Emmanuel Lubezki for Birdman "The whole movie was thought-out to be shot, the way it is shot. It’s not something that happened posteriorly, it was how Alejandro wrote the movie. His other movies are very cutty, sometimes he uses multiple cameras. His movies are wonderful and beautiful, but he wanted to do something different with "Birdman." I don’t think we could have done this movie a year or two years ago. The ALEXA camera and the ALEXA M especially, allowed me to do handheld for so long. The fact that you can record media for so many minutes and also that the video system gets an image that is so clear for the director…It allowed us to do the movie. Otherwise, I think it would have been probably close to impossible. I wanted the movie to look as naturalistic as possible. We did not use movie lights. It’s all light bulbs. All the lights that you see in the set are the lights that are lighting the scene. These cameras allow us to do that because the dynamic range of t...

  Director Joe Talbot and screenwriter Jimmie Fails met in grade school and became close friends as teenagers. Talbot convinced Fails that his family’s story was worthy of a 90-minute-plus run time. They have a shared love of movies, skateboarding and their multigenerational connection to the city. Fails and Talbot have made their debut. Their films provide commentary on issues plaguing the Bay Area, such as gentrification, racial tensions and race relations. They join the cinematic wave of contemporary Bay Area filmmakers whose projects focus on these issues. Cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra shared "We spent a lot of time going through references for the film as well as scouting iconic locations, but what it came down to was devoting ourselves to creating a beautiful, romanticized, modern-yet-nostalgic vision for the city. We picked impressionistic times of day to shoot our exterior set-pieces, and sought out areas that reflected the tone and energy of each scene. The locations...