Five Questions With… ‘Barb and Star’ Cinematographer Toby Oliver

Cinematographer Toby Oliver, ASC, loves to capture the darker moments of life on film. His notable work over the last few years includes Jordan Peele’s Oscar-nominated Get Out, Happy Death Day and its sequel Happy Death Day 2U, and Insidious: The Last Key. So, he’s no stranger to highlighting aspects of terror with his lens.

Which makes it an hilarious surprise that his latest film is the sunny and pastel painted slapstick comedy Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar.

Starring and written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumlo, Barb and Star is best described as if Romy and Michele remained friends into middle age and decided to go to Vista Del Mar, Florida, for a bit of adventure, a lot of drinks, and a threesome with Jamie Dornan. Toss in a little Austin Powers’ Dr. Evil, and you’ve got a very silly, very fun, and often very funny cult-film-to-be.

So, naturally, it seems perfectly suited to the cinematographer for Get Out, right?

Here, Toby Oliver talks to Awards Daily about why he chose Barb and Star after a string of darker-themed projects. He also talks about how cinematography can accentuate broad comedy and how he filmed those unexpected musical sequences. Finally, he talks about stylizing Wiig’s Bond villain sequences.

Awards Daily: So I want to talk to you about Barb and Star. You’d worked on darker projects before like Get Out. Were you looking for something lighter? I know you’d also worked on Netflix’s Dead To Me, but I wouldn’t necessarily call that light either.

Toby Oliver: Yeah, it’s not super light. Those ladies in Dead to Me spend half their time bawling, tears coming down their face. We actually shot Barb and Star was shot before Dead to Me. But you are right in the sense that I was absolutely looking for some different genre experiences, I suppose, because I had spent a fair bit of time doing horror and thrillers, some dark material, indeed, which has been great. I was deliberately looking for something more fun, more light, where I didn’t have to worry about how dark it had to be all the time in the camera. I could actually just do something completely different. Barb and Star ended up being terrific, a really fun experience.

AD: What was it that clicked for you where you said, ‘Yes, this is something I want to pursue.’

TO: I think probably the fact that Kristen and Annie were involved, obviously, having written the script, having collaborated on Bridesmaids. That’s a really big tick there. We’ve got such talent, and they were in nearly every scene in the movie. The script itself was just really funny and kooky and pretty wacky. It fit into the idea of what I wanted to do in terms of moving into a different genre. Plus, it was an adventure. It wasn’t just people in a room telling jokes. We ended up filming in Mexico, doing water work, and going to these fabulous locations. It wasn’t just just a comedy. It’s really a comedy adventure, and that part of it was really appealing.

AD: So talking a little bit generically, how does cinematography underscore moments of humor in a broad comedy like this?

TO: What’s really important with comedy is that you’ve got the right size shot for the moment that we’re trying to tell. That you’re not somehow with your framing, even if it’s a fabulous shot, excluding or cutting out some little detail of the performance that’s hilarious. It’s a different way of thinking about the framing and composition than you would use when you’re doing a straight up drama. Kristin is so funny physically, so you want to see all of that. You don’t shoot the whole thing in a close up. Stuff like that’s really important. With the sequence where we had the musical sequence with Jamie Dornan singing the song and running around the beach, which is really quite hilariously silly, every shot in that sequence is pretty much designed. What’s the funniest frame we can have Jamie run through? Or do we go up the tree with him when he’s climbing? That kind of stuff is where the camera is accentuating the silly stupidness of what he’s doing or the silliness of his performance. That’s where it becomes really fun.

When you’re working with Josh Greenberg, who is our director, he’s had quite a bit of experience in comedy. It was great working with him because, what he thought was funny, we all thought was funny too. We were all on the same page. Of course, Kristin and Annie were really involved in a lot of those decisions, obviously. They’re writers, so they’re often rewriting the script, fine tuning, or sometimes ad libbing on certain scenes. We were all pretty in tune with the way it was shot and with shooting in certain ways to enhance the comedy. You put on a different hat when you’re shooting a comedy than if I was going shooting another horror movie.

AD: So talking about Jamie Dornan and the musical sequences, have you ever shot a musical number before this film?

TO: Not quite like that. I have shot musical numbers, but that was super fun and pretty big and silly too. It sort of seemed to get bigger and bigger as we got closer to shooting it. There were more and more dances. Then, we got a big 50-foot techno crane to get all the big overhead shots of this huge group. That ended up being this massive, epic introduction to the hotel that was really fabulous. The choreography was terrific, and they’d been working on that for quite some time before we filmed. We took our time with it to get it right.

AD: There’s something completely unexpected at the film for those who haven’t seen the trailer, which the introduction of a type of Bond villain. Tell me about filming those sequences. 

TO: Yeah, a little bit. We were definitely going for that Bond-esqe, kind of supervillain, reference. We were deliberately recreating in a comic version these villains in lairs. The main lair set was our biggest set on our biggest stage at Mexico City. So, that was quite a big deal for us to pull that off because it had to have the scale, and it had to have some amazing qualities about it to make it stand out. I think we did that. We talked about it with Josh in pre-production that the lair sequence should have a different feeling to the Nebraska sequence where we first meet Barb and Star and then later on when they go to Florida.

Those are the three different sections of the movie that all had a had a slightly different look. We had that slightly brown and faded look in Nebraska and then the incredibly vibrant colors, particularly pinks and aquas, in Vista Del Mar. That was all tweaked in the camera and in post when we finished the movie. For the last sequence, the lair had a slightly heavier, slightly darker, but still very colorful look. It was a little bit more sci-fi and a bit more modern or contemporary kind of sweetness to it. I did treat it a little bit differently, but at the same time, it’s still comedy. There are still funny jokes going on down there in that location. It wasn’t a case of trying to make it look scary or anything. It’s the case of making it look a bit more slick and sci-fi compared to the rest of the movie.

Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar is now available on VOD.