Danny Jarabek
Created by David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo, the Netflix series 3 Body Problem is based on the highly successful Chinese novel series written by Liu Cixin. With multiple worlds and timelines, one of the biggest challenges of bringing the series to life was developing a visual identity that embraced both the physics of the science involved in the narrative and the fantastical fiction elements.
In conversation with the team of DP’s for the series, Martin Ahlgren, Jonathan Freeman, and Richard Donnelly, each discuss their role for their respective episodes, and also the collaborative effort amongst their team in creating a cohesive look for the show. Each detail some of the prominent challenges including the strategies for visualizing the significant ‘Judgment Day’ episode and the VR world that many of the show’s characters occupy.
Read our full conversation with 3 Body Problem cinematographers Martin Ahlgren, Jonathan Freeman, and Richard Donnelly below.
Hi, this is Danny Jarabek here with Awards Radar, and I am very delighted to have with me today Martin Ahlgren, Jonathan Freeman, and Richard Donnelly, DPs for the Netflix series 3 Body Problem. How are all of you guys today? I’m very excited to talk with you all and I hope you are as well.
Absolutely. Thank you, Danny.
Awesome. I’m very excited to have a whole team of DPs here. I think the cinematography, the visual language for this series, is absolutely incredible. It was really, really fun to watch, so I’m excited to hear a little bit more behind the scenes of how you guys developed that. I would just want to start with, of course, 3 Body Problem, coming from the source material, source novel, I wanted to start with if any of you were familiar with the source beforehand. And if so, or if not, if it was something that you continuously referenced throughout the process of developing the visual language, developing storyboards, anything like that.
Jonathan: Well, I don’t know if anyone wants to jump in. I was familiar with the novels. I didn’t complete the series before starting, but I did complete the first book. It was inspirational, but it was also interesting how the scripts that David [Benioff] and Alex [Woo] produced, demonstrated also effectively almost a different world that we also needed to create. So, it was inspirational, but it was also, I think, something that I didn’t reference too many times. But, in particular, I would say I did reference the books, particularly for the China storyline that we started the first couple of episodes with, introducing one of our key characters, Ye Wenjie. That that part of the novel I was inspired by.
Martin: I was made familiar with it. I didn’t know of the book trilogy before, but I was made familiar with it a few months before I came on board from my episode director, Minkie Spiro. At first, I just started reading them and got into it. Then, when I found out that I was going to join the production, I really started speed reading them because I knew that once I start to work on something, I don’t really want to refer back to the source novel because it can get really confusing with the script and the novel diverting and all of a sudden you’re not sure if something that you have a vivid memory of is something you’re actually about to shoot or something that you read in the novel. And then also the difference between the two. But as Jonathan said, I think part of what was interesting to us also was how the creator sort of took the novels in a slightly different direction. I think one thing that was nice about having read them is that there’s, in some ways, more depth to your understanding of some of the things that are happening in the show, even though it’s translated into a different form that works better for their version of it.
Richard, for you?
Richard: For me, really, I wasn’t aware of the books until I heard of the show when I started talking to the producers. I tried to play catchup quite a lot with it. As Martin was saying, I did a lot of speed reading. I got the first book when I first joined the show. And, really, that was all I read. From then on, I just devoured the scripts and reread and reread and reread and went to the art department as much as I could, from a visual standpoint, to just get a feel of particularly the Chinese element of it all, as Jonathan said, particularly for the first couple of episodes, to just get an idea and a handle of the time that these were set in, and costumes, the sets, etc., just to get a whole feel of the Chinese element of it. So, I wasn’t familiar with it, but a lot more now having done the show. In fact, I began reading the books again when we finished the show.
That’s great. Well, because, you guys split episodes, I’m curious to hear what the overall process was for beginning to develop a visual language for the show, developing what the overall look would be in creating continuity between different directors, different DPs, as you guys are well aware of, and what that collaboration process looked like early on with potentially working with the storyboarder or what that process was for all of you.
