When cinematographer James Whitaker joined the sci-fi action comedy Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, he knew his biggest challenge would be grounding its wild, VFX-heavy sequences in reality.
The film stars Sam Rockwell as a man from the future who recruits the patrons of a Los Angeles diner to help battle a rogue artificial intelligence. It also stars Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Peña, Zazie Beetz and many more, and premiered in September at Fantastic Fest, where it won acclaim for its virtuosic inventiveness.
Whitaker, who has shot films including the 2005 indie satire Thank You For Smoking, the 2015 documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, and Marvel’s 2021 Disney+ series Hawkeye, knew that Good Luck director Gore Verbinski — best known for the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films and Rango — would aim to transform the film’s clever concepts into cinematic spectacles.
One sequence, involving a kitty cat centaur, encapsulated the blend of planning and pandemonium.
“For that single sequence, we storyboarded over a hundred frames and pre-visualized every shot,” Whitaker recalls. “The sheer logistics were staggering: a street lined with houses, hundreds of zombie-like teens staring at their phones, and the creature appearing from blocks away. A tremendous amount of planning went into the lighting alone, crafting a foundation that would let the absurdist terror feel real.”
For our latest What’s In Your Kit feature, Whitaker , who shot the film with a Sony Venice 2 8K Motion Picture Camera, walked us through the tools of the trade he always brings with him to set. Here’s what he said, as told to Joshua Encinias.—M.M.
James Whitaker on His Essential Tools as a Cinematographer
SPECTRA LIGHT METER
I still carry a light meter. Every show is different regarding the gear I use. I intentionally try to change things up just to avoid boredom in my daily life.
HATS
I always have hats. I wear lots of hats. I’ve got like 40 large-brim sun protectors.
FUJI XT-5 AND X100VI
I scout with my Fuji X-T5 with the zoom, and I take fun photos with my X100VI.
CONTRAST GLASS
They used to use these to look directly at the filament inside a really bright light, because you could actually see the filament without burning your eyeball. That would be like a welder’s glass darkness. This is a medium one. I use it to look up at the clouds, to see the sun ball through the clouds, so we can see when the sun’s going to pop back out.
I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT: Sleep. There you go. Sometimes I struggle with that during a production, but sleep is critical when we’re on these long shoots. The shoot I’m on now is nine months. It’s 125 days of photography.
MY INDULGENCE:The one thing I will not budge or give up on is being able to control every single light through a programmer so that I can be very fast. Everything has to be LED, basically. So, LED lighting.
GEAR I’D LOVE TO HAVE:I’ve tried almost everything, tinkered with almost all the tools out there for our business. I’m constantly looking for new versions of LED lights. The struggle is getting them bright enough. There are some amazing Nanlux lights out now, like the Evoke 5000B, that are 5K, equivalent to 9K HMIs, so, really bright. I’m always looking for brighter, brighter, brighter LEDs, fully color-correctable, full RGB control with dimmer control so we can be fast.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is now in theaters from Briarcliff Entertainment.
Main image: Cinematographer James Whitaker and director Gore Verbinski on the set of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. Photo by Graham Bartholomew, courtesy of Constantin Film.
