Why it's so hard for movies and TV shows to film night scenes during the day
- Hollywood has long shot many night scenes in the daytime — an approach that isn't always convincing.
- On "Nope," DP Hoyte Van Hoytema innovated a new day-for-night technique based on his work on "Ad Astra."
- A two-camera rig on "Nope" used infrared photography to capture the illusion of immersive nights.
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Most of the nighttime scenes in Jordan Peele's "Nope" (2022) were filmed in broad daylight. The same is true of films like "Mad Max: Fury Road" (2015), "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962), and many other Hollywood classics. So why does Hollywood film its night scenes during the daytime? We spoke with cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema — the director of photography behind "Nope" and other films like "Tenet" (2020), "Dunkirk" (2017), and "Interstellar" (2014) — about the challenges of this approach and how he innovated an entirely new way of shooting day for night for "Nope."
Historically, the day-for-night approach hasn't always produced the most convincing results. On "Nope," Van Hoytema and director Jordan Peele wanted to avoid the aesthetic of practical smoke and fake silhouettes that characterizes traditional day-for-night scenes — an aesthetic that Van Hoytema and Peele referred to as "movie nights." To find a new approach, Van Hoytema adapted a technique he originally developed to film a lunar chase for "Ad Astra" (2019). The solution on that film involved a two-lens 3D camera rig, including one camera that filmed in color and one camera that filmed in infrared. The infrared footage allowed the team to more naturally alter the colors of the California landscape into something closer to moon lighting.
Van Hoytema used a similar two-camera rig on "Nope" that simulated the way the human eye behaves in low-light scenarios. The result: deep, immersive nights that capture the vastness of the desert and sky — and amp up the tension in Peele's sci-fi thriller.