Cinematographer Jake Saner used an old indie filmmaking trick to shoot an arresting underwater sequence in Sarah Elizabeth Mintz’s indie drama Good Girl Jane on a small budget.

Good Girl Jane follows Rain Spencer as the title character — a shy and troubled high school teen who lives life as a loner until she falls in love with Patrick Gibson’s Jamie, a meth dealer hiding his own addiction. In the film’s gorgeous pool party scene, pictured above, Jamie and Jane meet for the first time, marking Jane’s departure from a good girl to a hard partier.

Saner says shooting the underwater scene took some creativity in order to make it happen without a lot of money.

“Because this was a small film with limited resources, we did not have the budget to source a full underwater housing or to hire an underwater team. Our solution for this scene became a large plexiglass fish tank,” Saner tells MovieMaker. “We placed our camera in this large fish tank and floated the tank in the pool. We could submerge the tank into the pool and the camera remained dry as long as the water level never went over the sides of the tank. This is an old indie filmmaking trick for underwater work.”

The result is a really cool effect that makes the viewer feel like they’re following the characters in and out of the water as they dive under and then come back up for air.

“What I love about this approach is that, because the tank is larger than the camera, we could create separation between the lens and the plexiglass, giving us a clean and distinct water line between the underwater and above water portions of the frame,” Saner adds. “I love how this turned out. I think in this case our technical limitations required us to keep things simple and allowed Rain and Paddy (Jane and Jamie) to carry the scene.”

Saner is based in New York, which is where he first met Mintz at New York University’s Tisch program in 2011. He worked with her on her short film “Transit” that year starring Dakota Johnson, and when he graduated in 2013, he won the Arri Volker Bahnemann Award for Cinematography. But long before college, Saner was making movies. At age 9, he made a stop-motion film on his dad’s VHS camcorder that made the rounds on the children’s film festival circuit.

Saner’s other film work includes Kaz Firpo’s 2016 short film “Refuge” that premiered at SXSW and Bassam Tariq’s 2019 short film “Ghosts of Sugar Land” 2019 which premiered at Sundance and was later acquired by Netflix. Also in 2019, he shot, edited, and co-directed Wale Oyejide’s short “After Migration: Calabria,” which became a Vimeo Staff Pick and is now streaming on the Criterion Channel. In 2023, he collaborated with Oyejide again on his first feature, Bravo, Burkina, which also premiered at Sundance.

Good Girl Jane premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2022, where it won Best U.S. Narrative Feature and Best Performance in a U.S. Narrative for star Rain Spencer. It will be available to rent on Amazon, iTunes, and other streaming platforms on Oct. 8th from Tribeca Films.

Below, Saner tells us about the color palette he and Mintz drew on for Good Girl Jane, shooting in tight spaces like cars and closets, and what inspired the unique camera movements in the film.

Also Read: Good Girl Jane Writer-Director Sarah Elizabeth Mintz Wrote A ‘Page Turny, Black List’-y Script — Then Tossed It and Started Over

Q&A With Good Girl Jane Cinematographer Jake Saner

Jake Saner behind the scenes of Good Girl Jane, photo by James Rosser Berry

MovieMaker: I love how real this movie felt, how the camera was almost another character in the story. How would you describe the style of cinematography that you used to shoot this? What inspired you? 

Saner: I would describe the cinematography in Good Girl Jane as intuitive yet choreographed verité. Each scene in the film (aside from several planned montage moments) is a single handheld shot. There are very few edits in the film. We essentially shot the movie like a series of mini plays with the camera as a guided perspective weaving through our characters.

This approach required our cast and crew to be completely present throughout each take, which added to the realism. Our aim was to immerse the viewer in Jane’s world. At a screening the other night, an audience member expressed that the tone of the camera reminded them of what it felt like to be Jane’s age: drifting, untethered, tumbling through unfamiliar landscapes. I like this thought.

Sarah’s decision to approach the film in this way affected every department. My team, especially my focus pullers, had to the be incredibly locked in and in sync with me and the cast throughout filming. I took most inspiration from the those around me: Sarah, the cast, our producer Lauren Pratt, our crew. Everyone was mindful of the tone of our working environment because, without editing, the feeling of a scene is very closely linked with the energy of the set. 

MovieMaker: You previously worked with director Sarah Elizabeth Mintz on the 2012 short “Transit” starring Dakota Johnson. What made you want to keep working with her, and how did you first get involved with Good Girl Jane? 

Jake Saner: Sarah and I are longtime collaborators. We first met at NYU in 2011 and have since developed a true and deep working relationship and friendship. I think collaboration within trust, built over time, is one of the most magical experiences. 

