Maxance Vincent
Awards Radar recently interviewed cinematographer Stephen Murphy about his collaboration with director Eran Creevy on episodes 3, 4, 5, and 8 of the second season of The Gentlemen. Murphy had not worked on the show’s first season, which developed the visual language that creator Guy Ritchie created, based on the 2019 film of the same name, but pushed the look of the show much further than its initial season.
In this conversation, we discussed his collaboration with Creevy, how his visual sensibilities might have influenced how the episodes were shaped, and breakdowns of some key scenes shot for the four episodes he worked on.
Read the full interview below:
If my information is correct, you didn’t work on the first season.
Correct, yes.
The first season of The Gentlemen establishes the visual look the show wants, and this season expands it further, creating jaw-dropping images that, to me, are some of the year’s most astonishing in both movies and television. Did you have any initial discussions with the director, Eran Creevy, who worked on the first season and had a sense of what the show was striving for visually, about taking this season to the next level?
The very first conversations I had with Eran Creevy, who had done some of season one and had a really good sense of what the show wanted to be. When you do season one of anything, you’re still figuring out the tone of the show, and by the end of season one you tend to go, “Oh, look, this worked really well” or “maybe this idea works less well.” You’ve got a really strong idea by the time you get to the end of season one of what you’re aiming for with future seasons. When I got to speak with Eran for the first time, he was able to say, “I really like this. That’s what I think we should strive to do more.” That gives you a loose structure for the visual style of the show. I’d seen his episodes and really liked a lot of the stuff they had done. You then begin to take notes, start reading the scripts, and see where they are going tonally in season two; you adapt your approach so you’re still working within the visual language framework of season one, but tailoring it to the specific drama of season two.
When you work on a show whose look has been established by someone else – the first two episodes of the first season were directed by Guy Ritchie and shot by Ed Wild, I believe – I’m wondering if there’s a balance in respecting what was established while also maybe finding ways to showcase some of your own aesthetic approach to cinematography?
I get asked that a lot because there’s a kind of old-school thinking for TV dramas, where maybe you were doing a 22-episode season network drama, and that all had to feel the same. All 22 episodes had to feel like one piece. When the bigger streaming shows started to come out, you usually have the same cast and some of the same locations. Some of the other components are similar, like the costumes and things like that, which gives you a consistent visual structure. As a cinematographer, you have quite a bit of leeway to change things up from episode to episode, and there have been shows where I’ve come in and completely changed the lighting style, camera package, or lenses. Sometimes, I’ve kept some of what they’ve done and changed other pieces.
As long as it feels true to the story and the tone of what that story is trying to do for an audience, it’s all good. You know you’re okay. In the case of The Gentlemen, Eran and I are both huge fans of shooting with anamorphic lenses. We’ve both used them throughout our careers, and that’s something I really wanted to introduce to The Gentlemen. At a certain point in our episodes, where we felt there was an extra level of visual drama needed, we switched from the regular spherical lenses to anamorphic lenses – vintage anamorphics from Panavision – and we just felt it gave us a more cinematic look and a little bit more cinema quality to the images. The DP that came in after us continued that trend. You have a framework that you have to loosely work with. But you do have a lot of freedom to change things up to marry with the story that you have in your episodes.
It’s interesting because a lot of the development in this season is experienced through the images, and there’s a lot of great detail in highlighting what’s going on in the face of, say, Eddie or Susie, as the story progresses. Was that something that you and Eran sort of consciously thought about when working on the show to highlight what is going on in a given actor’s phase during a specific scene?
One of the really great things about the show is that it’s full of fantastic performances, and the dialogue is great. However, the moments between the dialogue are just as powerful. Being able to focus on those and linger on them, to leave room for the music, or to just watch somebody as they’re processing and making a decision, because so much of the show is about decision-making. Does Eddie believe Susie, or does he not? Do I choose option A or option B? Then watch the consequences unfold. Having a camera that can pause and sit with the actor for a moment while you watch them make that decision is great drama, and it’s great visual drama.
I also noticed the color palette is quite heightened, and that enhances a lot of what we see on screen, even in the way a scene is lit, or just the costumes. Can you talk about the process behind shooting this heightened world, and how you make sure every aspect of the production is highlighted in a way that lets the audience immerse themselves in that part of the world?
It starts in prep as a three-way conversation between Eran, James North, our production designer, and me. You’re scouting for locations. You spend a huge chunk of your prep time scouting locations to find spaces that work within that world and give us something visually interesting that isn’t just a white-walled box. Very loosely, I break it down into two worlds. There is the world of luxury and the criminal world. We try to give them their own feeling. By design, the manors have a different quality than something you’d find in the middle of London or in the underground weed farm. We try to keep all of the wealthy world looking opulent and luxuriant, and then we want everything else to look quite slick and sexy, even though it’s dangerous.
I assume your collaboration with Loulou Bontemps in the costume department, and you’ve talked about the production design as well, is very close because you have to highlight the work that they’re doing, and for the audience to notice that there is a story, not just with what’s happening on screen, but also in the way the characters are dressed and the spaces maybe influence them in a way?
