Cinematographer Thomas Kist’s experience shooting Interview, directed by and starring Steve Buscemi, must have had a sense of déjà vu. The film, shot in nine days with standard-definition Sony XDCAM equipment, is a remake of a film of the same name directed in Holland by Theo Van Gogh and also shot by Kist, in 2003, just one year before Van Gogh’s murder.

It was a retrospective of Van Gogh’s work at the Rotterdam Film Festival after his death that brought international attention to his films and sparked the notion of some American independent filmmakers, such as Buscemi, remaking these films using Van Gogh’s method of shooting quickly, inexpensively and as completely in sequence as possible.

“It was something I wanted to do,” says Kist of his work on the Interview remake. “Theo was working on doing an American remake himself, and I was eager to fulfill his dream in that. I looked forward to this. There were no sad thoughts. It was a very positive experience.”

The simple story concerns nihilist journalist Buscemi interviewing pop-cultural flavor of the month Katya (Sienna Miller) for his newspaper. The two meet in a restaurant, where he makes it quite clear he doesn’t know anything about her. This offends, then fascinates the starlet, and what follows when they wind up back in her loft is a back-and-forth drama of two damaged people both trusting and lashing out at each other.

Shot in a loft on New York’s 29th Street, which was selected in great part for its handy skylight, the action was carefully rehearsed, “like a play,” says Kist, for three weeks and then shot over a nine-night period, entirely in sequence, as Van Gogh had created the original. “We mostly had two or three of the XDCAM cameras handheld, following them around. It would be nice for the actors if we just shot 360 degrees, but we’d often go more for something like 270 degrees so we could hide some lights.”

The original was shot in Amsterdam using Sony DSR-570 2/3-inch DVCAM equipment in PAL. This version was shot with the XDCAM 2/3-inch-chip standard-definition (PAL) camera with Canon 17x zooms. “I really like that camera,” says Kist. “I think it offers a great contrast range, especially with the film gammas. And it’s great at really low light levels, which is why you could see the New York skyline out the window all the time.”

A lot of the lighting inside the apartment, where most of the action occurs, was created with small, practical units—lamps from the Dutch lighting company Lotek. “Everything was run through a dimmer board,” Kist notes. “Otherwise, we’d have gone crazy.”

Kist also took advantage of the skylight to bring some soft ambient light into the apartment. “I didn’t motivate that light,” he adds. “In the city, there’s always light coming in through windows from streetlights or other buildings or bouncing up from the street.”

Kist started out lighting with a meter but soon gave up on it. “The meter didn’t really work out, especially with the very low light levels we were working at.” Instead, he relied on the image on his 20-inch Sony CRT monitor, which he also used to confirm focus, and on the zebras in the viewfinders as his exposure guide.

The cinematographer says the film’s premiere at this past Sundance Film Festival was an emotional experience. “People were standing in line, freezing, for six hours to see it,” he recalls, “and they went crazy for it. They love Steve there. He took an hour for the Q&A afterward and it felt triumphant. This was why he went to the trouble of doing this remake: to give Theo the recognition he deserves.”