The horror streaming service Shudder recently made available Nora Unkel’s A Nightmare Wakes, which is a retelling of the time renowned author Mary Shelley spent writing what would become Frankenstein. Blending the biopic and horror / psychological-thriller genres, Unkel’s film explores Shelley’s fraught psychological state, depicting the horrific hallucinations she experiences and the consequences they pose on her intimate relationships (particularly with her husband, Percy).
I had the pleasure of interviewing the film’s cinematographer Oren Soffer. In the following interview, Soffer dives into his inspiration for the visual tone of the film, the challenges he faced in balancing light and shadows (small spoiler: he and his team used only four lights throughout production), and his desire to see more diverse storytelling in cinema.
A Nightmare Wakes is currently available to stream on Shudder, a service attached to Amazon Prime Video. Additional costs may apply.
Congratulations, first of all, on the film and its release on Shudder. What initially drew you to the film? Were you familiar with Mary Shelley’s story and / or Frankenstein?
Thank you! As a cinematographer, there are two factors in particular that draw me to films. First, and most important, is a good script and a compelling story. I find myself particularly drawn to stories about women, characters of color, immigrants, LGBTQ stories, and shining a light on stories about minority groups who have not been represented as often on screen as white men. And the other factor I look for is whether or not a film will be visually interesting to craft and shoot. On “A Nightmare Wakes,” I was familiar with and had been fascinated by Mary Shelley’s story for quite some time as the godmother of both the science fiction and the horror genres; and the opportunity to shoot a period piece with dark natural lighting and moody candlelight is a cinematographer’s dream.
The cinematography is very reminiscent of Victorian art—which would have been Shelley’s time—in that there are a lot of tableau-like shots that play around with light and darkness. Was this intentional? How did you initially approach shooting the film? Did you look anywhere specifically for inspiration?
I’m so glad you picked up on that because we, indeed, looked at a lot of Victorian-era paintings, as well as Dutch Golden-Age paintings from earlier in the 17th century, as a big inspiration for the visual look of the film. In fact, in some cases we specifically set out to recreate certain compositions inspired by specific paintings! We also looked at a number of movies to help build our reference image library and inform our approach – Cary Fukunaga’s “Jane Eyre” and “Lady Macbeth” were big influences for us; both are films that Nora and I both love and both think are quite underrated. On the lighting side, we also took a lot of inspiration from “Barry Lyndon”, “Bright Star,” “The Beguiled,” “The Witch,” The Crown,” “Game of Thrones,” and other dark movies and shows with period settings. We also looked at “Alias Grace” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” quite a bit for inspiration for subjective framing. And we also looked at “Black Swan” and “Mother” for how to integrate surreal, nightmare imagery and have it blend into the world of the film.
There are heavy shadows throughout the film, and yet you’re still able to see everything you need to see. How did you go about balancing the light and the dark?
Balancing light and dark is really at the nexus of the art of cinematography; at the end of the day, for me, it comes down mostly to being inspired by reality and how natural light interacts with the environment. Beyond that, my lighting approach is mostly intuitive – I draw inspiration from great DPs of the past like Gordon Willis, Nestor Almendros, Harris Savides, and contemporary masters like Greig Fraser, Bradford Young and Roger Deakins, who adopt a lighting approach that involves lighting scenes from single light sources, and letting the shadows fall off into deep darkness. All of this of course is built on the work of the great Dutch and Italian painters like Vermeer and Caravaggio, which ties into our overall aesthetic as well.
I understand that you worked with only four lights, plus natural light—what were some of the technical challenges you faced during production?