Sarah first sent me a draft of an earlier exploration of this material in 2014. There was no hesitation in agreeing to be a part of this process. We’ve always been in alignment with what inspires us: human connection, heart, authenticity. Truthful, simple, human stories. To explore a story that was inspired by Sarah’s own experiences was exciting because I knew she would bring a unique specificity to her world-building as well as a 

true and complex tenderness toward all her characters. This project has clearly been in the works for a long time and has become a lesson in the monumental effort it takes to make work like this. 

MovieMaker: Can you talk about what inspired the specific lighting and color choices in this movie? I feel like it had a really specific palette and I’m curious about how you approached it. 

Saner: Sarah and I were discussing the other day how our color scheme seems to have materialized out the combination of each of our individual aesthetics. The cooler tones come from Sarah and reference a more electric candy-colored vibrance: blue Gatorade and pool water. The warmer tones come from me and play off sodium vapor streetlights (that were the norm through the 2010s) and dimmed incandescent lamp bulbs.

Our production designer Tom Castronovo was instrumental in cultivating this cohesion. The color story developed naturally as our priority was naturalism over distinct stylistic choices. Lighting in general was a puzzle for this film because so many shots showed 360-degree field of view requiring us to cleverly hide units and stands. 

MovieMaker: A lot of this movie takes place in tight spaces, like cars and closets. What were the challenges of filming in those settings and how did you make it work? 

Saner: We had several solutions for these tight spaces, from relatively complex camera support rigs to simply squishing me in the back seat of a car holding the camera. Our toughest car shot involved an SUV with five actors in it: both front seats and all three back seats were filled leaving nowhere for me to be as the camera operator. After much deliberation on how to cover it, our solution was for me to operate through the sunroof of the car! We rigged the car to a process trailer and built a truss structure around it from which to extend an EasyRig line down through the sunroof.

I was secured to the outside of the windshield and roof, lying flat on my stomach with my arms through the sunroof holding a camera with a small monitor rigged in front of my face. It was a wild experience to shoot and so fun to have full flexibility inside the car.

We used this setup for several key driving scenes with all the kids. There were several other car rigs that we had on standby including attaching the camera to a small pulley and running a rope across the roof on the inside to take some of the weight on longer takes. I think I ended up removing the pulley though because I did not have enough flexibility of movement while attached. For the closet scenes, our production designer built Jane’s closet out of a bathroom using drywall so we had a little more leeway than we may have had if it had been a real closet.

The final closet close-up of Jane lying on the floor was actually a simple set build in yet another location because that scene was added to the script after we had left the home location.

MovieMaker: What type of camera did you shoot this on? Any other pieces of equipment you want to highlight that were essential to this shoot? 

Saner: We shot on an Arri Alexa Mini LF with Cooke S7i lenses. Because this was all handheld, we needed the build to be light and compact. I took the camera package home with me before production to spend some time configuring it to exactly how I wanted it to feel. Balance was a big concern as many shots utilized an EasyRig (a device which distributes the camera’s weight by suspending it from a pulley) and I knew that if the camera was not perfectly balanced my horizon would end up tilting. I developed a little offset for the EasyRig mount that I could adjust for balance.

I also bought an EasyRig arm on eBay and sawed off the end so it would have a slightly smaller profile to fit through doors etc. We had several shots on rickshaws and golf carts and also twice passed the camera between myself and another operator. It was a fun and scrappy puzzle to maintain our long takes throughout with limited resources. 

MovieMaker: What was the most challenging part of shooting Good Girl Jane? 

Saner: Our biggest challenge, oddly, ended up being one of our biggest blessings. We started our 4-week production in March of 2020. Halfway through our shoot, we had to shut down for Covid. At first, this seemed like a devastating blow but, with the trust we would complete the project, we kept working: reviewing footage, editing, shot listing, scouting, planning, and Sarah doing some script revisions.

A year later, in March of 2021, we resumed production when it was safe to do so. We had learned so much in this hiatus and returned refreshed with new certainty in our approach. The excitement of the entire cast and crew to be on set again, after a year of isolation, gave a new vibrance and energy to the production. It would have been a very different film without this challenge. 

MovieMaker: What was the most rewarding part? 

Saner: This was a family affair: a group of dear friends and collaborators working together to make something very meaningful to us all. Sarah fostered a deep sense of care and trust with her team which was crucial in creating such authentic work. It is incredibly rewarding to create in this environment. 

The past few weeks we have been screening the film in LA in anticipation of our digital release. It has been so meaningful to hear peoples’ responses and reactions in person. To hear how many people resonate with this story for so many different reasons. I’m incredibly grateful to have been a part of this film, this trusting and caring team and I’m excited to let it find its own way out in the world.  

Main Image: A still from Good Girl Jane, Tribeca Films