In Conversation: ‘Plainclothes’ Cinematographer Ethan Palmer

by Jamie Rogers

Carmen Emmi’s feature-film debut, Plainclothes, follows Lucas (Tom Blyth), a talented young police officer in the 1990s who works undercover to entrap and arrest gay men. The complication? Lucas is secretly gay himself, and his carefully concealed world begins to unravel when he falls in love with one of his targets.

At the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of Plainclothes at The Ray Theatre, Programming Director Kim Yutani described the film as a “really special, textured, sensual, high-intensity ride”—and it delivers on every word. From start to finish, the film maintains relentless intensity, keeping the audience breathless until the credits roll. For which the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Ensemble Cast was awarded to the film.

Someone who played a pivotal role in creating the much-talked-about tension and capturing the complex performances given by Blyth, Russell Tovey, and Maria Dizzia, is the film’s cinematographer Ethan Palmer. We got the chance to speak with Palmer about what it was like to work with Emmi to create a tension the audience can feel.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

How was your Sundance?

Great. Really great. It's a nice culmination of a lot of work on a feature and uncertainty, you know, you jump on a project and it could be years before it premieres anywhere.There's so much uncertainty in the film business, so it's really nice when something gets accepted to a festival like Sundance, and you get to share it with everybody. And, this film did really well there, I think created a bit of buzz, and that's the best you can hope for.

For the people who don't know maybe what a director of photography or cinematographer does, what does your day to day look like when you're on set?

What does a DP do? It's a role that is very adjacent to the director. You know, ostensibly, by definition, you are in charge of everything visual. So, everything camera and lighting related would be under my purview. But, it ends up being a role that has to straddle more than that in some ways because you kind of are sitting in the middle of a bunch of different departments. That’s part of what I like about it, is that it's sort of multidisciplinary, I'm interfacing with the costume department, with the art department, with grips, electrics, and my own camera team.

But then, there's also a lot of contact with the actors and the cast and, depending on the type of scene you're filming, you are kind of part of the scene if the camera is sort of handheld among the actors.

So, yeah, it's sort of a dance with the actors and then just a lot of collaboration and coordination with the other departments. I feel like it's a pretty fun position to be in because you get kind of a firsthand view into a director's process; you're kind of with them every step of the way, and then you're bringing the thing to life together.

How did you get involved in Plainclothes?

A mutual friend connected me and Carmen, the director, when he was in the search process for DP. It was actually pretty close to the time that he needed to start prep and filming. So it was one of those calls where I thought the script was very strong, and we had a very good call.

We kinda hit it off, and then, like, immediately, I started working on it. So, there was very little build-up time. Then the whole process was actually really quick. Carmen and I were talking yesterday (February 5, 2025) and we realized that February 5 might have been the first day that we started working together last year.

You know, to have the whole thing happen and be at Sundance and everything in less than a year is pretty unusual for any sort of movie, it's been a wild and fun ride. But, we just hit it off. We had the same references, we started talking the same language right away, and that was lucky because, again, we didn't have much time to prepare, so we just kinda jumped into it together.

How did you approach this project in a different way than the ones that you've worked on in the past?

Well, it's interesting because I definitely do a wide range of things from documentary to feature films, and I've worked in a few different genres within feature films and commercials. My approach ends up not being all that different, I guess, in terms of going from disparate project to disparate project. It's definitely led by the script and the director; the process of trying to put a script to photography is remarkably similar, across the different projects.

And I actually see quite a parallel between documentary and fiction work just in terms of creating a set and working with actors, it’s very similar to a documentary setting where you have to be very sensitive to your subjects and create an environment that feels comfortable for everybody. In a documentary, it's somebody sharing their personal life and on a scripted movie, it's an actor going to a vulnerable place, and those are very similar environments and sensitivities that one needs to have as a filmmaker. But, yeah, I just enjoy that variety. It's sort of a grander understanding of the larger human race, I guess and there's different ways to access that.

With Plainclothes, we were definitely building a specific world and visual style, and that's true of any especially scripted project. But, you start to kind of align on kind of what the thing will look and feel like. Carmen and I were trading images and references and having long discussions about all of that, and that starts to come together as a coherent world. Sometimes you have hard and fast rules; we had certain constraints we wanted to work within, certain styles that we wanted to be consistent with, and certainly having a ‘90s-set period film kind of dictated some of that. But, yeah, it sort of all builds up organically, and then suddenly you've got a little bit of a lookbook or a bible to work off of.

Since you've mentioned Carmen, in the Q and A he mentioned using several different types of cameras, like an actual old camcorder, and having to blend the new images with the older real-life footage from police officers and body cams. How did blending those different formats or having to approach it in that ‘90s style change what you had to do or make it different than using a regular handheld, Steadicam, or gimbal?

We had a lot of fun with that because it was an opportunity to really play around with the different textures and formats. We knew pretty early on that we were going to incorporate Hi8 Camcorder video footage—Carmen had his own personal Hi8 camera that he was already starting to shoot with before, even through prep and everything. He really wanted a “winter in Syracuse” set movie. Syracuse is, I think, the snowiest city in New York state, maybe the Northeast, and yet last year, it didn't snow once. So we were chasing snow the whole time trying to get a little bit of that into the movie and I knew that would be a nice fallback in a way to have all that Hi8 footage that he was shooting when it was snowy. I was thinking, selfishly, that's gonna be great; that'll be B-roll, that'll be the shoe leather of the film if we can work that into it, that'll be cool, to fill in some of the imagery that I would like to get, but we're not gonna have time to because we had 18 days.

