BEN RICHARDSON is one of the versatile and exciting young filmmakers working today. Skilled in working with both film and digital, one of Ben’s greatest talents is knowing how to use light and lens as part of the storytelling canvas. Two of his films, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and Joe Swanberg’s “Happy Christmas” (Ben’s second collaboration with Swanberg after “Drinking Buddies”), have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. “Beasts of the Southern Wild” was also nominated for four Academy Awards at the 85th Academy Awards, including a nomination for Best Picture. For his work on ‘Beasts”, Ben also picked up a Film Independent Spirit Award for Best Cinematography. The film garnered four Spirit Award nominations. His short film “Seed” won Best Animated Short at the 2010 Slamdance Film Festival. He is also known for his work on “The Fault In Our Stars”.
With last year’s “Wind River”, BEN RICHARDSON took his cinematography to a whole new level when he teamed up with writer/director Taylor Sheridan. Challenging himself, and as he did with “Beasts”, celebrating nature but in a rugged form of cold, ice and snow, the result was exquisite. And so was the collaboration; so much so that he made the leap into series television with Sheridan on YELLOWSTONE. As Ben himself admits, he is partial to feature film versus “long form television”, but when Taylor Sheridan asks and then states that the show will be shot like a feature film, there was no way he could say no to the opportunity. And not only is he the cinematographer for Season One of the acclaimed show, but a co-producer with creative input and collaboration.
As Taylor Sheridan promised, YELLOWSTONE has all the hallmarks of a feature film both in its scope and in Sheridan’s approach to filmmaking. Along with the work of costume designer Ruth Carter and production designer Ruth De Jong, Ben Richardson’s cinematography is essential to creating and establishing the visual and emotional tonal bandwidth of the series, not only for Season One, but in laying the foundation for Season Two as the work is handed off to a new crew of master artisans. When I spoke with Ben, he was already scouting locations with Sheridan for their next collaboration, which will again celebrate the majesty of this beautiful country.
Starring Oscar and Emmy award winner Kevin Costner, YELLOWSTONE boasts an exemplary ensemble cast in this modern western that retains the mores and touchstones of the Old West which are such a recognizable part of the tapestry that is America. Costner, as John Dutton is a sixth-generation homesteader and patriarch of a powerful, complicated family of ranchers. The Dutton ranch is the largest contiguous ranch in the United States but suffers from the conflicts arising from its borders – an Indian reservation, America’s first national park, and an expanding local town complete with land grabbers and corrupt politicians. In addition to Costner, other principal cast members adding to the fabric of YELLOWSTONE are Luke Grimes, Kelly Reilly, Wes Bentley, Cole Hauser, Kelsey Asbille, Brecken Merrill, Jefferson White, Danny Huston, and most notably, Gil Birmingham.
Having known BEN RICHARDSON for a number of years and had the privilege of watching him grow as a cinematographer and using light and lens for textured storytelling, it was a joy to speak with him about YELLOWSTONE. With his usual good humor and affability, he spoke with a passion for his craft and for YELLOWSTONE. Going technically in-depth about YELLOWSTONE, they were Shooting three cameras and in a 2.00:1 ratio, a new experience for him. But Ben stayed true to his own visual ethic with Zeiss Ultra Prime lenses to capture the beauty of Montana, Utah, and particularly the Dutton Ranch which is, in reality, the noted Chief Joseph Lodge. Creating beautiful visual arcs with visual tones crafted for each of the characters and each of the various settings, there is a texture with his lighting and lensing in YELLOWSTONE that distinguishes between the poverty and wealth that permeates the battle in which John Dutton is engaged with all around him. Celebratory is the color and vibrancy of scenes with traditional Native American settings and activities. Deeply contrasting that is the somewhat claustrophobic world of John Dutton, ensconced in rooms made of finely hewned logs which appear larger than they are to create that metaphoric claustrophobia. But through it all, there is a simplicity that is elegant and honest. Just like BEN RICHARDSON.
Ben, you know I watch every film that you do. I love to see the variety in your work and your growth as a cinematographer. And for you to really come into the limelight with “Beasts” and then pull off “Wind River” with all that white on white lensing, and now to give us the beautiful panoramic vistas of the American West with “Yellowstone”, I have to say that you have just brightened the whole cinematic arena.
