Rodrigo Prieto

“I'm going to start with the film that actually I shot and the reason is that we recently did this remastering of the movie, so it's a new color grading. The original video color timing was done without our supervision, Alejandro González Iñárritu and myself, Amores perros. We used the film print to make this version of it, so it's much closer to the way people experienced it on a cinema. So I'm excited about that and I'm taking it home to have this version.”

“I'll take Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. I remember being so struck by the color and the cinematography of it. It reminded me of the lighting that I was seeing in still photography, soft side light, that sort of thing. Very neutral in color, the light, but not the sets, obviously, very colorful. So years later I got the chance to work with Almodóvar in a movie called Broken Embraces in which we actually emulated this film in one of the sequences, and I used a specific film emulsion that was Ektachrome because the colors were especially saturated on that film stock. It was reversal, actually, and I wanted that part of the movie to be even more color saturated than the rest of it, which is already pretty saturated. So in honor of that moment, I'll take Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.”

“Kwaidan. This movie I pick because I'm about to embark on a new chapter of my career. I'm going to direct a movie, if everything goes well, knock on wood. It's an adaptation of Pedro Páramo, which is this very famous Mexican novel. And with this movie, Pedro Páramo includes dead people, ghosts if you may, that's part of the film. So my daughter Maria, who went to film school, recommended this film because it's an anthology of I think it's four or five ghost stories. It's very tactile, it's you can feel the set, you see the artificiality of it, and I think this movie for me is a reminder that anything goes in cinema.”

“Raging Bull, my favorite film. Also just stylistically it's it's so amazing. For me it was a huge discovery of sound, for example. The sound design in this movie is really incredible because you feel the world around them, the tenements where Scorsese grew up, you really get a feel for being in one of these small apartments and hearing the neighborhood around. I've been working with Mr. Martin Scorsese for a while, I've been doing a few movies. It all started with The Wolf of Wall Street, and later I learned a weird thing that Scorsese wanted to meet me because the movie I did with Ang Lee called Lust, Caution, and which has nothing to do with Wolf of Wall Street, it couldn't be more opposite in style. And that's one thing that I've enjoyed throughout my career is really going in different directions stylistically as a cinematographer.”

“Yes, Rumble Fish. Okay, an oldie but goodie for me, and the sound, again, the sound was amazing. The main character, the Motorcycle Boy, he, if I remember correctly, couldn't hear well, so the sound is very much like it would be. The sound is somehow muffled or you don't hear lots of the ambient sound, you just hear kind of the dialogue, and that it's artificial, but it's subjective, and I found that really interesting. It's true, I have mentioned sound in a couple of the movies that I've talked about, even though my thing is imagery, I'm a cinematographer, but I think of images in terms of how they might sound, because after all an image is vibration, light is vibration obviously, and it's sound is vibration too. And when I'm designing shots or even lighting or camera movement, I often make a noise when I'm describing it, and people make fun of me a little bit, but it does what it is. So I might say, okay, we'll push in and it'll sound like... Or if I want faster it's more like... That connection between image and sound is essential in cinema.”

“Yes, After Life. This film is so beautiful, and the whole premise is that people die, go to this building, and they're interviewed by these people who are actually working the place, and they have to say a moment in their lives that they'd like to they'd be willing to live to eternity, a moment. These people just saying these very simple moments that they remember as the most cherished moment of their lives is truly wonderful, the meaning of life literally. And it made me think of, okay, so what is my favorite moment in my life? And yes, I picked, and I still think it was one day in my honeymoon with my wife. It was just wonderful to remember that, and then I go back to that day often, and that's because in my memory, because of this film. So, life-changing movie, I highly recommend.”