ZEISS: Director of "Eric", Lucy Forbes and you are now long-time collaborators.

BENEDICT SPENCE, BSC: Lucy Forbes and I first met, and both began our careers many years ago in factual entertainment. We entered the commercials world together. In 2017 she asked me to shoot a pilot TV show for her called "In My Skin" for the BBC. It launched Lucy's drama career and I guess at the same time my drama career. We got a show called "The End of the F***ing World" for Netflix, then "This Is Going to Hurt" for the BBC and off the back of that Lucy got "Eric" and brought me on board!

What is it like to work with someone for so long?

I've only got a sample size of one to know what it's like to work with somebody for so long. But, you know, Lucy is truly a good friend of mine. On a TV show, especially something long like "Eric", which was shooting five months, when you've got a good friend there in the foxhole with you, stressed with you, it’s always an amazing thing. Lucy and I have been working together for... almost a couple of decades, you can't help but build a relationship and a language. We often come to the same conclusions about things because we've been on the same sets and doing the same jobs. We're not the same people and we think differently, but we also have a shared history. I hope we always push the style of the shows we shoot, but also not to become cliquey as well, not to exclude other people from our ridiculous self-constructed language. However, when you're up against it, when time is tight, that level of trust and that ability to communicate very quickly is incredibly useful. If I say to Lucy, let's just do it this way, it's faster this way, it's better this way, trust me, she'll go, yeah, that's great, we'll do that. If I turn to her and say, are you sure this is the way to do it? And she'll say, yes, I entirely trust her. The trick is not to become complacent with this. You have to work on every single relationship, and you can't become complacent in a second. You become complacent in any relationship, whether it's your marriage or your DoP-director relationship, that's when it doesn't work.

How did the collaboration go with writer and showrunner Abi Morgan?

Abi Morgan's an incredibly experienced and brilliant writer. I remember being on the Good Day Sunshine set with Abi once and her saying something along the lines of, I write this stuff down and then all these people come on board, and it springs to life. It's one of my first times working with a showrunner rather than necessarily a writer. Abi was very open to collaboration ideas from her director, DoP, production designers, but my day-to-day boss was Lucy Forbes.

How did you tackle the preparation?

I find prep to be a really challenging time because it's quite unstructured. On the shoot you've got a schedule, but when you're prepping, a part of you wants to run and start thinking about shots and lighting, but there's a lot of stuff which has got to happen first. You get the scripts, and that's almost overwhelming because you've got to film it all and you barely know it. You've got to start to take it apart and separate it. With Eric it started in November 2022. I went out to Hungary where the first part of the show was being shot. I would go into the production office every day and sit opposite Lucy trying to ingest the scripts, whilst trying to fill my brain and my eyes with everything that is New York 1980s. It would include everything from watching films at night to looking at references. One of the things Lucy and I always do is to print off hundreds of photos, anything which feels like a near reference to the 1980s New York that we like, or references for specific scenes and moments: underground tunnels, puppets, anything like that at all, print them off, put them on the walls of the production office we shared.

In previous shows, I have done handover documents for the second block, not necessarily as instructions but more to say, this is what we did, if you'd like to do the same, that's great. On Eric, because Lucy and I were shooting all six hours – which was a challenge in itself – I didn't actually produce that document. But what I realized is that you have to produce quite a lot of documentation to talk people (the team, executive producers, channels) through the look and the feel you want for the show. For me, that's a really useful process because that forces me to gather concrete references and say, this is what it's going to look like.

Did you want the show to look like it was shot in 1980?

For an audience to engage in a show, I think it has to feel real to a degree, it has to feel believable within whatever universe has been created. For a little bit we talked about going a bit pastiche, lighting it like something from the 80s, shoot on vintage lenses, but it felt reductive. I was very keen to deliver a high-end TV show. I wanted well-motivated modern lighting, modern camera equipment, modern grip, and modern lenses, but it had to feel like it was still somewhere along the line, the 1980s. For me, that was my simple but main creative choice: to shoot it in a modern way but had to feel like something from the 80s.

