Saturday Night
Organized Chaos

A Conversation with Matthew Moriarty, SOC, Jason Reitman & Eric Steelberg
By David Daut

In the year 2024, Saturday Night Live is an institution—culturally ubiquitous and perpetually known for “not being as good as it was when I was in college.” Fifty seasons on from its debut, it’s hard to imagine a time when NBC’s late night variety show was seen as such a risky gamble that the network was, in fact, counting on it to fail.

This is the reality audiences are thrust into with Saturday Night. A frantic, frenetic, in-real-time race to get the show prepped and ready for an 11:30 pm premiere. Camera Operator had a chance to talk to A camera and Steadicam operator Matthew Moriarty, SOC, along with Director Jason Reitman and Director of Photography Eric Steelberg, about bringing this story to the screen, from finding the film’s voice to working with a massive ensemble cast and only 33 days to shoot the picture.

It is ten o’clock on Saturday night, October 11, 1975, and the first episode of Lorne Michaels’ sketch comedy show goes live in just 90 minutes. There’s just one problem: the show is not ready. There are too many sketches, the credits are not locked, the stage isn’t finished, the cast is on the verge of mutiny, and the network—all things being equal—would rather be airing reruns of Johnny Carson. It’s a mad dash to the finish line as things spiral out of control and the show that would become a cultural institution threatens to collapse under its own weight before it even has a chance to start. Saturday Night is directed by Jason Reitman from a screenplay by Gil Kenan and Reitman. It stars Gabriel LaBelle, Rachel Sennott, Cory Michael Smith, Ella Hunt, Dylan O’Brien, Emily Fairn, Matt Wood, Lamorne Morris, Kim Matula, Finn Wolfhard, Nicholas Braun, Cooper Hoffman, Andrew Barth Feldman, Kaia Gerber, Tommy Dewey, Willem Dafoe, Matthew Rhys, and J.K. Simmons.

Camera Operator: Matthew, I know you’ve worked with both Jason Reitman and Eric Steelberg in the past. Tell me a little bit about what it’s been like developing that working relationship with them.

Matthew Moriarty: Saturday Night is my third full film with Jason Reitman (plus pickups on both recent Ghostbusters) and I’ve done about a dozen gigs with Eric Steelberg; I’m always honored to work with both of them. There’s a lot of trust between the three of us, and J.R.’s process is really clean and focused—always great clarity, which is the lifeblood of getting 200 people through the work of making a movie, especially one with as many moving parts as Saturday Night.

Eric and Jason were recently honored at the Middleburg Film Festival for their decades of collaboration and it’s so well deserved. Eric is one of the wisest people I know, so there’s no mystery as to why J.R. would depend on him through the years. He’s also just about as young as a DP can be and still be an equal master of both film and digital, moving seamlessly from one to the other throughout his career, right up through today. Making movies with Eric is my happy place. Making movies with Eric and J.R. is extra sweet, and I know I speak for a whole lot of people when I say making Saturday Night was one of the best experiences of my career, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

Eric Steelberg: Matt and I have a great relationship that goes back over 15 years on a variety of films and series. Simply put, Matt takes whatever crazy idea I or the director comes up with and figures out how to execute it in the most elegant and narratively appropriate way. And he takes the execution of each shot very personally. He listens to the actors as much as he responds to me, and he knows when he can make creative suggestions that tell a better story. I welcome that collaboration because it makes me feel like he’s got my back, and I like how engaged with the story he is because, at the end of the day, the operator is my partner in telling the visual story.

CO: The “gimmick” of the film, so to speak, is that it covers the 90 minutes leading up to the premiere of the first Saturday Night Live, essentially in real time. Broadly speaking, what were some of the challenges that came along with that concept?

Moriarty: We had, like, 33 days to shoot the whole movie, with scenes that involved more than 40 speaking parts. If we’d stuck to the whole “bring the actors in and do a private rehearsal” approach, the studio would have shut us down in the first week. This put an unbelievable burden on Jason to have the totality of each scene in his head ahead of time so that actors could then, one-by-one, be plugged into the plan as soon as they walked on set. The net result is that Saturday Night was a masterclass in preparation. 

