Cinematography of "Maxxxine" by Eliot Rockett

Continuing the ongoing series of interviews with creative artists working on various aspects of movie and TV productions, it is my honor to welcome Eliot Rockett. In this interview, he talks about the transition of the industry from film to digital, advances in lighting technology, potential impact of generative AI, and working through the Covid times. Between all these and more, Eliot dives deep into what went into making the breakaway horror trilogy of “X”, “Pearl” and “Maxxxine”, its message of self-destructive pursuit of celebrity and fame, the cathartic experience of the horror genre, placing each movie in its own time but connecting them all, and how “Pearl” might have been a ’40s film noir instead of a full blown Technicolor extravaganza.

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

Eliot: When I was an undergraduate at the University of Oregon, I was working at a little movie theater called The Bijou in Eugene. I ended up taking a class in the film studies department, almost randomly, and our professor Carl Bybee started showing us all these movies from the French New Wave and the New German cinema. His approach was that film is art and social criticism, and not entertainment. That struck me at the time, with the combination of working at the theater, seeing the movies that we were showing at the theater at the time, which were in the similar vein.

This class that I took started the wheels turning, and after I finished my undergraduate degree in philosophy, I went to graduate school at NYU for film. At that point, I was thinking I would probably try to be a director. But what happened was that everybody in the program needed to use people in the program to shoot their student films. Generally what would happen every year was two or three people would end up shooting everybody’s movies, because they were the people that had a propensity for it, and that was the one crew position that could screw up the entire movie.

I had done tons of still photography prior to that while I was in undergraduate. I would have probably gotten a minor in still photography, but they didn’t offer it where I was. So I was this person who ended up shooting. I made a couple of my own films, and then I ended up shooting mountains of short films. And it all went from there.

Cinematography of “Maxxxine” by Eliot Rockett

Kirill: Looking back at when you started and now, did you go through all five stages of grief around the transition from film to digital?

Eliot: I was in graduate school at NYU and I finished in 1991, so it’s been a while. I started doing a lot of music videos in the ’90s. I moved to San Francisco, I kept doing music videos and also a bunch of computer company corporate work, and shooting one or two small independent features each year. And I resisted shooting anything on tape. I told myself that I was going to shoot stuff on film, and if the job wanted to shoot something on video, I was not going to do it and somebody else can do it.

Eventually at some point, the first Sony HD camera came out, and it was the time for me try it out and see what the deal is. So I started shooting a little bit of stuff in HD here and there, but I was very much not a big fan of it. As the years went by, I would keep doing a little bit of HD stuff and predominantly shooting a film. Much later when I moved to Portland, Oregon, I got hired on the NBC show “Grimm”, and they were shooting it on the original first Alexa. That was it, here we go. That’s what they’re doing. This is what we’re going to do. That show ended up going for six years, so for six years, I shot digitally.

By the time I was done with that show, digital had just eclipsed film. That was a six year transition where I was doing this one show, and everything else started moving very quickly. Alexa and Red were taking over everything. So by the time I got done with “Grimm”, everybody was shooting digitally. I didn’t go kicking and screaming into it. It was a segway into it.

Cinematography of “X” by Eliot Rockett

Kirill: So basically you’re well beyond acceptance.

Eliot: For a while, I felt that the digital product was at a point where the technical side of it was different, but not worse in every way. There was film and there was digital, and digital had some better aspects compared to film, and some worse aspects. It’s not about being equivalent. One might have an advantage here and the other has an advantage over here. It became two different things that were both viable.

Where we are now, the digital world keeps moving forward, and film, at least on the acquisition side, is still where it was 30 years ago. There used to be this constant progression with Kodak and Fuji in film stocks and grain size. Nobody’s paying any attention to that anymore. It’s just not happening in the same way.

Cinematography of “X” by Eliot Rockett

Kirill: Do you see any other big technological changes, maybe in lenses, maybe in lighting?

Eliot: In the digital acquisition world, you have the choice of whatever camera you’re going to use. What tended to happen over the years is that they have converged in terms of their look, for lack of a better word. They’re all different, but it’s an engineering process that’s driving them all towards the same direction, the same point.

