Master of creating imagery that illustrates beyond the narrative, Erik Messerschmidt is an Academy-Award-winning cinematographer and long-time David Fincher collaborator equipped with a captivating photographic eye and razor-sharp instinct. Messerschmidt’s expertise lies in the visceral experience, the intricacy of his lens causing hairs on the backs of necks to stand to attention while Fincher’s protagonists face a run-in with death, and chests to pound amid the thrill of a car chase – all thanks to the cinematographer’s ability to deliver a sucker-punch to the senses.

After starting out as gaffer on Fincher’s 2014 thriller Gone Girl, Messerschmidt was the guiding visual eye behind the auteur’s chilling Netflix series Mindhunter, his monochromatic ode to 1940s cinema, Mank (for which Messerschmidt won the Oscar for Best Cinematography), and most recently The Killer, stalking the dark psyche of a trained assassin. Having developed an instinctive shorthand with Fincher, Messerschmidt’s ongoing intention is to ensure the viewer is immersed in a world that is palpable in our own. Messerschmidt switched lanes for his most recent project, as Michael Mann’s cinematographer for his acclaimed high-speed epic, Ferrari, bringing to life the tumultuous rise of Enzo Ferrari’s automotive empire in Northern Italy.

Ella Joyce: You began working with David Fincher on Gone Girl a decade ago, how has your creative relationship evolved over that time?
Erik Messerschmidt: In the beginning, I had been hired by Jeff Cronenweth who shot Gone Girl to be the gaffer on that movie. I was principally working with Jeff but of course, David is involved in every aspect of his films and he forms a relationship with everyone on the crew. He gave me the opportunity to move up and become a director of photography on Mindhunter, which was an extraordinary gift. We formed a very tight working relationship, over the years. I’ve spent a lot of energy and time trying to make sure that I understand what he responds to and what he is interested in seeing. I’ve grown as well, my tastes, my sensibilities, my skill and my technique have evolved.

EJ: The films you create build such immersive and visceral experiences, how do you go about crafting those environments?
EM: We try really hard to think of it as a completely holistic experience for the audience. David is interested in using every aspect of filmmaking, sound, imagery, music and performance equally in how he communicates his ideas to his audience. Nothing takes more importance than anything else, it’s a very egalitarian type of cinema. In terms of my participation in the process, it’s primarily one of storytelling with the camera, how are we using the camera to enhance the experience the audience has, when can the camera take a step back and when does the camera need to be very expressive? Those are the discussions we have in terms of when my job is important and when it’s not, if you catch my drift.

EJ: Your latest project with David, The Killer is an intense portrait of a lone assassin, what was it like designing that world?
EM: We primarily discussed the idea that this is a person who never lets anyone in his personal space and works extraordinarily hard to remove himself from the public view, but not in a way that he’s hiding, just in that he doesn’t interact with anyone unless it’s absolutely necessary. You can see that in the script when he’s buying things from a kiosk or he’s ordering things from Amazon – he’s minimising his interaction. So, we thought that when we use the camera it becomes a conversation of subjectivity. When we’re observing him and the character is in control and confident, the cameras are in absolute lockstep with him and it’s almost a silent personality-less observer. You don’t see that the camera is operated, the camera is an objective ghost in the room and it’s watching him in a way that he never would allow. I found it to be interesting that we’re in his space watching him and he is completely unaware that the camera is there but is behaving in a way that is entirely focused on his success in the task at hand. Then, of course, when things fall apart, we thought it would be interesting for the camera as well to become much less controlled, much less manicured and more frenetic to mirror his state of mind. The colour palette and the tone were more driven by the production design, locations, costumes and the inherent weather or climate of the places we were shooting. In my mind, Paris always looks cool, it always looks sort of blue, and it has that kind of split-tone colour while the Dominican Republic and Chicago all have their unique visual palette.

“I want the movies I’m involved in making to be something that people return to, watch again and think about.”