Some directors love storyboards, but Jason is famous for “photo-boarding” his shoots. He takes a still camera and a group of second teamers (stand-ins) into the set and lays out the shots, writing the roadmap for us in terms of who goes where and what the camera will see and do. Immediately it grounds the process in a human reality—not sketches on paper drawn by someone far removed from the eventual set, but actual humans in actual space; equal parts human limitation and human possibility. But the biggest benefit is that it creates a safe space for Jason and the rest of us to put maximum thought into the “what” and “how” of a scene way ahead of time, away from the pressure of having to make the days work during the shoot. Again, it not only provides great clarity, but having done all that prep frees you up to be even more spontaneous on the day because you’ve already evaluated so many permutations of “how” things could go that great last-minute ideas become really non-threatening and much easier to implement.

Jason Reitman: We spent the months leading up to shoot “video-boarding” the entire film as they built the set around us. We took the approach that we were making a dance movie that required chaotic choreography.

This was no new task for Matt Moriarty. Eric and I have been working with Matt since Up in the Air. Together, we’ve been developing a visual language that attempts to be specific within the chaos. This is exactly why we often opted to shoot with a CineMoves Matrix Head on a Super PeeWee dolly rather than Steadicam.

Moriarty: One of the great decisions of the whole shoot was to have Jess Gonchor build an absolute replica of NBC’s legendary Studio 8H well ahead of principal photography. Of course it was being painted and finished and dressed throughout the prep, but having the basic architecture in place during the photo-boarding process was priceless. It allows you to fit the material into the absolute reality of the space in which it will ultimately play out.

Steelburg: If this was to be successful, it was crucial that we engage the audience by making them feel like they were dropped in the hallways, rooms, and studio as a fly on the wall at some points, a participant in others. Our first decision towards that goal was to shoot the movie on 16mm for its color palette and grain structure. Beyond that, movement and focus is the heartbeat of the film and crafting that visual energy was paramount. Reitman, Matt, and I spent weeks in prep with stand-ins on the set (which was still being built around us) blocking and taking stills of the scenes, trying to figure out that journey and the energy the scenes and narrative required. We came up with a combination of putting the camera on a remote head on a dolly, gripped by Darryl Humber, a little bit of Steadicam, and some handheld. If the audience would feel the tension and pressure of the ticking clock, the movie wouldn’t work. It may seem straightforward but moderating the elements within individual scenes, making those decisions, was incredibly challenging.

Moriarty: Throughout the prep, our mornings were spent with the stand-ins, walking the entire movie, in the actual set, and shooting stills and video of every shot J.R. might want, filling his head with answers to all the questions the actors and crew would eventually be asking weeks later. It was a really wonderful, relaxed process rooted in the concept of “what if….”

Then, because of all the prep, we’d start each shoot day at J.R.’s big whiteboard, which contained a diagram of the whole set, and he’d draw out the day’s movements with a marker like a football coach teaching plays to his team, only with lots of laughs. Starting each day with that level of clarity would prove essential to finishing the movie in just over six weeks with zero reshoots.

CO: We’ve seen other films like this that have tried to convey the feeling of playing out in real time by presenting it all as a single, continuous shot. With Saturday Night, you do have a lot of oners and extended takes, but the film also breaks into punchy, rapid-fire cutting, as well as more conventional coverage. How did you go about finding the visual language of the film and creating that feeling of nervous energy through the camera?

Steelberg: I will say the film was originally conceived and pitched to me by the director as one single shot with no hidden cuts or stitches. For a variety of reasons—primarily story—we decided the film would be more successful and story more enjoyable if we could break it up and still include the longer takes which show all the simultaneous chaos without the deception of editing. The rapid fire cutting you mention was decided late in the editorial process to heighten the tension of the footage further.

Moriarty: One of the great things that happens when there’s trust among the filmmakers is you develop a faith that the film will eventually tell you what it needs to be. That was completely true on Saturday Night, where we found our groove very quickly.

