NAB
At first glance, a murder mystery set at a remote
luxury retreat for some of the world’s most influential people recalls shows
like The White Lotus and Glass Onion: A Knives
Out Mystery, but new seven-part FX series A Murder at the End of
the World has a different spin.
article here
“With its time-jumping structure, uniquely eerie
tone and warnings about artificial intelligence and climate change, it is also
unmistakably the work of the idiosyncratic creators behind Netflix series The
OA, Sound of My Voice and The East,” Esther Zuckerman
writes in The New York Times.
Those creators are Brit Marling and
Zal Batmanglij — a creative team who’ve been together since their first short
film in 2007.
Their new show — marking the first time Marling, a
writer and actor, has stepped behind the camera as director — is an Agatha
Christie-inflected whodunit, featuring a Gen-Z amateur detective played by Emma
Corrin (Diana Spencer in The Crown).
Emma Corrin and Harris Dickinson in “A Murder at
the End of the World.” Marling also co-stars as the wife of
Clive Owen’s tech billionaire, who invites a motley crew of guests including an
environmental activist, a roboticist and an astronaut to his Icelandic retreat,
where one or more of them wind up dead.
“It was really eerie, actually, to
see the number of things that, when we had set out to write it four years ago,
were science fiction,” Marling told Zuckerman. “When we talked about any of
this stuff with people, we had to explain what is a deepfake, what is an AI
assistant, what’s a large language model — how does that work? And then by the
time we were editing it, to see everything come to pass.”
To film their story, Marling and Batmanglij sought
out acclaimed cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen, ASC, who shot horror
hit A Quiet Place; All the Old Knives, directed by
Janus Metz Pedersen; Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut, Molly’s Game;
and Denzel Washington’s film Fences.
“At heart this is a coming-of-age story about a
child of the internet who knows more how to live her life in cyberland than in
the real world,” Christensen tells NAB Amplify. “The script had
this larger than life quality as if the world of the internet can’t be
contained or quite grasped.”
She continues, “As a teenager I
remember thinking the stars were so beautiful but there was an unfathomable
distance between them and me. That is how I think we all felt about the
cyberworld in this story. You can’t put it into a cage.”
The Danish DP has enjoyed a long-standing
relationship with director Thomas Vinterberg, which began when her own short
films caught his attention. This led to Christensen’s first feature film, Submarino,
which earned her a Danish Film Academy award for best cinematography. She also
shot The Hunt and Far from the Madding Crowd for
Vinterberg.
“From what I know, Zal loved The Girl on
the Train (shot by Christensen for director Tate Taylor) but it was
one of those processes where our agents got in touch. I was in New York having
just shot Sharper (dir. Benjamin Caron) so we had our first
meeting there and it was like first love. No one who meets Brit can fail to
fall in love with her.”
Having shot a number of features
back-to-back, Christensen wasn’t particularly looking for a TV project.
Instead, it was the co-director’s passion and the story itself that convinced
her to take the job.
The central character’s crime solving cyber skills
might recall The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Swedish author
Stieg Larsson. Christensen says their chief cinematic reference were the films
of great Polish auteur Krzysztof Kieślowski, and in particular the Three Colors
trilogy (1993-1994 Red, White and Blue).
“We learned a lot from Kieślowski
movies and wanted to emulate that tone, something very raw yet cinematic and
truthful,” she says. “It’s the way that he took simple ideas and then
photographed that idea.
“In these days when you can move the
camera so much, even virtually, you can have it fly through a keyhole, under a
bed, through a wall; we wanted something that felt raw and which retained those
happy accidents, those glitches or scratches that are evidence of something
real. We wanted an analog style.”
She elaborates, “Our question to
ourselves was how do we make it feel minimalist? For us, perfection was
imperfection. We didn’t want to be afraid of imperfections but to embrace all
the things that can go wrong and not try to fix everything in post. You really
have to work hard to protect that because the instinct from your colleagues in
post-production is to fix things.”
To photograph the series she selected the ARRI
Alexa equipped with a set of spherical lenses from Panavision that Christensen
had previously used on the three-part BBC mini-series Black Narcissus —
which Christensen also directed.
“The image needed to be messed up a
little and these lenses added that less-than-perfect quality,” she said,
explaining that Panavision’s VP of optical engineering, Dan Sasaki, “detuned
the lenses to achieve a softness and vignetting to break up the digital
sharpness and cleanness and push the lenses to capture a less perfect image.”
She devised LUTs for each of the
three principal locations in New Jersey, Iceland and Utah. “The color contrast
was important to creating an energy between scenes as we move from white
‘desert’ to ‘red desert,’” she says. “Among our first creative conversations
was about how to delineate between the real world and the cyberworld.”
She approached the show “like a
seven-hour movie, as one story and one journey in terms of lighting,” operating
the A camera with occasional second unit work for pick-ups.
While Batmanglij and Marling swapped
directorial duties on the episodes, Christensen lensed all seven over the
100-day production period.
“I love prep and being in control of
what we’re doing but here I learned how to prep while shooting,” she explains.
“If Zal was directing for three days than Brit would be prepping her next block
of two to three days and vice versa but I was busy shooting all the time.
“So when either director came to me
with a new idea that they’d thought about I had to be quick to re-evaluate. So,
I learned to go and chat with the director who wasn’t directing that day in my
lunch break to tap into their thoughts and to prep for the next block while
shooting.”
The billionaire’s Icelandic retreat recalls the
opulence of the Roy family in Succession or the forest mansion
in the sci-fi feature Ex Machina. It was built on soundstages in
New Jersey and presented the biggest production challenge to the DP. The budget
wouldn’t allow for the build of the entire set so they built half, dressed it
for half the show, and then flipped it around, dressing the other half of the
hotel weeks later.
“It’s a circular hotel but we only
had space to build half of it at a time so we’d shoot the one half then, with
the other half of the set dressed, we’d shoot the same scenes but in the other
mirrored half. We also had to connect those scenes to Iceland. We had snow on
the stage to link to snow in Iceland.”
Working within a LED Volume might
have solved the need to dress and redress the scale of sets but would not have
delivered the analog aesthetic they desired.
While the co-creators and directors
naturally sing from the same sheet, Christensen says that they were different
in the way they executed things. Making her directorial debut, “Brit is a very
organized with thorough prep and previz. She needed that security while Zal
allowed for a more spontaneous approach. It’s not quite improvisation but he
wasn’t scared of seeing what happens on the day and reacting to that.”
Although she says that the shoot
during winter and under COVID conditions in Iceland was particularly tough,
Christensen wouldn’t hesitate to work with the duo again.
“Their passion for the story and the
camaraderie they bring to set is something to be valued. It was a full on
experience but I have to underline that Brit and Zal were an amazing team —
which, trust me, does not always happen.”
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