The Second Golden Age of Television rightfully gets lauded for incredible stories and characters on shows likeThe SopranosorMad MenorBreaking Bad, but another key aspect of this period is an upswing invisualstorytelling on the small screen. As more and more talent has moved to TV for longform stories, the cinematic language of those stories has grown considerably to the point that the cinematography on shows likeGame of Thrones,Better Call Saul, orFargoandLegionrivals the work done on the big screen. It’s the latter two shows that are particularly interesting, as they’re both run by showrunnerNoah Hawley, who approaches each season like one long feature film.
Hawley doesn’t direct every episode ofFargoandLegion, but his fingerprints are all over these shows, and it’s up to the directors and cinematographers to execute that vision in a manner that’s both faithful and unique. The bulk of these two shows were shot by cinematographersCraig WrobleskiandDana Gonzales, who are responsible for crafting some of the most exciting shots on the small screen all year.
Recently I got the chance to speak with Wrobleski about his work on bothFargoandLegion, crafting nods to theCoen Brothersand cinematography greatRoger Deakins, the specific references inFargoSeason 3, and more. He also extensively broke down his work on the Season 3 episode “Who Rules the Land of Denial?”, including thatBig Lebowskishot and a surprising nod to another Deakins film. As forLegion, we discussed how Wrobleski brought Hawley’s insane ideas to reality, crafting the astral plane, and the biggest challenge of the season.
Wrobleski is responsible for shooting eight episodes ofFargothus far and handled three key episodes ofLegion, including the season finale, so he has intimate knowledge and insight into how these shows work. He’s a fascinating and talented director of photography, and if you’re at all a fan ofFargo,Legion, or just great filmmaking in general I think you’ll find this interview interesting. Check it out below.
How did you first get involved withFargoback in season two?
CRAIG WROBLESKI: I actually got involved at the tail end of season one. They had shot the majority of the season and they got into their last two episodes and obviously had a lot on their plate with having to shoot some additional footage for earlier episodes. It started out as fairly traditional second unit work, establishing shots, drive-bys, inserts, that kind of thing and someone, one of the others on the show I’d given Noah my name and said if you can help me out, I’d just wrapped a series at that point so I was available. I came on to do the second unit work, which like I said, it started out as fairly conventional second unit work but evolved over the course of the two weeks that we were working where we ended up picking up scenes for main unit and by the end of it, we were doing two page interrogation scenes with principal cast.
It was a really interesting process but a very natural evolution from essentially traditional second unit work into essentially what became a reduced main unit approach. It’s sense been an approach that’s been carried through on other seasons. I was invited back on season two as main unit DP alternating with Dana Gonzalez and I stayed on at the tail end of season two to do additional second unit work for episodes nine and 10 which was, again, two solid weeks of shooting with some substantial call sheets. Then we did the same thing a month ago at the tail end of season three when we wrapped up episodes nine and 10, I stayed on to help out with some second unit work. It was an interesting experiment that ended up becoming part of the language of the show.
That’s fascinating. I was curious about the production of the show. Is it shot in blocks? Because I know you’re alternating with Dana.
WROBLESKI: Yeah, it is shot in blocks, two episode blocks. Except season three, they shot episode three on it’s own and episode one on its own. Episode three was the L.A. episode so it was a standalone.
Oh yeah, that’s right.
WROBLESKI: Episode one was the first episode so it stood on its own as well. I shot episodes two, four, seven, and eight. That’s season three.
It’s a unique show in that Noah Hawley is the main creative voice but he’s not directing every episode. How do you as a cinematographer ensure that ever episode feels Noah Hawley-esque and is in line with his vision?
WROBLESKI: It all starts with the script, which is a very incredible document. If you ever get a chance to read aFargoscript, I feel like they should be put into novel form and you should be able to buy a season and read it like a book because it really is amazing the detail in the scripts and the tone in the script is so specific. As an incoming director, we have the entire legacy of the Coen brothers and Roger Deakins' work with the Coen brothers to use as a point of reference. When someone comes ontoFargo, they obviously, there’s the feature film version ofFargo, which is an incredible compass point for us and then you also have the entire legacy of the Coen brothers and their work with Roger Deakins to use as a jumping off point for the aesthetic. As a DP, it was great because we’ve got all this common language to work from and everyone has a pretty good understanding of how the Coens work and that’s always been our true north from an aesthetic standpoint.
