American DP Richard Rutkowski ASC wrote-in with details about his work on the highly-acclaimed new AMC series The Audacity, which delves into the Silicon Valley as it explores the unorthodox relationship between a wannabe tech titan and his therapist. After director Lucy Forbes and her DP Paula Huidobro ASC had shot the first two episodes, Rutkowski took over on blocks 2 and 4 and pushed the visuals even further as the characters spiral.
Rutkowski is well-known for his credits on Apple TV+ series Sugar, for which he was recognised with an ASC Award and an Emmy nomination, as well as Apple TV+ limited drama Masters Of the Air, FX Network’s The Americans, and the WWII period drama Manhattan.
Showrunner Jonathan Glatzer’s take on the mind-bending excesses of Silicon Valley is the type of project I’d long sought as a cinematographer. In the way it takes on a hotly contemporary subject with humour and fast-paced, blistering dialogue this show demands that the camera responds to the actors with core realism and a feeling for the absurd. A story about the people creating and manipulating the online tech we all function within, The Audacity showcases their outsized egos, infinite ambitions and devastating damage dealt in the name of the information age. This show brought my director Dan Sackheim and I into its stark world of eccentric characters in superbly written scripts.
Portraying not just individuals in our story but also the whole “startup ethos” of breaking things and calling it progress while destroying the concept of privacy, this series reflects the digerati in a darkly satirical mirror. From a camera perspective, we needed to visually represent these characters and their motivations clearly, for better and for worse.The dissonance between what they may have set out to do with their heightened intellects versus the results of that work holds the key to this first season’s tremendous arc.
I was DP for half of the episodes, including the final episodes 7 and 8. The lead off team of director Lucy Forbes and her DP Paula Huidobro ASC, introduced a broad set of characters. Where Dan and I began in episode 3 of the season, several plot lines were shifting into high gear. We represented this satirical world with a naturalism that was always tilting towards heightened dramatic tension. Our choices in camera placement and lighting helped bring a sharper edge into the existing tone. Motivated always by knowing where a character came into a scene and their state when that scene ended, our cameras searched existing and new sets for frames that best captured context for evolving moments in each plot line. Dan and I focussed on tone and pace with mainly hand-held shots, keeping the humour as quicksilver and clever as possible, encouraging long takes and trusted the audience to embrace inspired writing.
Right from the first moment of episode 3, a California wildfire in Napa Valley is starting to cloud the skies and the lives of the entire cast. Visual adjustments increase across the episode till they depict by the end “a world on fire,” in the words of showrunner Glatzer. Our skies and the colour of each environment shifted through a combination of old-school glass filtration on top of changes to the in camera LUT. Working from a show LUT established in the first block, we skewed the overall daylight colours through degrees of added warm/brown tones, based on our direct memories and images of The Palisades and Altadena fires, which had occurred only months before. Choosing glass sky grads and diffusion off those examples and emulating the dramatic skies seen miles away during the Napa wildfires, we created a careful progression with the end result requiring surprisingly little VFX enhancement. Very aware that a metaphor of nature’s power to overwhelm even the most sophisticated technology of man was the goal, we kept the changing skies and colours of light in windows a motif in our framing.
By the end of episode 3, the restaurant favoured by tech titan Bardolph – superbly played by Zack Gallifinakis – is suffused in sickly brown/red tones from fire lit skies. We achieved this principally by placing heavy gel on the windows, which avoided layering an overall color across the scene and separated what the light from outside contributed versus the established interior lighting of the space. Placing several 18K HMI or M90 lamps, both bounced and pushed through large frames, the lighting output to accommodate the heavy saturation of the gelled windows. Our lensing inside allowed more expressive flares and hot zones in the windows to show a dramatic change from previous scenes on this location, resulting in what I called a “belly of the beast” look. Then as our lead character Duncan emerges triumphantly, arms up into skies misty with smoke and deeply saturated, our camera look, lighting and filters worked in terrific combination.
This evolution of the wildfire’s impact on the show’s world brought in another challenge; we were not actually filming in Silicon Valley. The production shot nearly entirely in Vancouver, BC with about 5 days of photography in the actual Palo Alto area filmed afterwards. The key to tying these environments together into a seamless whole was careful research and a constant eye towards making California’s particular strong sunlight part of our Vancouver staging. We emphasised bright exteriors for sets and location work, bringing light into windows hotter and sometimes warmer than what the natural lighting was on a particular day. With camera color temps adjusting and calibration of HMI or large tungsten lamps on stage these shifts were critical to combining locations into our single world. When seeing out the windows of different locations, something consistently sought, it was with consideration for the reality of what actual Silicon Valley locations would have offered. This found a terrific result when a pair of redwood trees in the actual Palo Alto streets perfectly mirrored our set’s built tree trunks on stage. With only the one visit to California, I filmed establishing and driving shots as well as whole scenes that played into every episode of the show. There also, my main concern was matching as closely as possible the qualities of light established in Vancouver, now interwoven to the authentic Valley locations. Where necessary we’d change colour temperature at camera and contrast in the grade for matching. This extended to the conclusion of episode 3, as Duncan drives off into Palo Alto having been seen outside the Vancouver restaurant exterior only a shot before.
In camerawork I enjoy working with visual metaphor. The Audacity offered many sly examples of combining humour and pathos into singular images, while being among the finest examples of fast-paced parody I’ve worked on. I consider it a darkly humorous and very necessary reminder that behind the supposedly infallible technology seeking our constant attention there are deeply fallible people, perhaps in need of attention themselves.
We captured the show on Arri Signature Primes on Alexa 35 camera bodies. Occasionally we used zooms but the vast majority was shot on the primes. Very little filtration was used with the exception of the wildfire effects achieved in episode 3. Our camera and lighting house was Sunbelt in Vancouver and Videofax in San Francisco. Final colourist Tim Vincent at Pictureshop was instrumental in tracking our LUTs and managing the show’s look from early testing on. I’m deeply grateful to their expertise and flexibility.
Richard Rutkowski ASC
