NAB
With director Susanna
White’s “The Buccaneers,” an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s unfinished
final novel set in the 1870s, Apple TV+ adds a period drama with a modern spin
to its lineup.
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The story turns on the fallout of
intercontinental marriages of convenience between five wealthy American
heiresses and Englishmen long on family trees but short on cash. The women
travel from New York to England, where they vie to pair off with aristocratic,
eligible young men.
For cinematographer Oliver
Curtis (“Stay Close,” “Vanity Fair,” for which he was nominated for a
BAFTA), who worked on the first two episodes, the contrast was a natural
setup.
“The theme of the clash of cultures from these vivacious, energized, young American women coming over to musty old England to meet their potential suitors has got a natural kind of transformative quality. You’ve got the color, light, and energy of their New York life, and then the dour, desaturated world of old England,” he told Motion Pictures. “It’s all about forward movement in people’s lives. It’s a playful show, full of light and color. The cinematography had to reflect that.”
Opening With a Oner
From the opening moments of the show,
the expansiveness of this world and its characters are established via a long,
meandering one-shot throughout an opulent New York home.
“Susanna and I designed … an opening statement of
energy, of movement, of exuberance,” Curtis told No Film School.
“So it was a real marker, if you will, for what you are getting yourself into
with this show. And also the fact that it’s driven by the movement of our lead
character played by Kristine Frøseth.”
Not only did the take need to
incorporate different spaces with the cooperation of dozens of actors and
supporting artists, but Curtis also had to consider what tools to use with his
Steadicam operator, Alex Brambilla.
“Because we start close and wide on the flowers and
as we sweep in, you get more compression as it gets busier with people inside.
So we probably went onto a slightly longer focal length there. And then when we
got up to the landing after Kristine meets Christina [Hendricks] there, I think we widened out a little bit
more so that when we do the hidden edit transition, we were on a slightly wider
focal length, which would allow us to get separation there.”
They avoided any reflective surfaces with the coordination of the camera ops and cast. Eagle-eyed viewers might catch the one hidden cut in the sequence.
“There has to be a hidden cut because
the first half of it is on location and the second half is on a build,” Curtis
said. “So where we go into the rooms, we built that because we couldn’t find a
building that gave us those two spaces. Plus we needed green screen beyond the
windows for the street, which was just outside Glasgow City Chambers doubling
for Madison Avenue.”
Camera Techniques Express Characters
The story theme of a clash of cultures gave the DP
a clue that there was going to be an evolution of the show’s look. “You’re
going to start with the modern American Vision and move to the old world
vision. So that was an exciting prospect and thinking about how we were going
to evolve that,” he explained to Patrick O’Sullivan.
The other aspect of the show he had
to consider was to marry the grand interiors and big ballroom and dinner scenes
with close ups of intimacy and expression. This drew him to using a larger
format sensor of the Alexa LF combined with portraiture lens of the Arri DNA
glass.
“It’s got all of the tropes of a
period drama that you’d expect, but it’s also surprising and different in a lot
of ways,” Curtis added.
Dynamic camera techniques, including
tracking and Steadicam shots, reflect the characters’ infectious spirit.
“When you’ve got an ensemble cast and the blocking
is fairly fluid and not too static, the camera has to adjust and configure
itself around their movements,” Curtis
told IBC365. “Also shooting ‘B’ camera most of
the time gave the editor coverage to build pace and find the action within the
scene.
Lighting, Then and Now
“Something I hadn’t really taken on
board previously is that the clothing from that period was much more reflective
than most modern fabric. The bustles and corsets are textured and reflect the
light so you get a lot of animation in the costume and movement.”
In the 1870s, electricity was
available in the homes of wealthy New York society, while British aristocracy
still had gas, oil lamps and candles. Curtis leapt on this as a storytelling
device.
“The New York interiors are flooded
with light, they are bright and open and accessible but when our heroes arrive
in London the light hardly penetrates indoors. We keep the lighting levels low
key there to build that contrast. Gradually as the women infiltrate high
society the light starts to flood in.”
Glasgow City Chambers was used for
interiors of London’s Grosvenor House, scene of a grand debutante’s ball. The
building featured a magnificent white staircase, which White thought ideal to
stage a parade of white gowned debutantes.
It was a very challenging space to
work in. A giant sky light overhead meant the DP had to compete with all the
vagaries of the Glasgow weather, and the staircase itself descended around an
atrium, making it tricky to position and move a camera.
“We managed to work our way down the
building in stages,” he told IBC. “Where there were doorways leading onto
council offices I asked [production designer Amy Maguire] to build window plugs
(where designers create a window) so we could bring daylight into the belly of
the building where otherwise it would be gloomy and dark. This created
interesting pools of light and contrast where we could stage different beats of
the story. It was an unusual piece of staging for something that could
otherwise have been a conventional ballroom scene.”
He used helium balloons to help light
spaces in period houses partly to protect the delicate cornicing from rigging.
They came in useful during the debutante’s ball scene, too, where the balloons
were towed down the staircase as the camera team worked their way into the
bowels of the building.
The British cinematographer expounded
on his process with O’Sullivan, recalling that at one point in his career he
was mostly shooting commercials.
“And as marvellous as that was in
itself, traveling, seeing the world earning good money and making some
interesting work it, you know, it can get very stultifying,” he said. “You kind
of find yourself yearning to be able to hold a shot longer than two seconds and
work with actors, I think it is great to have a good mixture [of work] so that
you stay fresh and challenged.
He started out his career shooting on
film and says his goal remains to shoot in camera as much as possible. “You
also have to be cognizant of the post processes and the ability you have in the
grade to work with the colorist. Colorists are artists, too, and they can bring
an awful lot to a show and surprise you with some of the solutions and make
transitions which you thought wouldn’t work.
“It’s really important to have that
in your back pocket. And I suppose my dialogue with the DIT and the VFX onset
is one of reassurance that I just, I can say, ‘you know, look, I haven’t got
the time, or the resources perhaps to deal with a certain problem, but do you
think that will be okay, in terms of exposure, in terms of separation?’ These
are experts around you doing their job for a reason, and you’d be foolish not
to take on board their input.”
The foundation of his craft remains
lighting and shooting it the way that you want it to be done, “if you walked
away from it that day and never saw the image again, which is often the case on
commercials. Because you can’t follow commercials through post production as
much as you can drama. You have to trust that the image is there. So yeah, I
try to walk away from set feeling that yes, I have got the essence of that, and
it looked the way I wanted to look, and I’m not going to have to do too much in
post.”
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