Cinematographer Richard Rutkowski on Upending Conventional Noir in Apple TV’s ‘Sugar’

Over Cinematographer Richard Rutkowski more than two decade career on film and TV, he has taken on some unique projects (Lights Out, The Americans, and Masters of the Air, just to name a few), but I don’t know that any film or show the veteran shooter has worked on is quite as unusual as Apple TV’s Sugar. Starring Colin Farrell and Amy Ryan in a modern day noir that doesn’t just nod to classic films of the genre, it actually inserts portions of scenes from those films into the show. It’s a bold endeavor to say the least, but one that works with great aplomb. Rutkowski, who shot episodes 3, 4, and 7, dove into the experimental nature of the show bringing in his own vision (particularly in the shooting of a film within a film during the series), using different types of cameras, film stock, and shadings. It’s bold work, and here Rutkowski does a deep dive with me on how he did it and the choices he and the crew made to create one of the most unconventional “missing person” shows you’ve ever seen.

AWARDS DAILY: With Sugar what you have is this modern day film noir, that is homaging film noirs as it’s going along, but still taking its main story seriously. The Colin Farrell character is such a lover of movies, it creates this space where you can add these classic references visually. The storytelling is terrific, but the real mystery of the show is Sugar, the guy. You’re telling a story about a guy who maybe doesn’t even entirely understand himself. 

RICHARD RUTKOWSKI: Correct. As we were saying while we were making it and certainly since seeing the finished episodes, it’s very meta. It’s sort of a semiologist’s dream that you have a lead character whose own identity is entwined with his search for others. Inevitably, for us the audience, the discovery of him is as trenchant a point to the show as his discovery of a mystery, which in the end has its own allegiances to previous film noir staples, and even color noir staples, like Chinatown, or The Grifters, or things like that. I’m glad you picked up on all that. I loved meeting and interacting and doing some of the filming for the blocks of (Director) Fernando Meirelles, a wonderful human, and his cinematographer (César Charlone) who came up from Brazil. I was able to sort of suggest and find the crew that worked out for all of them and the system of getting the gear together. 

AWARDS DAILY: What the show does is interweave these clips from these other classic films. Did it give you any pause, because there’s a real risk of a comparison factor when you’re having Humphrey Bogart or Jack Nicholson interspersed. Did that make you nervous at all? 

RICHARD RUTKOWSKI: In the beginning of how we created the show, it wasn’t known that there were going to be such explicit cuts to classic noirs. We knew we were sourcing visually and tone-wise from those films. I’m not sure when it became apparent that they were going to actually cut in scenes from Mike Hammer or something like that, although it made sense because we were treating LA very much as a character in the way that it becomes a character in those films. The idea that we were referencing storylines that had a lot to do with classic noir and antecedent stories is always worrisome. You want to hold up your end of that kind of storytelling. You want the technique to shine in equal measure. And all I can say is, while that would have given me hesitation if they told me we’re literally going to cut in these classic films to your work, it wasn’t there for me to worry so much at the time.

When we did have to make a kind of throwback piece, an actual period piece within our story, we made Winds of Change, this four minute reel, to show on the screen–a Lorraine Everly tribute film. We had so much fun doing it. We really enjoyed it. A lot of us had been young people in the film business when it was all shot on film, when a Panavision camera and C series lenses were not uncommon. Now they are uncommon, for better or worse. Going to the lab and waiting for your dailies to come out is not typical now. But, a lot of us had had that experience and really loved it. So, I would say there was actually a great deal of warmth and open embrace of the legacies we were perpetuating with our storytelling. If there was something that gave me pause, it was to be working with Colin—who I first worked with on Phone Booth many years back, and also James Cromwell. That was incredible. L.A. Confidential was a film I’d seen three or four times in the theater. I was so impressed by Dante Spinotti’s work on it. It’s just a masterful film in every respect. So to have the villain from that film show up in a dark role in ours was just a thrill. All of the actors were great. So if there was something that brought me pause, it was to have heroes among the cast. 

AWARDS DAILY: Speaking of Farrell, a couple years ago, he had one of the greatest years any actor has ever had in their career. Then to see him in this sort of meta film noir zone, he does such a wonderful job of underplaying his character. When you say that you were nervous working with him, I’m also wondering what it was like to work with him in the sense that he seemed to have an understanding that he didn’t have to do too much as far as emoting.

