“It’s the light! Always the light!” exclaims a priest to the murderous Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott) as they bask in the glory of a Caravaggio painting in Netflix’s new adaption of the Patricia Highsmith novel The Talented Mr. Ripley.

There are a multitude of exquisite facets to cinematographer Robert Elswit’s work on the series, including the formal compositions that embrace the Italian setting’s architecture. But, more than anything else, it’s the light as Elswit harkens back to classic noirs, 1960s Italian cinema and the canvasses of the great masters of chiaroscuro.

Elswit earned an Oscar nomination for his black and white work on Good Night, and Good Luck, which was shot on color film and converted much as Ripley was shot on an Alexa LF and then desaturated to monochrome. He later took home the Oscar for There Will Be Blood, a capper to an amazing career that includes six films for Paul Thomas Anderson, a couple of epic Mission: Impossibles and a resume dotted with the likes of The Town, Michael Clayton and Nightcrawler. But outside of a handful of pilots—most notably The Night Of for Ripley director Steven Zaillian—Elswit has rarely ventured into the world of episodic storytelling.

With his Emmy-nominated work for Ripley currently streaming on Netflix, Elswit spoke to Filmmaker about what finally coaxed him onto the small screen.

Filmmaker: You’ve shot a few pilots over the years, but this is your first full series. What convinced you to spend a year of your life in Italy making Ripley? 

Elswit: It was a long shoot, but it was a joy to be there. Steven [Zaillian] is a great guy. I was able to bring my best guys from the States and had just a fantastic Italian crew and a wonderful production designer, David Gropman. It couldn’t have been better, honestly. I had a wonderful apartment in Rome. [My wife and I] had just become foster parents on King Richard to a one-day-old baby boy. When Ripley started up, he was 10 months old and we were given permanent placement. So, we took him with us. He learned to walk on the streets of Rome. So, a big part of Ripley for me was becoming a dad.

Filmmaker: At this point in your career, do you still like to make lookbooks and pull references? There were a lot of shots in Ripley—particularly night scenes—that reminded me of classic 1940s noir.

Elswit: We were looking at Italian films of the 1960s, which was the great era of Antonioni and Fellini and to some extent De Sica, but we weren’t really imitating the pictorial style of those films as much as we were making something up that we’d never seen before. Steven collected still photography and photojournalism from that era in Italy. It was extraordinary and not many people have seen it. One guy in particular, Gianni Berengo Gardin, a fine art still photographer, [inspired us] with his structured formal language that made use of the unique architecture in Italy. Another influence became Caravaggio when Steven added him as a character in the show, because he saw the parallels between Ripley and Caravaggio, this 16th century wild dude who ends up murdering somebody and is chased all the way to Naples. All of that is from Steven. It’s not in the book. [In the series], Steven has Ripley going to see any work he can find of Caravaggio’s. The way we used the spaces and their formal shapes and structure is more along the lines of German Expressionism from the 1920s and 1930s. So, [the aesthetic of the show] was a compendium of a bunch of different things.

Filmmaker: How early did you decide on black and white?

Elswit: Steven said black and white to me at the very beginning. He really wanted to do the kind of exaggerated contrast that exists in the color paintings of Caravaggio. He wanted your eye to be directed by where the light strikes and where it doesn’t, and that’s something you can do in a very dramatic way with black and white. You can create a reality that’s very theatrical and stylized. Steven had a very specific and clear idea of the kind of pictorial style he wanted. He is one of those directors who knows that the lighting has a direct connection to the feelings of an audience. He didn’t want sunlight. I’m sure he’s said this a million times, but he didn’t want the postcard version of Italy, the beautiful travelogue with sunlit water and beautiful colors. He didn’t want any of that. He wanted a noir-ish black and white with wet streets and dark shadows. 

Filmmaker: How did you achieve that desired contrast? 