EJ: I wanted to ask you about how you work within different locations, can you automatically see how you want a certain city or country to be shot?
EM: Yeah, I think so. There are two methodologies, you can do lots of visual research, and create lookbooks or visual plans, which I do from time to time, but if it’s not done in context to the location’s specific characteristics it can feel quite forced in the end. It’s very difficult to project ideas onto something that won’t accept them. In this particular case, we started with scouting, we would go to see these locations and discuss how they look and for me, it also has to come from the location’s natural state. If the curation of the shooting environment is done properly, then the lighting and the resulting aesthetic decisions are much easier and feel so much more natural.

EJ: You mentioned earlier how you used the camera to reflect the protagonist’s mental state in The Killer, in general, how do you use your framing technique to guide the audience and influence the story you’re telling?
EM: We’re never looking for the cool shot or the interesting shot, I sort of hate that idea. It’s really easy to just reach for the thing that immediately looks interesting but often, those decisions don’t serve the story. I think of the frame as being the principal tool of communication the director has for explaining contextual relationships between characters and locations to the audience. The Killer, in particular, is very much about that, it’s very much about the Killer’s relationship to his targets and his relationship to his personal space. We tried to be really thoughtful about what we were including in the frame, for example, there are very few over-the-shoulder shots in the film, and very rarely are we over his shoulder observing him observing something. We’re either looking at him looking at the world and then showing the audience what he’s looking at, or we’re slightly too close to him, observing his contemplative nature. We shot in a slightly wider screen format and aspect ratio than we had worked in before, we made that decision because we knew we would be including other things in the frame that were relevant to the character while he was in the frame, so we wanted to make sure we have that extra space on the edges. The framing is very specific and selective, it’s decided very early on in the process of the rehearsal.

EJ: That’s really interesting. Mank was the first film you were the cinematographer on alongside Fincher and the visuals are stunning. How does shooting in black and white compare to colour? And, how does that alter the narrative and experience of the film as a whole?
EM: It was extraordinary, I loved it. The process of lighting and composing for black and white has a real elegant simplicity to it because it distils everything down to just tone, composition and texture. In colour photography, we can use colour as a separation tool to describe depth and we do that all the time. We put cooler objects in the foreground against warmer objects in the background, those objects can have similar brightness values and yet you’re still able to distinguish things around the background. In black and white photography you can’t work that way, so it has to be a contrast or textural change and that’s enormously challenging, but it’s also fantastic. I had shot black and white in film school and on one or two commercials but that was it – it wasn’t something I’d done extensively.

EJ: The differences between Old Hollywood and New Hollywood are well documented but what are the differences between heritage and modern techniques in cinematography? Are there any traditional techniques you use today?
EM: Absolutely. Modern cinematography is very obsessed with soft light and very low levels of light. Part of that is driven by budget restraints while the other part is how the audience’s taste has evolved and the cameras, of course, are spectacularly fast now so they’re very sensitive to light. A lot of the aesthetic of Old Hollywood was driven by the necessity to work at 50 or 25 ASA film with a lot of light on the stage because that’s just what you needed to do to get quality exposure on the film. I quite enjoy working with larger amounts of light than I need because I feel like I have more nuanced control over the image and the exposure that way. I quite like working with hard light or mixtures of hard light and soft light, it’s a technique I grew up using in my younger days as a gaffer. There’s a lot of hard light in The Killer, for example, when Michael [Fassbender] is in the car there’s a lot of hard light used and in some of the exteriors in the Dominican Republic we were really embracing the hard light in the sun and not diffusing it extensively. I enjoy the process of mixing old techniques and new techniques.

EJ: You most recently worked on Michael Mann’s Ferrari, how did you capture such a high-octane environment? It must’ve been a real adrenaline rush of a project.
EM: That’s a great way to describe it. The movie is told in two very distinct, separate aesthetic principles. The dialogue-driven scenes, particularly between Adam [Driver] and Penélope [Cruz] are shot very classically with soft light and composed compositions, and the editing process is quieter and less frenetic. Then, in the racing sequences or anytime any of the characters are in the cars it becomes very alive, frenetic and visceral. We were mixing techniques with mounting technology and how we were operating the camera, but also with lighting and exposure. The racing sequences outside are often in front light so it’s not overly manicured at all, the image is kind of raw and aggressive while the interiors are more managed. Again, so much of that is driven by the location, and the fact we were able to shoot in Northern Italy in the location the story took place, where the real characters lived and worked brought so much to the world that we were building.

