Frame & Reference Podcast - 243: "The Audacity" Cinematographer Richard Rutkowski, ASC

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

Richard Rutkowski is back! This time we're chatting about his work on his new show "The Audacity". Enjoy!(As a note, we had some Zoom trouble during our discussion so if you hear some choppy sections, that's what happened. Did my best to edit around it!)► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠F&R Online ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Support F&R⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Watch on YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Produced by Kenny McMillan► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ► ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Hello and welcome to this, episode 243 of Frame and Reference. You're about to drop into a conversation between me, Kenny McMillan, and my guest, Rich Rukowski, ASC, DP of the Audacity. Enjoy. It is a satire. And of course, our showrunner came from Succession and before. And these are very dialogue-driven shows with witty, fast-paced dialogue, almost like rapid-fire dialogue. And it questions about visual style. and there was a first block shot by Paula Hedobro

with a director Lucy Forbes and they had a point of view within that first block and it quite often involved being very in movement with the actor, moving to and fro with the doing a pan over to see something if it was attached to the actor.

As we came to episode three and Dan Sackheim and I started our block and Dan had had a glatzer in the past so he had a language to approach it from. Plus, Dan is a very good mind for this sort of pace. Like Dan, as a human, has a fast pace. And within that, he was able to, I think, expand on the range we were working in without

it stepping outside the show. And that was very important. We all wanted the show to feel consistent, but also supporting dialogue and supporting the script page to the utmost. and we basically affected a kind of naturalism that still allowed for heightened dramatic moments to peak heightened dramatic moments and to realize, oh, wow, I can't believe

the characters have gotten here, that's insane. Or even the sort of sotovoche of dialogue, which is so funny, but it goes by in an instant because you've got so much in a run. And so good. So Billy, Zach, Sarah. I mean, Tom, a Ruffridge played by Rob, any of them could do a genius rendering of a quick undertone line. And we just knew visually, you have to hear it, see it, feel it.

It has to be viable. It has to have context and it has to advance story while at the same time seeming like, oh, just another thing said in rapid fire. But it's too clever a script for you to do that. You have to emphasize and reach those dramatic heights. And I especially am fond of the finale. I'm a fond of all the episodes I shot, but I'm especially fond of the finale for what it's able to bring

to the overall arc of the story without seeming too forced, without seeming like, oh, we really punched this up. It felt like, no, we're still traveling with these characters and they've just reached increasingly high levels of both importance in their lives, what's going wrong for them, what's not happening that they've been striving for, we've seen it for seven episodes, but also how they're dealing with it and how fragile it all becomes,

how fragile their very consistently heightened egos deal with things. And I thought that was a great way to ground a kind of satire with rapid comedy. You know, sometimes I'd say to myself, is this like Leo McCarrie, like a Leo McCarrie comedy in the 30s or 40s, where the dialogue is so vast, you almost have to rewatch everything that said. And that's a testament to the screenwriters and also the directors. Yeah.

You know, as I was watching it, I was getting kind of a photographic feel from it. I don't know if Steven Shore is the right thing off the top of my head, but it felt very, it was Steven Shaw, all right, go ahead. Oh, you nailed it because there's a body of work

called American Prospects. And the enthusiasm for the ever-increasing wealth and status of the American consumer is belied by the image in many ways. It's sophisticated that you brought that up. And it's also sophisticated that the work was created along those lines. I definitely brought a lot of still photography to the table. Paula's lookbook with Lucy had shows, had episodic shows and also films, and they were very good references. Dan Sackheim himself is a talented photographer. So when I want to bring something to Dan, sometimes a photography reference is the right one. And it can be from almost any period.

I mean, we're talking going back to the 1900s or up to seven weeks ago. We were very focused on the idea that this story is so current that you could see an image in the news while we were making it. and it might bring up Alibaba or it might bring up AI, you know, big AI news that was changing the economy. And we would be just a few weeks ahead of it with a script. So you were having these images from the Silicon Valley world come in to your prep. And a lot of them were stills and a lot of them, to me, mattered. It was like, this is the reality.

We're making a satirical and very, very humorous version of this. but how far off are we really when we think about the sets we're building the way we're doing them, the way we're crossing over sets in Vancouver with actual Silicon Valley. In fact, one of the real veris-similitude moments was

during the making of the finale and then we went down to Silicon Valley to film scenes that would intercut throughout the whole season. We stayed in a hotel right in Palo Alto that had a beautiful restaurant, a no-boo Japanese restaurant. And one of the guests on our

