COURTESY OF NEON32 SUMMER 2019 MOVIEMAKER.COM
EYE PIECE
JUNGLE
F E V E R
DREAM
DP Jasper Wolf journeyed into the
heart of a Colombian jungle never
before captured on film to shoot the
surreal survival thriller Monos
BY JASPER WOLF
IRECTOR Alejandro Landes
and I envisioned Monos as
a subjective war fable. We
wanted to create an intense,
intimate, and sensory expe-
rience—a fever dream channeled through
the perspective and emotions of a strange
group of kid soldiers who watch over their
American hostage (Julianne Nicholson).
The film starts high above the clouds on
a hilltop and quickly delves deep into the
South American jungle—two extremely con-
fined spaces that act as both our characters’
natural habitat and their natural prison.
Fittingly, Monos owes a debt to
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies,
Elem Klimov’s Come and See, a plethora
of still photography known for its diaristic
quality (such as the work of Bill Henson,
Jim Goldberg, and Tim Hetherington), and
Henri Rousseau, whose paintings heavily
influenced our understanding of the jungle.
The bunker where these soldiers reside sits
atop the Páramo de Chingaza—a 4,020-meter
mountain in the Eastern Ranges of the
Colombian Andes that’s beautiful, yet rough
and cold and feels as if it exists in another
world. The altitude was of course a factor
and the weather was capricious, changing
quickly between sun, rain, and fog.
The jungle was the opposite: a hot, humid,
and dense area of Antioquia, Colombia that
surrounds the Samaná Norte River’s wild
stream. The brutal conditions and inaccessi-
bility of both locations prevented them from
ever going before cameras... until now.
From the moment I read Alejandro and
co-writer Alexis Dos Santos’ script, I was
completely taken with its exciting cinematic
possibilities. Alejandro and I shot-listed the
whole film up front, which established a great
creative synergy between us that we main-
tained throughout our shoot. Besides being
well-prepared, we wanted to be bold, fearless,
sharp, and spontaneous—to be open to the re-
alities of the moment, and to adapt whenever
we saw opportunities to improve the material.
Defining Monos’ visual identity began
with camera movement. We decided that
the aforementioned river—with both its
unique flow and the symbolic power of
water—would be our iconic motif, the spirit
of the film around which our camera moves
and pacing would be centered.
We wanted Monos to be a sensory experi-ence—to create a feeling within audiences
of being physically present in each scene in
a hyperrealistic way. To capture this height-
ened tone, we shot in wide-angle Cinema-
Scope, which added an epic dimension to the
oddly fascinating behavior of the soldiers. This
shooting scheme also added a sense of weight
to the harsh environment in which they’re
placed, and even to their abstract set of values.
Because the film treats this group of soldiers
as one character in itself, we wanted our
camera to be an omniscient observer of the
group—not quite a human presence, but in-
stead like a spirit, all-seeing and all-knowing,
with its own conscience and point of view.
One key to this approach was our exten-
sive use of long takes during dramatically
significant moments. Initially, we thought
we’d lean in the direction of using a Steadi-D