How DP Arseni Khachaturan shot Kristoffer Borgli's subversive 'The Drama' in 35mm in two contrasting visual styles in Boston and New Orleans

How can love feel both undeniable and destabilizing at the same time?

This was the question posed by director Kristoffer Borgli (Sick of Myself, Dream Scenerio) in The Drama, his car wreck of a wedding planning rom-com for museum curator Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and bookstore clerk Emma (Zendaya).

After a whirlwind courtship and blissful domesticity in Boston, the happy couple's pending nuptials are upended after Emma makes an explosive confession about an aborted school shooting during a drunken game of "What's the worst thing you've ever done?"

Cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan (Bones and All) was immediately drawn to the project. "I thought it was a very exciting script because it was hard to pinpoint the genre exactly," he says of his first collaboration with Borgli. "And it was liberating once I read it because it could go in so many directions and explore so many different things. There was a comedic element to it, there was depth to it and substance. It was about acceptance, it was about love, it was about forgiveness. And it also had this punk sort of fun element to it, which was quite unusual."

Both director and cinematographer are avid 35mm users, and this subversive love story created lots of visual possibilities. They shot in autumnal Boston and wintry New Orleans (for the flashbacks of younger Emma, played by Jordyn Curet) on Panavision Millennium XL cameras and Panavision's P-Vintage optics. After numerous testing, Khachaturan chose his favorite stock: KODAK VISION3 500T Color Negative Film 5219.

Not only that but Khachaturan also tested and used Kodak's new Anti-Halation Undercoat (AHU) for the VISION3, which removes the disposable, carbon-based remjet backing. "I think 500T was one of the first ones to get that new stock with no remjet layer, and we were testing it extensively," he adds, "and I was super happy to find out that it looks pretty much the same...it's almost identical."

With the emphasis on beautiful faces and portraits, Khachaturan was very pleased with his choice of the 500T 5219 and P-Vintage optics. They provided a vintage character to the cinematography. "This was honestly quite amazing because I've never done a film where we had so many tight shots and so many tight portraits," he explains. "And it was definitely a lot of long lenses and zoom lenses."

Shooting The Drama on film provided an aura of empathy and humility for Charlie and Emma. During prep, Borgli rented a movie theater in Boston on weekends, where the cast and crew watched an assortment of films, including Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher, Claire Denis' 35 Shots of Rum. 

What the cinematographer aimed for in this multiple-camera shoot was evoking a sense of normality at the outset. "It was very important for me to have a film that visually looks mature and low-key and create a sense of relatability, because, at the end of the day, [Charlie and Emma] are very normal people," Khachaturan recalls.

The 1.85:1 aspect ratio worked really well for portraits but also was not too narrow to be able to isolate characters from one another easily. But after Charlie learns Emma’s secret we start to often find them estranged from another and not share the same frame anymore.

This is when emotional chaos ensues, lending a hallucinatory surrealism amidst the metropolitan affluence. Among the highlights: Charlie and Emma breaking into the Cambridge Art Museum and kissing when the red alarm lights flash, and his bloody nightmare, in which all of the wedding guests get mowed down by gunfire.

"Boston was really beautiful to shoot in because it offers such a big variety of locations," Khachaturan says. "We shot the apartment in Back Bay, toward the end of production. It was not the easiest to work in with a lot of steps and spiral ladder, so working there was an exercise."

The Cambridge cafe, where Charlie and Emma first meet, was discovered after an exhaustive search. They wound up shooting at Tatte Bakery & Cafe, which was big, bright, and exposed, which was important, given Charlie's sneaky back and forth to impress Emma.

Emma's publishing house was shot at MIT with its Brutalist architecture, and the dance studio, where Charlie and Emma rehearse their choreographed wedding dance, was found on Google Maps by Khachaturan. "It was on the top floor, and I was hoping for the sun to be there on the day and it was [exquisite]," he says. "We shot it on day one, actually. We just started shooting and it was so nice to start the shoot that way, with the beautiful light that comes in."

Normally, the cinematographer likes to use as much natural light as possible, but he wasn't able to do it as much because of Boston's temperamental fall weather, where there was a lot of wind and the sun came in and out.

Both the wine tasting — where Emma divulges her secret — and the wedding were shot at the Mansion on Turner Hill, an Elizabethan-style estate in Ipswich, Massachusetts. In fact, the wedding was very difficult to shoot. They shot for more than a week, and the shot list took a long time. "There were so many different dynamics between characters," Khachaturan explains, "and so many angles and eyelines, and everybody's sitting around at circle-shaped tables in this big hall. We were making sure we didn't miss anything and also didn't overshoot."

What was also noteworthy about the wedding was that the ceremony took place throughout an entire evening until nightfall, so it was exciting to shape each moment and each bit with a gradual light change. "Starting in bright daylight first," offers Khachaturan, "that created a sense of ambiguity, like anything can happen, and things can go either right or wrong for the bride and groom."

"And, as the dusk was creeping in," he continues, "we had a scene between Emma and Charlie and Misha [Hailey Gates], his co-worker, which was pretty cathartic, with the last rays of golden sunlight. Especially on Charlie, as he is confronted with his own lies and secrets, as Emma simultaneously fears that now everyone at the wedding knows her secret. And, as the nightfall comes, that’s when things get out of hand quite rapidly."

Khachaturan, who was assisted by gaffer Frans Wetterings and key grip Matt Mania, lit the entire wedding from the outside. The setups were large because they shot it for several days. "There were so many angles and so many scenes in different rooms," Khachaturan recalls. "And I had to bring a lot of stability. There again, a lot of windows and light coming in. So chasing lights wasn't really an option on this particular film."

Meanwhile, the flashbacks in New Orleans, which depict Emma's teenage alienation in the early 2000s, were filmed two months after the Boston shoot in early 2025. "New Orleans has a pronounced contrast visually with the Boston scenes," Khachaturan suggests. "And also, a contrast to Charlie's upbringing in the UK. I think we were looking for the southern texture. We shot in some swamps, looking for the nature that is clearly on the other side of the country."

Even though the look is more saturated (playing up the red, for example, in Emma's high school sweatshirt), they used the same film stock. They didn't push or pull anything but graded it differently with colorist Damien Vandercruyssen at Harbor Picture Company to have more vivid impact. However, to depict Emma's low fi web and phone capture, they used a Hi8 camera and a web cam from that era on her computer.

Speaking of film processing, Khachaturan gave a shout out to Tony Landano, the late manager of the Kodak Film Lab in Queens, who passed away earlier this year. "This was my last film with Tony, and I've been working with him for over a decade," he remembers. "I did three features with him. He was great. We've lost a legend."