Ripley is an unusual show for many reasons, but chief among them might be its astounding visual command. All eight episodes of Netflix’s limited series, adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s iconic novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, are directed by writer and creator Steven Zaillian, and they’re all lensed by cinematographer Robert Elswit. This singular vision gives Ripley both an impressive aesthetic cohesion and a radical kind of ambition. The camerawork and lighting are playful, risky, curious, and endlessly surprising—not to mention rather gorgeous.

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Neither Elswit nor Zaillian has done much work in TV outside of their previous collaboration, the Emmy-winning HBO hit The Night Of. (Elswit is known for lensing films helmed by Paul Thomas Anderson, including his Oscar-winning work on There Will Be Blood, while Zaillian is a five-time Oscar-nominated screenwriter, winning once for Schindler’s List.) Their Ripley follows the events of the book more closely than Anthony Minghella’s Oscar-nominated 1999 film, The Talented Mr. Ripley—in part because it has nearly eight hours of storytelling space. We meet Andrew Scott’s enigmatic grifter in ’50s New York before he’s tapped to find the wealthy scion Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn) and his girlfriend, Marge (Dakota Fanning), as they live out an escapist fantasy on the sun-dappled beaches of Italy. What follows is a dizzying saga of lust, murder, impersonation, and deception, all captured in radiant black-and-white. 

“I knew from the beginning that I wanted to have this high contrast film-noir style,” Zaillian says. “We didn’t want to do anything that was familiar to us… I didn’t want to make a pretty travelogue.”

With the show now streaming on Netflix, Zaillian and Elswit joined Vanity Fair for a comprehensive breakdown of Ripley’s visual storytelling. The pair pulled over a dozen shots and frames from Ripley that reflect some of their major goals and themes behind the camera, which contribute to its singular and immersive feel. These images and conversation cover all eight episodes, so while plot details are kept to a minimum, light spoilers follow.

Robert Elswit: Andrew has such an expressive face. It dominates the series in a way. In all the different lighting setups where we did medium close-ups and tight close-ups, it was always fun to find an interesting way of creating contrast and shadows on his face. He was an inspiration to me all the way through.

Steven Zaillian: I was often, as you know, trying to put people in half light, and him in particular. And that’s why I would sometimes object to being out on a bright sunny day. [Laughs] This was something that we actually shot in New York in a bar. Right from the beginning of the story, we wanted to, in a sense, be in Tom’s head, be close to Tom as much as we could. He’s in every scene, I think, up until the 6th episode. We’re with him, we’re part of him, and that’s the idea of this shot.

With Dakota, this is in Italy at the police station. And again, it’s this hot, bright contrast between light and dark. I didn’t know what to do with her hair because she has, naturally, this long blonde hair. My wife said, “Why don’t you look at some pictures of Grace Kelly,” and that’s where this hairdo came from. She wears it a lot in the show. It’s the kind of shot that you can imagine taking place in a detective story and a film noir film, the woman at his office. It was always important to shoot singles on her. It was important to see the moments where she’s looking at Tom when he’s not looking at her—she is so expressive in a subtle way. She’s suspicious of him right away.

Zaillian: And this is what I call our Nosferatu shot. This wasn’t really planned. That shadow was a surprise to me when I saw it. It wasn’t like, “Oh, let’s do a shot with a big Nosferatu shadow on the wall,” but that’s how [Robert] set up the lights. He’s a master of light, and this was so perfect for this location and this part of the story. This figure is going up and down these stairs, in a particularly noir-ish, suspense-type framework.

Zaillian: This particular scene is on the Amalfi Coast. It’s hard to make a beach look ominous. It’s ocean and sand on a sunny day. I saw a photograph of a couple on a beach in a pose similar to this. It wasn’t as high an angle shot, but it was a shot from above them like somebody was spying on them. I think the costume designers gave it to me as a reference for clothes, but it was also a reference, unintentionally, for behavior and this shot. I just put the camera up another 20 feet and shot down as our introduction to Dickie and Marge. This is the first time that you see them. And the water is lapping up to them, and then the shadow falls across them, which is Tom Ripley walking by.