Last night there was Tim Cook. He showed up with SUVs, much like Bartoff was in our story, with security guards. And he sat over at another table while we were having a sort of final meal at this Palo Alto Nobu. And I was like, wow, that is like life imitating art, like, directly. Yeah, I grew up in the Bay Area, and it has been very interesting to see. how since, you know, 1990 till now, just how aggressively the tech industry has changed that town in a way that I, I'm not a genius, but I can't think of another city that, like, has been so drastically. I mean, it's not even just the Bay Area, you know, it's the whole world, but specifically, you know, when you're close to them, it's a very strange ecosystem and orbit that they've created around themselves. Yes, and it creates a great thing to write about and make a show about. When we were in Palo Alto and we'd be driving to location or on our scouts, we'd see those buses,

the buses that Google and Meta gets to be able to bring their young engineers all the way from San Francisco where they prefer to live down the coast in like business classy looking seats inside the buses that are driven by Teamsters, by the way, interesting note. and they have super Wi-Fi on the buses so they can work the whole drive down and the whole drive back. I think there's a lot of that culture that bears examination,

and the show does a great job, more to come. We're starting season two in just a couple months, and I'm thinking that even more and better is coming, especially now that we've learned that so much of the military work being done in the Middle East is connected, to AI and connected to serious number crunching by computers across the world. It's potent to work on material like that and understand that it's about something real.

It's also potent to work with actors who are really good. I think many people have asked me, well, what was your major help? What was your major assist in terms of how you did the work on the show? It was the performers. And they lead you on a trail that delivers visually. in a way that I'm very happy about. Yeah, you do have a, what is it, like 12 storylines? It's kind of a big show.

Not 12, but if you add in what's happening with the kids of the engineers slash entrepreneurs, it gets to be a complex web, and that was very much by design. And I think the finale really attests to how complex it gets and how you have to keep your eye on the ever-evolving beats. of individual characters' moments to understand where the tragedy and ultimately the very dark humor lies in the writing. Yeah. What were some of the – because, you know, coming off of the back of like Masters of the Air and Sugar and stuff, some of those shots could get pretty complicated. This is a pretty – one moment.

This is a pretty more straightforward, you know, people talking to each other type show. were there any unique challenges coming off, you know, doing something big than going to something a little more contained that you weren't expecting? I would love to give you an answer that admits like, oh, scale matters to me. Scale doesn't matter to me that much. Like, I just want the quality of the work to reflect the quality of the writing and the acting. I don't need an enormous canvas or hundreds of people in a frame to tell a story that connects. I just need good writing, good performances,

a technical crew that can work with me and keep up with the pace. The biggest challenge, often the biggest challenge, was dealing with the locations that we had in Vancouver, knowing that the whole show had to appear to have been shot in Silicon Valley. So, you know, Palo Alto and it's Anderons. And when you know what those look like, which fortunately I did,

then we went down and did a pre-scout before shooting there, you really can feel the differences and you start to become a critique of locations. You're like, this location is only good in this much of the circle of view, and then over here we cannot do this. And you also become a critique of daylight because you want the daylight to feel California, and you want the colors of the sky to feel Californian. So that was a challenge. The sets were incredibly well done, but to light them and give that California feel is its own challenge. And there's a certain type of California interior, you know, the heat of the light outside, the brightness of the light outside, and then also how it falls off in a lower ceiling craftsman house

or how it affects an office space. And you ask yourself, am I really staying true to what the location is supposed to be? I think another challenge was in the final episode. We had multiple timelines that coexist. So we had multiple story points happening in a coexistent timeline. And you didn't want any confusion for the audience. You needed to have the audience understand. This is coexisting with that.

And then the child Orson on stage is coexisting with his mother having left at the moment when it's his moment. That's a big story point. but it's not expositionally stated. It's a visual statement. Like, where's the mom? This is, he's been practicing. She brought him to this school to be her child again and they hadn't lived together for a while.

This is important that we see that he's been left out. And I think equally important is in episode three, we had to sell the wildfires. Now, this is for several reasons. But I think a lot of people who live in California and went through the palisades and Altadena fires and before that, the station fire, before that the Malibu fires,

knows what happens when fire and ash and that desaturation of daylight happens to you. You feel like you're in some other place. It feels like an alien world. We really wanted to punch that and to say this is what happens when wildfires are destroying, hundreds and thousands of acres near enough to where it affects you.

And actually, I had been around in San Francisco when Napa fires were happening and it had this huge effect in San Francisco, sometimes eerily beautiful, but mostly like, holy cow, we are nature's supplicants. We think we control the world. We control large parts of the world we're paying attention to, but we are nature's supplicants. And I think that's one of the underpinnings of the show that's smart, like nature rules. and you only think you rule because you have some amazing algorithm or web tracking device.

Yeah. Yeah, the, the napifier specifically, it was exactly like the Blade Runner scene where K is walking through the, you know. But yeah, down here was a different type of light. And I will say, I was definitely pulling out the color meter. Like, what is this? You know, oh, interesting, you know. Because hopefully the chances of me seeing that type of atmospheric nonsense is low. But it is a fascinating way that the sun, I've never seen anything like that.