RICHARD RUTKOWSKI: That’s a tribute to his true talent, which is not doing too much on screen while making his character a very solid and relatively quietly spoken character. He was doing a lot. I think the guy barely slept. He was looking at the scripts. He was thinking of things. He was really producing in a hands-on way, and to the better for the most part. He understood the character and he understood the draw. He also had a great knowledge of camera. He really knew how to work the camera in ways that made things that were seemingly going to be difficult much easier. For example, in episode seven, he and Amy Ryan go into the house of one of the henchmen, and they don’t know what they’re going to find there. It’s a simple sequence, so we did it relatively quickly, obviously.

But the reason we were able to do it quickly is, Mr. Farrell and Ms. Ryan were so camera aware that they knew how to pace out their movements like a dance through the little hallway and into different rooms and seeing different things and then they made a discovery. He choreographs with a camera beautifully. He’s also inventive. In the opening of episode three where he’s on the chair, having the twitch, observing the reflections of water in the ceiling, that was an idea he brought in that morning. I was like yes, that’s a great idea! And meanwhile, the calculator in my head is going okay, how are we going to get this done? What do we have at hand? I turned to special effects for water, grip for some mirror fragments, and created the classic reflecting water effect in a little pool off the side of the set and kicked it up into the ceiling and it worked. They obviously loved the metaphor of it for the beginning of the show. 

AWARDS DAILY: I have to ask, how was Wiley, the dog to work with? He’s a key part of the show, because the dog represents a part of Sugar’s personality and his need to save things. 

RICHARD RUTKOWSKI: Yes. The dog was fantastic. The dog was fantastically trained, fantastically managed. A sweetheart animal, and the dog was a pro. Did the dog sometimes want to jump out of the Corvette? Yes. The dog wasn’t always thrilled to be stuck in the Corvette in the sun. It’s funny how when you go on a set sometimes, and everybody’s out in the full sun, working away, and you watch as the animals find the shade, and get underneath, and put their bellies to the ground, and you’re like ah, yes, even they know this is probably not the way to spend the whole day. (Laughs). All the actors worked very well with the animal, and when the animal was not needed, the animal was not around. We took the animal off set and brought it in for the shots. And it quite often did exactly what we wished of it. There’s one shot, actually, early on in four where Colin brings his Corvette back to the hotel. He and the dog walk the path, and then the dog sees Melanie (Amy Ryan), and we just pan with the dog over to her, like it just choreographed the shot for us. It was fantastic. So there was a lot of that with the dog. Honestly, when it needed to put its head in its paws and do a kind of inquisitive work, it was capable of doing it. Thank God. (Laughs).

AWARDS DAILY: Speaking of the Corvette, you shoot the car in an almost  fetishistic way. I imagine it’s not hard to do. I don’t know how else you shoot that car. That car is a beautiful piece of machinery. 

RICHARD RUTKOWSKI: The car is very beautiful, although I think that they had originally wanted the same Corvette that Mike Hammer drives in the Mike Hammer films. But, all those cars have a slight drawback in that their frames are not really metal. Their frames are, for the most part, a kind of plastic piece. They don’t have a great deal of structural integrity around the frame, so we couldn’t do traditional hood mounts or side mounts. The car wouldn’t really have handled it. So we wound up either handheld inside the car filming directly from the passenger seat to the driver or making small mounts of little iphone shots mounted around the vehicle or carrying it on a low loader process vehicle. That meant you had the whole caravan of safety vehicles and cars that were yours that were surrounding the trailer and in the trailer, and it complicates the photography a little bit compared to what we’re used to doing now. But it was fun to work with a Corvette in the sun in Los Angeles and see those frames and especially a convertible, just a gorgeous, gorgeous look. I’m proud of the work we did on our episode. César also did beautiful work with the Corvette on his. 

AWARDS DAILY: When the show begins, in the title scene sequence, it’s slightly out of focus to the point where you start thinking is something wrong with my television. Of course the rest of the show is very much in focus, but the color palette is kind of interesting to me. You don’t leave out the brightness of Hollywood, but you also bring in some different shading to show the darkness of the noir theme. 

RICHARD RUTKOWSKI: César Charlone got in on creating a lot early on, making a LUT early on that wound up being called K Lady. Working with his approach with K Lady and DIT Kyle, Kyle Herbstern is very talented, we kind of settled on this idea of exteriors having an extra brightness to reflect that it’s LA and it’s going to be bright highlights, but they have a beautiful roll off at the shoulders, so it’s trying to emulate the film roll off and overexposure and that there wouldn’t be primary colors. You really would not see a primary. So all the colors are sort of tweaked off of primaries a bit, and you don’t really have an LA blue sky. You have something slightly different. We introduced a kind of gray green sometimes, and we also pull back on saturation, selectively. LA is so saturated already, so even though we pulled back slightly on saturation, it still looks plenty colorful.

