The first time Juanmi Azpiroz read the script for Netflix's The Rip, his reaction was definitive: this is a black-and-white film. A noir in the lineage of 1940s and 1950s crime dramas. A film from the same world as The Night of the Hunter.
He knew they wouldn't actually shoot it in monochrome — a contemporary audience expects colour — but the impulse set the visual code. Shadow over light. Held frames over coverage. Faces held long enough that the viewer has to sit with what the person on screen might be thinking. When Ben Affleck and Matt Damon share a frame in The Rip, the air between them is doing more work than anything either of them says.
In conversation with Zebra Home Cinema, the Spanish DP explained how that instinct became the film's visual language, why he considers a cinematographer a translator rather than an author, and what he tells film-school students who turn up with only one short to their name.
A Noir Film Shot in Colour — The Visual Code of The Rip
"The first time I read the script, my first reaction was: this is a black and white movie. This is a noir movie from the 50s, the 40s. I said, yeah, I want to shoot it in black and white. Then I said, okay, just don't be stupid. We're not shooting black and white. But that was the core. That was the heart of the movie."
Azpiroz gathered references for director Joe Carnahan, his gaffer, and his camera department — almost all of them in black and white. The touchstone wasn't Robert Rodriguez's Sin City, he clarified, but something older: The Night of the Hunter and the high-contrast crime pictures of the same era.
The finished film sits in colour, but its DNA is pre-digital. Murky yellow tints where other films would punch up saturation. Faces held in shadow longer than most streaming directors would tolerate. The bridge sequence near the opening of The Rip — shot in Miami — evokes the same queasy yellow haze as the opening of Michael Mann's Miami Vice. Azpiroz suspects it might actually be the same bridge.
The editorial discipline is deliberate. Azpiroz resists calling The Rip an action film at all.
"It's a thriller with a little bit of action at the end. If I have to describe the movie in one word, I would say thriller more than action. There's a little bit of action and it's fun to watch, but it's not an action-driven movie. It's more of a who-done-it at the end of the day."
That framing matters for cinematography. Action films cover fast and wide. Thrillers stay on a face. The Rip is built on long-held close-ups — not because there aren't fights and chases, but because the tension the audience is meant to feel comes from not knowing who to trust.
From San Sebastián to Cincinnati — Azpiroz's Path Behind the Camera
Azpiroz grew up in San Sebastián, in Spain's Basque Country. The first films that imprinted on him were the Westerns his local TV station ran on Saturday afternoons. The moment he knew he wanted to work in the industry came later — after watching Raiders of the Lost Ark.
"It was the first time I said out loud: I want to do that. Whatever that is, I want to be part of that."
By 14, he'd told his parents he wanted to make films. As a teenager he played what he now describes as "horrible" bass in the San Sebastián music scene, but he had a stills camera in his hands constantly, photographing his friends' bands. When he enrolled in the local film school, the transition from still to moving image was almost automatic.
He started his first film-school placement in the directing department. By the end of the first week, he'd crossed over to camera. That pattern — moving toward whichever department had the physical instrument in it — shaped the rest of his career. He worked his way from second assistant to first assistant to DP in the Spanish commercial and feature system, then moved to the United States.
Today Azpiroz splits his time between Spain and the US, with the majority of his feature work in America. When we spoke, he was shooting a small film back in northern Spain with a longtime collaborator — "small" only by production scale, not by ambition.
The Carnahan Partnership — Eight Films in Ten Years
Azpiroz first met Joe Carnahan on Wheelman, the thriller directed by first-timer Jeremy Rush and produced by Carnahan. Azpiroz was the DP. Carnahan was on set nearly every day as a producer, trying to help a rookie director get across the line.
Midway through the shoot, Carnahan asked him: do you want to shoot a movie for me?
Azpiroz thought he was joking. He wasn't.
Since then, the pair have made eight films together — three with Carnahan as producer and five with him directing. The Rip is the eighth. The cadence is roughly one film a year for the last decade, meaning the two now spend four to five months annually working directly alongside each other.
"We're like the old couple. At this point, we know each other really well. That shows — in the way we learn to work with each other, in how efficient we are on set, in how we share ideas that end up on images."