Loulou spends obviously a hell of a lot of time working on the costumes. She’s seeing the location photographs come in as we’re choosing locations. She’s choosing colors and textures that’ll complement or stand out from the spaces we’re going to be in. What my job is to do a lot of the time is figure out the best way to shoot that space, the best way to light that space, where we’re going to get the most bang for our buck and get the most drama out of something. I don’t want to end up shooting a scene in the corner of a fantastic-looking room. I want to see the whole room, not the scene in the tiny bottom right-hand corner. I really feel that space informs character, and it’s important to me to see those characters in their spaces, even in close-ups. I’m not crazy about shooting with a very shallow depth of field. I really like to feel the locations and sets behind the characters, so it’s always part of their visual presence.
The show also plays, I think I’ve alluded to this before, with a lot of different light sources. And there’s a scene, I think it’s in the finale, where Susie and Eddie walk towards where Tommy is. All the lights come out. Tommy’s men are all dead. And before that, we see flashes of gunfire as they’re getting killed. I’m wondering if you can talk about shooting that specific scene and the process that went into playing with all these different type of types of sources in the camera as well?
That’s a really great example of that three-way collaboration that I was talking about. On the page, when the script came in, that scene was set in a different space and written in a more nondescript way. As we were scouting locations, we struggled to find something with the scale we wanted that also met the physical requirements: somebody being able to hide in the shadows and not be seen until a certain point in the script. We found that huge cavernous warehouse. There were no lights in it. It was totally empty. It was just a complete blank canvas, and I pitched the idea of what you saw on screen. The designer got it straight away. He pitched back his own versions of how to build that set in the middle of a set and have the windows be anamorphic. We’d have frames within frames, and we kind of huddled together and worked it out. When we pitched it to Eran, he loved it, and everybody loved the idea. We pulled that set together really quickly, and it’s a fantastic example of a collaboration between a director, DP, and a designer. It works really well.
Did that collaboration also come into play in the fifth episode, where Eddie talks to Geoffrey? They’re sitting in this garden, and there are so many detailed flowers around them with very heightened colors.
That garden scene is a great example of what Conrad Hall used to call serendipity. That was not supposed to happen in that place. That was supposed to happen in a totally different location, and for a bunch of reasons, we had to pivot and find a new place to stage that scene. The garden was around the corner. The clouds are starting to roll in. We walked into the garden. We staged them on the tree. You get this beautiful white cloud with the tree behind it. The flowers. It will look amazing. Eran took a chance, and we staged the scene just as the clouds got to their darkest. I had lots of warm backlight coming in, and it gives you a really interesting quality, especially when you view that scene in the context of the overall story and where Eddie’s character is at that point. It’s not something that we consciously articulated we were trying to do. It was literally me responding in the moment, watching the weather crawl in, the clouds roll in, knowing if I light it this way and I expose it this way, it’s going to have a really interesting quality. We did it, and everybody looked at the monitor and was like, “This is crazy. This looks like a visual effect,” but it wasn’t. It was all real, and it had a really interesting effect on everyone watching.
Across all the episodes you’ve worked on this season, you and Eran shoot action in different ways, and I’m wondering if you can talk about the process behind crafting some of the action sequences you collaborated on?
A lot of it depends on the scale and specifics of the action sequence. I always treat action like any other scene. If you do it well, it’s revealing a bit more about the characters. If you do it badly, it just feels like a second unit did it, and it’s kind of done by numbers. Eran is really experienced with action sequences. He has the same feeling. We both love the same action movies from the 80s and the 90s. A lot of our touchstones are very similar. But basically, we just work through it. We figure out what the story beats are. Eran is always very focused on story and character, which is great. We find the space we think will work well for the sequence, then mark it beat by beat and see if it physically makes sense. Could this be staged this way? As Eran does that, I’m watching the blocking and looking for the best way to lie and shoot it. We then start talking about shots and break it down into pieces.
Do you have a particular scene or maybe just an image that you crafted for this season that you would say is the one that you’re the proudest?
Probably the scene I love most is near the end of episode five. It’s an airport hangar at night, a private air hangar at night, and it’s Susie getting rid of Joe, turning him over to the Colombians, and then Eddie turns up at the end. It was a fantastic location. It’s a great scene. The writing is really good. The performances are great. It was a lot of fun to shoot, and Kaya Scodelario gives a brilliant performance. It’s a turning point for Theo James, for his character. It’s a really nice wrap-up, a really nice ending to that episode as well. So I think it was probably that. There are lots of scenes that I love shooting. There are lots of images that I could point to and go, “This is my favorite shot.” But that sequence is, if I had to direct you to one sequence to watch of the show, that’s probably the most me.
When you reflect on the work and the time you spent conceiving the episodes you did with Eran this season, is there one thing you would say, as a cinematographer, was the most rewarding aspect of working on a show like The Gentlemen?
That’s a great question. You know what? The thing I loved most about the experience was actually just hanging out with Eran and working with him. We had a great crew, a great first AD, and a great designer, and our industry doesn’t always attract the nicest egos. Even if it’s a great experience on screen, it might not necessarily be a great experience shooting it. That said, working with Eran on The Gentlemen was a pleasure. That’s my overriding memory of it. I might look at a movie or a show in like five years’ time and go, “That looked great, and that was a great story,” but my memory will always be of the fun you have when you do it. I got in the industry to enjoy being a cinematographer, to enjoy making movies and TV shows, and it doesn’t always get to be like that. But in this case, it was exactly what I thought it would be as a teenager, saying, “I’m going to get to make movies.”
[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]
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