Call of the Wild

As seen in the December 2024 issue of ICG Magazine
By Valentina Valentini
Photos by Anne Marie Fox / Searchlight Pictures

Nightbitch is a film that depicts both the loss and rediscovery of self through motherhood. The loss of self, which a child-bearing mother experiences when her offspring enters this world, hasn’t been well-documented in mainstream media. Still, the struggle is a hot topic amongst mothers whose voices have grown collectively over the last half-century.

When Rachel Yoder’s novel Nightbitch came out in 2021, those voices grew to a fever pitch. Marielle Heller – who was hand-picked by producer and star Amy Adams and Annapurna Pictures to adapt the novel and direct the film – had already read the book just after she’d had her second baby and was experiencing her own identity metamorphosis. Diving into Yoder’s magical-realism take on motherhood, where the Mother (Adams) turns into a dog at night, Heller instantly felt seen, like someone was reflecting her own life to her. She says working on the adaptation was as much catharsis as it was a job.

“In a lot of ways, this film reminded me of Diary of a Teenage Girl, which was the first movie I made with [Local 600 Director of Photography] Brandon Trost,” Heller shares. “Both films are subjective. I wanted Nightbitch to be completely in her head; I intended to plop you as an audience member into the perspective of one person for almost the entire time, except for one scene with a moment from the Father’s (Scoot McNairy’s) point of view.”

Heller’s visual plan meant the cinematography needed to make the viewer feel what Mother is feeling at any given moment. When Mother feels like she can’t tell one day from another, Heller writes a montage sequence during which Mother plops food into a pan, fries it, stares into space and repeats. She’s in different outfits and her disheveled hair may change, but her stare stays the same, and it’s a feeling of a continuous day that the viewer can’t keep track of. “I never wanted to pull back and have it be like a documentary, with an objective point of view,” Heller adds. “It was always about being subjective in the visual style.”

Trost met Heller in 2010 when he was shooting MacGruber for Jorma Taccone [Heller’s husband], and Heller was acting in the film. The three became fast friends, and when it was time to crew up for Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015), Heller knew who her DP would be. The pair went on to make Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2019), What The Constitution Means To Me (2020), and the festival hit Nightbitch.

What Trost loved about Heller’s script was the crossing of multiple genres – family drama, comedy, dark comedy, horror, body horror, magical realism – but always with a wink to the tone rather than a deep dive into any one category. Trost says he wanted to find ways to bring all the various genres into the visual storytelling without being overly stylized. Though, he stresses, they weren’t afraid of stylization, just in a more subtle way. 

“I wanted the look to assist the feeling,” says Trost who grew up on film sets – his father, Ron Trost, a special-effects coordinator; his grandfather an assistant director; and his great-grandfather a stuntman. “I wanted to spell-out the feeling of motherhood as it’s presented in this movie, which is a stay-at-home mom with a three-year-old son who loses her sense of self because she is living only for this child,” he describes. “She gets lost in the repetition of cooking, feeding, cleaning, bathing and putting her child to bed. It’s something I’ve experienced, as have Mari and Amy, too. We were keen to show how unglamorous that work is. In my past films with Mari, we tended to induce a bit of a cinematic veil across the lens to filter out the sharp effects of reality. For Nightbitch, we went the opposite direction, opting for more sharpness within the lenses to lean into a more gritty reality. Not that the movie is gritty, but I’m talking in more subtle terms with optics and how we shot Amy.”

The production was completed in 36 days in Los Angeles in 2022, and producers opted to hold its premiere until the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival due to the double strikes in 2023. Trost shot on the ALEXA Mini LF with Panavision’s expanded T-Series anamorphics, glass that A-Camera 1st AC Kingslea Bueltel loved for its clarity, contrast and resolution. “The almost imperceptible breathing during focus pulls, the lack of noticeable aberration, and the minimal flares make them such a beautiful option when you want anamorphic lenses that have anamorphic traits like a wide field of view and shallower apparent depth, but without calling attention to themselves,” elaborates Bueltel, who works out of New Mexico and jumped at the chance to work with Trost again after a previous project stalled out. 

