C. Kim Miles is already missing the prairie. Busy with work on The Last of Us, the cinematographer was unavailable to be a part of the second season of Little House on the Prairie. Based solely on how he describes shooting the show’s landscapes, it’s easy to see why he’d miss the beautiful nature showrunner Rebbeca Sonnenshine captures.
Kim shot four episodes of season one, including the final two episodes of the drama.
Little House on the Prairie was, from the sound of it, a cinematographer’s dream. Even the sun was kind to the production. It’s an experience Miles, who previously worked on Yellowjackets, Champions, and Lost in Space told What’s on Netflix all about.
The site spoke with director Sydney Freeland, who had Unforgiven on her mind when working on the show. Did you two share many references?
A little bit. We always talked a little bit more about Days of Heaven and movies like that. But yes, Unforgiven is a masterpiece, right? And Sydney’s so great. I love her to death. Yeah, a little bit we talked, but the show, by the time Sydney came along, was sort of on its way to finding its groove. There was a Days of Heaven kind of Terrence Malick-y sort of underpinning to it, I think, that had developed by then. I wasn’t necessarily by design. It just was one of those things that evolved into being.
How does that naturally evolve on a show?
It’s interesting. It’s funny, I’ll tell you this story. I love Terrence Malick films. He has a way of capturing emotion on the screen in a way that I’ve not come across before or since. When you look at some of the cutaway stuff in The Thin Red Line or The Tree of Life and all that growing-up stuff, it’s so poetic. From time to time, you’re doing a show and you’re like, “Oh, let’s do something that’s sort of Terrence Malick-y.” I’ve never been able to quite capture that.
Until this show, we were doing one of those evening campfire fiddly song-and-dance kind of scenes. We’d done a bunch of stuff on Technocranes and on dollies and that. And then Amy Belling, our C-camera operator, said, “Can I try something?” I’m like, “Yeah, let’s go on a wide lens, go on a 21 or something like that. Throw it on your shoulder, Amy, and just get in there and be part of it.”
We did a couple of takes of that and all of a sudden it was like, there it is. Amy has this Malickian sensibility about her. So, that’s how that kind of evolved into it. We ended up using that from time to time here and there in some personal moments in the show.
But by and large, the sort of governing edict was to just be honest with it and let the prairie inform how we light it, not to overlight it as the original series. I remember watching that and going, “Wow, they really lit the heck out of this show.”
Little House on the Prairie. (L to R) Crosby Fitzgerald as Caroline Ingalls, Alice Halsey as Laura Ingalls, Skywalker Hughes as Mary Ingalls, Luke Bracey as Charles Ingalls, Warren Christie as John Edwards in episode 108 of Little House on the Prairie. Cr. Eric Zachanowich/Netflix © 2026
[Laughs] A different time.
A different time, yeah. It was a matter of just really letting the performances and letting the landscapes inform how we did things. There were discussions that Jonah Markowitz, the designer, and I would have about building house sets. For example, the Ingalls cabin and how he wanted to stay really true to the architecture of the time and make it out of logs and build these little tiny 18-by-18-inch windows. I remember going to him to beg for windows that were a little bigger so we could get some light in because the rooms were so dark as it was.
But I think we ended up finding what we both wanted and needed. The result, I think, was a very nice kind of honest interpretation of it. It was great that Rebecca Sonnenshine was always very helpful and very supportive in the sense that she was like, “Just make it real, make it feel real. If sometimes things play in the dark, then they play in the dark. That’s just how it works.”
And having that backing from her was great so that we could unapologetically photograph the show without worrying about lighting it like a Disney film all the time. So yeah, all those things together informed how it ended up looking. And once the performances started coming, it was
When you’re out on those beautiful landscapes, especially when you’re in prep, does one side of your brain go, “This is gorgeous,” and then the other side of your brain go, “This is going to be very difficult to shoot”?
Yeah, usually the gorgeous wins, and then the difficult-to-shoot part is like, “I’ll apologize for that later when the crew is trudging out here with their gear.” We were lucky in the sense that almost all of the locations on that show, on Little House, were accessible and reasonably well accessible. The prairies are flat as heck as far as you can see. A lot of the way they section out the roads and the parcels of land there, you’re never really more than a mile from a road anyway.
What was your eye immediately responding to in the land and sky?
It’s big-sky country and no matter where you are, that’s always the dominant thing. It was a big part also for Rebecca because it’s mentioned in the books, the depthlessness of the sky was always something that came up.
And that’s one of the reasons that Ari Wegner, who shot the pilot, and Nate Goodman, who alternated with me on the show, we all had a conversation or multiple conversations early on to talk about aspect ratio. It was decided on 1.85 for that reason, to keep holding sky in all the time and let that be as much a character as anything else.
I have to admit, I was a little opposed to it at first. I was like, “Yeah, I don’t know. It feels to me like a widescreen show. The word prairie is in the name.” But they talked me into it, and not to say that I had to make any decisions, but that was what we decided on. I think it worked really well. It was nice to shoot a taller aspect ratio for a change.
