‘The Crown:’ How Cinematographer Adriano Goldman Captured Mohamed Al-Fayed’s Rise in British Society

Already a two-time Emmy winner for The Crown, Adriano Goldman is once again nominated for the episode “Mou Mou.” The third episode of season five traces the story of Mohamed Al-Fayed [Salim Daw] from birth in Alexandria, Egypt, humble beginnings as a street vendor, to gaining power in business, and entering the upper echelons of British society, where he befriends Princess Diana Elizabeth Debicki].

Much of “Mou Mou” takes place outside of the established world of The Crown. Goldman cleverly created a new, warmer visual palette for Al-Fayed’s story, one that slowly transitions to a more familiar aesthetic as Al-Fayed gains notoriety.

Here in an interview with Awards Daily, Goldman discusses returning to the royal drama for two more pivotal episodes, crafting a new esthetic, and teases what’s to come in The Crown’s sixth and final season.

Awards Daily: First of all, congratulations on your Emmy nomination. Because you have two previous wins for The Crown, does that give you more freedom, more confidence? Does that affect your mindset going into the new season at all?

Adriano Goldman: It didn’t really affect how surprised I was when I got nominated again, to be honest. With the industry’s love for The Crown, it’s just a show that never stops giving. It’s my fifth nomination in five seasons. So, it was like, ‘Really? Again?’

It’s funny because I have a different feeling about “Mou Mou,” the nominated episode. I was doing another show [Andor] between seasons four and five. I’ve done The Crown since the very first season, and now with season six that we just finished, I did the finale, the last episode. It’s an incredible journey for me, for my personal and professional life. It’s life-changing in so many aspects.

“Mou Mou” was also a gift because there was a moment in 2021 when I thought I could not rejoin The Crown for season five because the other show took me one year. But because we love each other, and I love the show. We’ve always had the best relationship—I’ve been the lead director of photography since season one—they managed to save two episodes for me, directed by a friend of mine, Alex Gabassi, on his first time on The Crown. Welcoming new directors was also one of my jobs during previous seasons. As Peter Morgan says, ‘Adriano is one of the keepers of the flame. Whenever a director comes, maybe it’s better if he works with Adriano, who knows how the show works and who’s who.’

When Alex came on, they said, ‘Look, he really wants you. What can we do?’ The final agreement was that I was going to have less prep time. So I could jump in right after finishing on Andor, with short prep time, but with a director I had worked with before. So he said, ‘Look, you know, it’s fine. I’ll do the long prep, check the first locations, whatever, so when you jump in, there’s lots to show you.’ So it was a short season for me compared to the others. And I felt privileged to come back and do the fifth season, and I knew I was probably going to do season six. It was quicker for me, and it’s paying off again. It’s amazing.

And I love the episodes. I loved doing it. I love Salim [Daw] and that kind of spin-off approach Peter Morgan brings to certain episodes of The Crown. There’s the famous fog episode in season one, and there are a few more. On season six, there’s a beautiful one around Princess Margaret [Lesley Manville] ‘s last days, and it’s really beautiful; there’s a beautiful flashback.

“Mou Mou” is almost like a chapter in itself. The whole reason for the episode is to get to the last season or the last scene of the finale, where Dodie [Khalid Abdalla] and Diana [Elizabeth Debicki] finally meet for the first time. But there’s the journey where you’re getting to know Mohamed, and the way Salim performed Mohamed was so brilliant and inspiring for us to watch and be part of. 

AD: Did you treat the episode as completely separate, or did you take previous principles from The Crown and apply them to the cinematography?

AG: No, I think you always have to apply some sort of a style that you are very familiar with. That’s only the starting point for scenes covering the royal family. We shouldn’t challenge that. Of course, the show needs to evolve— we’re not going to be shooting season five like we shot season one, which was a little bit more classic, a little bit more period-like, a little bit warmer. Now it’s a bit more contemporary, so we’re using longer lenses even for the royal family. But it hasn’t evolved in how I treat the lighting and the color palette: that should still feel familiar to the audience. But then there’s the other story, Mohamed’s, that starts on a flashback. So that gives us a little more freedom to be more inventive, to try something that still should belong to the same visual realm but with a little bit more freshness, let’s say.

