How ‘Asteroid City’ Became Wes Anderson’s Most Visually Ambitious Movie Yet

Yeoman: It’s very difficult to try to blend comedy and grief in the same scene. Jason was able to portray both things within the scene. We shot it during the middle part of the day in a harsh sunlight. Jason’s angle actually is a little bit backlit at that point, but if you look at the other, the shots of the kids from the side, the side angles, they’re very kind of harshly lit, front-lit, a lot of harsh midday sun. In a movie that Wes isn’t directing, I would be inclined to throw a giant silk up and just try to soften the whole thing out. But Wes wanted to have that feeling. Before we started shooting, we looked at movies, The Bad Day at Black Rock and Paris, Texas, and how they use the sun in those movies to become really a character. They weren’t afraid of shooting at midday, and they weren’t afraid of harsh sun, which is typically, for most cinematographers, something you prefer not to do.

In all honesty, I was a little skeptical about that approach at the beginning, but as I saw more and more of our dailies, I grew to really embrace it and realized that we were creating a world. You’re out in the desert in the middle part of the day. During the digital intermediate in post, we took a little contrast out, and it kind of took a little bit of the edge off that hard light, I think. But again, it was all natural light. I would’ve shot it way later in the day if I was scheduling it, but we kind of wanted to embrace that feeling.

Anderson: I don’t think it’s such harsh sunlight, this scene. I don’t love to have everything be backlit with, I guess, what I look for, is some simplicity in it in terms of the lighting. But to me, Jason’s character and role is the center of the whole movie, and this scene is a crucial one, and so for me, it was just, on the set, I’m just an audience member. Jason was so good playing this scene and so surprising. He’s just so interesting, and so for me, this scene is one of the crucial ones along with the other one with him and Margot Robbie. Those two scenes are the tentpoles of the movie.