A wealthy oil tycoon scrambles to undo a major disaster he inadvertently unleashed in Director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s satirical black comedy, Digger.

Iñárritu’s film tells the story of Digger Rockwell, an ostentatious oil tycoon who is the most powerful man in the world but is completely oblivious to the outside world. After his company’s drilling operations in Greenland cause a massive expulsion of methane gas and dislodges a giant ice shelf, he embarks on a frantic mission to prove he is humanity’s savior before a catastrophic tsunami hits Europe.

On September 27, after the DGA membership screening in Los Angeles, Iñárritu discussed the making of Digger during a Q&A moderated by Director Denis Villeneuve (Dune: Part Three).

During the conversation, Iñárritu spoke about his use of VistaVision on the film.

“VistaVision is very challenging, but it’s worth it. When we were shooting Digger’s house, everything is at Pinewood Studios and on sets, which is good for VistaVision. We wanted the interior rooms to be very rich, so they would inform us about the context of the characters. Who is Digger Rockwell? Why is this his house? All these details we had to build into each set to have a huge depth of field to inform audiences. I didn’t want to point out where to look; I wanted people to wander and get lost inside these paintings on the wall. For that, we needed lots of quality, so, VistaVision, which is double the size of 35mm negative film, allowed us to have so much more information. We were shooting sometimes at f/5.6, f/7, f/8. The quality of VistaVision is stunning, although the sound of it was a challenge too.”

Iñárritu’s other directorial credits include the feature films Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Biutiful and Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths. He was nominated for both the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film and the Academy Award for “Best Director” for his 2006 feature film Babel. He took home both the DGA Award the Oscar for his 2014 film Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) and the DGA Award for his 2015 film, The Revenant. He also won the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Commercials for “Best Job” (Proctor and Gamble) in 2012.

Iñárritu has been a DGA member since 2002.