How DP Janusz Kaminski Shot Steven Spielberg’s Drama ‘The Post’ As A Thriller – Crew Call Podcast

Two years after Spotlight won best picture at the Oscars, there’s another newsroom drama in the awards season race, Steven Spielberg’s The Post. The film recounts the Washington Post‘s race during the early 1970s against the New York Times in the breaking news coverage of the Pentagon Papers, a study leaked by former Rand military analyst Daniel Ellsberg which revealed the U.S.’s losing battle during the Vietnam War. Kaminski takes a dialogue-driven ensemble drama and turns it into a thrilling race against time with a similar 1970s voyeuristic sensibility he employed on Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich. Kaminski uses teal blue and grays to paint the intensity in the Washington Post’s newsroom, and brushes shadows to capture the gravitas of Kay Graham’s (Meryl Streep) restaurant conversations with her editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) and New York Times adversary Abe Rosenthal (Michael Stuhlbarg). Similar to Spielberg’s long-running working relationship with composer John Williams, the director’s credits with Kaminski span close to a quarter of a century, with the DP earning two Oscar wins (for his first title with the director, 1993’s Schindler’s List and 1998’s Saving Private Ryan) and six noms. The Post, from DreamWorks, Participant Media and 20th Century Fox, opens on Dec. 22.