DAN LAUSTSEN, NIGHTMARE ALLEY

Searchlight’s Nightmare Alley is Danish cinematographer Laustsen’s fourth film with Guillermo del Toro. He also was Oscar-nominated for the director’s The Shape of Water. The psychological thriller opens in 1939 as Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) takes a job at a carnival (lensed on location outside Toronto), though he later moves on to Buffalo, New York, and a more elite crowd.

From early conversations with del Toro, Laustsen says they wanted to use single-source lighting, meaning that the light is coming from one direction. “We want to have kind of a much more realistic [look, for the carnival] but still deep shadows and nice, bright highlights,” notes Laustsen. “And when we come into the Buffalo world, we wanted to go much more like the ’40s, lighting the actors much more like an old Hollywood movie, [with] very strong single-source lighting. … When you’re shooting with Guillermo with the cameras moving so much and actors moving, it’s going to be a kind of a ballet between the actors, the camera and the lighting.”

He also describes lighting Cate Blanchett as Dr. Lilith Ritter in her office during the second half of the film. “Cate is very beautiful and very powerful,” he says. “There’s no doubt, when you see her in her offices, she’s a woman with power and a diva. We didn’t want to go with soft light. We wanted to do noir lighting on her in those scenes. … Everything was noir, but the lighting was making that feeling stronger.”

Dan Laustsen on the Nightmare Alley set.