Chase Irvin is a Canadian American cinematographer making waves in the film industry. Chayse has received immense critical acclaim for his vision and style. He has worked on features, shorts, and visual albums, most notably in his collaboration with Director Kahlil Joseph on the film Beyoncé: Lemonade. He lensed Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, which received 6 Academy Award nominations, winning for best adapted screenplay. Chayse’s first feature film Medeas won the prestigious Best Cinematography Debut at the Camerimage Film Festival in 2013. Hannah, starring Charlotte Rampling, won a Silver Hugo from the Chicago International Film Festival. Chase is a member of the Canadian Society of Cinematographers. His latest films are Netflix’s Blonde starring Ana de Armas and A24’s God's Creatures starring Emily Watson.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I just adored the film, and I think it's quite a challenge to address, as you say, the legacy of the mental illness, of dealing with Marilyn Monroe’s mother, and her fear of that being passed on to her, and the sexual abuse, and being an orphan or fostered and still being a child, still looking for affection and love from the parents that she didn't necessarily have in her life. And, of course, the sexual politics and the underside of fame. All these things, that's quite a lot to pack into one film. I know you are also very instinctive, so how do you weave it in a way that comes across as natural as a pure life and not as something that's checking off the themes.

CHAYSE IRVIN

I was using this jazz technique called woodshedding where you basically isolate yourself, and you come up with harmonic devices that then you can put in your pocket and play during the set. And it's sort of like you create events where you can stimulate happy accidents.

So I was doing that I think over a six-month period, and I came up with a lot of different ideas, for example, the sequence where Marilyn Monroe is in the ménage à trois, and she's having a three-way sex scene, and the image is . I found that idea when I went to Canal Plastics in New York, and I ordered a piece of polycarbonate that was mirrored on one side, and I was able to bend it and I would shoot stuff in my studio collaborating with Jack Martinez, a photographer, who would cast different people and we would shoot things together. And I basically, through pre-production, I created I couldn't even count how many cinematic devices, and they were happy accidents in a lot of ways, but in other situations, they were gifts that were given to me by collaborators. And I just had those in my pocket. And a lot of times they would come out spontaneously, like if I saw a scene, and I felt like there was a moment in which we could articulate in a more abstracted point of view...there's a sequence like when Marilyn is coming to the premier, and it's a frenzy and the fans are looking like they're going to consume her. And that sequence, the way it's written, I can interpret that as almost, to go back to the same musical analogy, in jazz would be a moment where the images get to give a solo on the song, on the theme and express it strictly through metaphor and distort notions of reality as long as it's in harmony with what's happening psychologically.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

How do you like handle artistic ships like that? You know, you go from shooting Blonde, which uses a lot of like you were saying, spontaneous editing and different tricks like the aspect ratio and different filters that you're using. And then something like, God's Creatures, which I feel is more observational, taking more of a standby approach. I really enjoyed both of the films. How you balance that out when you switch like that?

IRVIN

In certain ways, I'm using my intellect and or making these connections, but then I'm also trying to do things such as... So the whole concept of subjectivity in a film is you're representing a particular character's point of view, but there's another way to express that. It's through mise-en-scène. So you can express a character, you could have a complete tableau and create the proscenium classical frame, but maybe it's the green on the wall that expresses her inner desire or the warm light. So you create these metaphors that are actually expressing the psychological experience of the character through the physical space.

For me, the more risky things, the more things that defied expectations are really important to me. I guess it even goes down to just novelty. How do you create a need or a yearning? And the spectator, you create a particular rhythm and then you change that rhythm, and then it's almost like you try to sensitize your spectator to these ideas by defining a particular rhythm that you've set for them. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I think that when something is too perfect and too complete that there's no space for our imagination in that sense. That every work of art and every film is a conversation among the many imaginations who made it, and then of those who receive it. And it's amazing the different ways it can be received. And being here in Paris, the views on sexuality and nudity are a little bit more relaxed. And then when I saw how beautifully Blonde was made, but when I'd heard that some people received it from a Puritanical point of view, that was a surprise for me that some viewed the nudity a bit harshly.

IRVIN

I think we're sort of in a period where there's a lack of permissiveness, and I think there's sort of a constant moralistic debate about the rightness and wrongness of anything that's consumed. Like in America, there was even a debate about abortion and stuff like that stimulated by the film Blonde that in our minds was not a theme that Andrew and I discussed. It was much more about how Marilyn Monroe would have liked things to have happened differently in her life. You know, it was more stimulus for emotions. It wasn't like a political thing that we were considering. So we're just in this moment, I think, in the collective consciousness of America. It's sort of captured in that kind of...violence. But in a way, I have always been curious about how people will perceive or receive the film as a collective because I think it had some controversial ideas in it. And one of the things that I value most about the film is that the reaction to the film was actually a part of the artistic endeavor itself because it is dealing with popular culture and how the collective views the persona in an individual and who the persona is outside of the individual.

And the collective contributed to that film in that way because they're projecting a version of Marilyn that they've consumed, that they have a connection with, that our film violates. So it was like, for me, the movie was actually the reaction.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

And as you contrast those two very strong, iconic women, you know, they define what we think of what beauty is: Marilyn Monroe and today Beyoncé. Although couldn’t be more different because Beyoncé really owns her image. She's not a victim of her image, she owns it. And others you’ve worked with, Spike Lee, he owns his production company. He’s punching back. They’re very much powerful artists with a lot of longevity.

