'Ripley' Cinematographer Robert Elswit on Filming and Lighting Freddie's Murder

The fifth episode of Netflix's “Ripley” takes a darker turn when Tom Ripley's (Andrew Scott) perfect life is interrupted.

Having found the ideal apartment in Rome – Dickie Greenleaf's – he receives an unexpected visitor, Freddie Miles (Eliot Summer). Freddie suspects that all is not what it seems, and soon Tom ends up murdering him. Rather than dispose of the body, Tom waits until it is dark.

Based on Patricia Highsmith's “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” the limited series follows con man Tom Ripley who befriends a wealthy shipping heir, Dickie Greenleaf, played by Johnny Flynn.

Lighting was important. It had to reflect who Tom was and the world he lived in, which was very contrasting. The black and white aesthetic would give the audience a feeling of anxiety, tension and mystery.

Cinematographer Robert Elswit sat down for Variety's Artisans Inside the Frame and discussed entering Ripley's mind.

“He's kind of trying to figure out what to do, and his plan is, 'I'm going to put Freddie in Freddie's car and drive him somewhere and drop him off.'” Elswit continued: “We're on a soundstage at Cinecittà in Italy and the wonderful David Gropman built this extraordinary set which is Dickie's apartment that Ripley rented while pretending to be Dickie Greenleaf, accumulating all the clothes and accessories that Dickie Greenleaf owned in his villa, and now he moved them all into the apartment in Rome, and he just finished killing Freddie, and he's trying to figure out what to do.

Working on a soundstage made it easier for Elswit to light the stage transition, which involved lighting the practicals and streaming light through the windows.

When Tom carries Freddie's body, the other transition is that the location changes from a soundstage to a palace in Rome. As Ripley puts Freddie's body in the car, a second unit moved in to film the sequence as he travels down the Via Appia Antica.

The biggest challenge was the lighting for this outdoor night photoshoot: streetlights were non-existent and there was no lighting in the building either.

“I needed large units that were very tall and far apart, lit from above,” Elswit said. “I needed far lighting in both directions, very far, providing backlighting in both directions. »

Elswit used LED boxes held up by construction cranes to “pretend it was moonlight or ambient moonlight” to make it look real. However, with the LED boxes so tall, they ended up creating a soft lighting effect atop the trees lining the street. “It’s completely unrealistic,” Elswit said.

Normally, he would have worked with the post-production team to darken areas of the frame and correct them.

Luckily for him, director Steven Zaillian wasn't interested in giving the series a naturalistic look to the night scenes. Rather, he wanted a pictorial effect. “It goes back to the way he introduced Caravaggio into the film,” Elswit said. Zaillian wanted to create a painterly impression of what an outdoor nocturnal painting would have looked like in the late 16th century. “They tended to exaggerate the nighttime light coming from the moon and stars,” Elswit said.

In fact, Zaillian likes the artificial look the LED boxes create in the lighting, and Elswit didn't need to clean up the frames. “He liked the trees to shine at the top. He loved anything that looked artificial, because it reminded him of what nighttime exteriors looked like when painted by Caravaggio or Baroque painters,” Elswit said.

Overall, the lighting style of the series was an homage to the chiaroscuro lighting technique where high-contrast lighting uses a low-key lighting setup to achieve contrast.

In this case: “This is what the priest says when he looks at the paintings of Saint Matthew in the church. “The priest said: 'It is the light, it is always the light.' There's something about black and white that you can exaggerate, which is so wonderful about monochrome photography.

“Where light comes from is why things are light or dark and the shape you give it,” Elswit added.

Watch the video above.