By Oliver Webb
Ella Purnell stars as Rhiannon Lewis, receptionist at a local newspaper who’s life takes a dramatic turn after an unexpected encounter. Based on CJ Skuse’s novel of the same name, all six episodes of Sweetpea were captured by DOP Nick Morris, who brings this refreshingly original serial killer series to life. (Interview contains spoilers)
Where did you train as a DOP?
Nick Morris: Well, I didn't actually. I did a geography degree, which has obviously not served me hugely well. Ella Jones, the director of Sweetpea, was coincidentally doing a history degree in the same place and we became friends. Leaving Uni, my intention was to move to London and then maybe work as a runner before perhaps shooting some short films and then I’d apply to somewhere to learn and train to do cinematography - I really wanted to go to the NFTS. In reality though, it just never happened. I assisted a little and then started doing some shorts and music videos with friends. Eventually, those music videos got a little bit bigger, and slowly became small commercials. Eventually some of the music videos started to get noticed for music video awards, and around that time, I got an agent, then all of a sudden it felt like taking time out to go to school wasn't the best choice anymore. I’m pretty happy with how it has turned out though. Often I’d love the security that I imagine comes with knowing you've been taught this stuff by someone, but otherwise I really wouldn't change anything.
Generally, I think I've learned the most from doing stuff myself; getting it wrong and trying not to get it wrong again. I would probably advise other people to do similarly because its really worked for me, but equally I wouldn't know the other routes. Learning about cinema and the history of cinema is very important, but you can do that yourself to some degree. I think as long as you surround yourself with a great team and trust your taste, I don't think it's absolutely integral to the job to do technical training.
How did you first get involved with Sweetpea?
Nick Morris: So, while we were at Uni together, I worked on Ella Jones’ first short film, which was also my first day on a film set ever. It's all actually very tied up in the story of how I got into cinematography in the first place. We were both at university together, but were in different years and I was very into photography. Ella asked if I wanted to come and help out in the summer on a little short film, and to take unit stills for her. Watching the fab Dave Pimm do his work as the DOP was my first time seeing what a DOP did. I was amazed by how much went into putting a scene together, how he could make it look like night-time in the middle of the day, and he had complete control of the image. First thing I thought was, wow this is something I want to do. So then full circle, many years later, after I’d been shooting for a while and Ella had continued into being the very successful TV director she is today; she got in touch about another project, but our schedules didn't quite line up. Then, a year or so later, she got in touch about Sweetpea. I read the script and thought the whole world was really fun. It's not often that I find a script that just feels like a definite, especially given how much of a time commitment these projects are. But it leapt off of the page, and with Ella at the helm - It was kind of a no brainer from there.
What were your initial conversations about the look of the show?
Nick Morris: There's a kind of version of this script which is all quite serious and plays into this sort of psychosexual serial killer, procedural kind of crime drama. She really didn't want that and wanted to have something quite whimsical about it all. There's a lot of comedy there in the script and she really wanted to play into it with this slightly heightened feel. In the cannon of things like Fargo, Barry and The End of the Fucking World. They are all very dark, but very funny and have this distinct off kilter nature to them.
We started looking at lots of Coen Brothers references and particularly their comedies. We looked at how they approach where they place the camera and how they edit and how it all plays into comic timing and stuff like that. That really influenced a lot of the choices, especially in terms of the decision to play most of the shots ‘inside the eyeline,’ i.e keeping people out of each other's shots. Things just gradually started taking on this almost graphic novel inspired look, where things are quite considered, with this sort of nervous, slightly heightened and slightly off kilter element to the framing.
I was also keen to play with colour quite a lot. Ella had this vision of what she called “shit Britain,” almost as an antidote to a lot of the Americana that has infiltrated a lot of British TV. Shows like TEOTFW and Sex Education have this really 90s America inspired aesthetic. We both love them, but we wanted to see if we could find a way to bring that level of cinematicness, but to something that really felt British. I likened it to the way that so many films are shot in and around Hollywood, that even the ‘trailer park’ aesthetic in American films feels ‘cinematic’; can we do something to the most humdrum British existence and try and give it the same feeling. “What if the Coen Brothers shot ‘The Office’?” was a joke we made.