Jonathan: I started the series first. I’m not sure when, Martin, you were aboard, but PJ Dillon was also, the cinematographer who’s part of our collective. I remember some of the first discussions that we had were things like aspect ratio and the lenses and whatnot. I initially reached out to PJ as well just to let him know what the discussions were coming down the pike and getting his take on it. Eventually, Martin, you joined in, and I discontinued that practice. And then, of course, when Richard came aboard when I had to leave the project a bit earlier, of course, we continued that practice. It’s a very unique situation to be able to work with multiple cinematographers working on the same sets and developing the look together. But initially, some decisions had to be made at the beginning. The aspect ratio and the lenses were one of the principal ones. We shot 2:3:5 as a widescreen choice because we felt that for our first season and even for future seasons, it made more sense to have almost a horizontal framing. We had landscapes in the VR world. We had the “Judgement Day” tanker episode. There are a lot of set pieces that made sense to basically frame in a wider screen. And then, eventually, of course, a widescreen displays well for the notion of space and literally using negative space to show distance and scale and vastness. So, those decisions inform, automatically, choices that I think all of us made later in our episodes. The glass that we used were these lenses that were developed by Greig Fraser on The Batman, and then the first set of production lenses called the ALFA lenses, which are by ARRI. They’re ARRI large-format anamorphics. They have a very unique bokeh, beyond the classical anamorphic look. They also have a very pure center so when you’re framing a close-up on somebody, there’s almost no distortion, which a lot of classic vintage anamorphics do fail that in that way. So, it was it was really quite unique. Those things are obviously a very strong signature of the look of the show. But then, beyond that, we, as all cinematographers, bring our own approach to color palettes and lighting. I think what’s great about our journey is that throughout the season there are new worlds that are opened up, so even though I may have started the first couple episodes introducing the VR world and the China storyline, there are many other new worlds that would be developed further, which the cinematographers equally contributed to. Does that make any sense?
Yeah, absolutely. What you allude to at the end is what I was really fascinated with, with the language of the series, because there are so many worlds and otherworldly universes and locations that there’s just such a richness and texture to all these different places that you guys are shooting. I’m curious to hear how much of this was shot in location, versus, obviously, some other landscapes that are very prominent within the series as well, especially the VR space. I’d be curious to hear from you guys what was shot on location and how you manage that versus the look of specifically the VR space and how that blended into the series as well.
Jonathan: Martin or Richard, do you want to go?
Martin: My episodes didn’t include the VR space as much as your guys did. So, you might want to refer to that a little bit. I think when it came to just shooting overall and, obviously, I think, Jonathan, you spent a lot more time in prep with Dan, David, and Alex, and also you have a longstanding relationship with Dan and David that I think sort of brought in the foundation of what we all came to, basically the sandbox that we all came to play in, as we all came in in a way. I think that there was something, to my understanding of it, that wanted to stay quite grounded and, in a way, naturalistic. The concepts are so out there and wild and that there’s something interesting about creating a world that feels somewhat grounded and believable for that. So, that was a little bit of what I took from my understanding a little bit of that approach was. And then, as I got into it, also learning quickly how Dan, David, and Alex, they’re quite, I would say, almost averse to anything that borders on camera trickery or wanting to call attention to the camerawork or style, in a way. I think that that was, in a way, a good thing for us, on the episodes that I did, to keep us in check and stick in this world that felt a little bit more grounded, in a way. We approached it with a fairly naturalistic look, but at the same time, you want to convey the feelings and the mood of the story and approach that. So, in my episodes, we did have quite a bit of location work and a little bit of the VR stage. But I think Jonathan and Richard, you guys spent a lot more time both setting up and shooting in the VR stage.
Richard: Yes. I did a lot of work with Jonathan on the VR. But also, an answer to your question, Danny, and also mirroring what you just said, Martin, we shot a lot in local, almost mundane locations. The extraordinary thing about this was bringing the extraordinary into these quite mundane and regular life locations, whether it was funeral homes or even the toilets in funeral homes and what have you. So, you could go to work telling this really far-out story with these characters who were just literally eating packets of crisps, drinking coffee, and having chats in toilets. It was quite a mix-up tonally but very enjoyable even from a comedic part of view. One of the location works that I enjoyed an awful lot is we went to Spain to film in quite a remote location outside of Madrid. And if you remember, when Ye Wenjie’s character, when she’s brought up to the radar base, which was called the Red Coast station, it was set in the dead of winter in this brutal world that she was living in. When we were there, it was almost midsummer time. So, what we did is we just embraced everything. I worked with Derek [Tsang], the director. I worked at the sun paths when she arrived. We worked it out that we could have this really harsh light, which was in fact almost midsummer light, but we gave it a cold look, kept all the characters with their winter costumes on, and with the help of VFX, added a little bit of breath work. I was very happy with the results because it gave a harsh, brutal, winter, cold-looking feel to quite a dreadful situation this girl was in in this remote-looking location when in fact you were telling a movie lie, as it were, where you were just cloak and dagger of the truth of the hot weather. But I thought the results turned out very, very well. I really enjoyed working in that location. We did a bunch of work out there for that story, and the local Spanish crew was great as well. So, that was an interesting aspect of it location-wise.
