How Lawrence Sher’s Shotdeck Helps Cinematographers and Directors Bring Film Worlds to Life

Cinematographer Lawrence Sher shot two of the most audacious and ambitious studio releases of the last 10 years with his Todd Phillips collaborations “Joker” and “Joker: Folie à Deux.” But even by his standards, director Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s script for “The Bride” was a big swing. “It was one of the best, and certainly one of the most unique, scripts I had ever read,” Sher told IndieWire when describing his reaction to the screenplay on first read. “There’s a lot of density to the material.”

For Sher, Gyllenhaal’s revisionist take on “The Bride of Frankenstein,” in which The Bride (Jessie Buckley) and “Frank” (Christian Bale) flee the authorities while navigating their own tempestuous love affair, was less horror film than outlaw movie. “We talked a lot about movies like ‘Wild at Heart’ and ‘True Romance,'” Sher said. “‘Bonnie and Clyde.’ These adventure movies that are really about true love, and this spark that can ignite really fast. But also outlaw movies like ‘Butch and Sundance’ or ‘Thelma and Louise’ — we wanted that kind of energy, and to think about characters who would go to the ends of the earth to be together.”

In finding influences, Sher and Gyllenhaal shared an abundance of visual references from road pictures and other “Frankenstein” movies to period pieces like “Road to Perdition” and “Once Upon a Time in America.” It’s in keeping with Sher’s omnivorous cinephilia, which has yielded an impressive side project for the cinematographer in the form of Shotdeck. Shotdeck is a site Sher co-created, designed to give filmmakers the largest searchable database in the world of film images; it contains millions of shots from thousands of films, with tools to browse and find inspiration from movies both known and unknown to the user.

‘The Bride!‘©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

“We’re trying to create a reference tool and a research tool and an inspirational tool for creatives across all spectrums so that they can have conversations with their collaborators,” Sher said. “And have something that is tangible and searchable and discoverable to to start those creative conversations. It’s a visual encyclopedia of the motion picture, and really, it’s like brain candy. You can pull up a movie and really feel its visual language by looking at the three or 400 shots that represent the key imagery. But sometimes it’s as simple as looking for inserts of black eyes, or leather jackets, or anything you can think of that comes from cinema and not just some random stock photography or Google images.”

Given the wild array of tones and influences in “The Bride,” Sher found he was able to let his imagination fly to where those references took him, which was both the most challenging and the most rewarding aspect of the project. “When we were making it, I was thinking about whether you take the easy road or the hard road when you’re making movies,” Sher said. “All movies have their challenges, but what I really loved about working with Maggie was that I love allowing movies to be expressionistic and have big, often disparate ideas. When you look back at the movie, the ideas connect, but they allow for unbridled creativity. That was our objective with the film, and it’s the thing I like the most when I see the finished product.”

The finished product was a combination of Gyllenhaal’s and Sher’s ideas and the ways the performers’ would make the ersatz world of the film feel real. Sher responded to Buckley and Bale’s gestures and movements in both the lighting and compositions. “The process starts with you doing things in a bit of a vacuum, with the script and Maggie but not the actors,” Sher said. “But early on, we did some makeup tests with Christian Bale, and once we put him in front of the camera, we could feel even from those beginning stages what his performance might be and how he would carry himself. That then informs the pace of a camera move, and conversations about where he is in the world of shadows that this movie is so much about.”

‘The Bride’©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

Just as Sher responded to the actors in formulating his visuals, they often responded to the lighting to guide their performance. For a scene with Bale and Buckley hiding out in an empty swimming pool, Sher created aggressive light coming in through the windows that led Buckley to retreat to one of the walls. “She’s reacting to the light,” Sher said. “When she’s just hanging out in this hard light against the wall, I never even had to talk to her about it. She just felt it, like a moth to a flame.” For Sher, the key is to come in with meticulous preparation that can be thrown out immediately if a better idea comes along.

“We run the scene all the way through, top to bottom, and try to create these mini-masters,” Sher said. “If we switch to a tighter lens or something, we’re still carrying that all the way through. But the performance guides everything from the pace of the camera and how close we want to get to the lensing that we choose. You start with a bunch of ideas, and then you hope that all that prep allows you to… not throw it away, because it’s all going to show up in the final thing, but not think about it so specifically. To really be present to watch what the actors bring to it. With Jessie, it was like trying to capture lightning in a bottle.”

“The Bride” is currently in theaters from Warner Bros.