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No Film School: I’m curious to know what first got you into cinematography.

Victor Tadashi Suarez: I didn't go to film school. I went to Columbia University, but I didn't study film. I studied economics and philosophy. I'm self-taught, like a lot of people. I grew up making films with friends and my parents' camcorders. When I was in school, the SLR revolution was happening, so I got a Canon Rebel T2i and was really excited about the footage I got out of the box.

In college, I would do gigs on Craigslist during the summers and work on really random film projects, and that's how I learned. When I graduated, I did the same thing, I worked as a DP on Craigslist. I had a little Sony FS100 at the time, and I thought that was really exciting.

Then one day, by chance, I got a call from the Al Jazeera producer of this show. Fault Lines Google “New York City DP” and “[Canon] I got in touch with C300, which I had at the time, and they emailed me and asked if I was doing a documentary, and I said, “Of course, yes.”

At the time, I barely knew what Al Jazeera was, and I had no interest in documentaries. For the next six years, I flew all over the world for that show. It was kind of the precursor to the Vice, HBO, and Showtime shows, and it was just a correspondent, me, and a producer on the ground. It was very fast-paced, but we were trying to make a show that was not like news, that was immersive documentary, that was more like a narrative language than a documentary language.

It was a great way to learn about the world, how to light it, how to shoot it, how to report on it. After that, I worked for National Geographic Explorer for a while, and then someone noticed my work at Left/Right, a production company that ended up producing a weekly documentary show for the New York Times. I worked with them to develop the look for that show. The showrunner who started the company, Maxine, Quiet on the set.

NFS: It's a bit surprising that you got an email out of nowhere and that this became your career path, but the right answer is to say “yes.”

Suarez: If you always answer “yes,” you’ll be able to do your SEO right the first time.

NFS: What are the challenges of working in nonfiction? You've said that you often work very fast.

Suarez: Well, I think the main challenge is always time and resources and trying to make something that feels as classy and cinematic as possible within a very large time constraint.

[And] Sometimes we work in small teams. Fault lines, Because we didn't have a sound guy, I was just learning. I had no idea what was normal and what wasn't. I learned how to manage my own sound. For better or worse, I still manage my own sound today on a lot of the projects that I work on. Quiet on the setA lot of it is real, which is good, because it has the benefit of keeping a small footprint.

In a vérité film, you're trying to capture an intimate moment of what's happening, and you only have one chance to get it right. And in a good documentary, these moments are intimate, and that chance is precious. The key is to capture an intimate, natural moment in the first take, using the best cinematic language possible.

Another challenge I feel is the setting of the interviews. The language of documentaries is very fixed. We're always trying to evolve the language or borrow more from music videos and other genres. But overall, if you're producing something that has interviews in it and it's for a streamer, the conventions are very fixed. So one of the main challenges we're always facing is how to film these interviews in a way that makes them feel different and new from others, and how do we push it to a degree that feels original?

Trying to bang my head against a wall has been the hardest thing I've had lately: How do I make this feel like something new and not just some old silly thing?

Quiet on the setResearch and Discovery

NFS: You've said that intimate moments are important, but as a cinematographer, is there anything you do to create a sense of safety and vulnerability on set?

Suarez: Yeah, that's also very hard. It's one of those ways of building trust, and it takes time. But the challenge is, especially with just the DP, you're just thrown into a place. The director and producer might have had a relationship for a few weeks beforehand over the phone or whatever, but the first time I meet them, I might spend an afternoon with that person. It might be just a day, it might be a couple of hours. You're often thrown into a very intimate moment. How do you do that when you don't have time? There's no magic way. I think it's just about being respectful and being a good person.

It's scary to show up with all that big gear. I'd panic if I was them. So you just have to treat people really nicely. It helps. I think it's nice to have a really small crew when it's an intimate atmosphere. So sometimes it's nice to run your own sound, because you don't have all these people touching you and doing all these crazy things.

Also, when covering a scene, prepare for your close-up. Start wide, let people get used to your presence, and then slowly work your way around, maybe from behind, and sneak in for a more intimate moment. Your overall vibe will just be, “I'm sorry. Thank you so much. Everything's fine. Thank you so much.”

NFS: I want to talk about the setup. Quiet on the set.