Thank you very much. That’s very, very kind. It’s been a fun journey so far.
You’re known primarily for your film work. You’ve done some shorts, but with YELLOWSTONE you step into a television series. Was that a big decision for you, or was it, Taylor Sheridan wants you and you’re going to do it because you just had such a successful collaboration on “Wind River”?
It was a little bit of both. I’ll be honest. While our business seems to be moving toward longer-form storytelling, I still sort of struggle with that medium because of its length and in some ways, its lack of focus relative to feature storytelling. Feature film you’re able to craft like a symphony. You can pick your themes, you can pick your motif, and you can explore and expand upon those during the run time of a 90 minute or a 110-minute story. But with the long form, you can’t just work in quite the same way without finding yourself being repetitive. So the challenge for me was finding something [that fit]. For years, my agents have been offering me series scripts, and I just hadn’t found anything that had worked out. But then of course, when Taylor called me and said he had something, not only do I truly, truly enjoy that collaboration with Taylor, the writing was just absolutely fantastic, and Taylor’s first comment to me was that we were going to shoot it like a movie anyway, so. . . .
And that’s how it plays when you watch the series. It feels like a movie. You take us through these beautiful visual arcs, and you have created different visual tones for each of the characters, and also the various settings. I find that really interesting with your work, Ben. You really give us a visual texture with your lighting and your framing that distinguishes between the whole idea of poverty and wealth that permeates the battle that John Dutton has with everyone around him. I’m curious how you and Taylor went about designing that particular feel through the lighting and the framing.
By design we had, and you correctly state, we had these different worlds, these different environments, and each of them had their challenges and their hardships, and each of them had their beauty. And I think the thing that Taylor and I just tried to do above all was just to use our own eyes and use our own experience of those places and bring that to the framing. In the reservation themes, obviously that is something that Taylor feels very passionately about and wanted to very clearly bring to the screen in a way that perhaps it hasn’t really been seen before. Obviously, that was a theme he touched on in “Wind River”; the idea that this entire people have been brought to this way of life which in a few select ways respects an ancient tradition and a grace and a beauty and an understanding of the landscape, but in other more essential ways, has been so limited by the fact that they are no longer able to move around a vast nation, that it really isn’t working the way it used to. That’s a constant struggle, and something that obviously the first few episodes of YELLOWSTONE touches on quite deeply. But equally, out in that space it can be beautiful, it can be wonderful, and I think we tried to find some of that in those environments as well. Similarly with the Dutton Lodge, which was actually shot on location in Montana, as you know, there are moments of true, just majestic splendor of the environment, the natural beauty of the weather, all the things, and we just try to stay open to those. The nature of the shoot was such that at any moment, we could pivot, we could embrace something that was happening. That’s kind of a method that I still do carry from “Beasts.” Nobody knows what the plan was. They only know what they present you with, and if you throw the plan out on the day because something wonderful is happening, then that’s a great move. But equally, with Dutton Lodge out there and all the trappings he’s surrounded himself while trying to remain a man of nature and a man of the land, he’s kind of built himself this prison of both his family and his wealth. They were new places to me. I hadn’t really seen a lot of Montana before. Spectacular! So I just tried to react honestly with each new scene and each new idea.
I love that you mention the character of Dutton, that he’s made himself almost a prisoner in order to adhere to his Western code of old that he’s trying to retain in the 21st century. You do that so well within the lodge itself, as beautiful as it is, and as Ruth [de Jong] then recreated the interiors of the lodge for other aspects of the film and you feel a sense of claustrophobia. You really bring that to life with your camera.
I’m glad to hear you say that, because I will confess, as much as I love those spaces and I can understand why people embrace them and Taylor, obviously that’s his choice and his aesthetic, I actually personally find that the heavy wood and just the sheer weight of physical matter around you, I actually find it quite oppressive. And when you’re in the lodge and in the hotel we were staying in nearby, there was something about it that it’s just not me. So I found it quite easy to understand how we could make that space both beautiful and majestic, and also, as you say, claustrophobic, a little oppressive. I tried to, wherever possible, feature just the sheer scale of the wood and the scale of the logs, and Ruth built everything from real material. It was quite an incredible piece of design, both the stage work and the additional work she did on the lodge itself. I had never seen anything like it. Just these colossal pieces of tree, just affixed against the walls and things. So I really did try and allow you to feel the weight of it and feel the weight of this nature being attempted to be harnessed, being attempted to be controlled. You still can’t escape the fact that, to a greater or lesser degree, you are still just in the forest. You’re in this massive natural construction.
