Happy Birthday: Emmanuel Lubezki

Emmanuel Lubezki

Born: November 30, 1964 in Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico

The first man to win for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography three years in a row, for his work on Gravity (2013), Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) and The Revenant (2015). He is the seventh individual to win a three-peat in any Oscar category. He is the first cinematographer in history to win three Academy Awards in a row.

[on Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)] I didn’t want to make a gimmicky film for no reason or just to do it in one take to show off. But Alejandro’s script had the seed of the idea in it and was perfectly written, it reads like one continuous take, where you go into the madness of Riggan Thomson [Michael Keaton] and the collapse of his life. So it did make sense. I think it works.(…) The making of it, as you can imagine, was incredibly complicated. Part of the movie was made in a different way from all the other movies I’ve done and from most of the movies I know that are being made right now. That is, it has a lot to do with theater in the sense that we had to build a proxy stage and learn how to do the movie and do a lot of rehearsing. (…) And just the proposition of doing a comedy in one shot or what feels like one shot with very long takes, most of the editing is in the way the camera moves and the way the actor moves. All that rhythm has to be determined in pre-production and as we are shooting the movie. And that’s very scary because most comedy directors will tell you that editing is the most important tool to create rhythm and to make jokes work.[2015]

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