Interview by Alessandro Chiodo
Editor Silvia Tarquini
After directing four episodes of the first season of Lidia Poët, you were given full responsibility for the cinematography of the second season. Can you tell us about this progression?
At the time, I was working on another project as a DIT (Digital Imaging Technician), my long-standing role. I had worked for many years with cinematographer Nicolaj Brüel, who had asked me to join him on an ambitious project, the series The Leopard, directed by the English filmmaker Thomas Shankland. I had begun preparing meticulously for it when, about two or three weeks before filming was set to begin, I was offered the position of cinematographer for the second season of Lidia Poët. Naturally, I was thrilled to accept the offer. I did feel regret about leaving the project with Brüel because I have a strong emotional connection to the original film, The Leopard by Luchino Visconti, which was shot by one of my great mentors, Giuseppe Rotunno. Additionally, during my university years, I had the privilege of studying under Francesco Orlando, one of the greatest literary theorists, who had the honour and responsibility of typing up the manuscript of The Leopard as the personal assistant to Tomasi di Lampedusa. Leaving the series was somewhat painful, but in the end, my heart guided me towards something more personal.
What was it like working with three different directors? What differences and complexities did you encounter?
The first episode was directed by Matteo Rovere, the three central episodes by Letizia Lamartire, and finally, Pippo Mezzapesa joined the project to close the season with the last two episodes. Working with these three directors was both stimulating and very intense. Each director has their own unique and personal approach, even though the final result was very cohesive. Matteo is an explosive director (and producer), with an enthusiasm that drives you to push beyond every limit. He makes decisions incredibly quickly and is a natural problem-solver. His speed of thought is reflected in the pace of the set, which progresses in a dynamic and extremely efficient way. His incredible technical mastery makes the work very straightforward and fluid. Letizia has a very sensitive soul and a total dedication to the actors, the story, and the staging. She has extensive experience in serial storytelling. Her filming style is deeply connected to music and musicality, which makes the work even more intriguing. Pippo Mezzapesa has a strong auteur background and is undoubtedly very demanding when it comes to grammar and framing. The most challenging aspect was probably maintaining visual unity while working with three different visions and personalities. This is why I found it important to follow the project entirely, from preparation to finalisation—something that doesn’t often happen in series production.
We cinematographers love lighting from the outside, but in the locations for the second season, external lighting is not very present, likely due to logistical issues. What was the reason behind this choice?
About 90% of the locations posed logistical challenges, both because of the fast turnaround required each day and the impossibility of having adequate support equipment for traditional external lighting (aerial platforms, Manitou, scissor lifts, etc.). We often filmed in beautiful historic buildings, on upper floors or the “piano nobile,” where it was impossible to rig, hang, and light from the outside. I had to make a significant imaginative effort to adapt the lighting style I had envisioned and find a balance between managing natural and artificial light. This aspect was crucial: in such a complex and “fast-paced” series, with challenging overlaps in cast schedules, directors, and locations, I had very little flexibility in choosing the times of day. I often found myself filming night scenes during the day and daytime scenes at night. I tried to schedule scenes within the day to avoid direct sunlight, using it only as a background or diffuse light, and then reconstructed the interior lighting (and sometimes even exterior lighting) artificially. In the end, this approach also aligned well with the aesthetic needs of the second season’s narrative, which shifted atmospherically: less shadowy, less sombre, leaning more towards a brilliant comedy tone. The directors and creative team specifically requested not to dwell too much on a noir look but to move towards a warm, luminous, and inviting dimension. In this second season, the thriller/noir narrative arc plays a much smaller role compared to the romantic arc, the comedic elements, and the family dynamics. The overarching structure focuses on political and social struggles, a historical narrative that wasn’t present in the first season. The evolution of the look, however, had to be careful and calibrated: it needed to stay within the guidelines of the first season while shifting gears. The narrative context broadens to include women’s conditions in general, and Lidia’s identity extends far beyond her efforts to be recognised as a lawyer, taking on even political dimensions.
Everything seems to revolve around Lidia. It’s as if she were the sun, illuminating all the characters—the sun around which all the planets orbit.
Lidia is an enlightened character, an advocate of the Enlightenment, someone whose personality tears through the preconceptions of a world shrouded in the darkness of ignorance. The request for warm, welcoming, bright, HI-KEY photography seemed deeply motivated from a narrative perspective, and I tried to embrace it fully. The references leaned more towards Bridgerton than Peaky Blinders, The Knick, or The Alienist. Another reason for this HI-KEY choice is tied to how the series is consumed. I’ve personally seen viewers watch the series on all kinds of devices and in all sorts of situations: a laptop in broad daylight, a phone on a train during the day with sunlight hitting the screen, an iPad in a playground, and, fortunately, the correct viewing conditions—an environment with controlled lighting, a calibrated 4K HDR TV, Dolby Vision, in the dark. This latter scenario is the viewing condition that should be considered standard. However, working for a streaming platform means dealing with a wide variety of devices and viewing environments. The request for brighter photography was therefore also motivated by technical reasons—to avoid penalising viewers with dark tones, ensuring the series could be enjoyed even in less-than-ideal conditions.
