In the vibrant landscape of Toronto’s film community, Nikolay Michaylov stands out as a cinematographer whose work masterfully intertwines technical precision with a love of profound storytelling. With two films that premiered at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Matt and Mara and Measures for a Funeral, Nikolay’s skill and artistic sensibility were on full display. He’s kind of a big deal! Collaborating closely with director Kazik Radwanski, he crafted the intimate, handheld visuals of Matt and Mara, capturing the emotional intricacies of a rekindled romance. On the flip side, his work on Measures for a Funeral, alongside director Sofia Bohdanowicz, showcases a palpable haunting feeling through dynamic Steadicam shots and meticulous lighting. We recently sat down with Nikolay to discuss his creative journey, his enduring collaboration with Kazik Radwanski, and how it felt to be showcasing two films at TIFF.
JG: Nikolay, you’ve worked with Kazik Radwanski several times now on a few different projects, including Matt and Mara. What do you think makes your working relationships so effective? And how does that enhance the storytelling in the films?
Nikolay Michaylov: I think it all starts with Kaz. The first film I saw of his was a short film he made called Princess Margaret Blvd. And he always had this realist approach to filmmaking, where the camera is at this suffocating distance. When I saw that, I found it super compelling. Then when a professor of mine in film school connected me with him, I wanted to jump at that opportunity to build on his filmmaking instinct.
What makes our filmmaking so effective? I don’t know. I think that’s something you have to ask the audience. But something like, and I always talk about it, this proximity to the camera and the emotional impact that a lens or a camera has when it’s right there in an actor’s face, but also giving them the freedom to express themselves. And so I definitely have this probing attention to detail. At the same time, it is this delicate balance of allowing the people in front of the camera to kind of forget about me and maybe think of me as an acting partner, or as not even being there, just so that they don’t feel the cinematic process affect them in this like physical way.
In terms of lighting, it’s a similar approach. Kaz gives me the freedom to do whatever I want. Knowing that the blocking is improvised, and as a result, the camera movement will be improvised, I have to approach lighting in a different way, where I have to think about what is naturally motivating the scene. What are the natural light sources that are available to me? And how can I, you know, modify them to make them feel consistent throughout the day, like if the sun moves? How can I approach that? And so, in a way, I have to light these spaces with 360 degrees in mind, so that no matter where I’m pointing the camera, it can still give me an exposure or an image that I feel is cinematic. That’s kind of a give-and-take relationship, like it’s a negotiation between me and the actors. You know, I’ll give them blocking notes or Kaz would give me notes and we just have this fluid process where we’re all just trying to compliment each other and not get too much in the way of each other’s process. And then by the end of a seventh or eighth take, there is this harmony where they’re hitting their marks, I’m finding the light that feels good, and Kaz is just happy with the performance and images that he’s seeing at the end of the day.
JG: Who would you say are some of your favorite cinematographers? Or maybe even films that inspire what you do?
Nikolay Michaylov: Yeah, that’s a hard one, because every project I work on is so different, like even if we talk about the two films that I had at TIFF this year, Measures for a Funeral and Matt and Mara, I think are just so wildly different in terms of its cinematography and tone and style, even though Sofia, Kaz and I are all friends, and we all admire similar filmmakers and watch some of the same films.
Some DPs that I admire. Darius Khondji, I think is a great one. Roger Deakins is an easy one. I like Bradford Young a lot, but I would say as a DP, I don’t really study cinematographers. I tend to study directors. And every project I go on, I’m looking at different reference points. So for Matt and Mara, Cassavettes was a big one, but we also watched David Lean’s Brief Encounter. What else was there? Toni Erdmann was a big one. There’s also a Bulgarian film called 3/4. Kaz wanted to stabilize the camera and he was moved by the Steadicam work in that film. All these films have some thematic similarities, maybe except for 3/4. But in terms of my camera work, 3/4 was a big one for Matt and Mara. And then for Measures for a Funeral, we looked at Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Blue a lot, or Bunny Lake Is Missing and Margaret for, like, the final sequence. I look at my cinematographic approach to filmmaking as fluid or chameleonic, and I look at each sequence asking what that sequence needs. And then I defer to a director or their work.