We talked early on about all sorts of approaches to the camera. Some of them came from a language we’d adopted on The Front Runner in 2017, which is another film that sort of told us what it needed to be as we shot it. That film had a real “fly on the wall” feeling where the camera is kind of the audience’s surrogate and is allowed to choose what to look at. Saturday Night did borrow from aspects of that, and it was a great point of departure for thinking and talking about the language, but honestly the exact style of Saturday Night was kind of an unknown until we started trying things. I don’t really know how to describe our style, and I definitely don’t know what to call it. I just know it didn’t take long before the movie was telling us how to shoot and we just had to listen and be faithful to it.

There’s a huge amount of movement in the film, both actors and camera, and the obvious instinct is “strap on the Steadicam,” but Steadicam feels a certain way to an audience. They know Steadicam. They’ve seen it a bazillion times and J.R. didn’t want that. Of course, I did do a lot of Steadicam on the movie because on certain shots it was just the perfect (or only) tool. But it’s a period piece. It takes place in 1975 and we’re already shooting on 16mm film—another genius (and courageous) decision by Eric and J.R.—which transports you back in time the moment the movie opens. So, we felt a sort of duty to evoke the feel of that era, meaning the movie should feel like it was executed with the tools of that era, like dolly and handheld, even if we were doing stuff that would have been impossible in the ʼ70s, aside from the early stuff Garret Brown was doing with the Steadicam.

Reitman: The goal from the very beginning was to create a film that felt like a document from 1975. We wanted to capture what it felt like moments before Saturday Night Live ever went to air. In order to do that, we used every technique we had to immerse the audience in live television. That began with shooting on 16mm. Eric Steelberg and I found that modern-day 16mm stocks replicated the look, feel, and tone of 1970s 35mm.

Moriarty: Our go-to platform quickly became a zoom lens on a CineMoves Matrix Head on a CineFlip mount, canted back into the center of a Super PeeWee dolly and I have to say, it was such a capable package it blew my mind. We could do almost anything except the stairwells with that setup.

Having said that, the capability is entirely a function of the people behind the gear and—as president of the only organization in Hollywood to honor the contributions of the crew—I always make a point of giving them their due when I’m interviewed. So here goes:

First and foremost: the legendary dolly grip (and SOC Lifetime Award recipient) Darryl Humber. Darryl is like a proper old ranch horse. He’s driven the cattle home for decades and can do it in his sleep, but when you take him onto a trail that’s new and interesting and mostly impossible for the average horse, his eyes brighten, the nostrils flare, and he goes charging up the mountain in a cloud of dust and you just try not to fall off his back. The degree to which Darryl welcomed impossible challenges just blows me away. Whatever notice the film gets for its visuals, I hope they credit Darryl by name because his contribution was essential and his investment in what we did together is something I will never forget.

Reitman: I’ve always felt that the relationship between camera operator and dolly grip is not unlike two ballerinas. One holds the other in the air with confidence and dexterity so that the other can perform aerial maneuvers. That said, I’m not sure how much Darryl and Matt appreciate that analogy.

Moriarty: Mad props also to Sebastian Vega, my good friend and frequent collaborator, for going back in time to shoot a movie on 16mm and gracefully navigating all the associated terrors and headaches that come with it, and being such a courageous, steadfast partner in some of the most challenging work I’ve ever done. If you’ve seen the movie, it doesn’t stretch the imagination to imagine the camera crew being at the edge of their abilities just like Lorne Michaels and his troupe of comedians were on opening night. There were many instances where the film needed us to completely wing it and Sebastian was so heroic and I love him for that. Remember, he’s the guy who spends the weekend wondering if Monday’s dailies will be in focus. It’s an awesome responsibility, and Bas just crushed it every single day.

Saturday Night might get noticed for the elaborate oners, but I want to highlight the massive contribution of our B camera team: operator Cale Finot and focus puller Pat Sokley. Again, it’s a trust thing. J.R.’s trust in Cale meant that he could spend very little energy talking about shots with the B operator and remain free to deal with other things, like answering questions from the actors. Cale and Pat were a massive “force multiplier” in the whole operation, nailing essential pieces without any fuss and giving J.R. the ability to move quickly through the day’s work. They were the model of what B camera can mean to a director when you’re doing scenes with lots of actors.

