There are plenty of reasons to lament the rise of the limited series, especially if you work in Hollywood and would prefer to know where your next paycheck is coming from. But there is also something creatively exciting about watching filmmakers jump from one fully realized world into another. A cinematographer can spend a few months defining the shadows and colors of one story, pack up the camera, and suddenly be asked to see an entirely different one.
Doug Emmett has had a particularly good year doing just that. His work can be seen in two of the year’s best thrillers, Apple TV’s “Lucky” and Hulu’s “Furious.” They share some DNA on paper. Both center on women operating outside the usual definitions of right and wrong, and both have the kind of cinematic ambition that makes the distinction between television and film feel increasingly meaningless. Once you actually watch them, however, they could hardly be more different.
“Furious” has been one of late summer’s most welcome surprises. Created by Liz Meriwether, the eight-episode series follows FBI agent Alice Black (Emmy Rossum) as she hunts Catherine Grace (Lola Petticrew), a calculating serial killer whose path toward her own version of justice gradually begins to intersect with Alice’s. The closer they get to one another, the more complicated it becomes to decide exactly whom we should fear, understand or even root for.
That sounds incredibly dark. It often is. But “Furious” can also be unexpectedly funny, sometimes at precisely the moment when it feels like it has no business making you laugh. Meriwether, who created “New Girl,” knows how to find humor inside uncomfortable situations, and the supporting cast gives the show room to breathe between its more disturbing turns. Steve Way is especially wonderful as Alden, whose relationship with Catherine becomes surprisingly tender, while Rob Yang’s Frank Choi brings some much-needed comic relief to Alice’s increasingly consuming investigation. That tonal balancing act extends to the images. Emmett shot the pilot with director Brian Kirk, establishing a visual language that could live inside the ugliness of the story without making every frame announce that we were watching a serial killer drama. As Emmett explains in our conversation, the goal was never simply to make “Furious” dark.
A few weeks earlier, Emmett’s photography could be found somewhere very different. “Lucky,” based on Marissa Stapley’s bestselling novel, stars Anya Taylor-Joy as a con artist who thought she had escaped the criminal life she was raised in until a multimillion-dollar heist goes wrong and sends her running from both the FBI and a dangerous crime boss. The seven-episode Apple TV series comes from creator and co-showrunner Jonathan Tropper, with Cassie Pappas serving as co-showrunner. Reese Witherspoon and Lauren Neustadter executive produce for Hello Sunshine, while Taylor-Joy also executive produces through LadyKiller.
And if “Furious” is about two women slowly being drawn toward one another, “Lucky” is about a woman who cannot seem to run fast enough. Taylor-Joy gives the series its restless center, surrounded by a terrific cast that includes Annette Bening, Timothy Olyphant, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Drew Starkey and Clifton Collins Jr. Emmett joined the production for Episodes 2 and 3 with director Greg Yaitanes before returning for Episodes 6 and 7. Rather than being asked to rigidly duplicate what had come before, he was given the unusual freedom to let the photography evolve with Lucky’s journey. The visual vocabulary grew along with the story, eventually incorporating anamorphic photography, hand-cranked 35mm footage and a healthy dose of Tony Scott.
Watching the two shows together makes Emmett’s work more interesting, not less. “Lucky” has Anya Taylor-Joy racing across deserts and highways with a camera eager to keep up with her. “Furious” often wants to get uncomfortably close to Rossum and Petticrew, searching their faces for tiny changes that might tell us which woman has control of a scene. Even the stars require a different photographic relationship. Taylor-Joy has the kind of movie-star magnetism that Emmett jokes makes his job easy. “Furious” asks the camera to do something more psychologically slippery, moving between Alice and Catherine until their perspectives begin to bleed into one another.
Emmett does not see that range as evidence of a signature style. Quite the opposite. During our conversation, he describes himself as “a little bit more of a chameleon,” someone who would rather listen to what a script is asking for than arrive with a predetermined way of shooting it. It is an idea that becomes much more convincing when “Lucky” and “Furious” are sitting next to each other on his résumé.
