Cinematographer Jacques Jouffret photographed “American Primeval” to reflect its sparse 1857 Utah environment, as a mother (Betty Gilpin) and son (Preston Mota) travel across untamed lands to reunite with her husband. “They don’t have much to eat, much clothes or transportation. They have to live in the elements, and we used that from a camera standpoint. No big equipment, most of it handheld. A very straightforward approach to create a connection between the characters and camera,” says the French native, who collaborated with director Peter Berg on the raw, unflinching imagery. “I wanted to give as much information in the frame as I could. We are going to be wide and we’re going to be close, but let’s not have empty spaces,” he says about the series’ visceral texture. He adds: “We never tried to say, ‘Let’s do a beautiful shot.’ What we tried to do is see what happened and find the beauty in the frame.” The series’ visual motifs, created with the help of camera operators Brett Hurd and Richard Coy Aune, reinforce the unsettling conditions behind the settlement of the American frontier: “There are many different factions fighting it out, and from that violence, you never know who is going to win. We are on shaky ground, and the constant Dutch angles left or right are a reflection of that,” he says.
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