And I was so tempted to show you a panorama I took in Altadena the day after the fires. I happened to be in California for a friend's birthday. It's a big birthday, and she planned it out in, you know, 29 palms. and we arrived through the smoke to land, only to then learn that my wife's family were being evacuated from Pasadena. And they were very close to the fires, and then we went up the next morning,

and I've never seen anything like it. Never seen anything like it. It was an absolute destruction zone, but the color in the sky was so unique. So we had a challenge to create that on otherwise beautiful days in Vancouver, and we went about it as you would by changing lighting, changing LUT,

changing, even re-rating the camera, and then adding color filters and sometimes grads selectively and always out tastefully to create this impression that it's just getting worse and that the characters caught up in their own world are ignoring this impactful thing happening to them. And so I think it was ultimately successful, certainly by the end of the episode.

Yeah, I was going to ask about that because I kind of, specifically the filters, because I kind of enjoyed seeing just a regular grad employed. I was like, yeah, that's good. I like that instead of, you know, whatever you do and resolve to try to like orange it up and, you know, in a weird way. I didn't want to burden the post with creating the entire thing, certainly. I wanted to have a very firsthand effect on it. I also didn't want them to be able to turn away from some of the things I chose and water it down too much. I thought that this is a really bold statement in the script. By the end, you want to see that the world is on fire.

And that's why that last dialogue scene in the restaurant with Bardolph and Duncan has an otherworldly feel to the light coming in from outside. I mean, we use gel on the windows so that it would only be the exterior light effective. and then the interior light would be normal tungsten sources or sources you'd have in a restaurant, but that the air would feel acrid. We used these diffusion filters that had an effect that really felt right. It felt like an acrid, very toxic environment so that you could sell this idea,

oh, everybody's home, but these two guys. You know, during some previous fires, not the big ones, in this exact room, my roommate at the time was sitting there, and I took a photo of them because it was that orange sky thing, but I think it might have been the evening or whatever. And the photo turned out green because it was like a cell phone photo, you know, and I was just so fascinated by how I expected this kind of almost beautiful orange glow.

And then it's funny you say acrid because that's how it looked photographically. And I was like, that's fascinating. But you're so right. The interior when it's all smoking stuff is just, ugh. I'm going to try and find this one photo. It's maybe you can or cannot use this part or I'll send it to you. But I'm going to show you this one photo where you see in a panorama exactly how truly the diverse the light is on that morning right after the fires

because in the direction of the sunrise, totally different. Direction of the sunrise is completely like, siena and all very opaque in the direction of the shore looking west from Altadena. It was like, no, it doesn't look like that. So hold on. Oh, wow. That's fascinating. So that's a panorama taken right near Alta's Park in Altadena up Lincoln Drive.

And we were checking on a home we owned there, which thankfully was not burned. It was fine. So I guess you must have planned out throughout like episodes like where, because we return to a handful of locations. Were you just setting up like lights? There it is. Or were you tracking time of day for a lot of the, because you don't really see to the outside. It's just sudden coming in. No, I was often asking myself, what's the continuity?

I was rarely placing a lamp except on stage. And even then we had alternates. So you'd have a lamp hung in a position that was favorable to the stage windows or the stage exterior, but I would often mix it up and say, no, this is morning. Maybe we do something from the floor now, or I would say, no, this is evening, so why don't we have an elimination of direct light, get rid of the direct light in the windows, put softer lights outside the windows and bring them in so that you feel like daylight's ebbing. And no, I often am concerned with time of day and how to represent it best. I was also concerned with flatly. I was also concerned with

the phases of the performer. So you often engage, like, in what angle is going to be working out best? And, you know, performers, you've got to take care of their eye sockets, their nose, their mouth. You want something favorable that still reads as a context that is believable to the storyline at that moment. Yeah. Well, and they're billionaires, right? So they're probably a little pretty. The school could be tricky for that.

Oh, yeah. The school can be tricky. You've got overhead fluorescence, not always favorable. and you're going into these different classroom hallway environments. And sometimes when characters came to the showcase, the whole storyline of the two teenagers exchanging messages through something they're doing in the school showcase, I was like, okay, they're always going to come downstage

to a very darkened environment. I need to help them out. The overhead fluorescent, while a useful and accurate depiction of light in a school, isn't often flattering to faces. And the kids, yeah, their faces took light very well. The adults I had to be a little more careful with,

and so we augmented close-ups, medium shots, group shots of the adults, and that was very much my goal was to keep faces flattered but believable within an environment. The show is at core realistic. It has a realism visually, even though the drama is so heightened.

