Cinematographer Igor Martinovic on Creating the Perfect Palette for the Tragic Love Story, ‘ George & Tammy’ on Showtime

Cinematographer Igor Martinovic has just scored his third Emmy nomination for shooting George & Tammy with Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain as real-life star crossed lovers (and country music legends) George Jones and Tammy Wynette. Igor gets to the heart of the methods that he used to put emotion, story, and character first, before their famous music. His use of color palettes, angles, and lighting greatly accentuated one of the most notable tragic love stories in the history of country music.

In our conversation, we dig into those methods with an understanding that whether in front of or behind the camera, it’s all about storytelling.

Awards Daily: I am from Kentucky originally so I grew up around this kind of music. For years I went away from it as one does when they reject things from their childhood, and then I came back to it. What I loved about the show is the way that it captured the South in multiple decades: the sixties, seventies, and eighties. What challenges did you face making the show look authentic?

Igor Martinovic: There are a few things that we had to take into consideration. We shot in North Carolina. So, we kind of had to watch for things that are signifiers of the South or things that are not happening in the South. So it could be: does the moss show up on trees in the South or not? Simple things like that. But in general, the most important element of this was actually to be true to their experience, to be true to the point of view of these two tragic figures. We focus on that because that is the key. Once you get the audience to live the lives of these two people, they are much more forgiving if you don’t get all the elements right. But a lot of research has been done on the props, on the costumes, on the cars, all things that represent the time period. Early in prep John Hillcoat, the director of the entire series, and I talked a lot about this being a show of contrasts. It is the contrast between the private life and public life. It is the contrast between the story that was presented to the public and their own life story. So that was something that I worked on a lot in terms of visuals: how to portray this polished side of being on stage showing all the glamour of live performances and then contrasting it with a little bit more edgy and rougher photography of the human struggle. And it changed throughout the time. So I was more concerned to psychologically portray the characters at the moment rather than portray the time.

Awards Daily: You were talking about glamour. People don’t understand that in the seventies when Glam rock was popular, there was a sense of glam in country music too. It just had more frills. (Laughs). The Grand Ole Opry was very glamorous.

Igor Martinovic: Absolutely. We analyzed all the stage performances really thoroughly and looked at all the footage we could find. We wanted to be true to the original, but we also wanted to create visuals that are exciting. So for those performances, we used a lot of the lights that were used in the past, lights from the sixties and from the seventies. We had some spotlights that we found almost in a junkyard. We made them work again and we used them. Also a lot of times we would hide the modern lights within the housing of the old lights. It all had to look like it’s from that time period, but we were actually hiding things wherever we could because we also wanted to have control and we had to be extremely fast. It’s a TV show, so you don’t have the flexibility of a feature film where you can actually shoot one performance, one song on a stage for a day. We had days where we would shoot two stages, two separate performances in the stadium on the same day. Also we added film grain to add to the feel of the image from the sixties and seventies. I used vintage lenses. All lenses from the same time period. I developed this thing, for this project especially, where I charred the glass that I would put in front of the lens. I would use a candle and char and haze different parts of the image to create a little bit uneven and not so precise optics. It works more on a subconscious level than that you can actually point it out and say oh, what was going on in this image?

Awards Daily: There’s a scene in the hotel where Michael and Jessica, as Tammy and George, are being intimate and that scene is shot with a certain level of darkness in it that almost seems to be, even in this moment of pleasure and taking joy in each other, signifying that it can’t last.

Igor Martinovic: The idea of their private lives was almost to create like a documentary of their lives, of their minds, how they feel. So for certain moments, we really had a documentary approach. For the love making scenes, that was the approach. We would empty the set. It would be a camera, lights would be set up, and I would mostly operate there and it was just capturing the moments and being there and keeping it in darkness. Obviously you don’t want to show everything and you don’t want to expose things in a way that you shouldn’t, but it also gets the audience to participate by looking into the image, to try to discover things. Hiding things is something that I do often in many of my works, because I think you have to make the audience work in order to create this two way communication. The audience has to participate in the process of viewing to make a connection with the narrative.

Awards Daily: Michael and Jessica had worked together before. In Take Shelter, where they also had a difficult relationship in that movie as well. Did you find that because they had already walked in with a level of trust that it was easier for you to shoot them for performance?

