It was almost by chance that Hoyte van Hoytema (52) received his Oscar for Best Cinematography at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles on Sunday. Wearing sneakers, he urged filmmakers to work with that “incredibly hip new thing called celluloid. It's much easier than you think and everything looks so much better.”
Van Hoytema shares that enthusiasm for old-fashioned, analogue film with director Christopher Nolan. Oppenheimerwhich won seven Oscars on Sunday night, is their fifth film together since sci-fi drama Interstellar in 2014. Four years later, Nolans helped Dunkirk Van Hoytema receives his first Oscar nomination. In that war film, Van Hoytema delivered miraculous performances – also physically – with extremely heavy IMAX cameras.
Hoyte van Hoytema makes himself scarce as DoP – Director of Photography, the person who leads the camera team in a film production. He shot only nineteen feature films, almost always with Hollywood's top stars: Christopher Nolan, Sam Mendes, Jordan Peele, Spike Jonze, David O' Russell. “Only friends make good films,” was the headline NRC in 2011 above an interview with him. Van Hoytema was already a celebrity in Sweden at the time, especially due to his close collaboration with director Tomas Alfredson. With him he filmed the coolly morbid children's vampire film Let the Right One In (2008), a world hit, and the John Le Carré film shot in a grimy vintage style Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011). Van Hoytema won the Guldbaggenthe Swedish Oscars.
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Sounding board
Van Hoytema said NRC at the time what he saw as the task of the DoP: bullshit filter, sounding board, but above all support and support for the director on the film set. After all, he has to maintain the appearance to the cast, crew and financiers that he knows everything. A lonely position, according to Van Hoytema, because the visual ideas are often still vague in the beginning. As a cameraman you should not trample on such a “tender flower” as in: “Something like that can't be possible, man!” But thinking along, being a safe haven.
Hoyte van Hoytema was born in Switzerland and grew up in Dinteloord, where his father, an architect, converted a grain factory into a home. As a student, he was, in his own words, a slacker and a “quite a bullshitter”: he rightly said that he was rejected by the Amsterdam Film Academy. Inspired by a Polish-Jewish grandfather, he moved to the very theoretically oriented film academy in Lodz, Poland, in 1992, where you learned the trade on cameras left behind by the Wehrmacht (Hoytema: “Real coffee grinders”) and had the legendary Krysztof Kieslowski as supervisor . After wandering, he ended up in Scandinavia in 2002 when he shot a failed no-budget film for a friend, Svidd Neger. After which he started working for TV series in Sweden.
In the mid-1990s, Van Hoytema interned with the legendary Dutch cameraman Robby Müller, his role model. Like Müller, he does not have an emphatic signature; Müller said he once wanted to film like “a cat jumping on the table”, with exactly as much force as required. Which does not mean that a cameraman has no style. It is just less visible; Van Hoytema compared that to a songwriter.
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Elusive
Visually, Van Hoytema is elusive. The muted, chalky futurism of Spike Jonzes Her has little in common with the dingy, greasy retro of Call Girlthe slick James Bond film Spectre little with the raw TheFighter (2010), his first Hollywood adventure. Filmed straight from the wrist, almost documentary, Van Hoytema broke with the convention that the camera is in the ring during boxing, with many 'point of view' shots of the boxers. For the sake of authenticity, he used an old-fashioned Betacam camera, the boxing looked like it was on television. That daring rawness earned praise, which Van Hoytema dismissed: TheFighter was an actor's film, not a visual powerhouse.
Hoyte van Hoytema is a visual innovator. Notable were his crystal clear night shots in the desert in Jordan Peele's horror film Nope (2022). Van Hoytema modernized the old one there day by nightmethod, where you achieve a night effect while filming during the day by underexposure and post-processing the film. Van Hoytema had a normal camera and an infrared camera film exactly the same during the day and then combined the images. The effect is fairytale-like.
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