So you have to take care of the realism vibe while hopefully giving people something nice to look at in terms of their characters. Yeah, was there a kind of rules of operation between you and whoever shot the other episodes so that there was kind of a cohesion there? Yeah. Yeah, we tried, yes, we tried to keep things handheld and not do very affected stylistic shots, trying not to do big long dollies or big crane arm moves.

We're trying to stay in a handheld, even if the camera wasn't necessarily on a shoulder, it would still feel like it. And we were also trying to stay close to the actor rather than at a distance on a telephoto lens, trying not to zoom in and be far away unless it was a needed point of view or some version of a stylistic point.

We wanted to travel with the performer. And I think in the finale, there's a long sequence of a war game concocted by Zach Aliphonakis' character Bardoff. And he wants to have very realistic war games. And he does a World War I trench battle, but with like all the stuff only a billionaire could afford, the explosions and the smoke and everybody in costume

and enemies coming at you. And we knew then that there was a stylistic quotient to selling that. But at core, it's about Tom Ruffage and his PTSD. At core, you're delivering the information that this is cruel to do this to a person. who has true PTSD from the first Gulf War should probably never be asked to put on a uniform or hold a gun again.

But there they are doing it, and it's part of that ego thing of like, well, because I do it, it's so cool. And of course, I love Ruffage for being a soldier. I'll put him in an outfit and he'll go into a trench battle. We wanted it to feel aggressively realistic at that moment to help us land Tom Ruffage's reaction to it.

So these are the kinds of rules. we had about sticking with the character's perspective during a scene. Yeah, it's very reminiscent of, uh, um, what's his name, uh, guy who played Kirk, Captain Kirk. William Shatner? Yeah, when Shatner came back from space and he was all emotional and then here comes Bezos with like champagne and he completely ignores what he's talking about. And, you know, he's,

Shatner's having like a real existential moment. He's like, here, have, you know, I know you're so, We have some champagne. You know, it's like just the complete disconnect between people. Right. And a good reference. So Silicon Valley billionaire, multi-billionaire, talking to a creative, a person with a soul, and not getting why they aren't immediately embracing what they have to say. Yeah.

The, did going fully, you know, trying to evoke that hand help look and shooting on, you know, a more normal lens, did that help with like the speed of everything or were you still uh because i'm always interested now in like how how people are able to move quickly and still evoke a really pretty look because the show is just like generally quite painterly and gorgeous right um speed of things is a funny concept i sometimes find a scene of just two people talking in a room to be more challenging than in conceiving and executing a big action sequence. While there's more on your list for a big action sequence, the shots themselves tend to have something in them

that makes the audience, oh, yeah, now this, now that. Whereas the two of us talking in a room or two characters talking in a room with all the undertones from the scripts before and the script they're in and what's going to happen later often demands more of you conceptually and then argumentatively lighting-wise, because you're trying to resolve something very simple into feeling like,

oh, an audience should watch this. Two people talking in a room, an audience should keep watching. A lot of that belongs to the script, but I feel an obligation as well creatively to bring something nuanced to that moment. And sometimes I find that harder. The speed of things, I know from minute one to the final minute of every shooting day that the pace of of the production is being monitored. It's like going to a gym and you're going to do your normal workout on all the machines you've always worked out on,

but someone's literally going to be stop watching you as you get on and off the rowing machine, on and off the bench press. And it becomes second nature to just want everything to move as quickly as possible. You design that in the prep. You talk about it with your lighting and grip team, with your camera team,

what's going to be the most flexible way to move what I call nimble throughout the day. And you design for that. So you may add a third camera for certain sequences or you may bring in a grip tricks cart that can move you along with an actor well. You'll do something that helps you with that pace. In the end, I like to work at a fast pace and I've been, you know, I think justifiably rewarded for keeping directors on track with their expected schedule. what I don't like to do is weirdly think about the time as a creative element it's literally just what you're supposed to do so it isn't to me so creative an element as it is a necessity and then I'm bringing a creative element into that mix I hope that answered in some way yeah no actually that's that's a good way to look at it because I you know like I was saying before like shooting docs you the thing I've said a lot is like they'll tell you you have an out of

to light something and then the guy shows up 30 minutes early and they're just like, go now. So I'm always like, you know, what are you guys doing that's making you faster? Because I might need them, you know, I'm always trying to mind little tricks. Right. One of the things I find with shooting close to the actors, and we shot a lot of times close to the actors, is you put white on the floor or on the back of a couch. You put white fabrics around so that you're taking the lighting you've already established and you're bringing it a little more into the face

or reflecting upon it. Simultaneously, there might be times where you put solids on walls, just literally taping solid black fabric onto a wall or arranging it in the room in a way that's artfully shaping the light. So I do equal amounts sometimes of removing light as adding light. You also, I believe,

