Interview with Jarin Blaschke
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Jarin Blaschke
American cinematographer known for his work with director Robert Eggers on The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman and Nosferatu, and for Knock at the Cabin.
Source: StudioBinder Academy on YouTube
These answers are taken from Jarin Blaschke Interview — Robert Eggers Cinematographer Explains His Career on StudioBinder Academy's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What was your very first experience with filmmaking?
When I was like six, I would play with Star Wars figurines and pretend I was making a Star Wars movie in the backyard, in kind of a dirt-pile redneck way, my friend Chris and I. And then I don't know why photography became interesting at some point. I think my mom had a proper Nikon, and I learned that you could make pictures really crisp with a very high shutter speed. I eventually inherited her camera and started taking pictures with it, and that kind of intertwined with the make-believe of when I was a small child, and keeping alive magic and fantasy and all this stuff.
I find the process of photography an editing process. It's not really about what you're shooting, but what of the clutter of the world you're removing. So that has an OCD function that works well with me.
When did you start making films?
Later, when I was in high school, there was one arty video store in my small town of 20,000 people, and I'd start watching all these movies. I figured there must be a job that involves photography, because you have to photograph the thing. I didn't know what that was, but that seemed like maybe the best match for me. And then I went to school, and everyone wanted to be a director, and then I learned about cinematography.
I went to the School of Visual Arts in New York City. It's more of an art school really, but they have a film department and it's very practical. People that tend to emerge from there are cinematographers more than directors. It was very hands-on. The first day of class they handed me a Bolex and showed me how to load it. There wasn't two years of theory. It's just, here's a light meter, here's how it works: it's not recording what you're seeing, it's measuring the light that's on the subject.
What drew you to a career as a filmmaker?
If you can play make-believe your entire life, let's do it. It satisfies on a creative level, obviously, but also on a technical level. There are some engineers in my family, so I don't know if that got passed down, but that tinkering nature is very satisfying too. Turning the nebulous into the real, I like that.
At its most basic level, cinematography is turning what is imaginary into what's real. Taking something that's just a loose idea, or coming from a totally different medium, on the page or in performance, and making it real, photographing it.
What do you enjoy most about making films?
At least since The Lighthouse, everything I've shot has been on film, which is rewarding. I like having that light meter, and I like the repeatability of it: for this movie my fill light's going to be at this level for night scenes and this level for day scenes. A form, but one that's tailored to the movie. I just like the rigor of film. Digitally, I slack a bit, even if I don't want to. That calibrated monitor will lie to you. And I do enjoy the little bit of anxiety before the dailies come in, because it just heightens any success that you have.
And I like someone who is going to nerd out with me. I want to recreate dusk. I want to recreate the sky on a piece of muslin out the window. Can we just nerd out about making the best sunrise with a mirror and some muslin and the gels? If they get that same OCD pleasure, then we're on the same team for sure.
How did your filmmaking career unfold?
Robert Eggers just reached out to me, because I had some material on an agent's website. We both lived in New York City. I had I think three short films on this website. He went there looking at someone else, decided he didn't love that person, and I had enough consonants in my last name that he wondered if maybe I was any good. He apparently liked the footage and wrote me a very, very sincere email: “Dear Mr. Blaschke.” He had a short film based on Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. At first glance I thought it might be a little tedious, but I read it and I thought it was extremely visual. The atmosphere is right there on the page. So I had to meet him. We met in a coffee shop. He had a waxed mustache, and we both were eccentric and wearing hipster jeans in Bushwick in 2007, and set off on our way.
He really put such care into the work. If you have perfectionist tendencies, you can be very lonely in filmmaking, because it's such a machine. But finding someone who really wanted to get the costume right, the wax in the hair just right, the coating of dust on the set just right, I felt kinship right away.
What advice do you have for new filmmakers?
At least in my case, it was just persistence. You need a lot of things to be good at this, and lacking extraordinary luck, I had to be very almost dogged and blunt and just persistent, to wait for the right lining up of elements to happen. You need the technique, you need the taste, you need some talent, but you also just have to wait around until you find the right people.
The fundamental thing is really to find yourself and just do that, so you can't be replaced. And that takes time, because you don't know what you're about for a while. I admired certain cinematographers. I want to learn this from Willis, I want to learn this from Storaro. You sort of copy that, and it takes time to synthesize that into yourself. But it has to come out of you. If you're just going by trends, you're becoming replaceable. And just do things you're interested in. No one's going to remember me for The Legend of Mary Hatchet. It's going to be stuff where I could put myself on the screen.
How do you keep your cast and crew communicating well on set?
By the time we arrive, it's been sorted. We know the shots, we know the order, and this has been discussed for weeks. So it's just enacting what we spent months talking about. Sometimes we'll have a separate group prelighting another set for next week, so while we're lighting one, there'll be another stage that I'll be scurrying over to, checking and giving notes, and then running back to set. I just try to have enough time and communicate well enough. There are always surprises, but a film is complex enough that there's going to be snafus, so I just try to minimize those.
I used to operate everything myself, because I have control issues. But having to relinquish that, I learned that I kind of like watching the shot and actually directing the operating, because I could see the movie holistically. I'm not thinking about where my elbow's going as I do this pan. I can step back and see the shot, and know if it works.
Describe your filmmaking style.
I light naturalistically. I feel like I need to believe the lighting. Not necessarily to make a movie that way, but it just helps me synthesize things. It's like Rob needs to base something in reality. His films don't have to be historically accurate, but it just gives him a road ahead. It's the same for me with lighting.
I read the script over and over, and I try not to push visual ideas until they arrive almost spontaneously. I generally don't like more than three ideas in a film, as far as general arcs of things. I think simple and strong is generally better. You don't want a look for this set and a different look for this one, so it becomes jumbled. Time helps me distill and simplify, and I try to make it stronger through distillation. I tend to be more affected by paintings, photographs and visual art than films, and music is a big one. Then I try to sit on it for a while. Sometimes the subconscious needs a couple of months to come up with the right expression of that feeling.
Tell me about a production that was hard to pull off. What was it and why was it challenging?
The Northman is pretty much what we drew. You could make a comic book of that movie and be pretty close. We basically have a comic book of that movie. We had a storyboard artist, and we had so much prep because of COVID. The production got delayed, so we got really anal with the storyboards. Toward the end, we finally had to shoot, because the artist needed a break. But such a big undertaking, that movie. It really saved the movie. For people of our experience level, we probably had no business making a film of that size. It let us have a chance of succeeding.
I was trying to make it a clean-looking movie. It just felt appropriate, for quote-unquote an epic, to be as immersive as possible, except for certain hallucinations where you want a more bombastic character.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your filmography.
On The Lighthouse, everything is filtered with the orthochromatic filter, which only passes blue light. The skin tones are really rugged and the sky goes blank, and everything becomes really textured and almost earthy. And then when he goes up to the lamp at the end, I actually switched it to red light, which is the other end of the spectrum. Maybe it's too subtle for people to actually notice, but it doesn't just get brighter. The blood that was on his face sort of goes away, because I was dimming from blue light to red light. Red light has a longer wavelength, so his skin tone gets more like alabaster. So finally, after watching this look for the entire movie, the transcendent spirit of the light transforms him and you see through him.
Also, The Witch was the first union movie I ever did, so it was mandated I had to have an operator. But I operated like half of that movie.
In which area would you like to improve as a filmmaker?
Knock at the Cabin is one location, so how do you have an arc to the look of that movie? The only thing I could think of is the passage of time. The end of the world is imminent, and if you visually read that the light is changing, then you feel that more. So I basically made a cyc of light out there, and broke the script down into stages: this scene to this scene we're in stage one, which is kind of midday. Then you move into the afternoon, and then twilight and dusk. I plotted that technically, the lighting ratios, where the mirrors should go, how far away the light should be.
Going back to my earlier point, do three things. I did five. I probably should have done three and not five, so I didn't follow my own advice. Maybe that's subconsciously what made me say three, because I had too many. In stage three the mirrors had to be hung, in some other stage they had to be on stands. It got a little too much. I should follow my own advice and simplify.
Jarin Blaschke's Full Biography
Jarin Blaschke was born on 28 September 1978 in Westminster, California, USA. He is a cinematographer and actor, known for The Lighthouse (2019), Nosferatu (2024) and The Witch (2015).