We have some beautiful sunsets and sunrise shots and things like that. So we really did try and explore the location in terms of giving the work a lot of context. We also embraced off color lighting, so sometimes a color balance on a lamp would be off what you would normally use, and tried to work with it aesthetically, which is very much the thing César and Fernando had done in their movies. I remember talking to them about The Constant Gardener and saying oh, the color palette, the saturation levels in that film were so inspiring to me, it’s wonderful. They were very humbled about it, but I was direct with them that between the color palette of The Grifters, the color palette of L.A. Confidential, and even going back to Altman’s The Long Goodbye, I was trying to help the work slide into this slipstream of modern noir in Los Angeles and all of the undertones of that. You’ll notice in our episodes three and four, we introduced the lower world elements. In one and two you’re dealing mostly with the higher end of Jonathan Siegel and the fancy mansion of the Siegel world and people in suits and people in nice dresses, but there’s a little more of the introduction of the lower end characters and their sort of deviance and the violence.

AWARDS DAILY: The confrontation scene that takes place in episode three, where Farrell pretends to be a parole officer. It seemed like that scene could be very complex to shoot because there’s a lot of people in a small space. You go outside and then you come back inside. And there’s even a little bit of comedic timing, Sugar gives a guy a whack. 

RICHARD RUTKOWSKI: It was fun to shoot and we did not have all the day to shoot that one scene, which is a set, by the way. I’m very proud of how we merged the set with the exterior, with the hallways of a real building, with the escape out to a real alleyway. I was very happy with that integration visually. That’s something I hold myself to, is that people don’t look at something and say oh, now we’re on a set. In any case, the shots were in groupings. You had a couple singles here and there. Of course, you follow Colin as he does his song and dance in front of the criminals, but we couldn’t do endless singles. So it’s just coverage in groupings, respecting the sort of spine of the room. We knew that he was going to be entertaining in some way. We knew that the gag was the smoke effect up front, which we thought was going to be a great visual with these guys going into the smoke in the California street, and then he would dupe the guy and subdue him in the most efficient way. He was sort of like yes, I have a higher intelligence and I will take care of the situation with no one getting truly hurt in the most efficient way possible. That was the goal of the scene. We’d just seen him have that moment on the fire escape, so it had to be acknowledged that the stakes were suddenly elevated. Are they going to put their hand in a blender? Is Sugar going to be alright? And then when he comes in, it all happens rather quickly. 

AWARDS DAILY: There’s a couple of hand twitch scenes, the one in episode three, and then there’s what amounts to a panic attack that Sugar has before the confrontation. What I thought was interesting is how you seeded it, the twitch and then the full blown. I assume that was intentional, and when the twitch goes well beyond just a twitch, the impact is greater.

RICHARD RUTKOWSKI: Yeah, that’s exactly it. Then by the time we get to four, he’s been advised he has to see Dr. Vickers, and he’s busy trying to, once again, do a sort of entertainment of Dr. Vickers with the story about the movie The Thing. By the end of the scene, we realize oh, he really is touched and needs help. He just doesn’t want to admit it. You bring up the twitch and you bring up that he’s having these internal difficulties, apparently assuaged by this injection of a substance. Among his secrets is that he’s hiding his dependency on to keep him functional and he’s highly functional. There is a mystery like, well, why is he so functional? Why is he taking this? What does it mean when he doesn’t take it? What does it mean when he’s in that shower in episode two, and he’s trying to just have a shower and he becomes inundated with these images that are haunting them. It’s, dare I say it, good storytelling. 

AWARDS DAILY: There are a lot of closeups. I didn’t really notice it at first, because the show does go very broad and shows big scenes of Hollywood and so forth. I assume there’s two points to that, and tell me whether I’m right or wrong. You had some great faces to focus in on, is one. The close ups sometimes were so tight that there are moments where the person’s whole face wasn’t even in the scene. 

