T1s Add Dread to Into the Dark: The Current Occupant
Soaring demand for high quality television, driven in large part by the popularity of streaming services, has had major benefits for cinematographers. But it also poses a challenge: How to make your particular project stand out from the crowd, without crossing over into stylistic overkill?
For Cory Geryak, a key part of the solution on his recent assignment, Into the Dark: The Current Occupant, was the decision to go with Vantage One T1 lenses. Blended with Geryak’s bold, yet controlled approach to color and framing, the distinctive T1s help draw viewers into a tale of diabolical political conspiracy that unfolds mostly in a creepy psychiatric hospital.
The main character, a man with no memory, comes to believe that he is actually the President of the United States and the victim of a coup. For visual inspiration, Geryak and director Julius Ramsay looked to The Parallax View, the 1974 paranoid classic directed by Alan Pakula and shot by Gordon Willis, ASC. For more standard narrative sequences in The Current Occupant, the filmmakers often chose to work with two handheld Arri Alexa Minis and zoom lenses in order to echo a 1970s documentary vibe.
But a number of excruciating scenes take place in “the sessions room,” where the main character undergoes reprogramming that includes being force-fed video images. For these scenes, Geryak chose the T1s – spherical lenses designed and built by the makers of Hawk lenses. For the most extreme shots, Geryak used a swing-and-shift lens rig. He says everything cut together well.
Along with their astonishing speed, Vantage One T1s deliver an array of optical flavors, from normal to more idiosyncratic depending on the stop. Geryak also made careful use of depth of field, color and bokeh to communicate a sense of dislocation and alienation.
“The way the T1s react with a wide-open stop is just extraordinary,” says Geryak. “When you’re at T1, it gets super creamy, and it falls apart more at the edges. The striking thing is the bokeh. Depending on the shot and the type of light source in the background, we would dial it in between a 1.0 and a 1.4 to find the sweet spot for that particular composition. I would actually figure out the stop based on how the iris looked, and then sometimes adjust the light levels to the iris to find the right effect. The T1s are an amazing tool – they are like a new set of brushes for me.
“The other interesting aspect of these lenses is how incredible the close focus is,” says Geryak. “We used that to our advantage for all the close-ups of him in the chair, undergoing these torturous conditioning sessions. The camera is almost up against the actor’s face, without a diopter. We were shooting at T1, just inches from his skin. But they did amazingly well.”
Geryak also used the T1s for a scene towards the end that takes place in the Oval Office of the White House. The idea was to maintain some narrative ambiguity about whether the scene is imaginary, and the T1s delivered a subtly unsettled feeling while subconsciously connecting the scene to the character’s harrowing reprogramming experiences.
“At that point, we didn’t want the audience to know if it was real,” he says. “From a stylistic standpoint, we kept it deliberately vague about where we were between the two worlds – the actual and the delusional.”
The Current Occupant shoot was accomplished within a tight, 16-day schedule. Geryak says that his prior experience as a gaffer on massive, Oscar-winning projects like Inception and The Dark Knight translates to greater efficiency in his current role as a DP.
“With my background in lighting, I go on my instincts and know what I need,” he says. “I know which shortcuts I can take to keep my day moving without sacrificing the look of the film. I decided to make my career move because I needed new challenges. The most rewarding part is working with the director and executing his or her vision of the film."
Geryak’s previous assignment, SuperCool, was shot on Hawk V‑Lite Anamorphics. That film is scheduled to debut in Finland in March 2021.
Watch the trailer to Into the Dark: The Current Occupant here
images: Cory Geryak, imdb, Vantage Film