need to think about the blocking with the director immediately in terms of how efficient the lighting could be. So if a light I put here, which can give a nice edge or shape to an actor, also can play as a key side when I go over that side of the room, that's the kind of thought process I'm going through even while the rehearsal's happening. And I usually do these diagrams. I'll take the back of the sides and I'll draw where everybody's going in the room or expected to go in the room, where they might sit down or stand up. And I'll start to rationalize in the

my head, okay, two sources here, maybe a little bit of negative fill, maybe a little bit of positive fill. Maybe I bounce one light off the floor. When they get near the window, you'll feel that up bounce. And that usually, you know, it's not always easy, but usually that simplicity of the conception works. Yeah. A big one for me recently is just conceptualizing. Instead of trying to think of how many sources, just thinking, all right, I'm going to make this in my head all one source. And so it can't jump around, you know, like it's only coming from, I'm now in my work just going like, okay, it's always the sun conceptually, you know, and then if other things, they might as well be lamp or bounce. But I found that's been nice for me. No, and do you ever work with Chinese lanterns?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, those are a bunch of savers. I work with them a lot. One of the things that's helpful with them, aside from the national. naturalism of how they look and you can nowadays change to LED bulbs so you can vary the you know the Kelvin of them is that should they get caught in someone's eyeball or eyeglasses they look quite natural they're just a round source which i i think stands out as far more environmental than when you use a gridded source or like a vortex or sky panel which are great lights and very flexible

and very quick to work with but if they show up in eyeglasses or eyeballs they tend to be a tell or even the tubes, you know, the astera tubes. I try to work with astero tubes nowadays mainly is either back or bounce rather than direct on the face. Yeah, that's the, I always applaud Yedlin for going to all the trouble to make like fake tape windows and stuff to reflect in people's classes. And I know on, uh, he told me on, uh, the new knives out that, like at one point that a character is next to a fireplace.

and I was like, did you CGI the fire in his eye? And he goes, no, no, no, we had like a $20 TV that we just played the image of a fire and just put it. That's wonderful. Yeah, Steve Ledland does beautiful work. I've tracked him for years now. Yeah. Are there other, you know, contemporaries, you know, your ASC sort of neighborhood that you, I guess, steal from? anyone that you look at and you're like,

I should be doing more of that. You know, it's funny. In thinking about cinematic lighting, I'm always reminded of the phrase, perfection is not the absence of anything more to add. It's the absence of anything more to take away. You've taken away every possible idea and gotten to the simplest ones.

And that can be number of units, but it could also be the number of units, number of effects that you want to have on a set wall, a furniture, the human face, a still life. And I come back again and again to thinking of the simplest versions of set-ups I've seen on screen. Derek Walski was an early inspiration and still is. You know, nobody can overstate how much Gordon Willis meant to everyone,

and I can't overstate to people who ask me about my favorite films, how much being there mattered to me, seeing the movie Being There, which was shot by Caleb Dashnell, but it was very much a continuation of a style he, I truly believe, observed with Gordon Willis. And then, you know, the work of Edward Hopper, the paintings of Edward Hopper,

which my mentor and very good friend, Ed Lachman, speaks about a lot, those films have, or those painting, this translated to films, have a very powerful impact. And I think because there's a cinematic nature in those paintings to begin with, and it's a great education in lighting

and also framing the way he lets certain things go out of the frame or half-cuts, windows, or things like that, and I think that's super-duper important. Robbie Mueller, who was also influenced by Hopper, is a go-to person for me, lighting-wise, because Robbie's lighting, when it hits, in its best way, it's some of the most beautiful cinematic work. But what people don't notice is when it doesn't hit, when it's just natural and feels good and feels right. And that's also

a real technique. You know, that's a thing to like let your lighting disappear. And yet if a person were to go back and step through the movie, they realized he was building that world throughout. There's so many people. It would be shameful for me to start mentioning them all because I would inevitably leave someone out, but there have been great people who are in great work. I really applaud Maddie Libetique, who changed the way we look at certain genres.

You know, Maddie got thrown a lot of genres. I was fortunate to work with them on Requiem for Dream as his operator. Then I wound up doing some work on some of the other films, just little bits by comparison. but the the requiem for a dream progression of saturation, how he handled the negative, and diffusion filters was genius. And of course, it's affected me ever since to have been front and center for that. And I shot those little quick cut bits,

that keeps staccato entering the movie. And I was very happy that those entered Maddie's film and were part of the visual language. I was influenced by Peter Bejou, also, the cinematographer Peter Bezhou. Even though I don't do work that looks especially like Peter Bezhu, I really enjoyed working with him as an operator. So I think your question is what motivates me now. Sometimes what motivates me right now isn't necessarily a big film like Frankenstein or something like that.

It's smaller movies and often from overseas. And when I see them, I get incredibly excited again about the visual. and how it can be handled. I remember Dan Landon did a film called Under the Skin, and I thought that was just so beautiful. It was just so beautiful. And there's a lot. There's quite a few.

