Legendary cinematographer Robert Elswit explains the process behind shooting the arresting image's of Netflix's show 'Ripley' with Andrew Scott and Dakota Fanning.
Variety Artisans presented by HBO.
Variety Artisans presented by HBO.
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00:00 Hi, I'm Robert Ellsworth.
00:01 I was the cinematographer on the limited series "Ripley."
00:06 Here to explain exactly what happened
00:10 when Andrew Scott finished killing Freddy
00:14 and dropped him off on the Via Appiantica
00:17 and what transpired after that.
00:28 Tom is one of those people who takes advantage of people.
00:31 I have no idea what you're talking about.
00:35 The real key to the look of this thing
00:38 was really Panavision Dan Sasaki's incredible lenses.
00:41 There was an out-of-focus quality to the middle range of the lenses,
00:45 which was quite striking.
00:46 The 65, the 50, the 40.
00:49 You'd see a marvelous kind of strange quality
00:52 to the out-of-focus backgrounds.
00:54 And yet, with the wider lenses, we could be up close.
00:57 We had great depth of field,
00:59 and I needed the stop to be able to shoot in low light,
01:02 which the digital sensors can do now.
01:04 So we shot with the LF, which is a sensor
01:07 that's almost the size of a 35mm 8-perf, really.
01:10 We were recording with a color sensor.
01:13 They'll give you a camera without a Bayer array filter.
01:16 They'll give you just a sensor that will only record black and white.
01:19 But nobody wanted to take that chance.
01:23 Nobody was going to say,
01:24 "This is going to be in black and white, no question."
01:26 They wanted to make sure
01:28 that if the thing had to come out in color, it could.
01:30 The way Steve Zalian imagines Ripley,
01:38 and the way Ripley's written, is that it's an improv.
01:40 He's kind of trying to figure out what to do.
01:44 So we're on a soundstage at Cinecitta in Italy.
01:48 The wonderful David Grobman has built this extraordinary set
01:52 that is Ripley's apartment, Dickey's apartment,
01:55 that Ripley has rented, pretending to be Dickey Greenleaf.
01:58 And he's just finished killing Freddy.
02:00 All the interiors in the Rome apartment
02:03 are really lit by window light.
02:05 If you were on the soundstage,
02:07 all you would see is giant green screens out there.
02:09 It's now night, which means there's not a lot of light
02:11 coming through the windows anymore.
02:13 There might be streetlights down low,
02:14 but most of it are the practicals that he turns on
02:16 in the space that he's in.
02:18 He thinks it's safe to go outside,
02:19 and decides that the only way to get him outside, obviously,
02:22 is to lift him up and carry him.
02:24 And they get in the elevator.
02:25 And this is the elevator that supposedly was repaired
02:28 when Tom arrived.
02:30 And they go down, and it stops.
02:33 It's not working.
02:37 And he has to go the rest of the way using the stairs.
02:40 And you watch Freddy's head bumping up and down,
02:42 poor Elliot, while Ripley grabs him by the feet,
02:45 carries him downstairs.
02:47 And the lighting in that interior,
02:48 we're no longer on a soundstage.
02:50 So the transition happens after Tom gets Elliot through the door,
02:55 and when he starts putting him in the elevator,
02:57 there's a cut.
02:59 And now we're actually in the real location.
03:03 Cinematographers believe that the way something's lit,
03:11 there's a direct connection to what an audience feels.
03:14 From the very beginning, we were giving the rooms,
03:16 the faces, the spaces we're in
03:19 a wonderful sense of shape and contrast
03:22 that recalls a little bit of maybe
03:25 the sort of noir style of filmmaking,
03:27 American films in the '30s and '40s,
03:29 a mood that suggested that there was something mysterious going on,
03:33 all these things.
03:35 These are all things that really work.
03:37 Tom's apartment at night,
03:39 when Freddy is dead, and he's lying on the floor,
03:42 how is that supposed to feel?
03:44 Seeing Ripley from far away,
03:47 it's a little bit kind of somebody else's point of view.
03:50 It elicits an emotional response
03:52 of making an audience feel a certain way
03:54 about what they're looking at.
03:56 He gets Freddy inside the car,
04:02 and he drives through Rome,
04:05 the number of second-unit shots,
04:07 as he goes through various famous locations
04:10 that get you out to the Via Appiantica.
