Based on Patricia Highsmith's bestselling Tom Ripley novels, Netflix's eight-episode limited series Ripley stars Andrew Scott as the eponymous antihero, a grifter scraping by in early 1960s New York. When Tom is hired by a wealthy man to travel to Italy and convince his vagabond son, Dickie (Johnny Flynn), to return home, he takes his first step into a complex life of deceit, fraud and murder.
The series was written and directed by Steven Zaillian, who partnered with cinematographer Robert Elswit, ASC for all eight episodes. Elswit's primary lenses for the production were Panavision VA primes, supplemented with select Primo 70 and Ultra Speed focal lengths as well as Primo 70 and prototype VA zooms. Here, in his own words, the cinematographer details the creative collaborations that brought Ripley to the screen.
I'd worked with Steve Zaillian a few years earlier on the pilot of his series The Night Of. I knew from that experience that Steve has very specific ideas about the lighting design and overall pictorial style of his shows. Very much like a cinematographer, Steve believes that the lighting of a movie, the way the spaces and characters are lit, is a way of making a direct connection to the emotions of an audience. When he told me that he wanted to shoot Ripley in black-and-white, I knew he had very different ideas about the nature of the character and story in his version of Highsmith's novel.
When I came on the show, both Steve and our production designer, David Gropman, had already spent months scouting and photographing locations throughout Italy, and theyd created a vast collection of black-and-white images not only of the locations but also the work of many Italian photojournalists that Steve felt were evocative of the era. The pictures became a great reference tool for thinking about shooting in monochrome.
In Steve's script, Toms actual talent initially seems to be simply that of a con man. A cold and calculating sociopath who's able to manipulate and exploit, to hide his emotions and play any role. But soon after Tom arrives in Europe and is exposed to the life and culture, language, food, architecture, and especially the music and art of Italian culture, it changes him in unexpected ways. It's Toms introduction to the work of the 17th-century Italian painter Caravaggio that makes a particularly strong emotional impact on him.
Caravaggio appears nowhere in the Highsmith novel. The inclusion of his art and then the painter as an actual character in Ripley is a pure Steve invention. Toms initial response to the painter's work is reinforced as he learns more about the painter's life. He begins to identify with him as he learns of the many parallel events in their two lives. As Tom travels through Italy to avoid the police, he seeks out Caravaggio's paintings wherever he is. His obsession and identification with the painter becomes one of the central themes in the second half of the story and it's Caravaggio's depiction of characters and spaces with a strong emphasis of contrasting light and dark that could also be seen as a metaphor for the narrative drama in Ripley.
The specific style of Caravaggio's painting, chiaroscuro, refers to the use of strong contrasts between light and dark that direct the eye and also strongly affect the overall composition of his paintings. This creates an underlying sense of drama and tension that we see in much of Caravaggio's work. It's this lighting style, emphasizing the contrast between light and dark, that is particularly well suited to black-and-white cinematography. We see examples of it in early cinema, especially in the great German expressionist films of the silent era. It's a lighting style that becomes associated with the American film noir movies of the '30s and '40s.
From the very beginning, Steve wanted this style of lighting, along with strong graphic compositions, to become the unique way we see the world in Ripley. With the sets, locations, costumes, weather, time of day and lighting, we tried to emphasize strong contrast between light and dark. For me, this meant the use of harder light sources throughout with the resulting stronger shadows and emphasis on texture that, in color, could seem theatrical and unrealistic, but in black-and-white becomes dramatic and somehow more truthful.
We had a 160-day schedule with an almost endless number of locations in various cities and lots of nights. Because of the large amount of VFX work and the 4K delivery requirement, we decided the best production camera for us was the Alexa LF. Steve was promised a black-and-white release, but there was no thought of using a camera without a color filter array. The advantage of using a camera without a filter array is that you pick up extra stop and supposedly there's finer gradations in the mid tones but also, no filter means a sharper image. The digital image is already too sharp, so that's the last thing I wanted.
The images were recoded as color files, but all the on-set monitors were black-and-white. I used a black-and-white LUT that I thought looked like a slightly more contrasty version of the old Kodak 5231. It's what I looked at and lit to in the DIT tent. We got two sets of dallies each day, one in color and the other in black-and-white; we never looked at the color files, and Steve edited the show with the black-and-white Avid files.
Not needing to deal with color allowed our wonderful DIT, Marco Coradin, to each day download a very accurate black-and-white version of what would be the final look of the show. I just made sure we were always exposing to hold the sky or whatever highlight detail I hoped to retain, but that wouldn't be visible in the dailies. We worked at ISO 800 for almost everything except the nights, which we shot at 160
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
01/06/2026
January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026
Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...
29/05/2026
With InfoComm 2026 just weeks away, NDI is giving attendees plenty of reasons to...
29/05/2026
Reaffirming a partnership that has defined Canadian sports broadcasting since 19...
