On the Road: Esmoreit Lutters on shooting How to Kill Your Sister

Three years before How to Kill Your Sister, Lutters worked on Roomies with directors Kato De Boeck and Flo Van Deuren. “The production company involved was De Wereldvrede and director Jonas Geirnaert was in contact with the team,” he begins. “He asked if they knew a good cinematographer for the project. He had a chat with me from there and sent me a pitch and an outline of the script.”

When Lutters first met director Jonas to discuss How to Kill Your Sister, it wasn’t a conversation about lenses or lighting setups, instead they discussed life and both of their world views. “I remember it was a very sunny day and Jonas was wearing a straw hat,” recalls Lutters. “We were in a bar/restaurant and I was quite nervous.” Geirnaert also spoke about the story in depth and Lutters admits he immediately felt connected to it. “I thought that we would definitely be able to collaborate on a project and it all worked out and started from there.” Lutters isn’t the kind of cinematographer to be directly into the look of something, instead he’s always searching for the storyline first. “Once I got the script, I tried to understand the characters,” he explains. “I always start from this perspective. For me, it’s very important to start with the characters and not from visual storytelling.”

Lutters’ initial process involves focusing on the story and what it needs. From there, he tries to find the emotion and then translate those emotions to the images. “I communicated my thoughts on what I felt would suit the show,” he says. “I don’t usually create mood boards at the very beginning, because films and shows are not about a single image. It’s more about moving images, emotions in the characters and the lighting and everything around it.”

How to Kill Your Sister revolves around two sisters who go on a road together through Belgium, France and Spain. “I once did this same journey once with my parents, so I was very familiar with this atmosphere and imagined exactly how it could be. It’s very interesting how everything connects to a story and that’s also the nice part of cinematography; you can really create this atmosphere around the characters.”

In terms of visual references, Lutters looked at Andrea Arnold’s American Honey (2016) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). “American Honey was one of my biggest references for the colours, although in the end we didn’t use it that much. We also looked at The End of the F***ing World (2017). It’s this sort of abstract world they inhabit. We tried to emulate this a little bit in our cinematography, to create this world that’s not completely realistic, even though it is the real world. I purposefully tried to make the lights not 100% correct and to create a distance between what is real and not real.” Lutters also explains that he was influenced by the framing in The End of the F***ing World. “The acting is also a little bit abstract and the camera point of view is very frontal. The framing is so the character is always in the middle of everything and looking towards the camera. We had a feeling we could use this, but in the end we created something mostly out of our own fantasy.”

Lutters paired ARRI ALEXA 35 with Leitz Summilux-C Lenses to capture the show, but admits he was initially doubting this combination as he wanted to go anamorphic, similar to Three Billboards. For Lutters, however, it was vital to create a realistic atmosphere around the actors. “Our choice of lenses reflected this,” he adds. “Also, due to the limited space we’d have as most of our scenes take place in a car, we needed something compact. The camera also had to be compact. This set up was 43cm long with the lens, so we could easily fit it in the car because we chose a Land Rover as the main vehicle of the show.” The camera and lenses were also selected for their dynamic range. “You have this summer vibe with a lot of overexposing windows, because we were driving through landscapes and you have these darker interiors and a lot of light outside. ALEXA 35 has a lot of dynamic range. When we went too vintage with the lenses it was blooming too much. When we shot outside, you couldn’t really see in the car, so we opted for modern lenses to enable us to see everything.”

Production ultimately decided to shoot the car scenes on location rather than in a studio. It proved to be a more cost-effective approach, or at least that was the intention, but more importantly, it allowed the actors to exist within a real environment. Working on stage would have reduced the sense of interaction with the surrounding landscape, whereas shooting on location gave the performances a more authentic and dynamic quality. “Everything was shot in a real car fitted with a top steer,” explains Lutters. “We had a stunt driver on top of the car and he was driving. It was a bit of a circus because he couldn’t really see anything, but he did an excellent job.” Lutters built a matte box to put against the car window as the camera was outside of the car. “There were lots of reflections and the matte box set up enabled us to eliminate them. Every car window is also tinted and so you always have a colour shift. When you go inside with the camera, you have this crazy colour shift from green to magenta. We did a lot of A and B cam, so we had this greener look and then shots which were more magenta. It was always a balance to make them look the same.”

Lutters created a LUT with grader Olivier Ogneux and did some test shoots in the car. He acknowledges that the most challenging aspect of the series was shooting in the car. “We always had to block roads because you are not allowed to drive with the top steer. We were also shooting across three countries, which was an added challenge. We had to close every road we used as we weren’t allowed to shoot with the car on the open road. We only had permission to block streets.”

For scenes with heavy dialogue, the crew would have to wait to start a take again to let passing traffic through as they couldn’t drive for longer periods. “We only had two rigged cameras in the car,” says Lutters. “It was an intense experience shooting this practically, but the car sequences were very fun to do. The camera assistant and I were always in the back of the car. We were stuck together and then we also had the sound guys in the car, it was such a packed group in this Land Rover and with the actors sitting there as well.” When it came to lighting, there were a number of different scenarios to consider and the approach was to keep it as simple as possible. “I think we rigged five lights on top of the car in total. We had some Vortex8’s, Nanlux and Asteras for the night scenes in the car.” Gaffer Bob Wouters was following in another car and could control the lighting with his gaffer control. “He could dim it down or light it up,” says Lutters. “I exposed for the moment and then once we started driving we would pass forests and it would suddenly be very dark and then we’d be passing a field and it would be super bright. Bob was always playing with his levels to keep ahead and that was our main set up. We also figured out when we were driving that the sun was creating shadows on the side of the car, so we had to block every light with black cloth. Then we’d start driving and you’d sometimes see shadows going over the windows.”

Lutters wanted to incorporate moonlight into the night sequences. “I always tried to put blue moonlight over it and then we relied on mostly streetlight for the night scenes,” he explains. “I tried to have some sodium lights in the image to maintain a warm atmosphere around characters. I really like to light with very dirty lights, so I use sodium lights, so it’s very green or orange and has some strange look to it.”Lutters likes to embrace practical lighting and always begins with what is already available. “I use practicals and try to create an atmosphere around it. For this show, I read the script and made a breakdown of every scene to find the emotion of the scene and then I tried to find the correct atmosphere. In lighting, I try to find images or moving images but reference the colours I like.”

Despite not having a hollywood budget, Lutters explains that he was impressed with how well organised the project was. “The production company were so amazing and did such a great with everything,” he concludes. “I don’t think there are that many Belgian road series, so it was quite new. I really liked working with Jonas. He had such a nice view of things, which was so refreshing for me. I really enjoyed making this series. It was a very big experience and not easy to make, but it was very nice to do.” 

A heartfelt thank you from Esmoreit Lutters to the entire cast and crew of How to Kill Your Sister.

By Oliver Webb

Key Crew

Laurent Heirbaut – stunt rigger

Philippe Marchal – stunt rigger

Maxim Honoré – director of photography: second unit

Antonio Belón – first assistant camera b cam

Pauwel Billiau – assistant camera / dit

Nick Bollaert – best boy lighting

Axel De Coster – best boy grip

Loïc De Wandeler – lighting technician

Sven Joukes – steadicam / b camera operator

Miguel Rinckhout – key grip

Rachelle Sluiter – first assistant camera

Charlie Speeckaert – camera operator: b camera

Bob Wouters – gaffer