It’s funny – this might seem counter-intuitive, but I found our limitations to be incredibly freeing. By adopting a hyper-minimalistic filmic approach, we actually removed most if not all of the elements that would have created technical challenges for us and it ended up being truly liberating and allowed us to focus on story and character, giving our director and actors the maximum amount of time to create and to bring these characters and performances to life. Our biggest challenge ended up being scheduling. We shot on a very tight 18-day schedule and had to ensure that we had enough time to capture everything, plus still give our actors the time to explore the scenes. One example of this was our decision to set our climactic scene during blue hour, a 10-minute window of light just before nightfall. The scene takes place in real-time, but is set across multiple different shooting locations and involves stunts, special effects make-up, a camera in waterproof housing, and many other elements that are time consuming to get just right. Our solution was to shoot this one scene over the course of four evenings, utilizing a one-hour window of light each successive evening, in order to gather all of our shots needed for the scene. We just prayed that we had consistent weather over the four nights, and thankfully we got very lucky!
What I liked about the film was how there’s a sort of push-and-pull relationship between the viewer and the characters; the close-ups pull us into the characters’—particularly Shelley’s—interior world, but, at the same time, there are just as many long shots that keep us at bay. Was this something you and director Nora Unkel discussed? What was it like to collaborate with Nora?
This is another element that I am so glad you picked up on, because it was absolutely something that we intentionally designed into the look of the film. Most of the time as filmmakers we assume that audiences won’t necessarily pick up on the technical reasons they are feeling a certain way while watching a story, but that subconsciously our choices will influence and shape those feelings, so it’s honestly so great to hear that you picked up on those very deliberate choices. Collaborating with Nora on this film was a real pleasure and we had the benefit of a very long pre-production period: in the months leading up to the shoot, Nora and I were able to meet up very consistently once a week in between our other shoots and jobs to work on this film. We exchanged reference images, built out the overall visual style and approach to the film, and were able to thoroughly shot list and plan out the entire movie well before we were even ready to shoot. Especially on lower budget projects such as this one, good preparation and having a thorough and well thought out plan is the key to success for me.
This is definitely a film that you need to watch on a bigger screen—definitely not on a phone—in order to fully appreciate the scope and significance of its imagery. Amidst the current debates between theatrical and streaming platform releases, do you find yourself changing the ways in which you approach cinematography? Is there, for that matter, any difference in shooting for the big screen versus the small?
This is a very interesting question, and one I’ve spent quite some time thinking about. Over the past decade or so, TV has increasingly looked more and more like films, to the point where we have TV shows like Game of Thrones which are indistinguishable from movies – and have even had episodes show in special engagements at IMAX theaters. With large flat screen TVs pretty much being the norm at this point (and quite affordable), my overall feeling is that we do not need to change our approach to cater to a smaller screen – I think the same visual language can come across just as well on a 40 foot screen from 30 feet away as on a 60 inch screen from 6 feet away. The only unique scenario I can think of is if you are making content that is specifically intended and designed to be viewed on phones – but other than that, I focus on making the film we intend to make, and let the chips fall where they may in terms of how people end up viewing it on the other side, since it’s not a factor you can really control. I’ve seen people watching Christopher Nolan movies like Dunkirk on their phones on airplanes – there’s just nothing you can really do to control that, and therefore, no need to cater to it specifically. If that’s how someone chooses to watch it… that’s on them.
You’ve worked in a wide range of media, covering an even wider range of stories—are there any specific genres / stories / universes that you would love to work in one day?
I mentioned this earlier, but particularly as a queer immigrant, stories about marginalized people and minority groups whose stories have not been told on screen very often are the stories that interest me the most. Generally speaking, I like stories that have a certain darkness and edge to them. But I’m also just a big nerd, and would love nothing more than to one day shoot something that takes place in the Star Wars or Lord of the Rings universes. I am also a big genre fan and would love to shoot sci-fi, westerns, musicals… overall, I’m genre-agnostic, but love anything that allows for some stylized visuals.
What’s next for you?
I shot another feature film in the fall – a really visually trippy psychological thriller titled ‘Fixation’ that is currently in post-production and will hopefully be released later this year. Other than that, incidentally to my earlier mention of it, I am starting work on shooting a digital series for Snapchat in the coming weeks, where we actually *are* framing explicitly for a small screen, which is going to be a fun new challenge I am excited to tackle. And as I do in between narrative projects, I am hoping to take on more commercials and music videos as they come in. I like to strike a nice balance between them all!