Moonlight, many, many, many. And Jomo Frey's work on, you know, the Nickel Boys. Nickel Boys. Totally outstanding. And hard to put your finger necessarily on what it was about his lighting that bridged so beautifully something very stylized and also something very simple.

So I applaud that as well. Yeah, I was able to talk to him when that came out. That was one of the few films where I was like, that going first person has been tried many times. This is the first time I think it's been like done perfectly. You remember late, known as kidding. What's that? Remember the film Lady in the Lake?

Oh, yeah. I'm first person in black and white. Yeah. I guess I haven't seen it. I know of it. Yeah. When shooting this show, there's obviously a lot of, the main focus is how tech billionaires can basically ruin their own lives.

But obviously, like you were saying, a lot of AI discussion and stuff like that. Was that ever talked about between, you know, You got the writers, directors, whoever's, you know, the idea of AI coming for filmmaking. You know, you're interfacing directly with that idea. Did you ever talk about it amongst yourselves? No. I think I've thought about it the same way that there's been a conversation now up to three years about are our jobs going to be replaced by machines. Every time I think about it, I'm like, there's no way.

Maybe I'm playing glossy in about this. Actors want to act in front of real cameras run and manage by real people. They want that feedback. And there is a feedback through the lens to the operator or to the cinematographer. It feeds back to the set. And there's an energy that I don't believe Claude or, you know, Domokron robot cameraman is never going to give the actor back what they need from the stage floor.

I believe directors as well don't get into this business to go to workstations and collaborate on an AI rendering. I'm sure someone will eventually make a beautiful and interesting and thoughtful and artistic AI project. And Hollywood will say, well, then we're going to save all this money. And then they'll realize, no, that was because that person had a gift and worked in it probably an expensive experiment to show that it could even happen. We went through the 3D thing 20 years ago, and it's been shown again and again, no, you don't have to make a film in 3D to have a creative impact on the viewer and their thoughts

and their belief in a story. You need a story. So to long answer your question, it didn't come up, and I didn't really much think about it. I thought about what I was doing in the way I've learned to do it with people I understand as fellow creatives, collaborators on this kind of work. And when it hits, it hits.

You feel it right there on the stage. It's quite wonderful. Well, and to kind of put a button on your point, I've seen so many kids, you know, whatever, teenagers to college age, largely reject the idea of AI generated content. So going back to the idea of tech people not paying attention, it's like the audience doesn't want it either. You guys just want to sell this tool to people who don't want it and people who don't want to see it.

Right. Right. Much like they told us with digital you won't light anymore. I've had to light more in digital than sometimes in film because digital sees so well with its heightened capacities and its sensor and all the adjustments you can make right there at camera. it sees into the picture as you're getting it, and it shows you on a big old monitor quite well what you're capturing.

So you actually find yourself nuancing the lighting even more, especially if you're trying to help out faces or maintain continuity across a stage that is using a volume wall or using special effects for a background versus reality. It becomes a whole different skill set that you're obliged to deliver. And I feel like my judgment of exposure and lighting in a digital world is more nuanced and tries to be more specific now than it used to be. Especially the highlight. You know, not every digital camera delivers a beautiful highlight.

You're worried about it. You can reach into the image and go grab more detail in the low end of the negative, quote unquote, than ever before. And that's interesting and useful. But I worry about the highlight a lot. especially on stage lighting. Yeah. What did you shoot this show on? Alexa 35.

Great high. Reynolds. Alexa 35 with ARI's signature primes, sometimes a zoom. We rarely stray away from the primes. I had both positive and negative reaction to some of the things I was seeing, and I really worked on the Lut

over the course of the show to kind of bring in a slightly, I'm glad you said painterly, a slightly more artful painterly vibe within the world of naturalism. It's hard because like even the bathroom scene looks gorgeous. You know, it's like, I kept, and it's so, it's, you know, intentionally, you know, it's comedic, but it's dark, but it looks gorgeous, but these people are ugly. You know, it's a very, a juxtaposition is the word. It's a wonderful juxtaposition of things that I find very attractive as a viewer. Well, it's pretty easy if you're talking about Duncan and Lily's bathroom inside this house.

It's pretty easy to see these people have everything, but their reactions to things are those of desperately needy people, like internally needy people. And it was kind of funny to, as you're saying, juxtapose this brutalist architecture and this like, oh, we paid for this incredible house in Silicon Valley. and yet all we do is complain in it, that's hilarious. Yeah. Well, and something that you had just said that reminded me to something we talked about earlier, which was like filtering for the fire scenes and trying to make it so that post can't mess with it.

It's a very sort of classical way of working. You know, I'm going back and reading all these cinematography books that I've had collected over the years, you know, the reflections and... Yeah, Masters of Light. All of that. Masters of Light, yeah, all those things. And it is very interesting to go back and see them basically talking about, like, I shoved everything in the toe so they couldn't do anything to my image, you know?

