“I feel like I came to a whole other place on Ripley,” said production designer David Gropman recently of his work on the Netflix series from creator Steven Zaillian.
Echoing those made by other department heads, Gropman’s remark came in conversation with Zaillian during the inaugural live edition of Deadline’s video series The Process. As Zaillian repeatedly expressed, the work on Ripley was all about finding different ways of experimenting with process, so there could be no better show to spotlight in this capacity our first time out.
A black-and-white thriller based on the bestselling Tom Ripley novels from Patricia Highsmith, the series centers on Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott), a struggling New York con artist who is recruited by a wealthy man to bring his wayward son back from Italy during the 1950s. After heading abroad, Tom’s encounter with Dickie Greenleaf’s (Johnny Flynn) luxurious and carefree existence abroad becomes the unexpected catalyst for a descent into a labyrinth of deception, fraud, and murder.
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As Ripley‘s cinematographer Robert Elswit recalled on last week’s panel, process was embedded in the show’s very DNA. From the start, it felt like something he’d “never quite experienced or understood before,” given how focused it was on the tiniest details of Ripley’s routine. “Whether [Tom’s] going upstairs to Dickie’s villa or dropping off a body…he’s doing it in a very specific way that meant a lot to Steve,” the DP explained. “There’s a lot of walking and a lot of climbing of stairs, and a lot of driving, and a lot of getting in elevators, and a lot of walking into different hotels.”
Admittedly, Elswit didn’t initially “get” what Zaillian was going for, feeling that cuts to the scripts’ procedural elements could be made to save time. On set, Zaillian admits, more than one person asked him, “Do we really need another shot of the Ferragamo shoes?” But in the end, at least for Elswit, the anxious atmosphere fostered through such repetition proved “a revelation.”
The episode best highlighting this, for Elswit, was Episode 5, which featured a tense stand-off between Tom and Dickie’s friend Freddie Miles (Eliot Sumner) following Dickie’s abrupt disappearance. “That’s an amazing sequence. It plays with all the elements that we’re all up here on stage talking about, which is the design of the film in monochrome, feeling a little bit of tension and anxiety just for the fact that it’s lit a certain way, and that what we see where the characters go,” Elswit said, “how Freddie moves around that apartment, looks at all the items, touches them, touches the record, looks at the passport, plays with the painting. All of these little details create an enormous amount [of tension].”
Another key creative taking a leap of faith with Zaillian, into unfamiliar territory, was composer Jeff Russo. He shared that while he tends to approach his work in a fairly linear fashion, Zaillian pushed his comfort zone by asking him to start out writing music for later episodes and let that inform his approach to the early ones.
Initially, Russo recalled, he was perhaps a bit off the mark. “I had started writing themes and sort of went in one direction, maybe in a little bit of a more romantic way that seemed like 1960s Italy,” the composer explained. “[Steven] called me and [was] like, ‘This is all great, but we’re making a thriller about a psycho, and we really need to focus on that.'”
When Russo took a step back and began his work again, starting at Episode 7, “I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s why you’re Steve Zaillian,'” he recalled. “Because I would never have thought to do that, and when that happened, it sort of opened up the entire score.”
For editor Joshua Raymond Lee, part of the challenge to the process on Ripley was grappling with scripts juxtaposing “40 pages of single-spaced scene description” with 30 minutes of “tête-à-tête dialogue.” Then, there was the tone, possessing elements of both “a romp” and a thriller to balance delicately.
As supervising sound editor and rerecording mixer Larry Zipf recalled, the challenges of his 16 months on the show involved long sequences with no dialogue and locations that he’d have to breathe life into through sound alone.
Elsewhere in the panel, editor David O. Rogers discussed “three-minute soundscapes” created for the end of each episode which previewed environments from future installments. Gropman, meanwhile, highlighted the contributions of Valentina Troccoli, the set decorating scenic artist who created deconstructed Caravaggios for the show, along with dozens of Dickie’s own, lesser quality paintings.
Our Ripley panel was one of three put on at Netflix FYSEE last Thursday evening. Moderated by Mara Webster, the others examined “Elements of World Building” and “Elements of a Character.” Panelists for the World Building discussion included Jabbar Raisani (EP, Director & Visual Effects Supervisor, Avatar: The Last Airbender), Boris Schmidt (Scanline Visual Effects Supervisor, 3 Body Problem), Liza Richardson (Music Supervisor, Griselda), Martin Phipps (Composer, The Crown), Iain Cooke (Music Supervisor, The Crown and The Gentlemen) and Martyn John (Production Designer, The Gentlemen). Those participating in the Character panel included Cate Hall (Makeup and Hair Designer, The Crown), Angela Nogaro (Make-Up Department Head, Griselda), Dan Hubbard (Casting Director, The Gentlemen), Loulou Bontemps (Costume Designer, The Gentlemen), Safowa Bright-Bitzelberger (Costume Designer, Griselda) and Kim Leonard (Set Decorator, Griselda).
Video of the Ripley panel can be found above. View the other panels, along with a sizzle reel highlighting Netflix’s major craft awards contenders, below.