RICHARD RUTKOWSKI: There’s something I often call the landscape of the face. I’m a great believer in the traditional breakdown of the visual landscape, portrait, and still life. If you can claim to have found great versions of those three modalities within your visual storytelling, you’re going to win. People will come away and say I love watching that. It won’t necessarily connect perhaps to their brain, but I think landscape is so important. Just the concept of landscape and the concept of having context of the world portrayed in the ability to say that life and space and the structure of a landscape matter, even if it’s just for a few seconds before you get back into watching the people. Portrait, of course, is 90 percent of what we’re asked to do. Still life is very beautiful and very precise and very important. I think about great directors, Hitchcock, Coppola, Fincher. They have fantastic close ups of objects. They really linger on them, it’s not an insert. They’re there fully with their close ups of an object, because an object can be magical. An object can carry a lot of things in it. The ring that proves that you’re my sister, or the watch that proves that you’re my father, or the letterbox.

How many times have we seen in a show that people pull letters out of the letterbox? It has so much weight, and it’s so silently beautiful. It’s like the essence of silent cinematography that you focus on that object. You asked an interesting question. In four, there’s a sequence where Bernie comes home at dawn. We don’t know it yet, but he’s been out at the Malibu house with Melanie. He comes home, and rather than getting in bed with his wife, he goes to his desk and starts going through the old photos. And we’re suddenly realizing that there’s some undertone here in the Siegel family that hasn’t been unearthed yet. And then there’s this completely amazing front on close up of Dennis’ (Boutsikaris) face. I remember when we were lining it up, and I was like geez, should I shape this a little? Should I make one side darker? Should I shape the light from above or something? And I looked at him and I was like no, it’s just great. We’re setting up the light to be nice and soft and firm and right on him. We’re just up in his head. It really was kind of magic. I love that sequence. Then of course there’s a wide shot that shows him silhouetted against a plate glass window of the modern house overlooking the strip. I don’t honestly believe that you can produce a formulaic approach to photographing the face. Either you’re feeling it or you’re not. That was a moment when I was certainly feeling it. In a lot of the close ups of Amy Ryan and Colin, I just remember looking through the eyepieces and thinking, I’m just so lucky for that. Amy especially, an actress with a lot of integrity, and you can just read in her face a life. She was such a great choice for the sort of love interest/sparring partner for Sugar.

AWARDS DAILY: You had mentioned before, in episode four, the shooting of the film within the film, the premiere, and going back and using old school methods and techniques. 

RICHARD RUTKOWSKI: I felt a connection to its sort of meta nature and the idea that here we are making a movie about people involved in the movies in modern day Los Angeles and they’re looking backwards and they have a legacy of problems within the family. They have this child who is struggling, as many children do now with the digital age, trying to avoid too much bullying or stalking on her phone, and yet, we discover that her mother was the victim of something. All of this led me to believe that if we’re shooting in a real Warner movie palace down in Long Beach, and they have not one, but two intact working projectors, and they have the de-anamorphosizing lenses, they have the anamorphic element to show an anamorphic print, why don’t we just do that? I talked to the director, Adam, about it and he and the entire production was game. We wound up saving a bunch of money because we never had to have a visual effect at all in that whole scene of the movie theater presentation, and everyone got to watch the film and react to it simultaneously, and its projection was reflected with shiny boards or white cloth onto the faces of the onlookers. We even had a shot where it’s going through the gate of the projector. You can see the little pictures, one by one, as they’re moving through the gate of the projector. I have to think, like, this is very much what the show is about. It’s about the waking up to the magic of that art form and trying to bring it forward and make a new story. We just shot for like three hours, right in the back alley of our offices on the Paramount backlot. So, it’s very old school. That’s an alley we’ve seen in a number of shows and films.

We conceived of this scenario where the woman is a nightclub entertainer in the 50s, and she’s in neon light with a glamorous shiny dress, and everybody has a hair light and everybody has some sort of classical shape to their lighting and we lit it for film, which is a different lighting technique, and then we put rain and old cars in and everybody’s in a beautiful outfit. It was just an absolute ball, and it worked so well that it went immediately to photo cam, developed overnight, good negative report, please let’s cut it. They cut it quickly and then we did what’s called A roll only, so we attached the negative A to A, we don’t do a B, which made it a simpler process to make the print. Tom Foden, our production designer found that graphic of “The End,” attached it and put a fade out on it. It really was actually much easier than if it had all been done digitally, in my opinion. We had them take a three and a half or four minute section that was there, and we printed it to a release print roll. Then we just had ten seconds black, and then we printed it again, and then ten seconds black, and printed it again. So, if you’re filming with it and you didn’t get the whole shot the way you wanted it, you knew that a couple minutes later it would come back up and you’d be able to roll again. It wouldn’t interrupt our process of filming, and it reminded me what an efficient process actual physical film is and was. The negative is there, it’s a great record of what you did. It can mutate into lots of release formats, including a physical print, which we saw and projected.