Awards Focus spoke with Emmett about building the damp, textured New York of “Furious,” finding visual empathy for a serial killer and what happens to the camera when Alice and Catherine finally occupy the same space. We also discussed following Taylor-Joy across “Lucky,” his collaboration with Olyphant on one of the show’s most memorable scenes, and why a beach in Big Sur became the perfect place to capture Lucky’s final moment of freedom.
Awards Focus: You have a couple of great shows out right now. I want to start with “Furious,” which has really become a runaway hit toward the end of summer. You shot the pilot, correct?
Doug Emmett: That’s right.
AF: Serial killer shows tend to have a dark visual tone, but “Furious” is doing something a little different. From the beginning, what visual identity did you and the creative team want to establish for the series?
Emmett: We were walking somewhat of a fine line because we knew the show was really dark in terms of subject matter, and we could have just leaned into that one desire to make everything very dark and feel very moody. But then there was also the idea that there’s still some comedy to be mined from that show. There are some very funny elements throughout the season, and Liz Meriwether obviously has a real talent for writing comedy. She came up in the comedy world. So it was important to Liz that we don’t go too heavy in terms of darkness with the visuals.
Brian Kirk, our pilot director, has made a very nice career shooting very dramatic television and feature films. So threading that needle was going to be really important for us, to find a tone that could satisfy all of those masters, if you will.
I think we found that, and not only did we find it, we were able to keep it cohesive across eight episodes and two DPs. That’s really a testament to the department heads, our production designer, our costume designer, and then the writers too, because they had to hone in on a very specific tone throughout the show.
It was fun. We were given a lot of time in pre-production. We were given eight weeks to drill down on our tone and the mood of the show. I feel like we really got there and established that early on with Brian. It was fun to see the other directors run with that template and then develop and build on it.
AF: As you mentioned, you could have gone very dark, but the levity actually grows as the season progresses. Were there specific inspirations or aesthetics that helped you find the right palette for the tone you wanted to establish?
Emmett: Specifically, Brian and I drilled down on a few references, but we kept coming back to Scorsese’s work in New York City in the ’70s. We found that we were drawn to gritty New York crime dramas in the ’70s and ’80s. “Taxi Driver” was one of those films that we kept coming back to and loved the look of.
Someone had described “Furious” as feeling very wet or damp, and we loved that description because we went to great lengths to incorporate elements like haze, steam, smoke, wetness and rain, and add these layers of texture to the city.
Another reference was Jane Campion’s “In the Cut,” a really great film starring Mark Ruffalo and Meg Ryan. It’s really dark in nature and tonally dark, but in terms of cinematography, it also finds the ability to incorporate a lot of beautiful color, shadow and playing with light versus dark, which is what we did on our show as well. Finding the juxtaposition between the two is really effective in telling the story.
In terms of photography, we really loved the photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia, who also shot in New York in the ’80s and ’90s. Really beautiful color photography, really saturated work. His use of what I would say are natural spotlights was really interesting because he’s able to isolate characters. A lot of his portraiture and his characters seem like people on the fringes of society, or at least convey to me the feeling of loneliness.
I was curious about the idea that you could put someone in shadow or in light, and what choosing to do so meant and what feeling that conveys. There’s an image that Philip shot with a person standing in front of an open refrigerator and the light coming on. It’s a bit theatrical.
I guess I could describe that as a little bit of heightened realism. I’m always curious about threading that needle too, specifically trying to figure out how theatrical we can go without feeling unrealistic. I’d like for it to be grounded in realism and still get to be playful at times.
I’ve found with spotlighting people and doing these natural spotlights that you might get from, say, a security light or flood lamp, or finding a very specific color in terms of lighting, that it draws your eye and directs the attention of viewers.
A good example is Danny in the police station when he’s working late at night. He’s under rows and rows of fluorescent lights, but he has a bright, warm desk lamp on. Even in a big wide shot, your eye can still find Danny in the middle of this room because he’s got that warm light pointing onto his face. These are little techniques that we used throughout the season that I really got to enjoy playing with.
AF: Alice and Catherine spend much of the first half of the season apart before their stories begin to converge. Do they have separate visual languages, and what happens to those languages when the two characters finally come together?
Emmett: The funny thing is they actually have a very shared language, which is that we treated them both like protagonists in their own story. Everything is really told from their perspective.
