Shooting a Secret Life with Ben Stiller

New Zealand cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh’s latest project is actor-director Ben Stiller’s film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, some of which was shot in mid-summer Manhattan, and the hardest aspect of that was not as Dryburgh (pictured, left) admits, “the obvious reasons of people and traffic”.

“It was because the sun only shines in those north/south canyons for about 80 minutes a day, so we had to spread the shooting out over several days and work out a schedule so we could be doing something useful, then come outside and shoot a scene or part of a scene,” Dryburgh told Christchurch Press journalist James Crook.

Then there was the four weeks they spent in Iceland shooting around half the film in a whirlwind schedule.

Stiller’s film is based on James Thurber’s 1939 short-story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

Walter’s vocation as a photo-editor for Life magazine allowed Dryburgh the opportunity to look at classic photojournalism pictures and landscape photography for inspiration and shoot on film rather than digitally.

Dryburgh, 61, is now working with fellow New Zealander Gregor Nicholas on a Volkswagen commercial in Alaska. He recently finished working with director Michael Mann on his film Cyber, which was shot in Southeast Asia and is due out in 2014.

Image credit: Stuart Dryburgh on IMDB