A unified vision

Cinematographer Michael Crommett (a DOC NYC 40 Under 40 honoree) with music producer and 99 Records founder Ed Bahlman and Anne-Katrin Titze on photographer Dan Winters: “Dan was a central part of this Nat Geo [Photographer] series that I shot.”

2024 DOC NYC early highlights include the Opening Night World Premiere of Sinead O’Shea’s impassioned Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story (with Gabriel Byrne, Walter Mosley), plus world premieres of Dorenna Newton’s insightful Watching Frank (with Gay Talese on Frank Sinatra); Reiner Holzemer’s spellbinding Thom Browne: The Man Who Tailors Dreams (Andrew Bolton, Hector Browne, Anna Wintour); Rex Miller’s unrelenting Harley Flanagan: Wired For Chaos (with Denise Mercedes, Lucy Sante, Marcia Resnick, Anthony Bourdain on The Stimulators drummer and Cro-Mags founder), and the New York première of Dori Berinstein’s socially relevant A Man With Sole: The Impact Of Kenneth Cole.

Gay Talese (at home with Anne-Katrin Titze) on Frank Sinatra in Dorenna Newton’s Watching Frank: "Even if I had reservations, as I did about Sinatra, I certainly had great respect for Sinatra." Photo: Anne Katrin Titze

From Brooklyn, not too far away, cinematographer Michael Crommett joined music producer and 99 Records founder Ed Bahlman on Zoom for a conversation on the Photographer episode Dan Winters: Life Is Once. Forever, directed by Pagan Harleman and executive produced by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. He is a DOC NYC 40 Under 40 honouree of the class of 2024.

Anne-Katrin Titze: Hello! Hi!

Michael Crommett: Hey? How's it going?

AKT: Really well! Are you at home?

MC: Yeah, I'm at home. I'm just right above you guys.

Ed Bahlman: Yeah, you're looking good!

MC: Thanks. You guys, too. How have you been?

EB: It's a strange kind of calm.

MC: Right? Yeah. The calm before the storm.

EB: Congratulations on being one of 40 under 40!

MC: Thank you.

AKT: Big congratulations. That's really great.

MC: I appreciate it. I had a producer friend who said congratulations, but most of all for being under 40.

EB: Do you know where it's going to be held?

Michael Crommett on Dan Winters: “It's impossible to be around such a master photographer and not have him influence the imagery …”

MC: So it's gonna be on Friday. And you know, that's a good question. I’ll look now. Reception, Good Behaviour on West 29th.

AKT: Never heard of it.

MC: Never heard of it either. But there I'll be.

EB: I remember you telling me earlier, I think early this year, that you were going to do some filming with Dan Winters.

MC: Oh, yeah. I did a bunch with Dan Winters. Dan's become more than just … some people use the word subject or contributor, or whatever. But Dan was a central part of this Nat Geo series that I shot. I shot the entirety of his episode, and then parts of other episodes, and Dan has become more than just the person who appeared in those episodes. He's become a friend, a mentor of sorts. He's really a delightful human being. I love him.

AKT: We have seen this episode.

MC: Oh, cool. Oh, great, awesome! Yeah, that's all our handiwork. I think any accolades it gets for cinematography, at least in part of Dan's episode, I have to give some credit to Dan, because it's impossible to be around such a master photographer and not have him influence the imagery, or be thinking about your imagery while you're filming him.

AKT: I thought some of the shots were an homage to his photography by you.

EB: The shot when he was working on his table, and the shot from outside in.

Sinead O’Shea’s impassioned Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story opened DOC NYC

MC: Yeah, yeah.

EB: And from the inside of him. The editing is also very good.

MC: Really good, really, really good. I think it actually to me shows the value of a diverse editing team, and like a multitude of editors, because there are multiple editors who came on and did various passes, and I think whether it was Shelby [Hougui] or it was Nick [August-Perna], the editors who came on. They kind of kept refining those passes, and then we had the added benefit that the director of this episode is the showrunner of the show and she also just has a great mind for cutting. I think that's where her strength is. And so I think you basically had three or four editing minds take a crack at that episode.