Yeah, how does it feel as a cinematographer having to mimic or fit in with the work of one of the greatest cinematographers of all time?
WROBLESKI: (Laughs) Well, in many ways it’s an honor and a privilege to carry that torch. I’ve been a lifelong fan of the Coen brothers and of Roger Deakins. For me, it is an honor and a privilege and obviously, I put my own spin on it. There is an element of my aesthetic that naturally leans very close to where the show is. Even if I wasn’t doing Fargo, a lot of the work I do is in that world. They’ve been a real influence on my aesthetic and my approach. On that front, it was simple but we obviously try to put our own spin on it and bring our own range of experiences to it. It is a jumping off point but we’re not slavish to it. We honor it probably more strictly on the lensing side where the way we lens the show, which is very specific. We use very specific range of focal lengths. We don’t use a lot of long lenses, we use them very sparingly and if we do, it’s for a very specific purpose. I’d say we shot three quarters of my episodes on the 29 mill. It seemed to be our go to lens where we would shoot a lot of the season on. I’d say 90% of the season was shot on three or four different focal lengths. In fact, and this isn’t a spoiler because it was in the episode that aired last night, but in episode eight, I was able to pay homage to Roger Deakins in a very specific way. When we shot the bus crash, we used some very specific homage to Roger Deakins' work inThe Assassination of Jesse James. When they take over the train. We basically, I don’t even know, it’s almost a straight lift of somebody. If you’re going to steal, steal from the best and that sequence as a cinematographer is a standout and it’s an incredible sequence and beautifully done. It was a lot of fun to play with those images and put them into our world and have them be on their own fantastic images but if people understand the reference, then it gives it that much more depth. It’s not a strict Coen reference but it’s a Roger Deakins reference, which is a sideways reference to the Coens.
Yeah, I mean, the Coens go hand in hand with Deakins even though he hasn’t shot all of their films.Jesse Jamesis one of the most beautiful films ever made.
WROBLESKI: Exactly. It was shot here in Alberta and I know a lot of the crew that worked on the show and I think the crew that worked on the show were on set. It was an interesting coming together of all these worlds.
I know with TV shows there’s a certain aesthetic that’s ascribed to the show and you fit in that, but here you’re also very clearly making sure it fits in with the Coen brothers. Is there a set of clearly defined rules? I know it’s not hard and fast but are there some guidelines that you guys always stick with?
WROBLESKI: Like you said, there isn’t a strict rule book. We’re not handed a thick tone that they slam on the desk and say “Here’s the rules.” It’s never that. We all understand and appreciate the Coens and Deakins so that’s this jumping off point but ultimately, the biggest rule we have is that the photography shouldn’t ever overtake the story. It should always be in support of the narrative and in support of what the actors are doing. My job as a cinematographer is to set the stage for performances. I view that as a very important part of my job and that includes obviously creating an environment on set but also building sets. In terms of how they look, they have a specific tone that feels right for the scene and they feel like real space. That’s all part of this idea of the photography supporting the story. We obviously have stylistic flourishes on Fargo that are part of the language of the show but whenever we assess one of those, they always have to be driven by the story and the narrative. We can’t ever do something for our own entertainment. It has to be for the support and guiding the narrative forward and also offering the audience those stylistic flourishes and thoseFargomoments that they come to know and love.
Well and then moving from season two to season three, it’s an anthology series but it all takes place within the same universe but you’re also moving into a different time period. What were those early aesthetic conversations about season three, about how Noah wanted it to be distinct but also what you were keeping or maybe some touchstones that you guys wanted to hit?
WROBLESKI: Well, Dana had shot the first episode with Noah so a lot of those conversations happened with him specifically but Dana always kept me looped in on where the season was going and I was involved in the camera tests and when we were testing out the look. It was decided early on between Dana and Noah that they would pursue and aesthetic that was similar toInside Llewyn Davis, which ironically is one of the few Coen brothers movies not shot by Roger Deakins.
