When I had the chance to speak to Die My Love cinematographer Seamus McGarvey some months ago, I didn’t even question that he’d be nominated for an Oscar. He was fresh from an awards win at the British Independent Film Awards (BIFAs) and is currently on the longlist for a BAFTA.
So when the 2026 Oscar nominations came out on January 22, I was aghast to find he was missing. With some of the most striking, risky, and startling visuals we’ve seen on screen in the past year, Die My Love‘s look is just as much of a character as Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson).
Thankfully, the movie is now available to stream on MUBI as of today (January 23), so you can see what I mean for yourself. If you’re a budding filmmaker or tech nerd – of course, you’re the latter, that’s why you’re on this website – and want to know how to replicate Die My Love‘s distinct abstract flavor, I’ve got the answers for you.
Die My Love brings back ektachrome in a big, bold way
“I just love telling stories with whatever camera I can get my hands on,” McGarvey tells me. “But when I have the joy of shooting on film when the budget allows for it, it’s great because it’s a poetic distance from the real.
“I think early on, Lynne [Ramsay] and I had discussions about what film stock to use and how we were going to approach the day and night scenes, and the peculiar depiction of postpartum depression in a woman who’s recently given birth. It’s a type of madness, really, that a person feels, so we wanted to find a way of expressing that pictorially, not being quite tethered in night or day. So we both said, why not Ektachrome? Because it’s a color film,but not real, it makes everything look slightly hyper-real.
He continues, “The connotation of it is that things have gone wrong and the color is over-ripe and almost rotten, so that we thought that’s perfect. So when we tested that, we realized that that was the film stock to use for the daytime stuff. All the nighttime scenes in the film that you see are shot in plain daylight, like midday or full sun. But we wanted there to be a strange, almost nightmarish moonlit quality. So that was done in the grade and with filters, very heavily smoked up filters that we used with candle smoke.
“That was great fun to do, because you just smoke up a clear glass and then paint out the bits that you want to see, and the rest falls into murky, inky blackness. Even the Sun becomes a moon.”
Watch any of those nighttime scenes and tell me that you aren’t convinced Lawrence is having the worst nightmare of her life at 4am. At this stage in the movie, we, as viewers, can no longer tell what is grounded in reality and what is suspended in the mind of a woman slowly losing hers.
I’d go as far as to say these are some of the best cinematic scenes of 2025, and certainly are the most unexpectedly haunting.
‘Art is how we look and feel, not what we use to shoot with’
But what about those of us who aspire to create things like this but have no idea where to start?
“I think you can tell a story with any camera, even your iPhone and or whatever digital device you use,” McGarvey explains. “As they say, it’s about looking with your heart and brain, and it’s about the kind of looking at the world, looking at art that inspires you, and take that in whatever camera you use.
“There’s a real beauty to using a big phone camera, like a Panavision, Panaflex camera that we used and PVintage lenses. But conversely, I have here in my flat a Sony a7 camera that I put little lenses on, and the results can be really beautiful. So for very little money, you can shoot great stuff. I’ve gotten trouble for saying that I shot stuff on the first Avengers movie, on an iPhone, which I did. But there you go.”
Not only do I now have to head to Disney+ and watch the Avengers films immediately, McGarvey’s subtle symbiosis of artistry and technological craft is also truly inspiring. I haven’t picked up a camera since I was a teenager, but even I want to have a go.
“I think if you use a camera with joy, enthusiasm, and thought and think into the story, it’s not about the technique, technology, or the camera itself. I’m very lucky to work with great people who guide me when I work on these fancy cameras. I know about film cameras, but these new cameras and large-format digital cameras, I have no idea. If all the people that I work with went away for the day, I would not be able to even switch on the camera. That’s how bad it is.
“So I prefer simplicity, because it focuses you on the looking. As an artist, director, or a young filmmaker like yourself and others, simplicity is all when you’re embarking on a career in telling stories with a camera. You know you can get more elaborate as the day goes on, but starting with talking about equipment alone is maybe a backwards step. Let our wonderful, imaginative, dreaming brains make our films. The equipment will be under our arms to decide what to use for whatever scenario we want to depict.”
You heard the man, people… get snapping.
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jasmine.valentine@futurenet.com (Jasmine Valentine)