What people have done in response to that is they’ve become very interested in lenses. The vintage lens thing and the character you can get out of a lens has suddenly become much more important, because it’s not a different film stock you’re putting in the camera. This lens can do this thing very differently for me. The science of optics and lenses is what it has always been. Coating or not coating has always been out there. I don’t know that there’s any remarkable change, other than people’s interest, in particularly vintage lenses, or detuning modern lenses.

On the sets of “Maxxxine”, courtesy of Eliot Rockett

On the lighting side, we have seen gigantic changes with LEDs. It also goes hand in hand with higher light sensitivity ASA ratings of the cameras. I’ve been using Sony Venice 2 pretty much for everything for the last few years, and now I can shoot everything at 3200 ASA. You approach the project of lighting things differently. If it’s day interiors, you still need a big light, because the world’s still as bright as it was outside. But when you’re on a set, or on a stage, or when you’re in a contained interior or a nighttime exterior, I see the whole world of what is available to me and what I can use.

What used to be a worry about things being way too dark and inky black, now becomes a worry of seeing all these strange shadows being cast, and it’s because of a work light on a cart 20 feet behind me doing something strange. You have so much control over LED light. Their color rendition has gotten better. You have wireless DMX and a dimmer board operator on location, and the whole thing transitioned a lot.

It’s a technologically-heavy craft or art form, and the digital thing has altered it greatly. And it keeps changing. It keeps moving forward. You have to keep up with it.

Mapping out “Maxxxine” sequences, courtesy of Eliot Rockett

Kirill: How do you feel about the explosion of digital screens in our lives? We used to watch movies in the ’90s either in a theater, or on a VHS tape on those old school TVs. And now we have so many screens and so many streaming networks with who knows what kinds of compression artifacts that they bring in.

Eliot: On some level with all of that, I had to let go of it. Every screen you’re going to see this on is going to look a little bit different. Hopefully it’s not going to be a catastrophe, and some engineer in the broadcast booth in some town might decide that this show needs to be a lot brighter and just crank it up. And there’s nothing you can do about it [laughs].

When you’re making something, in my mind at least, you think that this is probably the best anybody’s ever going to see it, and hopefully people will get a chance to see it looking like this. But there’s no control over it when it goes to streaming platforms, when somebody is watching it on their phone or a 72 inch flat screen at home. It’s all going to be different, and there’s nothing you can do about that. I try to make it look like I wanted to look when I’m looking at it, and hope that that translates through the process for as many people as possible.

Cinematography of “Maxxxine” by Eliot Rockett

Kirill: Getting into the closer to the X trilogy, how do you explain the enduring appeal of the horror genre across so many generations of American moviegoers?

Eliot: This is a hard one for me to answer, because as I’m not a huge horror fan, which is somewhat ironic. I took a good friend of mine (who is working as a producer in the industry) to the premiere of “X”. I told her that it’s an horror movies, and she said she loves horror. It was a great experience because she was caught up in it. There was a lot of difficult things going on with a show that we’ve been working together on, and then we go to this premiere, and I’m sitting there next to her, and I realized she’s totally enmeshed in what’s going on.

It was a totally cathartic experience for her. She’s completely left all the problems of the show that we were working on, and she was right there in the moment. It was visceral, and there’s not a lot of thought that has to go into it. It’s this shocking moment, and then you come out of it, and you have this full body release. And at that moment I got it. It wasn’t even that long ago, but it was an eye opener for the why of horror.

I think certain horror movies are really good cinema. I have a vivid memory of thinking that the first “Silence of the Lambs” was a great movie, just on a movie level. I wouldn’t say I dislike horror. I just like what I consider to be good movies, but I didn’t think of horror as a genre, as something that I was particularly drawn to. But now after seeing “X” with with her, I have this understanding. It now makes sense to me why a lot of people are drawn to it as a genre, and not necessarily as I want to go see that good movie.

