Sugar is a noir lover’s dream show. The series, which is created by Mark Protosevich, has the language and the swagger of a classic detective tale. With those familiar staples, though, all involved tell a new sci-fi story, with the help of Emmy-nominated cinematographer Richard Rutkowski.
Rutkowski work on episode for, “Starry Eyed,” is nominated for Outstanding Cinematography For A Single-Camera Series.
Director Fernando Meirelles (City of God) and cinematographer César Charlone set a tone for the series that Rutkowski was jazzed to follow. “The nature of working with Fernando and César, let’s just go for it,” the cinematographer told Immersive. “Let’s try something. The way that you often do shows, there is a set of rules. Instead, the set of rules was, well, let’s not think about that too much and try and make the rule that we’re adventuresome. We’re trying new things.”
Of course, you’re referencing the past for Sugar, but for you, how did you want to bridge the past, present, and maybe even future?
Well, there’s a bit of a twist at the end, and the twist demanded that we examine this not from the perspective of always looking back, but looking backwards to look forwards. So, we look backwards at the genre and some of the stylistic choices that were our communal database as filmmakers. And then we said, “Now, how do we update and engage the audience so that by the time the big surprise is launched, it doesn’t feel like it wasn’t seeded into the work beforehand?”
Part of that was to realize that he’s an outsider in a big sense. He’s an outsider looking at not only Los Angeles and the world, but looking at human beings very much as an observer and often as a detective, but often also just as an emotive observer. And in fact, it becomes an issue with his handler, Ruby, that he’s writing about feelings and observations more than he’s coming up with an analytical approach to what is the human race.
I think that allowed us to say he’s seeing things that are very beautiful as well as the dark. He’s got an eye for the beauty that is inherent in the world, especially as represented in movies where things are naturally idealized. But then he’s forced to reckon with his own history and the history within the polyglot group of a darkness and what is the dark side of human nature. And that’s a theme that runs throughout. We tried to lean into the celestial.
So there’s a scene within view of Griffith Observatory. There are many shots in which the sun either appears in frame or is a dominant characteristic of the frame is bright LA sunlight. And there are scenes where we have reflections of light on water and then the reflected light is on the wall or the ceiling of a room. And that’s an approach that was very much about the observer point-of-view. A person, in this case, a very unique person observing the life around us and that has a deeper impact than what we’ve initially realized because we then discover who he is.
What is your relationship as a cinematographer with the LA sun?
Well, it gives us a lot of beautiful shots with palm trees, lush gardens, water with reflection on it and overhead angels flying over things. The ability to do big cranes with lights going down boulevards, it allows us at night to embrace multicolor streets and the open car, the convertible allows you to let that light in and become the predominant sources that’s hitting the actor’s face and reflecting off the shiny surfaces and in his rearview mirror. So, I have a great relationship with that high overhead noon sun in Los Angeles.
Gordon Willis once was asked about whether he regretted starting his work in New York and not ever having experienced filmmaking in Los Angeles, and he compared Los Angeles sunlight to being inside a microwave when it’s on. And so, that was funny, but we actually embraced it because we knew we were going to drive around in Sugar’s vintage vehicle and have that color tone of a deep, deep Los Angeles saturation.
We actually pulled back from it a little in the lut, various reasons of a different characteristic. We wanted slightly off hues, not full primary hues. It worked out very well for us, I thought. I mean, especially when you contrast it to then we keep going in the story to darker and darker places till eventually you’re literally in a basement, which is revealed as a torture chamber. The light is this cold, antiseptic, green-y white, and the look on Colin’s face when the lights come on is spectacular.
When you think about film noir, you think of shadows, but also, the language. How did you find the dialogue was influencing your choices?
Well, you have a character who’s performing voiceover for a large amount of the work. Sugar is telling you the story. You start to imagine tying the camera to that character in a way that’s observational of him, but also allows him to show you the audience where he’s going with thing and what he’s seeing. This goes back to Chinatown where John Alonzo really kept the lens close to Jake Gittes, walking and traveling.
