Celluloid is an important part of the partnership, but it does not by itself explain images that change radically from one film to another.
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 parts of Kill Bill count as separate feature films in his professional credits. Death Proof is a different case: its director of photography was Tarantino himself. Richardson’s partnership is extensive, but it does not justify automatically attributing to him every film made during those years.
His work involves decisions about lighting, exposure, lenses and visual organisation alongside the director and the camera team. Talking only about a preference for celluloid would leave out much of that responsibility. Two productions shot on film can present completely different colours, contrasts and spatial relationships. In this collaboration, the medium sits alongside a willingness to shift register within a single 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 stylised compositions allows the story to move from uncomfortably close violence to combat fantasy without demanding a uniform naturalism.
The House of Blue Leaves organises bodies, routes and levels within a large space. Colour helps identify zones, while silhouettes can momentarily reduce the fighters to figures in motion. In other sequences, proximity to a face makes a small variation in expression important. These are different visual functions. The Kill Bill guide places those changes within a film that uses stylistic heterogeneity as part of its storytelling.
Recognising Richardson’s work does not mean assigning every shot to him alone. Cinematic composition brings together direction, cinematography, design, costume and action. One light can make visible the sheen of a fabric chosen by another department; one lens can make use of a built set to enable a particular movement. The result allows us to study collaboration, but not to divide up private decisions that the sources have not documented.
Django Unchained presents another difficulty: sustaining a broad 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 resources 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 shooting and projection avoids a common confusion. Panavision documents the restoration of these lenses for the film; that work required company specialists 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 may 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. One figure close by and another far away keep a visible relationship, and the viewer has space 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 retains 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 us to distinguish 1969 Los Angeles from the fictional productions in which Rick Dalton works. The viewer moves between experiences that do not necessarily look as though they were photographed in the same way. Black-and-white television, a western shoot and journeys through Los Angeles belong to related but recognisable registers. The cinematography helps identify when we are looking at a life and when we are looking at a manufactured professional image within it.
Panavision records 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 instruction to make it look old. However, the emotion of a scene is not automatically determined by the age of a lens either. The distance to the actor, the available or constructed light and the length of time we keep looking all play a part.
The cinematography of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood shows a collaboration capable of adapting its resources according to the world being represented. The defence of photochemical film belongs to the debate about Tarantino and celluloid, but it is worth avoiding absolutes about Richardson’s entire career or about the absence of digital processes. His contribution with Tarantino is recognised in concrete images: light that separates, width that connects and visual shifts that allow more than one cinema to be inhabited within a film.
Further information: Tarantino's technical team.