We spoke to Bojan Bazelli, Director of Photography on MurderMystery2 and PeterPanAndWendy, about having fun with Adam Sandler’s latest and retelling a Disney classic:
Warning: Mild spoilers for Murder Mystery 2.Murder Mystery 2 brings back the winning duo of Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston for another round of finding out whodunnit. The fledgling film franchise’s distinct blend of action and comedy makes Murder Mystery 2 exactly the right project for Sandler and Aniston alike. Murder Mystery 2 was written by James Vanderbilt and directed by Jeremy Garelick.
The first one was actually, all jokes aside, quite well done. In my opinion, nothing was wrong with it. When I was asked to do the movie, they said, "We don't really like the way it looked. It was sort of flat." I said, "Well, you know. It didn't look that bad." I mean, I can say, "Oh, yeah, this looks not good, so we can make it much better," but I was like, "This is not an easy subject to photograph.
Bojan Bazelli: I don't think too much beauty will harm it, as long as it's appropriate. As I mentioned, the goal is to let them deliver their acting parts without obstructing their movement and obstructing their creativity and performance. As long as you're achieving that, everything else is just extra, and welcomed from everyone. You would have to draw this soft line where you, as a cinematographer, cannot intervene further.
Bojan Bazelli: Yes. [The hard part isn't] "How do you repeat what you said?" but in matching the emotional side. If you cut the shot, reverse the angle 20 minutes later, and go, "Now, do the same thing that you did 20 minutes ago," it may not come out that way. Guesswork in advance of what the actor is going to do is important - not that we were perfect all the time.
Bojan Bazelli: I would say there is a connecting tissue, but basically, there are three [separate] looks. There's a Brooklyn look, the kind of meat and potato look of their apartment, which is basic and just kind of gray. It's conducive for faces, they don't look horrible, but it's sort of a Plain Jane look. Then we had this over-the-top island, which is owned by the Maharaja, who owns everything and is a multi-millionaire.
Everything is [also] shot out of sequence, so it becomes a little bit of a brain-teaser, like, "Okay, how can we do this?" I don't think it was the most difficult scene, but it was challenging in terms of the [logistics]. It was done on a stage, but still, you have to move the walls at a certain angle to put a camera in the back, and you don't want to move things too many times, because time is of the essence.
Bojan Bazelli: It's both. Fire never looks good in CG, and this was not the exception. It's borderline, and it's a difficult subject matter to create on stage. We shot all we could with a real fire. Every time we could fire something in the background and in the mid-ground without affecting the actors, we did, but all the close encounters with flames and all that - that's all CG-world.
It's lots of work, but it was justified. I think the story of that shot is really good; I think it's symbolic of falling in love again. There's a lot of symbolism in the shot, so the high degree of difficulty is justified. Sometimes producers will not give you time to do great shots, [saying] "They're not that important." Everybody agreed that this was a good storytelling shot, and to invest time into it. I thought it was a good shot.
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