And you really bring that to light in John Dutton’s bedroom. I really felt it there, that claustrophobic nature, because the bedroom is smaller than the great room is anyway, but then the way you position the camera, you really got the sense of the wood, the log walls being much bigger than they really are. That they are a burden on him; they’re like the yoke on oxen that he’s tied to. I just thought it was so spectacular watching scenes like that that you set up and shot that way. With a television series you rarely, rarely, if ever, get this kind of visual metaphor that you have brought to YELLOWSTONE, and it is a joy to watch this and what it adds to the series.
Totally. I’m so, so glad to hear that, I really am. I feel like the bar has been raised very, very high in recent years by a couple of select shows in particular. Obviously, we can all talk about “Game of Thrones”, it’s just remarkable every time, but also some of the other projects like “The Crown”, where there is a new cinematic scale and a new cinematic scope that is being brought to what used to be the small screen; because let’s face it, most people are now watching this on pretty giant screens. You can buy a $300 55-inch screen, so I see there have to be some things that account for Netflix’s massive permeation into the industry and to the world. So I did feel like there was an opportunity to just do what we did. We shot it in a 2.00:1 ratio which I really actually enjoyed. It was a struggle at first to wrap my head around, are we going to go with 16 by 9, which I don’t dislike entirely as there’s something about that ratio. “Beasts” is a 1.85 movie, and I’ve shot a couple of other 1.85 movies, but there is something about it, especially in an environment like a Montana landscape, where I just feel like it makes the world seem smaller somehow. We obviously couldn’t go to a full 2.39 aspect. Nobody in television shoots and broadcasts that way, but the 2.00:1 has become something that is a little bit more accepted and understood, and it was a delight. Framing within that was really wonderful. One of my favorite tricks was just do wide shots on longer lenses. The mountain and the hills and the background didn’t diminish but, in fact, were exaggerated in scale. So you just constantly had this sense of this vast environment in which these very real, very profound struggles between people were taking place, but I kind of wanted this reminder constantly that we are still just animals in a wilderness, and at the end of the day, life will end and generations will come again, and the world will go on. I think that’s what Dutton is struggling with. Obviously, Kevin [Costner] is bringing this wonderful portrayal of a man who is kind of realizing his mortality as he looks back on his life and looks at his children, and wondering what’s next and what will it be that endures.
I find it interesting that you talk about the struggle and the animals. You really connect with nature. When I look at your best films, your best works, you have this great affinity for connecting with nature. You did it in “Beasts”. You did it in “Wind River”. And now you’ve done it with YELLOWSTONE. What is it about that that attracts you as a cinematographer, as a filmmaker?
That’s a tricky one to answer. There’s honestly something about it that I gain a great sort of peace from being in any environment where people are living, not necessarily in perfect harmony with, but in a kind of struggle with or a flow through nature. Urban environments are wonderful in their own ways, but there is something a little constraining. Storytelling can work in those hunting grounds but there’s something a little constraining about the way everything is formalized and most structures are linear. And these kinds of things, to me, there’s something really effortless and delightful about beating out the beauty and the shapes and the structures of a natural environment, and particularly when people are struggling within it. I suppose it’s the element of surprise, the element of the unexpected. There’s nothing about a natural environment that is entirely repetitive or entirely safe. There’s always an edge to something, there’s always a shape that drops off a way you didn’t expect. And I personally enjoy being in those places. The crew can always tell when we get scouting. I’m suddenly like a little kid again. I’m out scouting with Taylor on the new feature project right now, and we’re trying to pick a vantage point, and before I even knew it I’d climbed halfway up a tree and I’m suddenly there a little embarrassed, because really there’s no need for a DP to be climbing a tree to find a spot. But there’s just something about it that I really enjoy. And I said to my crew as we were going into YELLOWSTONE that they needed to bring sturdy hiking boots and be prepared to spend half their day running up hillsides because to me, to be in those places is about sharing all of that with an audience, it’s about sharing everything that is remarkable. I just really wanted to spend my time placing this story in this truly, truly just beautiful environment, and majestic environment that we were so fortunate to be able to actually shoot in. It’s really a privilege to spend that much time out there.
