Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. One of the most visually stunning films of the year is Train Dreams, the beautiful and melancholic story of a logger named Robert and his family as they navigate life in the Pacific Northwest. That beauty is thanks in a large part due to the work of my next guest. Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso used natural light to shoot breath breathtaking scenes of nature, forests, sunset, family life, and logging in early camps of the 1900s. His work earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Cinematographer, his first ever. Train Dreams, directed by Clint Bentley, is now still nominated for four total Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

I'm joined now by Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso, who joins me as part of our ongoing series, The Big Picture, celebrating Oscar nominees who work behind the camera. It's nice to meet you.

Adolpho Veloso: My pleasure, Alison. Super excited to talk to you. Both Clint, the director, and Alex Schaller, the production designer, a big fan of yours, and they're all saying hi.

Alison Stewart: Well, hi to them back. You've worked with Clint before on Jockey, a great movie, by the way. How did you first get connected with Clint?

Adolpho Veloso: He actually wrote an email when he was about to shoot Jockey. He wanted to-- I think maybe he was desperate and not finding anyone, I'm not sure.

[laughter]

Adolpho Veloso: He saw the documentary I shot, and he wanted to find someone that was able to shoot the documentary-style scenes, but also shoot fiction. He wanted to do a lot of that in Jockey and blend those two worlds in a way that made sense. He just wrote me an email and we did Jockey together. I'm glad we did that because that led to Train Dreams.

Alison Stewart: When you talked to Clint about what the visual language for Train Dreams would be, what did you talk about?

Adolpho Veloso: Well, we did talk a lot about memory. That was really present on the script. He wrote the script with Greg Kwedar, and I could sense on the script that it was all about memories. It didn't feel like a journalistic version of a biopic. Felt like someone telling someone else's life memories in a random way, sometimes out of order, and more in a way that felt like not necessarily those memories are what actually happened. Just an impression of someone's life.

I was just trying to figure out how to translate that into images. Where we landed was we found this metaphor, which is basically like you went down a basement and you found a box full of pictures of someone's life, and you're trying to go through those pictures and trying to figure out who that person was, and that those pictures, like those memories, are out of order. Some of those pictures are really posed. Some of those pictures are more organic, and I know, just an impression of a moment. That was kind of the whole idea behind it. That led us to all other decisions visually.

Alison Stewart: You shot in Washington state. Did you do any research about life in the 1900s during that time?

Adolpho Veloso: We did. We looked at a lot of pictures from the time period, which also helped. A few images in the movie actually are really based on those images. Like there's an iconic one with a guy living inside-- he built a house inside a tree. Another one with a guy lying inside the tree and two other guys hanging on the sides of the tree. Those are all based on pictures we saw from the time period. Those trees were so big and so large that they could actually inhabit those trees in a way.

Alison Stewart: What were the challenges of shooting so much outside?

Adolpho Veloso: It is challenging, but to be honest, I feel like there's nothing more inspiring than shooting real world, real nature, and to be around real elements. I was just talking about that there's nothing like you plan a lot to do something in a certain way, and then suddenly things change, starts to ring, and then that is not exactly what you imagined, but that brings another magic to it. When you embrace that in a way that Clint would always incorporate just to embrace it, things can be much more magical than necessarily what you imagine.

It is very challenging because you need everybody to really be on board of that. You are in the middle of the woods. It's trickier to carry the gear, but it is also, at the same time, really inspiring and magical.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso. We're talking about his Oscar-nominated work on the movie, Train Dreams, which is also nominated for Best Picture. This conversation is part of our annual series, The Big Picture, celebrating nominees who work behind the camera. I'm going to get a little nerdy here. We're going to talk about aspect ratio.

Adolpho Veloso: That's perfect.

Alison Stewart: All right, let's try. Your aspect ratio is your width, your height, and you shot in 3:2, yes?

Adolpho Veloso: Yes.

Alison Stewart: This creates a box-like frame for people to see what you want us to see. Let's put it that way. Creatively, what did this do for you?

Adolpho Veloso: Well, the main reason we chose that Aspect ratio is because we wanted to evoke that memory lane, as I was saying before. That aspect ratio is basically the aspect ratio we used to see in our old family photos because that's the aspect ratio for still photography, in a way. We were just trying to evoke that feeling in whoever is watching the movie. Feel like whenever you're choosing something like that aspect ratio, for example, it can be really random. You can just choose it for the sake of it because it feels better. We always prefer to have a reason behind so that helps the audience feel connected to something in a way.