Elswit: The way you set it up now is you have a digital monitor on set that’s tuned to accurately reflect what is being captured on the sensor, then you create a LUT. There are some old film stocks I love and at the post production house in Los Angeles, Company 3, I created a black and white LUT that to my eye imitated two stocks. One was 5231, a Kodak stock that was very slow that they don’t make anymore. It had wonderful contrast and very little gray. You could really see the shadows, but it gave you beautiful highlights as well. I added to that some of the characteristics of Ferrania P30, which was the stock that a lot of the classic films in Italy in the 1960s were shot with. It’s now been revived as stills film. So, that LUT was on the monitor and that’s what I lit to. I could always go into LOG and look at the flat image to make sure I wasn’t losing highlights and to where the shadows were falling, because LOG gives you the whole flat image that’s being put on the sensor without any contrast at all. So, you can just push a button and see that.

I had a wonderful DIT in Italy, Marco Coradin, who was just the best. I was worried that I wasn’t going to be able to time the show at the end, because you never know how long post might go on. The post for the last thing I did with Steven, The Night Of, ended up being a year and a half. So, on Ripley, I looked at dailies pretty carefully when they came in. I’d put them up on the monitor in the DIT tent, and if I wanted to make a change we’d adjust things so that essentially we had what the movie was going to look like. We really timed the show as we went, which is so much simpler to do if you don’t have color—all you’re dealing with is highlight and shadow detail and contrast.

Filmmaker: The series actually originated at Showtime before later being picked up by Netflix. Was the 1.78 aspect ratio something Showtime required?

Elswit: It was. We had to do 1.78 and 4K. We needed to shoot with an ARRI LF just because of all the visual effects. All those railway stations don’t exist anymore, so everything over the top of those frames is post production visual effects. Also, Steven insisted that there be no sun at all when Tom is killing Dickie on the boat, which meant that we had to have a completely controlled environment.

Filmmaker: You shot that at a swimming pool at the effects supervisor’s house?

Elswit: There was a wonderful effects guy who had a nice swimming pool. I think he did underwater photography for some things because the pool had a little viewing port down at the deep end. So, yeah, we were in a big swimming pool with three cameras and three cranes. We also had an underwater head so we could kind of sink it. I put greenscreen on three sides of the pool, then overlaid the top of it with a silk, which diffused the light. We didn’t want the light from the sky to be flat. It wasn’t supposed to be overcast or foggy. The light was going to have shape to it. So, I had to create shape on everybody’s face that was consistent as if we were saying, “If you’re looking straight down the center of the boat, on the port side the sun is up further right.” We were able to do that by having scaffolding all the way around the greenscreen, which I think was 25 feet high, where I could put lights and either bounce or diffuse them to create some sort of soft ambient shape on the actors. The WETA visual effects people did an astonishing job combining all of that and connecting the water, the boat and the sky.

The boat was actually pretty static for that. It turned a little, but most of the motion you see was created the same way as shooting spaceships at ILM [which Elswit did at the outset of his career in the early 1980s]. It’s all transferred motion. The boat [that looks like it’s moving] is static with the camera moving toward it, then we had these underwater little blowers that can make the water look like it has a wake. We spent six days there [for the murder] and probably three or four more getting them out there [to that spot in the water] and then Tom burning the boat and all that stuff. We also did a few pickups later, just tight shots.

Filmmaker: That sequence of Tom trying to figure out how to burn the boat highlights one of the things that is so great about the show, which is the level of detail. The violent acts of the murders themselves are like 15 seconds of runtime, but they’re followed with 30 minutes of aftermath. I want to ask you about a specific detail. In the first episode Tom has this scam where he calls patients of a chiropractor and tries to get them to submit payment directly to him. There’s a cutaway to the chiropractor at work that starts with a wide shot of his shop. Then you cut to an insert of the hem on his pants as it lifts up every time he presses down on a patient. Where does a detail like that come from?

