The TV series The King, directed by Giuseppe Gagliardi, features Luca Zingaretti as Bruno Testori, director of San Michele prison. Other cast members include Isabella Ragonese, Anna Bonaiuto, Barbora Bobuľová, Giorgio Colangeli, Fabrizio Ferracane, Katsiaryna Shulha, and Thomas Trabacchi. The screenplay was written by Stefano Bises, Peppe Fiore, Bernardo Pellegrini, Davide Serino, Alessandro Fabbri (season 2), and Federico Gnesini (season 2). The set design was by Simone Taddei, Paki Meduri. The first season aired in 2022 and the second in 2024. The cinematography is by Carlo Rinaldi, CCS.
Part one
The first season was in 2022, and the second in 2024. How many episodes are in the series?
The series is made up of eight episodes per season, therefore I’ve shot sixteen episodes. Unlike what sometimes happens abroad, it is entirely directed by Giuseppe Gagliardi and thus entirely photographed by me. Our approach was like working on a huge, very long film.
I imagine this allowed you to have greater control over the photographic evolution of the series.
Yes, not only I had control, but I also had the opportunity to determine the visual style of the series from the very beginning, during preparation. Abroad, as I said, a series may be started and then some episodes are left to other colleagues, but in this case, I started it, set it up, and completed it throughout the first year, and then built its evolution for a second season. Indeed, it was a very interesting and demanding job.
Was it the first time you worked with Giuseppe Gagliardi?
Yes, it was. I have always been a great admirer of his. I loved [the TV Series] 1992, 1993, 1994, a trilogy about Berlusconi’s rise, his first film Tatanka, so I was particularly pleased to receive his call. Giuseppe is a top-notch director, moreover, he is one of those directors who pays great attention to the visual aspect of filmmaking. I am happy to say that a beautiful professional and personal relationship was born.
We’ll talk more about your collaboration later. I wanted to go through some purely technical aspects, but first of all, I wanted to ask you about the initial choice, namely what led you to do this series? What was the stimulus? Was it the desire to work with Gagliardi, or was there something specific that drew you to this particular story?
There were various stimuli. It was truly a choice that I claim with a certain pride, in the sense that alongside this opportunity, I had the chance to shoot another TV series, which was, however, in its seventh season. It was an offer from the United States. So, the first great stimulus was the opportunity to create a first season, seeing it born and bringing it to life together with the director. Doing such in-depth preparation, creating a relationship with the set designer, with the costume designer, with the director, with the characters, is an opportunity that doesn’t come often; on the other hand, I had a series heading toward its conclusion in front of me, a seventh season where, more or less, everything had already been done, and I would have had to probably apply a similar approach to it.
As a second major stimulus, there was the fact that, when we started, this was essentially the first Italian prison drama. It was something new in the Italian television landscape, told with such a knowledgeable eye like Giuseppe’s and with a very respectable cast.
First and foremost, Luca Zingaretti, who was coming from Inspector Montalbano, the very popular character who had become a household name for all Italians, after many years had to confront himself with a completely new character, Bruno Testori, an almost evil figure at times, a hero/anti-hero. This fascinated me. Let’s say I took on these challenges. In addition, the scale of the project was large enough to represent a real technical challenge, with very demanding situations related to the prison: the interiors and exteriors, the mass scenes, many extras. There were also very elaborate secondary locations, many cities… We shot in Turin, Trieste, Rome. There was also a part on stage; it was a very heterogeneous job, and therefore fascinating.
How many weeks of preparation did you have?
We had months of preparation because this series started during the COVID-19 pandemic: location scouting and preparation was in December 2020 and filming began in March 2021. We prepared, not every day, but with a certain commitment, for two and a half months, also relying on some location scouting that had been done pre-Covid.
And how many weeks of shooting per episode?
The series had about one hundred and five days of shooting in the first season and one hundred and twenty days for the second one. About fifteen days of filming per episode: an excellent ratio compared to the way television is shot around the world.
What camera and lenses did you use?
The series was shot with Sony VENICE 1 and with wonderful lenses, the classic Technovision Anamorphic lenses, the Cooke base set. A bold decision, which I partially claim credit for, together with Giuseppe. Initially, Giuseppe was more inclined towards the Arri world, so we tested the lenses with ALEXA Mini (ARRI) and VENICE 1 (Sony). The issue is that those lenses—vintage lenses, with decades of work behind them, used by Vittorio Storaro for some of his greatest masterpieces—is that they need to be treated like vintage cars. They require a lot of light. They work very well at a smaller aperture, as they were used in the past, and don’t handle wide-open apertures well. During the technical tests, I suggested to Giuseppe to consider the Venice 1 because it offered higher sensitivity, with the possibility of a dual ISO, up to 2500 ASA. This allowed us to work with a slightly smaller aperture in many dark scenes (night, interiors), and make the most of the lenses Giuseppe wanted.