Even though it's very subtle and people might not realize that, somehow that gets embedded in your brain and you relay that to old memories. That also helped us a lot because it is a taller aspect ratio and we wanted to portray nature a lot and to film trees a lot, and that really helps too.

Alison Stewart: What kind of lenses did you use?

Adolpho Veloso: We had two different set of lenses, both old lenses. We wanted the texture. We wanted those images to feel old but not faded in a way. Almost like using the tools from the past, but making sure they were vivid with full colors. We had two different sets, one for the daylight stuff. It's a Japanese old len called Kowa. The main reason we had those is because they render nature really well. The sun flares are beautiful. Everything felt super magical with them. They are really slow lenses, which means that we wouldn't necessarily be able to capture everything we wanted at night with only fire. We only use natural light and real fire, real candles, real oil lamps, real campfires.

We needed the different set of lenses for the night stuff to be able to only use fire and not enhance anything with LEDs or artificial lighting.

Alison Stewart: Why do you like working with natural light?

Adolpho Veloso: Well, I feel like there's nothing like it. I feel like it's really hard to beat it when you are in the right time of the day and the right--

Alison Stewart: Magic hours, they say, right? [laughs]

Adolpho Veloso: Yes, exactly. There's a reason it's called that way. I think there is a reason why the masters, like Dutch masters from the past, painters often would paint at that time of the day. I feel like there is something beautiful about it, and I feel like it gives you also so much freedom on set. The fact that you don't have C-stands around, you don't have a lot of lights around, allow the actors to actually inhabit those spaces, to move around, not be worried about marks, and the camera can actually follow them. There is a freedom for spontaneity to happen in a way that I feel like it's really magical too.

Alison Stewart: You shot this film digitally, right?

Adolpho Veloso: Yes. Correct.

Alison Stewart: That's surprising when I read that. I expected them to tell me, "Oh, they shot this on film." Why did you decide digital was the right way to go?

Adolpho Veloso: Well, there's still a bit of nostalgia about films, and I feel like there's always good reasons to shoot on film, but I feel like we got with digital in a place that it is a very good tool, not only for the reasons we wanted in the movie, but for a lot of reasons also. I feel like the main thing for us was we wanted to be able to shoot with natural light, to use only real fire. Some scenes in the movie are literally lit by a single candle, and we wanted the freedom to improvise.

A lot of the scenes in the movie came from 40 minutes non stop improvising. Just me running around with the camera, following the actors and the chickens and whatever. Those would all be very difficult things to achieve with film. Not only because you don't necessarily have the sensitivity to shoot with a single candle, but also you need to reload the camera every 5 minutes or 10 minutes, depending on how big your magazine is. There's a lot of things that would get in the way we wanted to shoot this specific film and to give all that freedom to the actors and to make it as naturalistic as possible.

Alison Stewart: Sounds so interesting. It's like you're using the new and the old to create this film

Adolpho Veloso: Which, I think, it's a good way to perceive memories in a way. Memories are things that happen in the past, but through a different lens. We always think about memories, but having in mind who we are today in a way. I feel like it's a good metaphor for that.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso. We're talking about his Oscar-nominated work on the movie, Train Dreams, which is also nominated for Best Picture. The conversation is part of our series The Big Picture, celebrating nominees who work behind the camera. This film has narration over huge chunks of it. How much were you keeping that in mind as you were shooting?

Adolpho Veloso: I try not to keep that in mind at all. I feel like my job was to try to deliver a movie that wouldn't need narration. I don't think it's the case, but I feel like I was just trying to-- Whenever I do my job as a cinematographer, I think I need to try to conceive things with the images. If dialogue was not present, if narration was not present, how do you deliver everything just with the images if all those elements were not there? Obviously, they are there, and you can rely on them. I'm always just trying to think, okay, "How can I frame here in a way and how can I light this place in a way that everything that needs to be told in a bigger way is told, even though those characters are not talking anything or there's no narration over it.

Alison Stewart: Do you take photographs?

Adolpho Veloso: Yes, but again, I always say that for me it's hard to take a photograph if there is not a reason behind it. I don't come from a photography back background. I just loved movies, and I wanted to work with that. Within that, I realized that the camera department and the lighting department were the things that I like the most. It's really hard. If you tell me like, "Take a picture of this room," I'll have no idea what to do, where to put the camera, what lens to choose. If you tell me right now, "Take a picture of this room, thinking that a couple was murdered here last night," whatever, and then suddenly I'm going to know where to place the camera and how to light it.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting. I got to think about that one. You shot the cabin scenes inside a cabin that was constructed for the film. What was it like shooting in this set, which was a set but was also built like a real home?