And how were you going to do that?

It's tricky, but for me, what we do as filmmakers is try and give the impression of things. Whether it's from walking down the street, it's the impression of someone walking down the street, or whether it's 1980 New York, it's the impression of 1980 New York. Everybody has this visual image of 1980s New York in their heads, because everybody's grown up with the American Hollywood culture of the 80s, 90s. It was an impressionistic feeling of something of New York of the 80s that Lucy and I wanted to achieve with Eric.

How would you break it down?

I'll be totally honest, once you have a fantastic production designer and a fantastic costume department, you're filming a set which looks like the 80s, you don't have to do much, really! I just have to make sure I capture what's there. A lot of the feel of the 80s were actually added in postproduction. And I was really pleased at how it worked. I put it at the back end so we're not dealing with grain, lens flare, and halation on set but in a place and time where you can have very long conversations with execs about the level of each element. The only vintage thing we did in camera was a bit of a vintage filtration: we used Pancro Mitchell filters, which are quite old and a bit tedious, but they give a tiny bit of in-camera halation, and you can just pop them out whenever you don't want them, like for VFX shots. The vast majority of that look was dialed in in post.

Would you say that your choice of the Alexa 35, which was really brand-new at the time you started the show, and the Supreme Primes, which you have already used on such different shows prior to this, was made to give you the flexibility you needed?

When we were talking about what camera to use, the Alexa 35 was pretty new. And I wasn't quite sure whether we could actually get hold of a pair of them. But Arri Rental in Hungary sorted us out with two brand new Alexa 35s. I always want to use the best, newest camera. Number one, I love the Alexa family. But number two, from what I understood reading the specs, it was fantastic at holding highlights way more than previous generations of Alexa cameras. I think it can hold two and a half more stops of information in the highlights. With that came much better color control, color rendition. And I thought two things: one is the way Lucy and I like to work is using practicals to light the space, because it feels so much more natural, and rely on those to motivate lighting on people's faces. Having that extra headroom in the highlights makes a world of difference when you get to the grade. And second of all, New York of the 80s is a place with all sorts of textures, and textures of lighting, and colors, and moods. I wanted to be able to take advantage of color to sell these different locations and the different moods. In addition, on a Super 35 sensor, it allowed me to make use of Super 35 zooms as well: we put in quite a lot of zooms in the show, to be able to guide the audience to make sure they knew when they should be looking at something, which was an important clue, or perhaps trick them with a red herring. With the Super 35 sensor, you have access to many more zooms, whereas on full frame cameras, I find the zoom lenses generally quite a bit bigger and bulkier, and more awkward to use, which equates to time on set. Those zooms in the show are mostly optical. For me, they're also hitting a nice 1980s retro style point.

Oh yes, zooms were something else in those days! What about the Supremes? You know them quite well, don't you?

This is my third TV show shooting on Supreme Primes. I feel like I know them inside and out by now. The last two shows I've used them on have been full-frame sensors, whereas this is the first TV show I've used them on a Super 35 camera. They work fantastically. You know, they look great; they work; there's no fuss with them at all. And they've got a fantastic set of focal lengths. They're fast, and with a really nice look, not in your face. They're not super clinically sharp, like Master Primes are: they have a very gentle softness, I feel maybe even more in Super 35 mode, because you're looking at a bit more of the middle of the sensor, but in a really nice cinematic way.

It would have seemed quite obvious to go the vintage route, since you're shooting Super 35, there are plenty of sets available.