Cinematography of “X” by Eliot Rockett

Kirill: What was the story behind doing “X” and “Pearl” back to back?

Eliot: Ti West [director] wanted to make “Pearl”, and he had an idea for what the movie would be before we ever left for New Zealand. But A24 and other folks weren’t necessarily on board with that. They were saying “You can go to New Zealand and make X. And we’ll talk about whatever else happens”.

It was at the height of pre-vaccine Covid. It was unpleasant to be shooting movies back then. I was in Los Angeles when productions started back up, and it was under the full Covid protocols with face masks and air filtration. It was stressful and difficult.

When we got to New Zealand and we were working on “X”, Ti already had written “Pearl” while he was in managed isolation for two weeks. It was this ongoing thing of “Are we going to get to make this other movie or not”. It always looked pretty good, but it wasn’t a for-sure thing until pretty far into the production of “X”, before it was a full green light on doing it.

Cinematography of “Maxxxine” by Eliot Rockett

Kirill: Which one do you find more visceral or more impactful, violence on screen or violence off screen?

Eliot: I don’t know that you could say that as a blanket rule. When you see violence on screen, you can’t deny it. But then you watch “The Zone of Interest”, and there’s a lot of off screen violence in the concentration camp. I found that movie to be devastating, the whole idea of what was going on and seeing people’s lives next door to it. That was intense.

It depends. You watch a superhero movie, and violence on screen is cartoonish. There is no sense of it being visceral. It depends on how it happens. Look at “Irreversible” with Monica Belucci. The on screen violence was horrifying. It depends on how it’s portrayed, and what the intention behind it is.

Cinematography of “X” by Eliot Rockett

Kirill: Talking about common motives between the three movies, each one opens with sliding or swinging doors. Was the intent to tie all of them together?

Eliot: I don’t know everything that goes on in Ti’s mind, but I remember when we were doing “X”, he wanted to start the movie in the barn. It looks 4:3, and then the doors open, and we push through it, and you see that it’s not. Then we started Pearl the same way, and at that point it became clear that we should start the third movie this way too. I don’t know if in his mind there was some reference that he had originally with “X” that let him down that road. He didn’t mention it if there was.

I remember clearly that we talked a lot about the opening shot of “X”, and we discussed having a drone or a wire cam over all the road to get up to the house. Then he came up with the doors, and that’s what we ended up doing.

Cinematography of “Pearl” by Eliot Rockett

Kirill: If you look at the three movies, how much did you want to tie them together visually versus how much you wanted to place them firmly in their time era?

Eliot: Very much the intention was for each one to stand alone visually as its own thing. “X” is an emulation of that genre film of that era. “Pearl” is in 1919, and you can’t emulate movies from that time because it’s too early, and we landed on the Technicolor, “Wizard of Oz” heavy thing and went with that. On “Maxxxine” initially I was worried that it would end up feeling like “X”, but as it went on, it also very much landed in its own place with the ’80s film look mixed in with that giallo Italian horror thing. Each one of them definitely was trying to be its own visual language, and not have anything really to do on that level with the others.

Cinematography of “Maxxxine” by Eliot Rockett

Kirill: Is there such a thing in your mind as the look of the ’80s and the look of the ’70s for “X” and “Maxxxine”?

Eliot: On a broad level, yes. There’s certain technological considerations of how films were made then that put them in certain places. And even more so, it’s an era thing, but it’s also a genre thing. You have late ’70s slasher movies all sharing these qualities, and then ’80s thrillers all share these other qualities. And those thrillers look different from ’80s rom-coms. It’s not necessarily the fact of it being in that decade, as much as it is that decade and that particular style of movie. That is what I think we were trying to emulate.

Kirill: Did you do something radically different between the three of them on the motion of the camera, the framing, how long the camera lingered, and how it moved?

Eliot: There probably is a distinct camera movement framing thing in each movie, but I can’t say that it was deliberately defined beforehand. I’m not much a fan of setting up rules beforehand, and never breaking them. That’s not the way I think about it.

This is how I do think about it. Let’s sit down with Ti, look at a bunch of reference material, talk about a bunch of things, grab a bunch of stills, pass them back and forth, talk about what the movie should look like, and then go do it. Then when we’re out there, somehow it’s seeped into the subconscious enough. I’m looking at the way this is getting set up, and I’m looking at the shot, and I’m looking at how the lighting is getting put together, and what the shot is going to be – and I’m starting to feel that it’s just not right for this movie.

It’s not that I have a set of rules and I see that we’ve just broken this rule and we can’t do that. It’s more that, hopefully, I’ve steeped myself enough in what it is that we’re trying to do, that it becomes obvious when we’re not doing it.

Cinematography of “Pearl” by Eliot Rockett

Kirill: How did you end up with that Technicolor look for “Pearl”?

Eliot: We initially were talking about doing “Pearl” in black and white, sort of a German expressionistic thing like “Nosferatu” or “Metropolis”, or maybe “The Night of the Hunter” film noir’y expressionism world. Basically, A24 was not interested in letting us do that. So Ti pivoted 180 degrees into hardcore Technicolor.

When I tell this, people say that it would never have been a good movie if we had done that. Well, it would have been a very different movie, but I think it would have been really interesting. These things are not set in stone. Once you do it, that’s what it is, and it worked or didn’t work. But it’s not like you had to do it that way.

“X” is a better example of that. If you want to make a movie like “X”, you shouldn’t probably try to make it feel like it was done with a more modern aesthetic. It’s meant to be playing in that era, so you would end up with a very different movie. “Pearl” is a little bit more arbitrary in some ways.

Cinematography of “Pearl” by Eliot Rockett

Kirill: I would love to watch a film noir ’40s version of “Pearl”.

Eliot: It probably would have been crazy. I remember a lot of the reference material we were pulling up, and thinking how crazy it could go. In some ways with “Pearl”, if you start analyzing things like window shadows and things at night, some of them are goofy. That might have been those lingering thoughts about that expressionistic thing, but you also see it in productions like “Gone With the Wind”. You see shadows of window mullions on the walls at night, and it’s so arbitrary and crazy. But they look great. So we went down that road.

When we were working on “Pearl”, we were just going for it. This is a fantastic thing about Ti. He’ll make a decision, he’ll say that we should go for it, and he won’t look back. There’s no doubting it, there’s no second guessing it. I remember when we were doing “Pearl”, I was thinking that it was crazy. It was so not the aesthetic that you would typically associate with this story and with all this stuff that’s going on. But I was also thinking that it was great and hoping that it would work.

Cinematography of “Pearl” by Eliot Rockett

Kirill: Do you find it’s almost arbitrary what gets the viewers attention?

Eliot: I can watch a movie and I will, from my own point of view, think that this is a good movie. This is cinema. This is well done. This is what I’m interested in. And it doesn’t matter what genre it is, or whatever era it is. I like to think that movies that end up in that category, regardless of what they are, because it could be wildly different, are ones that people notice. That’s not always the case, obviously. Most certainly, a lot of movies that I think are great, 99% of the people out there probably have never seen or couldn’t care less about.

It’s hard. That’s the whole thing about making movies. Nobody really knows what’s going to work. There’s so many variables. It’s such a complicated process. There’s so many things that can go wrong, and so many decisions that have to be made constantly every day by so many people. You’re lucky if you get something that’s coherent in the end. Hopefully, the creative group that’s making any of these things have the wherewithal to be able to shepherd it along to a successful product or a successful movie. But it’s a mystery, on some level, why some of them work and some of the other ones don’t.

It’s also a thing about taste. There’s that phrase – there’s no accounting for taste. Some things that I think are horrible are extremely popular, and some things that I think are great are not so popular.

On the sets of “Maxxxine”, courtesy of Eliot Rockett

Kirill: How was it during Covid? Do you feel that it’s all back to how it used to be?

