• 6 months ago
Legendary cinematographer Robert Elswit explains the process behind shooting the arresting image's of Netflix's show 'Ripley' with Andrew Scott and Dakota Fanning.

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Transcript
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]
09:06 [MUSIC PLAYING]

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