American Cinematographer - May 2020 - 46

Thoughts From the Director

Carlo Mirabella-Davis: Katelin
Arizmendi is a visual genius with the eye
of a renaissance painter. A true warrior
of cinema, her control over frame
composition, sculpting light, and illuminating character psychology with her
camerawork is second to none.
Kate and I storyboarded every
frame of Swallow, creating a massive
archive of film stills from our favorite
movies as inspiration. We crafted a rigid
vernacular of camera direction, a strict
set of rules that we would break at key
emotional junctures in the narrative. In
the beginning of the film, Kate frames
Hunter with many locked-down master
shots where Hunter is lost in the frame.
Later on, Kate breaks those rules by
suddenly using handheld or a shallow
depth-of-field close-up to reflect Hunter
breaking free from the patriarchal paradigms of her environment.
Kate had this brilliant idea to use
Master Prime lenses, which capture
everything in powerful textural detail to
reflect the way people with pica often
describe the texture of objects.
Working with Kate was one of the
best artistic collaborations of my life. We
both love aesthetically striking imagery,
so we shared an instant aesthetic camaraderie. She relishes upending convention, and values visually arresting images
that leap off the screen and sear themselves into your memory. Kate ushered
us into Hunter's way of seeing the world
with such artistry, courage, insight, and
heart. It was a dream come true to work
with Kate Arizmendi, and I thank the gods
she decided to be the eyes of Swallow.
May 2020

Picture Perfect

Hunter contends with her feelings of isolation.

through the windows. But that strategy was challenging, because it was a
house with huge glass windows! With
a limited budget, I didn't get to have
a ton of HMIs to push light in, so I got
comfortable using the curtains and
shaping the light that way. If it was
sunny outside, I closed the curtains
and put 12-by-12 frames of muslin or
negative outside the window to heavily diffuse the direct sunlight, while
allowing the ambient through. I
keyed with 4K HMIs through diffusion from the balcony of the living
room or coming through various
windows in the house, and was able
to control the level of contrast on the
characters by taking out the competing factor of the sun outside. It
became more about taking light away
rather than adding it, in order to
create a uniformity in this 'perfectly'
lit house. The approach also had a lot
to do with the camerawork - a lot of
lock-offs where we would obsess over
every single thing in the frame,

making sure that each and every
object had a visual purpose.
How did you visually portray
pica, the disorder Hunter suffers
from, and all of the objects she swallows?
Arizmendi: We discovered that
the 100mm lens with a +2 or +3 diopter was sort of the sweet spot to shoot
those objects. A big part of pica is the
feeling of the objects' textures in the
mouth, so that was a crucial part of
the story to visually convey. I wanted
to shoot the objects so close that you
can almost feel or taste them, and I
would add a little bit of a backlight to
each object. For example, with the
marble, I had a pinpointed light that
backlit the marble - and when you
see Hunter holding it up, you can also
see the light from the marble in her
eye, which created a bit of magical
surrealism. In the scene with the ice,
we backlit it and got so close with the
lens that the ice practically glittered -
it almost looked like tiny glaciers that

AC: The camera's perspective often feels voyeuristic. Was that deliberate?
Katelin Arizmendi: [Director Carlo Mirabella-Davis] told me that he wanted it
to feel as if someone was always watching Hunter, so I incorporated shots where
it's not clear whose POV we're showing. The house is like a glass box, with Hunter
- and sometimes her husband, Richie - trapped inside, and the viewer looking in
from the outside. For those shots, I pulled out to extreme wides so the characters
would feel very small and insignificant in this house surrounded by nature. In the
scene when they're getting ready for bed, the camera pulls out to a wide shot at
the corner of their house, making them look like little people in a dollhouse.
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American Cinematographer - May 2020

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