Sticking with the idea of the sun, there’s an element that struck me, especially in the first three episodes but also present in other moments: a yellow tint. Yellow is a challenging colour to use, particularly on skin tones, where warmer, more orange hues are usually preferred. Here, however, this shade proves to be an intriguing choice, capable of creating a unique atmosphere, as in the morgue scenes, where it adds a distinctive visual intensity.
It’s interesting to note that in that scene, the yellow wasn’t a deliberate choice; it wasn’t invented. The stained-glass windows of that historic location are yellow. In reality, it’s not a morgue but a church, and when you’re lucky enough to scout the location at just the right time of day, with the sunlight hitting those windows, you find yourself bathed in this yellow, in this golden, Klimt-like atmosphere, which I then tried to recreate both in that setting and in others…
Yes, and you carried this through to other situations as well. There are indoor shots where faces are lit with a light that isn’t orange—it’s not the colour of fire, even though there’s a fireplace. It’s a very specific yellow that recurs, almost breaking away from conventional colour schemes, evoking a more metaphorical light, less natural but highly evocative.
It’s a yellow that also has a cinematic origin, albeit with all due respect and differences. It’s inspired by Roger Deakins’ use of this colour—one of my greatest references. I think of Blade Runner 2049, 1917, or Empire of Light, Sam Mendes’ latest film, which features stunning instances of this specific yellow. But I’m also reminded of Disclaimer by Emmanuel Lubezki and Bruno Delbonnel, Alfonso Cuarón’s latest series, which includes moments with such soft yellows. And Anna Karenina by Joe Wright, shot by Seamus McGarvey, also comes to mind. In post-production, we were asked to significantly boost the saturation, by about 30%. This decision to push the saturation came from the creative direction and the directors’ desire to explore a distinctly pop aesthetic, moving away from more “authorial” tones. The saturation was pushed well beyond natural and realistic ranges, and as I watched those images transform before my eyes, I thought of Andy Warhol’s pop art and the baroque richness of David LaChapelle. Just as the soundtrack and costumes push the limits towards a deliberately and delightfully loud and baroque direction, I was fortunate to have some free time before filming began, which I used to study extensively — immersing myself in countless paintings, painters, and exhibitions. That historical period, the mid-to-late 19th century, is extraordinarily rich from every perspective. At the time, painting was the queen of the arts, much like rock music in the 1970s. In that era, across Europe and in Italy, painting literally exploded, breaking free from patronage. It’s a period ripe for inspiration. I felt like Winnie the Pooh in front of a jar of honey.
Can you talk about these artistic references?
There were many—I’d even say infinite—but not explicit. I was pleasantly surprised that many reviews of the series, in one way or another, captured this strong painterly quality. Some critics precisely identified the painters I studied for this work and rediscovered for my own enjoyment. For instance, some recognised Divisionism, the Pre-Raphaelites, Pointillism, and Pelizza da Volpedo. It’s such a rich period, and the significant work I tried to do in various stages — from preparation to post-production, including the addition of textures — was to recreate a painterly texture and convey the feel, the atmosphere of that era without resorting to superficial citations of specific paintings or artists. It was a process of research and reinterpretation — a personal take on the era, seen through the lens of the many artistic visions of those who lived in that time. First and foremost, I would mention Giovanni Boldini, a painter I’ve always loved. He seemed to perfectly embody the spirit of the era with the lightness of his bourgeois, post-baroque strokes. The vibrant and ethereal energy of his colour felt ideal to represent the character of our Lidia. Then I rediscovered Vittorio Matteo Corcos, Federico Zandomenighi, Giuseppe De Nittis, and, of course, the Pre-Raphaelites. Beyond that, there’s also David Hockney, Francis Bacon, and Turner, who aren’t directly tied to that era but remain important references that inspire and resurface. After the study and analysis phase — once you’ve absorbed everything — you forget it all and confront reality, reinterpreting it with fresh, clean eyes, open to embracing the surprises of the real world. On top of the references I’ve mentioned regarding yellow, there are always cinematic memories present. I must at least mention Peter Weir and his splendid Picnic at Hanging Rock, as well as Sofia Coppola’s cinema.
What struck me most about your lighting was its softness. A ‘wrapped light’ that recalls English cinematography: enveloping but three-dimensional. Achieving this requires ‘working the light,’ as they say in the industry. I think of what Russell Boyd did in Picnic at Hanging Rock, using fabric veils in front of the lens to diffuse the light, creating soft and dreamlike images. That effect came to mind when I saw some of the atmospheres in the second episode of Lidia Poët, with the young women. Your work also seems to have that same attention to detail, balancing atmosphere and aesthetics. Would you share any of your technical secrets?