Yeah, yeah, Bruno Delbonnel.
WROBLESKI: Yeah, he shot that and it’s beautiful, I mean, I absolutely love the look of that movie. It’s an incredibly beautiful film and the defining element of that look was that they had decided to remove the blue channel when they did the final grade. They obviously decided earlier on because it drove all these aesthetic choices but in the final grade, they did remove the blue channel, which creates an interesting, unique set of challenges and also a very unique look. I think I won’t speak for Noah but I think the decision was partially driven by the fact that as a way to lean away from the idea that cool toned images, blue toned images feel cold. It’s almost a visual cliché when you’re in snow, you shift to cool tones so it feels cold to the audience. Which has a certain amount of truth to it but it’s a bit of a cliché and I think it’s one that Noah wanted to stay away from. It was an interesting route to travel to go down the road of removing that blue channel. We did it at the lut stage, we did it in the camera where a lut was built with Dana. They went in and removed the blue channel and a portion of the green channel as well.
WROBLESKI: Yeah, it really took away some of our story telling tools but by taking that away, it added arguably many more where we had to make choices all along the way aesthetically that were driven by the lut and it became a really fascinating process. I created an emulation look in Light Room so when I took location stills, I could go in to Light Room and emulate the look of what the lut was going to do to the locations, to the sets, to the wardrobe, all of that and it became a really valuable tool to be able to get an idea and to explain to the other departments and to show the other departments how this look was going to affect their work. If they were going to add a blue element to the production design or to the wardrobe, so they had an understanding of how that would render on camera. It was an incredible process and it ultimately became a very unique look that I think it’s fair to say, we wouldn’t have been able to accomplish any other way. Because by removing those elements, it became a very, for lack of a better word, organic thing where the look was inherent … The aesthetic was inherent in the look and it wasn’t something we were dropping on later. Every choice along the way was made with an eye to this look.
For sure. It definitely comes through. I also wanted to ask about the episode “Who Rules the Land of Denial?”. There’s a lot of really great stuff in it but I was curious what it was like shooting that arrow fight around the tree stump that ends with a severed head.
WROBLESKI: (Laughs) It was so much fun. Honestly, when you read it, it was actually a great moment when we were on a location survey. We went with the whole team and we were standing in a clearing, which wasn’t ultimately the clearing that we ended up shooting in but we stood in the clearing and we all stood there while the system director read the scene to us. Which is something we do sometimes to get an idea of the workload and stand in a space and listen to the scene and say, okay, now we’ve got it in our heads, now let’s talk about it. We all stood in this clearing, it’s snowy and cold and the AD’s breath is visible as he’s reading, it was all very interesting. He read it and there was a moment of silence after he finished reading it where we all came to the realization of the sheer workload we had ahead of us.
I think it was Warren Littlefield who was the first one to speak, our executive producer, after this moment of silence, Warren said “How long do you have to shoot this?” It was a matter of coming to that realization of the workload we had to do and then breaking it down. Ultimately, we ended up shooting in a different clearing because the sheer workload. It was so much fun to plan out. There was a Friday afternoon when we were sitting in a industrial bay, which was one of our lunch rooms at the studios we shoot at. We were working it out with the stunt coordinator guy, and it was like we’re little kids. We’re figuring this out and we’re like oh, we can do this and then this happens. It’s so much fun because you’re like a bunch of kids play fighting. Our stunt coordinator, Guy, had so many great ideas and he’s so creative about how he likes to stage things and obviously everything was there one the page but we wanted to take it up another level in this process of doing the choreography. I think what we used as a stump for our rehearsal of it was a garbage can. We’re all congregated around this garbage can in the middle, this tree stump, and we’re working out all the beats and we shot it on our iPhones and I have a recording on my iPhone, I was standing on a ladder, I have a recording of this rehearsal from the overhead viewpoint, which became one of the pivotal viewpoints of the scene where you see the blood bath get bigger and bigger as things continue to get worse. I’ve got this great recording of Guy and one of his stuntmen, Tommy, and the AD’s and everybody acting this out. It’s remarkable how similar it is to what we actually shot (laughs). It’s fascinating. That’s part of the great thing about this process. I think people have this image of it’s all very glamorous and very … But a lot of it, we’re embracing our inner kid and figuring it out.
