Greig Fraser Picks a Favorite Shot From Each of His Most Iconic Movies

We asked Greig Fraser, Oscar-winning cinematographer to pick one favorite shot from each of his most iconic movies. The director of photography of Dune, The Batman, Rogue One, Zero Dark Thirty, and many others breaks down each shot for us and explains what makes each so special to him.

Zero Dark Thirty (2012)“Zero Dark Thirty is the first film that I shot on digital. We tested film. We tested 16 mm. We tested a whole series of different options for that movie, and that was the first time I’d used a digital camera for a film. Now, with a digital camera… Just to get into the technicals. Pretty much any digital camera shoots beautiful images if you expose the image properly and if you shoot it “properly”. What I knew on Zero Dark Thirty was that we were going to be facing challenges: that we were never going to have the opportunity to shoot things properly all the time. We were going to need a camera that was going to be able to in situations that weren’t bulletproof.

My favorite shot in that film is actually one of the hardest technically to achieve and it’s the one that I tested my cameras on. That’s the scene where Jessica Chastain’s character is coming into the interrogation. You’ve got Reda, our actor, on the floor, strung up with ropes. We’re over Reda, and the door opens. It goes from almost pitch blackness to blown out highlight behind Jessica as she comes through that door.

The shot in itself, I think, sums up a lot of things about the film as well, talking about the horrors. But technically, what I love about that is that, obviously, I couldn’t test that shot when I was testing in Hollywood because that was in Jordan. But I knew we were going to shoot that. I did these tests where I’ll be shooting the darkest interior in a test bay and the brightest Los Angeles sun outside. I would see which cameras performed the best.

The Arri ALEXA was just head and shoulders above any other comparable camera at that time. It was because during those times that I broke the camera, effectively, that it performed well. But that wasn’t why I loved the shot, I loved the shot for other reasons. But I think it’s interesting that it became my technical flag in the sand.”

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)“My favorite shot in that film is the Darth Vader lightsaber coming on at the end of Rogue One. To me… I don’t know, I still get the chills when I watch that. The magic’s lost a little bit with me being on set creating a lot of these things because it’s me who remembers how much effort we went to figure out a way to make him backlit. And even though the lightsaber’s front lighting him we made the lightsaber not light too much of Darth Vader because Darth Vader front lit doesn’t look as good as Darth Vader backlit.

There’s a whole series of tests that we did to really figure out how to make that scene work and how to make that introduction work. It’s funny, the first time Gareth talked to me about that scene, because that scene occurred as a pick-up scene, the film was going to end a slightly different way. Not fundamentally, but just the way they got to the end. We shot a really great scene. For all I was aware, that was in the film.

But then Gareth called me and said, ‘We’ve got an idea. Vader’s in the ship. He’s going to go gangbusters.’ I went, ‘Okay, cool.’ I mean, anytime Vader’s on set it’s always a good day. You’re like, ‘All right. Great. Good to shoot Vader again, my buddy Darth.’ But I was a bit perplexed because we’d shot something really good. I expressed that to Gareth and said, ‘Okay. Well, sure. Of course. I don’t quite understand why, but fair enough.’ He explained the scene, and I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. That’s pretty cool. That’s a pretty cool scene.’

But the main thing was it was a chance to really create an iconic Vader moment, as iconic as Vader walking through the smoke in the door of a New Hope. That scene: this black figure in this white space. I mean, you can’t get any more iconic than that. It was our chance to try and create something that was iconic, also. I wouldn’t say as iconic because nothing would be. We hold that up as our gold standard. But it was our chance to create a Vader scene that had that level of iconic-ness that people, hopefully, will watch years down the track and go, ‘I want our thing to look like that.’”

Lion (2016)“Lion I shot the same year that I shot Rogue One. For me, those two movies are completely linked. I wouldn’t say they’re almost the same movie, but for me, they had some very similar attributes that I felt like I was able to draw upon one to give to the other and vice versa. One of the things in Lion that we were toying with and playing with was Saroo’s scale when it comes to big things. If you watch any Star Wars film, that’s what it’s all about. It’s knowing how big a human is going into this massive Millennium Falcon, how big the Millennium Falcon is going to this massive Death Star. It’s scale upon scale upon scale.

Doing something like Lion, we play Saroo’s story very much at his level. We treat Saroo as a full-sized character. We don’t look down at him. We don’t look up at him. We just sit at his level. That was a conscious, deliberate choice that Garth and I made to make sure that every time we saw Saroo, for the most part, we were at his eye level. It helps create a bond with the audience. The audience doesn’t necessarily see this character as a child all the time. But when we want them to, then it helps because then we can see him as a child. Him surrounded by tall adults at a train station. We can see his helplessness.

But one of my favorite scenes in that entire movie is where Saroo is running across the Howrah Bridge. He hears some dogs and stops in the middle of the bridge. What I love about that, and what I love about that character’s journey at that point in time is the bridge is obviously symbolic. It’s crossing over. It’s him moving from one to another. But I think what’s really important for the audience to realize at that point in time is just how vulnerable this guy is. This young kid is tiny amongst this massive, empty, desolate bridge. It’s empty and anybody who’s been to India realizes that rarely, if ever, happens. The small child, desolate bridge: it says so much about the film and says so much about the character at that point in time.”

