How DP Ari Wegner Crafted the Stunning Visuals of ‘The Power of the Dog’ and ‘Zola’

“Stressful”: that’s how “Zola” filmmaker Janicza Bravo described the aesthetic of her Twitter tale–turned–A24 epic. Director of photography Ari Wegner—who received an Oscar nomination for this year’s “The Power of the Dog”—followed Bravo’s lead. It paid off: For “Zola,” she’s been nominated for the Film Independent Spirit Award for cinematography. Here, she explains how she and the other visual departments curated chaos onscreen and how her approach differs from project to project.   

When you first signed on to “Zola,” what conversations did you have with Janicza Bravo about how this film needed to look? 

Janicza is someone who loves aesthetics and attention to detail. When we first started chatting, she had an incredible library of images of every possible detail: costume, location, light, and skin. So we started with this amazing tonal bible. From there, like with any film, you then have to start translating that into reality and putting it in line with the script. It was a process of taking those images that she had in her mind and finding a place for them in specific scenes, and scouting locations that aligned with what she’d imagined. As a DP, you first understand what the director’s vision is, and then add to that with ideas that are necessary to adapt the initial vision to reality. 

Nicholas Braun, Riley Keough, Taylour Paige, Colman Domingo in “Zola,” Courtesy of A24

“Zola” has a constant air of chaos and kinetic energy. How did you help foster that with the camera? 

That was one of Janicza’s keywords: stressful. We really wanted that feeling of chaos. The blueprint is the Twitter story, which has chaos but also an amazing narrative throughline. It’s such a visceral story. There’s so much sensory input that Zola [the character] is being bombarded with. The situations kind of create the chaos, so in many ways, it was not necessary to add additional visual chaos on top of that. Actually, the cinematography is quite considered. There’s chaos happening in the frames, but the frames—the actual camera movement and the coverage—is quite calm. The colors and the things that are happening in the frames have that stressful, discordant quality to them. 

Your other recent film, Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog,” is a slow burn. What was different, from a cinematography standpoint, about working on those two projects?  

In every way, they are such different projects. That’s what I love about my job: You get to experience the full spectrum of ways to make films. There are infinite stories that people want to tell, and there are infinite ways to tell them. The visual style of “The Power of the Dog” is about as far from “Zola” as you can get. “The Power of the Dog” is all about characters not expressing their true feelings because of social taboos or just an inability to have an emotional language. There’s an unsaid energy to it, whereas Zola is such a contemporary character who is so good at expressing exactly how she’s feeling. You see it just in her eyes. 

Ari Wegner (Director of Photography), Jane Campion (Director, Producer) filming “The Power of the Dog,” Courtesy Kirsty Griffin/Netflix

Is working with a filmmaker like Jane Campion a very different experience from working with Janicza Bravo? 

They both have a really strong sense of time and place, and that’s kind of the job of the DP and the director: to make sure that all that information is somewhere on the screen so that an audience can inherently know where we are, when we are, and what the context is. I love all their differences, and in many ways, I can see a lot of parallels between Jane and Janicza. For me, it doesn’t matter if I have four or five weeks to prep or a year to prep, as I did with Jane. The experience is the same in that I’m completely invested. Every hour that I’m on board, it’s my entire life. That year that we spent prepping, there’s still a lot of hustle and chaos, and then you get to the shoot day, and you’ve still got 10 hours to get the most out of it that you can. We had half as many days to shoot “Zola” that we did to shoot “The Power of the Dog.” 

How do you, as the DP, work with the visual design departments to achieve the overall look and feel of a film? 

That’s one of the most fun things, I think, about filmmaking: It’s a team sport. You’ve got these highly specialized creative people, and they’re all going to come together under one director and do what they do best. And then when you look at a frame, it is all those elements that you see in front of you. What color are the walls, and how do they go with the costumes, and how do we light it? We spend a lot of time taking all that into account: what costumes should be in which locations so they are both distinctive and bold, and they don’t disappear. It’s lots of conversations and lots of hustle. It’s one of the most satisfying parts of filmmaking, that collaboration between the departments.

This story originally appeared in the Feb. 17 issue of Backstage Magazine. Subscribe here.