Hoyte Van Hoytema on Developing

a Relationship with Nolan

As long as your choices are driven by growth, no matter how far you already are, you will feel scared. What terrifies you today and feels like an insurmountable mountain to climb will feel like a hill tomorrow when looking back, especially compared to the next mountain ahead.

The good news is that it’s a universal feeling. You can’t pretend to be growing without taking risks. You can’t pretend to be taking risks without betting something on the table. Everything comes at a cost.

It feels nice to know that Swiss Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema felt insecure during his first collaboration with Christopher Nolan on Interstellar, even though he had done Her, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or Let the Right One In.

During the Hollywood Reporter roundtable, Van Hoytema talks about the evolution of his relationship with Nolan and how the first film leaves an unsatisfying unless another comes after:

After you finish your film it’s always kind of unsastifying because you started to discover things together and one film is just not enough to develop that on and then you do your next film and you get much deeper and you get to challenge each other much more. It’s so much about chemistry you know, at the beginning you’re very stiff and you really feel each other out and you’re sort of tiptoeing around each other. But then on the next project you can do more, you dare to do more and you can use things that you have been learning from each other and I very much enjoy that. I took over Wally (Pfister), which is always a very scary thing, after the divorce you’re the new girlfriend, you know. Wally wanted to pursue directing so Chris had to find a new person so he found me. But you know I was scared to death at the beginning. You want to fulfill certain expectations you want to deliver what has been delivered before and at the same time you want to bring something of yourselves to the table.

The interesting element, apart from the fact that fear will never really go away if you push yourself, is that there is no correlation between making a great film and being a long-time collaborator. Sam Mendes directing his first feature with Conrad L. Hall as DP and the pair taking American Beauty to the Oscars and plenty of similar examples can prove that point. But it does make the collaboration easier, highly probably more pleasant, and creatively speaking more exciting to know the people you work with.