Production designer David Gropman develops a black-and-white Italy as seen through the eyes of one Tom Ripley.
In Steven Zaillian’s Ripley, the cobblestones are always wet, the air heavy with moisture. Author Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 tale of murderous desire and stolen identities played out across Italy’s most picturesque cities and coastal settlements has often lent itself to sunny, saturated interpretation: Alain Delon’s blue eyes flashing in René Clément’s Purple Noon (1960); islands awash with bright, striped sun loungers and lemon trees in Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). But in the Academy Award-winning writer-director’s eight-part Netflix series, the palette is not so balmy. Moodily shot in black and white, the story of Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott) inveigling his way into the affluent, leisurely lives of Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn) and Marge Sherwood (Dakota Fanning) acquires a noir-ish tone, its scenes set up like mid-century photographs, meticulously arranged and frequently pooled with shadow. Absent of color, the show acquires the kind of macabre texture that Italy, with its high Catholicism and narrow passageways, excels in. Taps drip, clocks chime in echoing squares, pigeons fuss on statues, laundry hangs listless between buildings, figures become indeterminate outlines behind translucent fabrics and beaded curtains.
For production designer David Gropman, recently nominated for an Emmy for his work on the limited series, photography was key to building the monochrome world of Ripley. “All of the details and the style were there in [Zaillian’s] script. I didn’t have to imagine much because it was so beautifully written,” explains the creative, who has been Academy Award-nominated for his work on The Cider House Rules and Life of Pi. “Steve is as big a fan of black-and-white photography as I am, and so we immediately started exchanging photographs back and forth.” Rather than referencing films, they stuck to the still image — Gropman working with a team of researchers to develop a visual language that was attentive to light and line, infused with a certain gloomy romanticism. “There’s one Italian photographer by the name of Piergiorgio Branzi who was a great inspiration to me,” he says. “You could just look at his work and see frames you hoped to realize in the film.” Other references included Pietro Donzelli and Mario Cattaneo, as well as photographers from further afield, including Leonard Freed, David Seymour, and Bert Hardy.
In a moment of incredible serendipity, this research period also coincided with an exhibition at New York University titled NeoRealismo: The New Image in Italy 1932-1960, which explored Italian life as seen through the eyes of its photographers before, during, and after World War II, as fascism eventually gave way to democracy. The exhibition focused on exchanges between the worlds of photography and cinema, and how the camera — at first a useful nationalist propaganda tool — acquired new power as it surveyed poverty, labor, and seismic social change throughout the country. Gropman visited and left with two copies of the accompanying book, one for Zaillian and one that became Gropman’s design bible, sitting on his desk in Rome for the entirety of the shoot.
“I’ve wanted to do a black-and-white film for years,” Gropman says. “[It’s] all about form, frame, contrast.” Form, frame, and contrast dominated the series’ sets, whether on location or built from scratch. Ripley takes us from New York to Naples and on to a little village called Atrani, racking up over two hundred interior and exterior locations with detours to Sanremo, Rome, Palermo, and Venice. Gropman’s onsite research began in Ischia, where both Purple Noon and The Talented Mr. Ripley were shot, before he began roaming the Amalfi Coast. “All of this [was] in November,” he explains. “[These] are obviously big vacation spots, and everything [was] closed down. The weather [was] horrible . . . stormy and gray skies. It was the perfect way to scout Steve’s version of Ripley.”
Although Atrani was not the obvious first choice for where Dickie and Marge had set up home, its geography immediately set Gropman’s imagination going. The series trades in repeat motifs and settings, lingering on reflective surfaces (mottled mirrors, shop windows, the aforementioned cobblestones) and forcing — or sometimes bumping — its characters up and down staircases. Atrani is known for its winding stairs, which Tom Ripley ascends and descends several times, increasingly out of breath, as he first searches for Dickie. It is in sly interludes such as these that Ripley finds tonal balance, its bleakness shot through with moments of levity. “[Dutch artist] MC Escher spent time there and did countless engravings and drawings of the stairs,” Gropman says. “It was perfection. You see those same kinds of stairs in Amalfi and Positano and other small towns that we looked at, but none as brilliantly convoluted and incredibly challenging as the ones in Atrani.”
Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott)
Gropman experienced another such magical moment when he alighted on a sixteenth-century palazzo in Rome with marble walls. Minus the modern TV, it was the ideal stand-in for the suite that Tom Ripley checks into at the Hotel Excelsior, slipping into his new wealthy identity with surprising ease as he carries a dead man’s belongings in his suitcase. “To me, it’s almost one of Andrew’s best moments,” Gropman observes. “The bellman takes him into the suite, gives him the key, closes the door, and Tom does this fantastic double take, like, I can’t believe it.”
A perfect location is a hard thing to find. The production designer often acts as magician, cobbling together hotel lobbies from ballrooms, and imposing rail stations from train maintenance yards; and psychologist, deliberating over what furniture choices and paintings can say about a person. As he points out, many of the more opulent spaces in Ripley are transient. “Dickie’s house, Tom’s apartment, the palazzo in Venice . . . All of those spaces are [ones] that they have moved into, that they are renting. There’s a whole world and aesthetic that exists before they come into those spaces.”
Others, like Marge’s house in Atrani, which was built on a set at Cinecittà studios, are more personal. “I thought I’d have the most beautiful palette of these blue-greens and a lot of age. Of course, that goes away with black and white.” For Gropman though, it’s always a question of coherence. “Back in the day when they made black-and-white films, there were lots of tricks: using orange to create gray, or green to create black. I’ve been designing films for a while; one thing that means a lot to me is that when the cast and crew walk into a location or onto a set, they can leave the other world behind them,” he explains. “To that end, I like to be as authentic and sensitive as I can . . . My whole career, I’ve worked with very limited palettes when doing color films . . . [so black and white] is comfortable and it’s not taking focus.”
Modern technology has its benefits. Gropman would often photograph the sets and locations, running the images through a black-and-white filter and playing with the exposure to assess how different shades and textures spoke to one another. Some props were also trialed in different shades — such as a rather crucial Murano glass ashtray. “[It] has a bit of color that lays in the glass at the bottom, so we looked at it in green and red and blue to see what would photograph most convincingly,” Gropman says. “Green won the day.”
Given the production designer’s role in conjuring the sinister world that unfolds around Tom Ripley, what impression did he take away of the titular con man? “I had to see it through Tom’s eyes,” Gropman says after a pause. “We see everything, every location, every city he visits through [him]. So I’d like to say I have a little bit of empathy, but that’s just too creepy.” His own eyes brighten. “The way I see him is as a character of literature. To me, he’s fascinating because of what his wants are and the lengths he goes to hold them in his hands.” Another pause. “But I can’t approve of his process.”
