American Cinematographer - March 2017 - 26

Asylum Seekers
By Phil Rhodes

Cinematographer Antonio Riestra,
ASC, ACK, AMC began work as a stills
photographer, capturing images of northern Mexico's indigenous cultures. Similar
work in Canada soon took him to a wildly
contrasting location: Fraser Lake, British
Columbia. There, he recalls, "I went for a
walk in the middle of a frozen lake, and it
started snowing - a real white limbo. I had
an epiphany there, and felt that moving
pictures were what I was going to pursue."
Riestra's first moving-image work
was the behind-the-scenes documentary
for the 1994 film La Hija del Puma (The
Puma's Daughter), shot by Dirk Brüel. "That
was the first time I saw a cinematographer
doing his work," says Riestra. "This had an
immense effect on me. It catapulted my
passion to another level, and I knew what I
wanted to do with my life: become a cinematographer."
He served as a loader on the Mexican phase of Clear and Present Danger,
photographed by Donald McAlpine, ASC,
ACS; with Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC, he
worked as a camera operator and secondunit cinematographer. Riestra also shot
commercials, and then moved to Prague for
his first feature as director of photography
on Julius Ševcík's
ˇ
Normal. The Catalan26

March 2017

language Pa Negre (Black Bread), directed
by Agustí Villaronga and shot by Riestra,
later netted both the Goya and Gaudí
awards for cinematography. One memorable production, Icíar Bollaín's Katmandú,
Un Espejo en el Cielo, was the first feature
on which Riestra departed from film stock.
"We [essentially] flew a whole truck to
Nepal, and shot in Kathmandu," he says.
Next came the 2013 horror movie Mama,
directed by Andrés Muschietti and
produced by Guillermo del Toro.
Riestra was immediately enthusiastic
about the opportunity to shoot Eloise, the
directorial debut of well-known visualeffects supervisor and second-unit director
Robert Legato, ASC. "When they said Rob
Legato, I was like, 'Great - of course, I'll be
very happy to work with him. Fantastic
guy!' I had an interview with Rob, we met
in Los Angeles and immediately bonded,
and he said, 'I think it will be great; we can
shoot this film together.' Then we started
talking about how we were going to
approach a movie that had a limited
budget. He's used to working on movies
with massive budgets, and he comes from
the visual-effects world, [but we agreed]
that we wouldn't have many visual effects
in this movie. First of all, we couldn't afford
them, [but we also wanted to] approach it
as an in-camera type of movie."
Shot during 2014, Eloise follows a
American Cinematographer

young man (Chace Crawford) and his associates (Eliza Dushku, Brandon T. Jackson and
P.J. Byrne) as they enter the eponymous
abandoned psychiatric hospital in search of
a death certificate with which Crawford's
character can inherit a fortune. Events turn
supernatural as the characters uncover the
hospital's history and the terrifying experiments led by a former staffer (Robert
Patrick).
Prep and production each took
approximately one month. Legato recalls,
"My agents called me up [while] I was starting The Jungle Book [AC May '16] and it
wasn't hot and heavy for a while, so I could
take two months off from the film. Foolishly
or not, I said I could do it. I wouldn't call it a
lark - [it was more like,] 'Let's see what we
can do if we have 23 days to make a wellphotographed, high-production-value-looking movie on a small budget.'"
Detroit Masonic Temple was the
principal location used to represent the film's
titular asylum. The structure's 1,100 rooms
- almost all of which the production could
access so long as no other clients had
booked them - offered considerable variety while also saving time, recalls Riestra.
"When we were offered the possibility of
shooting there," he says, "it became a lot
easier because it's one building, and the
look of it was perfect for the era." The
much-used main hallway was built in one of

Eloise photos by Kim Simms, courtesy of Vertical Entertainment.

Jacob Martin (Chace Crawford, second from left) enlists his friends (from left: Eliza Dushku, Brandon T. Jackson and P.J. Byrne) to help him find his aunt's
death certificate in an abandoned asylum in the horror-thriller Eloise.

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