Reading between the lines. If you’re watching the Netflix adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley, you might be wondering why Ripley is filmed in black and white. The way that it’s filmed is actually a tribute to the original book.
The show portrays Tom Ripley as a grifter scraping by in early 1960s New York, is hired by a wealthy man to travel to Italy to try to convince his vagabond son to return home. Tom’s acceptance of the job is the first step into a complex life of deceit, fraud, and murder. The drama series is based on Patricia Highsmith’s bestselling Tom Ripley novels.
“People have a lot of preconceptions about Tom Ripley,” Andrew Scott said about his character to Netflix’s Tudum. “So it’s my job, I suppose in some ways, to ignore all that and try to create our own particular version of it.”
Writer-director Steven Zaillian had a specific vision for the Netflix show that largely differs from other adaptations of Patricia Highsmith’s famous novel The Talented Mr. Ripley—it’s shot entirely in monochrome. So why is Ripley shot in black and white? Read more to find out.
Why is Ripley in black and white?
Ripley is in black and white because Zaillian thought it would fit Patricia Highsmith’s original vision of the novel. “The edition of the Ripley book I had on my desk had an evocative black-and-white photograph on the cover,” he told Vanity Fair. “As I was writing, I held that image in my mind. Black and white fits this story—and it’s gorgeous.”
The Talented Mr. Ripley has many adaptations such as the 1999 movie starring Matt Damon which uses warm tones to evoke the Italian flair, but Zaillian had a different outlook. “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.”
“I also felt that this story — the one that she told, the one that I wanted to tell — was quite sinister and quite dark,” he added. “I just couldn’t imagine that taking place in a beautiful Italian setting with bright blue skies and colourful outfits and things like that.”
In the interview, cinematographer Robert Elswit talked about how they were challenged to reimagine different scenes and lighting. “Andrew has such an expressive face,” he praised the actor. “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.”
Zaillian had similar thoughts, “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.”
Meanwhile, in an interview with IndieWire, Andrew Scott was infatuated with the idea of the black and white cinema and how it relates to the audience. “I think the great achievement of this version of the story is how it teaches the audience to watch the show,” Scott said. “We live in an age of television — not just television but in social media — where you have to say everything really quickly, and you have to say it in 15 characters or less, and you have to get on with it, people have a great obsession with that. But when you’re reading a novel, you can take real pleasure in the description of something over five or six pages. What I love is that sometimes the pacing can actually be very quick, but sometimes we can be really immersed in something. I think that’s a real real pleasure for the audience. And so, knowing that the black and white nature of cinematography marries in some way with the pacing and the tone of the show, also means that it allows us as actors just to be.”