Elswit: We almost always tried to avoid direct sunlight, and every once in a while we got stuck outdoors. It just happened to be, I thought, a lucky accident, but Tom just walked and threw his shadow across them, which is such a self-consciously, old-fashioned black-and-white thing to do. It really felt right for that scene. We did some other shots from the crane, but it really wasn’t anything like this.

Zaillian: It seemed like everywhere we went there were stairs. There’s a lot of stairs in Italy. And this is one that’s leading down to our morgue that [production designer] David Gropman made, showing our detective go down. When David Gropman and I first found the town and we were scouting it, we basically ran out of breath. That ended up in the story, with Ripley running out of breath.

The outside shot was San Felice, which is an incredible architectural building in Naples. We shot quite a bit here because it has a lot of different areas. It also has stairs. And I was up on those stairs at one point looking down, and this was what I saw after we had already started shooting. After we had actually already finished the scene, I said, “Let’s just do one more and let’s go up there and get one more shot,” and that’s this one. I love it: It’s almost like these stones are reptilian.

Zaillian: This was a lucky find at the location we were shooting at. We see Ripley go up and down a different set of stairs when he’s in this hotel. In this case, he’s supposed to be escaping the hotel, and there was really no way for him to escape down the main stairs. I asked if they had any back stairs, and to my surprise, this was their back stairs. There’s only one way to appreciate this staircase, and that’s when you get low and you shoot up. It becomes this incredible geometric composition. This was the last scene that we were shooting there, and we didn’t even know that staircase existed until that day that we shot it.

Zaillian: And then this is our famous elevator. There’s a lot of action that takes place in this elevator. It’s a a symbol of dread for Tom when people come up in this elevator: He doesn’t want any visitors, but if an elevator is going to go all the way to the top floor, he knows it’s coming to see him. It’s an important character, in a way, and it was a very important location for us. We shot it, basically, every way you could; from inside, from outside, from low, from high. But I had something very specific in my mind, and it was not this. [Laughs] We reached a point where we didn’t find anything else, and I started to embrace this and started to see ways of shooting this location in a way that could be really fascinating, with this open staircase.

Elswit: The biggest challenge with really just the amount of time. To try and make it look interesting at night was a little tricky, because we were relatively restricted as to where we could put stuff and how we could do it. But I think we ended up doing okay. The hardest time I had was when Tom carried [a body] down the stairs through the front entrance. It was the one time where I did some outlandish film-noir-style, aiming a light at somebody and throwing a giant shadow on the wall sort of thing.

Zaillian: When I was talking about the half lighting, it’s not to be precious about it, but just that he’s two people almost all the time. Then this was a lucky discovery of a statue that just happened to be where we were shooting. That was in Naples, on the circular road where we drop Tom off in the second episode.

This next one is very similar, in my mind, to the shot in the bar where Tom is in foreground. He’s in focus; the person who’s spying on him is in the background out of focus. What I love about it too is that we’re indoors and the other character, Carlo, is outdoors. He’s lit up and Tom isn’t. Tom is closest to us and he’s in total silhouette: You know exactly what he’s thinking without seeing his eyes.

Zaillian: This is where Ripley discovers the Caravaggio.

Elswit: This is the Church of Naples. I guess it was deconsecrated, so they let us shoot it here. The sun is coming up. It’s actually hitting the ground, hitting the surface of the tile over on the left. But because the window was so bright, we used the silhouette in the reflection. We had some wonderful opportunities to have Ripley as a small subject, a silhouette against the background. And he does a lot of walking.

Zaillian: Some of these places are so magnificent that we were shooting in, and they are so grand, that the only way to show them is to have the figure be small and the place big. If he was really big in the foreground, you wouldn’t get a sense of the scale of this place. I don’t know if you had lights, Robert, or if you were augmenting the outside with any of your lights.