AWARDS DAILY: There’s one point when somebody asks Sugar if he is a movie buff, and he says more like an addict. That is something I very much understand myself. I actually think what you did by shooting this movie within a movie makes the inserts actually more valuable than they might have been otherwise. They’re a piece. Did you kind of discover that afterwards?

RICHARD RUTKOWSKI: We knew we were going to use Polaroids because they’re part of the clues as to what’s really going on with Jonathan Siegel. We knew that the dress was going to be a clue, but the only difference was me being able to convince them that this method would be faster, cheaper, and ultimately more satisfying on our filming days. I was just so happy it worked out. To be honest, I’m now just thinking please, someone, let’s go make an anamorphic feature again on film. It’s quite enjoyable and you know who really loves it is the actors. The actors really love that feeling when you roll the camera, and you’re rolling film, it is their time and nothing moves besides what helps the actors with their shots.

AWARDS DAILY: When one of Davy’s victims reveals the level of depravity. There’s a lot of changing of the POV from one character to another. Obviously you always want to get expressions and reactions, but she’s laying out some heavy information at that point. There might’ve been a tendency to want to hold on her, and she’s doing great work. You have to hold on her face a little bit more, but you move around a bit to show more explicitly what’s going on in those three characters’ minds.

RICHARD RUTKOWSKI: You could look at it a number of different ways. People often ask me do you worry when you have to do a big action scene? Or do you worry when there’s lots of special effects that you’re going to have to have active on camera with things blowing up or things falling over. I often say that kind of kinetic action actually is rather easy, it solves itself. These are points in a timeline that I know we’re going to hit. We’re going to go down the elevator shaft with the camera, and we’re going to find the actor who we just lost for a second, and that’s all self-choreographed. It is very challenging to film a dramatic sit down scene, a two hander, a three hander, where you have to maintain the intensity of something that people are going through, experiencing or hearing for the first time, or saying for the first time. You don’t have a lot of stuff to hang that on. You have to go with what feels right photographically and let the actor own it.

We also knew that the style of the show, established in the first episode and continued, was to use jump cuts and to use off beat timing, where someone’s comment might get unfinished on the visual, but it’s finished on the soundtrack and moved forward into a jump cut. The third thing was to land her information onto Sugar in a way that gave you the impression that Sugar was taking this very seriously. This is reprehensible. Obviously there’s a connection to whatever happened to his sister, which we see towards the end of the season, but we needed to know how important this was for him to bear witness and be the solid center of a scene like that and that this woman is really struggling to actually say the words and get through it. Stylistically, we decided there would be no slow dolly. There won’t be a sort of master that’s putting her between the heads of the other person or something very traditional like that. We were going to choreograph, sometimes panning off the person who’s speaking to a person listening, and also give the audience some uncomfortable push into the edge of the frame–the short side as we call it. We just went for it. We filmed a lot of material very quickly with two cameras. We would sometimes move the camera during the photography. Two cameras are going, one camera is keeping a frame, but if I felt like this frame has kind of done its work, I would get down on a knee or put the camera lower on a box, on a sandbag. In the end, it’s effective. And it’s a collaboration. It starts on the page with great writing, and then the performers did a great job with it–Amy and Colin in the role of the observer and the witness. I think it’s a very good sequence. 

AWARDS DAILY: The sort of typewriter that you open on in episode seven is just a beautiful artifact, and the way you shot it lingers on the style of that instrument.

RICHARD RUTKOWSKI: It isn’t a typewriter. It’s a communication device with typewriter parts to it. It’s actually a carefully, beautifully fabricated prop, wonderfully designed, and very lovingly fabricated. It actually looks so cute. We had established that set during the polyglot party, as a place where Ruby downloads information. We hadn’t really fully understood what all this meant, but we had seen her start to send messages from that device after getting Sugar’s notebook. So now, things come to a deeper understanding of what’s happening. She’s having a conversation and that leads to a lot of change. We needed to give that some emphasis and I particularly wanted the plainness of that room to emphasize how stylistic and beautiful the device is. It’s a very plain room with the suggestion of some windows that maybe let in some daylight as it shifts from night to dawn. The main point, from my point of view is, you mentioned fetishistically looking at the Corvette, to me, it was just the typewriter there. You got a real kick off of how beautiful it could be. Kirby’s (as Ruby) is so beautiful, too. I was like whoa, what a treasure to light her. She was fantastic. 

