i'll be at the pictures

One way the film places viewers up close to its fraught battle scenes is through its varied color palette. “The soldiers’ uniforms were designed to be camouflaged and blend in,” Friend says. “So, we would find any excuse to add a pop of color.” For example, when Paul and his comrades find themselves under attack from a tank division, the vehicles appear from behind a dramatic cloud of yellow smoke. “I don’t know if that color is historically correct,” Friend says. “It was dreamt up in a hotel suite between Ed [Berger, director] and me as we did visual notes and thought, ‘What horrible, acrid color can we introduce that will pop?’ We didn’t want the film to have that desaturated, almost black-and-white ‘war movie’ feel that has been visually exhausted.” — The American Society of Cinematographers, November 2022

"With Oppenheimer, the assignment was capturing human faces, but when we look at a human face, it doesn't end at the surface of the face itself. It's also about what we project onto that face. As an audience, when you look into someone's eye, you're wondering, "What is he thinking, or what is she thinking? What's going on in their brain?" You see an expression, but beyond that expression, there can be a plethora of emotions and thoughts, and that was something that we were very interested in. We wanted to be able to look into Oppenheimer's eyes, fly through them, and then turn around 180 degrees and look through his eyes into the world. We really wanted to embrace the power of projection." — Hoyte van Hoytema for A.frame, February 2024