Inside the Black-and-White Look of ‘Ripley’: Luxury, Danger and a Whole Lot of Stairs

Almost 35 years ago, production designer David Gropman worked on a Merchant Ivory World War II-era drama called “Mr. & Mrs. Bridge,” in which the opening sequence was in black and white. He still remembers watching dailies to that sequence and hearing director James Ivory exclaim, “What have I been waiting for all these years? It works so much better in black and white!”

“He was right,” Gropman said, laughing. “And I have longed to do a black-and-white film since then.” He finally got his wish with “Ripley,” Steven Zaillian’s Netflix limited series based on the Patricia Highsmith novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley” — although Gropman estimates that the eight-episode, seven-hour series was really “about five films” in scale and complexity.

The action begins in New York in the early 1960s and then moves to Italy’s Amalfi Coast, where a petty criminal named Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott) has been tasked with persuading rich would-be artist Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn) to return home, though Tom really just wants to share in Dickie’s lifestyle. From there, it moves among lush Italian seaside towns, lavish hotels in Rome, Palermo and Venice and other outposts of magnificence, all shot in luxuriant monochrome by cinematographer Robert Elswit.

“I’ve always been taken with how powerful images are in black and white, how everything else is erased except for the subject matter,” Gropman said. “I’ve spent most of my career trying to erase the design in my work. For years and years, that meant being very careful with color — not necessarily monochrome, but really tightly controlled palettes. So the natural evolution was to do a black-and-white film.”

He and Zaillian began by trading black-and-white photographs so that the film’s visual language could be established before location scouting began. Gropman said finding a New York City street that could pass for 1960 was particularly difficult. “I had recently done a film in New York called ‘The Humans,’” he said. “It took place in one stage, basically, with a little bit of contemporary New York, Lower East Side. But going back to scout for ‘Ripley’ not even a year later, and trying to find period New York felt almost impossible, really.”

Once he found a street that would work for New York, he and Zaillian went to Italy to find locations that suited the idle rich who Ripley so desperately wanted to join. The Amalfi coast town of Atrani – augmented by Dickie’s house, which was actually filmed on Capri – had the right look and the right amount of stone stairs for Tom to climb as he tries to ascend to Dickie’s level. “The steps are so spectacular there,” Gropman said. “MC Escher spent time there and did any number of drawings and woodcuts of stairs, so it was perfect.”

But “Ripley” features many more steps than just the ones in Atrani. One entire episode takes place largely in a Rome apartment building where Ripley is living and where he has to dispose of a body by dragging it down several flights of stairs because an old, creaky elevator isn’t working.

“The Rome apartment was quite key,” Gropman said. “Not only did we need a great flight of stairs, we needed a period cage elevator. And finding that combination was very, very difficult. Many of these old apartments are converted palazzi, but of course, anything actually from the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries did not have elevators. So we had to find a palazzo that had an addition with that wonderful flight of stairs and cage elevator.”

Many of the interiors, including all of Tom’s apartment, were constructed on Stage 5 at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios, known as “The Fellini stage” because it was where the Italian icon made many of his films.  “Everything from the hallway to the fantastic bathroom and his room looking out on the street was built at Cinecittà,” he said. “We had two stages that sat back to back with a green screen right down the center separating them.”

Train stations and ferry docks were another challenge, with CGI to get the correct period look. “The ferry docks were not real ferry docs, the train stations were not train stations,” he said. “So that relied a lot of CGI set extensions.”

Everything was built in color, including reproductions of Caravaggio and Picasso paintings. And while certain colors have long been thought to not work well when shot in black and white, Gropman said he ignored the conventional wisdom.

“There were rules in the time of black-and-white filmmaking for how to use green or orange to get more contrast or more of a gray tone,” he said. “I guess I should have paid attention to those, but I didn’t because we’re in a digital world and I could manipulate it and push it to give it the look we hoped to attain. I didn’t pay attention to any of those rules, but I think we did OK.”

And because of the level of detail in Zaillian’s work, Gropman said he never felt in over his head despite the scale of the project. “As I was doing the breakdown, of course I was a little bit overwhelmed,” he said. “In the old days, I might’ve had a panic attack. But there wasn’t a single set or a single moment in the scripts that I didn’t want to do. It was all joy.”

A version of this story first appeared in the Down to the Wire: Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

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