[on
Lion (2016)] Visually, we definitely found influence and inspiration from photographers that work in India. Filmically though, it's more about what influences Garth [director
Garth Davis] as a filmmaker, and it's the type of decisions that he makes as a filmmaker. He's very much kind of a filmmaker that works in this neorealist kind of way. People like
John Cassavetes, he's kind of very much Cassavetian. (...) We used Alexas on a gimbal, and it was the flexibility of that digital format that allowed us to be more free with our decisions, and be able to shoot on a train with very little lighting. We discussed film, and we discussed the idea of film, and as much as we of course would have loved to have shot film for some of the movie, if not a lot of the movie, it just wasn't a viable option. I think that, realistically, we wouldn't have been able to achieve half of what we achieved if we shot on film. (...) I think in this case, where we were travelling across India, we didn't know where we were going to land, we didn't know if we had to shoot into the nighttime because the train didn't arrive on time, so therefore the scene would have changed from a day to a night scene. There were all these elements that were out of our control, strictly working in that system, in that Indian system, which is pretty wild. I guess in the end, even though our first choice may very well have been film, had we had no limitations, I think we ended up with the right format for the job. [2016]
