We sat down with Sean Bobbitt BSC at the Camerimage festival to talk about 12 Years a Slave — his third feature with director Steve McQueen after Hunger (2008) and Shame (2011), and the one that has put their working method in front of the largest audience yet.

A long collaboration

Bobbitt and McQueen have been working together since Hunger, and the conversational shorthand between a director and a cinematographer who have made three features together is a recurring theme of his interview. Where a first collaboration is mostly about establishing a shared language for what light, lens and frame should do, by a third feature that vocabulary is in place — which is what makes McQueen’s signature long, locked-off takes possible. The famous unbroken bench shot in Hunger and the single-take dinner conversation in 12 Years a Slave are not stunts; they are the natural extension of the way the two of them think about screen time.

Shooting on location, mostly with available light

12 Years a Slave was shot on location in Louisiana on the ARRI Alexa. Bobbitt’s preference, as he discusses, is to lean as heavily as possible on natural and available light, both for tonal honesty and for the practical advantage of being able to follow performance without rebuilding the lighting plan every time the actors find a new rhythm in a scene. The plantation interiors were dressed and rigged so that lamps could supplement, not replace, the daylight coming through the windows; the cane fields and outdoor sequences were timed for the light Louisiana actually offered on the day.

The visual arithmetic of the film — restrained camera movement, a willingness to hold a frame past comfort, light that falls off into the room rather than filling it — comes out of the choice to shoot what was there rather than to build a controlled environment.

What he tells younger DPs

The advice Bobbitt repeats in our shorter BiteSize clip is consistent with the way he works: shoot frequently, and shoot consistently. A cinematographer’s eye is built up over years of accumulated frames, and there is no shortcut to that mileage.

12 Years a Slave went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2014. Sean Bobbitt’s interview at Camerimage was recorded a few months before that win, when the film was already in front of festival audiences but the awards conversation had not yet started.

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