We start in Alexandria with the young Mohamed, and it’s a little bit warmer. But because his goal in life is to become a British gentleman. Little by little, the Mohamed side of the story slowly turns more into the familiar Crown look. So, it’s almost like us trying to help him to blend in, although we know he never was able to. He hires the same valet that the king used to have, and then during that beautiful montage, Mohamed is taught by the valet how to behave—taught all the etiquette and rules, how to pour your tea, how to eat, how to dress. Then little by little, especially during that montage, the styles start to blend and be more or less the same, and then they carry on until the end, being more like The Crown that we know.

We discuss these ideas during prep and ask, ‘What should we bring to this episode that should be specific to this episode?’ I think the flashbacks are a good way to start because you already approach that with a little more freedom. I’m not saying that we will go crazily handheld and shaky just because it’s a flashback, but it gives us some freedom. Especially after doing four seasons, rejoining on season five, knowing that it’s going be a shorter one for me—I wanted to offer something that is just a little less conventional, a little less expected in a way. But honestly, when I watched the episode, it stood out, but it still belongs to The Crown.

We do love the idea of people starting to watch the episode, thinking or asking, ‘Is this really The Crown? 

Why am I watching these guys playing football?’ Right? But then, you also want to bring the audience back into the show to something they know and feel comfortable with—with familiar characters. So you have to intercut and not spend too much time with Mohamed at the beginning because then you might lose the audience because they want to see the queen, especially in season five, where there’s a new cast and a new queen. So you need to eventually just go back to the royal family and start a proper Crown episode. But the introduction, the pre-title sequence, is almost like a little film.

AD: As you mentioned, with The Crown, you have four or five seasons to develop a palette, whereas, in this case, you have one episode that has to essentially span someone’s entire life. How did you condense these visual elements and still make it flow? That’s a lot for one hour of television.

AG: It’s funny because we usually also shoot much more than you see on screen, sadly. So if the episode was 65 minutes long— it’s 52— but if it was 65 minutes, the timeline could be slightly more extended. A few scenes that never made the cut were also very beautiful and on the Mohamed side of the story. But it’s funny because it’s still an hour show.

I think that’s much more challenging for the writers and editors, to be honest than it is for me. I can probably approach almost every scene individually. While I always have to consider the scene before and the scene after in terms of continuity and style, one of the privileges of what we do is you can more or less be obsessed and specific about what you’re doing that day or those two days where you’re shooting that specific sequence. That’s a lot of fun. I don’t engage too much, to be honest, on watching assemblies, the first cuts, when they first come out because I know they’re going to be chopped anyway. And I love every single scene we do. It’s a little too painful to watch the first cut and realize, ‘Where is that night scene? Where’s the beautiful moment between Mohamed and Dodi?’ I have a bad feeling about it, but it’s part of what we do. But you have to produce a little bit more ‘fat,’ as we call it, so that you can adjust it. The Crown is a very big show that allows directors and editors to have a cutting period. Once you finish a block, like how I shot “Mou Mou” and “Decommissioned,” the season five finale, Alex got his cutting period, something like eight weeks. And then, after eight weeks, maybe we shoot additional scenes to help with fluidity. So we always go back and reshoot additional beats for almost every single episode. There are ways to shape and reshape almost constantly when doing a big show like The Crown. But the first cuts are usually 70 minutes long, sometimes 75, and they must be cut to around 52.

AD: I was wondering if you could take a scene or a shot and break it down for me. It could be particularly special, something you’re proud of, or something deceptively simple but was very complex to crack.

AG: I always find it exciting, but also tricky, to have big party scenes. There’s that scene where Mohamed buys the Ritz, and there’s that first night where the French lady is singing, and it’s the first time he sees Sydney Johnson [Jude Akuwudike], and he asks Dodi to fire the guy, and it’s incredibly openly racist because he doesn’t want the guy there just because he’s Black. And then he regrets it, and he rehires the guy. There’s a ball scene with singers singing, guests, and lights where everybody still has to look beautiful, and there are 200 extras, and you’re only going to have 10 hours to shoot it. Those days are always a bit more tense to me because they’re complex and require a lot of attention and preparation. So, for a 10-hour shoot, you’ll probably prep for 20 hours. You have to make sure you have all your lights in place. You have a strategy; you know where you’re supposed to start from. And then you have to know the progression during the day: where you want to be when you wrap, the essential shots, the ones you cannot miss under any circumstance. So those days are more demanding in terms of attention, speed, and coverage. I’m not going to say they are incredibly difficult because I’ve done a few, but those days always give me a little bit more anxiety. I’m very used to doing long dialogue scenes around tables.  

