'Griselda' Cinematographer Breaks Down Shooting the Cocaine Bonfire Pool Scene

Variety

Armando Salas, ASC, cinematographer of Netflix's 'Griselda' breaks down defining the looks of the show in the 70's and 80's off Polaroids as well as using the Red Raptor on set.

Transcript

00:00Hello, I'm Armando Salas.

00:01I'm the Director of Photography on the limited series Griselda.

00:05♪

00:15I heard that you like my product.

00:17We can make a lot of money together.

00:20Who is the one in charge?

00:24In my early conversations with Andy, the director,

00:27we wanted to create something very unique.

00:29The color science was actually based on Polaroids

00:31that we were taking in pre-production.

00:33And so I brought those Polaroids very early on

00:36to my colorist, Ian, at Light Iron,

00:39and we landed on a very aggressive,

00:45Polaroid-inspired, two-tone look for the late 70s,

00:49and a slightly broader color palette for the early 80s.

00:55Because the look was so aggressive,

00:56it was important for me to be viewing that on set.

00:59And so we lit to that LUT religiously.

01:02We treated it like a film negative.

01:04So by the time we got into final color,

01:06we weren't really discovering or playing

01:09with what the look will be.

01:10We'd all been living with it for a long time.

01:13It became much more about finesse

01:15and about focusing the eye and making sure

01:18the audience was brought along from scene to scene

01:21without any distractions.

01:22Beautiful.

01:23It was like shoving a fucking coca plant up my nose.

01:27We tested several cameras and landed on shooting

01:30the show on the RED V-Raptor.

01:33At the time, it was so new, we could actually only get one,

01:37and we tested the Panavision DXL-2 against it.

01:41And after some color tests and some color correction,

01:44we felt really confident in the matching.

01:47The majority of the show was shot single camera,

01:50so I'd say 70% was shot with the Raptor.

01:53We were going to be shooting in very tight

01:55practical locations throughout Los Angeles.

01:58The way we were going to be shooting most of the show

02:00was on a compact remote head,

02:02and so having a small form factor for the whole thing

02:05so my AC could take it from a dolly to a crane

02:09to a jib very quickly was important

02:11because it was an ambitious schedule.

02:14And we paired the camera with Panavision Panaspeed lenses,

02:19although I love many of the characteristics

02:22of older vintage lenses.

02:25I was going to be so aggressive with the lighting on Griselda

02:28that I needed the performance and the consistency

02:33of the Panaspeeds, but paired with how gentle

02:36they were on skin tones, it was the right balance for the show.

02:39I'll fucking drink to that.

02:42One of the things that made this episode so exciting

02:45was there were visual elements that were a motif

02:48woven into the fabric of the episode,

02:50and those are water and fire.

02:52The episode begins with her and her son in a car wash.

02:57There's no dialogue.

02:58She's just processing and reliving the betrayals of the past

03:02and everything that's put her at this point,

03:04and it's essentially washing the slate clean

03:08as she moves forward into this new chapter of her life

03:13as she goes to war with the dealers

03:16and essentially with the Ochoas.

03:18The last shot of that sequence is the blowers

03:20moving the water off the windshield,

03:22revealing her face and the title card for the episode.

03:26This sets us on our path to war.

03:29Just as Griselda believes she's getting the upper hand,

03:32her Miami home is burned to the ground,

03:34and several of her friends and confidants are killed.

03:37Dario shows up to see the house in flames

03:40and Griselda's best friends murdered on the front lawn.

03:43Unlike the cocaine scene,

03:44we couldn't actually burn this house to the ground,

03:46so we revealed the house with Dario pulling up in his car

03:51and bringing us into the scene.

03:53We placed dozens of maxi brutes,

03:56both in condors and on the ground,

03:58some in the shot to actually create

04:00the right interaction of light with the lens,

04:03creating a halation around some of the characters at key moments,

04:06and used a ton of smoke in the front lawn

04:09and then some real fire elements that were controllable

04:12without putting the house or any of the characters in danger.

04:16And then Andrew Sepperle, our VFX producer,

04:18was in charge of taking all those elements,

04:21the interactivity of the light, the color,

04:24and actually adding the majority of the fire to that scene.

04:31That night, a rainstorm begins that moves across several scenes,

04:36and it leads to one of my favorite shots of the episode.

04:39There's no dialogue.

04:40It's Dario telling Griselda that her friends have been killed,

04:44and it's her against the windows of her estate

04:47where she's holed up in with the rain coming down,

04:50and it's all just Sofia's performance and body language absorbing the news.

04:54As part of that rain sequence,

04:56she calls Rivi, who's hiding out in the California desert.

05:00It's the first time you see the motif kind of back and forth,

05:04especially in terms of color,

05:06because she's in her Palm Beach home at night,

05:09rain on the windows,

05:11and he's standing at the patio of his desert motel at sunset.

05:15So the sky is essentially the color of the fire,

05:18and she is crying.