Episodio 2
Even the reasoning behind this choice is twofold. Actually, threefold. The first is a pragmatic motivation: I didn’t have much time to light the scenes, so I had to focus on two things — the quality of the light and its direction. I wanted to place the light source in the best possible position to highlight our lead actress, Matilda De Angelis: as far away as possible, as large as possible, with the best quality possible, to achieve the softest light possible. Secondly, softness was essential to blend different materials seamlessly — to integrate the settings, the elements of the set design and furniture, the costumes, and the characters into the period. It was also necessary to enhance the actors‘ performances, avoiding excessive shadows unless they were in the background. The blocking couldn’t be too rigid either, allowing the actors more freedom of movement. These are the technical reasons. An additional reason concerns the aesthetics of the era. By analyzing the visual culture and references of those years, it seemed to me that, to convey the feeling of the time, it was crucial to eliminate as much as possible the specular reflections and harsh highlights that result from digital capture systems, which, of course, didn’t exist at the time. Back then, there was canvas, brushwork, and printed paper still rooted in the naturalness of craftsmanship. Photography was in its infancy, and the main materials were far from glossy, unlike today’s acrylic paints or plastics. Instead, they were based on pigments, collodion, albumen, and other organic substances. Photography was also still closely tied to painting, representing an “artistic” depiction of reality, far from the artificiality of polyethylene elements. The key to recreating the feeling of that period, for me, was paying close attention to eliminating specular reflections—the “mirrored lights.” The work on softness stems primarily from this intention. I wanted to avoid these overly modern, excessively digital effects. Painting from that era was almost always composed of uniform fields of colour, smooth and consistent. I aimed to soften the light as much as possible to ensure that the light sources, their direction, and the contrasts didn’t feel too pronounced or exaggerated, which would have broken the authenticity of the period.
It seems, if you’ll allow me the term, like “reverse photography”: I, for example, always try to place the light source “inside the gaze” when possible. But in Lidia Poët, the light source sometimes feels as though it could, at any moment, project the shadow of someone standing “offstage” onto the person in front of the camera. Lidia often seems to be lit not exactly from the camera’s perspective, but almost aligned with it, or just slightly off-axis. It’s an extremely precise lighting approach technically, with very soft contrast ratios.
This ties into the concept of beauty light. The ability to use a type of light historically considered “flat” but which, in certain cases, can become a narrative tool — a chromatic field, a brushstroke, a method of working with hues and color contrasts that brings a creamy texture to the image. Very often, this was needed to meet the constant and unrelenting request for a world that felt warm, enveloping, welcoming, like velvet.
Take the kitchen scenes, for example, with actors standing just 50 centimeters from the wall. They work because there’s an almost inexplicable separation between the characters and the background, even though the background was light and very close. I found it to be a very challenging and sophisticated effect.
Certainly, as you say, the lighting in the interiors is very crafted. Technically, it was a challenge because we had to clean it up as much as possible, diffuse it as much as possible, respect the spaces, respect the actors. The main resource was an extensive use of cloths, diffusion frames, negative fill, tools designed to channel, shape, and rectify a light source that in the vast majority of cases came from within: a great deal of work to make it as realistic and acceptable as possible. If you think about it, light from within doesn’t exist, or rarely exists in nature. It’s a great deal of work that in other cases one might avoid, but here most of the environments were very large, very difficult, couldn’t be pre-rigged, there was a logistical complexity to solve. We chose to sacrifice convenience in exchange for stunning locations, beautiful backgrounds. One thing I’d like to mention, from one technician to another, is that this is an almost entirely single-source series. There are almost never top lights, almost never backlights, and if there are, they’re either non-diegetic or serve a diegetic purpose. In other words, wherever possible, the setup has a single light source coming from one direction only, as I mentioned, broader, as far away as possible, and from the most favourable angle for the scene. Perhaps in a corridor there were twenty windows, and perhaps there were twenty projectors, but the concept was single-source: if you’re very far away and need more output, for example in some night scenes, then you combine multiple projectors but channel them into a single source, preferably wide and soft.
I noticed that the camera generally uses medium-tight framing, with quite wide apertures.
Yes. As often happens in television series, wide shots, long shots, or even long takes are frequently cut during editing in favour of medium shots or close-ups that emphasise the actors’ faces and performances. The aperture was almost always at T2. During testing, I realised this was the right aperture to convey the painterly texture and to subtly highlight the locations and set designs. Often there’s a risk of making the location, the set design, the costume or the lighting become the protagonist, but we mustn’t forget that our protagonists are the actors, the characters, what they say, what happens, what they do. The selective focus needed to be on them. Moreover, this aperture allows you to maintain a more painterly quality, less sharp and defined. I did various tests: already at T3.5 everything became hyper-defined, hyper-realistic, hyper modern. And this is especially true for the 4K HDR master, which would open up a very broad discussion worth exploring separately.