It's just constantly like the lab is not your friend a lot of the time. They're going to try to mess with you. I neither have that attitude about the lab, which is invaluable in digital, nor do I have that about Post. Post is there to help me. I just want to guide them from the very start of it. I want the first image that arrives in dailies and then on the editorial table to have the intentionality of what we visualized right away

because then hopefully the editor, the director, the post supervisor, and I love post supervisors, they keep me on track about things as they're adjusting and things I'm going to need to do to deliver a product that can survive the visual effects that may have to come in for certain sequences. I try to give them something they fall in love with early on so that when they go to finish the show, it's about maintaining a tracking and a consistency

of that original intention, not suddenly changing wholesale the intention. So it is a collaboration. I don't try to marginalize what Post can do. Instead, I try to help them have more room to do something they've seen. And if they've seen it, I think they're already on the way they're finishing it. That's my general. The lab is kind of in the camera now. But there is a huge role that Post plays to then minting that into a finished mastered piece, you know, a finished version of what we were able to start to do that day on set. Yeah.

Well, the reason I was bringing up the negative versus the digital thing was just the idea of, for instance, shoving everything down in the toe and bleach bypass. If you were to do that on digital, it would be, it would just be destroyed. It wouldn't look artistic at all. So are you the type of person who is kind of shooting, I guess, a consistently healthy negative and just making sure the ratios are good? Or are you more playing with the, I guess, latitude of the digital sensor? Well, that's a great question.

Often the exposure of the faces or the principal item in frame that your eye is tracking is down around the 20s and the 30s on the IRA scale. But I'm struggling always to make sure that's. consistently rendered across the different points of view through a scene. Many people I know work even lower than that in terms of how much visual information is reaching the sensor. I am more of the healthy negative school where I've designed a lot that I've made sure matches what I meter. I still use a light meter. I think it's right here actually because I was out with my still camera today.

I still go on set and use this to try and determine. Oh, spectra, all right. Yeah. What's the amount of light? the actor's face based on how I've rated the camera. And if I've rated it to be a true 800 ASA or do I think it's a 640 ASA camera, then I might expose it a thousand,

but I know I'm doing that. I know I'm at two-thirds under to the rating of the camera and then I check the key and I just try to make sure that relative to the key, everything's falling on the scale, the old idea of the 10-zone system. Yeah, great scale. that I'm being consistent.

If the shadow is down on, like right now, there's a shadow on my right side of your face as I look at you, and I picture that shadow at two and a half under. I could get a meter across this screen, and maybe I'd be right or maybe I'd be a little bit wrong, maybe it's actually three under. But then when I cross the line and photograph back towards me,

if I'm in the same environment as you, rather than digitally across continents, I would want to have that shadow on my face, which your right side would become my left side on screen, I would want that shadow to have the same amount of under exposure consistent to the key. What I do with the backgrounds depends on the room, what I do with your key light should probably be consistent,

but we can also portray me slightly differently. The thing is I'm in charge of it. I'm using everything I have, the meter, the waveform, the false color, and then eventually a little chat. over the radio with my DIT to hit those metrics consistently. And that's the job. That's what I'm asked to do. It's almost second nature.

I almost don't even ask myself whether I'm doing it or not. I just do it, like responding, you know? Yeah, because that was going to be my next question is like just hearing you describe it almost sounds like you're having to remember. Because it just happens, you know? Second nature at this point. I know that that's part of what I'm hired to do. And I enjoy it. So why not?

And I enjoy visualizing it and then saying, oh, in the war game, there's going to be much less contrast than there might be in other scenes in order for Bardolph's war game to seem like, oh, this departure from a reality we've been creepying. Right. Did you find, no, you've shot big open. I was going to say, did you find that scene particularly difficult, but you've shot big, like big scenes before? We planned it well, and I had a good director for the planning, Alex Bueno, who has done big things himself, and we had a good special effects team, and we had a good art department, and they dug a real trench, and they put in all the stuff. I had to avoid trying to shoot when the sun was coming out. We had some cloud issues. I really tried to hold off the moment of photography until the cloud came in. Otherwise, things could get too contrast. Like I was saying, I wanted to lower contrast on private Tom Ruffington. in his outfit, you know, it meant something to me. It was leading into a bigger story point that I'm not going to spoil for an audience,

but Tom Ruffage has a massive arc in episode eight, and we needed to give him that, like, leverage up from the very first scene. Yeah. It's a, nope, lost that talk completely. Well, just Ruffage is military history and what he represents. to Silicon Valley, he starts to represent a buying opportunity for private data, whereas that should not be what we do with this technology. We should help veterans and help veterans at risk and allow people like Tom Ruffage to create, and I do believe the character is a creative, an

