‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’ Tells Its Comic Nightmare Through Gorgeous Cinematography

Right from its opening scenes, director Gore Verbinski‘s “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” announces that while some movies do visual storytelling, it is going to do Visual Storytelling. The film begins with an elegant glide through a diner (Angelinos will recognize the legendary Norm’s, albeit recreated on a stage in South Africa) to find a band of strangers who are about to change the fate of the world, and it doesn’t let up from there. Cinematographer James Whitaker immediately creates an atmosphere of heightened nocturnal reality reminiscent of other highly stylized comic nightmares like “After Hours,” “Repo Man” and “Into the Night” — a tone he sustains and then elaborates on right up to the movie’s stunningly ambitious climax.

The characters Matthew Robinson’s script assembles in that Norm’s are recruited by an unhinged time traveler played by Sam Rockwell, whose wardrobe is itself a lighting tool. “Sam’s costume was always a factor with all of the LED lights on it,” Whitaker told IndieWire. “Three different departments — costumes, props, and lighting — collaborated to figure out how to build that suit.” Whitaker controlled the LED lights in the suit so that no matter what the situation, they would light Rockwell and the other characters appropriately.

“At any given moment I might be working at an exposure where I needed the lights to be brighter, or darker, or cooler, or greener,” Whitaker said, adding that he wanted to use light to create the impression that the characters had all been wounded in some way. “I love the idea of the lighting expressing the emotional backgrounds of the characters, all of whom have lived through something bizarre and terrible, and that’s why they end up at Norm’s that night. There’s an emotional bruising that’s created by mixing cyans and ambers and blending in artificial moonlight.”

‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’

Whitaker’s distinctive color palette, designed in collaboration with Verbinski and production designer David Brisbin, gives “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die,” a haunting quality that acts as a counterpoint to the broader satiric aspects of Robinson’s screenplay but also helps amplify them. “It’s better not to tip the hat to the comedy,” Whitaker said. “We’re not trying to go, ‘Okay, here’s a funny lens.’ The comedy can be far more effective if you just play it straight.” That said, Whitaker loves satire for the opportunities it provides to create a varied and heightened visual style. “You can play with a lot of range, because you always have those comic ups and then downs where it goes really dark.”

The delicate tonal balance in “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” requires a lot of its ensemble, which includes Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Peña, Zazie Beetz, Asim Chaudhry, and Juno Temple. As members of a group Rockwell pulls together to stop AI from ending the world, they have to bounce between the truly tragic and the hilariously outrageous — particularly in a subplot involving the school shooting that took the life of Temple’s son before the action begins. Whitaker was determined to set the right mood on set to allow all of the actors to fully explore the script’s complexity.

“The way I behave on set affects the cast, as do the camera operators and the gaffer,” Whitaker said. “Sometimes the actors need things to be completely quiet to get to an emotional place. Sometimes they want a little goofiness to get them to a funny place. I let the actor set that tone, and then I can just be a mirror, which is what the camera is supposed to be anyway. If they show up and they feel like talking shop, or they’re homesick because they’re homesick and in South Africa, figuring out how they showed up that day and what they’re looking for is part of my job.”

‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’

Speaking of South Africa, one of the most astonishing things about “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” is how convincingly it recreates Los Angeles in another country. Verbinski and Whitaker spent many hours in pre-production sitting in the real Norm’s and observing how the passing traffic lit the restaurant, which Brisbin then built to accommodate the intricately choreographed camera moves and blocking Verbinski had in mind. Careful planning allowed Whitaker to maximize his resources on a film that required between 35 and 70 set-ups each day.

“Gore wanted 80 days, and I think we got around 60,” Whitaker said, noting that the challenge of making days was particularly harrowing when shooting the movie’s climactic scenes. Without giving anything away, the scale of the sequence in which the heroes finally confront the AI force that threatens to destroy them is massive, and lighting and planning shots for the enormous set — which had the largest LED installation ever built in South Africa — required 600 storyboards.

“Gore said, ‘This is where I’m going to blow up the movie and make it look massive,'” Whitaker said. “I’ve spent a lot of my career lighting a lot of different places, but I’ve never lit a room that looked like that.”

Whitaker concluded that working with Verbinski made the project as fun as it was challenging. “He was just such a driving force. He probably knows everyone’s job better than they do, but that doesn’t make him horribly difficult the way it might make some directors. It makes him help you problem-solve impossible situations. It was the most amazing filmmaking pursuit of my career.”

“Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” opens in theaters on February 13.