Shadow and Light: Cinematographer Robert Elswit’s New Noir for “Ripley”

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All eight episodes of Netflix’s limited series, adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, are directed by writer and creator Steven Zaillian, and they’re all lensed by cinematographer Robert Elswit.

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“This singular vision gives Ripley both an impressive aesthetic cohesion and a radical kind of ambition,” says Vanity Fair’s David Canfield, who has the filmmakers dissect a dozen shots from the psychological thriller.

“When we had a chance we, tried to create a kind of chiaroscuro, a feeling of very strong shadows and very strong highlights,” Elswit explains. “I kept thinking while we were shooting, ‘I’ll fix all this later.’ And we didn’t fix any of it.”

Ripley leans into the noir of the original story in a more literal way than the 1999 feature adaptation starring Matt Damon. “What follows is a dizzying saga of lust, murder, impersonation, and deception, all captured in radiant black-and-white,” says Canfield.

The story is set in Italy, including in Naples and the Amalfi Coast, and the locations were a key part of the look of the 1999 movie.

“I knew from the beginning that I wanted to have this high contrast film-noir style,” Zaillian says. “We didn’t want to do anything that was familiar to us… I didn’t want to make a pretty travelogue.”

Elswit says that lead actor Andrew Scott has such an expressive face, “it dominates the series in a way. In all the different lighting setups where we did medium close-ups and tight close-ups, it was always fun to find an interesting way of creating contrast and shadows on his face.”

For lighting co-star Dakota Fanning, photographs of Grace Kelly served as inspiration. “It’s this hot, bright contrast between light and dark,” Elswit explains of one shot of her in a police station.

A lot of the show’s action takes place in an elevator. “It’s a symbol of dread for Tom Ripley when people come up in this elevator,” Zaillian says. “It’s a very important location for us. We shot it, basically, every way you could; from inside, from outside, from low, from high. But I had something very specific in my mind. We reached a point where we I started to see ways of shooting this location in a way that could be really fascinating, with this open staircase.”

Other classic noir lighting shots included looming giant shadows cast onto a wall, recalling Orson Welles’ entrance into the film The Third Man.

They used half lighting to evoke the idea that Ripley is two people almost all the time. In other shots Ripley is in total silhouette: “You know exactly what he’s thinking without seeing his eyes,” Zaillian says.

They also used the texture of buildings and cobblestones in ways that have been done since the 1920s. Zaillian added, “It doesn’t look nearly as interesting, by the way, in color, it just doesn’t.”