Interview with THE MONKEY Cinematographer Nico Aguilar

For a movie with a lot of blood and guts, The Monkey is full of life. Through filmmaker Oz Perkins and cinematographer Nico Aguilar’s eyes, the world is bright. Greens are lush. Houses are full of color, time, and history. Even the titular monkey is a bright light to the eyes. Death looms large over the James Wan-produced Stephen King adaptation, but so do vibrant color and joy.

It is a comedy, first and foremost, so cinematographer Aguilar’s colorful, wacky choices are spot on for Perkins’ madcap vision. The cinematographer previously shot Rodrigo Prieto’s Pedro Páramo and Elle Callahan’s Witch Hunt. Aguilar took the time to speak with Daily Dead about crafting The Monkey, including the bloody motel sequence and how to best frame the deadly toy.

You’ve said before that you don’t want genre to influence your choices, but rather the story. For The Monkey, being about life and death, how did that shape how you visualized the movie?

Nico Aguilar: First of all, we wanted the movie to be visually open. In other words, there weren't any specific rules that we needed to follow. It was more about a journey. This is a journey that I laid out on paper in the form of a timeline where I was like, okay, we start the story here and we end the story here. How are we visually going to create that journey?

In that journey, you inevitably make distinctions between life and death. For example, when Louis is alive, the camerawork is brighter and warmer. The first funeral scene is warm and happy, for the most part, because the mom is still there. And then a few scenes later, after she dies, I make that same space way cooler and way more desaturated.

Most of the scenes up to that point were a combination of happy and a bit of scary, but this is the first time in the story where you actually feel bad for the characters. So, I wanted to represent that visually. And then, of course, when they’re adults, I wanted to make a distinction between the two characters and how they’re dealing with loss and trauma.

For me, Bill was really stuck in this cycle of trauma from losing his mom and wanting vengeance, so colors were on the cooler side and green. There was always a little bit of warmth. Hal was always warm colors. Maybe he had a little backlight once in a while that’s cool. It was done very purposefully, where their colors were completely inverted because they were experiencing the same trauma from two very different perspectives, yet they both had a little bit of each other.

When they finally come together in the end, no matter how briefly, how did you want their colors to converge?

Nico Aguilar: In that particular scene, it was the first time that I was transitioning the colors. If you see how the brothers are lit, it’s the first time they’re both lit by cool light on one side and warm light on the other. It’s also the first time where Bill is starting to be mostly lit by warm light.

Red is a heavy color in this movie – not just the blood, either. For the motel pool sequence, which is the Fast Times at Ridgemont High fantasy gone wrong, you couldn’t have had too much red there, right?

Nico Aguilar: We put in that motel sign. I remember Oz saying, “We should really lean into the neons and interesting colors here.” There was this arcade room that the production designer, Danny, created right next to us where Hal is talking on the phone. He brought in all these neons and all these lights to make it even more red and even more wacky. You’re right, that scene is very much about that, especially the explosion of red. The red happens in every scene where someone explodes. It’s overwhelmed by red.

How did you plan that motel sequence in pre-production?

Nico Aguilar: You plan it with the other departments, so you figure out a shot list for it. It’s VFX, the art department, the SFX department, and editorial – just to make sure that everyone will have what they need. For the pool scene, we had to build a sort of truss rig for me to put the [guts] cannon in the center of the pool so that it would have all the blood splatter and everything, but then we needed to shoot again without any blood and just light.

So then I replaced that, and I put a waterproof light in the truss rig in the middle of it, and then I would shoot flashes – lights that shoot in all directions – and then remove it, and then nothing. Just an empty plate. There were multiple cameras, and unfortunately we only used one angle, but we actually shot three or four angles. The cameras were, of course, very protected. We put a clear filter in front. It was all about just getting the right equipment and making sure that the cameras were never touched and that they were in the right place.

Oz told us that the movie was very much influenced by The Simpsons, Tales from the Crypt, and Death Becomes Her. What were some of the odder technical choices you wanted to make to really double down on the comedy?

