Romancing Anyone But You DOP Danny Ruhlmann | FilmInk

“I felt like Sydney Harbour and the city itself needed to be shown off as this location that you fall in love with as well as falling in love with the characters,” says Sydneysider Danny Ruhlmann.

“I’ve shot on the harbour many times, but often, like my previous film, True Spirit, the iconic nature of the harbour wasn’t so heavily featured,” says Ruhlmann, who great up in the Emerald City. “Having shot high-end commercials for 15 years, it’s your job to find a fresh perspective of things that you see every day. Here, I was really trying to look at the Sydney Opera House and Harbour and see it from a perspective that you may not have seen in film before or lit the way it’s usually lit.

“For example, when the guys get on the super yacht. Initially, I think that was written for late afternoon and we really pushed to shoot on the Jones Bay Wharf side of Pyrmont because it’s just a very different perspective of the city that most people don’t really appreciate. But to shoot it at night, I think really helped because it just took away the things that you didn’t want to see. It highlighted the beautiful lighting and shapes of the skyline and reflections on the water. Thankfully, the production had enough money in the budget to light the Opera House. I went there often at night and walked around. Unfortunately, the eastern side of the Opera House is almost forgotten. I don’t think that whoever is responsible for lighting the Opera House really cares about the eastern side. It is all about the Harbour Bridge, Circular Quay, the Opera House, that kind of loop. But when you look at it at night from the other side, it looked quite sad, almost. So, I wanted to throw a lot of resources into that, and it’s just really showing off that perspective of the Opera House that you wouldn’t normally see.

“It’s important to follow the script, it couldn’t go off tangent, but we did decide that we wanted to put the buoy on this side, and logistically, it made sense because we were out of the traffic of the harbour. We were a little bit protected from that and we had a bit more control. It was great because this is not what you would normally see, and then we could just really build on that.”

This is Danny Ruhlmann’s first rom-com, having shot the likes of The Nugget and Little Fish in Australia, and series such as Sense8, Messiah and Foundation abroad. After living in the US for a decade, he returned to Australia during Covid.

Anyone But You Executive Producer Catherine ‘Tatts’ Bishop was determined to use an Australian cinematographer on the film.

“I had spent a lot of time living in America and working the American system, so I ticked the boxes,” says Ruhlmann about the process of landing the gig. “I still had to pitch to the director a couple of times. We had a number of calls, and it was a matter of just convincing him that my experience in America was going to suit the way that he wanted to work.”

Soon after nabbing the gig, director Will Gluck got Ruhlmann to watch a handful of rom-coms. “I went back to him afterwards and he said, ‘those rom-coms I wanted you to watch … I want this film to be nothing like those films, nothing like those rom-coms’. So, that was the brief. He was quite open about it. He gave me a lot of freedom, but he didn’t want it to feel artificial. Sometimes rom-coms feel artificial, over-lit and a bit plastic. So, that was my challenge.”

Mission accomplished.

To get to this point has been a circuitous journey for Danny Ruhlmann.

“As a 12-year-old, I was given a camera. I had a dark room at home. I processed my own film. When I left school, I was lucky to get a job at Channel Seven. I did a traineeship there in the news department. After a couple of years, I was officially graded as a TV cameraman. I was 21, and I thought that there had to be more than this.

“I loved movies and photography. I put the feelers out in regards to a film school, and I ended up at the American Film Institute in LA. I funded that myself, travelled to LA, lived there for a year. That was instrumental in learning the art of cinematography and filmmaking, learning how to tell a story and use tools to help push a story forward and to support a director’s vision.

“We learnt video as well as film. It wasn’t important whether it was a 35mm camera or video, it was about how you use this tool and light and lenses and camera movement. How do you use all these elements to help tell a story?

“I was incredibly poor. I struggled on lots of levels. I had to come home because I just didn’t have any money. The Americans really respected that film school but then I came back to Australia, and no one understood what it meant to have gone there.

“I ended up meeting Andrew Lesnie. He was incredibly generous with his time, and he became a mentor to me. I worked with him as an assistant for a couple of years, but then I really felt like I wasn’t following my true love, which was being behind the camera and nurturing my love for cinematography. I used my TV contacts and started shooting documentaries, TV promos for the networks because I could shoot film. I spent a lot of my career shooting high-end television commercials. And then throughout that period I was able to dip in and out of drama and long form filmmaking, feature films and TV.

“It’s important to go and do other things,” according to Ruhlmann. “Shoot a documentary or a short film, it’s part of the rounding. I think it’s part of what’s made Australian cinematographers well-respected overseas. We are comfortable shooting with limited resources and thinking in a practical way in order to overcome the fact that we don’t always have all the tools.

It’s poetic that Andrew Lesnie gave Danny Ruhlmann his first opportunity on a film set.

“I’m a huge fan of the Australian cinematographers who came before me,” he says when asked about his influences. “Russell Boyd, John Seale, Dean Semler, obviously Andrew Lesnie. Those guys were my heroes growing up. They had a similar background to me. They shot documentaries, I think Don McAlpine worked in news, as did Dean Semler. These guys that also worked in Hollywood, if they could achieve that, then I could possibly achieve that as well.”

Having come back to Australia and taken advantage of the number of offshore productions that came here around the time of Covid and beyond, what does Ruhlmann think of Australia being used by Hollywood to shoot American stories?

“I think it benefits us, the film industry, economically. It allows small companies to invest in equipment that we are used to working with in America. It gives cinematographers like myself an exposure to the international market.

“I sometimes get frustrated when a lot of international crew are brought in,” he admits. “But, if cinematographers and production designers and camera operators are employed locally, I think that’s a fantastic thing that they get exposure to that.

“It’s interesting, though, I have had converse experiences; camera department people who have never worked on anything but the big American productions. There’s a certain kind of attitude where some of those guys just need to go away and do a short film or work on a low budget Australian film just to balance the experience. If there’s enough work, they get on the treadmill, going from one big production to the next.”

Anyone But You is in cinemas now.