Picture Credit: Netflix / Jeff Powers
The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel is an intimate portrait of young friends coming together and making music. The music documentary focuses on the early days of one of the biggest rock bands around. It portrays Anthony Kiedis and Flea’s early days as a museum with their brother in art, guitarist Hillel Slovak, an early member of the band gone too soon.
There is no Red Hot Chili Peppers today without Hillel, who went to High School with Kiedis and Flea. He kept them inspired and collaborating. Through good times and bad, too, which the documentary covers in fairly candid detail. Cinematographer Jeff Powers captures the band reflecting on the past interviews. Powers helps tell some larger-than-life Los Angeles tales.
Recently, the cinematographer took What’s On Netflix behind the scenes of The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel.
When [the director] Ben reached out, he mentioned how your past work fits how he sees the doc. What was he looking for?
So what he was looking for, because he had been developing this movie with Hillel’s brother, James, for a while and had been speaking to people in the band and in the whole orbit and whatever. So he already had a bunch of material and was confident in the quality of the archival stuff that he was going to have. What he told me he was looking for is someone to light and photograph his sit-down interviews so that he could really put a backbone on all this other material to tell the story. He had mentioned the American Gladiators doc that I’d done.
With Netflix and Jared Hess, right?
Yeah. And I believe this Heaven’s Gate doc that I’d done for HBO a couple years ago, which, if you see, they have a similar… I wasn’t trying to replicate it, but there’s a through line stylistically. Heaven’s Gate is obviously a very heavy subject, and the Gladiators doc is a little more fun. And this one splits the two. It’s a really fun moment, but it is also kind of sad.
I also imagine just in terms of lighting your interview subjects, you have to be delicate or just unobtrusive. How did you want to make Keidis, Flea, and everyone comfortable?
Yeah, it’s tough because sometimes you need to balance out being a storyteller and a visual artist or whatever, as well as being a good person. But fortunately, Ben had that pretty well covered. Do you want to fix this technical tweak, which is maybe a huge problem or maybe it’s just bothering you and you should let it go, especially if that means you might need to interrupt this conversation right now? Maybe that’s fine, but it could also derail someone’s thought process or make them uncomfortable. Because it is nice when the subject forgets that there’s anyone there at all except for Ben. That’s my goal.
The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel. (L to R) Anthony Kiedis and Hillel Slovak in The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026
How’d you approach the lighting?
The lighting approach was to keep it broad and applicable to whatever might develop in the interview. We had time before each of them to get the preset, but whoever’s sitting in is not Flea, it’s not John. So you don’t really know what it’s going to look like until they actually sit in.
The one thing I did ask of Ben was, if I can just get 90 seconds, two minutes when they sit. You can just chat them up and get them comfortable, but a couple of people and I might need to run around and adjust some lighting, maybe lower the camera, raise the camera. Ben was very amenable to that. And then you just have to sit back and, unless there’s a problem, let it go.
How many problems are you usually solving within that 90-second span?
Ideally, none, but you never know who’s going to show up with some wild wraparound glasses or something like that. It does happen. But that’s what I’m saying, that’s where it comes in when you’re like, “Is this a problem I need to solve or is this something that’s going to bother me?” And this person seems ready to go. They’re ready to talk. So I’m going to do a little tweak, but maybe it’s not that important. My job’s not the most important thing around here. We’ve got to capture this person’s story that they’re willing to tell us.
What are some of those things where they’ll bother your eye as a cinematographer, but you probably know, well, for an audience member, they might not see this the way I see it?
Back in the day we’d shoot a lot of music videos, so this would come up quite frequently. You do this whole lighting setup and then the person comes in and sits down and they have these glasses on, which look very cool. We’re like, “Oh wow, there’s the whole lighting setup.” Didn’t anticipate that coming. I should have, but I didn’t.
In the interview with Jack, fortunately I saw him before he got on camera, and I was like, “Ben, can you ask him if he’s going to wear those glasses?” He’s like, “Oh, are they going to be a problem?” I was like, “Maybe. If he wants to wear them, it’s cool. I just need to know.” And he said yes. So we move all the lights up and away and do the best we can to clear what I thought it was going to be.
And so he sits in, we make a little adjustments. I’m like, okay, I think this is going to work. Glasses are cool, and I can’t really see many bad reflections in them. And then as soon as he starts talking, he thinks for a moment and there it all is again. So I was like, I’m going to have to let it go because it’s not going anywhere. And also, you shoot interviews for hours and however much actually makes it in, so it’s probably not as big a deal as I thought it was. And it’s not. I mean, it’s in there, but it’s not a big deal.
What did you learn from your music video experiences that you bring to a music documentary?
I think it’s a lot of the same because there are a lot of musicians in this doc, and those types of personalities, you never know what you’re going to get. Honestly, everyone was lovely to work with on this. I have no complaints.