“I think that’s why Brandon chose them for the bulk of the story taking place in the everyday life of Mother,” she continues. “They feel observational and closely approximate how a person’s eyes view the world. They were excellent tools to ground Mother in her real life, especially when juxtaposed with the more stylized visuals of the hyperreal transformation scenes and the moments of exploration into the raw, feral power bound in her femininity that Mother discovers along the way.”

Trost wanted a cinematic (aka anamorphic) look right out of the gate, and he gets that from the opening frames of rows of tin cans in a grocery store panning along as Mother pushes her Son (played by twins Arleigh Patrick Snowden and Emmett James Snowden) in a cart. Because much of the story takes place inside a house, Trost pushed for cinematic flares to counteract the domesticity, somewhat reminiscent of a throwback John Carpenter horror movie. 

Shooting at 3200 ISO to stress the image and take a little bit of the electricity out of the digital camera, Trost did employ a softer vignette to frame the movie but kept it ultra-sharp in the center. And while the T-Series will naturally fall off from the side, he explains, specifically on the LF, because it’s a large-format sensor when those lenses are expanded, it forces them to use a portion of the lens that wasn’t designed to be used. Hence, the imperfect etching. 

Trost hired Benjamin Verhulst as his A-Camera/Steadicam operator, who came highly recommended from Bueltel and recently worked on Amazon’s New Mexico-shot series, Outer Range. “Brandon is one of the best bosses I’ve ever had,” Verhulst beams. “He’s kind, handles adversity easily and with a smile, and he’s got a strong vision that he trusts his crew to deliver for him. Marielle, Brandon and our first assistant director, Jonas Spaccarotelli, were so family-oriented – we worked reasonable hours, scheduled night work in a humane way, and even got out early on Halloween so everyone could trick-or-treat with their kids. It was one of those jobs that make you question why the rest of the industry is so hard.”

Interestingly, while Verhulst normally has conversations with the DP ahead of shooting, he says that Trost and Heller wanted to keep it instinctual but purposeful. “Amy’s performances informed a lot of the camerawork” he continues. “We got to experiment with these slow, specific push-ins – the kind of specificity where we’re coming up with crazy grip builds just to get the camera an inch lower. I also remember doing a lot of the slowest zooms you’ve ever seen on screen, where you go through five microforces to find one that works just right, and even then, you have to make sure you have the right amount of coffee in your system so you can keep that super light thumb pressure for minutes on end,” he smiles.

For those slow zooms, Trost went for a lens he hadn’t even known existed: a Panavision Primo anamorphic macro zoom, 14.5 to 50 mm, which he calls “a true anamorphic lens.” It was used throughout the film, but the montage of Mother’s morning routine at the beginning is the best example. “It’s a shot that is pushing forward and is zooming at the same time,” Trost describes, “and you think it’s going to stop, but it doesn’t. It just keeps moving in and gets right into Amy’s eyes, where you can see the pores of her skin. We wanted to go beyond that traditional, comfortable close-up and see every part of her face and clearly into her eyes. It was a technique we wanted to announce in a loud way, and that specific lens let us do it.”

Bueltel says she’d never seen anything like the lens. “It was a pretty lens in terms of falloff and contrast. The shot was in the family kitchen, starting with Amy leaning against a counter and the camera on dolly and track about six feet away. We did a push-in/zoom-in landing at minimum focus with her eye in extreme close-up. Such a cool shot to help create.”

They also utilized a micro zoom, a Panavision lens that functioned similarly to a probe lens but was variable. They used it for extreme macro work like individual hairs, skin texture, teeth, shots of Mother finding subtle changes to her body that signal a drastic transformation into something not fully human. And according to Heller, Adams was game for all of it. (She even grew out a hair in a mole on the underside of her chin for a micro zoom moment.)