EB: It doesn't show; it's seamless.

MC: That's the best part, it still has a unified vision. And I think also it was a really great testament to that collaboration does not mean that there isn't a unified voice. You know, the directors were on set, for maybe a quarter to half of the time of filming. But the producers were on for all of filming. And then, obviously Pagan [Harleman] as a showrunner, she was on as a director for her episodes, but wasn't on set for any other stuff.

And so you really see this collaboration between the directors, the producers, the showrunners. There's a unified voice per episode. But I also think there's a unified voice through the whole series, which I think is really a testament to Pagan's mastery of this format, the documentary series. She's a unique person that can keep all these disparate narratives and storylines together, and somehow still make it all make sense together as a whole series.

Andrew Bolton in Reiner Holzemer’s Thom Browne: The Man Who Tailors Dreams calls Thom Browne the rare designer “who is able to marry a sort of technical virtuosity with a very refined level of concept.” Photo: Anne Katrin Titze

AKT: And you traveled with Dan Winters? You shot everything? You shot the rocket launch? You were in Iceland?

MC: Yes! I was in Bangladesh. Yeah. It's like you spend a lot of time with Dan and you start to understand his mentality, but because it's a single trip, I think in that instance you really saw Dan how he works, because it was a concentrated work environment. When he's at a studio, it sort of flips between his home life, his wife, his son. It flips between us filming his work, whereas when we got to Bangladesh, it's all work. And so you start to almost predict where Dan's going to go, because you start to get into his mind. And you're like, oh, I know where he's looking now.

For instance, there's a moment when there's a bunch of handprints on the wall that he notices, right? I actually noticed those right away. I actually noticed them when we scouted the day before Dan got there. I'm like, Dan's going to love that, but like nobody let him know, let him find it! And so the second he pointed to it, you notice the pan is really clean over there, because I'm like, when is he going to notice? When is he going to notice?

And then finally, it's like, yep, he noticed. You start to get into his head, right? Oh, these chains! He's going to do something with these chains, the texture is too enticing. It's too much connected to the mechanical, which he's always so interested in.

EB: And you were there, too, when they were talking about getting the visas?

MC: Yeah, all of that.

EB: That's great insight for you to have.

The Stimulators (Anne Gustavsson, Patrick Mack, Denise Mercedes, Harley Flanagan) are seen in Rex Miller’s unrelenting Harley Flanagan: Wired For Chaos Photo: Ed Bahlman

MC: Oh, I mean, this whole series was like, I'm just cheating off other people's work, in the sense of: It's easy to make a series about photographers look good because they're already filming interesting things. And then you have another visual mind cooking at the same time as you. So it's a great sort of asset resource.

And then just to learn from Dan how he thinks about the world. It's all great insight, I think, from the creative to the logistical to the career advice. And even with somebody like Krystle Wright, who's much closer or much closer in age, right? Or Campbell Addy, who's younger than me, like there's still so many things I can learn from seeing their creative sense, hearing their stories. So it was really an honour to work on it. And we're all hoping for a second season. So hopefully, it happens, yeah.

AKT: It looks great, and one of my favourite moments in the Winters episode was at the rocket launch with the frog on his hand in the foreground. It talks about everything, humanity and our anthropocentric worldview and machines. Everything is in that one shot. Tell us about that!

MC: Yeah, we love that moment. The second we got it. I was joking with the producer. I was like, we are going to have to fight to get them to include it, because it does seem so particular for a television series, right? It's very poetic, to your point. It speaks to all these kind of deeper resonances and themes. But often that's kind of reserved for a film. You know, a TV series, especially on Disney+ with National Geographic sometimes has to fit an adventure format. This is much more poetic. Maybe some of those become a little bit more prosaic, right? And this was able to be included, I think, because of Dan; this is how Dan sees the world.