04:12 And he finds a particularly marvelous place that he loves.
04:15 The road looks like there's nothing there
04:17 except for these abandoned buildings.
04:19 And to find a place where we could get permission
04:22 to light the area where we were going to drop Freddy off
04:26 and where, subsequently,
04:28 Inspector Ravini and all the other police officers
04:31 and all the sort of giant circus that shows up
04:34 when they discover Freddy's dead
04:36 was the biggest challenge of kind of the night exterior work that we had.
04:40 The way I needed to light this night exterior
04:42 is to have big units, very, very high, far away,
04:47 and light from above, providing backlight in both directions.
04:51 So we needed to find a place that would allow us
04:55 to park a construction crane
04:58 and then lift these boxes up in the air,
05:01 very, very high,
05:03 and kind of create this kind of--
05:05 what always happens in movies at night
05:07 when you're somewhere where there's no lights,
05:10 you pretend it's moonlight.
05:12 There's always a little bit of a,
05:14 "How do we do this and make it look like--?"
05:16 We're not just lining up big movie lights
05:18 and shining them on people.
05:20 But in this case, because those boxes sit way up high,
05:23 they actually light the tops of the trees
05:27 in a very lovely way, but it's completely unrealistic.
05:30 And in most movies when I do that,
05:34 I go in post and I darken the areas
05:38 that give away where the light is,
05:40 that tell us that the light's too close
05:42 to the tops of a house, top of a building, top of a tree.
05:46 And in this case with Steve,
05:49 is that he liked the fact
05:51 that the trees kind of glowed at the top.
05:53 He liked all the things that seemed artificial about it
05:56 because it reminded him
05:58 of what painting looked like in that era
06:02 and what night exteriors looked like
06:04 when they were painted by, well,
06:07 artificial or Baroque painters
06:09 or people who created night exterior lighting.
06:11 And so I didn't end up cleaning any of this stuff up.
06:14 We had backlights that were a little too bright,
06:18 and of course the ground is always wet.
06:20 Whenever we're outdoors on Ripley,
06:23 there's always a water truck,
06:25 and we're always wetting it down.
06:27 So backlights tend to kind of kick and sing
06:31 off the wet cobblestones of the streets,
06:34 of the sidewalks, the buildings, whatever it is.
06:36 Starting from the very beginning of dragging for the outside,
06:39 if you look at all the streets in Rome that we drive through,
06:42 they're all wet all the way through.
06:44 It was mostly about light and dark.
06:46 It was mostly about contrast and shape
06:49 and the quality of the light.
06:51 We were always, always, always conscious and aware
06:56 of what was bright, what was dark, and why.
07:01 There was a moment when Tom walks to the beach
07:04 and meets Dickie and Marge,
07:06 and Tom in his little Speedo walks down there,
07:10 and there's a shot from the crane
07:13 where you see his shadow go across them,
07:16 which is a really shameless metaphor, I think.
07:20 There was a sunny moment when we're in a Trani,
07:24 and in the background is the sunlit steps of the little church,
07:27 and Steve had the wonderful idea, because it's in direct sun,
07:30 he'd have two nuns walking down the stairs,
07:33 and Tom would be in the foreground in shade.
07:36 Now, there's all sorts of ways to think about lighting
07:40 that it becomes a kind of a metaphor for the emotional state.
07:45 So what's lit in those paintings,
07:47 and especially in his religious paintings,
07:49 is the suggestion that light represents
07:52 a kind of gaining of wisdom and knowledge
07:54 or a way of understanding grace or transcendence
07:59 or something like that.
08:01 So there's this Tom in shadow,
08:03 the nuns in direct sun walking down the stairs.
08:07 I kind of love all that stuff.
08:09 Salute.
08:11 Quite honestly, I never expected the response that it got.
08:16 I really didn't.
08:18 And the response that the look of it got.
08:21 It's like everybody watches TV.
08:24 I heard from people I haven't seen in 40 years.
08:29 That's the most surprising thing, that so many people saw it
08:33 and that they reacted the way they did.
08:35 I mean, I didn't just show up and do all this.
08:38 This is the work of so many hardworking, gifted, and talented people.
08:42 I'm nothing without them, really.
08:44 This is a 5-year labor of love for Stephen,
08:47 and to have it so well received is just so wonderful for him.
08:51 [music]
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