Director Jason Reitman and cinematographer Eric Steelberg first met as teenagers, and the two soon became friends who shared a love of filmmaking.

Steelberg recalls Reitman was "another skinny dude who loved movies. I met him, and he was playing with Legos and a Super 8 camera. It was fantastic. That's what I did, too. I screwed around with friends and a video camera trying to make movies and get lost in stories."

Reitman was impressed with Steelberg's skills. "He was already shooting on 16mm film at 15 years old. It was unheard of," the filmmaker says.

Their shared passion for film led to a lifelong friendship and years of working together. Reitman has trusted Steelberg as his DP on films such as "Juno," "Up in the Air," "The Front Runner," and his latest, "Saturday Night."

What makes Steelberg his go-to man? Says Reitman, "Things inevitably are going to go wrong when you're on set. The question is, who do you want to be standing next to? And that person is Eric. We have each other's backs in every act of life, and we balance each other."

The two were honored at the 12th annual Middleburg Film Festival and presented with the inaugural Variety Creative Collaborators Award in celebration of their work together.

JASON REITMAN: We had just done "Juno" and my agent asked me, "What do you want to do next?" I had two dreams when I was a kid; one was to direct, but the other was to be a writer for "Saturday Night Live." My agent reached out to Lorne Michaels and he said, "Yes." I got to go through the whole experience, from the table read to not knowing if your sketches get in. They walk out of Lorne's office and pin a piece of paper up on a wall, and that's how you find out. And then, there's the night of, that

exhilaration of feeling it all come together. That's where the kernel of the idea came from. When we think of "Saturday Night Live," it's the ensemble cast, but when you're there in person, what blows you away is the crew. It's the people behind the camera who do this chaotic ballet that allowed the existence of your show. And I thought, "How do I capture this one?"

ERIC STEELBERG: It was the pandemic, and Jason said, "I just wrote something a little crazy, and I want to do it in one shot." The idea was that we were going to go entirely in one uncut shot, no stitches, no cuts and no hidden anything. We started looking at what that would look like, and as time progressed, we realized it would be challenging. We were doing "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire" in the U.K., and Jason said, "I don't think I wanna do one shot anymore, but let's talk about how you do it a little more traditionally." He says we have to really make sure we feel the chaos and that we're in the middle of it, like a fly on the wall. We wanted to shoot film and 16 mm, and we did a bunch of tests, and we liked it.

STEELBERG: I remember another enthusiastic kid playing with cameras. The first time I met Jason, he was doing a stop-motion animated Lego film at his high school on a weekend when I was also there with my other friends shooting a short film. We were in another room, we needed students for the short film, and not everybody showed up on the weekend, and he said, "Sure."

REITMAN: Eric was shooting 16 mm when he was 16 years old, and he was already a technical genius and just a very curious person. Eric is a pilot, and that's one of the key things that I associate with his calmness, his ability to manage 100 things at once and remain completely calm. That's something that I can say now that I'm older and I can look back at who he's been for the last three decades. It feels like I'm making a movie with my friend, and I can't speak highly enough of that. Nothing has brought me more joy as a filmmaker, and as a result, nothing has made me more true as a storyteller than being next to Eric.

STEELBERG: If we were to go back and redo "Juno," or any of the short films we did before that or commercials, we would not tell them the same way because we're so different, we're so involved and mature in our storytelling. The way we made this movie very much reflects our current state of mind. Being able to grow together as storytellers has been just as special as our first relationship, if not more so in a way because so much has been born out of these intense days and long schedules on these films figuring out these problems. Our relationship is trying to figure out how to get ourselves out of these really tricky situations.

REITMAN: Jon plays Billy Preston in this movie, and he also wrote the original score. He wrote and recorded the score live on set. He would shoot from 8 to 6, and Jon and his band would get out of their costumes. Our editor would come in with his laptop, and Jon would turn to his bandmates and build the score in real-time on set. He'd grab an instrument and start adding things. You could see the scene in your head by the nature of the music. Also, our production mixer, Steve Morrow, would have up to 58 microphones on set, and he's bringing in ideas in real-time, so by the time we get to editing, even before we get to our post mix, he's created a sound system of the world.

STEELBERG: I wanted to use period-correct lighting because the lighting's almost a character in the movie. All of our lights are built into the set. I worked with [production designer] Jess Gonchor in pre-production about where the lights should go based on shot designs that Jason and I were doing. We got all the old lights we could find.

REITMAN: Eric lit the lead roles and 80 background extras, tracking everybody. We rebuilt the entire eighth and ninth floor as a 360 set, and we figured out where every actor was going to land at any given moment in advance, and Eric lit the entire set. And once we started shooting, no matter where the camera was, the light is always going to be already perfect.