05:21The water is a metaphor for tears, right,

05:24for her sorrow that she has brought this upon herself.

05:27And he's essentially giving her the courage to fight on,

05:30you know, to bring the fire back.

05:32That is what leads us to the moment

05:35when she decides that she's taking this all for herself,

05:38and she's going to continue to fight,

05:40and the bonfire of cocaine in essentially an empty pool,

05:45you know, to continue that back and forth between water and fire.

06:00So much of the story and Griselda's journey

06:03is this balance of being a mother and a caregiver

06:06and the importance of family,

06:07but also being essentially this ruthless drug kingpin,

06:11or that's what she aspires to be at this point.

06:13So much of that duality is dealt with

06:16both in color and in framing.

06:18So we do quite a bit of two-tone color,

06:22of gold and amber representing the glamour that she aspires for,

06:26and this kind of olive base that balances it out.

06:29In this episode, we get into more blues and greens

06:34that expand the palette,

06:35both to represent the shift in location

06:38as she hunkers down in this fort,

06:40essentially, you know, this defended home in Palm Beach,

06:43but also to show the expanded ambition.

06:46As she's laying in the sofa, she has her hand over her stomach

06:50because we've just found out that she's pregnant,

06:53and she's having her fourth child,

06:55and she's balancing the decisions

06:58she's making for her family against her ambition.

07:01We get our answer immediately

07:03when we see a giant mound of cocaine pallets

07:07in an empty swimming pool being doused with gasoline.

07:11This is all the drugs that she and her army of marielitos

07:14have stolen mid-shipment from the Ochoas,

07:17and she's about to burn it.

07:19-♪♪

07:22Earlier in this episode, when she's first finding

07:25the dynamics of how she's going to go about achieving her goals,

07:30the camera is much more fluid, much more roving,

07:33feeling the presence of those around her.

07:36By the time we get to this moment,

07:38the camera work becomes more centered.

07:43The world revolves around her.

07:45There's very little movement other than the opening frame

07:48that shows the mound of coke

07:50with gasoline being poured over it

07:52and the bottom of this large swimming pool.

07:55So we're on a 30-foot techno crane

07:58moving across the cocaine and revealing the scene

08:01and showing just how many people are there.

08:03And Dario, her partner, her lover, and her muscle,

08:09who's advised her to not take this route,

08:11you can see he's diminished in the background

08:13or he's off to the side.

08:15So it's a very operatic moment, and it's a rebirth by fire.

08:21She's essentially burning down the power structure

08:24that exists at that time,

08:27and she's establishing a new power in Miami.

08:31This is the moment, essentially, where she becomes the godmother.

08:42Andy and I were adamant to do as much of it practically as possible.

08:47And a fire that big presents some challenges,

08:51obviously from a safety standpoint.

08:53Everyone around the pool in proximity to the fire was a stunt player.

08:57And we were shooting from a techno crane,

08:59so there was no camera personnel close to the fire.

09:02But we still wanted a rather large fire, 10, 12, 15 feet, if we could have it.

09:06And so in our conversations with our department at Special Effects,

09:10we came up with the ability to reproduce it as quickly as possible

09:14without having to rebuild the mound of coke.

09:17So all of those what looks like thousands of kilos of coke

09:20are all essentially made out of metal

09:24so that we could pipe a gas fire in, turn it on,

09:27bring it up to the correct height,

09:30and not have to worry about fumes and gases

09:33and replacing everything that burned inside the pool.

09:36It's just a quick cleanup.

09:38The lighting challenges that that creates is that as she's giving her speech,

09:41the fire hasn't kicked on yet.

09:43And when it does, there's going to be a dramatic change in exposure,

09:47and of course the flame is going to burn very bright.

09:50So we built up quite a bit of exposure for our night exterior.

09:53I think I had an ND9 in the camera,

09:56so we were using quite a bit of light out there.

09:59It looked like we were shooting night for day, actually to the eye,

10:02so that I didn't have to rebalance once the flames kicked on.

10:05Even still, the fire burns very hot,

10:08even with that much neutral density in front of the lens.

10:11The only shot that essentially is CG fire is the overhead drone,

10:15and that was due to the downdraft of the drone

10:18shooting the final shot in the sequence.

10:21And so we had to recreate the interactive lighting for that moment.

10:25So the mound of metal cocaine bricks was removed from the pool,

10:30and we put in four 12-light Maxi Brutes in a circle,

10:36run through the dimmer board on a flicker pattern.

10:39And just referencing our previous shots,

10:42we just matched the color intensity and frequency of the flicker as best we could,

10:47and it all blends in pretty well.

10:57Cinema is a very collaborative art form,

11:00and so we're constantly refining between departments.

11:05And a sequence like this requires both the craft and artistry, and also logistics.

11:14I have this idea in my mind of what the images will be,

11:17and I judge success by how close to that ideal we get.

11:22With Griselda, we got there more often than not,

11:25so I think we're all very pleased with the way it turned out.

Category

Transcript

Recommended