That all started to become a big feature of how we talked about lighting this place that we were in. We wanted it to feel slightly nostalgic, slightly timeless, slightly 90s, in a sort of forgotten part of the world. And with that was quite a lot of entertaining opportunities to bring in this dingy, fluorescent green approach to the lighting. While we were talking about more serious Serial Killer based references, we talked quite a lot about early Fincher films like Fight Club, Se7en and Panic Room. Fight Club is a very different film to what we were making, but it has some similar undertones in terms of the arc that the lead character goes on. I was very inspired by the use of fluorescent lighting in that to create this really humdrum feeling to the world and the place in the palette that this green in the lighting took, it all looked so great when paired with warm tungsten practicals and daylight. That became a real foundation of the look.
Which camera and lenses did you select, and why?
Nick Morris: We did two full days of camera and lens testing; first looking for sensors and then looking for lenses that were appropriate for them. I like to try and be kind of agnostic to them. It's not necessarily like there's a particular camera for every show. I tested the Alexa 35 and it was head and shoulders above the rest in terms of latitude and what we could do with colour. We looked at a whole range of vintage lenses. We looked at amorphic lenses, spherical lenses, and then we landed on this feeling that we wanted the image to be quite un impacted and quite like neutral. So, we went for master primes, which had enough of a look, but they were quite neutral and it meant that the camera felt quite objective. I think that helped as we didn't want it to be too extravagant.
What was your approach to capturing the first murder sequence?
Nick Morris: That one was a huge challenge. I think if I was ever to go back in time and have an opportunity to talk to the writers, I'd say “please don't set this in a canal!”. It was a very difficult place to light and shoot, especially because we were very keen to use lots of rain and it all very quickly turned into a complete quagmire down there. There were lots of challenges that came with that.
I guess a key tenet to the general approach was that we needed the space to feel dark. In order for that murder to happen, it couldn't feel like they just happened to be stood under a well placed streetlight, or next to a coincidental practical, they needed to be down there in the dark. That's obviously quite oxymoronic when we also need to see what's going on and understand everything the actors are giving us. I landed on this slightly ambiguous moonlight look: it was dark and cool, and predominantly dominated by the reflections on wet people and the water occasionally rippling light into faces. It's not 100% justified, but I think it worked out.
We had a big machine boomed out over the river that took a bunch of sky panel S360s which predominantly backlit the scene and the Rain FX, and a few of them provided front light for the deep background trees. We also had this moving light source, almost like an event spotlight, that we could remotely pan around and focus on different areas of the scene. Often we bounced it into the water to get a kind of ripple effect bouncing onto the faces and the surrounding walls. I also had a few Titan tubes in inflatable soft boxes that could sit in the rain but provided some eyelight and filled in the faces.
In terms of shooting it, we did a lot of Steadicam, predominantly on the bank, but then we also had this floating pontoon which had a technocrane rigged on it. That basically allowed us to then get out over all the water areas and also be up inside the tunnel under the bridge and get some of our high angle shots. That was a pretty invaluable tool. Generally all of these choices reflect the way that we wanted to approach the camera language throughout, we wanted it to be very understated. It's a really intense moment, so we could have shot it all handheld, and put the audience right in the thick of it, but we were wary of being overly subjective. We wanted the audience to be involved, but also have a healthy distance so that they could come to question Rhiannon’s actions later in the series. Generally this meant we didn't have many big camera moves and there's categorically no handheld. There's none of the moments of intensity that you might apply a shaky camera to. We didn't want to do that. We wanted it to rest on the performances more than anything else.
What was your approach to lighting the many night exteriors throughout the show?
Nick Morris: It's not a very high budget show in the scheme of things and so whenever big night exteriors come into the scripts, it's always a big alarm bell. Often night exteriors just mean lots of kit, machines, lots of long cable runs and generators and stuff in order to facilitate them.
I think it was a challenge. Obviously, we had to be clever and we had to pick and choose the key moments when we needed bigger stuff, and other times we would be led predominantly by streetlights and practical lighting.