Igor Martinovic: Michael and Jessica found their connection and bond from the very beginning. Because they were singing live and recording live audio while we were recording, we needed to have an approach where we give them as much space as we can and not intrude. As I said, it was almost like a documentary approach. Certain times we wanted to have cameras really far away from them, giving them space so they can actually play wherever they choose. There were not particular marks for them. We gave them a lot of freedom, but my job is to be less present and try to capture the energy and bring it to the screen. Hopefully the audience feels some of it. We create almost like a visual narrative where we can subtly influence the audience in a way by using a murkier, edgier photography for the moments when things don’t go well. Or we would put them in frames within frames to create a sense of entrapment or we would use negative framings and so on. Lots of subtle things that in the visual vocabulary of the series were done to create that parallel visual story that supports the main narrative.

Awards Daily: Speaking of their live performance sequences, you could tell they were singing live because at times you would show their throats and you could see their vocal cords moving in time. I assume that was intentional to cut away any potential need for suspension disbelief.

Igor Martinovic: For me, I wasn’t thinking about that. (Laughs). I was thinking more about how when you have a live performance and you have six cameras rolling you really need to make sure that all the technical aspects of it are working perfectly and that you don’t call attention to yourself. That was the key for me. So, to be honest, it wasn’t something that I was paying attention to. I was paying attention to how the light hits their faces. What is the color of it? What are the angles? Do we go with higher angles, lower angles? How do we actually portray that moment? Because we would oftentimes look from the audience, we would be in the audience and see from their perspective because we wanted the audience that watches the TV show to almost spy on and participate in their lives. The cameras would often have foreground elements, like in the concert you would see the audience in the foreground, you would see shoulders. It’s not just being with them for that performance on stage, but also being experienced as one would experience going into the live show.

Awards Daily: It’s interesting you say that because the best concert films that I can think of, like Stop Making Sense or Sign O’ the Times, do give you that looking out onto the stage vibe. I hadn’t thought about that until you just said it now, but you very much did that.

Igor Martinovic: Any time we could, we would place cameras either behind the audience or seeing it from a low angle where the audience would be looking out from the first or second row, just seeing the performance from there. In general what we wanted to create is that stance of voyeurism for the audience to feel like they are participating in the very intimate moments of George and Tammy’s lives. And taking perspective was the key. For any scene we would do, we would always analyze whose scene is this? From whose perspective do we see this? How can we actually portray somebody’s state of mind? If somebody feels betrayed, how do you portray betrayal? What are the visual cues we can introduce to show that feeling or any other feeling that you encounter within a scene? That point of view is crucial.

Awards Daily: To that point, there are a couple of scenes I want to talk about in particular. One is the Christmas scene, which is arguably the most dramatic moment and the most hair-raising moment in the relationship that is shown. That whole sequence with the chandelier and also the use of blue, which I thought was interesting in that moment. It wasn’t just the typical Christmas colors. Tell me about what you were going for there in creating that moment of chaos, because his behavior is a betrayal to her, I think, in that space.

Igor Martinovic: That scene is very dramatic and it’s very loud. It’s loud in many ways. We didn’t shy from taking extreme angles, introducing light and color. It was something that called for it, because it was the scene of betrayal, a scene of disappointment, breaking of promises and so on. So the cameras are following George’s drunken state of mind. He was unstable, the cameras were unstable. We purposely shot handheld, contrary to many scenes that we shot very precisely with no camera movement or very limited camera movement. So that scene, I would just call it loud. Contrary to that, we would have scenes that are completely visually silent. There are scenes where the camera is completely stable. The lights are there, there are no loud colors there. The lights are undefined. There is no contrast. We would subdue the visuals and put them into a small box of silence and just let the actors be there and perform. This scene particularly was the complete opposite.

Awards Daily: Speaking to the other moment I found most devastating, but in a much more subtle way, in the show is the “He Stopped Loving Her Today” scene in the studio. She’s brought in and she watches entirely behind sunglasses. It’s very well lit. It’s probably one of the brighter scenes in the show. Her silence and his singing is a magical piece of shooting. What you were going for in that space.

Igor Martinovic: Jessica’s decision to keep the sunglasses on just shows you what this scene is about. It’s about building the wall Tammy needed to protect herself from the devastating power of the relationship. This was her way of creating this distance. What we did visually was that we shot a lot of those shots through glass, so there is a barrier in between him and her. The recording studio itself had sound muffling barriers that we designed and some of them had glass on top. Whenever we would shoot George, we would shoot him through the glass so there was always some element in between them that was separating them. Other scenes earlier in the film were all about being with them. We were close to them, the camera was really close. There was nothing in between the camera and the characters. Here, there are so many layers physically dividing them and physically dividing the camera from the characters as well.