Lensing people close up with a wider lens or medium focal-length lens, being close on their face and then spinning around and going over their shoulder and seeing the world from their perspective really puts you in their mind’s eye. We did that both with Catherine and with Alice throughout the season.
What’s fun, and I think you picked up on this, is that at the end of Episode 5, we’re still in Alice’s point of view. As you’ve seen the show, we bounce back and forth between these storylines, and we’re ending Episode 5 in Alice’s perspective.
We’ve been following her for a little while at the very end of that episode, and what’s fun is that you’re seeing Alice noticing Catherine in the mirror. Alice is essentially looking over her shoulder into the reflection of this mirror and seeing Catherine. What you get to experience is watching Alice walk into her own POV and sit down.
The mirror that we photographed had this great distorted quality. It was not a flat, perfect mirror. It had bubbles and bumps. It was a nice metaphor for the way that we view ourselves and view others through a distorted lens.
Then immediately, if you go right into Episode 6, we’re hit hard in Catherine’s point of view. Not only is it her own perspective, but her state of mind is distorted. We were using these special filters called Prism FX filters that are subtle but are held in front of the lens, and you can jostle them back and forth and create split images. It was a visual representation of her mind state at that moment.
We stay in her perspective and stay really close to her. The lens was just inches from her face that whole time we were walking down the sidewalk and into the women’s shelter. We stay really close with Catherine and then see Alice in the background. The timelines converge, and then we pick up with Alice sitting down next to Catherine.
At that point, we’re mainly back in Alice’s point of view for most of that episode. I thought it was effective, and it was such a well-written episode. It’s so gratifying to see them share the screen together. They’re both such professionals and incredible actors. It was lovely to work with them together on set. After a whole season of television, it was pretty fun to finally get them both on camera at the same time. They did a great job.
Once Alice and Catherine start sharing scenes, their dynamic can shift very subtly within a moment. How do you use the camera to respond to those changes in the performances?
Emmett: Not specifically, actually, no. Once they started entering into each other’s timeline, I think with each scene we became a little bit more specific about whose perspective we’d be in, what lenses or what close-ups we needed to get.
A great example would be Catherine and Alice in the locker area before they go into the showers. There are women showering in the background, and it’s the first time, I think, that we become somewhat aware of Catherine watching Alice and understanding that maybe Alice is potentially investigating her with this question about Isabella.
You see this really subtle shift in Catherine that is so well done. We use two different angles, and I thought it was brilliant the way the editors used the other angle of Catherine. There’s one that’s more frontal on her where they’re just very conversational back and forth, but the moment there’s a tonal shift, we cut more to this very specific angle that is more from the side. You just feel that the tenor of the scene has shifted when she’s feeling looked at in a different sort of way.
That’s when she stands up and gets closer to Alice. Stuff like that is pretty subtle, but it’s a great example of giving the editor all of these different angles to play with and then turning it over to the editor and director in post to nuance those very specific scenes.
AF: Catherine does some horrific things, yet the audience can still find itself empathizing with her. How do you use the cinematography to help navigate that complexity?
Emmett: That’s the reason, I think, in so many ways that Steven’s character, Alden, exists. He really humanizes her.
What’s interesting is that by Episode 6, you’ve got Danny interrogating Alden, and Danny is essentially saying, “Alden, she’s using you. She killed your mom. She likely killed your mom.” And he’s like, “So what?”
There’s so much gray area in this show in terms of how we relate to these characters and what they make us feel. Isn’t that brilliant? Isn’t that the sign of really great screenwriting? It’s not so cut and dry, just as life is not ever cut and dry.
The way that we photographed Catherine and Alden in bed together is so intimate, lovely and peaceful. We lit it in a way that felt romantic and very calm, and almost unadorned. There was not a lot of theatricality to how we were presenting it. It needed to feel very accessible and realistic in that moment.
But later on in Episode 5, when Alden is learning that she’s not who she says she is, you hear the lawyer screaming in the other room. He’s obviously in pain, and Catherine is going back and forth. Something is up. Then it all comes to a head with Alden confronting her.
What we did was use his computer terminal as a source of colored lighting. I was able to use screens throughout the season in moments where I felt there was something toxic happening on screen, using that as a visual cue for some monstrous behavior. In that moment, you see Catherine bathed in this horrific green light that makes her seem like a monster.