When it comes to camera and lens choice, creative decisions are tied into functional and logistical decisions. For example, I'd love to shoot in, say, an Alexa 65. But it's enormous, it's heavy, it complicates things. Would Eric have been better on vintage glass? It would have been maybe a tiny bit different, but I'm guaranteed we would have dropped a couple of shots here and there because the vintage glass would be playing up. Or the VFX might not have been as good because of a flare in a certain place or one of the parts of a lens was out of whack. There's always a price to pay. Personally, my choices of lenses and camera are really a marriage of what's right creatively but also what works on a drama set. The last thing you want to be doing when you've got Oscar nominated actors and executives both looking at you is to be faffing around with the vintage lens because it's older than I am! For a little while I was thinking about vintage lenses, but I'd much rather use modern glass, and if you want a bit more grubbiness to it, filter it up. I think we worked with the 11 lens sets of Supreme Primes, but we essentially shot half the series on a 29 mm. Love that lens. We shot 29, 35, 40, and that was the vast majority of the show.

And what was the zoom lens you paired them with?

We had a Fujinon 19-90, which was from the start of a new generation of compact super 35 lenses from about 10 years ago. It's clean, it works and it's not too big; you pop it on the camera, and you can do zoom shots. We didn’t shoot any normal scenes with it; we never used it apart from specifically when we wanted a zoom. In terms of our other lenses, I have a TLS rehoused Leica 50mm T0.95, which I love to pieces, and is always fun for focus pullers. We used that one once or twice in the show. We also used an old Russian Peleng 8mm fisheye, which I bought for £300 about 15 years ago! If I'm being totally honest, we also shot on a number of vintage TV lenses, like Canon J11s, which is what I started my career using, with vintage beta SP cameras from the early 90s – I'll call it vintage now, it's mad because that's what I used to shoot on! – on the puppet show Good Morning Sunshine and for TV news, to gather footage to go on TV screens and occasionally full screen. The very first shot of the show, with Benedict Cumberbatch / Vincent at a press conference is actually not a nice Alexa 35 with Supreme Primes, but the old Beta SP which we fed into an external recorder to get its feed a little up convert.I I think probably somewhere there is an entire show of Good Day Sunshine, if anyone ever wants to dig it out.

You said you managed to secure two camera bodies: did you shoot two cameras?

We probably shot single camera about half the time, and two cameras for the other half. In Budapest we shot mostly single camera. Lucy hates two cameras, but she also understands you sometimes need them to get through a day. It’s also because of how we like to shoot, which is on the wider end of the lenses – not the very widest, but around the 29mm, 25mm, 35mm world. That's our favorites because that forces you to get the camera physically close to the cast. There's an intimacy which you can feel through the lens when it is physically close. It doesn't distort a face, but there's a difference between someone's face like this [leaning away from the webcam] and someone's face like this [coming up close], and you feel that intimacy. And it's actually very tricky to get two cameras in there when one of the cameras is three feet away from your main cast. Where do you put the other one? The backup camera body was ready to be rigged on Steadicam or crane. In the United States, we had two camera crews the entire time. It was generally bigger setups, bigger exteriors. We were in New York and New Jersey for those exteriors and bigger setups. I'm very thankful: we wouldn't have gotten through our days otherwise. What one wants to do is to shoot everything with a wide lens up close and a single camera, but what you have to do is actually get that second camera in and compromise somewhere just in order to tell the story and finish the day.

In "The End Of The F***ing World", the way you moved the camera was pretty strict, I would say. It's totally different here: the camera moves in such many different ways, from handheld/shoulder camera to tracking shots, SteadiCam, crane… How did you work on the camera moves with Lucy?

On "The End of the F***ing World", we had a very strict rulebook. The show was very minimalist, and we brought the camera movement and the lighting into a very minimalist place. That was a really enjoyable process, but with that, the script was minimalist. It was essentially two people in most scenes. Whereas in Eric, there are puppet shows, cops, underground tunnels populated by homeless people, trains, murder, missing kids, there's so much going on during over six hours. So, early on, Lucy and I had a talk about what rules we could apply to the show to give it style. There's so much going on, there's so many different types of beats and types of scenes, that we felt that we'd really be doing the show and the characters disservice if we were overtly strict about how we do things. So, I wouldn't call it a maximalist approach on Eric, I still feel we were gently controlled on our lens choice and didn't move the camera unnecessarily, but we did all sorts of things with it. We put it on cranes, we put it on SteadiCams, we tried to knuckle into what felt right for each scene rather than what felt right for the show holistically. I don't feel we have unmotivated camera movements. Each time we spoke about a scene we talked about how the characters would feel and how we could show that in the camera movements, about what scenes we were coming from and going in. We would try to think really hard about what worked for each scene individually.

