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“Steve is the most meticulous, focused, precise director you could ever work with,” says Elswit of his “Ripley” writer-director. “He had a very clear concept of shooting in black-and-white, making a designed movie formally organized around tonal structure and graphic images.”
Elswit, who’s previously worked in black-and-white (“Good Night, and Good Luck”), explains why cinematographers love the monochrome palette. “You can exploit the extremes between the brightest white and the blackest black. You exaggerate the contrast in their faces. You can feel it. Sense it. You really do create tension and anxiety through lighting. It’s been done since the beginning of movies.”
Cinematographer Robert Elswit delighted in shooting in black-and-white. “You exaggerate the contrast in their faces. You can feel it. Sense it. You really do create tension and anxiety through lighting.”
(Netflix)
It’s even baked into Zaillian’s script. Ripley’s fascination with Caravaggio allowed the Italian master’s famed tenebrism — intense darkness and pockets of equally intense light — to also become a guiding aesthetic for Elswit. Caravaggio “was also obsessed with quality of light, its direction and the reality of it. Like a spotlight on what was interesting,” he says.
Elswit says Italy’s very physicality lends itself to such extremes of light and shadow. “There’s so much texture when you’re looking at walls, streets, the surfaces of buildings, the cobblestones, stairways. It’s granite, plaster, rock, marble, whatever it is, and in black-and-white, it emphasizes the texture.”
Caravaggio and his era’s peers influenced the show’s look in another way. Elswit and Zaillian gave themselves an unusual rule in framing, to keep Renaissance and Baroque art’s straight-ahead perspective and avoid converging vertical lines, as would happen if a camera tilted up or down. It’s why so much of “Ripley” is a crisply edited procession of static shots, with only humans providing movement.
“We were going to have the picture plane parallel to the walls of structures we were shooting, always. The buildings couldn’t have converging lines. Steven [Zaillian] wanted that formal graphic design,” says cinematographer Robert Elswit.
(Philippe Antonello / Netflix)
“That was built into every setup, indoors and out,” Elswit says. “We were going to have the picture plane parallel to the walls of structures we were shooting, always. The buildings couldn’t have converging lines. Steven wanted that formal graphic design.”
Zaillian also preferred overcast days, to avoid any sun-kissed hint of romance and warmth. But Elswit made great portentous use of a hot sky for when Ripley first encounters Dickie and Marge, lying on the gravel beach. “We had a high shot where we had Tom walk by them, and his shadow goes over them,” Elswit says. “I was thrilled. I’m not sure if Steve was at the time, but he ended up being happy with it. That was a wonderful advantage to a sunlit day!”
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