AF: When Catherine has a psychological breakdown, it looks like you’re using lenses or filtration to keep portions of the frame distorted or out of focus. How do you find the right amount of technique and distortion before it becomes distracting and takes away from what you want the audience to experience?
Emmett: We’re right there from her eyeball, and we’re using wider lenses. That was the first time we photographed anybody in the show like that. It was a bit of a departure from the style before, but we also felt that we had permission to evolve the look of the show as it went on.
Working with Destiny on Episodes 5 and 6, we found that there was enough of a progression in terms of the visual that we could get away with doing close-up photography like that. It felt warranted.
In terms of distortion, the distortion was the effect that we were going after for sure. Again, that’s why we used the filtration to create some double images. Everything was done in camera. There were no post effects applied at that point.
I think it’s taste, right? It’s your own degree at which you decide what is enough and what’s too much. There were times that we were going pretty crazy with the filter, and I don’t think all the crazy stuff made it into the edit.
As a filmmaker, you want to give the editor a lot of options and let people decide later in post what is enough and what’s too much. I think they found a nice balance.
AF: One last question on “Furious.” There are several moments of real fear during the season, usually coming from Catherine’s victims, and then we have those moments with Alice toward the end of Episode 6. When so much of the series is rooted in Catherine’s perspective, how do you build that tension without losing our connection to the person who may be in danger?
Emmett: What’s interesting is the locker room scene between the two of them toward the end of Episode 6. I find Catherine to be quite sympathetic in that moment. Although her behavior is reprehensible, it’s also very understandable.
I think partly why that show is so fun to watch is that it’s excusable to some degree. As a viewer, this is still entertainment, right? It is fun to root for her. At least I find it’s easy to find yourself empathizing and sympathizing with her.
That’s a unique scene because we really wanted to share both their perspectives at the same exact moment and let them overlap. Then obviously we’re back in Alice’s perspective as we’re chasing after Catherine, but that’s also just the nature of the hunted versus the hunter.
In having to be specific about creating a jump scare at the very end, we needed to be in Alice’s perspective so that we could allow Marshall to jump out and scare us. Then for Catherine to come back at the very end, it was really important that we not give that part away.
Technically, I think the decisions of when and where we ended up in certain perspectives made a lot of sense. The main thing was trying to make sure that we felt we could access empathy for these characters. That was really important.
AF: So when you leave one thriller and move into another that has a very different look and feel, what do you consciously leave behind?
Emmett: That’s a great question. It’s almost always not a question of what you leave behind, but what do you choose to bring with you? Because when you start a new project, it really should be a clean slate, at least for me.
My approach to filmmaking has always been that the script will show me and indicate to me how it should or wants to be shot. The style comes very much from the voice and from the script first and foremost, and then I can bring my style to the project, but never the other way around, if that makes sense.
I never want the tail wagging the dog because I don’t have a very specific style necessarily. There are certainly cinematographers out there who have made a long career for themselves doing a very unique, specific look that you can call them for. You’ll get that thing, and it’s awesome.
My thing has been that I’m a little bit more of a chameleon in terms of how I’ve been working. There are certain genres that I really enjoy working in. I’m finding that I really like working in thrillers. That’s been fun.
It was a blank slate starting over. Brian Kirk and Liz Meriwether on “Furious” both have very strong personalities in terms of what they want to accomplish, so it’s easy for me to take their lead. That’s also true for working on “Lucky.”
AF: So if the visual approach starts fresh each time, what did carry over technically from “Lucky” into “Furious”?
Emmett: The truth is, what I brought with me from “Lucky” into “Furious” was more of a technical thing. I know I love working in anamorphic, and the fact that both these networks and studios allowed us to shoot anamorphic was awesome. It feels like a very cinematic format. It’s just a joy to photograph in that way.
I knew that I wanted to use the Venice camera and pair those with Panavision lenses. I think that’s a really happy marriage between the two.
“Lucky” was fun because, though I didn’t start the season, I was still tasked with defining the look of the show as it evolved. Episode 1, which was shot by Jaron Presant and Jonathan Tropper, the director, is such a different experience than Episodes 2 and 3, which I shot with Greg Yaitanes. Their worlds are different. The locations are vastly different. We go from Vegas and then find ourselves in a desert and then Los Angeles.