But you do need to be prepared in the sense that, in a music video, when the musician steps in front of the camera, you’ve got to be ready. Because if you’re not, then they’ll get disinterested maybe and walk away. Now you’re losing more time.
learned that you have to be ready to roll the camera when the talent’s ready to go. And so, that’s just about preparation, really. I learned how to be quick from music videos.
Picture via Jeff Powers / Instagram
How many days did you get with Anony and Flea?
We only got one go at each person. We didn’t film any additional interview material afterwards. We actually started with Flea, which was cool. Actually, it was great because it set the tone for the whole thing. But I was like, a little warm-up would be nice. I’m pretty sure this interview’s going to drive the whole movie, but let’s do it and jump in the deep end.
That’s tough.
Ben just made sure to allot plenty of time. I think we had at least two hours before Flea showed up, maybe even a little bit more, so that I could set things up and then he and I could look through it all. Not that you’re hard-locked into it, but you’re establishing the language of where the cameras are going to be and what angles you’re going to use and that sort of thing.
We definitely took our time beforehand to make sure, do you want the wide here and the medium here? How far of a profile are we talking about? So we were able to dial that in before Flea came. And then he’s also just the most easygoing dude, so it was no big deal. There was the aura of, “Oh, Flea’s here, Flea’s here.” And then he walks in and he’s totally cool. Fortunately, there was not a lot of pressure from that end.
Leading up to those interviews, were you studying Flea and Anthony Kiedis and thinking like, huh, how would they catch the light?
I didn’t do that, but kind of unrelated but not unrelated we did Anthony’s interview and he sits down. Again, it’s real quick. He walks in, gets a microphone, sits down, and we’re going to roll. And so we do all last-minute adjustments and the interview starts and I’m doing what I normally do, just there at the monitor trying to find, is everything okay? Is it working?
And then he leans back and starts gesturing with his hands. A lot of that. In the most Anthony Kiedis way. And it hit me at that moment. I was like, there he is. He’s doing the points, he’s gesturing as he’s speaking. And I’m like, “Perfect.”
Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026
[Laughs] Was there a lot of restoration for the archival footage?
Ooh, that’s a good question. I don’t know. I don’t know what restoration was done because it looks good.
It does.
They definitely cleaned it up, but I didn’t have a whole lot of involvement in that process. I did see some of the material before that they had. They had put together basically a concept of the project, obviously without any of the interviews. It was mostly archival strung out with some voiceover telling the story.
So I saw what they already had, and then they were collecting it as we went. They went to James’ house and just dug through everything he had. I think even Flea and some of the other guys were talking about a photo or something, and Ben was like, “Do you think you could dig that up?” They were just pulling it as we were going as well.
How’d you want the digitally filmed interviews to play comfortably alongside the VHS footage and all the different formats?
We did talk about the formats of it and how what we were doing would either blend or stand out from those formats. There was a conversation about potentially doing the interviews anamorphic, which is cool. Look, I’m happy to do it. It’s great. I love filming anamorphic. But it also can lead to strange formatting. A lot of the archival is going to be 4:3 or something like that. Jumping in and out of a square format and a wide format can be a little jarring.
So we had talked about stuff like that. And then we used very modern digital cinema cameras, but there was an effort to at least soften the image a little bit so that it wouldn’t be such a striking contrast. Obviously, something shot on videotape in 1988 is going to be way softer than anything I would be firing at, but we did try to go out of our way to lend a little nod to that softer look.
As a modern cinematographer, was there anything you really appreciated about the texture of the VHS footage?
Oh yeah, man. Well, I started a MiniDV guy. That was the camera that was in my hands first. I mean, there’s an inherent nostalgia to it, but that’s come through time. But there’s also something to the imperfection of it that feels like you’re catching a glimpse of the past that just survived to this point somehow. It feels special like that.
What were you shooting with the first time you had a MiniDC camera in your hand?
I was shooting bands. I also used to be a musician, which is what made me interested in this project. If you’re young and you’re a musician, you have no shortage of friends who also play in bands and want you to film their show or their rehearsal or whatever. So I’d do a lot of that. I don’t know if any of that material is making it into a Netflix doc, but…
[Laughs] You never know. What would you say you found most fulfilling as a cinematographer just working on the rise of The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel?
I think the film turned out great. It seems to be getting a good reception, and that’s incredible. But I got to watch the whole thing [happen], which is cool. I was there listening to the whole interview, some of which were hours and hours long. Just great stories. There are too many good stories to ever put into one film, but it was a blast to be able to just hear the complete story.
And there are so many little details about the punk scene in L.A. back in the day, which is fascinating. To hear Flea talk more in detail about playing in Fear and all that stuff, it’s I love it. It’s one of the coolest parts about doing interview-style documentaries.