EJ: What is it about a project that first grabs your interest?
EM: For me, it’s the director. I believe filmmaking is a director’s medium, I believe as a cinematographer I’m there to help that person make their film and certainly have my sensibilities, my tastes and things that I respond to, but I need to be inspired by the director. I need to be sucked into their world and see them be excited by it, be passionate about it and have an idea about what it is they want their film to be. I don’t want the first meeting to be them asking me what I think, I want the first meeting to be me listening for an hour and a half as they tell me how they see their movie evolving visually. You’re going to be spending 80 days with somebody and you need them to be overjoyed with the prospects of making their film. The script is a serving suggestion in terms of what the movie could be, but in my experience, so much of the movie is made as a result of the actors that are involved, the director’s take on how the film can be made, the composer, the production designer, the costume designer – the players that are coming to the table are oftentimes my chief concern.

“I think of the frame as being the principal tool of communication the director has for explaining contextual relationships between characters and locations to the audience.”

EJ: As someone who has such a visual eye, do you find yourself compiling a catalogue of inspiration from day-to-day life?
EM: I love photography and fine art photography. The wonderful thing about photography is the art of a singular image, which is different to a film. Film is something you have to experience over two hours whereas a photograph is an immediate response. It’s nice to collect, respond to and reflect on lots of pictures – I love that and collect a lot of photographs. But, it’s also about the serendipitous moments of walking around and seeing natural light through a window or someone sitting in a cafe with an interesting face. I’m often thinking about the interpersonal conversations I’m having in a restaurant with friends or family and thinking about how that might be assembled into a film [laughs]. Which is probably a bad disease I have, I’m often distracted by it in that way because I’m so used to looking at dramatic sequences in terms of contextual filmmaking. I’m more interested in the assembly of cinema than I am in the photographic part of it, to be honest with you, I’m a montage theorist. I’m interested in that first, and then the photographic aspects of light and colour are entirely secondary to me.

EJ: The industry is constantly changing, as advancements in CGI and AI continue to evolve, how do you think those elements will affect or enhance the filmmaking process?
EM: I think they’re exemplary of the fact art requires curation and requires selection. I’m sure painters made similar accusations about photography at the turn of the century and now, it’s so easy to just point the camera and take a photograph and think that this is taking away the skill and quality of photorealistic painting. I don’t see it that way, I think that in the end, human beings – and artists in particular – are respected for their ability to say, “This is important,” and for the audience to agree. As much importance as we put on the execution of technique, for me, it’s a much more macro conversation. It’s about communicating emotion and eliciting a response from an audience, so I’m not really scared, I’m more curious. Technique is enormously important to me and my understanding of tools, but I hope my tastes and sensibilities can transcend changes in technology. I think that’s what people should focus on when they’re thinking about these things. We spend a lot of time in our life learning how to execute things and so they do become very precious too.

EJ: As somebody who is immersed in the world of cinema, what does the future of it look like to you?
EM: I think if we’ve learned anything from this year, it’s that cinema is still alive and well. The heart of cinema beats strongly in the world and I am hopeful that it will continue to be considered and appreciated as art. I don’t believe that cinema is a consumable product, which is why I don’t care for the word ‘content’, because I think it implies that this is something that is meant to be consumed and then disposed of until the next piece of content has arrived. I want the movies I’m involved in making to be something that people return to, watch again and think about. I’m optimistic about that idea for cinema and I feel like this year in particular, the success of some movies that maybe otherwise would not be expected to be acknowledged is a great indicator that this is very much a reality. So, I’m optimistic, but cautiously optimistic.

Feature originally published in HERO 31.