This shot in an industrial space of these guys play fighting around a garbage can, it’s pretty entertaining. That whole sequence ended up being … We shot it over the course of two nights and there’s a lot going on it obviously. The critical thing was we had to find a clearing that was accessible and that we could work with. We actually found that location by scouting via drone. One of the art directors on the show has a drone and the initial clearing that we all stood in for the realization of how much work we had to do wasn’t the one we shot in, we had to find another one. We didn’t have time to drive all over the place looking for something, so we initially went on Google Earth and basically did a high angle flyover on Google Earth for potential clearings in these woods and then he took his drone out and shot more specific views of them. That’s how we scouted it and then we went out and looked at the two or three that we isolated and ultimately found our favorite.
Obviously in the same episode you have another huge Coen brothers nod toBig Lebowskiwith the bowling alley scene. What was that like to shoot?
WROBLESKI: That, again, it’s such an honor and privilege to carry on these Coen brothers homages because they’re so beloved to audiences and to be able to put the audience back in that world but in a different way is so much fun and we all watchedThe Big Lebowskiscenes many times and obviously our bowling alley’s different, our characters are different. It is part of our world but we shot it basically, identically to how they did it because it felt like the right thing to do. It didn’t feel that it would’ve been right to mix it up. Why mess with perfection? Those scenes are amazing and we took them to a different place by virtue of having Ray Wise instead of the stranger, we had Ray Wise. He’s so incredible and charismatic. Those scenes are so beautiful with the content and they were amazing to shoot. It was actually one of the last things we shot. Which, it was the last thing we shot in the episode and it was a beautiful way to end.
I also wanted to talk aboutLegion, which I think is visually stunning but also incredibly different. Here, you’re also keeping everything in line in a single creative voice but there’s so much more dynamism from episode to episode and sometimes from scene to scene. I was curious what that experience was like coming off ofFargo?
WROBLESKI: It was very different, obviously. The whole process of shootingLegion, we would spend a lot of time in prep figuring it out, really. It’s so dense and so layered and so rich and so complicated that so much of what we would spend time doing was figuring out the right way to approach it. I use the analogy that when you first look atLegion, the target seems like it’s a mile wide and you’re like whoa, we can’t miss. But then you start to pull the threads of it and you realize the target might be a mile wide but the bullseye is the head of a pin. To hit the target bullseye was such a complicated process because it’s the kind of show where you could throw anything at it. You could easily empty the truck on it, as we say. Where you could use every tool in the book and every camera technique but it would ultimately, I think, be the wrong thing to do because the show needed to have a structure to it because it’s so dense and layered for the audience and in some ways confusing. It needed to have a grounded structure around it so that it never became too much. It would be so easy for the show to be too much and over the top where people were like I have no idea what’s going on and I don’t care anymore. We never wanted them to feel that way. That is hard, let’s be honest,Legionis a story about … There’s a love story at its heart and it’s a story about people trying to fit in. It’s about misunderstood people trying to find their way through the world. Yeah, I think that’s a common experience that almost every human being has at some point in their life and that’s ultimately what was driving us from a storytelling standpoint. There’s so many beautiful, fantastic elements that go into telling that story but ultimately, we always had to support the narrative of what the story was really about which is friends and people trying to find their way through the world.
Absolutely. You also got to bring to the screen the Astral Plane with these incredibly strange scenes with David and Oliver. I was curious, what it was like working on a set that’s translucent or maybe it wasn’t, was that green screen?