But more than that, there’s a much different engine. Episode 1 doesn’t stop moving. We’re 100 percent in Lucky’s perspective the entire time and literally not out of her perspective for the entirety of the show.
Whereas with Episodes 2 and 3, we start to get more into the perspectives of Rand, the FBI agent. We have these long conversations with Lucky and the woman who takes her in out in the desert. Then she’s being stalked by Dutch, so you get a little bit of Dutch’s perspective. The world opens up, and the language of how we photograph opens up. It gave us a much bigger sandbox to play with in that regard.
Jonathan and Jaron were really gracious in saying, “Look, we did this one thing very specifically and it really worked for our episode, but you guys have different episodes, so just go ahead and do what you want, and then we’ll follow your lead.”
It became this very organic thing where we were able to build on top of each other’s episodes. Jaron took over on Episodes 4 and 5 and, again, has a very different engine. Episode 4 has a lot of car chase. Then my Episodes 6 and 7, Episode 6 is almost entirely in an FBI office and a hotel room.
There was a lot of evolution in terms of the look, but something stayed consistent throughout. Our references were somewhat consistent. We really leaned into Tony Scott references. For texture and the look of the show, we looked at “Domino,” we looked at “Man on Fire,” and for some of the office stuff, “Spy Game.”
AF: How common is it when you’re working on a show with different DPs for the directors and creative team to give you that freedom and say, “We’d love to see what you’ve got,” rather than forcing everyone into one visual bucket?
Emmett: That’s pretty uncommon, right? It all comes down to the tone and the mood that you’re trying to keep consistent throughout the show. As long as that feels consistent, then I think there’s some room to experiment.
Greg incorporated hand-cranked 35mm footage for his flashbacks. That was something they didn’t have in Episode 1 because they didn’t have any flashbacks written in Episode 1. I think they went back and added some flashbacks later.
Then it was really the question of how much more do we incorporate this 35mm camera? We decided to keep carrying it along into the further episodes. It was this organic process of building a visual look as we went.
AF: A lot of those different visual identities are story driven. Early on, “Lucky” is incredibly propulsive, but like any Jonathan Tropper show, it ultimately becomes very character driven. You get these wonderful scenes between Timothy Olyphant and Anya Taylor-Joy. Anya is incredibly magnetic on screen. As a DP, how do you work with that?
Emmett: I think it makes my job really easy, doesn’t it? [Laughs.] If there’s ever a question of where the camera needs to go or what kind of lens to use, or what you should do with Anya, you just have to point the camera at her and let her do the work. It’s quite simple, really.
Specifically, we chose to do a lot of close-ups, especially in the final episode, because we found that if you just cut from close-up to close-up to close-up, it never releases tension. We’re able to keep building on the tension.
In some of those scenes when there’s the standoff and they’re standing in the gas field together, it’s really quite rare that we ever cut out to a wide. Once we got into some of the meatier dialogue scenes, it was really close.
I just watched the final episode last night on the big screen. It was a really cool experience seeing the work again with fresh eyes and seeing it on a bigger screen. I felt the tension ramping up, and then all of a sudden, when it cut to a wide or a drone shot, you could feel yourself physically let go, unclench your fists and take a breath. I was like, “Oh, that’s all because of close-ups.”
I think that’s something that we learned from the Tony Scott movies and watching how he’d shoot some of these really intense moments between his actors. We’d get on a long anamorphic zoom. We found ourselves gravitating closer and closer. Again, Anya has these incredible eyes, and so do some of these other actors. We found ourselves just wanting to get closer and closer.
AF: There’s a beautiful scene where Timothy Olyphant’s character is telling the story of his first debrief. The close-up is incredibly tight and the monologue is long, and for quite a while we don’t know who he’s talking to. We eventually discover it’s Lucky. Was building that mystery intentional from the beginning, or was that something you discovered in the edit?
Emmett: You picked up on something really nice. We knew we had this long monologue, and we kept thinking, “How can we shoot it in a more unique sort of way that feels cinematic?” It didn’t feel like we needed to cut away to any reaction because that wouldn’t really serve our story.
