IBC
Muppetry and misery in Manhattan: the recipe for new
Netflix drama Eric explained by DP Benedict Spence.
A script about a missing child, a TV show puppeteer and a
giant monster puppet set in the seedy underbelly of 1980s New York “sounded
incredibly exciting and batshit - in a good way,” to cinematographer Benedict
Spence BSC. “There was no way I wouldn’t do that.”
He’d received the script by award winning screenwriter Abi
Morgan (The Iron Lady, Shame) from director Lucy Forbes and
production company SISTER with whom he had just made This Is Going To Hurt.
That was in summer 2022 and six months later Spence was in
Budapest with star Benedict Cumberbatch as bereaved father Vincent and larger
than life puppet, Eric, a creature of his imagination.
“It's a psychological thriller bordering on a fantasy with a
lot of world building because of its period setting,” says Spence who shot all
six episodes with Forbes directing. “The puppetry scenes were incredibly
rewarding and very complicated.”
The Netflix production designed two versions of Eric: a suit
that fitted the design parameters of a Sesame Street style children's
television show, and a hallucinatory Eric that would interact with Vincent and
look more grounded in a public world.
Experienced puppeteer Olly Taylor is mostly inside the
hallucinatory Eric suit performing the body, face and left arm. Yet he couldn’t
see from outside the 20kg suit except via video piped into first person view
drone goggles. Nor could he see his hands and feet. The goggles were fed with
four camera feeds, three from lipstick cameras trained on Olly/Eric from the
set plus a fourth view from the main camera monitor.
An external operator remotely controlled the animatronic
eyes and mouth of Eric's head with a third operator handling the right arm of
Eric's suit for times when he needed to be multi-dexterous.
“He and Benedict would rehearse the scene on set,” Spence
explains. “Benedict would perform the scene and Eric would mimic it.
“When the suit was on Eric would come to life. It was
amazing to be able to integrate this giant puppet monster with practical
lighting rather than working with a shiny ball on a stick.”
Films like Taxi Driver and The French Connection
were early references but their aim was not to make it look like it was shot in
the ‘80s so much as wanting the story to feel as if it was from the past.
“We wanted to give the impression of something from the past
but nothing explicitly vintage; a feeling of something gently out of time,”
Spence says. “New York is a place that I grew up with in my mind’s eye. Dozens
of films and TV shows have shot there. As we went deeper into the script it was
obvious the scope of our story included family apartments, a police station,
dark clubs, an underground village populated by homeless people.”
A particular still photograph that Forbes found of a subway
with a graffiti covered train with a man inside holding brightly coloured
balloons summed up the essence of the show as a pure, joyful and colourful
bubble encased in the rusty, gritty and dangerous world outside.
It was never going to be an option to shoot a production
that extensive in New York because of its expense. In addition to which very
little of Manhattan resembles the city of half a century ago. Budapest on the
other hand had an existing New York backlot originally built for Hellboy II in
2008 which they were able to adapt, plus the city has several kilometres of
underground beer tunnels.
After four months in Budapest shooting interiors at Korda
Studios and Astra Film Studio as well as a number of civic buildings doubling
for 1980s Manhattan they shot another five weeks in New Jersey and one week in
Manhattan itself.
“Lucy and I like to shoot on wider lenses and to put the
camera in the middle of the action. The image had to have both immediacy and a
roughness to it. All our characters are broken in some way so we wanted to
inject that.”
But with so many characters and plotlines to juggle across
six hours attempting a single style felt too much of a straitjacket.
“It would have done the show a disservice to be too strict
when we have raw handheld scenes, lots of Technocrane and Steadicam, large
sets, green screen and some virtual production work for a subway train scene.”
ARRI Alexa tends to be Spence’s go-to camera and Eric
was his first use of the Alexa 35. “I trust Arri to make a good camera. The
main thing for me on this show was the highlights protection. When shooting
with lots of practicals and lighting faces the extra latitude of the Alexa 35
means you’re not burning out [over exposing] the image but retaining all the
information.
“You can get most cameras to look like each other in the
grade but being able to shoot and light the way I want on set without have to
worry about it was a bonus.”
For example, scenes in the Lux nightclub were lit with a red
colour wash. “Normally I’d be worried about clipping the colour channel but I
had complete confidence that the Alexa 35 would hold all the detail.”
A set of Zeis Supreme Primes offered the speed (T1.5), focal
lengths and compact build suitable for his camera plan. “This is a mystery
thriller and a police procedural so to show clues as well as misdirection we
wanted a visual motif to draw people’s attention. The simple answer was a
zoom.”
He put on a Fujinon ZK19-90mm to draw attention to real
clues or red herrings and sometimes extended the optical zoom in post: “Using a
zoom is also a cool retro thing that echoes eighties movies.”
Good Day Sunshine, the kids TV puppet show in Eric,
was shot using older Ikegami studio cameras. Broadcast TV news segments at the
opening to episode 2 were shot on DigiBeta tape.
Stitches & Glue, who also built creatures for Stranger
Things and The Last of Us, built the puppets from initial designs by
illustrator Poppy Kay based on Forbes’ vision. Since Eric had to exist in
Vincent's imagination but had to feel like he belonged in the Good Day Sunshine
world, there was a lot of thought about his colouring.
Burgundy, browns and cornflower blue and buttery yellow
seemed to populate the New York landscape which is why Eric has a buttery hair
colour combined with cornflower blue. His eyes are direct copies of
Cumberbatch’s.
It’s a first major Netflix commission for SISTER which
Spence admits made for a degree of tension at the outset.
“I’m a great believer in screen tests so the week before we
started principal photography we took the main cast in costume and lit them on
set. We graded that and sent it off to Netflix. That reel was a validation for
everyone. We could see this show come to life.”
That test reel was used as the basis for the show LUT
designed in concert with Spence’s long term collaborator Toby Tomkins at Harbor
Picture Company.
Having shot all interiors in Budapest in the winter they
shot exteriors in New York in late Spring. Marrying those two was a matter of
skill and luck.
“You can’t predict the weather that far ahead so do you light interiors for weather which may or may not be sunny or overcast or do you light more neutrally? There’s no right answer so I lit interiors for the mood I felt was right for character and story. We got lucky in that for the most part the exteriors matched what we had already shot.”
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