Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with creative artists working on various aspects of movie and TV productions, it is my pleasure to welcome Imanol Nabea AEC. In this interview, he talks about the transition of the industry from film to digital, working through the global pandemic, the potential impact of generative AI on the industry, and the variety of screens in our lives. Around these and more, Imanol dives deep into his work on the two seasons of the fan-favorite “Warrior Nun”.

Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and the path that took you to where you are today.

Imanol: I was born in Spain in 1971, when I finished high school I went to an engineering college. I always wanted to become a photographer, but I never thought about working in the movie industry because I didn’t know anyone in that world. At some point I quit the engineering school and started at an image and sound program in a technical public school. That was around 1992, I started shooting short movies with some friends, and there was going to be a movie in my hometown Bilbao, and a friend of mine told me that they needed a video technician to work with the Hi8 recorder of that time. I did two movies as a video technician, and after that about 10 years as a camera second assistant, 13 years as a focus puller, shooting second units as a camera camera operator – and always thinking about being a director of photography. I did short movies, I did a lot of photography for myself, and that’s my background. I never thought about working in this industry, but suddenly I was there, and I was fascinated by it. I love it.

Kirill: How was the transition from film to digital? Do you feel that something has been lost during that transition?

Imanol: I don’t remember exactly when it was. At that time I was pulling focus and I lived it as a soft transition, but I was having conversations with colleagues in the industry talking about this transition, and I remember saying that it was not going to happen, that things would continue as they were with film. Film wasn’t going to die. I guess I couldn’t – or didn’t want to – see the reality.

Film has such a beautiful texture, and I couldn’t see how digital was going to take over. Sometimes I watch a movie, and I see something that is there, and you can’t put your finger on it, but whenever you look at how it is shot, you realize it is shot on film. I still think that film has something that digital doesn’t have, and not just the texture. You see highlights, you see how different colors interact with each other.

But then there’s the other side of it. I worked as a focus puller on about 50 movies, and every day I would be waiting to hear from the film lab to see if there was anything out of focus or too soft. As a focus puller I could sleep much better with digital than with film.

Things are so much faster with digital. You have to shoot much faster. You don’t have those breaks you had when you were reloading the magazines or checking the gate. The timing is different. In a way, the set has changed. Everybody can see what you are shooting, from the director and yourself to other people that have access to the monitors. Now everybody can instantly form an opinion, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It is just how it is.

The set is not as silent as it used to be. Negative costs money, and each take was money spent, so everybody kept quiet once the camera started rolling. Right now there is a sense that digital is free, that you can keep on shooting and shooting. It costs money, but the economics are different. Every roll of film was money, and once you use it, you can’t overwrite anything on it. There was a mutual respect from everyone on the set.

So that’s the two biggest things that have changed – the texture and the way of working. Focus pullers today can do their job sitting in a room watching a monitor – and that was simply impossible back in my time. It has changed, not for better or worse, but simply different. At the end, the basics of the light are still the same, but you have to adapt to how the set works now.

Kirill: When you meet somebody outside of your industry, and they ask you what do you do for a living, how do you convey the complexity of the different roles you play on the set?

Imanol: I would say I translate the script into images playing with my tools – which are the light and the camera, and that also I am the director’s right hand, or at least I try to be. I help a director to tell the story. I talk with all the departments that are involved in what appears in the frame because all of us create the visual image of the film.

For me it’s crucially important to understand where the director wants to go with the story, what he wants to tell with the camera and the light. Every director has a different way of facing a story, and part of my work is to adapt myself to that, and I love it because it makes me improve and learn from different points of view.

Kirill: There are so many screens in our lives today. Do you feel that you lose a certain degree of control because you don’t know what will be the lighting environment, what will be the screen aspect ratio, what color profile is going to be there for each viewer?

Imanol: You can’t have complete control, even when you’re doing color grading. You can control only how it’s going to be seen in the movie theater. And then a few weeks later it’s no longer playing in the theater, and people are going to watch it on streaming networks, or home with all kinds of TV screen setups, or on their phones in the subway, etc. I do the same thing when I’m traveling, and I can only watch movies on my iPad. I don’t like it. I wish I could go more often to the theaters, but there are no other options sometimes.

When you are doing color grading, you’re thinking about where you want to take it, and what do you want people to see. You sit in that studio and grade it on a professional monitor/screen, and you think to yourself that maybe you should do it on a screen that is closer to what people have in their homes. What is better at the end? I don’t have an answer to this question. It’s tough to decide which colors you want or how much contrast you want in there.