A quick word about the aspect ratio? Vintage!

Lucy and I hate shooting normal 16:9 aspect ratio. We were talking about what aspect ratio to shoot Eric on, and I had watched Marriage Story a few nights before, which has got a lovely 1.66:1 aspect ratio. For a moment, I thought about shooting a squarer aspect ratio, like 4:3, or at least open gate on the sensor, which is 3:2 and can look fantastic. For me it is all about using more of the sensor rather than cropping the sides, if that makes sense. But actually, having seen a few 4:3 shows and films, I think they work in the cinema. When it gets onto your TV, those black bars on the sides feel quite claustrophobic and I'm not a huge fan. However, I found this 1.66:1 ratio, which is really close to the golden ratio, very pleasing; it also gave a little nod towards something of a past without necessarily having these hulking great big black bars at the side, which you get from 4:3 or 3:2 open gate. Another good reason to use it for me is, you're using a little bit more of a sensor, so you can actually run the camera slightly higher sensitivities without noticing the grain because you're squishing the picture down a little bit. It gives you a slightly finer grain structure. From a grade point of view as well: the black at the sides of the screen gives a base setting of black level to your eyes. In the grade, when you do a little fade at the bottom, a little milkiness of blacks, it means your eyes never adjust to that fully: this little black level thing at the sides grounds your eyes and your brain.

It’s interesting, I had never heard about this black level reference as one of the differences between grading for the theater screen and grading for the TV screen!

It's a bit like in the grading suite, you have the light behind the TV, which allows your brain and your eyes to hold onto something which has no color. This is the gentle equivalent of having a black balance at home when you watch it. You can feel more of what the black level on the show is, if that makes sense.

You actually did the grading on a monitor, and not in a suite with a projector.

Yeah. In the Harbor post-production facility, Tobias Tomkins, the colorist, works on a very expensive whatever mega monitor, but we were watching it on essentially a well-tuned 42-inch or a 50-inch OLED consumer television. We had four days in the grade per episode, maybe five days for a couple of episodes. We would initially do an HDR pass, and then we would do an SDR pass for one day to bring it all into an SDR world. Essentially, we don't step into the HDR world much in the show. It doesn't go super bright so actually the SDR trim was pretty quick and simple, we didn't have to compromise it much. HDR really is about the colors. The colors really sing in HDR. It looks fantastic in HDR. It looks nice in SDR as well! [laughs]. But for me, there's a depth of colors when you watch Eric and in HDR, there is a real difference.

Netflix very kindly do a thing called "content preview" where they put your show up on their platform, so I could watch it at home mid-grade to see how it was looking in my front room and on my phone in the pub. I just wanted to look at it in a number of places to make sure that we weren't doing the show a disservice or doing disservice to the people that are going to watch it at home.

And after having watched it on your personal TV or on your phone in the real-world condition, did you go back to the grading suite and say, we must change this and this because it doesn't work on my TV?

I don't think I actually did that, but we had a lot of talk about grain structure of the show. All that is post-production, and that's not there for the sake of it, but to bring texture to people's faces. That is the sole reason to have that level of grain. We went through a lot of process to get that to the right stage. Grain is the antithesis of compression, and all compression algorithms want to do is to get rid of that grain. You're adding this extra grain, and it's just keying the compression to try and get rid of it more. So, finding the sweet spot where you can get a degree of grain which doesn't affect the picture as a whole, doesn't make the picture look worse, but which the compression algorithm doesn't spend all its time just getting rid of to the detriment of the rest of the picture, that was quite hard and took a lot of back and forth. I watched it at home using Netflix's content preview with a whole bunch of different grain levels: Toby Tomkins output about six different grain levels, and I watched episode one about six different times after they had been compressed and uploaded to the Netflix platform. Wherever I was, for a week I just wandered around with the show going, what does it look like now? That took a long time. I had lots of meetings with Netflix as well: I wanted to understand how their compression works and make sure that their engineers were happy with the grain. I've spoken to people about it: I think there's times where you really feel the grain – in the mid-tones you really, really see it. It gets lost a little bit in the darker and brighter areas. It's a thing which is very hard to get right for everybody at every viewing distance. How far away you're looking at the screen makes a huge difference, how big is your screen, is the area you're looking at light or dark… but I feel we got to a good midpoint on it where it works to bring out faces, without completely overtaking the image. To be honest, I've watched the show this past week with my wife and when the show first comes on, I'm like, oh, it's a bit grainy. Five minutes in, I forgot about it completely. I'm not going to barely see it. I'm going to have to go, where is it? Is it even there? Like your brain just gets rid of it. And all that's left is the texture. All that's left is the way it affects faces, eyes, mouths, and hair. And that's really what it's there for.

It's pretty spectacular. It's here. You know it's here, but it's not in the way. And it doesn't take you from watching the actors’ faces and feeling the emotions. It's really a great achievement.

Netflix were incredibly supportive and helpful about getting us to the right place for the grain. And there's some potential future algorithm things, not necessarily just for Netflix, which maybe will make this process easier in the future.

You didn't use the texture feature of the Alexa 35, did you?

No, we didn't. I looked at them. All this grain and halation, which we added at the end of the grading process, I was very clear at the beginning of prep to tell executives and channel, this is where we want to go with this. But I also was aware that there would have to be a conversation about it in the grading suite. And so, I think it would have maybe worked against the confidence that I need from those people to have baked in that look. I think much better to say, here you go, I'll give this to you clean and we can really finetune this in post rather than baking in something. I think the midpoint of the standard texture is probably the least destructive of all, therefore that was where I wanted to sit as the sweet spot of what the sensor could do, to give us maximum latitude of pushing it around. Look, I would love a world where I can do like with white balance. I play with my white balance on my camera all day long. I push it around, but I know the camera shoots raw, and I can take chances with this. I can go very, very cold and look or push a load of green and magenta into the white balance of the camera because we're shooting raw, and I can always pull that back. And if a producer ever says, why did you make it so cold? I can just go, don't worry, it's just raw. I can just pull it back. And I would love for Arri to allow me to set my intent, i.e. grainy intent, without it, and still be able to say, when a producer comes to me, oh, you made it so grainy, I can say, oh, it's just raw.

It's great that you mentioned the white balance because I wanted to have a word about colors and the mix of color temperatures. The colors on the show are really, really surprising. Can you say a word about that?

1980s New York is not a city of a single color. This is a city of a million different colors and a million different locations. The script follows multiple journeys and characters through multiple different setups from family apartments to underground tunnels to nightclubs, police stations, to millionaires’ apartments. I dislike a “clean” white balance. I like to push color wherever I can go. The Eric script gave me a lot of opportunity to push color into the show. I like to pick a single color for a location or a character or a scene and I like to push it hard. One of the things I always ask myself for every single scene is, what is the weather? What time of day is it? What are the windows doing? And lean into those things whether it's dusk or a rainy day or a warm tungsten wash. The Anderson family apartment is probably a good example. When we first get in there it's full of warm tungsten lights and as Edgar, their child, is lost, we turn that into a dusky feel full of coolness in the apartment or a rainy overcast day and push all this blue light into the space. For me Eric was an absolute joy in that there's a huge opportunity for this palette of colors, both from the locations and from what the characters were up to. I love mixing color temperatures. It looks nice, but also it allows you to show character or show two sides. For example, the Lux nightclub, which is superficially an exciting sexy 80s nightclub but underneath it, there's a dark seedy world. I wanted to show a yin and yang to that, so the theme of the Lux is warm and cool. There's blue lights and red lights, there's warmth and there's cold. And I hope that shows the two sides of the place, but also looks cool. Which is where you want to get to.

It could look like a paradox to have so many colors to tell such a dark story. I don't know if you if you ever talked about that or not, or it just right from the beginning, you work with colors, and that's it. That's how you tell the story.

Absolutely. Yeah, that's how I tell the story. And I really try to actually make it look visually pleasing, by mixing color temperatures and picking complementary colors. It keys something in people's brains, which makes you enjoy looking at it, but also really try hard to bring that back to either character or scene. And as always, I'm a slave to lighting motivation. I absolutely cannot light something unless it feels well-motivated. All I think about is what is generating the light here. When it doesn't feel like there's a window or a light bulb or a whatever it is, that's when I feel like I failed my job.

How did you light the sewers, based on this motivated light method?

These underground tunnels were a real place in 1980s New York where homeless people would shelter. They lived in the tunnels surrounding the New York City subway. There is a black and white documentary called Dark Days, where a documentary crew went down into these tunnels and filmed these homeless people living in these shacks on the ground. It was fantastic to watch this, but in terms of a visual reference point, it's very hard to use since it's in black and white. These people are using a handful of light bulbs and kerosene lamps to light their homes, and it is incredibly dark. And you've got to take this and bring it into a high-end TV world, so you've got to start thinking about what could be done with these tunnels. Could they have tapped into existing electricity, or could they be living in a service side of the tunnels where there's still a bit of electricity? And there's some fluorescent lights around the place. What colors could these things be? Where's the color contrast? So, we went with slightly greener fluorescent lights, mixed with warm tungsten and flame light sources.

Essentially, how I like to light a set is, I will put lights everywhere. I'll fill the place with practicals. I'll push lights through the windows. On the pre-light, I will light every single corner of that set I possibly can, and then I'll turn off most of those lights and I try and work subtractively, taking away light to add shape. In those underground tunnels: absolutely cover the place in lighting and when it came to the shoot day turn them off and turn them off again and again until it felt like it was an exceptional level of darkness. Because you've got to produce an image, you've got to see something, but you have to make it feel like it's a dark underground tunnel. And to be honest, it's a really tricky thing to do. Often you find in a script: a couple running through a field at night lit only by the moon, and it's incredibly dark. Well, it's a really, really hard thing to do in a way which feels believable and well-motivated, but also that you can actually shoot in as well, because you've got to shoot what's on the page. You must think practically about how you're going to be able to turn the camera around quickly and look the other way, and how you're going to see faces, the back of their heads, and the thing which you've got to see over there. It can't be completely dark here and very bright there. I feel we got quite close to the Dark Days documentary reference, but we definitely have a slight high-end glossy version of it. It's an impossible task, being asked as a DoP to make an incredibly dark space, but also that the camera and the audience can see, and we're not just looking at a black hole when it's broadcast on television.

But the good side of this kind of setting is that the average viewer won't have many references in mind. Anyway, this place is just like a big metaphor for hell, right? Vincent descends into hell. To me it felt like that, and I loved it.

Thank you. You're completely right, it's supposed to be a hellish place for Edgar to end up in and for Vincent to finally end up in as well. I'm glad you felt that.

The other tricky looking small location was the basement in the building where the Anderson family lives, where Edgar has done his drawing on the wall. And it's only lit with torch lights.

