
Sam McCurdy, ASC, BSC is nominated at the Emmy Awards for his work on Shōgun. McCurdy received a nom for episode nine, “Crimson Sky,” in which the Shōgun cinematographer and director Frederick E.O. Toye delivered an emotional wallop. It was an hour of pure cinematic drama.
McCurdy shot five episodes of the series. He helped bring Shōgun to a satisfying close with the finale, which we covered in part one of our interview with him. For part two of our discussion with the cinematographer, we focused more on the technical side of the Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo-created show.
Enjoy part two of our Q & A with the Shōgun cinematographer, the man who also shot one of the scariest films of the 21st Century, The Descent.
Let’s start with the balance of natural and artificial lighting on show. How’d you find the light in Vancouver?
When they chose Vancouver in particular for Japan… Obviously I’ve worked in Vancouver a lot, and I love it there very much. As an outsider, it has got a quality that I love, especially at that time of year. I mean, Shōgun was a year of our lives, but the principal seasons that we shot through were fall into winter and into spring.
We kind of ran into summer, but it was at the backend and a lot of it was at night or stage work. Vancouver at that time of year has got a cold, blue, silvery tone that I love. Unfortunately, we weren’t going to get the chance to go to Japan, but it suited the aesthetic of the show. It suited the costumes, the set design, and everything. Having gotten used to controlling the weather up there, that side of it, I was really looking forward to it.

Say for the torches or oil lamps, since they’re often used as light sources, was that all natural light or did they have LED strips on them as well?
The oil lamps, in particular, went through lots of incarnations. The issue over the last four or five years is… LEDs are phenomenal. They’ve made our lives so much easier in so many ways, but they have trouble with certain colors. One of those colors happens to be that really warm side of tungsten, that kind of earthy, organic oil lights, anything like that. I’ve always struggled with that.
The gaffer on the show, David [Tickell], just happened to have these bulbs, these NYX bulbs. I think they’re built by Astera. They’re an RGB bulb, but they have the capabilities of getting well below your average color temperature of an LED. I’d have to check, but I’m sure they get down to 1800, 2000 kelvin. They go super warm.
There’d already been a lot of the oil lamps designs with amber versions of LEDs in. We ended up stripping them all out and putting in these, basically, butchered NYX bulbs. We found out what was inside it and put those into the oil lamps that we used in the distance. They could match the real oil lamps. So, we used real oil lamps in the foreground, and then we used these butchered ones we had made up in the background.
In the process of destroying the bulb, we found that we could make tiny little soft boxes we could hide on the backside of oil lamps, underneath oil lamps, literally anywhere we wanted to. We could hide them out of shots. They were a natural-looking color. I dunno how they’ve done it, but it took very little manipulation with bits of trace and everything to make them look subtle and really pretty.
They worked for the costumes, worked for the makeup, and worked in terms of just having a really natural falloff that felt like an oil lamp rather than having to blanket light things in a particular color. I love them. Jokingly, I’ve been saying over the last couple of months, “Yeah, we lit Shōgun with light bulbs!” [Laughs] Which I kind of did, and now I’m getting into trouble for it. The show I’m prepping at the moment, the producers all caught wind of an interview I did and went, “Okay, Sam, you just used light bulbs. Everything’s going to be really cheap now.” I think, no, we use them for certain things [Laughs].

With the fog and the rain, you really get to fill the frame with those elements. Was the weather that good to you or was there much artificial fog?
We were very, very lucky. The gods of nature on the Pacific Northwest were looking down on us favorably during Shōgun. I’ve said it many times now, but episode seven in particular has this kind of gloomy aesthetic. Justin Marks had it written in the script that there was this forbearing fog that was going to sit through the whole of episode seven. We did it.
We started with manmade fog, but very quickly, Mother Nature decided that she was going to look very favorably on us and introduced fog, introduced snow, introduced rain, introduced all the elements that gave that episode a real heavy feel to it. The whole episode punctuated with very, very sparse use of such golden warm lights. I loved it.
How was it witnessing that work come to life in post-production?
I love all episodes obviously, but that was one of those episodes when we first started color-timing, you just knew it was going to be exactly as you’d seen on the day. You were like, okay, this is going to have all the textural elements that we talked about, just a hint of color every once in a while. Episode seven, in particular, it’s almost black and white. It’s almost a monochromatic episode other than the little punctuations of light.
It’s tremendous. I’m not just saying it from my side of things, but I genuinely love watching that episode because everything in it. The introduction of Saeki (Eita Okuno), the brother, with his costume, everything about it, developed into something that I’d never expected.
We were lucky to speak with costume designer Carlos Rosario about the series. How was it lighting those costumes just right? What did they give you as a cinematographer?
Myself, Carlos, [production designer] Helen [Jarvis], we’ve all been very lucky having the opportunity to work on a show like this. When I first walked onto a set, when I first saw Carlos’ designs and saw Hiro or Anna in a costume, from my perspective… I’m not trying to dumb down what we do, but you realize that actually your job was going to be made so easy [by them]. Shōgun is Carlos and Helen’s show. It’s beautifully designed. Carlos’ costumes are just stunning.
I mean, the battle dress… Every episode it got raised, it got raised, it got raised, and then the battle dress, it’s so authentic. Everything was so authentic that, as I say, it made my job so easy. You turn one light on and the costumes come to life. There’s Hiro bringing out the character of Toranaga in that costume. You kind of just go, “I don’t have to do anything. I just have to point the camera in the right direction. My job’s done.”

I really enjoyed the blackness at the edge of the frame along with the grain.
Good.
It created this very filmic tangibility you don’t alway get from digital. How’d you create that effect?
That’s very kind of you to say. We went through a lot of variations. It is something that [cinematographer] Chris [Ross] and myself had discussed a lot as we’d gone through the use of the lenses. So, the vignettes that we would get around the edge of the lenses, in my opinion, if they’re used properly, it’s not that it’s a vignette – it just looks like dirt. You mentioned film. To me, it looked like an open gate on an old film camera, so you are almost seeing the perforations.
So we went with it and really, really bought into it. We enjoyed seeing those edges on frames. Then we’d accentuated by actually pushing the lenses as far as they could go in terms of their apertures, also pushing them as far as the sensor could go, so that it was reading the inside of the lens, but it wasn’t reading it clearly. It was actually reading it as distortion, as opposed to literally the back element of the lens. I have to be honest, some of it was just happy accidents.
How so?
You put a lens on, you kind of see it, then you’d suddenly point at a skyline or the sets, and then you would work with it. It was like having an edge of frame here. You go, “Okay, well, let’s put some candles and some oil lamps in there, so it actually accentuates this corner of the frame. Let’s make sure we’ve got a bit more sky in shot, so that it really affects this top part of the frame.”
I am a huge fan of Sony Venice. I’ve worked with it many, many times. One of the things I do love about it is if you push the sensor just a little bit, it has a texture, a very different texture to a lot of other sensors. In old school terms, I pushed the lens, I pushed the sensor, the stop, so that it would create a little bit of an artifact, especially in the highlights where my windows were blown out there. It would create artifacts, but not nasty electronic ones, just a haze that would, because of the anamorphic lenses, bleed into the lens a bit.
Without getting into the painting with lights scenario or anything like that, those are the reasons we try to pick the right lenses for the right job. They will give you a sense of character and depth. Certainly from our perspective, from everybody in camera, electric, and grip, those lenses gave Shōgun a character that you wouldn’t have got anywhere else. I don’t think so. The use of that lens with that sensor in the particular way that we used it helped give Shōgun its structure.
Shōgun is available to stream on Hulu.