opportunity to see an ability to help people through this data. They see something different, and that's a core conflict, and it ends in a tragic way. I'm not going to go beyond that. But how we handled the Bardolph-generated war games was super important to me at that moment in the script. You know, it really set up what's going to

play out at the watch code event and then eventually Tom Refage as a main through line to the characters in that movie I said, which is nice in that episode. Feels like a movie. I mean, you touched on it

earlier, but as you're making the show, you know, a couple weeks later, there's new, like, this is a very hot, or not hot, but current topic. It's a hotly contemporary. It's a hotly contemporary topic with sometimes astonishing things happening outside the bubble of a show. And you're reading them and you're like, wow, we have got to get this show out because it's becoming modern news and it needs to be. knowledge the whole Sam Altman arc going through the contemporaneous production of our show

had an enormous effect on it. And I do read a lot of news and I do get into a lot of tech news. And then I'm also a person just watching the marketplace for these companies and how they're promising so much to the world. Will they deliver it or will it be the next bubble in our a stock and expectation market of what tech can do. It's happened before. It's likely to happen again. So, yeah, we were constantly, like, thumbed pulse of what the tech industry was delivering. And what that meant to us, you know, what that meant to our show and also our ability

as creatives to deliver something that hopefully helps people contextualize this. Yeah, you know, in a way, it's kind of got a bit of a big short as it's half. happening kind of immediacy to it. And that was an influence, the way they shot the big short, the way they were handheld moving through scenes in the big short and also commenting on that form of market-driven, tech-driven money total mishandling. Totally great. You know, I love that book, actually.

I have it at a home at hand. can always read it if I want to. I love that writer. Yeah. Well, the hour has gone by and I want to be respectful of your time because I can see it's nighttime out there. But I would love to have you back on. No, it's true. We can keep talking. I realize, thank you. We can keep talking. I realize that a lot of maybe drifts off of the subject of the show in a way that I don't want you to be saddled with for the get it. If you have some more questions to have answered, let's do it. Oh, no, it's actually perfect because the trick of this show has always been. It's more about the person than the show, you know, like what interests them, what inspires them, that kind of stuff. And then we use the show

as the sort of bed for that discussion. So I'm good. Okay. If you've gotten what you needed from hearing my song, how we generated images for this show, and also the practicality, of it, then I'm glad. I think everybody shows these days has an obligation to the audience to think about what is quality at this point in time. I really am very lucky. I've worked on some quality productions. I try to bring that aspect history to each new show and say, what can I do differently? Not what can I do the same. I'm not going to bring lighting from the Americans set in 19 to lighting for the audacity. set right now, like right this week, I want very much for what I bring to a show to have the capacity to look historically at things and the ability technically to make it exciting and fun to watch. So I had a good one up. Very grateful. It will not look like sugar. It will look like the audacity and I'll be happy for that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I'm excited for people. I guess it just came out a couple days ago. So I'm excited for

people to start seeing it. And, you know, I think that'll be one that people will start, you know, texting each other about like, hey, have you seen this show? Me too, and especially the performances, Billy Magnuson and Sarah lead a cast that's huge. But really, each person gets their part to play in this. Lucy Punch, Sack Halafinakis, Rob Kodry, Elliott, who plays, you know, Orson, huge. and his fellow teens in the show also huge. So everybody has a role to play.

That's why it's a well-written show. I believe it's a well-filled show, and I hope other people when they see it start agreeing. Because as you pointed out, there is a painterly aspect to it. Yeah. Yeah, and it's, I think, a... I think there's been a lot of discussion

about how modern television can look kind of samey and not... cinematic in such a way but I think this one certainly carries that I prefer a painterly look to a without it be you know when we say painingly we're not talking about like

soft or like in a kind of glowy sense it's very you know it's pastel almost in a way that's very pleasing but not low contrast yeah it's not long doesn't have to be barnished doesn't have to lose contrast and garnished over be aged in wood

it's something different and I'm glad you perceive that I'm always trying to come up with a different look for work so hopefully people respond well with this I'll tell you the thing that excites me is always the next season

we're lucky to have a second season already in the planning already starting I'm always excited about what the next step is not necessarily beholden to the last yeah and especially with how things are going now like you were saying with like the wars and stuff. That second season is probably going to be something else. Oh, I can't wait. I totally can't wait. Yeah.

Well, when you get done with that, let's have you back and we can get into a big job. We'll stay more on the show that time. I will pull you off track. It's fine, Kenny. I'm happy to do it. All right. Thank you so much. Frame and Reference is an Albot production, produced and edited by me, Kenny Macbillan. If you'd like to support the podcast directly, you can do so by going to Frame and Rep.pod.com and clicking on the Patreon button. It's always appreciated. And as always, thanks for listening.