Suarez: Creator and executive producer Mary Robertson approached me about this project, which is about the Nickelodeon shows I grew up on. All things and Amanda Shaw— I watched it every day. When she approached me about this project, this idea for a series that was taking these shows that were so fundamental to how I watched TV as a kid, I was looking at it from the perspective of 2024. I was really excited by the creative possibilities, but also scared about what it would mean about me as someone who grew up watching these shows.

But like I said, we knew right away that we didn't want it to look like any other premium streaming show, and we wanted it to look like a cheesy true crime docu-series, and it could have been both.

With these two points in mind, we developed a look that was a bit like “Nickelodeon Noir.” We took the color palette of the show itself as our starting point. If the show is a hallucinatory experience of primary colors and high-key lighting, then the look of this series was the opposite – a representation of failure and downfall in front of the camera.

We used the same color palette, but we changed the lighting completely to make it feel very atmospheric and dangerous. [re-creation]But a lot of it will be interviews. We wanted to tell as much of it as we could, story-wise, in the interview setting itself. So the whole idea of ​​the show is to take these behind-the-scenes stories and literally put them center stage and literally shine a light on the places where these traumatic events happened.

That was the idea. We created sets that were like the behind-the-scenes support spaces of these shows: the writers' room, the hair and makeup room, the wardrobe, a green room for the parents. We created a world for the interviews, but we didn't want it to look super upscale and shiny. We didn't want to get close to anything super digital and clean. And because we're editing a lot of archival material from the '90s and 2000s, we wanted the interviews to have a slightly dirty, cinematic feel.

I shot with two Alexa Minis, underexposed by one stop, to emphasize the grain. …I also used an Alexa Mini in Super 16 mode with a vintage Canon 8-64mm lens for some of the re-enactments and current LA work. I think this Super 16 combination worked really well for the archival work.

Quiet on the setResearch and Discovery

NFS: Was that the main lens you used?

Suarez: Most of it was shot with the Angenieux Optimo zooms, 28-76mm and 45-120mm, and then the modern LA visuals with Canon lenses, shot at the highest ISO on the Alexa. We tried to completely break down the images and we were very happy with the results.

That's what's interesting about this project. We were trying to do things that you wouldn't expect. We were trying to break the image. The lighting is really weird and dark, but there's weird colors and lime greens that bleed into each frame. It was cool. It was weird.

NFS: What are some common mistakes you see new DPs make and how can they avoid them?

Suarez: I still make a lot of rookie mistakes, so I think this is inevitable, but I'll tell you one mistake that I think a lot of DPs, rookie or not, still make: setting up an interview with someone who's just sitting in a chair in the middle of nowhere.

I don't know if I should say this, but for the majority of my career I went a long way in not using any filters in front of the lens whatsoever. Nobody ever told me it was a good idea and I feel like with modern cameras, with soft effect filters etc, everyone should always be doing that.

I think the only mistake beginners make is not shooting as much as possible when they're starting out. The great thing about DSLRs is that suddenly everyone has a camera with them all the time and they can shoot all the time. I feel like a lot of people today are trying to level up their gear right away for work, which makes a lot of sense. But it also makes a lot of sense, because just having a camera that you can carry with you all the time makes you motivated to shoot and make something all the time. As cameras get bigger, it's very hard to go out and shoot something if you have to assemble a whole set of gear out of a Pelican case. I think the best advice I can give to anyone is to go out and shoot as much as you can.

NFS: What advice would you give to someone breaking into the nonfiction field?

Suarez: I think it's the same when you're getting into any field, it's like when you're starting out, it's like the projects that you're working on as you're building your website and your reel, and those are the projects that people are going to ask you to do.

So if you want to work in non-fiction, then just write non-fiction works. The nice thing about non-fiction is that if you're just starting out, in some ways the barrier to entry is lower than other genres.

Find a good story, good characters, a story that you care about and create a project for a website without a lot of support. I didn't go to film school and did it all by myself, so I'm biased towards going out with friends or yourself and creating your own website and portfolio.

But I work with a lot of people who came out of Berkeley J-School and Columbia J-School. I think the great thing about going to film school, among many other reasons like learning how to use filters in front of a lens before you're too far along in your career, is that you get a great network right away. When I started out, I didn't have that network, so it was definitely harder. I think if you make something that you're passionate about, the rest will follow.