Interview by Marcello Montarsi, CCS
We speak with Luca Ciuti, CCS, one of the cinematographers establishing themselves at the forefront of Italian film and television. In February 2026, on the occasion of the Winter Olympics, Luca served as director of photography on a film tied to the Games — bringing his vision to its visual and photographic language. Let’s start with a classic, but unavoidable question… Would you like to tell us about your relationship with the director Giorgio Testi? You both attended the Centro Sperimentale together and are friends…
Giorgio studied sound at the Centro Sperimentale, not directing — he came to directing later. Ours is a very close personal relationship; we’ve been friends for many years, and that makes the work easier. He is clear and determined about what he wants, yet at the same time he trusts my choices. One distinctive aspect of his background is his deep connection with music: he has worked extensively in that world, particularly on live projects. Live production is a demanding training ground — when you’re managing 15 cameras at once, with major artists and a large organisational machine around you, you learn to solve complex problems fast. That background has a strong influence on the way Giorgio works. He is a difficult director to pin down: he values spontaneity and a certain creative freedom, which isn’t always easy to navigate. On this project, for instance, working in a completely spontaneous way wasn’t possible — we had fairly tight constraints tied to the location, to the client, the Olympic organisation, and to the creative director, who effectively functioned as a showrunner would on a television series. She had a say in the directing choices, so there was a process of mediation and negotiation on several fronts. On top of that, many of the people involved came from outside the world of cinema: the story had been written by them, and it was then our job to translate it into images.
Did you develop the visual concept together? And how did you arrive at the film’s visual language — the shooting style that carries the whole narrative?
From a cinematographic standpoint, I had complete freedom to do what I felt was right. That comes from the relationship we have built over the years. Giorgio tends to give me broad indications, a few fixed points, but he never goes into detail about lighting or visual style. For instance, he said to me: “Remember that in the first part we’re in a backstage area.” In reality, we were shooting inside the Arena di Verona, where nothing really resembled a backstage. So I came up with the idea of bringing some lights into the frame — moving lights, as if spilling in from the stage. At certain moments
could be glimpsed in the background, giving the impression of a living, breathing environment. It was a solution I proposed knowing it would speak to his sensibility. With another director, I might not have made the same suggestion. A separate issue concerned the route through the Arena’s underground spaces. Initially, the plan was to shoot in a storage area of the Arena di Verona, which would have called for an entirely different and far more complex lighting setup. I pushed — together with the production designer — for the scene to be moved instead to the Arena’s smaller tunnels. The idea was to light almost everything with a single bare bulb, adding only a few small hidden lights tucked among the set elements. The one other creative indication we received came not so much from Giorgio as from the client — specifically from Stefania Opipari, creative director of the entire Olympic ceremony and of these films. She kept coming back to one idea: she wanted the result to feel “magical.” So I set about interpreting that and finding a way to translate it visually.
The visual language and the approach to storytelling through images followed a somewhat unusual process. Far more people were involved than on a traditional narrative film, and during prep it sometimes felt almost like working on a commercial. There was a constant back-and-forth of feedback: the storyboard was revised shot by shot, because it had to pass through several levels of approval — from the organising committee to the creative director, the production designer, and others. Giorgio and I always said: the storyboard is a guide, not a cage. From the outset, I asked the production to get that message across, because it made no sense for someone to arrive on set with a ruler expecting to find the exact shot drawn on paper. When you’re shooting a narrative film, you have to be able to respond to what happens in front of you. It’s not a sterile process like photographing a product. So we followed the overall structure of the storyboard while keeping a certain degree of freedom. During prep, for instance, I said very little about individual shots — with so many people involved, it would have been counterproductive. If you’re not dealing with people who have a strong visual instinct, you risk creating nothing but confusion. On set, on the other hand, I made many suggestions, particularly around things like lens choice and focal lengths. Giorgio really likes to follow characters closely, with very wide lenses. In this case I think it was a 14mm — something we’ve used together many times before. It’s not the kind of decision you necessarily need to announce to everyone in advance: you just do it, because within our shared language you both know it works. And then, of course, there were also the requirements
specific technical requirements tied to certain transitions. But otherwise we tried to hold to a narrative approach. I remember, for instance, a moment when the storyboard showed a shot of Figaro — the character summoned by Rigoletto from inside his box — in which only a portion of the box itself appeared to be visible. At some point, the production design team wrote to me saying they were dressing only that section of the set. I stepped in immediately: I wrote to everyone explaining that this wasn’t an option. The box had to be fully dressed, because a storyboard cannot be taken literally. You can never know with absolute precision what will happen on set. And in fact, when we shot the scene, we realised we needed more dynamism: the camera pulls back, then moves in, the character enters, the shot changes. If we had dressed only half the box, we would have been completely stuck.