Dune (2021)“In Dune: Part One there are a few. But I’m going to specify the shot that sums up that entire film for me. That’s when Paul first receives a face full of spice. I love the way Timothée looks in that, and I love his performance in that. I love the way that Joe and Denis have cut that in a way that ages Paul. He seems to grow a few years. He seems to age a few years at that exact moment. I don’t know if it’s a combination of being a little more weathered because of the sand on his face, but he feels like he’s just matured.”

It’s funny, Denis’ pick was from that same sequence. It’s the man-on-the-moon first steps.

“I remember that scene because when we shot that, we were trying really hard to keep that camera nice and steady because there was lots of wind and stuff. It was a really hard one because, obviously, when you do footsteps, you can’t go again easily because there are footsteps in the way. You’ve got to clean the sand, you’ve got to really prepare it. It was one of those scenes that we didn’t get many shots at. Everything had to work. The wind, the focus, the footsteps, the movement, so a fun sequence to shoot.”

The Batman (2022)“The Batman is a film I shot over the course of three years because of COVID. For me, who normally does a film for six or seven months and then moves on, I can compartmentalize the film and move on from it and change the style or change the look so that the next film is very different. The Batman I was living with for three years. The Batman was in my brain in my visual cortex for three years.

There’s a couple I love in that film: the first introduction of our main character putting on his eye makeup to become the Batman. But I think my most favorite is the end of the movie. The Riddler has effectively realized that he has not succeeded in his journey and he’s standing in prison. He’s staring out the window, wondering what’s going on. Then, a little voice comes in and has a chat with him. I love the mood of that scene and I love the fact that it sets up such an interesting arc for those characters. It ends in a really abstract way where we don’t get to see these characters too clearly.

It ends up being light, flare, and darkness. It feels to me a little bit like being underwater except being in prison. It was low sun and because of that, it allowed us the flexibility to be able to create light and flare. We’d been in the prison a few times before and we’d been in an interrogation cell. This needed to be a lot more unusual. The concept effectively was to try and create something that was a little more heavenly, something that was a little bit harder to put a pin in and harder to read.”

Dune: Part Two (2024)“Dune: Part Two was a tough one because I lived and breathed, like all of our collaborators on that movie, every single shot every single day. But I think the one that really got my blood going in the cinema was during Paul’s worm riding. I saw Denis’ favorite shot on this and it was really funny because Denis’ favorite shot is where Paul stands up. It’s the shot behind him as he gets his knee off the worm and then starts to stand up. My favorite shot was the one exactly after that where he’s standing up, and it’s on a long lens. It’s shaking and moving really quickly.

I remember seeing that in the cinema for the first time. I saw the film with Denis with full sound and everything, and I was high-fiving the air and I was punching Denis saying “This is amazing!”. With Hans’ score and with everything, that was my favorite shot for that whole sequence. Still, every time I see it, even from when we shot it I have the same reaction. It hasn’t lost any of its impact on me.

That sequence was one of those labors of love that we, as an entire film, spent our days working really hard on because that was probably the longest sequence in the entire film. We started that before we started filming and I think probably the last shot in the sequence we did maybe a week before we wrapped. It took that long. You know why? Because it’s complicated. We had nothing to draw on as a reference. We had no other worm-riding sequences that we could draw upon to figure out how to film this.

Getting it right, we were meticulous with it. If the stunt didn’t quite work, or if the camera shake wasn’t quite right. To move the camera like that, we have to shake it in a way that’s not natural. We didn’t have a machine in the desert traveling at 150 miles an hour with a worm. We had to make it up. It’s a really fine balance between it looking false and feeling real. It was one of those things that we knew we were going to have to work hard on, and we did. I’m really proud of that shot. I just love it. I just love, love, love that shot. Every time it comes up. I’m like a kid again.”

Any other film… Magnolia (1999)“I’m a massive fan of the film Magnolia from Paul Thomas Anderson. There are a few films that I could sit here and go on, talk about changing my life, opening my eyes to cinema because I was a photographer if you know anything about me. I used to be a photographer and I used to know all the photographers, but I didn’t really understand film. I’d never studied it. I never trained myself to know what made cinema. As I was learning cinema, as I realized I wanted to transition to become a cinematographer, there were a number of films that became my go-to films that I could probably recount every single shot in those movies.

I just watched Magnolia again recently, probably for the 75th time or something. My new favorite shot in that film, as of today, is the final shot in Magnolia: the track in as John C. Reilly comes to sit down and talk to her, and it pushes in. It’s a two or three-minute shot and it’s a fantastic two or three-minute shot. The culmination of the entire movie is summed up in that entire shot with that character. The cinematography and the lighting are incredible. I watched it again and just direction-wise, it’s insane. Acting-wise, it’s insane. Lighting-wise, it’s insane. I mean, Robert Elswit; the master. I can’t tell you how much I’ve been inspired by that film.”