Nico Aguilar: Well, one thing that Oz is very specific about is the framing. He gives me a lot of freedom, but the one thing he asks for is a lot of headroom in the framing. For me, I had just finished a movie called Pedro Páramo in Mexico City, directed by this amazing cinematographer, Rodrigo Prieto. He had conditioned me, after months and months of working with him, to have the headroom stop four pixels between the edge of the frame and the hair. And then when I worked with Oz, it was 200 pixels. So, that was an instinct that was very hard to fight, but I identified it because it’s what the director wanted. Sometimes I wanted more headroom or less headroom, and he’d be like, “More headroom! More headroom!” He supported me a lot in the movie. Any decisions I wanted to make, he would hear me out, and when he found it beneficial for the movie, he’d just let me do it. 

For example?

Nico Aguilar: I changed lenses throughout the piece. When it’s the kids’ story, it’s spherical, super speed lenses that are vintage. When they’re adults, it’s these LOMO anamorphics, and LOMO anamorphics are very wacky anamorphic lenses. I mean, you kind of get used to them when you watch the movie, but in a vacuum, you’d be like, “What are these lenses?” They have so much distortion, but because one gets used to seeing the images, your brain adapts to processing the distortion. 

The motel scene is so distorted. Even the grocery store scene, when we’re pushing between the aisles – if you were to grab a straight line, those aisles are warped. We do that throughout the film. Everything is so warped because we wanted to show how the monkey is messing up the world. It’s been 25 years; it’s been a while. Even though the monkey has been dormant, we wanted to show its effect on their psychology.

Knowing Oz likes a lot of space for the characters, especially headroom, did you ever ask him, out of curiosity, what about that space speaks to him?

Nico Aguilar: I never asked him that question. I have a good idea as to why, and I think it’s primarily because it makes him uncomfortable. Visually, he just finds way more comfort in having that headroom. To his point, I love that decision because it makes things funnier. It makes the scenes a little easier to watch and a little less serious. I don’t know if that was his intention, but it’s certainly the effect. 

You both did a lot of tests for how to best shoot the monkey. What did you learn from those tests?

Nico Aguilar: A lot of tests were done to see how the monkey’s colors, textures, and everything would react. I learned two things. One is you can have a lot of fun with how you light the monkey, because it has a lot of curvature and interesting angles. There’s actually one angle that survived in the film that I loved. Even when I read the script, I always hoped we could do this angle – attaching a tiny probe lens to the monkey’s arm and moving it up and down. 

How was rigging that shot?

Nico Aguilar: The actual rig of it was crazy. I had the guys who made the monkey, I had them just make an arm. They had this loose arm that I attached to the camera, and then I made the camera go up and down onto a loose drum, and that's how we achieved that shot. 

The other important thing was how to create personality for the monkey. That came from the eyes. We learned that there was a specific way to light the eyes that made the monkey feel alive, through an eyelight. In every shot of the monkey, we would position a light to reflect just enough to catch some light in its eyes.

There’s definitely the Stephen King atmosphere of the horrific happenings in familiar small towns. Did you and Oz take any influence from King in terms of setting?

Nico Aguilar: No, I don't think we ever talked specifically about incorporating a King aspect of it, but of course, it's a Stephen King story. If anything, Oz and I spoke about our own personal relationship to the story. I know that Oz changed the original story to make it very personal to him, to make it his own exploration of life and death.

When I was reading the script before officially being involved in the movie, that's the part where I thought, okay, I'm in. Because it wasn’t a story about a monkey. When you first hear about the movie, it just sounds so silly. It’s a story of a killer monkey. What? I don’t want to make a Chucky movie.

But it's not about a monkey. The story is about loss. It’s about life and death. It’s about family. The monkey is just this metaphor, this symbol for all intents and purposes. It’s actually just a monkey, and everything around it is just superstition because the monkey never actually does anything but be a toy.

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Editor's Note: To read Jack's interview with Osgood Perkins, visit: https://dailydead.com/interview-osgood-perkins-sings-a-bloody-pop-tune-with-the-monkey/