Digger DOP Emmanuel Lubezki on the movie’s uncanny visual world

Renaissance paintings, miniature dioramas, VistaVision and specially made lenses. DOP Emmanuel Lubezki breaks down how he crafted the uncanny visual world of 2026 movie Digger.

I meet Emmanuel Lubezki in a rather grand room with a view of one of the city’s most iconic streets. Lubezki, nicknamed Chivo (meaning ‘goat’ in Spanish – a moniker given to him by schoolmates), is a name that has become synonymous with his achievements in cinematography. He holds the record for number of consecutive Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, with three, for Gravity, Birdman and The Revenant.

After I walk into the room, Chivo guides me towards one of the large windows. “It’s an amazing view, isn’t it,” he says, pointing to a nearby street where he shot a scene from Children of Men. Like that film, Digger explores a dystopian near future. It’s difficult to provide a synopsis without spoiling it, but director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s eighth feature film stars Tom Cruise as the eponymous Digger, “the most powerful man in the world, who embarks on a frantic mission to prove he is humanity’s saviour before the disaster he’s unleashed destroys everything”.

It features an impressive ensemble cast that includes Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Emma D’Arcy, Michael Stuhlbarg, Sophie Wilde and Jesse Plemons. Digger, Chivo says, is unlike any other film he has worked on.

Chiaroscuro on film

Iñárritu started planning the film nearly ten years ago, with the script going through several iterations. “We prepped this movie for so long,” says Chivo. “I travel a lot with Alejandro; he’s my teacher, my brother and my friend. During that time, we drank coffee and wine and went to all these galleries, primarily in Amsterdam and London.”

During these travels, certain paintings particularly stood out to them. “A lot of our inspiration came from Bruegel and Bellini, where the characters have this uncanny fill light. Their work is almost shadowless, very much like a diorama. We approached the sets in a similar way. The dioramas are complex in the sense that they are multilayered – and some of these layers were created by using miniatures.”

More than 30 different sets were built on various stages across Pinewood Studios, and proxy sets were constructed with grey canvases. Chivo worked closely alongside set decorator Anna Pinnock, who was there throughout the entire process. “We mapped the movie and storyboarded with a little digital camera,” he says. “It took us a while to figure out how to get the right tone.”

Sophie Wilde plays a theatre director, and her character’s vision for a play became central to the film’s visual language. “Part of the creation of the miniatures had to do with her character recreating the past,” he says. “We loved the idea of her building these dioramas, like you would see in a natural history museum. Most of these characters are taking us towards extinction, and all these dioramas are the sets of a play. It’s slightly weird because they look real, but they aren’t.”

To capture the film’s artificial quality, Chivo utilised fill light. By contrast, in the scenes set in ‘reality’, the lights came from real sources and he implemented handheld camerawork to distinguish the scenes from the rest of the film. They deliberately relied on an imperfect lens with lots of halation and blur to help achieve this effect. “Little by little, we transitioned to handheld camera, so you can have the energy of the camera moving between the actors.”

In terms of the ‘unreal’ scenes, he admits that the solarium sequence was particularly challenging for everyone. “The whole conception of that was super tricky. I based the light on a Rembrandt painting that Alejandro and I found in a gallery. It’s one of [the] only landscapes that he did and it worked perfectly for the tree in our scene.”

When playing with the lighting, there was one major limitation. Tom Cruise’s makeup could not be heated more than 19°C. They had to ensure it stayed cool and without too many variations, or risk expanding the glues and the makeup. “We didn’t want to melt it, so we had to use LEDs. The lights are also changing constantly throughout the film, [so] LEDs made more sense for us.”

Shooting in VistaVision

Creating the film’s uncanny visual language wasn’t only about lighting. The choice of format and lenses were equally as important, and Digger marked the first time Chivo has shot the majority of a film in VistaVision. “Back in the day, we used VistaVision for visual effects. The first time was on Meet Joe Black. We had a complicated effect where Brad Pitt’s character is run over by a car and we used it to shoot all the different plates. When I saw the dailies, the projection was horrendous, but the image was breathtaking and looked spectacular. It planted a seed in my head that one day I could shoot on the camera.”

The cameras are still extremely loud – he does an impression of how they sound on set – remarkably like machine-gun fire. “Some actors love it,” he says enthusiastically, “as they get to feel the tension of this expensive film going through the magazine. Most of our cast enjoyed that. It also gave them time to talk to Alejandro between the reloads and created a whole atmosphere that he wanted to have on set.”

