Some of your most interesting work comes when you feel like you’re skating on thin ice. On Splitsville, director Michael Angelo Covino and I leaned into the imperfections that come with shooting on film with older lenses and doing fewer takes. Riding that razor’s edge of getting the shot or not getting it — we live for that.
Mike is drawn to French cinema made during the 1970s, when the introduction of sync-sound reflex cameras meant you could run out with a battery and a small crew and just make something. We wanted Splitsville to honor that spirit; we worked with the mindset that we would strive to create something special without bogging it down with too many tools or people. We wanted the look to come across as intentional yet raw.
Mike understands how to highlight the absurdity of the human experience, and to that end, Splitsville moves from moments of minimalism and simplicity to extreme maximalism. We sought to constantly upend our relationship with the audience so they’d never be completely comfortable with the story we’re telling. The extended fight scene, which places the viewer right inside a brawl between Carey (Kyle Marvin) and Paul (Mike) after the former tells the latter he has slept with his wife, Julie (Dakota Johnson), falls firmly on the maximal side of this tonal spectrum.
Broken Home: Choosing the Fight Scene’s Location
For our fight-scene location, we chose a modernist lake house that best represented the type of second home we thought Paul’s character would have — something beautiful that felt connected to the water and nature, but still felt like a bold, modern statement of wealth and abundance. We then discussed what within the environment might be possible to break, and which spaces would be most fun to move through. We considered how the scene could start out simply as a moment of believable dialogue; then move into a wrestling match; and then have it devolve into a fight for the characters’ lives that would include breaking pottery and glasses, smashing tables, bodies being thrown down stairs, a fish tank blowing up, and finally, the characters crashing through a window into a swimming pool, all of which was written specifically in the script.
Our production designer, Stephen Phelps, then helped build furniture pieces and windows for our actors to break. Kyle and Mike worked with stunt coordinator Tyler Hall on the scene every night after prep. At first, their extreme devotion boggled my mind, but it was clear they understood that this early scene would set the tone for the rest of the film.
Doubling Down on No Stunt Doubles
Kyle and Mike didn’t have stunt doubles for any part of the sequence. This was a point of pride for them. Early on, I told them the only way the scene would work would be with doubles, and that I didn’t think they would go at each other hard enough, but subconsciously, I think I might have been challenging them! At times, it felt like the three of us were all daring each other to grab the electric fence. I told them they’d have to commit 100 percent or it wouldn’t work, and to their credit, they did it. It’s also true that if your actors can perform something like this themselves, the results look better because you’re not hiding physical actions either with the camera or in the edit. I always push to do things practically even if it means rethinking how we shoot a scene, and here, we leaned into what’s happening in the moment onscreen.
Camera Techniques and Oners
We aimed to approach every moment within the sequence as one shot and managed to achieve this in capturing the portion of the fight that takes place in the downstairs area of the house. For the first part of this shot, our Steadicam operator, Andre Perron, rested the Steadicam on an apple box so the shot would feel more locked off; at this point, the shot has a feeling of tension, but it’s also humorous. From there, the confrontation between Carey and Paul slowly escalates. Once the fight is fully underway, the two men fly into the study; at that moment, Andre lifted the Steadicam off the apple box and moved with them into this new room. Following this portion of the fight, Carey and Paul end up back in the living room, then move into the kitchen, then onto the stairwell, with the action in each room covered via the same Steadicam move.
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I love oners; if anything, my work over the last couple of years has shown that shooting them is my dream scenario. But because Kyle and Mike performed their own stunts, and because Splitsville is a comedy about humanity — not an action movie — I also felt that some additional coverage would help the scene, even if it was just one punctuated move that sells the impression of a hit landing harder or a line landing funnier. So, we peppered in these little moments throughout. We shot a reverse on Paul for the beginning of the scene, but chose to remain wide, to keep our distance. This allows the viewer to observe that Paul is reacting, but not completely read into how he feels. We also captured some more extreme angles of the beginning of the wrestling — with one camera on the floor when the characters topple to the ground, to help sell the impact and signal a turning point in the fight; and a top shot of some of their wrestling maneuvers, to help better show their faces and play up the comedy of their lines. For the upstairs portion of the shoot, we added an underwater shot in the bathtub, to reveal Carey’s face as Paul tries to drown him in the tub. We also added close ups here and there for reactions, dialogue, or reveals, like when we see that Carey is missing his eyebrows.
