American Cinematographer - November 2016 - 26

Station chief Steven Frost (Richard Jenkins) finds himself in deep water
during a nightmare sequence.

look at what the director and Hagen were
doing. Even if it was on a set I was pretty sure
I wasn't going to shoot on, it helped to get
deeper into the style and how the directors
would work. I'd send out emails at night with
specific questions for Hagen or the directors,
and sometimes they would swing by [the
second unit's] set. If I had a lighting question,
I had my gaffers André Poser and Axel Scholz
contact the main unit's gaffer, Janosch Voss,
or the rigging gaffer, Stephan Rother.
[Throughout the production] I was involved in
all the head-of-department meetings, where
we went through the script and addressed all
the needs for every department - that was
crucial. We also had a great digital clouddailies system, where I could watch main
unit's footage and they could watch my
footage.
Bogdanski: In modern filmmaking,
the workload is so big and the actors' schedules are so limited that you cannot work without a full additional-photography unit
anymore. You need a second-unit cinematographer and director to understand the visuals
of the whole show and what the director
wants. That requires a lot of meetings, a lot of
time, a lot of work, but without it I think it
would be impossible to shoot a show like this
on schedule.
How did your interaction with
showrunner Bradford Winters and
creator Olen Steinhauer compare with
your interaction with the episode directors?
26

November 2016

Bogdanski: Olen and Brad gave
their input, but on a very subtle note. They
were looking out for the dialogue, and
whenever the actors had questions about
their characters' past, then Olen or Brad
would step in. Not what the actors had to
do now - this is the director's job - but
more about the context and where they
came from. The director was really running
the set.
Kaechele: Olen and Brad would
sometimes split up, and one of them would
be on the main-unit set and the other
would come over to my set. They would be
there to advise on how things should feel
and what they thought were important
beats, but leave all the rest up to the director and cinematographer. Michaël Roskam
was the driving force of the style of the
show. When I talked to him, it really became
obvious that he favors the 32mm lens, and
he likes to keep the camera low, and he
likes to set everything up in long takes.
Were the four directors who
succeeded Roskam primarily following
his blueprint?
Bogdanski: Every director brought
his own energy and his own view to the
show, but still they were very accepting [of
what had already been established]. We
tried to give every director as much freedom
as possible while still maintaining the look.
We had five directors, but we didn't want it
to look like five different films.
Ralph, did your work evolve over
American Cinematographer

the 10 episodes to mirror the differing
sensibilities of the main-unit directors?
Kaechele: The job evolved quite a
bit. I always tried to put myself in the different directors' heads. It was really interesting
to observe and to translate their work into
what I had to do and to make it seamless.
The second unit's goal is to be completely
invisible.
For the first two episodes it was actually fairly traditional second-unit work:
establishing shots, inserts, driving shots,
camera vehicles. The main unit had 11 to 12
shoot days, and we had four to five for
second unit. That all changed with the
beginning of the third episode. Main unit
had a few days less per episode, which were
added onto my schedule - I was handed
entire scenes to direct and shoot.
Bogdanski: Because Ralph did such
a great job, his job became more and more
important. It evolved, and I don't think it
was second unit anymore - it was an additional unit that really supported the story
and supported every individual director. I'm
sure it became more interesting for Ralph,
and it definitely became more important for
us as the first unit.
Hagen, by the time you came
onto the show, was production
designer Marco Bittner Rosser already
constructing the sets?
Bogdanski: He and Michaël were
on board already when I came in, which is
typical. But the main set, the CIA headquarters, was not built yet, so they asked me,
'What do you think? How do we want to
incorporate the lighting fixtures?' I was
happy they were building it in the studio [at
Studio Babelsberg]. Ninety percent of the
show was on location, because we wanted
to show Berlin and therefore we had to go
out into the city.
The CIA station was a completely
self-lit set. We bought industrial LEDs that
we incorporated into the set on a dimmer
board. It was programmed for different
lighting setups, but there were no traditional fixtures - no HMIs, not even any
traditional LED fixtures from any big brands.
We were not able to dim the LEDs down
properly, so we had to build in three stripes
and, instead of dimming, we switched them
off or on individually. But we could walk in,
hit the button, and off we went. The work-

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - November 2016