Absolutely, really tricky. There are two scenes down in that basement, one with Gabby Hoffman and one with Benedict Cumberbatch, both with Clark Peters. There was one single fluorescent tube, but essentially, we had to see both what was on the wall, and their faces. It's a blessing and a curse: the good news is, you've got a lovely bit of bounce lighting, so faces are going to look great with that light bouncing off them. We did a combination of things actually. I had quite a powerful compact LED, which I would give to either Clark Peters or Benedict Cumberbatch and get them to shine it towards the wall when we have cameras looking at their faces. That generated a much brighter and better color-controlled bounce. On wide shots with both the faces and the wall you'll notice that I framed out the torch. I gave them the LED again for close ups of the wall. It was a real prop torch which had a grubby shape. The trick about that is you're asking actors… “You're concentrating on acting, rightly so, so here you go, here's your main key light. Can you just light your faces with it?” Bless them! They often do it very well, but also often they don't do it very well because they're concentrating on their own job. Luckily, they're very helpful and willing to give me a hand with it all. When you've got tiny locations like that, there's nowhere to hide anything. If I really wanted to, we could have lit it with Skypanels and been very careful about what directions we filmed, but I don't think it would have looked nicely lit. But yes, it's a DoP's nightmare, having two people standing two feet from a wall in a dark room.

It was one of the last things we shot. It took a lot of work because we had to create a custom rig. We had to use the real Eric costume. He had to wear it, and we had to strap a camera to him, whilst making it feel like he was being lit through the costume, and so he could stand around with it. We built and tested it in Budapest with Olly Taylor, the lead puppeteer, and it worked.

We flew that rig over to New York and hired it for about two months across the whole New York dates until the very end of the schedule in New York. We tested it again, put it together, and then on the shoot day, it was ready to go with Benedict Cumberbatch. I mean, it's a very personal thing because we were strapping it to him, and it's quite heavy. It was just an Alexa Mini with, I think, a 29 mm Supreme Prime. The Eric cushion and head went on top of him. We took the face off, and we put lights through gauze. We shot it in a studio: we had some big ultra bounces and a bit of hard lights to push through to make it feel like the puppet's mouth or eyes were allowing the light through. And then of course with all this stuff on him in a studio, good old Be nedict Cumberbatch had to act like he was on a stage talking to his son. As always, when it appears quite simple on the screen, it actually required a lot of prep to make it work and to make it look and feel right. And also, a lot of work from the actor to emotionally be on the stage talking to his son who's gone missing five episodes before. I think it turned out really well, but it took an obscene amount of talking to get to the place where it works. We probably worked on it for about two months.

What were the scenes that you preferred shooting?

I really enjoyed working in the Anderson apartment. It was one of the first places we shot on, a gorgeous set built by Alex Holmes and his arts department team in Hungary. I would love to live in that 200 square meter, beautiful wood wall apartment. At one end we had Rosco Translite softdrops made of real photos of the exterior location in New York. We spent days pre-lighting them so in a touch of a button we could go from day to night in there and hold these long dusks. Alex allowed me to put some soft boxes in the set through hatches in the ceiling, which Jean-Louis, the VFX supervisor, kindly scrubbed out again. I could put just a little bit of a base of lighting from everywhere and nowhere, if I ever needed it. We had fantastic practicals everywhere. The whole place looked amazing. Thanks to my Hungarian gaffer, Zsolt "Hofi" Hoffer, it was lit to perfection. Shooting there was really enjoyable because it was quick, and I still think it looks real, I don't think anyone can guess it's a set build.

Beyond that, one of my favorite days was in episode six: there is a moment with a big stage, people protesting, and Vincent / Benedict Cumberbatch gets on stage dressed as Eric. That was in New York, right at the end of our schedule, in May. We were really tired. The production had put us up in an apartment in Wall Street, and we were shooting in City Hall Park, which is an about four minutes’ walk away. I remember getting up one morning, knackered, I was on my knees by then, but walking for four minutes from the Wall Street apartment to City Hall Park, right in downtown Manhattan, – I love New York, I’m from London and I love big cities – and arriving there… We had four Alexas and a vintage camera that day, because we had 250 extras, a big stage in downtown New York, and period cars everywhere. It felt like we were shooting Ghostbusters. It was a fantastic feeling. And going, wow, this is my life. How did I get here? Lucy and I were just shooting terrible factual entertainments, and then suddenly, we're here doing this massive show in New York. You kind of rub your eyes and go, oh, yeah, what's happening? I'm just working on it. And we had a fantastic team, both sides of the Atlantic.