AWARDS DAILY: The show does a lot of little things like where it seems to be, not showing off, not bending to convention, and doing things not just because you can, but more because if you do them, they add something. Like the sudden switch to black and white. 

RICHARD RUTKOWSKI: It’s a stylistic choice that started with Fernando and Cezar as well, and even before their first episode of this show, very much in the legacy of their work. The image is classic. The image can mutate. We can do things with it, and we’re allowed. If you want to flip the frame, change color tonality, we can zoom into the image and back, or something I often love to do is to find a way to reflect a lot of the action of the scene in reflection, and then someone who’s in the reflection comes into the frame. You essentially have like a shot against the wall with the glass of a car, or glass on a wall, or a fake glass window. But you have a way of incorporating that effect and then the actual person into the same shot. I love all of that, where the image is treated in a plastic manner. It’s a little bit like the artwork of Robert Rauschenberg. 

AWARDS DAILY: Would it be fair to say that this is perhaps the most unusual and pushing of the envelope of what people might expect in this type of show? If it would have been a more straightforward kind of thing, I think it would have worked, but the show doesn’t settle for the conventional. You have to be immensely proud of how it turned out. 

RICHARD RUTKOWSKI: I’m very proud of the show. I’m usually most excited about whatever I’m doing right now, which is that hunter’s instinct of looking for the next shot, looking for the next sequence, looking for the next idea that turns out cool. I recently got a kind of honky tonk country western bar scene where women are just getting drunk, and having fun dancing with two boys they just meet, and I was like this is great, you know. So, you kind of attach yourself to whatever you’re most involved in at the time. I’ve done a number of things, in both the traditional film world and also the arts that have been interesting, unique, sometimes even experimental. That’s what I like, when I get to bring something into a format that I haven’t seen there before. I get to bring a shot that I’ve just never seen into a format that people have expectations of, but then it can be subverted. Filming and now streaming cinema, however you want to call it, is an amazing, powerful, storytelling device, because once you’ve done the groundwork of showing people that your language is solid, that your vocabulary is clear, the bus door will open, they’ll get on, they’ll put their quarter or their metro card in, they’ll go and they’ll take a seat. The bus will pull away from the curb, and then they can go anywhere. I can now, outside the windows of this container that we’ve created for the story, take you to any place you can imagine. 

AWARDS DAILY: You used the word subversion, and I think Sugar is very much a subversion of what you might have expected.

RICHARD RUTKOWSKI: Yeah. I think about the swimming pool sequence at the end of three and the house. We were beset by a storm at that moment, but the sequence comes out beautiful. It’s because I had the support of the production and a great director, and then collaboration with such fine actors that you could say let’s try this, and instead of people looking sideways like, have you lost it, they’re like, yeah! Or they show up in the car and there’s two other cameras literally at their knees, staring up at them, and they’re like oh, yeah, we’re on that show. I did have a great time. It was nice to be in Los Angeles working with friends. Some of the crew were new to me, but some of the crew I met twenty years before, and we’ve worked on little films in our history, and it was sort of fun to go onto a back lot doing a production for Apple and able to say we’d like to do this on anamorphic film, but we want to do this other sequence on an iPhone, and another on an RXO–essentially this GoPro.

I’ll bring up just the sequence in the movie theater, which really centers on Sugar following Melanie, and then he gets into the projection booth and there’s that sort of elegy to film moment with the projectionist, and then there it is, the array of security cameras. We didn’t have that much time, so the way we solved that is that I was hiding security cameras in every scene. I was putting little devices to record, and of course there are specific ones, because you have to see Bernie encounter Melanie. You have to see him walking down the stairs, and a number of things have to do with those cameras. But a lot of it was just like up in the corner, behind James Cromwell while he’s encountering Sugar. I just knew that kind of mixed medium, that kind of, again, plasticness with the visual, would have an impact. You could say oh, this is a great storytelling technique. Look, such an observant guy who’s watching a movie, could be watching security cameras in the projection booth, and he could be watching the movie from the projection booth while he’s conducting the business of solving the riddle of what was in those dreams. Loved it. Totally loved it.