OCTOBER 26, 2026
After months of lens testing for Digger, Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, ASC, AMC, had found the lenses he wanted. Getting them onto the cameras was another matter.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s film reunites the director and cinematographer behind Birdman and The Revenant, with Tom Cruise playing a powerful man trying to save the world from a catastrophe he has unleashed. The Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures production also stars Sandra Hüller, Jesse Plemons, Riz Ahmed and John Goodman.
Chivo chose Leitz ELSIE lenses, which offer a warm color rendition with a gradual falloff of focus, resolution and illumination toward the edges of the frame, creating depth and separation while retaining a sense of the space around the subject. But the production had also chosen to shoot primarily on the Beaumont VistaVision camera, also known as the Beaucam. (Recent productions using the Beaucam include The Brutalist, One Battle After Another and Bugonia.)
The ELSIE lenses were designed around the LPL mount, exclusively used on digital cameras, and adapting them to work on the Beaucam required changes to the mechanics and, at the wide end, the optics. With only a few weeks to go before shooting, Chivo approached Leitz to adapt the lenses to this unintended format.
Making Room for Film
The first challenge was converting the lenses from LPL to Panavision mount. To accommodate the more than 13mm difference in flange depth the rear housings of the lenses had to be redesigned.
The second was mirror clearance. The rear diameters of the wide ELSIE lenses were too large for the space around the Beaucam’s spinning mirror. A lens could have the right mount and still be unusable on the camera.
For Chivo, who is known for using wide lenses to bring the camera close to the action while keeping the surrounding world in frame, losing the wide end was a dealbreaker. The Leitz mechanical design team immediately started working on the rear housings and mounts, while the optical team began redesigning the ELSIE 25mm, the widest lens that could fit on the Beaucam, with new front elements to create a custom 21mm lens.
Within a few weeks, the Leitz team completed the modifications, tested and revised the lenses, and delivered them to set before shooting began. The production also carried a separate set of wide to medium ELSIE lenses for digital capture, including the very first ELSIE 15mm.
Open for Custom Work
“Chivo knew the look he wanted. Our job was to solve the practical problems that stood between his lens choice and the cameras he wanted to use,” says Leitz Cine Managing Director Rainer Hercher. “We love these kinds of challenges. Working with cinematographers to explore what a project needs, whether that means tuning a lens, modifying its mechanics or developing a custom optical solution, is a great way for us to continue pushing boundaries and challenging ourselves. We encourage filmmakers to bring us their ideas so we can work through the possibilities together.”
