Shaping the visual identity of The Moth hinged on a delicate interplay between natural and artificial light—a balance that became central to how the film feels. Cinematographer Gus Aronson approached this challenge with an instinctive sensitivity, treating light not just as a technical choice but as an emotional engine. His work moves fluidly between the softness of available light and the crafted precision of controlled setups, creating a visual rhythm that mirrors the film’s shifting inner states.
What makes Aronson’s contribution stand out is his ability to fold these two worlds together without drawing attention to the seam. Natural light scenes hold a quiet realism, while the more sculpted moments introduce shape, contrast, and a subtle sense of hyperreality—allowing the film to slip between grounded intimacy and something more heightened. In a production defined by tight resources and a strong creative community, his lighting choices give The Moth its tone, texture, and emotional depth. The following is taken from a conversation with Gus about his approach to lighting. It has been edited for clarity.
References
I wanted to make something that was a little bit fucked up. Not to the extent that it was dirty and illegible, but just about making something that felt a bit bug-ish. I started thinking a lot about the way that when you're looking around the room you only actually see a very concentrated amount of your sight in focus. We usually have one small point of focus in our eye.
That became a more important way of considering this film than any references to other films. Instead I started to focus more on tools and objects, like magnifying glasses, binoculars and optical equipment. Anytime we tried to pull a reference, like Taxi Driver, it's like, okay, well the thing about referencing Taxi Driver for The Moth is that 90% of The Moth doesn't take place in the city.
It’s an exciting part in any movie when you have your references and then the actual practice becomes different from them and you start to not feel like any one of them is correct. Instead, all of them just are put into this machine, which is your brain, the director's brain and the brains’ of the other team members. Then, the references get shoved through and you get these new results and it feels so far from the originals. Most of all, I felt like I was seeing something in my head that I hadn't seen before.
Light
The light is a hundred percent a character. It's maybe the main character of the film, even more so than the Moth, because the Moth is always in pursuit of it.
The light always has this very important, broken presence in the spaces we shot, which was achieved through either using large sources or by bouncing it. I think bounce light always feels beautiful, but when you bounce with a mirror, it kind of breaks into a scene and a shot, making it feel wrong. We were bouncing some light to hit an actor where it normally wouldn't hit them, changing the direction of space so you have light that's hitting in the background, but also their face. A person watching might wonder “how is that happening?” or, “that's impossible.”
Additionally, I focused on using white light instead of warm light, working with fewer lights, putting them deeper in the spaces we shot in, to backlight subjects and create contrast. We’d also find ourselves wrapping a character in red, closing down the Iris so that there's a lot of darkness in certain scenes and not that much light. Then, getting low, flaring the lens a little bit, pushing light through things like in the adjoining bedroom next to the TV room – Theo Webb used glass and paper on the window in it to obscure the outdoor light.
Essentially, I was finding way of making the light fucked up. The philosophy I followed was that no light is pure, no light is totally natural. Even when we were in the meadow, we used mirrors to add light and filters to make sure it didn't hit the lens cleanly. We used small format lenses on a big format camera so that we're seeing parts of the lens that we're not supposed to. It’s like you're looking through a magnifying glass.
Light had to be the defining source of every scene. The TV room was difficult at first, because we hadn’t figured out the right color. Then, I discovered this very weird, ugly white light that worked in conjunction with the tv. It brought about this look like you've taken the life out of the light, white pure light feels so gross.
Favorite Shot
There's maybe three that I would think of and they're just all very different.
The first, I didn’t expect would be one of my favorites until we shot it. It's a moment after the Moth’s daughter and wife have left and he’s up against the window and you feel the paper on it and the flies on the wall. He’s up against the light of the glass and you feel his face and you feel how fucked up he is and you cam feel his eyes. I love that shot, it's really cool and feels very original.
The second one that's in my head, is at the end of the movie when he's in the TV room after he’s destroyed it – we're shooting from the other room looking into the room he's in and there's one light on in the background and he's just there, destroyed, on his knees, feeling hopeless.
The shot that I knew I was going to love from the beginning was the one in the cave. You see the moth and his wife silhouetted with their wings open as they're entering the big open area where the cave opens up into this weird shaft up to the sky and just we're behind them. There's all these leading lines of the rocks and there's this framing of the rock and they’re silhouetted and looking out, it's their first time experiencing light. That's a big moment. I knew that was going to be my favorite shot from the start and I sent it to people during pre-production and people were like, oh my god, this is going to be crazy. That was exciting.
A Special Shoot
The experience was unique in the sense that it was the first time I've spent that much time on one project. Pre-production was a very extended process – our location scout was at least three months before the shoot and that happened after months of conversations prior.
For the shoot itself, we were together for 10 days. It was unique to be able to spend that many days with the crew. You get to know everyone more intimately and in this totally new way. You also get to know the film in a new way and to develop the look. Having the time to let something change and morph and grow was really special.
It was more days of shooting then you are normally afforded. That was a huge process takeaway. It was like everything can take more time, even though it was a lot to do. The idea that we could realize halfway through a shoot that we needed to change the schedule around to make I work better, we had the days to be able to do that and had everyone's together and you don't have to worry about, you could wake up and be talking about the film and hang out with everyone for such a sustained amount of time is really unique.
Camera Movement
IMovement is something that is very difficult for me. I get really frustrated by unmotivated camera movement and so I'm very resistant to it, I’d like to mostly be on a tripod or dolly.
That being said, Juan had a real structure in mind for the edit, and a lot of our movement was dictated by how it would function in it. He called it engines, which would aid in the crosscutting. For example, in the bonfire sequence there was a circular motion that made sense because of the character’s choreography that had them encircling the fire and the energy of their dance movement to cut on. It's a literal manifestation of the metaphorical engine.
The rest of it just felt very natural. When we meet our character for the first time in the Optometrist’s office, it’s very static on a tripod and locked off entirely. We need to have a grounding force and it wouldn't make sense to be in a small room without any actors moving and then having a moving camera. I think some people would do that, but I think it didn't make sense for us to do that.
We wanted to capture the atmosphere of a grand cinematic story where you have a very weighted down camera that locks us in a position and we know that this is where we're going to return. Then, when we follow the story into the cave and there’s a bunch of lock off and some slight pans, which is supposed to feel very grand and signal it as a grounding start.
It’s a world of majesty and weight, and this is the birth of everything, Juan called it the “Adam & Eve” moment. Our location also dictated these choices, we're in this giant cave and so motion feels very specific there.
We did introduce a little bit of handheld in that sequence through the POVs of our two characters looking at each other. The movement was basically just someone in one place and you have a little bit of the float of a person sitting still with the natural emotion that a body has, but it wasn't moving around, it wasn't circling them, it wasn't going crazy.
Once they make their way from the caves into the meadows and find this home they're going to build their campsite in, a lot of the motion is tripod panning, it's all this left to right, very much a momentum and traversing sensation. It's not until we get into the birth sequence and the dance when things start to feel more organic and more alive. And as they start to get more and more corrupted that we start to introduce more and more emotion to the film. And that emotion is kind of tied with the characters breaking from the constraints of knowledge that they've had. I also think it's a manifestation of their frustration with their situation, frustration with the addiction of the light and the TV.
Ultimately, motion just felt very grounded in where we were in the story and where we were in their journey of corruption, just how it synced up with the character.