I’m in the northwest of Spain working in a new show, and I’m living in this house rented by the production. Every time I get to a new place like this, the first thing I do is to change the parameters of the TV. I hate the default settings, but that’s how a lot of people are watching it. Who is wrong and who is right? What should be the direction of my color grading? Sometimes when I do my grading on a 4K monitor or screen, I also watch it on a regular HD monitor to see the difference. And even that second screen of the lab is much better than what people have in their homes.

Imanol’s notes on “Warrior Nun”, courtesy Imanol Nabea AEC.

Kirill: Getting to “Warrior Nun”, what brought you to it? How did you find it or how maybe it found you?

Imanol: It found me. I was on a movie, and they called me for an interview. It was Simon Barry the showrunner and Zack Tucker Gangnes the producer. We talked about the scripts, and I presented my ideas about how I saw the image of the story. Christopher LaVasseur was the other cinematographer on the show, and it was a great collaboration. When Chris, Simon and I were discussing the show, we talked about the reality that is in the script, but also about the fantasy, and we wanted to combine both genres.

Kirill: Spain feels to be the perfect choice for this show, with so much rich history of Catholicism in the country, and the deep tradition of architecture and art.

Imanol: It does. The first season happens more inside cathedrals and churches, and we shot it in Malaga, which is in the southern part of Spain. This part of Spain is more religious that the north – although you can see and feel the Catholicism in all of Spain. Here you can see the evolution through the centuries of the religious art. There are amazing places, some are stern and others more baroque, but each one has something to show and you can feel it. It doesn’t have anything to do with religion, but with the history, the art, and the people of those times. You read the scripts, those brave nuns with their weapons, fights between different factions of the Christian Church – at the end it’s a metaphor of the real life, but told with action, humor, fantasy and surrounded with actual women and men. It’s a brave script.

Kirill: And it’s this interesting merge between the ancient world of the traditional church and the modern world of technology – most of which doesn’t even exist today.

Imanol: You see that mix of the past and the present in both seasons. When you watch Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”, you see that future world mixed with the past in the architecture of the spaces, and you see that a lot in “Warrior Nun”. Bárbara Pérez-Solero the production designer did great work creating that mood that bridges the past, the present and the future.

Season one is more classic in terms of sets, with the churches and cathedrals, and season two changes to brutalism architecture. And you have the mix of futuristic technology inside a classic XVIII century set, TV sets converted in online mass, the gray of the cement and the colors. The mix of all these elements creates a good contrast.

Kirill: What was your approach to lighting the main church in season one?

Imanol: There was one thing that I didn’t think about until we had our conversations with Simon and Chris. Growing up in Spain, you don’t pay attention to stones being used in all the old churches or in the architecture in general. It’s nothing special, it’s a part of our life. I love to watch films made in other countries – USA, Russia, China, South Korea, Brazil or any other places. Everything is different from what I’m used to, and I love it. The houses are different. The spaces are different. Every place has its own culture, and that includes architecture of spaces.

When we started “Warrior Nun”, Simon and Chris were telling us that what we see as normal – churches, cathedrals, spaces that have been built hundreds of years ago – is different for an international audience. You need to change your way of thinking to have an “outsider” look at what is “normal” for you.

Every space has its history, and what you see today is a mix of its past and its present. An old church today would use different lighting from what it used when it just opened 400 years ago. Back then it would only be candles, but today they might have some modern lights. As time passes, every building gets new layers. If our story happens in the twenty first century, we can’t put the viewer in a space that looks like it looked back in the sixteenth century. When I’m watching a story, I want to see those layers from the past and the present, and that was our approach.

You also follow what happens in the story. You want to create the mood that depends on the specific sequence. Sometimes you play with candles because it creates a certain mood, and sometimes you put fluorescent lights for a different mood, to reflect something that is happening right now.

Kirill: It’s interesting, because you can make two movies in the same church, one set in 1624 and the other set in 2024, and you would need to reflect that 400 year history of the space as every generation of priests, nuns and service workers maintained and repaired it. It can’t stay in the same exact condition over centuries.