Heller says she wanted the approach to strip away all vanity when it came to women’s bodies and aging. “People who have worked with me know I hate makeup and wigs,” she shares. “What I love about film is that you get to go much closer than you do in theater, where I began my career, and see something truly vulnerable in your characters. This movie is a metaphor not just about becoming a mother, but also about this transformation that happens as we age. It’s something as a society we’re uncomfortable with, being honest about women’s bodies and aging. In many ways, I thought about Nightbitch as an antidote to our youth-obsessed culture. So, it was incredibly important that the lenses we picked were able to investigate Amy’s face and body with this extreme closeness.”  

Towards the end of the schedule, there was a home-birthing scene with the rare handheld shot. The scene called for Verhulst to rush in with the camera at the moment Mother gives birth in the living room – an emotionally taxing scene for Adams and a big reset if they had to go again, with the possibility of a lot of coverage to cover their bases for the edit. But they did one take, and everyone was in sync, especially Adams, Bueltel and Verhulst. After two minutes of conversation, they moved on to the next scene. “How often do you get that amount of trust and professionalism on a studio feature nowadays?” Verhulst wonders.

“This movie deals with topics that are rarely addressed in cinema,” he continues. “It felt important to give Amy’s character the best canvas we could to tell the story, and that can be difficult in a story that’s short on dialogue and focused on a character’s internal life. I never made overly dramatic camera moves. Instead, I let the story come through on its own with a million subtle little choices that influence the viewer. Whether to make a tiny tilt with her gaze to emphasize her look or to center-punch her eyes to keep the viewer’s intensity, all these decisions affect the psychology of the moment. This movie is all about the audience understanding what’s happening in Mother’s head, so it felt incredible to watch an important close-up that holds so much more power because of the barely perceptible tweaks you’ve made.”

The story travels to the past as well, with flashbacks of Mother with her mother (Kerry O’Malley). For these scenes, Trost wanted a focused storybook frame and used Panavision’s Petzval lenses (58 mm and 85 mm). He had used them in a previous film, and it’s their vintage, painterly quality that drew him back. “There’s an ingrained feeling to them that makes the image feel distant, so they made perfect sense for the flashbacks,” Trost explains.

Exterior flashback scenes were filmed in a lush, green section of Disney Ranch. Bueltel says the Petzvals grabbed onto the texture of the foliage and rendered it in a way that looked like actual brush strokes. “Painterly is the perfect way to describe those lenses,” she says. “At the time, I remember immediately thinking of Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth – Kerry was lying on this thick carpet of long-bladed grass, and it recalled that painting to me exactly. There were stunningly beautiful compositions where the actors resolved nicely in the center of the frame but were surrounded by these swirling, dreamlike vignettes.”

The team also used screw-on portrait adapters (SOPA’s) built by Dan Sasaki that could attach to the front of the T-Series lenses. The SOPA’s gave their hero lenses interesting characteristics and distortions similar to the Petzvals that Bueltel could use while staying anamorphic and having a larger selection of focal lengths. They were used for some POV’s and scenes with animals. As Bueltel describes: “It was a smart, elegant way to create a visual bridge between the flashback world revealed to Mother in her search for the origins of this ancient and divine aspect of womanhood and the ways it begins to manifest itself in her present circumstance.”

During testing, Trost and Bueltel had one SOPA that hadn’t been labeled yet and was housed in a way where they could get it on the lens both in its intended orientation and backward. Because the curvature of the SOPA glass was so slight, they couldn’t tell which direction it was meant to go on, so they put it up facing both ways to see which looked best. 

“We quickly figured out which way gave us the portrait effect, but when added in front of the anamorphic primes, the reverse direction offered a distorted look that was really cool,” says Bueltel. “The best I could describe it would be almost like a mild tunnel-vision effect. Brandon liked it and thought we might use it, so we labeled it for reference and kept it with that ability to screw-on either direction. We ended up doing some ground-skimming shots with the backward SOPA for the Dog’s POV. Definitely a happy accident!”

Harbor Post colorist Andrea Chlebak and Trost enjoyed a unique collaboration for Nightbitch. Chlebak had colored Trost’s directing debut, An American Pickle (2020) [ICG Magazine September 2020], and when he reached out to her about “the perfect movie for us to work on together that is like neo-horror, but also kind of dramatic and funny,” Chlebak almost instinctively knew what he was talking about. Six months earlier, her best friend had sent her the novel out of the blue and told her to read it and that, as a mom, she would totally get it.

