the original title of the film was Earthquake.

So first we did a lot of testing, and even before that, Neo had a brilliant idea about how to construct the earthquake sequence.

And this was the idea that he told me about even before the school location was found, but of doing a long take with Ko that leads us into the scene and then pushes straight in with Yuta, and then that the earthquake occurs at the end of that long take, especially on a budget.

But I think it would be brilliant on any scale of film, allowing the audience to sit in an unbroken take like that where they've seen the set and seen that there's, you know, there are no shakers, there's nothing there.

And then for the earthquake to start at the end of that, I think just subconsciously convinces you that, oh, this is really happening, because it's an effect.

Every earthquake in a film is an effect.

And so we, through testing, started to understand that a combination of shaking the background and shaking the camera would be the best way to kind of sell this feeling that it's really happening.

And I had a terrific key grip on this named Iko San, who was doing the Dall e for that shot while I operated the camera remotely with the Ronin.

And then when we got to the end of the shot, he would physically shake the Ronin.

And so there was a whole iterative process where we were testing, like, different shake levels.

Ultimately, it really sold.

But that was one of the most technically challenging scenes in the film because not only camera, but also the actors had to get the entire scene exactly right.

And then we had to do the effect at the end of it.

So the stakes of that became really high for everyone.

Yeah.

And also almost imagine that it's such a fine line between it becoming too improvised or too calculated, because either way, it.

It doesn't work.

Yeah, exactly right.

That's something that I think about a lot.

And I think Neo is very aware of too.

Like finding the perfect balance between an aesthetic choice, but something that doesn't separate you from the story.

And, yeah, I'm so proud of the whole team.

The production designer as well, that was.

We had many conversations about whether it's horizontal or vertical blinds in that scene where the earthquake takes place.

And it basically doesn't work with horizontal blinds.

They have to be vertical.

It's so satisfying to see the fruits of everyone's labor come together in that way and say, oh, it works.

Yeah.

So, so many factors you got incredible.

And yeah, given everything we've discussed about this near future, the film presents and where you find yourself now, Gwenis films working with Neo on these very different projects, the rising star recognition.

And this is a question I returned to many times.

What excites you most about the possibilities ahead.

So much?

I think one of the reasons Neo and I started working together was I was shooting a lot of celluloid film.

And that's something I'm super excited to continue doing.

I think it just the way that I like to focus on the process.

I think film inspires everyone on set to focus on the process.

So that's something I'm super excited about and just working with great directors and great collaborators.

A few people have reached out to me about their films and their three projects that are coming up that are at various stages of financing that I can't wait to shoot.

And I think it's that thing.

It's directors who want to take risks, who love great movies, who are excited about storytelling.

That's what inspires me.

And then for me, continuing to learn on every project and pushing the boundaries of what I'm capable of and really, you know, trying to have that close collaboration where you can ultimately, when you're shooting, instinctively know what your creative partner wants to do.

I think it's the most efficient, it's the most fun.

And, like, becoming that focused on a particular story is really inspiring to me.

100%.

Bill, once again, thanks for your time for this conversation.

Thank you for having me.

I really appreciate it.

Yeah, I can't wait to see whatever you do next.

The one after and the one after.

Thank you so much.

I hope we can talk again sometime.

And I really have been inspired listening to this podcast.

So thank you.

Thank you so much.

Looking forward to catching up with you.

Awesome.