When Steven Zaillian sat down to adapt Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, what he produced was akin to a five-hundred-page film script.
This in-depth approach to bringing rich literary texts to the screen is typical for Zaillian, who earned four of his five Academy Award nominations for previous adaptations (including a win for Schindler’s List), and it’s what makes his eight-part series Ripley such an immersive and visceral watch. “This is different because my whole career I’ve dealt with two hours,” says the writer-director of the series' format. “I could understand the character [of Tom Ripley] better if I had more time to see the details of his behavior. I felt that I was the only person to do it. I mean, I knew it so well.”
By breaking down the methodology of the murky main character, Ripley hews as closely as possible to Highsmith’s characterization of Tom Ripley. Zaillian’s Tom, played with brilliant subtlety by Andrew Scott, is a cipher among the wealthy characters whose circle he infiltrates — Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn), Marge Sherwood (Dakota Fanning), and Freddie Miles (Eliot Sumner) — and whose residences and luxury European playgrounds he insinuates himself into. “I saw it as I think Patricia wrote it,” says Zaillian. “A rather sinister story and in a dangerous place. And so for all those reasons, [shooting it in] black and white made sense to me.”
From the lush noir cinematography to the half-painted Caravaggio prop paintings and the hundreds of alluring Italian locales, the exemplary crafts team, comprising many frequent Zaillian collaborators, left no stone unturned when creating the world he’d imagined in such detail. “I want to thank Steve because it’s his vision, relentless and clear and precise, that guided all of us,” production designer David Gropman says. “I think everyone would agree that we all come with our talents and our skills, but Steve took me to a whole other place.”
Gropman, director of photography Robert Elswit, editors David O. Rogers and Joshua Raymond Lee, composer Jeff Russo, and supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer Larry Zipf sat down with Zaillian to discuss making the seductive, thrilling world of Ripley.
An edited version of the conversation follows
Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott)
Steven Zaillian (writer, director, executive producer): When you read the script, did you see anything that made you think, Oh, God, this is going to be challenging?
Robert Elswit (director of photography): One of the things that was so important to Steve was the process that Ripley goes through in all of his activities; whether he’s going upstairs to Dickie’s villa or dropping off a body at the Via Appia Antica, he’s doing it in a very specific way that meant a lot to Steve. When I read the script, I kept thinking, Oh my God, we can save so much time. Why does he go back and drop Freddie off and then go back and then pick up his passport? And I didn’t get it. It was really with Steve later that I got a sense about the process and what Ripley was going through, about who that guy is.
I know there’s a lot of climbing of stairs and driving and getting in elevators and a lot of walking into different hotels, and I just ended up finding it utterly fascinating because of the locations. David and Steve spent a year and a half driving up and down the coast of the Amalfi finding these places. Those locations told the story as clearly and specifically as I could possibly imagine — architecturally, design-wise. There isn’t a [piece] of furniture, prop, or piece of clothing that hadn’t been thought through in a very, very specific way by these two guys, and [prop master] David Gulick. The very specific way that Steve saw Ripley wandering through the show just turned it into something I’d never quite experienced before or understood. The amount of time that David and Steve took to prep this thing was extraordinary. I don’t know how it would’ve worked any other way and I don’t know what I would’ve done without it.
Zaillian: Were there about two hundred locations? David, maybe you could talk a little bit about location scouting.
David Gropman (production designer): I start out the way I would with any film: We do the research and we talk and we start scouting for locations. We built a lot of stage sets, but [with] one hotel, the exterior would be one place, the lobby would be another, and the room would be a third place. So that’s how we got up to such a big number. I feel like I came to a whole other place on Ripley. I’ve always tried to not be a designer but a world builder for a story to take place in.
Marge Sherwood (Dakota Fanning) and Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott)
Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott) and Dickie Greenwood (Johnny Flynn)
Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott)
Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott)
There isn’t a [piece] of furniture, prop, or piece of clothing that hadn’t been thought through in a very, very specific way.