Despite having shot many of his movies on film, he admits he is no longer the biggest fan of the medium. “We live in the moment where digital cameras are the best they’ve [ever] been, and for capturing, I still love digital. The question is how you treat the digital, so it feels more organic. For this film, Alejandro’s vision was to shoot on film, and after several tests, VistaVision was the superior choice. You have a larger format and field of view, but you still have all that depth-of-field.”

Actor and DOP Giovanni Ribisi restored a vintage Beaumont VistaVision camera for One Battle After Another and the same camera was subsequently lent to Chivo for Digger. “The camera was sent over to us quite late and was completely beat up,” he recalls. “We had to rebuild it and change the prism. The lenses they used for that film were good at servicing a film that aimed to look like a seventies movie with all the aberrations and flares, but it didn’t work for our film.”

With limited time before shooting began, he reached out to Dan Sasaki, Panavision‘s senior vice-president of optical engineering and lens strategy. “He built us a package that consisted of four lenses. Leitz also really saved us and built us a whole set of lenses that were slightly cleaner and allowed me to shoot against all the skies and windows without blurring too much. Panavision don’t usually like to put bases on lenses that were not made by them, but they very kindly did for Alejandro, Tom and myself.”

Most of the film was shot on a 29mm lens. The very wide shots were captured on 21mm, with maybe one shot on 18mm. With VistaVision, a 29mm lens already gives you a very wide field of view. “We shot at f/8 because when you have all these actors sitting around a table, you need a lot of depth-of-field. You want to be able to see action and reaction without having to constantly pull focus or have someone fall out of focus.”

One of the limitations of shooting in VistaVision was the relatively small size of its film rolls, which allowed for less than ten minutes shooting. “For the longer shots, we had to shoot them digitally,” adds Chivo. “For example, the European Parliament scene was one extended take and so we knew we had to capture it digitally.”

Filling the frame

During the European Parliament scene, Tom Cruise delivers a ten-minute monologue. “I love when you can capture a performance that is evolving, where the energy is changing and it‘s getting increasingly visceral without cuts, because you allow Tom to go to those levels. The heights of his performance could not be captured with cuts.”

Chivo is very much in awe of Cruise’s ability to deliver the scene in one take, and he tells me that Iñárritu also likes to get as much coverage as possible. “Can you imagine cutting and going back to the end of the scene and saying, ‘OK, Tom, let’s start here.’ He could do it for sure, but I don’t know if you would have that same energy. He’s almost out of breath at the end of his monologue. It’s just unbelievable, and that’s because we didn’t cut.”

The parliament is filled with obvious dummies throughout the scene, adding to the fantastical element. This is a technique he learnt from Michael Mann when filming Ali. “That was the first time I used dummies,” he recalls. “We actually used them for Birdman too, as we didn’t have the money to fill the theatre with real people. We didn’t want the audience to notice in that film, but obviously we wanted [them] to for this one. It also ties in with the theme of these characters just being dummies that are sitting there brainless and opinionless.”

Digger was shot across a period of 50 days, with an extended prep due to the proxy sets. “We had a troupe of incredible actors that stayed with us throughout the movie. Alejandro was open to their suggestions, but you have a very good layout of what the movie is going to be and how it’s going to look and how it’s going to be shot. Once we establish the rules and regulations, I like to stay within the parameters for the movie to achieve a style. Otherwise, you go crazy.”

Working with Iñárritu is always a joy for Chivo. “I talk to Alejandro about everything,” he says. “I complain and he complains. We always fight in Spanish and people look at us confused. He’s very giving and an incredible artist. His drive is impeccable and I admire him a lot. It’s fantastic watching him work.”

For someone with three Academy Awards to their name and a further five nominations, he is incredibly modest. “I couldn’t have done this without my crew,” he says. “The collaborators on this project are so good at what they do and much better than what I could do. It’s like working with teachers. It’s fantastic to go to work and be able to learn all this stuff from these masters.”

The project was also his first time working with Tom Cruise. “He’s so knowledgeable about lenses, eye lines and distances of the camera, to the point that it’s intimidating. I think his performance in this film is absolutely a miracle. I also love that this film is not derivative. It didn’t come from a novel or another movie. It’s just the mind of Alejandro and his writers, talking about a theme that is probably the most important thing right now.”

Digger (2026) is in cinemas now.

 

This article appears in the October/November issue of Definition

WORDS: OLIVER WEBB. IMAGES: WARNER BROS