Elswit: All we did was augment the little naves, the cutouts in the sides left and right. It’s the natural indirect light coming through the window, and you can see the sunlight on the ground next to him. It was a perfect time of day to shoot this. A little earlier, the sunlight went right down the middle, but it was almost too much. It was like an explosion or something, whereas this was just right.

Zaillian: And then here’s Fisher Stevens, the banker. It’s not a rarely used location. This comes at a point in the story when the bankers are onto Ripley. This is really Tom’s imagination. It’s not meant to be reality; he imagines him in this place because he has been to this place himself. Again, we wanted it to be big, imposing. It felt like one of the churches that he visited. What do you have here, Robert, in the bank? I think you’ve got lights outside, right?

Elswit: We’re coming in through the windows. There’s one whole side of the building that’s next to another building, so we had to create the illusion that there was indirect, available light pounding under the windows on the left. On the right, it’s real. And of course, he’s lit in the foreground, and we have little accents in various places. This might have been our biggest lighting setup in New York. But God, what a great space. I think they used it in John Wick as well. It feels very much like the cathedral that we see later through Italy. That is an amazing thing.

Zaillian: We shot for the first couple of weeks on a stage. This was our first day out in Rome, like, two weeks after we started shooting. And of course, it’s a night shoot. [Laughs] And I remember we didn’t have a lot of time. We were rushing towards the end. But Robert, I have to say, you are incredible. When I first saw this, I just thought, “Wow.”

Elswit: We picked a great place to do this. Backlight and water are as old as movies, I think. [Laughs] You’re very lucky to find a location where you can take advantage of it, and we did. You get the ground wet, get a big light up high, far away. And Atrani had really great texture. The cobblestones, the buildings themselves, everything else. That’s what you get in black-and-white—texture. That’s just the great example of something that’s been done since the 1920s, and so I’m glad we were able to do it. It’s wonderful. It doesn’t look nearly as interesting, by the way, in color, it just doesn’t.

Elswit: [Filming on] Via Appia was quite a challenge, maybe our biggest challenge. There’s no street light; there’s nothing to augment. I hang these big LED boxes in locations like this. That’s what’s lighting the tops of the trees. There’s a crane holding a giant light over this area, and it lights the ground beautifully, but it tends to make the trees a little too bright. We were in a timing thing and I was saying, “Can I make the trees blend more…” And he goes, “No, no, no, no. That’s what makes it feel like a Renaissance painting, something that would have been done in the 16th century by someone painting this background. They would’ve exaggerated the moonlight on the trees.”

It was the first time I thought about it that way. It’s a very artificial lighting setup, but in keeping with the thematic ideas about the design, Tom falls in love with these paintings. Tom falls in love with that part of Rome: the architecture, the painting, the music, the light, the language, everything. There are so many things we’d seen in museums that tried to convey what night looked like. When we had a chance we, tried to create a kind of chiaroscuro, a feeling of very strong shadows and very strong highlights. I kept thinking while we were shooting, “I’ll fix all this later.” And we didn’t fix any of it.

Zaillian: This is probably a little more of my obsession than Rob’s.

Elswit: Yes, absolutely. I don’t get these at all. I don’t know what this is. It’s wonderful. I just never would have found these.

Zaillian: I’m always wandering around. You can look at something head-on; you can look at it from behind; you can look at it from the next room. I often try to shoot things where we’re an observer in the next room looking through a doorway. I like the way it looks and the way it feels like we’re spying on people. I’ll wander around wherever we’re shooting, and sometimes luck it out and find a nice spot like these. This New York post office, it looks wildly different on the other side. Like night and day.

Elswit: There’s no storytelling element involved here. It’s just a marvelously unusual, interesting way of seeing that space and seeing him in there and looking at him. I think it has to do also with Ripley’s fastidious nature. All the typing he does, all the writing he does, all the careful massaging of his various con ideas that are going into all this—it all feels like this. He’s that guy. Watching him do things surreptitiously is something that Steve brought to the series all the time, every time. It’s never a straight-up shot of Tom doing anything, it’s always a sneaky way of getting to look at him.

This interview has been edited and condensed.