Are you sure you’re not John Ford reincarnated, Ben? You brought up one of my favorite topics, as you may recall: your lenses. What lenses were you using? I know you were shooting on the Alexa, but I’m curious about the lenses that you used here. I know you’re a fan of Zeiss.
Yes. Very much. “Wind River”, as you know, I shot on the really old Zeiss standard speed, sort of 80s and 90s vintage lenses, and there’s a few elements to the design that they simply can’t redo today. I think they have lead-based glasses and some slightly radioactive elements in some of the glasses. All completely safe to work with now that the lenses exist, but now currently illegal in manufacturing. So Zeiss’s next generation of lenses, the Ultra Primes were my go to. I tested a lot of other lenses. I’ve worked a lot with the Cookes. But something about the Ultra Primes for this. They’re just very, very simple. They’re simple in a way that I felt complemented the somewhat simplicity of the ways of life, you know? They’re matter-of-fact. They don’t bring any strange flares or any strange aberrations to the image. They don’t de-focus perfectly. There’s a tendency in recent lens design to kind of perfect out some of the aberrations. People are making wonderful work on some of these lenses, but some of the more recent designs I look at and when the background de-focuses, it goes away so completely it just becomes a mush. And while that’s interesting for certain projects, I’m sure, it’s just not something that tickles me in the same way. The Ultra Prime, when they go soft in the background, they still have a few little sharp edges. You can feel foliage. You can feel grass on a hillside. It doesn’t just become a perfect blur. I think by technical standards, maybe they’re less perfect, but I found them really, really perfect to work with. We shot the majority of the show on Prime lenses. We were running three cameras all the time and I found that putting up zoom lenses, while that was all to do with the fact that we have so much animal performance, as you’ve seen, cattle and the horses and the bear, when that stuff is going down, the only way to put it on screen, and Taylor is an absolute master at this, is to simply make it happen. He’ll spend days, weeks, working with the wranglers, working with the stunt team and coordinating it so that when we actually come to shoot some of these epic cattle and horse moments they’re simply unfolding in front of us for real. So we had to roll that many cameras, and I found that if I put zooms on the cameras, it was very hard for me to keep track of what kind of coverage we were getting. If I wasn’t certain of the focal length that an operator was able to be using, I would sort of lose track of my designs. So by going with Prime, even though objectively some might say it sort of slowed us down a little bit because of the focal length change and the physical lens change, I found that it let me structure the shoot and structure the scenes much, much more easily, because I could hold in my mind, “Okay, A camera caught this and this, B has got this and this. We need this and this,” so I could just call out lens changes to people without any confusion.
Were you shooting in a raw setting on the cameras?
More or less. I have a single LUT table that I use. It’s evolved over about four or five projects and several years now. I used the same process on “Wind River” and on “Sand Castle” and on “1922”. I’m actually looking at it right now as I plan for the next feature, and I’m struggling to find anything I want to tweak about it. It just kind of works for me now. So yeah, we’re shooting raw. We did shoot the pro-res format. It’s just a little more manageable with the sheer volume of the material we were shooting.
Now, of course, you do get a chance here to also play with a lot of color with the ceremonial Native American aspects of YELLOWSTONE. How fun was that for you as a contrast to nature’s inherent beauty, and then the world of John Dutton within his world, the coldness of Danny Huston and the grey, the way that you made it a more sickly color every time Danny is on screen. It works so well for him being a sleazy developer. But then you get the magnificence and majesty and vibrancy of a lot of Ruth Carter’s Native American costuming. Was that a fun change for you?
