The Principle
Kasper Tuxen works from a position of trust — trust in actors, trust in available light, trust in the idea that the most truthful image is usually the quietest one. His cinematography resists the seduction of beauty for its own sake, though his frames are consistently beautiful. The distinction is important: Tuxen's images earn their loveliness through specificity and observation rather than through imposed grandeur. When Julie wanders the streets of Oslo in The Worst Person in the World, the city doesn't glamorize her confusion — it simply contains it, as cities contain everyone who has ever felt suspended between the person they were and the person they haven't yet become.
What unifies Tuxen's body of work across wildly different genres and scales — from the intimate Scandinavian character studies he's made with directors like Joachim Trier and Anders Thomas Jensen to the period-set prestige of The Professor and the Madman and the charged American drama of The Apprentice — is a fundamental belief that cinema's job is to reveal psychology rather than narrate it. His camera rarely explains. It attends. This requires extraordinary patience and a willingness to let scenes develop at the speed of thought rather than the speed of plot.
Tuxen's visual sensibility is shaped by his Scandinavian roots in ways that go beyond the obvious — the northern light, the muted palette. It's more philosophical than geographical. There is in his work a kind of democratic humanism, a refusal to privilege any single emotional register over another. Comedy and grief coexist in Riders of Justice. Tenderness and compromise share the same frame in Hateship Loveship. The camera never tips its hand about how to feel, which paradoxically intensifies feeling considerably. He is a cinematographer who understands that ambivalence is not a failure of storytelling but its most sophisticated achievement.
His approach to collaboration is worth noting as a principle in itself. Tuxen's work with Joachim Trier across The Worst Person in the World demonstrates a shooting style that feels like co-authorship — the camera seems to know the characters as intimately as the director does, to understand that Julie's face in a moment of apparent happiness is simultaneously the most melancholy image in the film. This kind of knowledge can only come from a cinematographer who has done the interior work alongside the narrative work, who has asked himself not just "where does the camera go" but "who is this person and what do they need from this image."
Camera and Movement
Tuxen favors handheld work that doesn't announce itself as handheld. This is one of his most distinctive technical signatures: the camera breathes with characters, makes small adjustments, follows the logic of attention and emotion, but never performs its own aliveness. The handheld aesthetic in The Worst Person in the World is utterly different from the aggressive expressionism associated with other practitioners of the form — Tuxen's camera holds when it should hold and moves when something internal has shifted, making movement a product of psychology rather than of cinematographic convention. The result is that viewers feel accompanied rather than manipulated.
His framing consistently gives characters space within the frame that functions as psychological real estate. Even in close-up, Tuxen resists the trap of the suffocating portrait. There is usually sky, usually a wall, usually some element of the world beyond the face that reminds us characters exist within reality rather than in the isolated theater of their own drama. His wider compositions in Riders of Justice use the Danish landscape not as picturesque backdrop but as moral context — the cold, flat beauty of the countryside makes the film's violence both more absurd and more devastating. In The Apprentice, framing becomes an architectural argument: how New York in the 1970s and 80s contained and partially created the ambitions it rewarded.
For more formal, period-driven material, Tuxen's camera becomes more deliberate in its placements without becoming stiff. The Professor and the Madman demonstrates his ability to adapt his instincts to a more classical grammar — longer lenses, more considered blocking, a shooting style that respects the weight of historical drama — while retaining his fundamental commitment to finding the human moment inside the institutional one. Across all contexts, he prefers cuts over elaborate camera movements as a means of advancing scenes. His edits are emotional decisions as much as rhythmic ones.
Light
Natural light is Tuxen's primary language, but "natural light" in his usage means something more precise than simply "available light." He is a student of how northern European light falls — its particular coolness, its horizontality in winter, the way it seems to come from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, the flatness that is not absence of drama but a different kind of drama. In The Worst Person in the World, Oslo in its various seasonal guises does genuine narrative work: the thin winter light of early scenes versus the longer summer days that accompany Julie's most reckless and alive moments. Light is marking time even when the script isn't.
When Tuxen introduces artificial light, it's almost always motivated by the scene's logic — a lamp in a corner, light from a television, the sodium orange of city streetlights bleeding through a window. He doesn't augment so much as shape what's already present. This approach can be demanding to execute — it requires extensive pre-production location work and a willingness to wait for conditions — but it produces images that have the authority of documentary and the intention of fiction simultaneously. In The Sea of Trees, working in different environmental and emotional territory, Tuxen used the filtered, diffuse light of the Japanese forest as a kind of moral atmosphere, the loss of direct light figuring the loss of direction the characters experience.
His work in The Apprentice, perhaps his most deliberately stylized project, demonstrates how he adapts his light philosophy to period and genre requirements. The film's early sections use warm, almost flattering light that implicates the viewer in the seductions being offered — we see what the young Donald Trump sees — before a gradual cooling and hardening of the light tracks the hardening of the subject. Light, in Tuxen's hands, is never decorative. It is always an argument.
Color and Texture
Tuxen's palette tends toward desaturation without monochrome — a world where color is present but chastened, where the visual temperature is cool to neutral. This creates an aesthetic environment in which emotional moments register as warmth rather than warmth being the baseline. The specific blush of a face, the gold of a late-afternoon window, the particular green of a Nordic summer — these colors mean something when they appear because they appear against restraint. The Worst Person in the World's stop-motion sequence is so visually arresting partly because it emerges from a film that has otherwise refused to draw attention to its own looking.
He works with a texture that suggests film without necessarily being film — grain is present as a tactile quality, images have weight and body, there is none of the clinical sharpness that can make digital cinematography feel antiseptic. This textural approach varies with the material: The Apprentice deliberately uses a more aggressive, period-appropriate grain structure that references the documentary and news footage of the era, making the film feel partially excavated rather than entirely constructed. Beginners has a luminous, memory-soaked quality, its images soft with retrospection.
Color grading in Tuxen's work is calibrated to protect skin tones while shaping the surrounding world. His subjects always read as living — human pigment is treated with a specificity that gives actors genuine presence — while the environment can be shifted, cooled, or rendered more abstract without losing the film's fundamental humanism. He is suspicious of grading choices that impose a mood the photography itself hasn't already established. The grade, in his practice, is finishing rather than replacement.
Signature Techniques
- The observational close-up: Tuxen holds on faces slightly longer than comfort dictates, capturing the micro-expressions that occur after the primary emotion — the thought after the feeling, the doubt after the declaration.
- Natural light integration: Motivated practicals and source light define his interiors; the camera is positioned to receive light rather than impose it, giving scenes a found quality.
- Spatial restraint in composition: Figures are placed within environments that register as real, with edges, clutter, and depth that prevent the frame from feeling constructed around the subject.
- Seasonal light as narrative: Time and emotional state are tracked through the quality of available light across a film's arc rather than through explicit visual signposting.
- Period grain calibration: For films set in specific historical moments, grain structure and color temperature are calibrated to reference the visual texture of that era's documentary record, as demonstrated in The Apprentice.
- Handheld as emotional seismograph: Camera movement is generated by psychological rather than cinematographic logic — the camera shifts when something internal shifts, making movement an event rather than a default.
- Tonal coexistence: Lighting setups are designed to hold multiple emotional temperatures simultaneously, allowing comedy and tragedy, intimacy and distance, to occupy the same frame without either canceling the other.