There’s that famous scene in the bathroom with Nicholson and Faye Dunaway where the camera is so close to the two of them as they talk about the flaw in her eye that you can hear the camera rolling still on the soundtrack. They couldn’t get that sound off the soundtrack, because the camera was rolling in such proximity.
And so, we traveled with Colin and choreographed with Colin. We’re very fortunate that he was an actor whose abilities with the lens and choreographing shots were quite apparent and helpful. They created more and better shots to do than we had initially thought.
With sunny noir, why do you think that contrast between light and darkness is so effective?
Well, danger in broad daylight is very compelling. Noir sometimes relies on danger in foggy docks or back alleys or under lit elements of the city where quite often a wealthy character gets dragged down by their vice and has to be revealed as being corrupt. In our situation, the version of that was the corrupting influence is actually fame in the movie business. We were on the paramount lot where many noirs have been shot classically, trying to show the Siegel family have one last chance at getting Davey back.
Now, David Siegel’s career is back on track with one last film, and that slide downhill that he’s experiencing is a classic LA film business story. And then we, thankfully, because it’s written into the script and we were able to do this technically, we literally put a classic movie up on the screen. So now you have yet another layer of reference. Here’s this fictional classic Douglas Sirk-like film with a woman who’s deceased, but her legacy still deeply troubles the Siegel family.
You shot that movie within the show in anamorphic. When is the last time you did that?
A long time back.
How was it this time?
I think the answer would be I was an operator on the film, The Number 23, Matthew Libatique shot it. I was an operator and shot a lot of second units. It had a lot of flashback memory pieces, and I did a lot of that with Joel Schumacher, who is now deceased, with his assistant at the time, Eli Richbourg, who’s also sadly now deceased. And that’s going back to the mid-2000s, and that was anamorphic on 35mm Panavision.
Actually, one of the assistants on our job was someone I remember from working with at that time, Matt Stenerson. We were just thrilled. I mean, between Matt and the operators, Kenny [Niernberg] and Sarah [Levy], and the gaffer Tracy [Estes], the grip Dave [Donoho], there was this real uplift at the end of the day to be lighting a set for rain and backlight and a lot of modeling in the old school style dense colors.
We made a relatively efficient short reel of this fake color noir from 50 years ago, 60 years ago, that could then be projected over and over again. We printed it multiple times onto one projection reel and projected it in the house. The projection was great. We had them tune up the projector and everything beforehand.
We checked the projection with the anamorphic adapter, and then we just let it flow. Then we would film the character’s faces and film their reactions to it ahead of the Q & A where we had real American television host and journalist, Benjamin Mankiewicz. Yet another meta level. I happen to know he’s a funny, nice guy, so we called him and he agreed to do it.
Point being, it really helped tell the story because there’s layers of information coming from a supposed old film. It’s one of the moments when Jonathan Siegel, James Cromwell’s face, is the most glowing and happy because he’s seeing that memory of his beautiful actress wife from the past.
I liked that metaphor of the glow of the screen on someone and how that memory is important. And then, it’s interrupted by digital media on phones, literally Deadline interrupting the story to tell you, “Oh, yeah, but this isn’t going to go well because your grandson is terribly corrupt and is going to ruin the family.”
As a cinematographer, there’s a metaphor here. There’s something being said from this cut anamorphic to the phone.
There’s always a metaphor. The image, we’d like to be able to describe the image in shorthand. Sometimes we’d like to be able to say, that’s a simple closeup or that’s a simple landscape, but the image is not disposable. The image carries with it all kinds of information. The more you try and just categorize it as one type of shot, the more you recognize that visually it has lots of clues to offer and it has lots of opportunities to influence the viewer.
You just don’t want it to overpower. I don’t want my lighting or my framing or the operation of the camera to overpower a moment. I want it to support me for a moment. And so, the dance you’re doing is supporting moments that have real dramatic and thematic consequence, but with the subtlety of a storyteller who doesn’t have to scream to get a point across.
Sugar is available to stream on Apple TV+.