It was one of the few times I stepped in directly. I would usually read the emails without weighing in, but that time it was necessary. At first there was some pushback — some people kept going back to the storyboard — but I made it clear that we were making a narrative film, not reproducing a drawing. In the end, the solution was accepted. On set, we were all on the same page, and a tight-knit team came together around that.
We’ve talked about how you approached the project and built its visual narrative. Now let’s get more specific: from a cinematographic perspective, what was the guiding idea behind your choices — the one that shaped the work at its core?
One of the first things I set out to do was build an image that would feel “magical,” as Stefania had asked. So I wasn’t aiming for realism. The idea was to create a world with a suspended quality — something that existed outside of reality. All the more so because this film was meant to open and close the Olympic ceremony, with two segments in between that wove into the live performance. At one point, the idea of cutting some live footage from the ceremony into the edit had also been floated. But I pushed back on that, because if images shot by us were mixed with live footage, the difference in quality and visual language would inevitably show. And at that point I would have been forced to shift much closer to a realistic register — in both lighting and cinematography. If, on the other hand, the two elements remained separate, I could build a world of its own: a dimension that existed backstage, in the underground spaces of the Arena di Verona, while the ceremony unfolded on stage and was captured live. That gave me far greater freedom to work. I had also spoken with the cinematographer of the live event several months before the shoot — somewhere between October and November of the previous year. I had asked whether there were any specific references regarding the colours of the ceremony, but at that point he didn’t yet know. What was curious was that when we
met during the event, he told me — after seeing the film — that he had picked up some of the colours I had used and incorporated them into the colour scheme of the ceremony itself. From a cinematographic point of view, I worked extensively on the contrast between warm and cool tones. It may seem like a simple choice, but it allowed me to create a slightly hyper-real, almost heightened reality. For example, the moon is strongly cyan, while some lights are very orange, much warmer than they would be in reality. This chromatic contrast was precisely what I needed to emphasise the magical dimension and to visually separate the spaces. It is also worth noting that, although the budget was not particularly low, the production was still quite compressed in terms of time and resources. We had to shoot in blocks and, in some situations, we had fewer means than would have been ideal. But this is part of the job: you have to find a balance between what you imagine and what is concretely possible to achieve. For this reason, I also chose not to light everything too evenly. I preferred to work with areas of light and areas that fall away into the background, allowing parts of the environment to remain in shadow. In this way, the scene also acquired a more mysterious quality, while at the same time we were not forced to show everything clearly. In the lower part of the Arena, in the underground spaces, I instead worked exactly in the direction I had in mind: a somewhat sombre and contrasty space, but not dark in a horror sense. It was still a very colourful world, also thanks to the costumes designed by Stefano Ciammitti, a highly skilled costume designer who made a huge visual contribution. He also comes from
the Centro Sperimentale, and he has worked with major directors. The costumes were splendid and contributed enormously to the image. The real difficulty of this project, even from a cinematographic point of view, was not so much finding a visual idea as managing to realise it within that location. The Arena di Verona is a wonderful space but extremely complex to handle. There were many constraints: for instance, we were not allowed to attach anything to the structures. I would have liked to hang some lights from above, but that was not permitted. In the end, I used two lighting balloons to create the overall ambience, both in the underground area where the “boxes” are and in the initial section that was meant to suggest a backstage environment. I would have needed at least four, but it was not possible. I also placed a 5,000 outside the two main entrances to visually connect the spaces, but in many other areas I could not rig anything. I managed to fix just a couple of Asteras onto two wooden panels near the doors, because it was allowed there, but otherwise everything had to be hidden in the most unlikely corners. This meant working with very small lights, tucked into tiny spaces. I had to make sure they would not be visible on camera, while at the same time ensuring they were effective enough. It was a very complex job.
In this case, the Arena forced you to rethink certain choices and to find practical solutions in order to realise the idea nonetheless…
Exactly. And consider that we did the first location scout at the end of March the previous year, while the shoot took place in December. In between, we went back at least six times. And despite this, at the last moment we discovered that part of the corridor we had chosen was no longer available because construction work had begun. There were many situations like this. For instance, there was a point where Rigoletto emerges towards the light from an opening above. The initial idea was to light that opening from outside using a cherry picker. But we were not allowed to position it outside the Arena; so we had to reconstruct the
solution scenographically from the inside. Another issue concerned the smoke. Until the very last moment we did not know whether we would be authorised to use it, despite the fact that it is normally used in performances at the Arena. In the end we managed to obtain permission, and for me it was essential, because it contributed greatly to giving depth and atmosphere to the images.