Adolpho Veloso: Yes. I think it's everything. I mentioned Alex earlier, the production designer, she did such an amazing job building all the sets on location, which is not always the case, but that gives you so much freedom not only for the camera, but for the actors. Everything in the cabin or in the fire tower or any of the sets we shot was practical so the actors could actually cook if they felt like it. Like everything would work or open any drawers. There is so much freedom within that because it allows you not only to adapt to things that not necessarily are happening. We shot with a kid a lot and animals. Not often a two-year-old is going to read the script and react to what the director wants.

[laughter]

Adolpho Veloso: You need to be open to, "Okay, the kid doesn't want to be inside, but the kid is happy to be outside now, so let's just go outside." If you're on a soundstage, you cannot do that. If you are in a real location with a set built on location, you can do that and vice versa. That gives everybody so much more inspiration, too.

Alison Stewart: Without giving too much away. There's a massive wildfire in this film. When is the process of shooting that?

Adolpho Veloso: Well, that's the trickiest thing. I feel like it was the scene that is probably the reason that I have so much gray hair now. I was really stressed about it because, as I was saying before, everything else in the movie is so naturalistic. We shot only with real light, practical effects. Everything is real. It's a really handcrafted movie in a way. For this scene, we obviously couldn't burn the forest down, and we wouldn't even if we could. We had to find a way to make it feel as real as everything else in the movie, relying on VFX and rely on artificial lighting. We just had to test a lot.

We ended up using a lighting rig that-- we needed something so large because it's basically a wall of fire that he cannot pass through. We needed something so large and tall that we ended up using a rig that is used on music concerts. We tested in so many different ways to try to find the right temperature in the fixtures, the right flickering so it all felt like all other fires in the movie that were real. Also, while we could shoot to deliver an image that was easier for the post-production department to work with, so we found the forest that had been burned before, for example, so all the trees were actually already burned, and that's all real.

All those elements that helped us, in a way, to achieve a realistic look in the end. I'm really happy with what everybody achieved.

Alison Stewart: One thing I noticed in the film, there are lots of shots angled from either way below or incredibly high. What discussions did you have with Clint about camera angles and when to use them?

Adolpho Veloso: Well, I think, again, it's all about the emotions and what those scenes are trying to tell the audience, in a way. I feel like the camera is an important tool to help with that. There is also one specific thing in this movie, is that we didn't want nature to just feel like a backdrop. We didn't want to shoot nature like you're shooting a postcard. We wanted to shoot nature like you're shooting any other character, almost like you're shooting a person in a way. A lot of those camera angles came from that. There is a scene in the movie where the camera is attached to the tree in the beginning of the movie, and then the tree falls down, the camera goes with it.

That was a way for us to say, "Okay, nature is another character in the movie. With nature, it's another character in the movie without putting a statement out. It's another character in the movie as important as any of the other characters here. I feel like seeing things from all those perspectives, like you want to see things through a character's perspective, makes you be more empathic to that character.

Alison Stewart: What was it like to put a camera on a tree and then send it over?

Adolpho Veloso: Scary.

[laughter]

Adolpho Veloso: We made sure-- we used a different camera from the camera we used on everything else because we had to put a camera there that we could spare if anything would go wrong. Everything went fine and the camera survived, but it was definitely scary. Everybody obviously was at a safe distance when that happened, so we just rigged the camera there and left the camera alone. Everything went fine, and the camera survived.

Alison Stewart: What are you most proud of when it comes to your work on this film?

Adolpho Veloso: Oh, that's a really hard question because I feel like we are our worst critics in a way. I feel like whenever I watch the movie, I'm just concentrating on everything that I could have done better and what I did wrong. I'm really proud of what everybody else did in the movie, and that I didn't mess it up. I feel like everybody did such a great job in the movie. I was just trying not to mess it up and not get on anyone else's way. I feel like I'm really proud of being part of the story and a movie that is doing a lot for a lot of people. We've been getting a lot of messages of people that really connected with the story, people saying that the movie helped them in a way.

I love that because that's the reason I even start to do what I do. I love films and so many movies helped me so much in my life. I'm happy to be a small part of a movie that is doing that to other people now.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about Adolpho Filoso's Oscar-nominated work in the movie, Train Dreams, is also nominated for Best Picture. Congratulations to you.

Adolpho Veloso: Thank you very much. That's very kind.