A Collaboration With Panavision: Giovanni Ribisi

Giovanni Ribisi began acting when he was 9 years old, and in the decades since, he’s appeared in projects as varied as Boiler Room, Gone in 60 Seconds, Lost in Translation, Flight of the Phoenix, A Million Ways to Die in the West, Selma, Meadowland, and Avatar and its sequel The Way of Water. In recent years, he’s also been working as a director of photography, embracing the collaboration inherent in the role and the more objective perspective it provides on the story being told. In this interview, Ribisi retraces his journey from in front of the camera to behind it and discusses the early influence of cinematographer Janusz Kaminski on the set of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Ribisi also details his experience as cinematographer on writer-director JT Mollner’s feature Strange Darling, emphasizing the importance of their preproduction planning.

Close Encounters

“As an actor, the first name that came to my head of course is Steven Spielberg and Janusz Kaminski on Saving Private Ryan,” Ribisi shares of a particularly influential encounter with a masterful cinematographer. “Janusz came down to sit with the actors, and talk to all of us, and just hang out and observe and look at our faces and the shapes and our personalities, and to see how he might photograph that. And I think that's very important, because it's not just a lighting thing or a technical lensing thing as much as it is really about personality.”

Early Exposure 

“I guess coming up and being a young lad on movies, it was of course always the fascination,” Ribisi recalls of his early experiences with the camera department. “I started acting when I was 9 years old, and if kids are playing with G.I. Joe or Tonka toys or whatever, my apparatus were cameras. That was what was in front of me. And so, with cinematography, it was always definitely a curiosity, but on a set, the actors are often separated from especially the camera department. I guess I couldn't help myself. It's just something that I'm just drawn to.” 

Shifting Perspective

“Being an actor, sometimes your focus becomes the other characters or the dilemmas of the story," Ribisi reveals. "And what I love about working on the other side of the camera is the collaboration, and it becomes a lot more objective. As an actor, and some of the things that I've done, I guess there's a sort of a different standard that might be expected.

“For me, at least, preparation is so important, and so this was something that JT Mollner and I focused on,” Ribisi continues, referencing his work as cinematographer on the feature Strange Darling. “We had three months, thinking of every little tiny thing just from the experiences that I've had in the last decade or so of making commercials and music videos, and the importance of not only conceptualizing the story visually, but also all the tools that you would need. Having that preparation, and to some degree, that confidence to go in there and go, ‘Okay, so this is what we're going to do here,’ is just invaluable.”

Collaborating With Panavision

“Panavision is the king, and I mean that,” Ribisi says. “The people over there, the staff and the engineers, are there because they love movies and they love Panavision and the tradition that's been there for as long as that company has been around. There's no other way to say it, use a Panavision lens and it automatically becomes a movie.”