“Brandon and I talked about my experience of reading the book,” recalls Chlebak, whose credits include Mandy, Elysium, and Immaculate. “He hadn’t read the book and was sticking close to Mari’s script for his ideas. They’d been working together for a couple of weeks at this point. And then he said to me, ‘You’ve read the book; why don’t you make a lookbook for us based on what the novel conjures for you visually?’ It was incredible to have a DP invite me to participate in the look establishment of a film before I’d even read the script.”

Chlebak used ShotDeck to create a mood board, and when it was done, because there was so much crossover in what both parties had come up with for the visuals, Heller and Trost took it and melded it with their own. “We wanted these rich blacks,” Chlebak recounts. “Like a Caravaggio painting. In the story, Mother is – or was – a painter and visual artist, so I always felt that the film needed to reference that in the look some way. We had these specific reds and deep jewel tones and a black where you can’t see anything in it. Brandon wanted it contrasty.”

Trost and Heller also looked at the photography of Gregory Crewdson for inspiration, particularly for the night exteriors, and Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) became a reference for the daytime look. Chlebak developed a range of LUT’s for Trost, starting with the concept of separate nighttime and daytime LUT’s for the film because she wanted something tuned in to the transformational shots of Adams. But what they found was that the look she’d created for the daytime actually worked for the nighttime, so she ended up creating a range of LUT’s that were the center point of what they had established with the reds, gold tones, and very deep blacks that made up their hero, mid-range look.

“I made a softer, lighter version of that LUT with a little less contrast – you could call it ‘Nightbitch Lite,’” Chlebak describes. “And then I made one that was more saturated, a little deeper, for the nighttime transformation scenes. I think for about 85 percent of the film, Brandon used the mid-range LUT. For the flashbacks, there was a separate LUT that was sort of a cross-process, desaturated Ektachrome. Our reference for that was Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life.”

Without the budget for LiveGrain, Chlebak created her own pro custom profile in BaseLight to mimic grain for the whole film. She blended Super16 and 35-mm film scans throughout for a clean grain, with some texture. In the final grade, she blended them in and out depending on the sequence.

Nightbitch didn’t have the budget for heavy VFX or CGI when it came to the Mother’s transformation into the Dog, but Trost never wanted to go there anyway. “I knew the more practical we could make everything, those horror fans would give us credit for not abusing the VFX aspect. We very much wanted to use a real dog and not have a CG animal.”

Heller found Juno, a rescued red Husky at a shelter in California, and got her trained in five months. Trost says they rehearsed the Mother-to-Dog transformation sequence the most during prep due to its pivotal place in the story. They worked with a stunt person (before rehearsing with Adams) to nail down the physicality of a dog digging and sniffing in a yard. Adams came in and replicated those efforts; during filming they incorporated small prosthetics on her arms and a nose piece to change the shape of her face, and fur and hair to mesh Adam’s red hair with Juno’s red fur. The transformation plays out in quick, close-up flashes. Only a few VFX stitches were needed to see the hair start to emerge and the body shape change beneath the new skin and fur, but Trost shot those moments close up so that it was as suggestive as possible. Even the shots of Dog running through the city streets were shot practically.

“That was a meticulously set up situation where we had dog trainers at different corners of a street in Downtown L.A., which was tightly locked down,” Trost concludes. “We had three shots to get it done, and it took most of the night. The practicality of those scenes stands out for me, and were rewarding to watch and feel.”

Local 600 Crew

Director of Photography: Brandon Trost
A-Camera Operator/Steadicam: Ben Verhulst
A-Camera 1st AC: Kingslea Bueltel
A-Camera 2nd AC: Neo Arboleda
B-Camera Operator/2nd Unit Director of Photography: Amanda Treyz
B-Camera 1st AC: Jon Lindsay
B-Camera 2nd AC: Tim Bauer
DIT: Tim Nagasawa
Still Photographer: Anne Marie Fox
Unit Publicist: Spooky Stevens