The movie which inspired this post is Left-Handed Girl (Shih-Ching Tsou, 2025), which I recently watched on Netflix. It was shot on iPhone (at 0.5x?), and has some gorgeous wide-angle shots:
To make the footage look less iPhone-like and more cinematic (at least, that's my guess), they used diffusion filters – see the glow around the light sources in the still below – and also bumped the saturation in some of the scenes.
In fact, some shots look over-saturated to my eyes, but I can forgive that because I thoroughly enjoyed the movie.
At the opposite extreme is Roma (Alfonso Cuarón, 2018), which is monochromatic – no saturation at all. It's also at the opposite extreme when it comes to format: a 65mm camera whose sensor is over 27 times the area of an iPhone 15 sensor. But like Left-Handed Girl, Roma too has some wonderful wide-angle shots. According to Jon Fauer in Roma and the Look of Large Format, the suite of lenses included a 24mm prime (the full-frame equivalent would be as wide as 14mm).
Some movies have gone even wider, such as Fallen Angels (Wong Kar-wai, 1995). According to this excellent video essay, Wong Kar-wai and his cinematographer Christopher Doyle probably used a Century Tégéa 9.8mm lens with a wide angle attachment that gave it an effective focal length of 6.8mm on 35mm film.
If you know of any other movies with good wide-angle cinematography, please let me know in the comments.
2 comments:
A Clockwork Orange has some good wide angle shots. I like the hallway shot at 3:47 in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il8fSKa5Y5c
The record shop scene at 14:02 was (so the clip says) shot with a 9.8mm focal length Angénieux lens.
Thanks, that's a cool video! YouTube seems to have encouraged a proliferation of such behind-the-scenes and "how it was made" videos about movies, and I'm here for it.
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