‘Étoile' creators say cinematographer M. David Mullen was their ‘film school'

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2 days ago

The man responsible for making Mrs. Maisel look, well, marvelous is Emmy-winning cinematographer M. David Mullen, who teams up again with collaborators Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino on their latest series Étoile. Once again, he brings his brilliant, bright eye for detail to the world of ballet in both New York and Paris. (Pro tip: His Instagram posts are veritable works of art in themselves.) 'It's a true collaboration of love,' says Sherman-Palladino.
Gold Derby: David, how did you first team up with Dan and Amy?
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M. David Mullen: I interviewed for the pilot for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel back in the summer of 2016. And then we shot the pilot in the fall that year.
Amy Sherman-Palladino: Yeah, and it went terrible.
Mullen: Terrible, obviously. I blew it. But no one else was available. It went well, I guess. I actually interviewed with you guys the year before for the Gilmore Girls Netflix [movie]. But that was a phone interview, and Maisel was an in-person interview. So I guess I do much better in person than over the phone.
Dan Palladino: Your physical presence is really powerful.
Sherman-Palladino: He just sat down, he put a gun on the table and then just sort of sat there. We went, all right, we get it!
Palladino: We actually had two people that we really trust in this business — there aren't many — that had known David or worked with David that gave him such a high recommendation and was saying, you guys are going to like this guy.
Sherman-Palladino: They were saying, 'He's your people.' And they were right.
So what makes him your person? What's the magic of David Mullen?
Sherman-Palladino: David Mullen is a genius. We are not trained. We didn't go to NYU. We are writers who became directors so that we could protect our scripts basically. And so it's a lot of, 'Here's what's in my head and here's what I want to accomplish.' To have somebody be able to go along on that ride and then take what is in your head, understand what it is you're talking about, and then blow it up into this majestic piece that is so much better than you even thought it could be, that's very rare. He knows everything, by the way, which can be annoying for some people because there's nothing he doesn't know. I once asked him during the pilot, 'Do you think that this shot is a Steadicam or a dolly?' I've kept the email. It's a five-page dissertation on the evolution of Steadicam, who invented it, pictures of it on a warship, the initial [idea] that it was [built by] the military. I literally had to write back, 'OK, but is this a Steadicam or a dolly?' I'm happy to have people [tell me], 'You're an amazing director,' but I've got to tell you, David Mullen was my film school. He feels what you feel so deeply. He knows how much you want to do something. And he doesn't light women like he hates his wife, which is a big deal with DPs because a lot of them, I think, hate their wives. And then they come to a set and they look at the lead woman, they're like, this is the revenge that I can take. He lights the women so beautifully, and he's so actor-conscious, and he's so gentle. You think he's not a dictator and yet he totally is.
Mullen: I take passive-aggressiveness to new levels.
Sherman-Palladino: I love you for it because he can take things that I think like this is way too ambitious, we're never going to be able to get this, and then he'll add an extra layer of ambition onto it, and I'm like, 'All right, let's go!'
Palladino: All the years of Maisel and this year of Étoile, there's nothing that Amy and I look back on and think, 'Oh, you know we could have done that but we weren't able to do it.' We realized everything the way we saw it in our heads because of David and some other key members of the crew. We were really lucky to gather all these guys together, especially David.
Sherman-Palladino: David takes these unbelievable, beautiful photographs, because he'll wander off in the middle of the night, much to my terror. And that is the film you get. His eye is amazing, and I just wish he wouldn't wander off in the middle of the night with a camera alone. I want to have some muscle with him, because I can't lose him. He must remain alive for me. He's an artist in the purest form. And it's not about ego. It's about what the work is and what the world is and what we can make of it. It's just a delight every day to come to work when you're dealing with that sort of energy.
David, what special challenges did set up for you? What did you have to accomplish for that tested your skills?