WROBLESKI: It depends which part of the Astral Plane (laughs). That was the challenge of the Astral Plane. The Astral Plane is the most difficult location I’ve ever shot because I have no idea what it was. I remember looking at the script going … Usually the script will say exterior, interior, and then the location and it didn’t say exterior or interior, it just said the Astral Plane. I’m like what is that? I remember googling Astral Plane and that didn’t help because that made it more confusing. It was a lot of smart people sitting around tables, figuring out what the Astral Plane was, what it should be, how to present it in a way that wasn’t overly affected or stereotypical or distracting. We had a lot of discussions about is the astral plane an emulation in David’s mind? Is it part of Lenny’s creation? Did Oliver create it? Where does it all come from? I think ultimately it came to a really interesting place but there’s many facets to it, part of the Astral Plane is the ice cube where Oliver lives which was a challenging set because it was always the question of is this a real ice cube or is this David’s version of an ice cube? It’s a bachelor pad set in an ice cube. We talked about a lot of different things and ultimately we got it to and place where I felt an aversion of an ice cube. Where people got the general impression of it but it wasn’t an ice cube in a stricter sense. I’ve never been in an ice cube, I don’t really know what that looks like but we got to a point where we felt like the audience would have an understanding of where they were. Put an environment force that would evoke that but wouldn’t necessarily have water dripping down the walls.
It works. There is so much nuttiness going on in that show that I can’t even imagine what it was like to try and visualize that in the beginning because even at this point when you’re seeing it, you’re still not entirely sure what you’re seeing.
WROBLESKI: Yeah. Again, that’s the beauty and the curse of it, right? That was the fun of it was figuring out what the best approach was because in the hands of a lesser writer than Noah, the show could’ve easily gone off the rails very early and never got back on the rails. The scripts had a great focus to them and were offered a clarity that really was helpful to us in prep because we always knew where the characters were even if we didn’t know where they were physically, we always knew where they were emotionally. That was always the driving force for how we handled everything else. It became our compass point for how to move forward by knowing where the characters were, emotionally.
Aside from the Astral Plane, what was the biggest challenge you faced on that show? Or was there one specific moment or scene or something that was really tough?
WROBLESKI: Maybe I’m overly optimistic but I don’t look back on the moments as tough, I look at them as challenges. One of the most challenging scenes to put together structurally was the fight montage that closes episode four where Kerry is in the woods with D3. Fighting with them and Syd and the Eye are duking it out in the second level of the lighthouse and all the while, Cary with a C is back in the … That’s how we called him, Cary with a C and Kerry with a K. Cary with a C is back in the MRI room, in the brain room feeling all these punches and impact that Kerry with a K is experiencing. Then all the while this is happening, Oliver’s dancing in the ice cube. One of the challenges of that sequence was to essentially tie it all together in a way that didn’t feel like it was a gratuitous montage. As Noah said, we had to earn it, you had to earn that sequence. I felt like we did and I think it was a testament to our director Larysa Kondracki and the dance choreographers and the fight choreographers who all worked together to essentially create this fight that became a dance. We did a lot of work on it in the choreography and again, it was one of those great moments when we’re standing in a parking lot, in Burnaby, BC outside the studios and everybody’s dancing and fighting and we’re shooting with our iPhone.
It was this weird dance party happening in this parking lot amongst all the trucks. I remember it was 30 degrees, super hot out, 30 degrees Celsius, it was insanely hot and everybody’s sweating and working but it was a lot of fun. Again, if we went back and watched that, these iPhone videos, it’s remarkable how close it was to the actual end result where we see this happen in front of us in this very raw form but it really inspires us and gives us a lot of inspiration as to how to move forward with it.
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today and congratulations, your work on this series is fantastic. I feel like between these two shows and stuff likeBetter Call Saul, the visual storytelling on television right now is so fantastic.
WROBLESKI: It’s a great time to be working in TV. Besides, like I mentioned, the honor and privilege of carrying on the Coens' legacy, it’s such an honor and privilege to work on material of this caliber. You read these scripts and they’re really phenomenal. They’re stories that are such a privilege to tell. You get really attached to these characters as a DP. When Ray got killed inFargo, we were all mourning. We missed Ray. He’s a fantastic character, we missed having him on set, we missed the relationship with him and Mickey and it is really an incredible time to be working in TV. I feel very fortunate.
