Film stock is an important part of the partnership, but it does not by itself explain images that change radically from one film to the next.
Robert Richardson began his collaboration with Quentin Tarantino on Kill Bill and continued with Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained, The Hateful Eight, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The two volumes of Kill Bill count as separate feature films in his professional credits. Death Proof is a different case: its cinematographer was Tarantino himself. The partnership with Richardson is extensive, but it does not justify automatically attributing every film made during those years to him.
His work includes decisions about lighting, exposure, lenses, and visual organization alongside the director and the camera team. Talking only about a preference for film stock would leave out much of that responsibility. Two productions shot on film can present completely different colors, contrasts, and spatial relationships. In this collaboration, the medium coexists with a willingness to change register within the same work.
Kill Bill and variety as a visual principle
Kill Bill offers a particularly clear entry point. A domestic fight, a hospital, and a late-night restaurant do not require the same relationship between light and space. The film turns those changes into part of its identity. The contrast between everyday surfaces and openly stylized compositions allows the story to move from uncomfortably close violence to a combat fantasy without demanding uniform naturalism.
The House of Blue Leaves organizes bodies, paths, and levels within a large space. Color helps identify zones, while silhouettes can momentarily reduce the fighters to figures in motion. In other sequences, proximity to a face makes a small change in expression significant. These are different visual functions. The Kill Bill guide places those changes within a film that uses stylistic heterogeneity as part of its narrative.
Recognizing Richardson's work does not mean assigning every frame to him alone. Cinematic composition brings together direction, cinematography, production design, wardrobe, and action. One light can make visible the sheen of a fabric chosen by another department; one lens can take advantage of a built set to allow a moving camera path. The result makes it possible to study collaboration, but not to distribute private decisions that the sources have not documented.
Django Unchained faces another challenge: sustaining a wide-ranging adventure without softening the spaces of domination that run through it. The open landscapes and the interiors of Candyland do not serve the same function. In the former, movement promises possibilities; in the latter, doors, tables, and glances turn apparent openness into a system of surveillance. The cinematography of Django and its visual devices develops those relationships without reducing them to a retro style label.
The Hateful Eight and the return of Ultra Panavision
The Hateful Eight was shot on 65 mm negative and Ultra Panavision 70 anamorphic lenses, a system associated with 70 mm exhibition prints. The distinction between filming and projection avoids a common misunderstanding. Panavision documents the restoration of these lenses for the film; that work required company professionals and equipment adaptation. It was not simply a matter of taking an old camera out of storage and starting to shoot.
The format produces an extraordinarily wide frame that can seem at odds with the story's confinement. Its interest appears precisely inside the room. Several people can share the frame without forming a united group. A figure close to the camera and another farther away maintain a visible relationship, and the viewer has room to observe reactions that the dialogue does not spell out. The width distributes suspicion as well as showing landscape.
Close-ups do not disappear either when working in large format. A face can occupy a dominant part of the frame while the remaining space preserves information about its surroundings. The decision combines intimacy and context. The analysis of The Hateful Eight in Ultra Panavision 70 makes it possible to distinguish those possibilities from the concrete experience of each projection system; the film also circulated in different roadshow presentations.
Hollywood: making image eras coexist
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood requires distinguishing 1969 Los Angeles from the fictional productions in which Rick Dalton works. The viewer moves between experiences that do not have to look photographed in the same way. Black-and-white television, a Western shoot, and trips through Los Angeles belong to related but recognizable registers. The cinematography helps identify when we are looking at a life and when we are looking at a professional image manufactured within it.
Panavision collects the lens tests carried out by Richardson and his team for this production. That preparatory work is a reminder that a period look is built through tested choices, not through a vague order to make something old-fashioned. However, a scene's emotion is not determined automatically by the age of a lens either. What matters are the distance to the actor, the available or constructed light, and the amount of time we keep watching.
The cinematography of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood shows a collaboration capable of changing its tools according to the world being portrayed. The defense of photochemical film belongs to the debate about Tarantino and film stock, but it is worth avoiding absolutes about Richardson's entire career or about the absence of digital processes. His contribution with Tarantino is recognized in concrete images: light that separates, width that connects, and visual shifts that make it possible to inhabit more than one cinema within a single film.
More information: Tarantino's technical crew.