Elswit: It’s absolutely from Steven’s head. He loves inserts. We did a lot of inserts on this. There are these comic moments that happen in Tom’s imagination. They’re not really moments that actually occur. They’re him imagining these things, like the various bank presidents who are talking directly to camera. That’s in Tom’s head. That was Steven’s humorous idea about how to do that. Steven always said he was more interested in what to do after you kill somebody than in killing them. With an impulsive act of murder, that’s it. But what fascinated Steven, and what he really wanted to make sure he captured, was the improv that has to happen afterwards, where all the mistakes are made and Tom just gets lucky. He wanted to see it and feel it through Tom’s eyes. It’s what they call shoe leather in most movies where he’s walking up and down the same set of stairs over and over again, but I think we brought it to life. 

Filmmaker: In that first episode, Tom goes to visit Dickie’s father, played by Kenneth Lonergan, at his ship building factory. There’s a version of that scene that could start with them already at the dad’s desk and you wouldn’t lose any information that pushes the story forward. But instead you have these little environmental touches, like shots of the worker with his welding sparks. Do you and Steven shot list or storyboard? How do you go about building those environments?

Elswit: There was always a detailed shot list from Steven, and we would go over it in a specific way, but he’s not one of those directors that gets locked in and says, “I have this preconceived idea and we’re doing it no matter what happens.” He was always open to seeing other things. On Ripley, we had one of the best assistant directors I’ve ever worked with, Peter Thorell. We always knew how many people we had as background and what they would be doing. There was always an attempt to make things authentic whether it was a hotel or the shipyard. So, yeah, we knew going in that we wanted those sparks and all that stuff. We also had two of the finest costumers I’ve ever worked with, Maurizio Millenotti and Giovanni Casalnuovo. I think their work is unheralded genius. They built every costume for every principal in that show as a period costume. They were very, very concerned with texture and tonal structure within shots. There’s shots that really work because of the tonal values of the pants and the shirt in the location we’re shooting in. I think the costume concept for Marge [Dakota Fanning] was extraordinary, because her costumes are so simple and yet they are a character piece. The way she’s dressed says as much about her character as Dickie’s fabulous wardrobe does about him. And Tom’s coveting of all those objects and Dickie’s clothes works so well because of the prop department. I know I’m going on about everybody, but David Gulick is one of the great prop men. The prop walkthrough, which happens before every movie, where we wander through and look at all these things and talk about them, took three days. Three days! We looked at every single thing that any actor touched in that movie—every ledger in every hotel, every piece of writing equipment, every typewriter, every phone, everything. Everything in that movie was assembled and lined up and we went scene by scene through the whole film. As much as Steven loves those elements of detail, he never loses the larger picture of what it all adds up to.

Filmmaker: Whenever I talk to someone who’s shot in black and white, I like to ask about the lighting units they used, because they’re often dusting off things they haven’t employed in a while. Anything you broke out for Ripley that had been on the bench for a while? Any old tungsten units?

Elswit: Well, the old Mole-Richardson 10Ks at [the famed Rome studio] Cinecittà were something I hadn’t seen in a long time. But we still use tungsten lights, though I just did a movie without a single one. Using tungsten lights with Fresnel lenses is a wonderful way to work, but even with the bigger LEDs I can still create a strong shadow that imitates a tungsten Fresnel unit—though it’s not a perfect imitation. On Ripley I wanted strong shadows, big fall off and hard light. It’s not this sort of ambient daylight that we’ve gotten used to in color photography. So, I wouldn’t say that it was particularly about using different units. I just used what I had in a little more focused and direct way. I wasn’t creating soft window light. When I did fake direct sun, which I did in Atrani in Dickie’s villa and a little bit in Tom’s apartment that he rents in Rome, I used HMIs. In Dickie’s I think we had 10Ks coming through windows, which we don’t use that much anymore. In big shots in New York, we even had 20Ks for big backlights. I think a 20K is still a great backlight no matter what.