Hitchcock would have used this guy....
The NY Times had a great article yesterday about one of Wes Anderson's key collaborator's, Key Grip Sanjay Sami. I'll paste in the article's text over a series of posts:
Wes Anderson’s Secret Weapon: The Camera Moves of Sanjay Sami
Sami brings ingenious design, a D.I.Y. spirit and pure athletic ability to the job of key grip — pushing and pulling heavy camera rigs with exacting precision.
By Melena Ryzik
June 21, 2023
Wes Anderson’s intricate films are known for their jewel box sets, vibrant costumes and starry ensemble casts. But there’s another element that gives his movies their distinctive look and feel, and it comes in the form of a 52-year-old grip.
Sanjay Sami, a native of Mumbai, India, got his start on Bollywood movies and has been working with Anderson since 2006, mostly as a dolly grip. It’s a rough job, pushing and pulling a camera mounted on a dolly — a setup weighing up to 900 pounds — along hundreds of feet of track built for a scene, and Sami has engineered, invented and refined it into an art form.
On a typical movie, a dolly might move the camera left to right or back and forth. In the Wesiverse, it goes in all those directions — and sometimes up and down, too — in a single tracking shot, allowing, Anderson said, for unbroken expression. “It means the actors can stay in real time, and you can create something that really exists, in front of the camera.”