Eliot: When the shutdown happened, I was halfway through season 4 of an FX show called “Snowfall”, and then we came back and finished it six months later. It was brutal, the whole working environment of getting tested every day, the face masks, and isolating from people. It worked on our show. There was no internal transmission of Covid, and they caught a bunch of people who got it outside of the perimeter before they got to work. It was a really not fun way to work.

Nowadays, pretty much all of those things in terms of the physical reality of it are no longer an issue. People are not getting tested all the time. There are no masking requirements.

But there is another thing that started happening in conjunction with that. We are in an economic period where we’re seeing the fallout of the giant expansion of streaming, and what is happening in the broader world with money supply, the cost of borrowing and other financial things that are changing everything. We had strikes that went for 6-7 months last year. It’s been a weird 4-5 years with all of that.

We’re entering another phase where people are pulling back on how much they’re making and how much product is in development. There’s a lot of people that aren’t working and haven’t worked since the strikes. Right at the moment, things don’t look super rosy business-wise. It’s depressing. But then again, making movies and TV shows is a business. It’s a lot of money, and you should expect ebbs and flows.

On the sets of “Maxxxine”, courtesy of Eliot Rockett

Kirill: Does it feel like a small miracle any time a production is made?

Eliot: I think so, especially independent movies. When I started doing this back in the ’90s or whatever, indies were on the rise. Sundance was gaining momentum, there were a lot of small theaters across the country, DVD was just coming out, and there were a lot of indies getting made. Things have changed dramatically since then.

I have a good friend of who’s a producer in New York. He’s done various types of art movies for the last 30 years, and he’s at the end of his rope. It’s not the same thing as it used to be. It’s a struggle for anything to get made. It’s a struggle on the independent side to get the traction, and it’s a struggle on the studio side because of the way that system works too. It’s all a struggle and it’s all a miracle [laughs]. And it’s a super miracle that it ends up being really good.

Cinematography of “Maxxxine” by Eliot Rockett

Kirill: How many takes was it for the sequence in “Pearl” where Mia Goth delivers the confession for Howard in front of his sister?

Eliot: We had two cameras rolling. Each take was a two camera setup. We did it a fair number of times, and we had a couple of camera position and lens changes within that too. Off the top of my head, I would guess that she probably did that monologue maybe 8-10 times. That was the only thing we shot that day, if I remember right. It was epic every time going through it, and her working herself through the whole thing, starting in one place and ending up in another. And then doing it over and over and over again. It went on for quite a while.

Kirill: Is it sometimes hard to keep your focus on the technical stuff when there’s this amazing performance right in front of you?

Eliot: I don’t listen. I don’t put on headphones, because it distracts me for that exact reason. This is what I’ve been doing for years now. I’m more often sitting back at a monitor and I have camera operators working, so I’m usually not even within earshot of what the performance is. I’m just looking at the picture.

The interesting thing about that is that 90% of the time I can tell you if the acting is working and if it’s solid, just by watching it. I know what the words are because I know the script. But unless there’s a particular reason that I need to listen to the dialogue or whatever’s going on on screen, I don’t listen, because it does distract me from keeping an eye on and making sure everything is looking the way it should.

Cinematography of “Maxxxine” by Eliot Rockett

Kirill: Was the Hollywood sign real? Every time I see it in the movies, it feels like anybody can get up there and do whatever they want. Is it fenced? Guarded? Restricted access?

Eliot: It’s really difficult to get to, and in “Maxxxine” it’s not the real Hollywood sign. Initially, there was talk about us going to try to shoot this at the real Hollywood sign. They went through the whole machinations of getting permissions, and then we went up there to scout it. There are all these limitations to what you can actually do there, and we knew what the limitations were. Very few people could be there. It’s on the side of this hill that’s almost a cliff. There’s just a little dirt pathway that’s underneath it, and you have to access it from this road that’s from up above that is all fenced off.

We got up there and went down to the base of the sign, and it was amazing. Not a lot of people get to do that. And even before we got to the sign, we knew that this is never going to work. We’re never going to be able to shoot this stuff at the real Hollywood sign.