Choosing — and Shattering — Glass
For the majority of the fight sequence, we used a Panavision Ultra Speed “Z” MKII series 24mm prime lens. (This lens, paired with Arri’s Arricam LT, our main camera, was occasionally exchanged with other glass in Panavision’s Ultra Speed and “Z” series.) The 24mm felt most natural and honest for the material — it’s wide but not distorted, the camera moves feel dynamic, and it proved versatile in finding wide or tight frames in the sequence seamlessly.
Our real set pieces — where things really got challenging — came when the fight moves upstairs. During this part, Carey and Paul move into Paul’s son’s room and Paul ends up breaking his son’s massive fish tank by throwing a bowling ball at it. We needed a tank that would be big enough to make an impression on the viewer, but every gallon of water weighs 8 pounds, and our tank held about 60 gallons that would eventually be spilled out. The house we shot in was brand new, and the owners were, understandably, worried. So, our art department designed and built a reservoir that looked like the floor of the room but was covered by carpet; the reservoir weighed about 3,000 pounds and held about 250 gallons, which allowed us to catch all of that water to prevent it from seeping into the floorboards.
On top of all that, we only had one take to shoot the upstairs material. We had special effects supervisor David Loveday remotely controlling a detonator that broke the fish-tank glass, which had to be perfectly timed with the throwing of the bowling ball. We wanted to capture this moment in camera, and although we did shoot coverage, we took care to avoid cheap cutaways. We needed to see the aftermath of the broken glass and water everywhere with the camera rolling. This was one of the few times we decided to have two cameras rolling to make sure we got the shot. All of this was terrifying, but in the end, we pulled it off.
Out of Window, Under Water
Another challenging moment to capture is when Carey and Paul break through the upstairs-hallway window and land in the pool outside. The production built a set that replicated the end of the hallway next to the actual window, and we stitched that together with shots in the hallway. We have a POV shot of Carey and Paul rushing through the window and a profile shot, for which we blocked the house with our set piece to capture them as they crash through the window and land on a mat off camera. We used a 35mm “Z” series lens in this shot to compress the background of the environment and ensure the set felt congruent with the geography of the location.
The jump for Mike and Kyle was about 15 feet down, and Mike tackling Kyle through breakaway glass had them cut up and bloodied. Shooting on film, we couldn’t watch anything back; we had to just pray the film would come back. We also shot the break through the window at high speed on an Arri 435 Xtreme, which made things even riskier. We did one take, which went well enough. After some discussion, we decided there was no reason to risk doing another one, so we moved on to our aquatic work to capture the moments following the characters’ landing in the pool and their continuation of the fight underwater.
We spent a morning shooting Mike and Kyle beating the hell out of each other underwater, using the 435 Xtreme, which was fitted into a HydroFlex RemoteAquaCam Mk5 housing.
Shooting underwater — especially on film — is difficult, because you don’t see what you get until you develop the film. Focus marks change with the flat-front attachment, so our 1st AC, Nico Marion, had to be very calculated in his focus-pulling efforts. On a bigger film, one would probably have another unit prepped to do this, but on our more modest budget, this was just an hour of an otherwise jam-packed day, so we really couldn’t afford to miss the shot. We just dove right in, and everyone nailed it.
I would never pressure an actor to do something they aren’t comfortable with, but a sequence like this one is always better when it’s practical and done as much with the actors as possible. It takes a lot of faith. If the actors are going to risk their safety, they must trust that I can capture that performance and deliver it in a way that makes it all worth it. It goes to show how important the relationships between cinematographers and actors are, and how much we rely on one another for success.
All images courtesy of Neon.