JG: You mentioned that you, Kaz, and Sofia have all known each other for quite some time. What was it like coming up in the film scene here in Toronto?
Nikolay Michaylov: You know, Kaz and Dan at MDFF, they have this production company and they were the first people in that community of filmmakers that I met while I was in film school. They had graduated a few years before me and so I felt really lucky just to collaborate with them. Then they started this screening series here in Toronto in a small room in this neighborhood called Kensington Market at a venue called Double Double Land and they would host one-night-only screenings of films that were undistributed. There were international films as well, so they’d come from China or Chile or Argentina or America or France. And I think there was just this collective interest in watching films that were not commercial here in Toronto, even though we still watch those films. I think people were just looking for an avenue to get inspired by filmmakers who were coming from different places. I believe that collective watching of films and even going to film festivals and having the opportunity to watch those types of films kind of sparked a new wave of filmmaking approach. And it’s not only isolated to Toronto, you see it in Vancouver and on the East Coast.
I think film festivals are a great opportunity for all these filmmakers to connect. In Toronto, because I live here, that’s where I’ve met a lot of these filmmakers. And if it wasn’t for MDFF’s influence, I don’t think I would have met someone like Sofia, Calvin Thomas, and Lev Lewis. These are filmmakers who are all making wildly different works but are still kind of making their mark on the map within the Canadian independent film world.
JG: Would you say that now is like a great time to be involved in the Canadian film world?
Nikolay Michaylov: I think so. Look at Matt Johnson, the co-lead of Matt and Mara. He hit it out of the park with Blackberry and now he’s got huge films coming out soon. I think there are other people better equipped at talking about it than I am, but what I’m witnessing is, certainly a renaissance in filmmaking approach and this non-reliance on what a film should be, I think the American film market has such a big influence on Canada, just in terms of proximity, but also in terms of the fact that American productions shoot up here all the time. And so we have a lot of service filmmakers contributing to those projects, and they’re amazing but I think those films can’t be approached in the same way that these smaller budget independent films are approached because the money’s just not there. The resources are way more modest. I think if you try to make an independent film with modest resources in the same way those American productions are made, you’re kind of setting yourself up for failure. That’s why Matt Johnson and Kaz are trailblazers in that respect because they’re just doing it their own way.
JG: I have to ask you about shooting under Niagara Falls in Matt and Mara. Were there any unique technical challenges with that and how did you navigate that while also ensuring the emotional authenticity of that scene?
Nikolay Michaylov: Yeah, it’s a funny scene, because we always knew we wanted to shoot at Niagara Falls as a transitional moment between this narrative part of the film where Matt is driving Mara to a conference in Ithaca, New York, and I think Kaz was always attracted to like the grandness of this space and how to capture it on camera. We had a hunch that we’d want to try and shoot in and around the falls, but we didn’t know exactly where we would get access to because our shooting model is so guerrilla. It’s kind of off the cuff like we’d sometimes have permits, but in terms of where we were allowed to go, that was always kind of a mystery.
We had adequate time to prepare, and I knew the mist would be an issue. I was also just anticipating it to rain. There is this piece of equipment called a rain spinner which essentially fits into the trays of your Mapbox that sits in front of your lens and it’s attached to a motor that spins really fast and kind of acts like a really fast-paced windshield wiper that synchronizes with the frame rate and shutter of your camera. It’s kind of indecipherable.
And that’s credit to my camera assistant James Salmon, he had about a day or two to prep that and make sure that no water would get on the lens. That still happened. We still had to take a break, wipe the filter, and calibrate the motor a few times. And there’s a bit of post-production help with that sequence as well. But yeah, the rain spinner is a lifesaver in those situations.
JG: Transitioning to Measures for a Funeral, how did you approach lighting and framing? In that film, I find that your work really has a sort of haunting visual flare.