Then, I think we had always been talking about that as a layer of that footage, but it became more than that. I think the more we started to get comfortable with the idea that that footage would be incorporated in there, we started to see more of a place for it. We would do multiple takes with our big camera and then do a take with the Hi8 camera so that there would be these opportunities to layer some of those shots or even match a frame in places and give another dimension to Lucas’ memory, his growing paranoia, and his feeling of being surveilled, but he's also doing the surveillance and police work. It all spoke to the different topics, the time period of the ‘90s, the police work, and everything.

It sort of came together cohesively. And I say cohesively as it came together, but, the effect is actually disjointed. Right? It's like the edit effect is jarring. It's like when you cut to that lo-fi stuff, you're suddenly displaced; sometimes it's just a flash frame and it's meant to really convey the main character's state of mind.

And speaking of the main character's state of mind, he, like you said, is paranoid. He's anxious. In the screenings, you could really feel the air being sucked out of the audience, and a lot of people walking out of the theaters were saying that this was peak anxiety cinema. Could you tell me a little bit about how you created such a true and immersive unease and tension with the cinematography?

I would start by saying our choice of zooms was a big part of it.

We decided to shoot a 16-millimeter format and that let me use some older 16-millimeter zoom lenses that are very small and lightweight, but have a tremendous range. So, I shot a lot of the movie with a 2-81 millimeter lens that is almost a 12-time zoom. Any of the other camera dorks out there would know the 24-290mm, huge, engineer super 35 lens—it's the equivalent of that, but with something handheld.

So, having the zoom lens on the camera allowed or gave us the opportunity to use zooms within a shot. Often, they were kind of slow deliberate zooms that would close in on our main character and I think drawing a shot out has some inherent tension in the scene. Combined with the zoom, combined with some of the texture and grain that we gave to the image, you [get] kind of a skin crawly environment with that. It's almost Hitchcockian or something where it's drawn out that way. I think that's how we amped up some of the more static scenes like that where there wasn't a lot of action going on within the scene, but there was a lot of internal emotional action.

Then, for scenes that were more fluid, like, sort of the New Year's Eve scene with the family at home, that was largely handheld, and we kind of moved with our actors and created awkward blocking and places where Lucas was kind of getting trapped by his family physically in the kitchen—those types of things were inherently a little bit tense.

But I think lastly, I would just say that all credit to Tom Blyth and his performances because his eyes and his face were just kind of an incredible representation of that character's emotions and so much you could just read on his face. So in a way, my job was made easy.

In that New Year's Eve scene that you mentioned, or in those scenes of really intense panic within Tom Blythe's character, those aspects of the film reminded me of Uncut Gems or even that scene in The Bear where it's Thanksgiving and it's really high stress and chaotic. Did you draw any inspiration from specific projects that maybe people have seen before, or is it just a happy coincidence?

I think all that stuff is in there. Uncut Gems is definitely top of my list. We, Carmen and I, didn't actually talk about Uncut Gems specifically, but we did talk about Black Swan quite a bit.

I think that's another film that's constantly ratcheting up tension and, you know, it is sort of about the main character's psychosis and just getting inside of her head and her world just kinda falling around her. So that was definitely, very much discussed for us. I'm glad those films are all intense and not easy viewing, but it's worth it because I think a goal of cinema is to take you on that ride. Sometimes, if you don't go somewhere that's a little uncomfortable, maybe the ride doesn't feel as good.

I feel like Plainclothes kind of just keeps ramping it up . . . It kinda just keeps building and building, right to that final exhale at the end, and that's the time to take a breath yourself. You know? But it was fun. At the premiere, there were a few moments in the film where there were audible gasps and I could tell the audience was really on the edge of their seats.

One reviewer called it an emotional thriller, and I was like, “Alright, that fits.”

Absolutely, that fits. One of my friends that I was at Sundance with said the movie felt intense and they were buzzing even after the film had ended.

I feel like it's a combo of the photography that we were able to do on set and Carmen's direction, then editing to build all that up. And those things were all working well together.

Earlier, you said basically every project is pretty similar, that you have to approach it with the same sensitivity and vulnerability, and your job doesn't necessarily change very much. But is there anything that you learned in this experience with Plainclothes that is going to impact your future work?

Oh, definitely, I learned so much.

I feel like I try to give very declarative answers in interviews, but of course I’m not that sure of myself. One truth that I feel like I could declare is that, I feel like if I haven't learned something or if I've stopped learning, then, maybe, it's time to go do something else because that's it.

I think that it’s really important to constantly be growing and to be open to new ideas and new ways of doing things and all of that. So, yeah, I feel like I learned a tremendous amount on this film. There were times when the going got tough where I certainly relied on some past experiences and dug myself out of some holes by just having a few tricks up my sleeve that I've used before. Every movie, every project is its own thing, and that's what's so cool about it. You feel like, okay, this is how we make a movie; so, we have a few ways of doing this and a few ways of problem solving. Then when it all comes together at the end and you go to the premiere, you see that it's become its own thing, it's taken on its own life, and that's kind of a fun process.

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