It was Jonathan Tropper’s idea to start really close on a long zoom lens and slowly, over the course of these pages, pull back and loosen out and widen.
What’s interesting is that we ended up having to reshoot that scene. There were some pretty significant dialogue changes that had to happen. We ended up going back a couple weeks later after we wrapped and shot that again.
We knew that shot was so effective, and we knew it was a big commitment because you could cut away to Anya at any point if you wanted to. But we all had this conviction that this shot worked.
What was so fun was that, having seen it once before, we trusted that we could replicate the shot again and make some minor improvements on how we moved the camera and the speed at which we zoomed out. Even having a chance to do it again was nice, but the truth is it remained unchanged because it was so effective initially. It was a nice way to see our instincts proven.
AF: Let’s talk about the final shot of “Lucky.” Lucky finally gets to the ocean, which feels like a bookend to the story she tells earlier about seeing the ocean with her dad when they were ready to live a normal life. What did you want that final image to convey, particularly if this ultimately becomes the end of the series?
Emmett: We had to convey this sense of freedom, of letting go and of being free. She’d been driving this whole time. There’s an element of driving toward the ocean, especially with the narrative throughout talking about the ocean and alluding to that.
The show started in the desert and made its way closer to the ocean. Annette Bening’s character lives on a bluff overlooking the sea, and Lucky keeps getting closer and closer to the ocean, and she never quite gets there.
That’s why that felt like a real catharsis for the character. That was mainly it. Very simply, it had to convey the feeling of freedom and finding peace. Where better to shoot that than Big Sur, on Pfeiffer Beach?
It was a nice choice for the show. At one point it was discussed, should she have traveled far away? Is she on the beach in Costa Rica? Is she in a different country?
We discussed that, but we also discussed, logistically and from a money perspective, purely from a producing perspective, wouldn’t it make sense for us to pile the crew in and drive them over to Malibu and go to one of these beaches we have locally in Los Angeles?
We decided it just didn’t feel far enough. Big Sur is a very special place, and it felt far enough away that she’s already begun her journey. She’s on her way, and she’s free now.
AF: And that was actually the last shot you filmed for the show?
Emmett: It’s not only the final shot of the episode or the series. It’s actually the last shot we shot on the show.
AF: Both of these shows have a very cinematic quality. When you think about something like the Emmys and evaluating the work of your peers, what do you personally look for in cinematography?
Emmett: That’s funny. I don’t really think about shows and people’s work in terms of what is, quote unquote, valuable in terms of awards season. That’s just not a way that my brain works.
But the things that I cherish and am amazed by are people finding uniqueness in their work, showing us something new or a perspective or a way of photographing that hasn’t really been done before.
Adam Newport-Berra’s work on “The Studio” last year, where he won for his episode, the oner episode, is so fun. It’s not that it has never been done before because we’ve seen oners before, but it worked so well on a meta level.
It worked so well on a photographic level. They found a great location. Adam did a great job lighting and shooting it. The blocking is excellent. From a production standpoint, it’s excellent. From a storytelling, self-referential element, it’s wonderful. It felt new. Though we’ve seen oners before, that just felt like a really great, effective use of it.
When I see photography that is creative and inventive and new, and shows us a perspective we haven’t necessarily seen in a while or a new sort of way, that’s what excites me and I think is worthy of our adoration.
There’s a new movie coming out that is photographed in such an incredible sort of way. I just saw the trailer. It’s the Robert Pattinson movie, “Primetime.” I saw that and was like, “Dude, they’re doing something so different in this.” Maybe there are elements borrowed from other shows and movies that we’ve seen in the past, but there is a really unique perspective here and a really great technique.
That sort of thing is what gets me going and gets me excited.
AF: That’s a very rich answer. Thank you for your time, and congratulations on the work on both of these fantastic shows. I can’t get enough of “Furious” right now. I get upset during the week when I have to wait for the next episode.
Emmett: Oh man, it’s such a cool thing to hear people say that. You have no idea what that means. I would hope to imagine that it means a lot to other filmmakers when they hear that, but on a very deep personal level, what a cool feeling that is to hear someone say that. Thank you. Thanks for mentioning it.