Nikolay Michaylov: Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head for what we definitely wanted. I think haunting is the best adjective that I return to all the time. I think the Steadicam really helps embody that. It’s always kind of in front of Audrey or behind Audrey. And when you have a fluid movement like that, it does feel weirdly not human. It feels a little ghostly. I think part of the reason why we wanted this haunting presence is because Audrey is kind of avoiding the imminent, which is the death of her mother, but also chasing the ghost of this legendary but forgotten violinist Kathleen Parlow. So, Audrey’s navigating both worlds, and throughout the film, those worlds are kind of mixing and colliding and become this confusing mess for her and capturing the chaos with Steadicam, but also with a lighting scenario that maybe felt a little haunting as well was integral to the process.
We shot at Kathleen Parlow’s real estate in Meldreth in England, and it’s this derelict old building that’s neglected and it’s part of a care facility out there and just kind of used as storage. Our production designer Jessica Hart in tandem with Sofia, we kind of wanted to embrace how messed up the building felt, but it really lent to this thematic idea of this haunting presence, and it was just a location that from a photographic sense lent itself to us. It was dusty and old and dark, and there were pockets of light that were presenting themselves to us. And, yeah, it was a good example of a location really working for you, but also presenting lighting conditions that fell on point with the concepts of the film.
JG: Speaking of that haunting quality, your work often blends technical mastery with profound emotional storytelling. How do you strike that balance in your cinematography, and are there any techniques or anything that you lean on to kind of evoke certain emotions in viewers?
Nikolay Michaylov: Thank you. That’s a huge compliment. I think I’m always thinking about form forward. I think the prerequisite to being a cinematographer is to have technical skills and expose your image properly. But that is, that’s even a subjective term. When I think about filmmaking, I don’t think about pretty pictures, because, again, subjectively to the film, what is the appropriate image? Is it one that you build with the director and, I just have to think about, yeah, what’s going to drive the story forward? What are things that we can do to experiment with the medium that keep the film exciting, while also, not alienating your viewer? And yeah, again, I have to credit the directors I work with, because they introduced me to films that maybe I typically wouldn’t watch. Films that are doing things from a formal perspective that are super compelling, but sometimes don’t have the resources to do things on a technical level. And I find a lot of inspiration from those films because I love blending form with accessibility. I think filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson and Scorsese are kind of the masters at that. And so that’s always something I kind of strive to emulate.
JG: Having two films premiere at TIFF this year is quite an achievement. How’d it feel to see both Matt and Mara and Measures for a Funeral showcased at such a prestigious festival? And what did that mean for you as a DP and cinematographer?
Nikolay Michaylov: I’ve grown up in Toronto since I was three years old. I live here. I shoot most of my movies here, so just getting the chance to showcase your work at an amazing venue like the TIFF Lightbox with your friends and family there, and even new audiences is like, it’s so exciting. I think the local film community here is so strong and interesting, and there’s a lot of curiosity. Even people who aren’t filmmakers, like cinephiles, go to that venue all the time and for them to watch and critique my work is exciting. I don’t know how else to describe it. I’ve been lucky to showcase my work at the festival several times.
It was a little overwhelming at times too. I didn’t even get to enjoy the festival. I was traveling a bit, and then, yeah, just in between the Q and A’s and the screenings and the celebrating, it’s hard because it’s a festival that I wish I could participate in more as a viewer. There are so many amazing films that play every year, even Canadian ones, and it sucks when you can’t catch them all. Sometimes when I don’t have a film at TIFF, it’s nice to go and watch like 20 movies in a week and have this euphoric experience of inspiration watching so many different things.
JG: Lastly, what’s next for you?
Nikolay Michaylov: I have a bit of a gap for the next feature that I shoot. I was in soft prep for a horror film called Split Rock, directed by Ryan Glover. I’ve done some genre stuff in the past, but never a feature, and that’ll be shot in 16-millimeter CinemaScope, which is super exciting and a challenge that I’m really looking forward to. And yeah, I’m attached to some other smaller projects in the coming months, like a music video for PUP or short films with friends. But yeah, that’s kind of the next six months for me.
Matt and Mara opens in Toronto at the TIFF Lightbox on October 4th. Get tickets here.
