DP Greta Zozula shoots The Testaments

Jul 16, 2026

BY IAIN BLAIR

The Testaments is the new ten-episode sequel to the Emmy-winning dystopian drama television series The Handmaid’s Tale. Based on the 2019 novel The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, and again created by Bruce Miller, the Hulu streamer follows the story of two teenage girls – the pious and repressed Agnes (played by One Battle After Another star Chase Infiniti) who narrates the opening episode, and Daisy (Lucy Halliday), a new arrival to Gilead who is put under Agnes’ supervision.

THE TESTAMENTS – “Daisy” – An incident on a school trip spurs Daisy’s memories of Toronto, revealing her past and a world shattered by violence. (Disney/Steve Wilkie)
ELISABETH MOSS, MIKE BARKER (DIRECTOR)

The lead director of photography on The Testaments was Greta Zozula, who shot six of the ten episodes of the series (Marc Laliberte shot the others), and was tasked with establishing a visual continuity to the new chapter while also expanding the tonal and aesthetic language of the original world. Zozula, who’s having a moment – her upcoming feature film Josephine swept Sundance 2026, winning both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award in the U.S. Dramatic Competition, reports that being offered the chance to join the show was “very exciting. When I initially talked to Bruce and director Mike Barker, they were really looking for a fresh perspective, and they wanted somebody coming from the outside who hadn’t been working in the Handmaid’s world before, so that’s where we started all our discussions.”

THE TESTAMENTS – “Daisy” – An incident on a school trip spurs Daisy’s memories of Toronto, revealing her past and a world shattered by violence. (Disney/Russ Martin)
CHASE INFINITI, MIKE BARKER (DIRECTOR)

The DP also had “many conversations” with Martha Sparrow, the production designer, “and that went on throughout the entire process,” she notes. “But before we even started prep, we were already discussing the color palette, and that involved Mike and Bruce and Leslie Kavanagh, the costume designer. It was a very big group discussion about how the palette was going to be different, and not using the colour red at all, and how the pinks and greens were going to become the palette of the new show. And then it was a matter of testing all these colors and figuring out exactly what the tone was, because that was the thing that we really had to get right.”

In addition to establishing a new palette that still referenced and honored the iconic visual world of the original while establishing a distinct new identity of its own, the creative team also worked to open up Gilead spatially for the first time and develop two contrasting and precise visual languages for the dual protagonists – one rooted in rigid symmetry and the other grounded in the grittier realism of Toronto. To this end, Zozula shot on the ARRI ALEXA 35 in ARRI RAW at a 2.00:1 aspect ratio, combining spherical K35s with anamorphic Atlas Orions and Todd-AOs to reflect the show’s shifting tonal registers. Keslow Toronto provided the camera and lens package. “They supplied the cameras for the whole first show, so they were really on top of it and very helpful,” she adds.

THE TESTAMENTS – “Precious Flowers” – In the halls of Aunt Lydia’s premarital preparatory academy, the finest in Gilead, Agnes is assigned to mentor a new Pearl Girl, and a fragile alliance begins. (Disney/Russ Martin)
BLESSING ADEDIJO, CHASE INFINITI, KIRA GULOIEN

“We used the same lenses that they used on Handmaid’s, as we wanted to keep a couple of things similar in order to preserve a certain DNA,” she notes. “That came out of having conversations with a couple of key people who had worked on the original show, like DPs Colin Watkinson and Zoe White. I did a lot of research with those DPs from the beginning to just really understand where the look came from and the thought process behind certain choices.”

Zozula also used Ben Whaley, the DIT from Handmaid’s, “so that we could really dissect the look of the show and that universe and decide what we were going to bring from that into Testaments and what we were going to leave out,” she says. “So that was a big part of the process, along with creating this new look with a newer camera system and newer technology that offered us a more dynamic range and a couple of other elements to give us a more modern setup that some of the older cameras just can’t quite keep up with. One specific thing was the great highlights of the system that I tried to really take advantage of and push as far as I could, as we did do quite a lot of work with sunlight. So, I wanted to play with that and the exposure on windows, and that was one of the big departures on this show – the decision to let you feel the outside world in these spaces, open them up, and make them feel more inviting and less prison-like.”