29/05/2026
Mobile/tablet is No. 2 device for watching TV, suggesting that the sports-production industry needs to take another look at the format
Ring Digital's Sprin...
29/05/2026
Berliner Ensemble, one of Berlin's five major theater companies, has expande...
29/05/2026
Solid State Logic will showcase its new compact, fly-away TCA Tour audio product...
29/05/2026
Gerald (Jerry) Pierce, a pioneering technologist who helped shape the digital transformation of the motion picture industry, passed away last month on April 12 ...
29/05/2026
Paramount+ will be the English-language U.S. home for Barclays Women's Super...
29/05/2026
Further strengthening its virtualisation strategy to fully support broadcasters ...
29/05/2026
Swiss broadcaster Canal Alpha has deployed Harmonic's award-winning, software-based XOS Advanced Media Processor to modernize playout operations across cant...
29/05/2026
PTZOptics will showcase a new generation of intelligent video workflows at InfoComm 2026, June 17-19, Las Vegas. Visitors to booth N8227 will see how PTZOptics ...
29/05/2026
Arizona's Family has launched the Arizona's Family Sports (AZFS) streaming app, a new direct-to-consumer destination for live, local sports. The app is ...
29/05/2026
Starting in 2027, DAZN will be the exclusive home of The Canadian Football Leagu...
29/05/2026
Comcast Business has detailed the advanced network infrastructure it has deploye...
29/05/2026
In two-day event, leaders from academia and industry explored solutions to chall...
29/05/2026
The Basketball Tournament (TBT), now entering their 13th year of competition, ha...
29/05/2026
Roku has launched FOX One as a Premium Subscription on The Roku Channel in the U.S. Roku customers can now subscribe to FOX One using their Roku account for liv...
29/05/2026
In its sixth year, the broadcaster's coverage has become a global brand and ...
29/05/2026
Ratings Roundup is a rundown of recent ratings news and is derived from press re...
29/05/2026
The days are getting longer, the temperatures are rising, and playlists are filling up for the season. With summer around the corner, Spotify's global edito...
29/05/2026
New retro-inspired MPC announced
There are few devices that have gained the status held by Akai Pro's MPC range, and in recent years, the company have s...
29/05/2026
Save up to 30 on acclaimed titles
Following a successful launch at Superbooth 2026, Bjooks have revealed that they will be continuing the Kickstarter campa...
29/05/2026
Binaural monitoring application improved
Genelec have just released an update that brings some powerful new features to their HRTF-based binaural headphone ...
29/05/2026
6 June 2026 at SAE Institute, London, UK
IMSTA FESTA 2026 is almost upon us, with some of the biggest names in pro-audio set to descend upon SAE Institute i...
29/05/2026
Gerald (Jerry) Pierce, a pioneering technologist who helped shape the digital transformation of the motion picture industry, died April 12, 2026, at his home in...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Comparing 5 AI Video Enhancers for Restoring Old Video Quality
Kate Luvis May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Digitizing VHS, MiniDV, and other legacy formats doe...
29/05/2026
Studio Hamburg Builds New Post Pipeline with DaVinci Resolve Studio
Brie Clayton May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Workflow replaces a patchwork of legacy tools...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
At the Intersection of Music and Dance, an Epic Collaboration Boston Conservatory musicians and dancers found creative parallels in their recent performance o...
29/05/2026
Something fundamental has shifted in how people consume media. Audiences aren't abandoning television or radio content; they're just expanding how, wher...
29/05/2026
Youtube exclusive special drops today
Watch now
UKTV today announces another e...
29/05/2026
Back to All News
The Official Trailer of Physical 100 Italy, on Netflix From Se...
29/05/2026
At just 20 years old, Sean Melia from Summerhill Co. Meath has been revealed as the winner of Super Garden 2026. Sean is the youngest ever contestant and winner...
29/05/2026
Experimental HIV vaccine achieves a long-sought goal In a first for the field, all non-human primates given a new series of vaccines generated antibodies capabl...
28/05/2026
Thomsons Climate Crisis Toolkit is already being put to work, helping journalist...
28/05/2026
FOX Sports' MLB coverage dominated the night at the 47th Annual Sports Emmy ...
28/05/2026
One of the most memorable postseasons in baseball history would have had no memo...
28/05/2026
NBC's Sunday Night Football is among the most-decorated and most-watched pro...
28/05/2026
The 2026 Sports Emmys marked a watershed moment for Prime Video Sports. After bu...
Based on Patricia Highsmith's bestselling Tom Ripley novels, Netflix's eight-episode limited series Ripley stars Andrew Scott as the eponymous antihero, a grifter scraping by in early 1960s New York. When Tom is hired by a wealthy man to travel to Italy and convince his vagabond son, Dickie (Johnny Flynn), to return home, he takes his first step into a complex life of deceit, fraud and murder.
