I just rewatched the first film in the Thor franchise, and story-wise/performance-wise, it mostly holds up. However, I was also stricken by the sheer number of Dutch tilts in the film. Every scene seems to have at least five versions of the angle. Why did Kenneth Branagh and DP Haris Zambarloukos make this stylistic choice?
asked May 1 '20 at 2:41
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7"Donatello, are you okay? What happened? I thought you were just watching a film?" [Lying on sofa, head back, groaning] "So... many... Dutch... tilts!" – Paul D. Waite May 1 '20 at 9:53
In the commentary track for Thor, Director Kenneth Branagh says that the dutch angles in the film were inspired by the style of comic books.
They were there because that’s how I received the dynamism of the composition in the frames, wide angle lenses with lots of depth. That’s why I chose that type of style for this.
Zambarloukos backed this up in an interview he gave to the American Society of Cinematographers.
We also made very liberal use of Dutch angles throughout Thor. The wider camera would be Dutched one way, the close would be Dutched the opposite, and we’d flip that for the reverse shots. It was a kind of interpretation of the comic-book style.
