How Giovanni Ribisi made his big-screen debut as cinematographer between starring in “Avatar ”and “Horizon ”sequels

The longtime actor explains how he made his feature debut as cinematographer in twisted thriller "Strange Darling."

While it's become increasingly common for actors to step behind the camera and into the director's chair (Zoê Kravitz's Blink Twice, out this weekend, is just the latest example), it's far rarer for an established performer to take hold of the camera itself and become a cinematographer.

That longtime character actor Giovanni Ribisi successfully made the transition, making a stunning feature debut with J.T. Mollner's twisted thriller Strange Darling, is a notable feat on its own. That he did so between starring in two major studio franchises — Kevin Costner's Horizon saga and James Cameron's Avatar sequels — is even more remarkable.

But, like most good things, it didn't happen overnight. "I've been doing cinematography in the background, professionally, for the past 15 years or something like that," Ribisi tells Entertainment Weekly. "But it wasn't really something that I liked to talk about. I wanted to really cut my teeth and pay my dues."

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So how did he end up as the cinematographer for writer-director Mollner's genre-defying serial killer thriller? "Well, J.T. and I had met, I think it was six or seven years ago, through a mutual friend," he explains. "Over the years, J.T. would send me material that he was working on and vice versa. And then he sent [Strange Darling] to me two years ago, and I think within 15 minutes, I called him up and I was begging to be a part of it. And then working on the cinematography was sort of an evolution from that conversation. I'm just grateful for him giving me the opportunity."

"When I met him, we became friendly, and we liked a lot of the same movies," recalls Mollner. "And I was like, I really can't wait to put you in a movie. Like, please do a movie with me. I want you to act in one of my films because I love your work. And he said, 'Well, sure, but this is the other thing I do that I really love.' And he showed me what he had been doing for all those years, and he took me to his studio and showed me his camera equipment and his screening room and scanners and all this stuff. And he showed me what he'd been working on and lots of footage. And I was just blown away that he hadn't shot a feature film yet. It was like unmined gold."

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As much as Ribisi liked his friend's script, it wasn't like he didn't have other stuff going. After his critically acclaimed Amazon Prime series Sneaky Pete ended in 2019, Ribisi played Joe Colombo in 2022's The Offer, the mini-series about the making of The Godfather. That same year, he also reprised his role as Parker Selfridge in Avatar: The Way of the Water, a part he will continue to play in the next three installments. Then, in 2023, he starred in the Showtime series Waco: The Aftermath, and earlier this year, he appeared briefly at the end of Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 as Pickering, a role that's set to expand in the franchise's next three films.

But in a twist of fate, the COVID-19 lockdown provided enough of a lull for Ribisi and Mollner to craft their project. "A lot of the prep was done during COVID-19 when productions were still shut down and even into the beginning parts of production. We were still wearing masks and we had a COVID team on the production," he explains. "But with the Avatar movies, I love it. I love the experience and the process, but we shot, I think 2 and 3, five years ago and then recently came back. There's just a lot of work that they do on that, and you can see the years of toil. So there was definitely a lot of time, and it was also in and around Horizon 1 and 2. There were a couple of days [of shooting] for each movie and then 3 and 4 are a lot heavier. So yeah, it was actually just a perfect window of about a year, a year and a half, to dive in with J.T. and work on this and conceptualize, and it was just such a joy. It was just one of the better experiences I've had professionally in this business."

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"He's being pretty modest," adds Mollner, sitting alongside Ribisi for the interview. "He's so busy, it blows my mind. I don't know how to multitask on things like that. I make a movie, and that's all I think about for years. And Vonni, going off and working with Kevin Costner on the range and doing Avatar somehow? We shot the movie two years ago and then went through post-production after that. But during the whole process of shooting and before shooting, he had all these other things going on, but Vonni always seemed totally available for this. He's got a family, he's got other movies, but he always makes it feel like a priority."

Ribisi's interest in filmmaking dates back to his early days in Hollywood as a child actor. "I went to school on movie sets and in the basements of sound stages," he says. "My schoolmates were really the camera crew. I didn't want to hang out with other child actors. I still don't want to hang out with other child actors," he adds with a laugh. "But I was fascinated with the craft. Eventually, about 15 years ago, I bought a digital motion picture camera and started shooting my friends. And that evolved into buying more stuff and eventually having a small studio and shooting music videos and really trying to cut my teeth and learn about it."

As Ribisi's acting career continued to thrive as an adult, appearing in classic films like Saving Private Ryan and TV shows like Friends, he got the chance to work with some of Hollywood's great directors and cinematographers. "If there is a cinematographer in the room, I'm just all over everything," he says. "At a certain point, they started to get hip to what my agenda was. They were getting a little more standoffish," he jokes, adding, "But I remember Peter Jackson's cinematographer, Andrew Lesnie, who's no longer with us, was a huge inspiration. I worked with him in Australia [on 2004's Love's Brother] and he was so fun and had such a wit, and there was a lot of wisdom that he was proffering to me."

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Ribisi also names Dante Spinotti, Sal Totino, and Reed Morano as inspirations, but eventually, he says, he needed to find his own way. "The thing is, at a certain point, you get saturated in experience and you're trying to cultivate your own voice. And I think that trying to look away from what the rest of the herd is doing — and I don't mean to insult people — and go, ‘Okay, well, that's great and I aspire to all of that, but what could I do that really is my own voice?'"

With his first feature, it's clear that voice is already coming into its own. Inspired by films like Tony Richardson's Mademoiselle (1966), Kobayashi's Harakiri (1962), and Ken Russell's The Devils (1971), Ribisi borrowed from his heroes to form his own unique style with Strange Darling, which revels in subverting genre expectations within the "final girl"/serial killer archetype.

But the first-time DP also brings something to the table as a director of photography that very few, if any, can boast: decades of experience in front of the lens. "I feel like as an actor, you often have a kind of interesting close connection with DPs and with camera operators because they're the people who are right there with you in the scene as you're shooting it," says Willa Fitzgerald, who stars as a mysterious character dubbed "the Lady" in Strange Darling. "And to have Giovanni be both the DP and the camera operator a lot of the time, it was almost like having another actor on set with you, like another scene partner in a way. I'd never really felt that to that degree. There was something kind of ineffable about that relationship and energy and it was really cool and really exciting to get to have somebody on your side in that way, in these crazy moments, whispering something in your ear and just trusting it. It was very cool. I really loved working with him and obviously, he's an amazing actor and an amazing DP."

Check out Ribisi's work in this year's most unique horror-thriller, Strange Darling, in theaters now.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.