It's like exactly in line with everything about it. If it were Krystle’s episode, it might be a fun offbeat moment. But it wouldn't speak to this wider idea to your point of: How does he see objects? How does he see living beings, you know? How does he connect to the world? And of course we had the macro lens ready to go with everything Dan does, because you always knew that the macro was going to be useful.

Dori Berinstein’s socially relevant A Man With Sole: The Impact Of Kenneth Cole

And there you see it, he's going to pick up a frog. It's like, what better lens to have, and incidentally, one of Dan's favourite lenses I was using. The second it came out of the the bag he was like, oh, the 100. It's here. There's a great symbiosis there. The producer and I were kind of fighting for this. It's Texas, you know, Terrence Malick lives close by. And so we were very much like Tree of Life, Tree of Life, Tree of Life, Tree of Life. Yeah.

AKT: Just this morning I was working on my feature conversation with Géza Röhrig. You might know him. He's the actor who played Saul in László Nemes’s [Oscar-winning] Son Of Saul.

MC: Oh, yes. Oh, okay, yeah. That's so cool.

AKT: I did the opening night post-screening discussion of Son Of Saul with him here in New York years ago, and so we reconnected. He's in a film called After: Poetry Destroys Silence, because he's also a poet, and, this is why I bring this up, he is in the latest Terrence Malick film, where he plays Jesus.

MC: Wow! I cannot wait to see that.

EB: Neither can he! He can't wait to see it, too, because it's been going on forever.

AKT: They filmed it before Covid.

MC: Yeah, no, I mean, that's like the classic story, whether apocryphal or not, where George Clooney goes to the premiere of Thin Red Line. And he's like, I have a starring role in this film. And then, like two hours of the film goes on and he's still not in it, and he's like, what the heck is going on? And finally, he has, like ten minutes in the film at most right? That's Terrence Malick for you.

Photographer poster

EB: Good thing he, Clooney, doesn't have a fragile ego!

MC: Right, I mean, I think he said he would never work with Terrence Malick again. But yeah, no, I mean Tree Of Life was going through our heads, I mean, we shot the entire episode on primes, which is pretty much unique to any of the episodes, and pretty unique to documentary as a whole. Obviously, it's less convenient for documentary to not shoot on a zoom, to have fixed focal lengths. But these lenses had a very particular characteristic to them that we thought sort of mirrored the lenses Terrence Malick might use, or other filmmakers we were referencing, and they have a very unique characteristic.

They also are the one big counterpoint to Dan. I think Dan loves a very accurate, very sharp deep focus lens and lensing and depth of field, and I think we wanted to kind of counteract that with lenses that were sort of imperfect, that were soft, that had character to them to try to create our own counterpoint, to Dan’s. So we weren't just shooting an episode that was sort of almost kitschily mirroring Dan. It also gave us a free flowing style for the more intimate scenes with Dan, with Dan and Kath, or Dan and Dylan. It connects these two elements, the visual artist and the man.

I’m so grateful to him being so vulnerable and recognising that we're making our own work of art, and that he makes works of art, and we're honouring that. But it's also like it's our own. I think maybe Dan, if he were making it himself, it would have a few more like, here's an image, and this is how I got that image, and this is all that went into it. And there's some of that. There's the Angelina Jolie shoot, you know, there's elements of that. And obviously Bangladesh being kind of the the central project that we see come to fruition. But I think we introduced a little bit of the chaos in Dan's world, because his photos are so controlled and so mannered. And it's like, no, he's actually like this incredibly manic person. And so the primes also give it this energy where we're moving with him at all times.

AKT: It works really well! Keep us in the loop with your endeavours!

MC: I will. Yeah.

EB: Celebrate on Friday and enjoy Good Behaviour!

MC: Thank you. I'll be on my best behaviour. Alright cool, great seeing you guys! Bye.

The 15th edition of DOC NYC runs through Thursday, November 21 for in-cinema screenings and through Sunday, December 1 to watch selected films online.