Mullen: I think the challenge is that it wasn't an obvious approach to it. When we did Maisel, it's a period film. So you get all these elements you can draw from period movies to period photography to just the amazing architecture and fashion of the late '50s in America. It's a wealth of information that you can pull on and build a look around. When you do a modern story, what you do with modern settings is filter out all the stuff you don't like about the modern world. You don't like the color of these stop signs or these billboards. It's much more difficult to pin down in a modern setting what you want to do and don't want to do. In this kind of theatrical setting of dance, it was always a question of a documentary approach do we take to the lives of dancers and the behind-the-scenes world and how much do we take the theatrical approach of the world of theater and music. And there's no easy answer there. I think we kept trying to lean more towards the realism of it, the pain and effort these dancers go through, but also lean away from the reality that when you go behind the scenes at the Lincoln Center, it's nothing but cinder block corridors and fluorescent tubes. It's very brutalist in a way, but that's not the reality we wanted to embrace. Paris was a lot easier. Paris is just gorgeous everywhere you go, inside and outside. I think our basic thing that evolved was that Paris has this kind of naturally, old world reality to it. So New York has got to be perceived as modernist visually, just to have a contrast. You know what city you're in just by the shapes and the forms and the colors that you get in both cities. Paris is inherently warm. It's all sandstone and golds and painted things. So I wanted to play New York the opposite, which is sort of blues and greens. So it became more of an old world, new world look. There's a modern art feeling to New York, in terms of the shapes and the walls and the furniture, more pop art in a way. And Paris has got that patina of paintings of 18th, 19th century paintings.
Amy and Dan, I love how you always manage to set up a new challenge for David and the crew. Was there a moment like that this season?
Sherman-Palladino: I've been bugging David and Jim McConkey, our Steadicam whiz. I keep saying, 'Where's my dance cam?' When I did the telephone operator thing in Maisel [with the switchboard scene], they invented this thing that I call the McConkey wonder stick. It's like a tube and there was duct tape and they hung a camera, and they MacGyvered this thing that was so great. And they kept perfecting it. I kept saying, I want something that allows me the max amount of dance flexibility, so where's my dance cam? They're still working on it, but they did come up with a version of the wonder stick, when we did the one-shot in the pilot of the girl doing her fouettes and I wanted to start with her feet and I wanted to go up and I wanted to go over her and I wanted to come around to the back and end behind her. And there was some duct tape involved in that.
Mullen: The problem is, to really fly something around, it has to be a smaller, lighter camera. Lately, some shows have been doing stuff with these smaller, pro-sumer kind of cameras, like Adolescence, like we used for the traffic jam sequence in Maisel. They stripped down their wonder stick into a Sony camera with a lighter boom pole. The trouble is we do a lot of visual effects work to our stuff in post, and that camera is fine if there's going to be zero visual effects done to the shot. But if we have to do extra work, our visual effects supervisor doesn't want us to use the cheaper, smaller, lighter cameras. We have to use our regular, heavier Alexa camera. That's been our one limitation is dealing with just mass and weight. Amy's always pushing what I call basic Newton physics. Anything that weighs a certain amount, it's hard to move and it's hard to stop because of inertia. And you always run into that with anything of any weight at all. We had that problem with the underwater ballet sequence in Maisel in Miami because we were trying to fly a camera underwater and then fly up over the water, look down on the pool and come back down on the other side of the pool. We discovered that you balance this 50-foot technocrane for the weight of the camera, except the moment the camera hits water, it stops being heavy, it becomes buoyant. So they couldn't balance the crane for both underwater and above the water. Essentially once it hit the water, two grips had to take a piece of pipe and shove it underwater and then hold it down like a drowning victim and then would let go and it would pop out of the water again and fly up in the air. We were just fighting basic Newtonian mechanics there.
Palladino: On our first date, all she did was complain about Newtonian physics.
Sherman-Palladino: I did. It's been bugging me for years.
Mullen: Yeah, we've got to appeal the second law of thermodynamics.
Watch our other recent Dream Team stories featuring Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, plus the two creators with star Luke Kirby.
This article and video are presented by Prime Video.
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