Leonardo DiCaprio in 'One Battle After Another.' Courtesy of Warner Bros. Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment For gaffer-turned-cinematographer Michael Bauman, One Battle After Another is the culmination of his 30-plus-year career. Beginning in the early '90s, Bauman cut his teeth in the camera department, eventually racking up credits that include Training Day, Munich and Iron Man. 2012 would prove to be a turning point as that's when he joined Paul Thomas Anderson's decorated team on The Master. That experience as gaffer has since turned into four more PTA films and several of his music videos for Radiohead. 2017's Phantom Thread is when Anderson began step one of Bauman's ascension to full-fledged cinematographer. He served as "lighting cameraman," which really meant that he was part of the multi-headed DP role. Thus, the Daniel Day-Lewis period drama did not have an officially credited cinematographer, but that changed on 2021's Licorice Pizza when Bauman and Anderson split the responsibility. The 2024 shoot of current Oscar frontrunner One Battle After Another is when PTA finally crowned his longtime collaborator as the sole director of photography. Related Stories Movies 'One Battle After Another' Leads Vancouver Film Critics Circle Nominations With Seven Nods TV The Mystery Person Leonardo DiCaprio Was Talking to in Viral Golden Globes Clip Remains a Question There's a common misconception that auteur filmmakers like Anderson have every detail of their films planned out ahead of time in excruciating detail. But so many of them live by the "best idea wins" mantra, something Bauman reconfirms in the case of Anderson. "On One Battle, we shot the scene where Perfidia [Teyana Taylor] and Lockjaw [Sean Penn] finally meet in the hotel room, and Paul was like, 'I'm thinking we should try something different.' And I was like, 'Well, why don't we shoot it like we shot [a passed out] Barbara Rose on Phantom Thread?'" Bauman recalls to The Hollywood Reporter in support of One Battle After Another's recent 4K Blu-ray release. "And Paul was like, 'Oh my God, that's it. Let's do that.' So that kind of shorthand and dialogue has been really healthy for us." One Battle After Another is the latest notable film to utilize VistaVision cameras. Brady Corbet's The Brutalist seemed to revive the high-resolution widescreen 35mm format from the 1950s, as Yorgos Lanthimos, Alejandro González Iñárritu, M. Night Shyamalan and Greta Gerwig have all applied it to their recent films as well. However, Bauman recalls Anderson testing it out all the way back on the 2011 set of The Master. "The question was more, 'Is this going to be a reliable enough format for us?' When you see the shots from The Brutalist, [DP] Lol Crawley has got the camera on a tripod. It's just sitting there, and we weren't going to do anything like that," Bauman says. "One Battle was always going to be about movement. It had to be handheld; it had to be on Steadicam; it had to be strapped to cars; it had to bounce around." VistaVision is considered a precursor to the much larger presentation of IMAX, and while Bauman and PTA formatted One Battle for IMAX screenings, the question remains as to whether Anderson will ever shoot with actual IMAX cameras. "I've talked to [DP] Autumn [Durald Arkapaw] a lot about IMAX and what she did on Sinners. An IMAX camera is huge and noisy," Bauman says. "It's obviously amazing as a format, but I think it depends on what the particular project needs. [Anderson] is always experimenting with stuff." Below, during a conversation with THR, Bauman - who recently photographed Matt Johnson's Anthony Bourdain movie, Tony, for A24 - also discusses the unsung heroes who helped make the climactic highway chase the film's most showstopping sequence. *** You started working with PTA as his gaffer on The Master (2012), and then your working relationship started to change as of Phantom Thread (2017). So how exactly did you end up becoming the full-fledged DP on One Battle After Another? It was just an evolutionary process between the two of us. With Paul, you do movies, and you also do a lot of music videos, which are tests for movies that he has coming. We have a very tight team that involves Colin Anderson, the camera operator. Colin has done six movies with Paul, and I've done five. All of us have a very quick shorthand, and that's really helped the process move along. So I did a Radiohead music video [for "Daydreaming"] with Paul, and he was like, "Hey, what if we did a movie like this?" Then we did Phantom Thread, and that role [as lighting cameraman] was really what started the train going down that way [of being DP]. Did he incrementally add more responsibility to your plate? Paul, like a lot of other directors, has a very strong visual sense. As