Jonathan: In terms of the VR world, it was a big challenge, let’s just say. The whole point of the VR scenes is for the characters to experience cataclysmic light, if you will. And that is to say, the sequences are where they’re walking on a barren landscape in the dead of night and then there’s a faint light on the horizon, and then suddenly a huge sun comes across and arcs across the sky and then dips down and then there’s a star field and then three suns come up. The biggest challenge was that we always knew that the actors or the characters would be walking in these landscapes that would have to be virtually extended by VFX, that the light that’s wrapping around those characters have to be integrated into what VFX will eventually create. So, the idea of having animated light, shifting light, basically trying to simulate daylight, not just at any one time but actually throughout all kinds of day and night, it just made sense that we had to shoot on stage. We couldn’t do it naturally. The challenge of that is how do we do that? I came up with an idea that initially we would use a volume stage, because that was certainly the most successful way to achieve interactive lighting, The Mandalorian being the first prime example of that. Volume stages were being built, but they were extremely expensive. Then, we also had the complication that the scale of the volume stage that we needed was much larger than most volume stages that were there. So, even before I started, I came up with the plan to present to the producers what I’d call a low-res volume, which was comprised of sky panels, which are the standard industry LED square light panels that are about one foot by, I don’t know, eight inches. I don’t know. Anyways, no. They’re a little bit larger than that. But anyway, if you can imagine a full array of them as almost like a wall, we have 1,200 in total. It was 70 rows wide and 14 rows high. If you can imagine, it wrapped around, almost like half of a hockey rink. We put a Rosco scrim in front of it. We were able to recreate, basically, skies that represented all times of day and effectively, in a way, at night, I guess. It was a very large undertaking and certainly still quite costly, but our great producer, Bernie Caulfield, found a way to make it happen, and I think it significantly made a big difference in terms of making those scenes as real as they could be. But we did have the one advantage that the idea was always to be as photorealistic as possible with the caveat that in some of these lighting environments, even though it should feel naturalistic, there’s no reference for a sun that’s 40x bigger than our own sun. That light is unique and frankly, alien. So, we had some fudging room in terms of those kinds of moments and those scenes, but it was quite a procedure.
I’d imagine that space needed to be pretty large, too, with some of the scenes that happen within the VR space.
Jonathan: Exactly. So, that was the biggest challenge. I did initial testing on the volume stage, actually, at ARRI London. It was 50 feet in diameter. It’s not only the scale, which we had literally a hundred extras running at full speed across the across a tundra, but we were also throwing in elements of snow and smoke and all things that volume stages don’t like. It kind of eliminated, and even though the test I did as a proof of concept demonstrated that this is the way to do it, it was obviously cost and reality of not even having a volume stage big enough that made us lean toward the so-called low-res volume. Richard, you were thinking it was 120 feet, maybe?
Richard: Yeah. I think it was about 120 feet, Jonathan, yes.
Jonathan: Yeah. So, anyway, it was one of the biggest challenges that I’ve ever had but fun.
I’m sure. Martin, I’ll go to you, because one of the things that develops as the show continues to go on is this really heavy and dense science fiction but also grounded in a lot of science and physics as well. So, I’m curious, for you specifically, especially with Episode 5, we have this grand set piece that I think starts to really blend these worlds of science fiction and physics. The making of this boat set piece that blends also lighting and body horror and so many different things happening in the scene, what the making of that looked like, and specifically, what the process of thinking this through in terms of physics, what this also would look like.