Imanol: And the same happens when you watch a story that is set in the 1960s. A real house at that time would have some older items, maybe some chairs or tables from the 1920s. It can’t all be from that exact period. If you go to your grandmother’s house, she is going to have the same chair she’s had for 30 years. She’s not replacing every piece of furniture every year. When you see those layers on the screen, it makes the place feel real. If a movie is set in the 1960s, you should see some cars from the 1940s. You don’t have every single person buying a new car every single year. If you reflect that in your visuals, it will reflect the real mix of colors, textures in shapes that existed at that time.

Kirill: And then in Arq Tech is all futuristic, with technology that doesn’t exist quite yet.

Imanol: That was the contrast. That’s the bravery of the scripts. You create contrast with the light, but also with design elements, the sets.

Kirill: And the main hero is not born, if you will, into that old world of the fighting nuns. She just happens to fall into it.

Imanol: She’s there because somebody put the halo in her back. That’s her reality. She’s there because someone put her there. She doesn’t want to be a hero. She wants to live. She couldn’t walk, and now she can, and that is the most important thing to her. They want her to be a hero, but she doesn’t. She wants to live.

That’s an interesting part of the script that has a wide appeal. Any viewer can imagine themselves in a situation like this. What would I do? She’s given the ability to walk again, and she needs to decide if she wants to leave or help these people fight. It reflects back on us as normal human beings.

Kirill: Going into season two and the rise of Adriel, did you want to go into more modern spaces?

Imanol: Yes, because it opens new worlds in terms of sets and creates more contrast between the old religious and the new, which at the end is the same with new faces.

There’s a lot of brutalist architecture in Spain that comes from the time of Franco’s dictatorship. There are inspirations from the Soviet architecture, creating big buildings that reflect the power of the state. You see that in hydroelectric dams that were built in the ’50s and the ’60s under his regime.

When we start on season two, Barbara, Simon, Chris and myself were talking about how to create the new antagonism, and highlight the contrast and the emptiness and the power of this new rising religion. And you see this happening in the world around us in different places in South America, Spain, United States and other places. Those were the spaces that we were going for, which is quite different architecturally to season one.

Kirill: Did you have ideas for season three?

Imanol: We thought season three was going to happen, because season two was received well. There was a script, and we were getting ready for it. But suddenly it was cancelled, and it was a pity. We had a great team across all the departments, and we all still stay in touch. We all got along together, and we all played the same match in terms of doing the best together for the show.

Imanol’s notes on “Warrior Nun”, courtesy Imanol Nabea AEC.

Kirill: How unexpected was it to see such a devoted fan base for this show? Not every show gets that.

Imanol: It was amazing what happened in USA. We were shocked. It was more successful outside of Spain than in here. I don’t know exactly why, but it surprised us. All of us were really happy with how people liked it.

Kirill: Season one was released just before Covid, and season two was right in the middle of the pandemic. How much different was the second season in terms of the production structure?

Imanol: Now that you are asking about it, I’m starting to remember, because otherwise we tend to forget these things. As human beings, we get used to everything.

We had to do all these tests, and we were careful and respectful, because we were privileged. We were doing PCR tests every day, and you get so used to that. You know that every day starts with a test, so you go into that corner and get it over with. You wear a mask, you are careful, and you get used to it. That’s what we had to do to keep people safe at work and outside when you go home.

You might get tired of these protocols, but you get used to them. You work for a living, and you have to respect the rules. You can’t go around ignoring them. It’s something that you have to do, and you do it. They tell you that you need to do a PCR test every day, and after a couple of weeks it’s the new normal, and you continue working. If you want to continue to work, you have to follow the rules. We had these circles, people on set, people outside the set, and you tried to be careful around maintaining the separation between the circles to minimize the chance of getting Covid.

Kirill: Was there any color that you wanted to stay away from, or did you explore the whole rainbow?

Imanol: We talked a lot about our colors. There is no huge palette on “Warrior Nun”. We don’t use primary colors. Our world is not brightly colored, especially in season two going into that brutalism and grayness.

Kirill: What was the most challenging or the most difficult set or sequence to work with?

Imanol: It was a tough show, because we had eight or nine days per episode. We had to shoot a lot every day. Our stunt coordinators were great, and it helped a lot for the fight scenes. It was a collaboration and discussion for every scene. Time was the most difficult, as always. You shoot your sequences the best way you can. You’re always pressured by how many days you have. It is what it is. Back in the day you would have twelve weeks to shoot a movie, and now you only have seven/eight weeks. Probably the fight scene inside the cathedral in episode six of season two was the hardest. We only had two days for it. It was tough work. I wanted to increase the mood of danger and I played with the light and the contrast, using light sources from lightshows.