Shot list for the Hollywood sign sequence on “Maxxxine”, courtesy of Eliot Rockett

So it went on for a long time trying to figure out where we could build it, and how much of it we needed to build for it to work, and how close to the actual scale it needed to be. What ended up happening was we shot it at a movie ranch up north of LA. It had a remarkably similar hillside, and a dirt road that we had access to that ran along the hillside that we could build our sections of the sign. Our art department built about a half or three quarters of the H and the O, and there maybe was a part of the L. And then there was a lot of empty spaces that were shown to the VFX people for extensions. Down at the other end where the detective dies, there was a substantial build of the D. Probably around 60% of the sign is VFX.

Shot list for the Hollywood sign sequence on “Maxxxine”, courtesy of Eliot Rockett

Kirill: Is there such a thing as your favorite scene or sequence in these three movies?

Eliot: “X” had a lot of memorable things. There are certain great things that stick in my mind, like when Martin Henderson is walking through the barn in his underwear, and they’re trying to find where RJ’s girlfriend has gone off to, and he’s talking to the cows, and he steps on the nail. I’ve always thought that was pretty great.

There are some really wonderful sequences throughout all of the movies, but they might not stand out with everybody else. I really like the shot in “Maxxxine” where the camera is moving down through the lightning and the trees, and it ends up on the apple. Then she bites it, and the lights come on, and it’s “Cut”, and you see that it’s part of the movie they’re making. This is what I like about working with Ti. It’s about making shots that make it into cinema. It’s all sequences that are built around the camera.

Cinematography of “Maxxxine” by Eliot Rockett

Kirill: Would you say that one of the main messages of this trilogy is that Hollywood is the real villain?

Eliot: I would think that it would be something more along the lines of the pursuit of celebrity and fame is self-destructive. And the corollary to that being that Hollywood being the machine that encourages people to do that is also very guilty in that self-destruction world. All three movies are one thing. As much as they’re different on their own, they are all exploring the same themes and the same ideas. That’s one of the things that is very good about them, although not in a way that it’s hitting you in the back of the head with a baseball bat.

Kirill: Is “Maxxxine” a happy ending, a realistic ending, an open ending?

Eliot: I think it’s almost an ironic ending. You get to the point where she’s achieved all of this, and if you look at it from “X” to her at the end of “Maxxxine”, it’s been this crazy journey of obsessive desire for this kind of fame and celebrity. And when she gets to the end, she says “I just never want it to stop”. That’s a bit much [laughs]. She’s the big star and she’s won, but at what cost?

Cinematography of “Maxxxine” by Eliot Rockett

Kirill: She doesn’t seem to mind the cost.

Eliot: That’s the thing, not at all. She’s super psyched to have gotten where she’s gotten. Maybe it’s something mixed when you’re looking at it from her perspective, or from other people’s perspective of what theoretically would be healthy.

Kirill: Did you miss the big screens? I didn’t get to see “X” and “Pearl” back in 2022, and I was happy to get a chance to watch “X” when it screened for one day right before “Maxxxine” came out earlier this year.

Eliot: They both played on about 2,900 screens in the US, but it was at the time where people weren’t going a lot. I was just happy that they were out, and that they got the attention that they did – all three of them. I would never say that I was disappointed in anything about any of that.

Personally I like to go to the movies. I’ll go and see a movie in the theater, even if I’m not that terribly interested in the movie, whereas I find it almost impossible to sit down and watch something on my laptop and stay engaged the whole way through, even if it is good. I’m a fan of the movie theaters, even if I don’t know that I have a lot of optimism for them. While it lasts, we’ll just keep going [laughs].

Shot list for the Hollywood sign sequence on “Maxxxine”, courtesy of Eliot Rockett

Kirill: How do you see generative AI today? Is it a distraction, a potentially useful tool, a threat that is going to end all human creativity?

Eliot: It’s probably all three of those [laughs]. I’ve been keeping a relatively close eye on it. From the perspective of myself in the business that I’m in, it is almost inevitable that over some period of time it will become the dominant way of creating what we would think of now as film entertainment. I don’t know if this will be in two years, in five years, in ten years, but unless there is some major glitch that stops it, the trajectory and the amount of resources and focus that is being put in to try to do that right now is off the charts.