The same pattern plays out with Spanish director Daniel Benmaier, with whom Azpiroz has worked for over twenty years across six films and more than a hundred commercials. When a DP has that kind of runway with a director, a shorthand emerges. Choices are made silently. Pitches are anticipated before they're made. Arguments are conducted in glances.
| Partnership | Films together | History |
|---|---|---|
| Azpiroz × Joe Carnahan | 8 features (3 as producer, 5 as director) | ~10 years, 4–5 months of collaboration per year |
| Azpiroz × Daniel Benmaier | 6 features + 100+ commercials | 20+ years, ongoing |
What a DP Actually Does (And Why It's Mostly Listening)
Ask Azpiroz what a cinematographer does, and his answer is unambiguous.
"A cinematographer is just a translator of the mind of the director into images. In every movie, my art is at the service of the director and the story. So I have to shift. I can't shoot every movie the same."
This is the opposite of the auteur-DP narrative. For Azpiroz, the first job is listening — to the director's voice, their strengths, their blind spots — and filling gaps.
"In an ideal world, me as a DP, I fit there to fill the gaps. If that person is very strong with actors and dialogue but not that fluid with the camera, I'll step in and help them with the camera. Listen: okay, what do you like? You like to move the camera? You like symmetry? You like a shaky camera? Do you want to shoot the whole film like Hannah and Her Sisters and we do it all handheld? All that information comes in prep."
The through-line across every collaboration he describes is prep. The director's vision is interrogated, mapped, and pressure-tested in pre-production so that production itself becomes execution, not discovery. Azpiroz's job is to make sure whatever is in the director's head ends up on the image — and to offer his "two cents here and there" when the execution needs a tweak.
How the Chase Got Built (With Extraction's Second-Unit DP)
The Rip contains a chase sequence that feels old-school — closer in spirit to 1980s and 90s action filmmaking than to the cut-to-cut geography of modern Marvel. Azpiroz didn't shoot it.
He and Carnahan designed the scene on paper and shot the actors. The actual vehicular mayhem — the crashes, the practical destruction, the dangerous camera placements — was handled by a second unit led by Greg Baldi, the cinematographer behind Extraction.
"It's fun. You have that feeling that, okay, this is like... this is what I thought movies were when I was a kid. Cars and explosions and breaking cameras. That's when you go home — 'Hey dad, what did you do today?' 'Oh, I broke five cars and blew up stuff.' That's the feeling I had making movies when I was probably 10. That's a second unit on an action film."
This is how modern action gets made on films that aren't tentpole budgets. The A-unit DP sets the visual grammar and shoots the actors. A trusted second-unit DP — someone with the reflexes, crash rigs, and stunt-coordinator relationships — handles the pieces that would slow down or endanger the principal cast. The grammar is then preserved in the grade and the edit, so the seams disappear.
The Trick of Reflections and Mirrors
One of the quieter technical questions in cinematography: when a character is in front of a mirror or inside a car with reflective glass, why do you almost never see the camera in the shot?
Azpiroz's answer is two-step.
- 1.Careful staging. Place the camera at an angle where the reflection geometry doesn't catch it. Use matte-black body panels, lens shades, and dark-cloth draping to suppress any incidental reflections that land in frame.
- 2.Post-production paint-out. If the shot genuinely demands a camera position that would physically appear in the reflection — the canonical example is a close-up with the camera directly behind the actor and a full mirror in front — the camera is digitally removed in the grade.
"You try the first thing, which is just not to do it — try to avoid it with the camera. But if you want to be right behind Bond and you want to be specific there, and the camera will be perfect anyway, they paint it out later."
The Casino Royale suit-fitting scene — Bond standing between tailor's mirrors, camera impossibly positioned behind him — is the reference every DP will cite. The rule across all such shots: solve in-camera first, commit to the paint-out when you can't.
Advice for Young Filmmakers — "Shoot Every Weekend"
Azpiroz is asked constantly what he tells young people trying to break into cinematography. His answer is neither a pure endorsement of film school nor the influencer-style "just pick up a camera" reply.
Go to film school, he says — because film school teaches the history of cinema, the grammar of the form, and (most importantly) puts you in a room with other future collaborators. Darren Aronofsky met his long-time cinematographer at NYU three decades ago; they still work together.
But when he visits film schools and asks students who want to direct how many shorts they've shot, the answer is usually one.
"Why? If I was 15, 16, 17 now, I would be shooting a short every weekend. Every single weekend. It's the only way of really learning. If you go to producers and you've been at NYU, AFI, whatever, and you have one short — chances are not going to be higher. But if you go and say, I've shot 150 short films and I'm 21, look at what I've done — those are going to be good shorts. You've had the hours. You've hit many rocks in your way."
