Meet Me at Crafty

Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth has lensed so many stone-cold classics and much-loved personal faves (one man did both Gone Girl and Down With Love?!)that his casual mention of imposter syndrome while discussing Joachim Rønning’s Tron: Ares is striking. Yes: The man behind the cinematography of Fight Club still gets nervous.

While talking about craft service go-tos, Cronenweth adds that, in lieu of breakfast, “ I’d rather get on the set and start figuring out what I’m doing. Because for anybody that’s out there, any young cinematographers, it doesn’t matter who you are, the same thing happens. You walk on the set, a thousand questions start getting asked. You look around and go, ‘Uh-oh. Today’s the day they figure out that I don’t know what I’m doing.’ And then you sit and analyze and figure it out and work your way through it. And I’d rather get into working through it and understanding how that day’s gonna go than eating something.”

There was a lot for Cronenweth to work through on the Tron: Ares set, his first sci-fi project. Starting with how to make an exact shade of red thread throughout the movie, in which warrior program Jared Leto emerges into the real world and befriends programmer Greta Lee while they flee his evil billionaire creator, Evan Peters. (It’s vibes, OK?) The bad guys are red; the good guys are white. But those colors had to look the same whether as neon bulbs or accents on costumes.

 “One of the challenges is you find a red that you want to make your primary color for the entire show, and now you have to put it into light cycles,” Cronenweth said. “You have to put it into light suits, you have to put it into set pieces, you have to put it into curvatures of sets. And of course, every material is different and will react differently to different tonalities and light and hiding the light sources that generate that red. So that was a huge obstacle for us at the beginning, to refine all that and get it in sync.”

A huge help in that regard was the ever-present Wētā, which made the suits and tackled the challenge of making those colors appear correctly. But the thing that aided Cronenweth the most was a set of lenses from a project far removed from Tron: Ares—a period drama about making a sitcom.

 “I thought the Red V-Raptor XL captured that color and tone [in Tron: Ares],” Cronenweth said. “ We changed them a little bit from what we had done on Being the Ricardos, but both of them wanted something that broke the veil of monotony, visually. To be able to add some nuances through lensing, I can influence the experience.”

Cronenweth admits that working on a movie so reliant on VFX took a while to wrap his head around, but it was also a rare opportunity to become involved in a film’s pre-production much sooner than a cinematographer typically would. “The fun thing about this movie is visual effects, production, design, and cinematography were interwoven from the beginning, right?” he says. “Traditionally, you don’t bring a cinematographer in 14 weeks before principal photography starts. When you’re designing sets that are inherently lighting themselves, that all has to start months ahead of time. And in this case, because most of the post was done after we finished principal photography, they had to follow the light. As opposed to us lighting around backgrounds.”

This was also the first Tron movie in the series to spend a significant amount of time in the real world, something that felt grungier and dirtier than Disney execs were expecting when they saw the renderings. “They would come by and go, ‘Is it really gonna be that dark? Is it really gonna be that gritty?’” Cronenweth says. “And I would debate them about how I think we really have to differentiate ourselves from Tron: Legacy. With our real world, we have an opportunity to make it starkly different. And then they hired Trent Atticus and Nine Inch Nails to do the soundtrack and came back and were like, ‘It’s gonna be this dark, right? It’s gonna be gritty like this, right?’

“ And I’m like, ‘Yeah… it was not gonna change,’” Cronenweth recalls with a laugh. “‘But yeah, I am glad we’re all on board now!’”

Jeff Cronenweth is an Emmy-, ASC-, and Academy Award-nominated cinematographer whose credits include George Michael’s music video for “Freedom! 90,” The Social Network, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and Tales From the Loop. His go-to at craft services? “ It depends on how tired I am. If I’m really exhausted and feeling sorry for myself, I’ll cruise by the donuts and cut one in half and then maybe three hours later, see if the other half is still there. But in general, I try to be pretty good. I’ll go for like a yogurt with fruit on it or something. I used to, oh man, first thing get outta the van, run right to the truck, get a big breakfast burrito. And I realized it’s so hard to get out of that lull after you do that.”