Which lenses did you use? Were there any additions?
I used a set of ARRI Signature Primes ranging from 12 to 280, a couple of FF extenders, and occasionally some FF zoom lenses. A Century Optic Swing & Shift series for some specific inserts. The Signature Primes are exceptional lenses, balanced, chromatically perfect, mechanically perfect. They help you work quickly and assist the entire crew. They also have an extremely versatile matrix and, in this case, along with the additional Impression filters (for this project I only used the positive ones, I tested the negative ones extensively at the beginning but they went in the opposite direction, beautiful but outside the project’s scope) they helped us enhance the texture. In perfect harmony with ALEXA Mini LF, these lenses and filters helped us favour the actress’s photogenic qualities, soften reality’s harshness, support the search for a painterly effect and enhance the blend of pro-filmic elements.
One of the series’ most beautiful aspects regarding cinematography, in my opinion, is the texture, the final result of a long process. A wonderful texture that deserves to be discussed…
Thank you for noticing that. I consider texture a fundamental part of the look. The texture really comes from many factors. Starting from the HMU up tests, it was important to understand which tool-sets I needed and which choices to make to achieve the desired result. All the choices I made during production aimed at that result. Always keeping in mind – and I’ll never tire of saying this – the 4K, HDR master. You need to know that you’re dealing with a very rich master, very “fat” in pixels, exposure latitude, and colour space range. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of over-using this technology, and in this series it would have made us lose the painterly thickness that for me represented that era. That’s why the texture work was very important. The primary phase is choosing how to use the sensor (underexpose, overexpose, etc.), then comes the choice of basic acquisition texture, the lens, and the glass you put in front of the sensor is fundamental. The glass is never alone, then there are filters and more glass that you put in front of the camera, which help soften the image and create an image identity. The haze, the light and how to manage post-production. Grain, halation, LUT etc.
For the night scenes, you chose a specific cyan colour; in the beautiful view, in church, with the light concentrating on the protagonist. Lidia shines even at night! There’s a stunning blue field. I loved it very much and it reminded me of El Chivo (Emmanuel Lubezki), when he creates large monochromatic fields with just one contrasting point of light in another colour…
Let’s say that perhaps the secret was the great distances. When you have them, it’s lovely to avoid getting stuck in a 4m x 4m room and use them to place the light far away, then break it up, work with it. If you have the possibility and time to bounce off large sources and then diffuse them further, that’s the best thing you can do. In that case, we were very fortunate because the church location was very long and allowed the light to be uniform. Usually, one tends to create “Caravaggio-style” photography, especially in a church, which I obviously love, but here it’s the opposite: the light is almost never cutting, almost never with violent contrasts. A painter that this type of light might reference, in terms of angle and typology, is perhaps Rembrandt. But often in this series, the light is even softer than Rembrandt. And in some cases, I would have liked to be more daring.
Would you like to add anything to conclude?
The thing that fascinated me most in this work was learning to love and use a light that isn’t by definition purely three-dimensional, and make it narrative. One of my great mentors, Gianni Fiore Coltellacci, who was Giuseppe Rotunno‘s camera operator for years and then had a tremendous career as a cinematographer, especially abroad, one day, during my time at Centro Sperimentale, took me aside and said: “Remember that there will come a time in life when you won’t have windows (which has an extremely metaphorical value!), and you’ll need to understand how to step out of your comfort zone and learn to place a light that doesn’t necessarily come from outside.” He told me this with a very French flavour. He said: “I’ll make you fall in love with the ‘flat light‘”, laughing, almost challenging me. Which is a type of photography used in much English cinema, much French cinema, but also in certain Italian cinema (I’m thinking of Gianni di Venanzo too). Gianni Fiore, to demonstrate the value of this type of light, made a wonderful film in France, Clo-clo, about the life of a television presenter. It’s a film with an extensive and very refined use of on-axis light and direct projectors, or anyway often beauty light. Which in that case too was deeply within the story. A film that struck me tremendously and helped me overcome my fear of “flat” light. Which isn’t necessarily anti-cinematic light, quite the contrary…
Thanks to this light, you contributed to the image of the protagonist, who emerges with great beauty…
I had an implicit obligation to the story and especially to a beautiful and extremely talented female protagonist. The character was extraordinary: a heroine who becomes, partly by luck, partly by necessity, an icon. Her photogenic quality had to be enhanced at all costs; beyond the lighting, with the framing, the camera height, the focal length, the distance, the angle… Everything had to contribute to enhancing the beauty and talent of the actress, thus enhancing the character and the story that is told through her.