It very much was. It was also a nerve-wracking thing. I felt such a great responsibility. Taylor has been friends with a large number of Native Americans and lived in concert with them for a number of years, and our co-producer, Michael Friedman, also has a great number of Native American friends who came on as advisors. When we started to actually learn about what the themes were going to be and what the arc for these characters was going to be, I just felt such a responsibility to not go in with too childlike of an approach to it. I didn’t want to exaggerate it, I didn’t want to heighten it beyond what it already is. When we had the powwow scene, for example, it was a real powwow. We managed, through Michael and Taylor’s connections, and Darrell who was our Native American advisor, we managed to pull together a huge quantity of people to do a real powwow that they had already had on their calendar, and just do it in our presence. And that was a really interesting thing to shoot because we were told from the moment it begins to the moment it ends, which was a decent amount of time, we weren’t to interact. We weren’t to cut it. We weren’t to try to change it. It was an important ceremony that was actually happening for real in front of us. Similarly, the sweat lodge scene. Building the sweat lodge was done correctly and ceremonially, and at the end of the day we were also aware that it was a set that we were not allowed to strike. Once the sweat lodge has been built, it has a meaning and a connection to the environment and the ground it’s been built on, and it’s a sacred space. We don’t really have things like this, particularly in traditional Western culture. It’s not a thing you can simply takedown. Taking it down has to be done with as much respect and ceremony as the building, so both seeing it in that sense and getting that perspective on it, I just tried to keep a documentarian’s distance, in a way. I tried really to present it, again, as simply and as clearly as I could without embellishing, without getting in and getting excited about something that looks cool or trying to exaggerate something. I just wanted there to be this sense of that culture in a very unvarnished way.
I think you achieved that, because it felt, as you described it, you tried to be documentarian in your approach. It felt like we were watching history come to life in the Native American ceremonial sequences. As if you are reading a history book and you’re turning the pages and you’re not part of it, but you’re so awed by it that you’re just watching it unfold. Whereas with the Dutton family and the other elements that are happening, you’re very much in the middle of everything. You’re in the middle of the father/son squabbles, the father/daughter squabbles. Dad and fighting everybody else squabbles. But when you get to the Native American ceremonial and traditional heritage moments, it really did feel observational for us. I liked that.
I’m very glad to hear that. I really am.
Before I let you go, Ben, I want to ask you, what is the magic of this collaboration between you and Taylor? You’ve got two big collaborations under your belt. You’ve got another one coming up here. What is that magic? The two of you now remind me of Bobby Bukowski and Oren Moverman.
Well, we joke about it all the time. He’s a straight up cowboy. A big, loud, Texan, horseriding, horse competing cowboy. There’s no real other way to describe it. And he finds it absolutely hilarious that he’s found his filmmaking counterpart in a small, pale Brit. We really do laugh about that. But I think the things that we complement each other. The thing that I like most about working with him is, he’s just a force of nature. And at the end of the day, to me, the most interesting films are about forces of nature. They’re about the world unbound. They’re about people, whether it’s interpersonal or people against an environment or against a culture, when people are fighting against something bigger than them, that’s where real drama exists for me, and the thing with Taylor is, he brings that to every day. He brings that to every scene. He lives and breathes it, and he writes so quickly. That’s one of the other delights, is that you’re kind of always kept on your toes. There’s no settling in and it’s a scene that we’ve all known for three months. There is every possibility he will pick it on the day and make some radical change. To me, again, that’s part of the joy of filmmaking. A perfectly executed uninteresting story is one of the worst things you can do with filmmaking. There’s no point in just perfectly executing with a perfect plan on something that ultimately isn’t interesting. And the thing that I know I’ll get from Taylor always is the precise opposite of that; he will always…He keeps the energy high; he keeps the reality high; he keeps the tangible nature of things high. And so for me as a cinematographer, it affords me an endless opportunity to capture and to enhance those things. YELLOWSTONE was by no small measure the longest shoot period I had done. I think we did 98 days all told. And there were days where it felt like the end was never going to come and that it was a true marathon, but in most ways, that remained invigorating. I have a brother-in-law who runs endurance races, and I just can’t even begin to understand how he does them. I think he did a 258-mile run over about six days. . . That does something for his spirit, that does something for his soul, his ability to push his body to do that. And while that’s not my version of it, I don’t think I would ever be able to do that, filmmaking, for me, actually being on set, the daily process of filmmaking for me is about that. I want to feel like I’m pushing myself. I want to feel like I’m running that marathon and choosing not to quit. And so that’s the great thing about working with Taylor, the stories and the environment that we find ourselves in, as much as it was with “Beasts”, just this endless series of obstacles to overcome. And what is there to life but overcoming obstacles?
by debbie elias, exclusive interview 04/27/2019