Imanol’s notes on “Warrior Nun”, courtesy Imanol Nabea AEC.

Kirill: You’ve worked on quite a few productions in different roles in the camera department. When you look back at your older ones, how do you remember it? Do you remember the bad parts, the good parts, or is it a mix?

Imanol: It’s a mix. It’s been a happy journey for me so far, because I love my job. Of course everyone has bad moments, but I can’t complain about anything. During your live journey you learn a lot. When I talk with students, I tell them that you have to learn not only the good things, but also the bad things. You have to learn what you don’t have to do. You learn a lot from the people. You have to observe how everybody works, the director, cinematographer, props, grips, everybody else, and learn from everyone.

And sometimes you learn more from what you don’t have to do than from what you have to do. When I’m are preparing a movie, sometimes I start not knowing what exactly want to do, but I do know what I don’t want to do – and that’s a good starting point for me. I will find what exactly I want to do during those days of prep, because for me it’s so important to see the sets and costumes, to talk about the color with the department heads and the director, with everyone who is involved in the image to create the palette of the movie.

When you read a script, your imagination starts creating a world that maybe is completely different what the director has in mind, or the production designer, or costume – and it’s great and tough sometimes to change your mind or convince other people about your ideas. But the great thing is that the sum of all of our ideas creates that project.

You look at how people work, and you learn from them. You have seen good directors, bad directors, good cinematographers, bad cinematographers, good technicians, bad technicians, and you learn from everyone.

Kirill: Do you worry about generative AI and how it can affect the human creativity?

Imanol: I go back to the time where I thought that digital would never replace film, and it’s the same thing with generative AI. You’re thinking to yourself that there’s no way it’s going to happen, that it can’t be happening so fast – and then two seconds later you remember that this is exactly what you were thinking 15 years ago about digital.

I think it scan change a lot. I’m 53 years old now, and in a way, I don’t worry too much about the future. Future is going to be what it’s going to be. I live in the present, and I can’t do anything about the future except adapt myself to it.

You can see AI as a tool, and think about how we as human beings can use that tool. Whenever a new piece of technology comes around, people complain that it makes work cheaper or easier to accomplish, and that all of a sudden a lot of other people can do it. I don’t think much about what is going to happen down the line. And if something big like AI is going to happen, I’m not going to fight against it. That doesn’t mean we shoudn’t create certain rules or keep an eye on it. Humans have been adapting to new technology for a long time now, and AI is another one step in our history. One day you are arguing passionately to defend the way things are today, and in a year you’re pressing a button and AI does that thing for you. Everything is changing all the time.

There’s so much beauty in life, and there’s so much beauty in human creativity. You can never fully grasp the world another person has in their head. These differences are beautiful.

When you start working on a show, the art department starts working on concept art for different sets. When you’re working in Photoshop, it was just a tool that helps you put your unique creative ideas on that canvas. But now with generative AI tools everything tends to look the same. There’s a certain pattern to it that keeps on repeating. It’s incredible how quickly you can do these concept pieces, but on the other hand it looks similar to what you did on your previous show. It’s so easy and so fast and so powerful, and it’s changing a lot of things. In a way, it’s so easy to follow that way, and that’s a pity.

Also, it’s a powerful tool. You have people who have been designing for years, and then suddenly someone shows up and shows you an incredible design that they made in a day, and they’ve started out only six months ago. That’s life.

Kirill: What keeps you going in the industry?

Imanol: I love fiction, to use the light to tell a story and I love to help people tell stories. I love using my tools to tell those stories.

You work with different directors, and each one has their own ideas. I read the script and I have my own ideas about it, and then I talk to the director and they tell me about their own visual concept for it, and I see it from a different perspective. That is nice, because I don’t want to do the same thing over and over again. Every story is different. Every story has its own moods, contrast, color, and camera language. It gets your brain working, and that’s the beauty of this work. You are not doing the same thing every day. The beauty of this job is that it forces you to constantly think and to create new things.

And here I’d like to thank Imanol Nabea AEC for taking the time to talk with me about the art and craft of cinematography, and for sharing the supporting materials. “Warrior Nun” is available for streaming on Netflix. Finally, if you want to know more about how films and TV shows are made, click here for additional in-depth interviews in this series.