When you work in a place like this, you are constantly confronted with the fact that the space itself is a work of art and cannot be treated freely. You have to find a balance between respect for the structure and cinematic needs. It was precisely from this kind of difficulty that the idea of the lantern also emerged. At the beginning, in the early versions of the script, the lantern did not exist. The character was simply meant to move through these underground spaces — which in the script were referred to as “the underworld” — navigating among sets and piled-up objects. Originally, the plan was to shoot in the warehouse of the Opera di Verona, where historical set pieces from many productions are stored. It is an incredible place: there are still scenic elements from productions such as La traviata by Franco Zeffirelli. The idea was that the characters would move through this environment while certain lights would switch on as they passed. However, there was no specific light source connected to the characters. As I mentioned, I was rather sceptical about that location. Even if the production designer had rearranged the scenic elements, its vast scale would still have been apparent. Moreover, from a material and architectural point of view, it had nothing to do with the Arena: they were industrial warehouses, with beams and structures that were completely different. At that point, I suggested moving the action into the tunnels of the Arena and introducing a lantern. The lantern became both a narrative and a cinematographic solution: it was a motivated light source within the scene, it allowed us to guide the viewer’s gaze, and to build the atmosphere without having to illuminate the entire space.
From a technical point of view, it proved to be a very effective choice, because it allowed me to work with a mobile key light, integrating it with small lights hidden within the environment. In this way, we could preserve that idea of an underground world, somewhat mysterious and magical, without having to illuminate the entire space artificially. In the end, it was a solution that worked both narratively and practically. Often, in our work, the best ideas arise precisely from the constraints you encounter along the way.
It was a completely different space from the one you had initially imagined…
Yes. The original idea was rather vague: we could have been under the stage, or in some technical area of the Arena. At a certain point, during one of the many location scouts, the production designer Matteo Oioli said to me, ‘Come and take a look at something.’ He took us into these much smaller tunnels that we hadn’t considered. As soon as I saw them, I thought: they’re perfect, we have to shoot here. Matteo, who was also the production designer for the ceremony and had a direct relationship with both Giorgio and Stefania, the creative director, spoke to her and in the end we managed to change location. Incidentally, this also saved us a transfer and almost a full day of work. At that point I said: if we shoot here, we have to do it with a lantern. It was the most interesting element for constructing the visual journey. Ultimately, it’s a world that is revealed little by little. I wasn’t looking for absolute technical perfection: as I said before, the fact that some areas fell into darkness in the background worked for me, because it conveyed the idea of a secret passage, of an underground world that only partially reveals itself. The lantern light guided both the viewer’s gaze and the exposure of the scene; when the character moved away, the light disappeared and the space returned to darkness. From a narrative point of view, it was exactly what I wanted.
So tell us as well how you technically realised the lantern.
In fact, in a very simple way — almost artisanal. We used Aputure bulbs — what are now called B6C. The prop lantern had a base for a candle and a small opening at the top where, in theory, a bulb could be inserted. We placed one of these bulbs there and fixed it with two simple clothes pegs. Around the lantern we added a bit of frost to soften the light. It was truly a very handcrafted solution, but precisely for that reason, effective.
After all, our work always has a strong artisanal component.
Absolutely. We did not have a special mount built for the bulb or a complex prop made: we worked with what we had, finding a practical solution — which was also very functional, since the bulb could be replaced in an instant.
In recent years, there has been much discussion of light as a dynamic element. Since Storaro, there has been a strong emphasis on the idea that light is not static but in motion, and that today, thanks to dimmable technologies, it can be controlled in real time. In this project, how did you approach this aspect?
Almost all the lights were LED and remotely controlled. I had everything connected to a single iPad: even the moving lights, such as the concert Macs you see in the scene with Manuel Agnelli. I could adjust intensity and colour at any moment. The only lights I didn’t have fully under control were the four set chandeliers: they had dimmers, but they didn’t work particularly well because they were fitted with very basic LED bulbs. Otherwise, everything was dimmable and programmable. This allowed me to work very quickly. For instance, the dressing rooms you see in the film are actually the same room, shot twice and redressed. I changed the colours and slightly repositioned some of the lights, and within ten minutes we had a completely different scene. It’s one of the great advantages of these technologies: flexibility. I also had two fairly large balloon lights, about 3 by 6 metres, which I used to create the overall ambience.