Martin: One interesting experience was because my director and I were working on the middle episodes, 4, 5, and 6. So, although I started before the first episode started shooting and worked on prep throughout that whole period, in a way you’re a little bit in the background because it’s not the immediate issue at hand. Everyone is focusing on what’s being shot next week and in a few days. It was funny. We had a lot of things to figure out. Although they’re written on the page, there are certainly different ways that you can go about approaching it. It was funny. The production designer, Deborah Riley, kept joking with us because we sometimes felt like, “Ah! We just need to get a meeting with the creators to hash out exactly what this is going to be,” and she would be like, “Oh yeah, just wait. As soon as it becomes your turn when you get the keys to the car, then you’re going to have all that attention and you’re going to be able to get quick answers.” But one thing that it led to was that we had a lot of time to figure out how we wanted that sequence to be and then have a very complete proposal to show with complete storyboards and everything like that that we could show and get feedback on as we started getting closer to that episode. It was nice to be able to work out that in detail and have that prep period, just me and my director, basically. One thing that we did was spend a lot of time with the physicist advisor, Matthew Kenzie, just to look at how to make this seem like something that actually could happen, having long nanofibers cutting through a ship. And there are definitely some gaps in the technology on how to achieve that where you have to make a little bit of a leap of faith, but we wanted to make sure that the science seemed as accurate and real as possible. Where there were things that were more difficult to motivate exactly because no one really knows exactly how you would accomplish something like that, we, of course, had to leave it a little bit more fuzzy. But we wanted to provide all the structure around it to where it sort of felt like this was something that could be achieved. Then it was working on storyboards to finalize exactly how to approach the sequence and also to find the right tone that worked within the story that we were telling because, obviously, it’d be quite easy to veer into something very gore, almost like a horror film approach to it. There’s certainly that element, but I think we realized quickly that you just need a few really specific moments where you show how this is working, and then a lot of it can be left to the imagination and can be left in wide shots and can be just implied. You take it from there. So, just from a storytelling viewpoint, that was an interesting thing to work out, how to find that balance as well. In some ways, if I go back and look at some of our early storyboards, I can feel like, okay. Before we pared back some of the goriness, we had some slicings of people in incredible detail that almost would have, to some extent, been interesting but also I think would have a little bit veered into a different genre altogether as well.
Yeah. Richard, I’ll wrap up with you here. Happening toward the beginning of the series, we jump a lot between timelines, especially with our protagonist, Ye. I’m interested to hear how you developed the visual identity for these different timelines, especially with Ye in her much younger years when she’s critical to the story unfolding and then seeing her later on in the present day. There’s a very distinct, I think, visual identity between these two timelines. What was your thinking behind that?
Richard: Do you mean in relation to how it all looked, how she looked?
Just the two places, when we see the main facility in the past versus seeing the present day following the main protagonists.
Richard: I guess when we see her at the beginning, at the very start of it, in the power center, etc., there’s a lot of VXF swirled in there as well. It’s quite dark. She’s at her wit’s end. That was fairly straightforward from just an approach that it was it was quite brief. I actually shot a bunch of things that didn’t make it in the cut with her journey, before she jumps off the plinth. But it was quite a dark, dark journey. So, when she’s talking to Saul at the beginning and everything’s packing up in the center to have this loneliness, this disused feel to her surroundings, but later when she’s older, again, going back to everything with her in these very ordinary settings, so when we’re in her house, etc., again, to mirror both what Martin and Jonathan did and were saying the lighting and everything wasn’t to be too stylized, nothing to take away from her reality from where she was. When she’s in the house, in her own home, she’s in her bedroom, she’s in the living room, all these places, although to look good and everything, we didn’t want to take away from what was going on with her character. It was very much a normal setting. So, nothing too stylized but just very much a real-based thing. That went hand-in-glove with Deborah Riley’s production design and with the costume design and everything. There was nothing there to detract you from what was going on. That was the approach, in general, from my end.
Awesome. Well, just as a quick aside before I wrap up, I’d noticed, and I’m assuming this is VFX, but in Episode 1, there’s a shot inside the Kamiokande physics facility famously photographed by Andreas Gursky. I was just curious if you guys did that in VFX or if you somehow got inside that.
Jonathan: Oh, no. That was VFX.
Okay, I assumed, but I just had to ask because I just noticed it. It was a very quick shot, and it’s a really interesting space, so I just had to ask.
Jonathan: Yeah. What’s remarkable, I would say, about this whole production is we basically shot most of it outside the locations that Martin had mentioned. Much of it was shot on Shepperton in the stages and even outside the stages. Even the opening sequence that’s set during this, the struggle sessions, I forgot the university’s name, that was just a stage set built outside basically in a bluescreen box. All that is extended. I think it’s actually one of the most significant pieces that the VFX team did. Obviously, Episode 5 is stunning, but it’s what they did. And I think also at the first scene of the whole series that what they recreated with the crowd extensions, considering that we shot handheld and basically delivered fuzzy photography to them, yet there’s no way you feel any visual effects in that whole sequence. It’s almost all VFX. My hat goes off to our VFX team for that sequence alone. It’s remarkable.
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time, Martin Ahlgren, Jonathan Freeman, Richard Donnelly, cinematographers for the incredible Netflix series, 3 Body Problem. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate getting to hear a little bit more, and I hope all of you guys have a great rest of your day.
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