'Wuthering Heights' DP Linus Sandgren Talks VistaVision’s Revival
L-r) Cinematographer Linus Sandgren and Director, Writer, Producer Emerald Fennell on the set of “Wuthering Heights,” a Warner Bros. Pictures Release.
Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros. Entertainment
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Wuthering Heights cinematographer Linus Sandgren lets the story dictate the format.
As much as the Swedish DP may enjoy shooting in IMAX, Emerald Fennell’s vision for her reimagining of Emily Brontë’s seminal novel had a different ambition than the one he fulfilled for Denis Villeneuve on Dune: Part Three. The writer-director wanted her tragic period romance starring Margot Robbie (Cathy Earnshaw) and Jacob Elordi (Heathcliff) to have a tactile, impressionistic quality, hence the decision to shoot the majority of the piece on standard 35 mm film.
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When it came to landscape shots of the Yorkshire Moors — as well as wide interior shots involving Edgar Linton’s (Shazad Latif) decadent manor — the filmmakers sought a higher resolution for the sake of detail, but without sacrificing film grain. Neither standard 65 mm nor IMAX were going to uphold both of those requirements. Thus, Sandgren and Fennell opted for VistaVision, a large 35 mm film format that presents high resolution and just enough grain to maintain continuity with the rest of the film’s 3-perf 35 mm.
“Each format will affect the emotions, and there’s a huge difference to me within the film formats. We tested 65, but Emerald was missing the grain, so we went for 35 to see the grain,” the Oscar-winning Sandgren tells The Hollywood Reporter in support of Wuthering Heights’ 4K release. “Our technical reason for VistaVision was to capture the landscape shots in a high resolution [with a finer grain] because they include small details that you want to see better. Basically, all real exteriors and wide-shot interiors were VistaVision.”
This particular system had a dominant run in the 1950s, but then it fell by the wayside until Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist seemingly brought it back in 2024. Since then, VistaVision has been used in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar-winning One Battle After Another, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia and upcoming films from Alejandro González Iñárritu (Digger), M. Night Shyamalan (Remain) and Greta Gerwig (Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew). In a time where moviegoing is on shakier ground, VistaVision, like IMAX, offers a marketable large format that promises a unique moviegoing experience compared to the majority of today’s films and series shot on digital.
According to Sandgren, its image clarity is a key selling point for filmmakers who’ve become enamored with digital’s sharpness. “People started shooting digital, and they got used to the sharp quality of the image. So directors who like the sharpness of shooting on digital cameras can maintain that very sharp image with film formats like VistaVision,” Sandgren says.
As for December’s Dune: Part Three, Sandgren did opt for strategic use of IMAX cameras to achieve the scope and scale that Villeneuve envisioned for his trilogy capper. He’d previously applied the camera to select sequences in First Man and No Time to Die. Compared to VistaVision, IMAX provides a larger and even clearer image, but it generally lacks the texture that comes with the former.
Sandgren has provided a great deal of feedback to IMAX as part of their ongoing efforts to refine its technology, but he’s yet to use the modernized camera system that Christopher Nolan and DP Hoyte van Hoytema deployed for the entirety of their upcoming epic, The Odyssey. The historical knock against the IMAX camera is that it’s heavy and noisy, preventing use during dialogue scenes. However, IMAX finally solved the problem ahead of The Odyssey’s shoot by surrounding the camera with a sound blimp or a box-like encasement. Sandgren admits he’s intrigued by the possibility of shooting an entire film with an IMAX camera, but he will still let the script govern all format decisions.
“I absolutely love films that are epic and big and use IMAX correctly. Some films shouldn’t be IMAX, and some films should be IMAX. We used it a lot on Dune: Part Three,” Sandgren says. “Of course, you want those IMAX cameras to be quiet, and we have all offered input on their new cameras to try to make them quieter. Still, a blimp is needed, and it’s as cumbersome