Robert Elswit, director of photography
Zaillian: Dave and Josh, they did a remarkable job. I will mention the famous boat scene because there are only two minutes out of 25 that are action and the rest of it is process and quite deliberate — that’s good editing.
David O. Rogers (editor): That attention to detail permeates the whole show and I think that really gives us footage that you can’t go wrong with because every frame gives you what you need. One of the things that was really a nice puzzle was in Episode 4, the scenes with Marge and Tom, with a lot of Tom moving around and packing things. Getting all that stuff to land in a clean and efficient way with the dialogue was a great challenge and very gratifying once we finally got it all to flow.
Joshua Raymond Lee (editor): What dictated how I tried to approach things were these images that Robert had captured, and the immense density and detail of the production design really merited being able to stay on any shot for an extended period of time. How do we give proper honor to every single frame without sitting in a slow, plodding narrative? This is a thriller and it’s also a romp and a comedy in many ways. So getting all those things to come through without sacrificing the attention paid to every detail and
every location was everything.
Zaillian: Jeff, how do we work together?
Jeff Russo (composer): We started in 2021 when you went to Italy and we talked about the Mina song [“Il cielo in una stanza”] and how that was going to look. I had started writing themes and I went in one direction, a little bit of a more romantic way that seemed like 1960s Italy. And you called me and were like, “This is all great, but we’re making a thriller about a psycho and we really need to focus on that. Start at Episode 7 and then see how that will inform what we do in Episodes 1 and 2.” I tend
to write in a more linear way, so when I [tried] that I was like, Oh, that’s why you’re Steve Zaillian because I would never have thought to do that, and it opened up the entire score. The way we created the score was something completely new for me, [even though] we had worked together on The Night Of. It was quite intimidating because I was looking at these images that were so spectacular, thinking, I don’t know how I’m going to
get there. But the change in perspective helped me.
Zaillian: What Larry created was an atmosphere. He’s done it all with sound and it’s subtle, but it works. Is that something that’s fun or is that a drag to do?
Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott) behind the scenes
I think everyone would agree that we all come with our talents and our skills, but Steve took me
to a whole other place.
David Gropman, production designer
Larry Zipf (supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer): It was very intimidating to look at those sequences at first and feel like I’m being trusted to support those scenes the way they need to be supported [using sound]. But like you said earlier with the editing, you have your couple minutes of action and then the rest is process. So in some ways, I’m just trying to work to support what you’ve already built there and the choices that you’ve already made. It was a blast. You’re constantly zooming in and zooming out and seeing the things that are really important in the moment; are they working in the context of the larger scene?
Zaillian: I remember that in these scenes there are a lot of details, and people would say, “Do we really need another shot of the Ferragamo shoes?” Did you ever feel that way, Robert?
Elswit: I looked at Episode 5 recently, and it’s the two scenes where Freddie Miles comes and visits Tom, who is pretending Dickie’s still alive, and Freddie moves around that apartment, looks at all the items, touches them, plays with the painting, all of these little details. It’s so carefully thought through and specifically detailed in terms of setups and dialogue. I kind of put it together in my head when we were shooting it, but until I saw what you guys turned it into, I didn’t appreciate how smart we were. I thought, God, we really know what we’re doing.
Zaillian: We also have lots of paintings that David had made. David, can you just explain what those are?
Gropman: Yes, so the two Caravaggios, we had to deconstruct them. A fabulous scenic artist by the name of Valentina [Troccoli] started with digital files of the actual paintings, but the amount of research that she did to understand Caravaggio’s painting technique, to know how to take it back and make paintings in progress . . . Even more remarkably, she created Dickie’s entire portfolio of paintings, [she’s] a scenic artist who can paint a deconstructed Caravaggio and then also paint about four dozen really bad paintings.
Not only did we have a fantastic crew to take us through the whole project, but the architecture of all of Italy where we shot created the scale of the film. With that architecture comes all those years of culture and passion, and I think you see that in every frame. So here’s to Italy.
