Protégé of Academy Award-winning DP Greig Fraser, Soffer is bound to become one of the most sought-after eyes behind the lens.
The Big Picture Looking for a filmmaker on the rise you absolutely need to keep an eye on? Look no further than The Creator cinematographer Oren Soffer.
You can hear about it all straight from Soffer himself in the video interview at the top of this article, or you can read our full 40-minute conversation in transcript form below. So many follow-up questions! What were those “silly movies” about? Do you find yourself still drawn to those kinds of stories now as a professional cinematographer?
SOFFER: Great question. I think first step for me was just starting to educate myself. I lived in Israel at the time so I was about as far from this as one could be, certainly as far from Hollywood and Los Angeles and the American film industry, but kind of always dreaming about it. I grew up in the States as a kid, so I always had one foot in both cultures. Obviously English is my first language. I'm not in here with an Israeli accent or anything.
I think also film history. I encounter a lot of younger DPs who don't watch movies or don't watch a ton of movies, and I'm always like, “How do you talk to directors?” Because directors speak movie. Directors all watch a ton of movies and they know all the references, and they reference specific movies and shots and film language, and if you don't speak that language, I'm like, “I don't know how you work with a director.” Especially in narrative.
SOFFER: He might’ve. You know what? I don’t exactly remember. Maybe I should tell myself that that’s what happened. [Laughs] SOFFER: 100%. Another great book that I read in high school, by the way, Rebel Without a Crew, Robert Rodriguez. He's written a few books about indie filmmaking. So yeah, I just soaked all those up. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, that’s another good book.SOFFER: Can we go? Can he make us some pizza? So we brought up Greig.
Before I get there though, Greig was meant to shoot The Creator. Dune 2 came up and he had to step out, and he recommended you for the job. When you found out and were offered this position, was it like, “Yeah, no-brainer.
But anyway, we had the costumes and then I was like, “Okay, who's putting them on the actors? The costume designer’s in New Zealand.
There's a lot of just-in-case thinking on big-budget filmmaking where you're like, “Well, let's just have all this stuff and all this crew and all this equipment just in case.” But for us, it was really more about paring it down and saying, “No, no, no. We're gonna narrow this down to just what we need in order to accomplish this look.” And it meant we shot on one lens, we shot on one focal length, we didn't carry a whole lens set.
I'm glad we started where we did with this conversation because it does feel like you held tight to what inspired you from the very, very beginning, and now we can see it reflected in your work. And also that same enthusiasm for similar things are still there powering everything you do. So, Gareth operated. Gareth’s a great operator. This wouldn't have worked if he wasn't, and this is also why this method would not necessarily work with every other director because you have to have a director who's good at operating and has a good eye. And Gareth, he just has good taste. He has great taste. He knows where to find the good lighting.
My whole goal on set was, he's dealing with so much – he was a producer on the project, he's operating the camera, he's directing the actors – I was like, “I don't want to bother him.
It was every day was that dance. We were reacting to what Gareth was doing and Gareth’s reacting to what we're doing and how we lit a space. So it was this mutual thing, but we wouldn't have to over-communicate about it because it was just planned that way. We would talk about these things on the scouts, so all this was already figured out by the time we would show up.
SOFFER: The most difficult sequence in the film was the tank battle. It's hard to break it down into individual shots because it was all difficult. That was the most remote location, the most physically difficult, the crumbiest hotel. Everything about it was hard. Not that I'm complaining about being flown around the world and put up in hotels, but some of them were very nice and some of them were not so nice. It's a very remote part of Thailand. Beautiful. I mean, just stunning.
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