IRVIN

Beyoncé has been a musician her whole life. She's been an icon since she was 14 or 15, so young. And when we were doing Lemonade, Kahlil Joseph and I, we talked a lot about how Beyoncé must have maybe skipped this moment in our lives that most people have where we're coming up in our twenties, sort of discovering ourselves. In Lemonade, we were really trying to explore that she's coming to herself now that she has a daughter and that she's married, and she's trying to harness a family life and these themes that she was singing about in the music. We were sort of trying to consider that and how we were going to tell that story, too.

And then also legacy and family, you know, that was the reason why we shot in New Orleans. On Lemonade, we didn't do any treatment or anything. Kahlil and I met in New Orleans, and we started scouting. And through the scouting period we came up with the concept and the ideas, but the scouting's unique because we we're basically connecting with liaisons. So we're connecting with the Beyoncé family member. We're connecting with the guy that runs security for Beyoncé there in New Orleans. And that guy, you know, he used to be a stripper at a strip club when he was in his early twenties. And we're going to the strip club, and we're seeing all his friends who are laughing at him. And it's like all of a sudden you get to an alien part of a culture that exists as an underbelly that is so hard to access because everyone's basically presenting a stereotype, typically. So then that's sort of what we were trying to get to on that. And that was actually really intuitive for Kahlil's way of working, who I consider an auteur director.

That's the thing I think is really beautiful in film is actually the harmony. It's musical. It's the cinematography, the emotions acting in harmony to one another. And that doesn't always mean that they're like perfectly matched.

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That's the thing that contributes most to a film is just really giving it your all. That's all I can do on a movie. I can't really make a movie good or not because that's decided by the spectator. That's not in my control. All I can do is give it everything that I have. Like that's just the love I have to give. So why bring in all these other things? Just set it up so you can give it everything that you've got each time. In those theoretical considerations about how a scene can function or be rendered or shot or executed or all these things, just think of it as, "Oh, this is the challenge." I want authenticity. How do we create an environment where that's more likely to happen? Because it's never going to be something that I can enforce, and the more I try to enforce it, the less likely it'll happen. So it's very tricky.

It's luck. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. There's definitely times where I think back, like I would have liked to have done that differently. But that's always going to be the feeling, no matter how well you do it, you know?

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Spike Lee is an auteur. He is expressing his sentiment and his culture and the things that he's learned in his life through his craft. Filming BlacKkKlansmen was a really confusing period for me because I felt very connected to Spike, and I just moved to New York at the time, and what a welcoming hand. You know, the King of Brooklyn sort of being like, "Welcome to New York!" and I'd just moved there, so it was like such a gift. When I reflect on the material, to be honest with you, the reason that I took the film was actually much more about a need to feel connected to my father. And when I read the part of the script where the guys in the KKK blow up in a car bomb, I just saw my dad laughing in my mind and sitting in the theater laughing because he would've found that so funny and ironic. And that's why I took the film, it was so I could give him that gift of laughter because I found meaning in that. And the challenges in the pre-production period, Spike has its way of working and it's sort of fun and it's not as serious. It's like things just made sense to him in a way that with other directors I've worked with, not so much. And then Spike has his office at 40 acres. He puts in work down there. Other times he's like on CNN or he's hosting a party with his family, or he is at the Nicks or Yankees game. Like he has sort of this other life. And he's also a persona. So even just walking around with him, he's like one of the most recognizable figures in America.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

And you've done a lot of work on music videos, and that also seems freeing, you know, the ability to go back and forth between longer film projects. And then the experimentation or the quick change process of music videos.

IRVIN

And so I started experimenting in different things. And that journey has taken me on kind of a different route. For a while, I've only done one movie a year, and then I may not do a movie that year, but I'm doing a lot of fine art. You know, I've worked with Adam Pendleton and Dina Lawson and Khalil Joseph, and other fine artists. And we'll do works that will be exhibited in museums and stuff like that. But I'm always just getting opportunities to sort of express what I'm feeling at the time. Whereas if I had a different need, I migh have just concentrated on films. There's projects that have come on my doorstep that have been big budget projects, you know, a superhero or whatnot, but I've always declined because I really have a need for freedom. And when I say that, I mean specifically freedom of interference from others. And I know that when you're spending a certain amount of money, you will get that interference. But then there's the other form of freedom, which is having the resources to act on your free will. So really the only way that I get those opportunities is working with guys like Spike Lee, where he gets the resources, just enough to act on his free will. But then he also protects the film so there's no interference, and he'll get rid of anyone who is messing with that. And so I just try to find directors with a like mind, and I am lucky to work with them. And I hope to travel my whole career working with people like that, or my whole life. 

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

It's interesting that you said earlier, the limitations of thinking. I also think, talking about the gift of dyslexia or different ways of seeing, is that language limits our mind too. Once we can define and label things, we almost to to some extent stop seeing it. So it's actually a great gift I think to sometimes see beyond the language and the label to actually see it for what it is.

IRVIN

I think it was Kafka who said, "All language is but a poor translation." I think about it a lot. I feel like what we are trying to communicate or what we're trying to say about all these things, all these feelings are going through these things are distorted or fragmented. We can never really communicate with absolute clarity what is going on. We're too limited. There's not a word for it. And I like that. I think what it is to be human is to be less than perfect.

And when I watch films, and I see these scenes that sometimes make me feel sick or make me happy, they're executed with imperfections. But then all of a sudden it becomes an interpretation because you're creating it in your mind. You're projecting something from your own experiences as a human being onto the scene because you're going into memory. Those are all virtues to me. Those are all the things that make it beautiful because they are an articulation of humanness.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Trammell Sisson with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this episode was Trammell Sisson.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).