You get a great sense of scale in the final shot in the finale. How’d you want that last image to wrap up season one?
I don’t know if I ever thought of it that way, but I knew that, “Hey, this is the last shot of the show,” and we planned it out. Sydney and I had worked out what we wanted to do early on, and we knew that we wanted it to be this kind of wraparound continuous shot and not allow it to get cut into as much as we could, because that would feel like a cheat to me.
There was a take, probably three takes before the one we used, where the sun was just a little bit higher and the clouds were in such a way that it was mind-bogglingly crazy-looking. It was unbelievable, but we had some other things go wrong in the take, let’s just say, and it didn’t work out. But no, I knew we needed to end in something kind of hopeful and epic.
It’s funny, I was reading something online from some viewers in comments saying, “Well, how can they be heading into the rising sun if they’re going from Kansas City to Minnesota?” But if you actually look at the geography, you are going kind of northeast. We were conscious of that when we were framing. We were like, “If we do them going into a sunrise, are we going to get in trouble? Is this going to bounce back and get us?” But no, geography-wise, it made sense.
So I’m glad to say that it was watertight.
I appreciate, too, that there’s comic-book-level nerd reactions to Little House on the Prairie out there.
There are Little House dyed-in-the-wool, grew-up-on-the-show, don’t-watch-anything-else folks out there that I was terrified would hate the show. When it first dropped, I thought, “Gosh, how are they going to react to this because it’s not the original show by a long shot?” But there’s been a general consensus that it was the old show, this is the new show, and everybody has come to terms with it, and they really like it, so that’s kind of neat.
How is your relationship to the sun on this show? It’s around Winnipeg, right?
Well, what it does give you in the middle of the day is eye sockets. It goes up here and it just hammers actors. So there was a lot of putting in diffusion frames and stuff to settle the sun down in the middle of the day. But you know what? The trade-off is that in the summertime in Winnipeg, the sun rises at quarter to five in the morning and it doesn’t set until 10:30 at night. But the real bonus is that because Winnipeg’s so far north, you get these evening light situations that go on for hours. Magic hour lasts two hours there, two and a half hours.
That’s a cinematographer’s dream.
It’s really great. It’s why they did Days of Heaven up in Northern Alberta. It’s the same thing where the sun just seems to find that spot and hang for two or three hours. It’s never enough. It’s never enough, but it’s better than half an hour.
I grew up in Malaysia shooting commercials in Malaysia, and we’re on the equator, so the sun… We would have a magic hour for 23 minutes at the end of the day and just fly through stuff. It would drop and be gone.
Little House on the Prairie. (L to R) Luke Bracey as Charles Ingalls, Alice Halsey as Laura Ingalls in episode 108 of Little House on the Prairie. Cr. Eric Zachanowich/Netflix © 2026
After you work with a filmmaker like Robert Zemeckis, someone who can make a camera feel very free, almost limitless, does an experience with someone like Zemeckis change how you look at limitations?
Bob loves the problem-solving. He loves prep. He loves figuring out all the, how are we going to do this so that it works? So I think that’s a big thing that’s rubbed off on me, is how much more I enjoy prep and finding the problem-solving in all the stuff that we do. And not only that, after working with Bob, I go out actively looking for problems, looking for more complicated stuff so we can solve that. He’s always been a great inspiration to me in terms of shot design. He is one of the greatest shot designers ever.
And that’s always in my mind. If we just have one camera position or one camera and no time to tell the story, how do we block the scene in such a way that we can tell it with one continuous camera move, that kind of thing? So I think that’s what I’ve taken away from Bob.
It’s very, very difficult though in television or in streaming to get away with that kind of stuff. Unless oners and long developing shots are very early on determined to be part of the DNA of the show. It’s very, very hard to introduce them during the show and to try to get people to buy into them because directors that do episodic stuff tend to be cautious in terms of their coverage. They don’t like to commit to a oner with the knowledge that exposes them in the editorial process to a lot of potential issues with pacing and so on.
So in this environment, it’s tough to build those oners unless you meticulously plan them out and get everybody on board right at the start. But that’s definitely a Bob Z thing for sure.
Another legend you worked with, Michelle Yeoh [on The Brother’s Sun]. What does she give you as a cinematographer?
Well, there’s one particular shot in The Brothers Sun that I remember. It was day one we were shooting with her. Now, I grew up in Malaysia, so Michelle is a national treasure for us. We bonded right away over both being from Malaysia.
She was Miss Malaysia too, right?
She sure was. Her hometown’s not far from my mom’s hometown. But there was a shot on day one with her where, in episode two, she’s sitting alone at her dressing table in her bedroom. We did this really slow wraparound shot of her. There’s no dialogue. She’s sitting there contemplating what’s going on with her kids, and we lit it like a big sunset and stuff, and the presence she brought to it was undeniable.
She has this massive presence on set. She’s very accommodating and willing to go, “No, no, you guys do whatever you need to do. You let me know.” So, that really was what she brought, was just her aura, and the shots just designed themselves around her, really.