These were lenses he had had his eye on for a long time. Even during my job interview—coming from Pietro Castellitto’s debut film, I Predatori [Predators], which I had shot with Technovision lenses—we discussed what type of lens to use and realised that we were both interested in the same kind of rendering and look. We wanted a slightly filtered view, not necessarily documentary-like. The camera and lenses had to slightly change reality, transforming perception and dirtying the image a bit. The story is violent, sometimes distorted, but it suited us… Obviously, to handle that type of lens, a little help from the camera sensor was needed. When we tested the
VENICE, Giuseppe understood the technical need and stepped out of his comfort zone, as he was more comfortable within the ARRI world, and he agreed that perhaps that specific technique would be to our advantage. Once we decided that this would be the camera and lens combination we would use, I immediately did a film emulation test trying to bring the combination of Technovision anamorphic lenses on the Venice sensor as close as possible to a cinematic image. Thanks to D-Vision Movie People rental, the cameras and lenses provider, I had the opportunity to set up the digital camera, the Venice, and these lenses alongside an Arricam with the same lenses, and to shoot a roll of 500T film. These tests, once developed and scanned, became the basis on which we built our LUT. That was the “seal of approval” on the look, as we were still in the exploration and look-building phase… Giuseppe was completely convinced, especially regarding some colour renderings, and that basis remained unchanged throughout both seasons.
Did you collaborate with a colourist During preparation? If so, who was he or she? Where did you colour grade? Did you create different LUTs for different filming moments? I’m also curious to know what aperture you finally chose to use with these lenses.
I’ll go in order of workflow, so I’ll start with who was closest to the camera initially: my longtime DIT, Manuel Mastrostefano, who was already present at those comparison tests between film and digital, in collaboration with Wildcat, that provided us with DIT services. I must mention Simone D’Arcangelo, a great advisor in developing that first LUT, which was still really an embryo, rudimentary. We developed, scanned, brought everything to Wildcat and sat down with Simone D’Arcangelo to understand what was happening within the Venice sensor, bringing that curve close to that of the 500T. This was the first step of the workflow.
The second step was the collaboration and then the post-production finalisation with Claudio Del Bravo of Frame by Frame, an extraordinary colourist. This was the first time Claudio and I were working together and another excellent partnership was born. Claudio had previously worked with Giuseppe, he had coloured 1992, 1993, 1994, so Giuseppe knew him already. I greatly admired his work, but I had never had the opportunity to collaborate with him before. I brought this draft LUT to him, and we perfected and tested it. It is essential to do this in a lab, especially during preparation, before shooting. Honestly, I don’t like having too many different LUTs. I tend to treat LUTs like a film emulsion, so it can happen that I have different emulsions, it has happened in other works, but for this one in particular, which was quite linear, I wanted a precise “look,” I wanted strong contrasts, I wanted to draw tensions with slightly burnt highlights and with slightly dark and mysterious blacks. That was my direction. Claudio allowed me to perfect this still somewhat raw LUT and adapt it to all situations because when you work with a single LUT, you need a softness in the curve that allows you, as it was in our case, to work from March to August, indoors and outdoors, at night and during the day. Claudio’s work, both in preparation and obviously in post-production, was fundamental.
I imagine your DIT’s contribution on set, with the application of some CDLs [Colour Decision List], facilitated this process…
Absolutely. On top of that Show-LUT, we created CDLs scene by scene, looking for continuity at times. Hundreds, probably thousands of CDLs were created on set, to allow the offline not only to be a bit more consistent but also to have that minimum of continuity so that the director and editor don’t jump off of their seats going from one scene to another. This seems obvious, and sometimes it is on a film, but in a series with one hundred and twenty consecutive shooting days, it was not obvious at all. In my opinion, it required a different technical expertise, and a different kind of attention from the DIT as well.
I agree. I also think that being so precise when preparing a show like this allows us to have a deeper dialogue with the director. Showing what it will most likely be, it prevents you from finding out the look in post-production only, which can sometimes prove problematic because different things were imagined on set. Instead, in this way, you can define more precisely what to do on set every time, as it was done on film.
Exactly. We built such a strong base, between the classic Technovision Cooke lenses and this interesting LUT, that in the end, the look was already there, you didn’t have to look for it, it strongly came to you. Initially, we had the opposite problem. My fear in the first days of filming was that this kind of approach, so aggressive, so visually visceral, would only be suitable and usable in some cases. Instead, I must say that we all fell in love with it, including the audience, including the network. In short, it was a series that made a visual impact, and I’m very satisfied with it.
