(Images courtesy of Apple)

The mystery drama, Sugar, follows John Sugar, a private investigator recruited by a wealthy movie producer to investigate the disappearance of his granddaughter, in a contemporary, genre-bending take on the private detective story set in Los Angeles.

American DP Richard Rutkowski ASC wrote-in with details about his work on the highly-acclaimed eight-part series now showing on Apple TV+. After director Fernando Meirelles and his DP César Charlone had shot the first five episodes, Rutkowski teamed-up with Alan Arkin for the final and exciting trio of shows in the second block.

Rutkowski is well-known for his credits on Apple TV+ limited drama Masters Of the Air, FX Network’s The Americans, the first three seasons of Amazon’s Jack Ryan, and the WWII period drama Manhattan.

“Our approach was to experiment and re-evaluate well-known noir plots and characters”

“Apple TV’s new series Sugar takes a well-known film noir staple into unexpected directions and boasts audacious style choices. Our enigmatic Los Angeles private detective is hired to search for a beautiful missing woman – in fact, in episode one, that is announced as his specialty – whereupon he finds the secrets surrounding her disappearance that mirror conflicts and history of his own. Classic. Acknowledging the influence of the famously dark tones in noir detective stories, the writing and direction beg comparison. Yet here our approach was not to emulate older films visually, but to experiment and re-evaluate such well-known noir plots and characters.

Our fundamentals were established in the pilot filming block with Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles and his longtime DP César Charlone. They ran multiple cameras in multiple formats, capturing scenes from a myriad of angles, and admittedly found the final result once in the edit. They collaborated closely, and the results were uniquely their established aesthetic vocabulary. By the second block, when director Adam Arkin and I started into our material, we devised how to best dovetail our work into the earlier work. But foremost, a sense of adventure had taken hold!

In classic noir fashion, the camera closely follows our protagonist and title character, Sugar. Like the narrative attachment to Jake in Chinatown (1974, dir. Roman Planski, DP John A Alonzo ASC), or Elliot Gould in The Long Goodbye (1973, dir Robert Altman, DP Vilmos Zsigmond HSC ASC), we discover this world of the Siegel family and their missing grand-daughter Olivia by staying close to Sugar nearly all the time. We track him and hear his voiceover, sharing his observations directly through a mixture of handheld work, Steadicam, driving shots and remote heads on dramatic crane moves.

In terms of camera movement, the show was blessed that our leading man, Colin Farrell, worked skillfully with the lens no matter the action. It was a gift, making the photography better as he choreographed his movement to our cameras – great visual storytelling! It freed us to avoid marks for the actors and to imagine more ambitious shots inspired by our actor’s collaboration with the camera and vice versa.

“The show was blessed that our leading man worked skillfully with the lens”

Another visual touchstone is that Los Angeles itself is a character in our storytelling, the principal influence for the colour palette. Referencing marvellous colour noir films, such as LA Confidential (1997, dir. Curtis Hanson, DP Dante Spinotti AIC ASC) and The Grifters (1990, dir. Stephen Frears, DP Oliver Stapleton BSC), we sought to expand the colour saturation and hues. With a nuanced LUT on-camera, we created a specific gamma curve to allow the overexposure of LA daylight to be ‘hot’ whilst still having a pleasant film roll-off.

The work balanced the desire to exploit higher contrast, another noir touchstone, with flattering shots of the performer’s faces. Amid darker themes, we also wanted to depict the many beautiful things Sugar sees in his starry-eyed version of Los Angeles. With saturation, particularly, there was a concern about drawing the image away from deep true blues or fire truck reds, most of the primaries actually, and to bend the tones into more original territory via attractive but offbeat colours whenever possible.

Our cameras were from Panavision Woodland Hills. Mixing Sony Venice 1 and Sony Venice 2 bodies became especially useful with their Rialto mode, which allowed César, myself and the camera operators to move freely in handheld shots attached by cable to the smaller sensor block. Also, this helped us place the camera in tight spaces, including Sugar’s classic Corvette.

“Mixing Sony Venice 1 and Sony Venice 2 bodies became especially useful with their Rialto mode”

Lenses were the PanaSpeeds alongside PV Lightweight Zooms. César introduced the use of iPhones with lens adapters as a standard capture option, hiding these into the set or filming up close and handheld. We even dropped them in and out of Sugar’s pool by rigging them to C-stand arms. It was the acceptance – really encouragement – of this mix of capture formats that shaped Sugar’s unique POV and edit style. For our episode four, in particular, it allowed information created for social media to integrate meaningfully into our storytelling – a very contemporary twist on the mysteries of identity and intent that fill the noir canon.

In a very “meta” moment of the story arc, we even captured images on old school Anamorphic film to fill the screen at a cinema retrospective where almost every one of our characters arrives to celebrate the career of Sugar’s client Jonathan and his late wife Lorraine Everly, the actress seen on-screen. How that image was achieved is one of my favourite stories from this show. Instead of allowing a blank screen to be filled by VFX, we actually shot and printed a scene on 35mm.

Our location was a restored Warner Movie Palace in Long Beach, complete with working film projectors. Right away, I advocated to avoid VFX and instead create our own ‘vintage noir film’ to be edited and printed in repeat segments onto a reel that was projected live for the actors all to see. Foto-Kem was the lab that cut the A-roll negative, arriving at a timed answer print within a couple of days.

Just three nights before, we had made our ‘film-within-a-film’ on the Paramount backlot. This highly stylised nod to the films of Douglas Sirk had many elements of classic Hollywood melodrama: a boldly saturated night alleyway lit by neon outside a nightclub; vintage ‘40s cars lurking in the shadows, headlamps casting onto wet pavement; the femme fatale in her soon-to-be-revealed clue of a shiny gold dress; her handsome bodyguard in his tuxedo being drawn into a passionate kiss; and all in backlit rain, no less.

Our director, Adam, and our crew were equally psyched to see film magazines going onto the Panaflex Platinum and to have old-school working methods returning to our set. In the theatre, we had the ability to move our digital cameras around to capture details of the projector beam, utilise reflections off the actual screen softly-illuminating the faces of our actors, and frame compositions that combined the on-screen image with our audience. Such a godsend, both aesthetically and for efficiency during very full shooting days.

It brilliantly fits the show’s overarching stylistic heartbeat, with Colin’s newly-imagined contemporary soir hero, the suited PI who himself holds tremendous secrets, engaging the playful self-awareness of this legacy that Sugar joins.”