Awards Daily: Despite all of your experience did you ever catch yourself looking at them going my God, those two are good—in terms of Shannon and Chastain.

Igor Martinovic: It’s amazing. It’s basically a privilege to be part of it. Oftentimes I would just stop as we were working on it, just being there and looking at it as an audience member, enjoying the performance, enjoying what they do. The chemistry was incredible. That chemistry was not just present when we were rolling. It was throughout. They were together. They were a couple from the moment they came on set in the morning till the end of the evening. They were a couple. You believe that they’re together. And that’s amazing. The level of artistry that they put in is incredible. The devotion to their job, to what they do and how they do it. It’s not just the fact that they’re putting all they have into those performances, but it’s also that their level is so high that you just can sit back and enjoy.

Awards Daily: I talked to John Hillcoat previously, and he said that one of his goals was to avoid typical musical biopic tropes. That can be hard, especially with a story that has a certain amount of real life Star Is Born elements to it. How did you partner with John to avoid that?

Igor Martinovic: John had an incredible image library. That library consisted of like 3,000 photos and those photos included photos of intimacy between two people, the South in the 1970s, colors present in photography at that time and so on. We referenced a lot of those photographs in the pre-production. And we talked a lot about how to actually portray this film. When he first called me, he said oh, this is Cassavetes. And I was like whoa that’s amazing. If you have a director that thinks like that, it opens up an incredible field of what we can do here. It’s amazing because that means that you care about the characters, that you care about what they go through, about their struggle and about their intimate life and about their inner life and so on. If you start thinking in those terms, if you care about the inner life of the character, then it’s so much easier because then you’re not portraying George and Tammy again, you’re portraying these two people that are struggling to find balance between each other. They’re struggling to find balance with themselves. Each one of them is trying to fight their own demons. When you’re looking at that as a story of two troubled characters that are fighting their demons, then you forget about anything like a biopic. Suddenly you have this breathing and living creature in front of you that you need to help express their story through visuals. And I think that makes it so much easier.

Awards Daily: It seemed to me that the show went relationship first and the music second.

Igor Martinovic: Yes. Because also what’s interesting is that the music is a mirror of their life. So, if you get the relationship moments right, the music is just going to be like icing on a cake, you know? The music gives an additional layer in portrayal of their private life. If we got this right, then the show is good. I hope that people can actually relate to their experience and then the music. I didn’t know anything about George and Tammy before starting this. For me, it was really fascinating to see how music actually reflected. It was simply a mirror to their experience. And talking about mirrors, we actually introduced mirrors as a visual element as well, because it’s all about this public and private life and about how you portray yourself. So mirror image and the reflection is important. We had a lot of scenes with mirrors, and then as the story progressed, we actually introduced mirrors that are broken or they are distorted or multiplying images, and multiplying characters within the frame. So we played a lot with that as well.

Awards Daily: It is useful to understand that George starts out with this terrible alcohol problem that I don’t know that he ever really completely conquers. But then along the line, Tammy develops her own health issues that send her into drug addiction. There’s a later part of the show as she cuts her hair short and looks gaunt, and the coloring of the show started to get this sort of, I guess I would call it, a cruel blue tint that seemed to accentuate the nature of her decline.

Igor Martinovic: For sure, for sure. I mean, this is all done on purpose. At the very beginning we played with lots of color contrast using complementary colors, using primary colors. Oftentimes they would be heavily saturated. As the story progresses, as they decline into alcohol and drug addiction, we drained the colors out and also the contrast. We used a lot of mercury images with desaturated colors. And we introduced a fair amount of light blue to her to wash out her skin and take the warmness out of her skin. So, that makes her look much sicker. We would also introduce more fluorescent lighting that is not so pleasant. To give credit to Jessica, she was always with it. There was never an issue. She didn’t mind actually portraying Tammy as she was at that time, losing that spark in her eyes, losing that healthy skin glow. This is all part of the design of makeup and lighting together.

Awards Daily: It’s terrific work. I can only assume you are very proud of the show.

Igor Martinovic: You know what’s interesting? It’s good to see that people pay attention because oftentimes you do your work and then at the end, the two cinematographers that see your work are like “Oh, you know, I saw what you did. It’s nice.” But the general public doesn’t necessarily notice it because it’s in the background. It’s nice to see that you were perceptive on all those things and you saw exactly where we were going and what we were planning to do.