Rhiannon’s house location was a very difficult place to light. It's on a dual carriageway, out towards the M25 and it's a really big, unusual house. A lot of the times when Rhiannon is coming back to it, it's empty and there's no lights on. There's not really any justification for any practical light sources to be there. It's also so on its own that there really aren't many streetlights and other things that naturally illuminate it. On the recess I was like “oh, this place is a black hole”. I tried to convince everyone in advance that if we went with this location, it would add a lot of value, but it would be pretty expensive to light. We had to effectively get a big crane with a soft box that went over the top of the house that gave it this subtle moonlit look. I tried to keep it dark enough that it was mainly just highlighting the relief of the house and giving it shape. I think it actually worked pretty well in the end. To facilitate it though we had to get all of this huge stuff in the next door neighbour’s garden. Two massive cranes all boomed right out over the next property, one for top light and one for backlight. It also really didn't help when we were shooting those scenes that there was a huge storm happening on the same day. We had to check the wind speeds every few minutes and there was always a strong possibility they were going to pull the plug - it was quite stressful.
We only shot the exteriors of the house on location. Everything inside the house is sets that the production designer, Simon Walker built. He did such a good job of matching the architecture to the exterior of the house. All of Simon’s choices revolved around making those sets as real as possible - he was very keen to have solid ceilings on all the sets and he'd build staircases with mini landings so that they really felt like they were going up to second floors. Those had some slight lighting impacts, but I really think that because of that, it was really effectively like shooting in a location, but just one that we could control the weather and that really helps them feel real. Those limitations meant that we were very strict with everything being motivated by real light sources that are in the frame. I think hopefully that helped us sell those locations and sets together.
They were all much bigger and more extensive sets than anything I’ve done before. It was really fun to be able to play with the lighting over those big spaces and get into the real nitty gritty about how we approach that. We had such a great team. My long-time collaborator and gaffer Helio Ribeiro worked alongside me, and it really was a highlight of my career so far designing the lighting for those sets.
What was your favourite scene to shoot?
Nick Morris: God so many. I loved shooting all the Gazette scenes. We did them all first up in the schedule and it was a bit of a trial by fire. It was the biggest set I’d lit at that point and it was nerve wracking but super rewarding. Having all of the cast in there riffing off of each other was hilarious, and it was impossible to keep a straight face, especially any time Jeremy Swift is on set.
Also, in the first episode there is a scene where Rhiannon’s burying her dog. It was shot on the same night that we had this huge storm. We had these machines up in the air and it was raining loads, but it just sort of created this intense atmosphere. Ella is such a great performer that she was soaking wet and freezing cold and lying in the mud just after having buried the dog. It's a really simple scene, but the intensity of it all combined with the simple shot of the camera rising up over her while she lay there in the mud was just a bit special.
There was another happy accident moment when Rhiannon goes and finds Julia's car outside of her dad's office, in the episode where she kidnaps Julia. There's a moment in that where she stabs Julia’s tyre and deflates it. We had planned various rigs for how we might go about stabbing a tyre. As it turns out - tyres are very hard and if you just go to stab a tyre, it's likely the knife will bounce off and it's really underwhelming. We were going to break up the sequence and shoot a real close-up of this fake tyre to sell the stabbing moment. Everyone was a bit disappointed not to be able to see it happen for real, so on the first go, while we had the real tyre there, Ella Purnell decided she was just going to give it a go and stab the tyre for real. The stunts people gave her some pointers with the sharp knife, but nobody thought it would work. We had one fully inflated tyre, so only had one go. Ella tried it and it bounced off as expected, but she stayed in character and just went for it again. She kneeled down and put all of her weight into it, managed to properly stab the tyre and then when she pulled the knife out, there was a huge gust of air that came with it and blew her hair around, while the whole car sunk down. It was better than we could possibly have planned! You can plan as much as possible, and you always have to have a back up, but you'd never be able to fake that.
Do you have any other projects lined up?
Nick Morris: I just wrapped on my first feature, which was a really exciting project. It’s called Pillion and directed by Harry Lighton. It was a quick five week shoot, but it was great fun. It's a kinky gay biker romance starring Harry Melling and Alexander Skaarsgard and it was honestly a riot to shoot. When I’m not on drama projects I tend to shoot commercials, so I’m going back to that world for a little while now!
Sweetpea is available to watch on Sky Atlantic