What are we going to talk about today? cinematographer Anastas Michos, ASC, GSC asks almost immediately after answering his phone. It's late July when Panavision connects with Michos, and though the vast majority of productions had ground to a halt back in March due to COVID-19, the cinematographer has managed to keep busy while also taking all necessary precautions to stay healthy and safe. After doing some shooting around New York City for a documentary about the pandemic directed by fellow ASC member Ellen Kuras, Michos lifted anchor and has recently been sailing along the East Coast. Isolating socially became let me go commune with nature,' just to put a different spin on it, he shares.The cinematographer also just had the romantic comedy The Kissing Booth 2 director Vince Marcello's sequel to his 2018 feature The Kissing Booth, which also had Michos behind the camera premier on Netflix, with the debut of another feature, director David Prior's supernatural thriller The Empty Man, on the docket for later this year. And that is what we're going to talk about today.
Though light years apart in both style and subject matter, the two movies are inextricably linked for the cinematographer due to the fact that both were predominantly shot in and around Cape Town, South Africa. Michos photographed The Empty Man in late 2016, and he describes the movie as a very dark supernatural thriller adapted from the Boom! Studios comic book. I do believe that those of us who are totally immersed in our work pick up the story's emotional vibes, and when it's a dark subject matter, it affects you. Towards the end of that show, I bumped into [The Kissing Booth] producer Michele Weisler in Cape Town. We went out for dinner, I asked, What are you doing?' and she said, Oh, this little, sweet teen comedy.' I thought, Right now, that would be so much fun,' so I said, That's great are you looking for a DP?'
Weisler then introduced Michos to Marcello, who was prepping the first Kissing Booth, with principal photography slated to begin in January 2017. We got along great, Michos recalls. He's witty, he's smart, he had a vision for his film and pitched it in a way that was so appealing. Based on the book by Beth Reekles, The Kissing Booth followed Elle Evans (Joey King) through her junior year of high school and the awkward realization that she was in love with Noah Flynn (Jacob Elordi), the older brother of her lifelong best friend, Lee (Joel Courtney) and that the feeling was mutual. Released on Netflix in May 2018, the movie quickly became a sensation, and it wasn't long before a sequel was in the works.
In fact, Netflix greenlit two sequels, with The Kissing Booth 3 shot in secret right on the heels of The Kissing Booth 2. The third movie, slated to debut in 2021, was finally announced two days after the second premiered and quickly rocketed to first place in Netflix's Top 10 in the U.S. Today ranking.
The Kissing Booth 2 picks up the story with Elle and Lee beginning their senior year, and with Noah now on the other side of the country as a freshman at Harvard. Principal photography on the movie began in February 2019, with Michos and Marcello reuniting on location in Cape Town. Though set in and around Los Angeles, each Kissing Booth movie has spent only a few days actually shooting in the City of Angels, relying instead on South Africa to serve as a convincing stand-in. Part of the sell is that Cape Town is as far south of the equator as L.A. is north of it, Michos notes. So in terms of climate, it's similar.
The illusion is further sold with a shallow depth of field that keeps the backgrounds soft while simultaneously bringing the audience into Elle's headspace. We wanted to keep the film intimate and let the background be pretty and drop away, Michos says. We used Primos, which are wonderfully sharp, and I had a little bit of glass in front of them just to take the edge off. We shot wide open all the time, even if we had to ND down, so we could really get the full effect of the softness in the background, with the bokeh being soft and round. The background became L.A. because there wasn't anything in focus that wasn't L.A. It was all in the viewer's head.
Indeed, in depicting Los Angeles, the filmmakers sought to present what Michos calls a heightened version that speaks to a collective mental image of the city. Everything that we were doing is a fantasy there is no high school that is necessarily as opulent, people don't necessarily live in those huge houses. To make that work, we wanted it to be bright, glossy, poppy and friendly, and to keep the mythology of Los Angeles working so that the global audience's idea of L.A. was satisfied. So everybody has beautiful rim light, they have a soft cheek light that is the world that we're portraying.
One of Cape Town's bigger challenges, when it comes to a movie that takes place in the States, is the fact that cars drive on the opposite side of the road. For one particular day exterior when the production wasn't able to stop traffic, Michos shares, I pitched an old trick to Vincent, and he was thrilled, so we asked wardrobe and the art department to print everything backwards all the signs, all the logos, all the license plates as if they were in a mirror. Then we just reverted the image, and nobody was the wiser for it. It worked out well, but it was weird doing it, and it was weird in coverage to remember that if they're exiting frame right, they're actually exiting frame left.
The Kissing Booth movies are all framed for a 2:1 release, and for the sequels, Michos opted to shoot with Panavision's Millennium DXL2 camera system, which he had used on the series Ambitions after wrapping the firs
