‘Spirited’ Cinematographer Kramer Morgenthau on Achieving a Lifelong Dream
FilmSpeak talks to ‘Spirited’ cinematographer Kramer Morgenthau on achieving the lifelong dream of shooting a movie musical, and collaborating with director Sean Anders on the film.
Cinematographer Kramer Morgenthau has an impressive body of work, having collaborated on several episodes of Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones, alongside high-profile films like Thor: The Dark World, Chef, Terminator: Genisys, The Darkest Minds, Creed II, Respect and The Many Saints of Newark.
His latest work, Spirited, was a lifelong dream for the cinematographer, stating that “there are a few things that are on a cinematographer’s bucket list. One of them is a Western, and the other is definitely a musical. I think it’s one of the great cinematic genres, especially whenever there’s a beautiful marriage between music and cinema. When an assignment like that comes along, in the middle of a pandemic, you don't expect somebody to call you up and say, “I want you to do a huge Christmas musical shot in the summertime in Boston, when it's supposed to be set in New York and stars Will Ferrell, Ryan Reynolds, and Octavia Spencer. Do you want to do it?” Of course, I would!”
In establishing the look of Spirited, Morgenthau and director Sean Anders “watched a bunch of movies together, Rob Marshall's Chicago. He really liked the way that was executed and it was kind of a high marker for the movie to at least match. We also watched An American in Paris, and Oliver, the latter acted as motivation for the Good Afternoon sequence. He would project them in his apartment in Boston. His vision for the film was crystal-clear. He storyboarded everything, and did his homework in conceiving how all these very complex sequences, especially the transitions, where we built set pieces that were physically moving for the transitions to occur.”
In trying to stand Spirited apart from the sea of A Christmas Carol adaptations out there, Morgenthau immediately tried to avoid “the colors red and green as much as possible. I instead leaned into cyan and magenta. They worked really well as background colors in some of the dramatic sequences and in the musical scenes as well. There was heavy use of those colors when the ghosts are involved in the frame. They would carry that color with them, whenever they appear in a scene. For the musical scenes in particular, there was a different approach to most Christmas Carol movies. When the music broke out, the fourth wall just gets broken down, and then Broadway lighting comes out. That was not something you usually see in most movies and definitely not something you see in A Christmas Carol.”
Morgenthau found shooting the film’s musical sequences challenging, “ because it's something I had never done before, especially pure musical numbers. We had a lot of prep. I had about three months of preparation in Boston, and the dancers were there for about six to eight weeks. We had a core group of dancers who were training and designing the choreography and we got some small digital cameras together and shot all the sequences as a rehearsal. The editor cut the shots together, and Sean was able to see what worked and what didn’t, because that's a very challenging thing to do on the spot. When you have about fifty dancers there and a hundred crew people standing around, everything has to be done right when we shoot it. Doing it on set was basically like putting on a full-on Broadway show. There were a few dress rehearsals, many weeks of testing out shots with the cameras, and some pre-visualization as well.”
Another challenge that Morgenthau had to undertake was balancing out different genres, and asking himself “how do you make it feel like one film because it's, in many ways, like five films in one? There’s the musical, A Christmas Carol, the romance between Will and Octavia, and a buddy movie, akin to a Buster Keaton physical comedy film. It’s like a morality tale or a fable. There are arcs of color that go through the film and stylistic treatments that unify the cinematography during the entire film. Even in the dramatic sequences, there will be large gestures of color in the background that would kind of unify the frame. It was complex to do, but it was also great fun.”
Morgenthau’s following two films are quite massive, with Michael B. Jordan’s Creed III releasing in theatres on 3.3.2023, which will be the first sports movie to have used IMAX cameras for select sequences. He will also be returning to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Julius Onah’s Captain America: New World Order, ready to start production soon toward its planned May 3, 2024 release date.