‘Saturday Night’ Director Jason Reitman and Cinematographer Eric Steelberg Looked to Altman and ‘Die Hard’ for Inspiration

Capturing chaos required meticulous planning: "You're lighting every scene of the movie on day one — every light in the ceiling, every light on the stage, every practical lamp, every elevator button."

Director Jason Reitman and cinematographer Eric Steelberg have made nine features together since partnering on “Juno” in 2007, but their roots go back even further. They met as teenagers and collaborated on several short films and commercials, establishing a vocabulary that they continue to build and rely on. “To talk about how Eric and I start a conversation about a movie, you have to start with us at 15 years old,” Reitman told IndieWire. “It starts with us taking our baby steps and making all of our mistakes together as kids.”

Reitman and Steelberg’s latest film, “Saturday Night” (now available to download or rent), provided the filmmakers with an opportunity to recapture their youthful energy while applying all that they had learned in the intervening years. The movie tells the story of the cast and crew of “Saturday Night Live” overcoming one obstacle after another on opening night in 1975 to make television history, and it was a feeling Reitman could relate to and wanted to capture on film.

“‘Saturday Night’ is a love letter to creation,” Reitman said. “It’s about watching a hundred people try to pull together a show at the last second, and in many ways what we’re recreating is how we felt making our first short films and commercials. That sense of being young people on set who don’t know exactly what they’re doing but bond because they have the same goal in mind. They don’t know how to achieve it yet. They don’t even know what the finish line looks like.”

“Saturday Night” is a technical tour de force, with elaborately choreographed long takes that would make Orson Welles jealous and a shooting method that required Steelberg to figure out his lighting plan for every single shot before the cameras even rolled. According to the cinematographer, this high degree of difficulty helped put him back in the mindset of a beginning filmmaker facing insane logistical problems without knowing how he would solve them. “We made the shoot as hard on ourselves as possible,” Steelberg said. “The hope was that we would thrive and that feeling would translate visually as a story point.”

Steelberg and Reitman wanted to convey the same sense of life caught on the fly that they enjoyed in the 1970s films of Michael Ritchie and Robert Altman, but creating the illusion of life in all its sloppiness meant that every shot had to be meticulously planned. “Creating that sense of chaos in a realistic way required Eric and I to work for months choreographing not only the interplay between the extras, lead actors, camera, and dolly, but also Eric’s lighting plan for the entire eighth and ninth floor [where the show was being produced],” Reitman said. “This isn’t the kind of set where Eric can show up and go, ‘All right, today we’re shooting a living room, and there are a couple of windows and a few lamps, and I’ll figure it out.’ Eric has to know that the entire set is live on day one.”

That’s because Reitman wanted the ability to shoot all of the action in 360 degrees with long camera moves that would pull the audience into the adrenaline-fueled terror and excitement of the opening night. “That means you’re lighting every scene of the movie on day one — every light in the ceiling, every light on the stage, every practical lamp, every elevator button,” Reitman said. “Everything is going back down to a lighting board that Eric and the gaffer are programming together for every change as the camera moves in and out of every room, every hallway, on the stage, up the stairs.”

Before the shoot even began, Steelberg and Reitman had to block out the entire film and create the actors’ marks, often guiding the actors toward specific positions in a way they wouldn’t have done on earlier films. “Having to light the whole movie beforehand and not be able to really respond to the actors’ rehearsals was definitely a new thing and a challenge,” Steelberg said. “Because the lighting was built in, we often had to move the actors to where we wanted the camera to be or where the light was.”

Lighting itself is a key subject of “Saturday Night,” as one of the storylines revolves around the inability to find a lighting director for the show until the last minute. “The lighting in the studio changes in every scene, because the show is evolving as it gets closer to going live,” Steelberg said. “There’s a story point about the lighting designers not being present or not being very good, so the lighting is changing as they try to figure it out.”

Although the long takes in the movie, such as an early one that introduces the audience to dozens of important characters in one intricately designed camera move, are stunning in their acrobatic technical proficiency, Reitman insists they exist solely to put the audience in the emotional state of Lorne Michaels as he frantically tries to pull together his show by airtime. “When Eric and I talk, it’s less about what it looks like than what it feels like,” the director said. “What we wanted on ‘Saturday Night’ was to capture the exhilaration of live creation.”

Reitman and Steelberg felt that the best way to do that would be to tell the story in real-time, hence the long takes and a structure that tells the story in the 90 minutes leading up to airtime. “For it to feel like real-time, you have to feel like you’re moving from room to room with these characters,” Reitman said. “The camera is a character, and everywhere it looks it’s like a head on a swivel that’s just trying to pick up everything around it.”

“You don’t have editing forcing your perspective,” Steelberg added. “There’s no cheating, it’s all done for real, and I think people know that and they know how complex it is.”

Something else that adds to the sense of reality is the decision to shoot in 16mm, which gives the movie a texture reminiscent of films from the era; the audience doesn’t need to be convinced that they’re in 1975 because the film stock does it for them. According to Steelberg, shooting in 16mm was a joy that didn’t present any surprises or obstacles — aside from simply getting the people in charge of financing the movie on board. “The infrastructure is there,” Steelberg said. “There’s a great lab in Atlanta run by Kodak, and the film is available and affordable. There were no challenges at all beyond the initial, ‘Can we please do this?'”

One of the most impressive things about “Saturday Night” is the filmmakers’ mastery of architectural space to tell the story — it’s not surprising to hear Reitman say that he and Steelberg talked about “Die Hard” as an influence alongside Ritchie and Altman. Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan created a Google doc during the writing to keep track of where all the characters were at any given time, and then in prep, Steelberg worked with the director to fine-tune the choreography.

“We spend months first on taped-out floors,” Reitman said. “Then in sets that are half-built with wood, but have no wallpaper or paint or anything yet. Then finally, we do it on fully furnished sets and then with lighting.” The result of all this work was to place the audience in a kind of time machine that would convey what it felt like to launch “Saturday Night Live” — a time machine Reitman was thrilled to enter as a filmmaker.

“At cocktail parties, when someone says, ‘If you could go back to any time, any location in history, where would you go,’ I think my answer would be ‘Saturday Night Live,’ October 11, 1975,” Reitman said. “And this movie was the opportunity to actually get in the DeLorean and go there.”