Also in the “unsung heroes” department, I must credit my incredible head tech, Pat Redmond, who not only gave us a dead-reliable, ultra-smooth remote head that we never once waited on, but did a huge portion of the zooms in the movie and, most importantly, helped me invent a critical protocol for changing pan speeds on a remote head during a shot. Whip pans are easy when you’re actually touching the camera because you can use body position, peripheral vision, all sorts of tricks. Whip pans from a remote head during a shot that moves through multiple rooms, where you’re in a constant back-pan to begin with, and working from a monitor that doesn’t allow you to see anything until the whip stops is extremely difficult. Knowing that J.R. also wants vicious, courageous landings (not “whip through the middle and then smoothly find the frame” landings) makes it even more so. So, Pat and I would find a speed setting that allowed me to go from pre-whip to post-whip in exactly two turns of the wheel and then he would ride the knob and dial me from the slow and smooth setting to the whip setting at the perfect time, and then immediately back to the slow and smooth until the next whip. Pat truly was my partner in the most difficult aspects of my job, and his attentiveness was just extraordinary. 

Lastly, I want to credit the most uniquely involved and dedicated group of stand-ins I’ve ever had. They spent weeks of prep helping J.R. formulate the game plan for the shoot and they were Johnny-on-the-spot every day of the shoot. Most of them got cameos in the film as well, as thanks for their hard work and wonderful attitudes. So, shoutout to Aidan, Alex, Caroline, Cassidy, John, and Onik!

CO: Are there any specific moments on the film that stand out as being particularly challenging?

Moriarty: It was all challenging. I think we did maybe one static shot in the whole movie and almost every shot I did involved some level of “how the fuck are we gonna do this one?” But that’s also the whole fun of it. Every day you’d walk away knowing you reached the edge of your abilities, or maybe even did something better than you thought you could.

That’s the thing about being challenged. We’re all human. We all get puckered. We all have doubt and we all screw up. What you hope for is to find yourself doing work you care about in an environment where everyone is taking risks right alongside you and everyone has enough trust in each other to believe that eventually you’re going to nail it together. And when you do, it’s pretty magical.

That’s the environment J.R. created on Saturday Night, and it was quite a thing to be a part of.

Reitman: At the end of the day, our job is not to wow the audience with distracting techniques, but rather to immerse them in a feeling. The conversations I have with Moriarty are all about how a shot makes the viewer feel. If we ourselves were walking down the hallways of Rockefeller Center, where would we look and what would we see and what would we miss?

My confidence in working with Moriarty comes from our willingness to try and fail. It’s the month leading up to shoot in which we challenge each other to be brave and stay on tone. In a movie like Saturday Night, the camera is another character, fueled by Matt Moriarty’s instincts and visual genius. 

CO: Sort of mirroring the story being told, on the film you have this huge ensemble cast of young actors, most of whom are relatively unknown. What was it like working with this cast both in the sense of working with them as actors and just logistically in terms of all these moving pieces in almost every scene?

Moriarty: This was by far the biggest ensemble cast I had ever worked with. We also had something like 60 full-time background players, each of whom was personally cast by J.R. and who went through a “boot camp” to learn the trade of their characters. Logistically, the daily movement of these performers was an undertaking that to this day I can barely comprehend. We’ve all done movies where we wait an hour for two actors to get out of hair and makeup. If one actor wears a wig, add another hour.

On Saturday Night we had 40 actors and 60 background in period costumes, wearing 27 wigs—27 separate hair-pieces—coming out of the works every morning, and I cannot recall a single day when we waited so much as five minutes on a single one of them. Huge credit to Shelly Ziegler and her AD team, along with all the hair, makeup, and costume departments for pulling that off. Also credit our amazing producer, JoAnn Perritano, who stretched the money we had to make the film further than anyone I’ve ever worked with, and who had us working mostly nine hour days. Just incredible.

