“Throughout the film we used essentially green to add to daylight lights,” he says, “to shift for nighttime scenics to make the skies more pink, and to maintain that palette of cyans, and blues, and pinks.” He also thanks the film stock and camera choice for such wonderful color saturation. He laughs that shooting film over digital was no extra challenge for him. “I know I will get something in camera that has captured a richer world.”

“For example,” he says, “cyans are really prominent on a film negative, while on a digital camera, you have to add a lot more color to the lighting to get those colors, if you can even get them. Even in the subtle use of palettes, certain color tones, like shades of green, are just so rich with film, so I felt like it was a better opportunity to shoot with film. It gives me a richer negative with more color and saturation. That way, in the DI (digital intermediate), you don’t have to add more saturation. Otherwise, shooting digitally, you may have to key colors and try to pull more out of them.”

For interiors, lighting differed by scene, but Sandgren tried to stay naturalistic. He says that he always uses a lot of practicals within a scene to give a source for colors and shadowing, even if they’re not adding any useful light to a scene. “Like the Italian restaurant where Ryan Gosling plays piano,” he says, “That was meant to feel like a cozy, Italian restaurant where people don’t really speak loudly. The palette is largely golden colors, so we worked a lot with practicals there, using cool-white behind the bar to give contrast to the golds and reds. The same with the kitchen, we used cool white colors to contrast against the gold. I love to have a contrasting color. If you don’t have a contrasting color, you can get a little too muddy with smaller lights or practicals. Cyan’s kind of nice to counter with some reds, for instance.”

The production also worked with covered wagons, strips of lights that are diffused with silks, most often placed on the floors or hidden from beneath. For overhead lighting in the club, they had an LED blanket light that was daylight but balanced to 4000K, near tungsten, to match the nighttime atmosphere, as well as to act as a dimmable spot light that would launch a piano sequence. Most of these dimming effects were performed manually, as well. The production had four electricians just for the dimmers. Even doing complicated light gags in a later movie theater sequence required grips and electricians physically creating shadows in front of the light sources.

“I like to work simply,” Sandgren says, “as simple as possible! I’m using a lot of practicals, but the practicals are more there to give set decoration and a little more glow to a scene, and then from there you work in a little more lighting, but I don’t like too much light. I always feel like you should start with one light and see what you get. Perhaps that is enough, you never know!”