Interview: Cinematographer Chris Teague Discusses the Look of ‘The Acolyte’

While The Acolyte is set in a universe that is now well-known to movie and television fans worldwide, it’s one of the most unique titles in the Star Wars franchise. It explores a side of the galaxy that has never been treated on-screen and contains some of the most intricate fight scenes ever crafted, inspired by the Wuxia films of the past. 

Speaking to Awards Radar on Zoom, cinematographer Chris Teague, who worked on the show’s first, second, fourth, and fifth episodes, said that “it’s a very difficult balance to try to find something that feels fresh but also like it’s a part of this very big, well-established universe. We started from the root of what most interested us in the Star Wars world. The original three films got me the most excited from an aesthetic standpoint. I saw them when I was very young, and they imprinted themselves upon me. As I researched and looked back at those films,  it felt like there was so much to draw from. Leslye Headland, the show’s creator, felt the same way. One of the things she would always ask rhetorically is, “What would George Lucas do? How would George approach this scene?” I think what she was getting at was striving for elegant simplicity in the way that we approach things. The camera moves only when it’s trying to say something when it’s expressing an emotion or creating a certain sense of drama, highlighting a story point or something like that. That’s the way we were approaching it. 

We wanted something that felt classic and was very much the same in terms of the action. We started looking back at all the Wuxia films of the 70s, like Come Drink with Me and Lady Snowblood. We noticed the photography was straightforward and very much there to support the incredible choreography of these performers. It’s a funny challenge because there’s so much you can do with the camera. You can move the camera so quickly and in so many different ways. It’s very easy to get tempted to dazzle the audience with a lot of fancy camera work. But for us, we wanted the choreography to speak for itself and the camera only to step in to underline or highlight certain specific moments. To me, it feels like when you do that. The camerawork has a more immediate and powerful impact on an audience when its power is used sparingly.”

In discussing with showrunner/director Leslye Headland on the look and feel of the series, Teague explained that it felt daunting “to be walking into such a show of such an incredible scale. I felt incredibly grateful to be there with Leslye because she and I share a visual language. The big-picture conversations about the show were fun and sparked many great ideas. It was this great process of us just sitting down, talking, and her throwing out references. I go back, watch the references, and bring things back to her. I’d pull images and clips, and we would start to refine things. We started from this very broad big-picture level about what the show should look and feel like. My task was to drill down and get very specific about what that meant regarding camera movements, lighting, and color palette. I brought those things to Leslye, who would react and respond. The result was this presentation document that we brought to the entire crew, which was very effective. We sat down with all the department heads, the camera operators, and a huge portion of the team and laid out our view of the visual approach for the show. It impacted the crew, galvanizing them and making everybody feel like we were all working together on the same show.”

In creating a look that distinguished the series from other Star Wars titles that were more volume and CGI-reliant, the collaboration between the cinematography and production design departments was key to creating a more classic feel for the show that would harken back to the look of the original trilogy: 

“Our production designer, Kevin Jenkins, was very much on board with that idea. It felt like that was right for the show. It is sometimes challenging, particularly in the forest setting, where we shoot almost two episodes. We had to imagine a space to work that would allow us to create the feeling that these characters are traveling miles and miles through an ever-changing landscape. It became an incredible team effort with myself in the lighting design and Kevin with his set design, making it as modular as possible so that we could have one space to shoot in and transform into another. Our greens department also did an incredible amount of work, moving live plants from space to space to create different density levels or shapes. We have these incredible, mangrove-inspired, gigantic Sequoia-sized trees in many spaces. They’re all peppered in with many live plants of different types and leaf shapes. We’re constantly reimagining the location as we go through the shoot.”

Developing not only the action but also the camera choreography of the show’s Wuxia-inspired fight scenes could’ve been a challenge, but the cinematographer explains that they were “fortunate enough to collaborate with this incredible team, which included Chris Cowan, our action designer, Mark Ginther, our stunt coordinator; and our whole fight choreography team. The conversations were about figuring out how to characterize each fight scene so that they feel dynamic and separate themselves. One great example is the fight between Mae [Amandla Stenberg] and Jecki [Dafne Keen], and Chris Cowan had this idea that it should be like a brawl, where it’s hand to hand. And we tried to keep the camera as close to the ground as possible for all of that. So we’re rolling across the ground with them, and they’re being thrown from place to place and up against trees off different levels of Kelnacca’s [Joonas Suotamo] shelter. That informed that scene, but so much about Wuxia films is about pacing: how we move within a fight sequence from something rapid-fire and relentless with these pauses where characters separate and face off. You can check in to where they are emotionally, and then it starts again. There’s this almost kind of musicality to the pacing of the choreography and the camerawork that tends to move with the actors. It tends to move in one direction, left to right, or in and out. But we often pause with our characters and stand static with them when the camera doesn’t move. There’s a visual rhythm, very much inspired by Wuxia films.”

During our audio conversation, seen below, we also discussed the challenges of setting the look that each location would have in the series, Teague’s collaboration with director Alex Garcia Lopez on episodes four and five, and visually representing the different lightsabers that each Padawan and Jedi would have in the fifth episode’s centerpiece battle. 

You can listen to my full conversation with Chris below and stream the first six episodes of The Acolyte on Disney+ today: 

[Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity]