Cinematographer Juanmi Azpiroz on Crafting the Look of Netflix’s ‘The Rip’

Picture Credits: Netflix Juanmi Azpiroz shoots The Rip with an old-fashioned punch. The cinematographer was always looking back to the past on the Joe Carnahan film, which is arguably more noir than action-thriller. Shadows loom large over the crimines in The Rip, which shows Miami law enforcement discovering a big stash of cash and not knowing who to trust with it. Producers Ben Affleck and Matt Damon star in the film, which is groundbreaking for its performance bonus deal with Netflix – benefiting not only stars but crew members. Azpiroz currently has two films in the top 10 on the streaming service, including one of his previous collaborations with Carnahan, Copshop. The cinematographer’s eye isn’t only all over both films, but his face is actually prominent in The Rip. Detective Lolo (Catalina Sandino Moreno) wears a T-shirt of a band Azpiroz once played in, which delighted the cinematographer. Azpiroz recently spoke with What’s On Netflix about the movies that influenced The Rip, including many black-and-white and horror classics. You started off doing black-and-white photography shooting bands. Making a noir like The Rip, anything about your past black and white work influence you here? The day I told Russ Faust, my gaffer, that we were making this movie, I sent him the script and I said, “Russ, this is a black-and-white movie for us. No one’s going to let us shoot the movie in black and white. No one is going to allow us to even say that out loud. But for us, this is a black-and-white movie.” The first picture I showed Joe Carnahan was from The Night of the Hunter. It’s a silhouette of the woman, you remember? With her and the shotgun, right? On the porch, yes. I told him, “This is the movie I think we should watch.” And he’s like, “Totally.” The levels of contrast that we applied in this movie, which are really high most of the time, were always thought of like noir films in black and white. Normally when I start a movie with Joe Carnahan, I go to his house in LA. It doesn’t matter where the movie happens, I go to his house and I spend a couple of weeks with him talking about the movie and learning what’s in his head. Before I go there, I gather a bunch of images that are applicable to the movie. Most of those pictures were black and white, almost all of them. There were movies from the ’50s, pictures from Cat People, and even the 1920s. This is what this movie should look like. He agreed. Joe actually told us how much horror influenced the movie, just given that it’s inherent in noir. How’d Cat People and the horror genre influence you? Joe said that every noir film has a big component of horror, and that is something that I took very seriously from the beginning. Every time they go out in the movie, it’s fog everywhere and you don’t really see what’s going on. In a weird way, what we tried to show in the movie was that being in the house, even if they were locked and surrounded, was safer than being outside. You don’t know where the monster is. You don’t know who’s going to attack you and where they’re coming from. So that’s why we add fog all around, from very early Cat People. Every exterior has fog, but I also showed Joe pictures from Todd Hido, the photographer. He’s got a series of exterior night pictures with fog around. They’re extremely beautiful — another big reference for us. What if we make our movie look like this outside, like the highlights have this glow and you see only to a certain point, but then you don’t see anymore what’s there?  There’s a big component of horror in the way the movie looks. Picture courtesy of Juanmi Azpiroz You’re also a big fan of Billy Wilder. In your lookback, were there any references to Double Indemnity?  Weirdly enough in this movie, we didn’t talk about that, but we are both huge fans of Billy Wilder. Double Indemnity may be one of my favorite movies of all time. It’s for sure in my top 10. But all the references that I have, Double Indemnity, it will be a huge reference to the script part of it. At first we had some crazier references. Do you remember the scene when Ben is in a house that’s completely empty and there’s shadows everywhere? Yes. I came to Joe referencing Dr. Caligari. For a minute, we thought of building a set that was completely twisted and using false perspectives and this and that. Obviously, to do that you have to build a set exclusively for that scene, but it’s more expensive, so we ended up not doing it for practical reasons. But that scene has a little bit of the — it’s a little Caligari-esque in the shadows, if you realize there are shadows in the ceiling sometimes, pool shadows everywhere. So those were my first references – M, Caligari, Cat People, those movies that have a more extreme black and white and, in a way, a little bolder image than Double Indemnity. How else did you want to make bold images for The Rip?  We always chose to keep a high contrast. Most of the time the characters are half and half, so half of the time you don’t see their faces. In my opinion, that helps show a little bit how none of these characters are completely clean. None of these characters are good or bad. The first shot in the entire movie is a silhouette. It’s two guys in silhouette talking about how they don’t have the funds to keep an investigation going. Every window has a light coming through and there are shapes and silhouettes and we try to keep all these things moving in that background to create a little tension. I don’t know if you realize, but there are many shots in the movie of people crossing those windows, the shadows of people crossing. When Ben’s character grabs the phone for the first time and hears, “Hey, just run out. Give it, just take the hundred, $50,000,” in the background, a shadow passes him by. We did many of those things to create a little tension. All of a sudden you may not realize that, but you feel it adds up. On the other hand, it’s framed very classically. There’s no extreme framing, nothing really, really out of the ordinary, but you have to pay attention to the movie. It’s not a movie that you can watch just while you’re scrolling on Instagram, you have to pay attention. There’s stuff happening all the time. THE RIP. (L to R) Ben Affleck as Det Sergeant JD Byrne and Matt Damon as Lieutenant Dane Dumars in The Rip. Cr. Warrick Page/Netflix © 2025. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were very diplomatic about Netflix wanting to keep viewers on their phones engaged by repeating plot points. As a PSA: what would you say, as a cinematographer, for people to put their phones down?  Well, the movie is about two hours, tops. I mean, you want to pay attention to what’s happening on the screen. You have another 22 hours in the day to scroll your phone. It’s not even out of respect or not. At the end of the day, the audience is king, right? They need to do whatever they need to do. But I think that when you make a movie most of the time, the amount of time and passion and love that you throw into the project, it’s worth two hours of your life. Just watch the movie, try to understand every nuance of the movie, try to pay attention. I spent months prepping for this movie, just adding details here and there. Just try to pay attention to that and take as much from the movie as you can. That’s it. Now, that being said, you do whatever you want to do, but if you watch the movie, it’s like going to a concert and you pay for a concert and you’re looking at the phone instead of looking at the guy singing. It’s like, why? Agreed. In general, how was shooting Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in such heavy shadows? How’d their silhouettes strike your eye? First of all, Matt and Ben couldn’t be more supportive of me and the bold approach that I did want to take to the movie. Making it deep shadows and high contrast and stuff like that, bold from the get-go. You get the advantage of being able to shoot people that everybody knows. Everybody knows how Matt Damon looks, even if it’s at the beginning of the movie, it’s a complete silhouette. Everyone knows that that’s Matt Damon. So that’s a big advantage too. When you’re shooting with movie stars, you understand why they’re movie stars, how good actors they are. They are obviously fantastic actors, they’re phenomenal actors. Also, Steven Yeun, Kyle Chandler, Catalina, Sasha Calle, all of them, they just step into your light and they make your lighting better. I mean, you understand why movie stars are movie stars because every time they step into frame, especially when you’re in a close-up, they make your lens better. That’s it. It’s as simple as that. And in this case, I had to be high and drunk or something to make them look bad. Even though it would be impossible, I was very, very fortunate to have that cast in front of me. They understood that when they were playing a silhouette, it wasn’t because it’s fancy to shoot a silhouette. It had a meaning in the scene. We shot one of the phone calls with Ben talking to Kyle. Ben is out of focus in almost the entire scene. Joe felt that in that particular moment, where he doesn’t know what the heck is going on, to shoot that phone conversation where Kyle is perfectly focused on one side and then Ben not only out of focus but silhouetted, that was the right thing to do.  Ben understands the reasons and thinking behind that. Before I met Ben, I’m not going to lie, it was a little bit stressful. Ben knows more about cameras than I do. I mean, it’s as simple as that, or at least the same. So it’s not something that you can bullshit with lighting or lenses or cameras and stuff like that. He knows a lot. He’s a geek. THE RIP. (L to R) Ben Affleck as Det Sergeant JD Byrne and Matt Damon as Lieutenant Dane Dumars in The Rip. Cr. Warrick Page/Netflix © 2025. I interviewed him once and he talked a lot about lighting in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.  He’s a film nerd, but also a photography nerd, and he knows what he’s talking about. And so, having that person on my side too, nothing wrong is going to happen here. If you go through all the Netflix catalog now, just find another movie that is shot like this one, with this contrast, with this darkness. Netflix was always, I have to say too, from the very beginning, saying the dailies looked great. So easy for me on this one. What about lighting the Affleck and Damon fight with candles? No artificial light there, right? The only light in the room is candles. There’s light coming from outside, but the light on their faces, it’s just candles, three candles for the entire room. How do you get that done? Well, because the cameras are super fast now. I mean, you could shoot 6,400 ASA with no noise, and we felt that I did want to make it feel real. I didn’t want to fake the candlelight, so we just put three candles on two mirrors, and we did the whole thing like that. The only lights in the room are those three candles, and then there’s some green light coming from the outside. But most of it is just that. And again, all of them in the room, all the actors in the room, they look gorgeous [laughs]. I mean, thank God, I don’t have to fight that. THE RIP. Lina Esco as Captain Jackie Velez in The Rip. Cr. Warrick Page/Netflix © 2025. Through their production company, Ben and Matt struck a pretty historic deal with Netflix. In short: if it’s a success, crew members see a profit. How much does a deal like that mean to you?  Well, the first thing is that Artists Equity cares about the crew. That’s the first thing, and that is the most important thing for me. When I knew that this deal was made before I started working on the movie, it never crossed my mind the entire time I was shooting the movie. I’m not going to shoot better or faster because of this deal.  But I have to say that the level of care and good treatment that we had from Artists Equity is part of having that deal, because they could make the exact same deal and just keep all the money for them. Just the fact that they thought, okay, if the movie goes well, everybody has to have a bonus, that is helpful. It shows how much they care about the crew and how much they acknowledge how important the crew is.  I hope that this works not only for this movie, but for many movies to come. As I was saying, I never thought about the deal while I was shooting the movie. I am shooting the movie, it doesn’t matter. But it’s true that from now on, if we know that going into a movie it may mean that we have a benefit after it, if the movie goes well, you have one more reason to love being on the set.