And I get it. If a producer could take a script, and feed it into a computer, and have a movie pop out on the other side that people saw as viable to go watch, why would he pay to go shoot it? That makes sense. On some level, you cannot argue the business aspect and the money making desire of all of this.

That being said, I also think that even if that is the trajectory, that it might do the same thing as how people have become fascinated with analog things in our world today. There’s this niche love from a certain group of people that have this passion for doing things the old way. I can see that as AI generated material becomes more and more convincing, people would still maybe more and more want to see something that was very obviously flesh and blood. It might lead to people going to watch live theater a lot more.

The final constructed Hollywood sign on “Maxxxine”, courtesy of Eliot Rockett

Kirill: If or when we get the point where generated content becomes indistinguishable from what is done by hand, I wonder if it will make any difference to the consumer. If I see two movies done in the some style, and I enjoy them both, and I can’t say which one was made by humans and which one was made by machine, the uncomfortable question is – does it matter to me as the viewer?

Eliot: My wife does custom, finely crafted, one of a kind porcelain dinnerware, and a lot of her clientele are fancy Michelin starred restaurants? Nothing is cast, nothing is done with a machine process, every single piece is made completely uniquely by hand, even if they’re all very similar. And there is a certain group of people who want her stuff very badly, as opposed to something that’s mass produced.

There is something about that handmade quality, even if it’s very nearly almost perfect and looks like it was machine made, that a certain, for lack of a better word, connoisseur of that thing responds to very strongly. This is my analogy to what could happen down the road.

But ultimately what that means is that it will become a rarefied niche, and obviously it won’t be as big money. Maybe the filmed entertainment that we see that is not AI generated are small intimate stories that involve two or three actors and one location. Maybe that is viable in the sense that there will be a small but devoted audience that will want to see that. But you’re not going to have a $100M movie made if you can make that same kind of content with generative AI.

Cinematography of “X” by Eliot Rockett

Kirill: Imagine you have an opportunity to transport yourself back into the early ’90s, when you were starting out. Knowing what you know now, what would you say to young Eliot as he’s about to start his professional journey in this field?

Eliot: I would tell myself to worry less, and to have faith in yourself and the process. And in conjunction with that, to not worry so much about what other people seem to think they want from you, but rather pay attention to what you think is good.

Ultimately what I’ve learned is that people want me to do something for them, because they want what I can bring to it. They don’t want me to do something that they already know that they want exactly? That’s the thing you got to cultivate. You got to know what you think is good for your reasons, and not worry about what the fashion of the moment is, or what somebody else thinks, or what you think would be cool if you did it because other people would like it.

Kirill: Do you think your younger self would care to listen to your older self?

Eliot: My younger self listened to nobody, so no [laughs]. Occasionally you can get through here and there to some people, but everybody will figure it out on their own, in their own time.

Kirill: What keeps you going in this industry?

Eliot: I love doing it. I’m very engaged whenever I’m working. I love the creative process and I love the challenge of it, even if it’s painful sometimes. I don’t know what else I would do at this point, although in my free time when I’m not working, I tend to work on our house and take pictures with my medium format film camera.

It’s engaging, it’s fun, it’s interesting. There’s a lot of really interesting people. It’s challenging because it’s freelance. You never know what’s going to happen next. There’s always something new. I’m never in the same place twice.

And these days too, the projects I’m getting offered and the things I’m being involved with seem to always be getting better and more interesting and more engaging. It’s just getting more interesting as it goes.

And here I’d like to thank Eliot Rockett for taking the time to talk with me about the art and craft of cinematography, and for sharing the supporting materials. You can also find Eliot on Instagram. The full trilogy is available for streaming on a variety of digital platforms:

• “X” is streaming on Apple, YouTube and Amazon
• “Pearl” is streaming on Apple, YouTube, and Amazon
• “Maxxxine” is streaming on Apple, YouTube, and Amazon

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.