Prep also included a lot of location scouting. “There’s two big locations – the MacKenzie House and the Academy, and both of those locations were split between real locations and sets,” she says. “Obviously we needed the exteriors but it was very important that we also had access to go in and out of these spaces. So, for many different scenes in the academy that’s immediately apparent, but at the McKenzie house there’s a very specific shot in episode two that we talked about early on, as we go from the outside all the way into the living room, so it was important to establish those locations. Then the production designer built the rest of the Academy and a replica of the interior of the MacKenzie house on stages.”

Before Zozula began shooting the first block of three episodes with Mike Barker, they also put together an entire lookbook. “It included character descriptions, and the ins and outs of certain scenes – like, why we were bringing sunlight into spaces,” she explains. “So, it was like a sort of ‘general rules’ of the approach to everything – all our compositional, lighting and color choices, and basically an entire guide that anyone could look at. And so we shared that with the alternate DP of course and we checked in with each other a lot during the shoot. We had a lot of initial conversations about intention, point of view, and I probably overexplained every reason for why we were lighting a certain way and what the colors meant, but it helped everyone get on the same page, even though it was kind of a crash course.”

The shoot was five months long, “all around Toronto,” she notes. “We did shoot a lot on location, but around seventy percent was done on the stages. It was a pretty quick schedule, especially for the middle episodes. We were pretty strict on our days, but there were creative fun challenges to it, like episode six, titled ‘Stadium.’ So there’s a location in a real stadium, and that that was challenging in a lot of different ways. It largely involves Aunt Lydia, it was a fast schedule, and we filmed some pretty big scenes with a lot of extras and a lot of important plot moments within the episode. And it was at the height of summer and very hot, and tricky to shoot as it involved a lot of choreography, a lot of people, and a lot of stunts. It was just very taxing and I had three to four cameras running every day. And on that specific episode we were shooting on the much older Todd-AO anamorphics and mixing them with other anamorphics that we had established the look with, just for pure convenience because there’s not too many focal lengths to those lenses. So to have to be shooting with four cameras and picking and choosing the older lenses and when to use them was a fun creative challenge.”

What was her favorite scene to shoot? “It’s not a bad problem to have, but I have quite a few that come to mind,” she says. “A big favorite is the opening dollhouse sequence in episode one that I really enjoyed constructing with Mike. It also involved Martha in the construction of the dollhouse, which was a very large build. They 3D modeled the entire thing and it was fully lit up and completely functional, and it had a couple of different trap doors so that we could do that one seamless shot where we go through the whole dollhouse, and it was just a really fun sequence to design and shoot.”

The grading was done at Company 3 Toronto with senior colorist Bill Ferwerda. “I’m very involved, and I did the sessions remotely from New York,” she reports. “Our DIT Ben was so influential and he’s such a key part of finding the look in terms of relating it to Handmaid’s for me because he came with so much knowledge. So I worked really closely with Ben throughout and in terms of the initial LUTs that we created, we found that through doing a lot of testing beforehand. Then as far as finessing and tweaking the look as the episodes progressed, I did a lot of that on set with Ben. So, then when we went into the DI, I did a lot of sessions with Bill to figure out – beyond just the continuity – where we would maybe tweak things or relook at things, but largely we stuck to what we did on set.”

THE TESTAMENTS – “Stadium” – As the Aunts sift through ancestry records to finalize matches, Agnes plots for her chance at love. Meanwhile, Lydia contemplates the choices that shaped her rise in Gilead. (Disney/Steve Wilkie)
LUCY HALLIDAY

“It was such a creative project for me and also really collaborative,” sums up Zozula. “I think that’s what made it really fun – and it wasn’t just the collaboration with all the different departments, but with the cast as well. It was truly an ‘everyone coming together’ effort.”