Creatively, it was by far the most adorable ensemble cast I ever worked with. They were all prepared. They were courageous, kind, generous to each other and to the crew. They were also under a lot of pressure to deliver, and they took it very seriously. I immediately think of Kirsty Woodward, a young British actress with mostly stage credits, whose character gets introduced at the very end of a four-minute oner that goes through the entirety of Studio 8H. She has the longest, wordiest, most difficult chunk of dialogue of anyone in the scene. It needs to come out rapid-fire, with great breath control and perfect comic timing. Her degree of difficulty was off the charts and yet she totally crushed it. Made it look easy.

I spoke with her about it afterward and it turns out she didn’t find it easy at all. She was keenly aware of the stakes, that if she blew a single word, it would render the take—and the hard work of 100 people during the preceding three minutes—useless. She was terrified, and yet she approached it with courage every time and nailed it like a pro. 

All of which leads me to conclude with the following: Watching my colleagues display courage every day is one of the things I’ll remember most fondly about the shoot. It was extremely demanding work that required maximum effort by everyone involved. From Jason Reitman down to the extra walking the clipboard down the hallway, every single person took it seriously and delivered their absolute best every day. 

I’m so proud to have been part of it.

PHOTO GALLERY

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Matthew Moriarty, SOC

Matthew Moriarty, SOC, has spent 27 years in the camera department and has an IMDb page with roughly 80 major credits on feature films and television. He served for 12 years as a member of the National Executive Board of IATSE Local 600. In 2023 he was elected President of the Society of Camera Operators (SOC), an organization that has twice nominated him for Camera Operator of the Year (2018 and 2021).

Matt works throughout the world and is local to both Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon. Matt is also a 23-year progressive political activist and donor, creating content in service of the candidates and causes he is passionate about, particularly in Oregon, where he lives with his wife and daughters.

Jason Reitman

Jason Reitman is a four-time Oscar®-nominated filmmaker who made his feature film debut with the 2006 Sundance hit Thank You For Smoking.  He notably earned Oscar® nominations for directing Juno and Up in the Air, the latter of which earned Reitman a Golden Globe Award, WGA Award, and BAFTA Award for Best Screenplay. His other films include Young Adult, Tully, The Front Runner, and Ghostbusters: Afterlife.  Reitman executive produced the Oscar®-winning film Whiplash and the Jean-Marc Vallee-directed Demolition, and served as a producer on the cult hit Jennifer’s Body and Gil Kenan’s Frozen Empire. He also produced four seasons of the Hulu comedy series Casual. Reitman was an artist-in-residence at LACMA, where he co-created the smash hit Live Read series. He currently serves as a governor in the director’s branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Recently, Reitman made headlines as the leader of a coalition of over 35 filmmakers acquiring and preserving the historic Village Theater in Westwood, California.

Eric Steelberg

Eric Steelberg’s interest in movies started in his childhood, a time when home video was arriving. Early exposure to films sparked a lifelong passion for visual storytelling, leading him to explore the works of various filmmakers across different genres. His entry into feature filmmaking was marked by the indie film Quinceañera, which won awards at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, a milestone that holds personal significance for him. Today, Steelberg is known for his work as Director of Photography on projects like Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: Ahsoka series and the Ghostbusters sequels Afterlife and Frozen Empire.

Over the years, Steelberg has collaborated with Jason Reitman on nine films, including Juno and Up in the Air, both receiving nominations for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Steelberg’s role as cinematographer for Dolemite is My Name and Baywatch, as well as his work on (500) Days of Summer and the Marvel series Hawkeye, showcase his ability to adapt to a variety of storytelling styles and genres. In 2012, Steelberg was invited to join the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC), where he actively participates in committees and is seated on the Board of Governors. He is also a member of the Cinematographer’s Branch Executive Committee, and former Co-Chair of the A2020 Membership Committee at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). In between long-form narrative work, Steelberg has also ventured into television, lensing pilots for series such as Showtime’s Billions and ABC’s The Good Doctor. He also has enjoyed 25 years of commercial work for various companies, as well as educational outreach, where he enjoys mentoring young filmmakers, participating in school visits, and teaching master classes.

Photo by Hopper Stone

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