Were they RGB?
Yes, they had to be. I have to say they were very useful. The only limitation of those RGB balloons is that they do not have a great deal of output: I had them almost always at full power, and even so they were not particularly strong. At a certain point I had to lower them slightly, whereas discharge balloons I have used on other occasions are a completely different matter in terms of intensity. This also depended on Giorgio’s way of working. I know him very well: he’s a director who likes to move, to change position, to explore the space. If you fill the set with floor lights, you’re forced to move them constantly and you end up limiting the camera’s freedom. In a project like this, where the staging moves almost 360 degrees, I had to give him a great deal of space. Sometimes I would joke with him: ‘I’d like to give you 60 degrees of freedom, but I have to get to 360.’ It’s his way of working, and in the end it’s also a valuable training ground for a cinematographer. Of course, in certain situations it becomes more complicated, because you have to be inventive in order not to reveal the lights while still maintaining visual coherence. The decision to place some lights directly within the frame also came from this need. In this case it worked, because the setting was that of a live show backstage: the presence of visible fixtures or light sources felt credible within the scene.
Let’s move on to another stage of the process: post-production. How do you work with the colourist, and what kind of preparation do you undertake during shooting with post in mind?
I usually try to arrive on set with a fairly well-defined LUT, one that allows me to see an image that is already very close to the final result — let’s say around 80%. It is a bit like choosing a film stock: once you have decided on it, you already know the kind of rendering you will get. I do not like shooting with a standard conversion — the classic Rec.709 or Rec.2020 — because the image remains too neutral. I prefer to work with a LUT that already has a clear character. If, for instance, I want a very high-contrast image, I also have to take that into account in the lighting: I might work with softer light or lower contrast ratios, so as not to push the image too far. This approach allows me to achieve a cleaner and more natural result. The image already comes with a certain identity and does not rely exclusively on post-production. In this project, in particular, it was important to work in this way, because there were many people involved in the decision-making process and not everyone is able to imagine how an image will be transformed in post. There is a risk that they think what they see on the monitor is the final result. For this reason, I asked the production to have a DIT using Livegrade, which I work very well with. We built the LUT together starting from some visual references I had gathered.
It could be interesting to compare those references with the final result…
Yes, it could be an interesting comparison. Among the references, for example, there were images from A Star Is Born, photographed by Matthew Libatique. I was particularly interested in certain colour solutions and in the presence of practical lights within the frame, because I wanted to work with a similar palette, with very specific reds and a certain type of atmosphere. Starting from those images, I asked the DIT, Giovanni Fiormarino, to build a LUT that would come close to that kind of rendering. Giovanni is a highly skilled professional; today he also runs Colorshape. We had already worked together in the past on complex projects, for instance a very demanding Andrea Bocelli live performance where it was not possible to intervene in colour during post-production, so the entire look had to be built live through the LUT and exposure. Drawing on that experience, we set up the workflow in this way: the LUT was prepared in advance, then refined on set with Livegrade. The final colour grade was done with Jean-Paul Snyder at M74. The colour work was mainly about refinement: improving and cleaning up certain shots, but without really altering the tones or contrast, because the image was already very close to the final result. We made small adjustments — for example, slightly lifting some faces that were a bit underexposed in certain transitions, gently containing the lantern without dimming it too much — because I wanted it to remain a very present light source — and then I worked with vignettes and power windows to guide the viewer’s eye, darkening or modulating certain areas of the image. Another important intervention concerned the integration of the 3D sequence, the one in which water descends from above towards Rigoletto and the underground world. The colours were already similar to those of the footage, but we had to work on it quite extensively to blend it with the rest of the film. We also added a certain amount of grain across the whole project, which in my view helped to make the texture more uniform between the live-action images and the 3D-generated ones. For me, colour grading is the ‘cherry on the cake’, the moment when you can work calmly on the details — something that is often impossible on set due to time constraints. In this sense, it is a very precise process, almost scientific. When I grade, I also like to watch the images with sound: for me, it is part of the narrative experience. At that moment I feel a bit like the film’s first viewer, and I respond to the images just as an audience member would. I then try to intervene in order to reinforce the sensations I want to convey. Ultimately, it is a process very similar to sound mixing: the material is already there, but you have to find the best way to make it work.
Thank you, Luca, it was a pleasure speaking with you.