The barrier to entry has collapsed. It used to be equipment. It's now effort.
"Any computer has a program where you can edit, a program where you can mix sound. Mics are cheap. You can do an amazing amount of stuff with nothing right now."
The thing you can't buy, rent, or shortcut is the number of repetitions. Azpiroz's rule, boiled down: if your goal is to direct, shoot. If your goal is to shoot, shoot more. Everything else compounds on top of volume.
Why the Big Screen Still Matters — Even for a Netflix Film
The Rip is a Netflix original. In theory, almost every viewer will see it on a television, a tablet, or a phone. Azpiroz, though, watched the premiere in a packed New York cinema in front of 1,200 people — and his framing of that experience is a useful defence of theatrical projection in the streaming era.
"Nothing replaces the big screen. I'm a huge IMAX fan. Movies are a communal experience. The laughter and the hysteria are contagious — it happens many times. You go to a comedy show and you laugh, and then you watch that same comedy on TV and you don't laugh. It's a whole different animal."
The images in The Rip were framed, lit, and coloured with an expectation that at least some of the audience would see them the way the premiere audience did: large, loud, and dark. Azpiroz doesn't pretend everyone will — he happily watches films on a 52-inch at home, or on an iPad on location — but he draws a line under what the image was made for.
For anyone who has invested in a home cinema — reference-level projection, calibrated acoustics, a room dark enough to let the image breathe — Azpiroz's point is the simplest justification there is. The image you're looking at was designed to be big. Give it space.
Key Takeaways
- ▪The Rip was designed as a colour film that behaves like a 1940s–50s noir — held close-ups, muted palette, suspicion in every frame. The reference point Azpiroz gave his crew was The Night of the Hunter, not Sin City.
- ▪Azpiroz and director Joe Carnahan have shot eight films together over a decade. Long DP–director pairings become shorthand; fewer words are needed on set and work becomes dramatically more efficient.
- ▪A cinematographer's primary job, by Azpiroz's definition, is translating the director's vision. Prep is where that translation is agreed; production is where it's executed.
- ▪Modern action on non-tentpole budgets relies on a trusted second-unit DP to shoot the crashes and dangerous pieces while the A-unit stays on the actors. The Rip's chase was handled by Extraction's DP, Greg Baldi.
- ▪Reflections and mirrors are solved in two steps: stage the camera where the geometry hides it, and paint out any remaining camera presence in post. The Casino Royale suit-fitting mirror is the canonical example.
- ▪The biggest gap Azpiroz sees in film-school students isn't knowledge — it's reps. Shoot a short every weekend.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is the cinematographer of Netflix's The Rip?
Spanish DP Juanmi Azpiroz shot The Rip for director Joe Carnahan. It's the eighth feature the pair have made together — three with Carnahan as producer and five with him as director.
Was The Rip shot in black and white?
No. The Rip is a colour film, but Azpiroz and Carnahan designed it around the visual language of 1940s and 1950s noir — muted palette, high contrast, long close-ups, and shadow-forward lighting. The crew's reference points were mostly black-and-white films, including The Night of the Hunter.
Who shot the chase sequence in The Rip?
The chase was shot by a second unit led by Greg Baldi, the cinematographer behind Extraction. Azpiroz and Carnahan designed the sequence on paper and shot the actors; Baldi's unit handled the vehicle action and practical destruction.
How long have Joe Carnahan and Juanmi Azpiroz worked together?
Roughly ten years, across eight films. They met on the thriller Wheelman, which Carnahan produced and Azpiroz photographed. Azpiroz has gone on to shoot every Carnahan-directed feature since Boss Level.
What advice does Juanmi Azpiroz give young filmmakers?
Shoot constantly. His practical standard for anyone at film school is: make a short every weekend. He argues the barrier to entry is no longer equipment — modern cameras, sound tools, and editing software are cheap — but the number of repetitions required to become fluent.
Why did Azpiroz choose a noir visual approach for The Rip?
His first reaction to reading the script was that The Rip is a noir in the lineage of 1940s and 1950s crime films. Rather than shoot it in black and white — which would have felt stylised for a modern audience — he translated the palette and grammar of that era (high contrast, suspicion-heavy close-ups, deep shadow) into a colour image.
