"But Soderbergh said the challenge was gaining access to real-life locations that embodied an affluent world, while for a small, nimble production, Soderbergh felt the advantages of the iPhone outweighed the image fidelity of an ARRI or RED cameras that cost a hundred times more."
“The iPhone still seemed to me a pretty natural fit for that approach,” said Soderbergh. “It still is, in my mind, in terms of the scale of it, the speed that was necessary to execute it, in the time we had allotted.”
For Soderbergh, it was all about the iPhone’s size — specifically the ability to get the shot he wants in tight quarters. In “Unsane” when space got particularly tight, he would just tape the iPhone to the wall to get the frame he wanted.
“I could point out many shots in ‘High Flying Bird’ where using a more traditional approach with normal-size cameras would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do,” said Soderbergh. “To get the lens where I want, or to be moving in a way that I want to move and, you know, have the camera reach multiple destinations without either somebody getting hurt, or the shot being compromised because of the size of the equipment. So, it seemed like a natural fit to me.”
“We’re in a very narrow path, we’re moving very quickly, and then as they sort of peel off from us, we sort of move away from them, and he goes into his office, and the camera sort of retreats,” said Soderbergh.”With a normal size dolly, which weighs 350 pounds, that becomes dangerous, potentially. Like, somebody could get hurt. And being able to take the corner to start to separate from them the way that we did… we could have been there for hours.”
Instead, Soderbergh sat in a wheelchair, holding the iPhone using a six-inch, $200 stabilizer (the DJI Osmo), his hand/arm functioning like mini-crane. It’s an image more evocative of undergrad student filmmaker than an Oscar-winning director with 30 features under his belt. And yet it’s an aesthetic decision completely consistent with the trajectory of Soderbergh’s career, especially since he permanently took over cinematography duties on his films under the alias Peter Andrews (his father’s first and middle name) in 2000.