On season six, which we just finished, we had Stephen Daldry returning to direct the series finale. He’s a theater man, and how he sees the space is different; it’s more theatrical. The way he plays with his choreography, as we say, or how much the actors move during the scene, is always way more complex than you first think when you read the script. It requires a lot of attention, so you fully understand what he wants, and you can translate that to filmmaking. You ask, ‘How do you start,’ ‘How do you finish?’ and ‘What are the priorities? Are we starting on the wide shots and jumping into close-ups?’ For example, Christian, the German director I had on season six, insists on starting with close-ups, a kind of reverse engineering for us filmmakers. But I also feel like, ‘I’m in; I’m going to learn a different way of doing stuff, right?’ But it’s challenging. I have to think ahead. So, I have to think, ‘If I was starting on a wide shot and then jumping into close-ups, what would be my strategy?’ So, I have to think ahead and then think backward again and start with close-ups. Even when you’re doing a show you know so well, and you’ve done for years and years, it’s always challenging because you’re dealing with different creative minds, you’re dealing with weather, you’re dealing with location restrictions or actors’ restrictions or time.

That’s why I am still very excited about what I do—I always find it difficult. I’m never relaxed when I’m working. It’s very demanding in terms of how to please the main storyteller, the director. Because I am a strong collaborator, but I am a collaborator. You have to listen first, then translate, and turn that into action into a strategy you share with your crew. It’s very demanding, mentally and physically.

AD: You began our interview talking about how life-changing The Crown has been for you. Now that it’s over, how do you feel looking back? How has it changed the way you might approach projects in the future?

AG: I’m more used to the size of projects like The Crown. So there are fewer concerns about, ‘Do I know how to do this?’ I feel much more confident about my knowledge and experience on big shows. It has completely changed my life. When I was first nominated for an Emmy and didn’t win, I learned it’s not about winning. It’s about the attention you get because you’re a nominee and the second nomination I won. So, you feel like, ‘This is absolutely amazing .’And, you get the attention again. There are a lot of things you learn. I think one of the privileges of working on a show for so long is the bond, the friendship, and how much more efficient and pleasant the communication gets between departments, between artists. My relationship with the production designer was the best possible because we did this for eight years together. My gaffer was the same for eight years. We got technological advances, especially in terms of lighting. We grew up together throughout six seasons, changing from filament and tungsten sources to LED sources. Maybe 10% of my sources were LED sources in season one, and now it’s probably 80%. It’s a massive kind of technological transition. We kept learning and testing equipment.  

For me, the length of a project is really interesting because you develop a methodology; you develop specific ways of working with different crews from SFX to makeup, from costume to production design. I want to get involved in every possible aspect of production, especially during my prep. I want to talk to the costume designer, and I want to talk to the makeup artists so that we make one team, not a cluster of different professionals that work together but never eat together and never go out together. The Crown has become a massive family where everybody’s friends with everybody. That, for me, is one of the best personal gains because you’re working and living with friends. That only happens if you commit to a series with more than one season. Of course, feature films have a different nature, and I love doing them, but they’re much shorter. What TV series offer us is very interesting in developing a methodology and understanding who’s who and how to work with this person and that person. I also had the privilege to work with probably eight different directors throughout six seasons. I met people I had never worked with before, and I got along well with them and still go out with them. I don’t remember having had a bad day on The Crown. It’s always a challenge, and it’s always exciting. And if you’re feeling insecure for some reason, someone will give you a little bit of information that you didn’t have or a little bit of support in terms of, ‘I know you need time.’ We had the best first assistant directors working on The Crown; they always adapt and listen to your concerns. It’s just a privilege that I’m going to miss. 

AD: What’s so great about “Mou Mou,” and I’m curious if you agree, is I think it represents everything The Crown does best—the acting, the mystery of it, the visuals, the world-building, just what you all were able to accomplish. If I were to pick an episode of The Crown for someone to watch, “Mou Mou” would be a top contender because I think it just hooks you into what the show represents so well. 

AG:  Oh, wow. Thank you. That’s interesting. I’m going to use that. Well, thank you. Anything I say now sounds pretentious, but season six is coming strong. I hope the love remains and the people receive this last season in the best way. Because it’s coming strong, and the finale is an amazing episode. 

Episodes three and four, which I did around Diana’s last days, are just amazing. So let’s see.

The Crown is streaming on Netflix.