Armenian Film Society sat down with the legendary Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Zaillian, ahead of his Netflix series earning 13 Emmy nominations, including nods for Best Writing and Best Directing. Steven Zaillian's credits include films such as Awakenings (1990), Schindler's List (1993), Gangs of New York (2002), Moneyball (2011), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), and The Irishman (2019). The Academy Award-winning writer is also the creator, writer, director, and producer of the Netflix series, Ripley, which has received critical acclaim. Armenian Film Society spoke with Steven Zaillian on the masterclass of visual storytelling that is Ripley, the recurring visual motifs at the center of the series, and he set the record straight on whether he'll ever tell an Armenian story.
Armenian Film Society: I’m honored to speak with you about Ripley, which I feel is your finest work and an incredible achievement. Congratulations on all its success.
Steven Zaillian: Thank you for your kind words.
AFS: You wrote an article about your mother’s grape leaves recipe, which I find fascinating because of how descriptive it is, and how you write the recipe and the instructions with such detail and storytelling.
SZ: I can't help myself, I guess. Even with a recipe, I have to tell a story.
My mother would make grape leaves a couple of times a month, and always on Christmas Eve, along with lamb kebabs and choreg with black seeds. She wasn't Armenian, but took it upon herself to learn how to make Armenian food for my dad and my sister and me. Her grape leaves, I think, were her own take on it, the way she cooked them in tomato sauce. I'm sure this wasn't an unknown way to do it, but I seldom see them cooked like that. They're delicious, and I still make them with her recipe for my family to this day.
The other thing I notice about that article is that I'm describing in detail a process. I'm always interested in process, in all my scripts, including Ripley. The mechanics of his schemes, how you forge things, how police investigations work...
AFS: Can you tell me about your Armenian background and your family?
SZ: I was born in Fresno, but didn't spend much time there. We moved to Los Angeles when I was two, and that's where we stayed. We'd go to Fresno once or twice a year for holidays to visit some of my father's Armenian relatives and my mother's German relatives.
My grandmother on my father's side died when I was quite young, so I never really knew her. Nor did I know my grandfather well. I remember him in his small farmhouse in Sanger, but unfortunately know very little about their lives before they came here. I'm not sure how much my father knew. He, too, was born in Fresno. He would talk about wanting to travel to 'the old country,' but died before he could. He died young, at 52.
AFS: Have you ever considered telling an Armenian story? Have you come across any Armenian stories that you have felt strongly about wanting to tell?
SZ: I have long thought about telling an Armenian story, and I continue to think about it. Every so often someone comes to me with The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. While it's an excellent and important book, and has been made as a film, I don't feel it's the only Armenian story to tell.
With Schindler's List, it was Oskar's story of building a business that brought us into the broader story of the Holocaust. Without his story I would have been overwhelmed trying to write it. I feel the same way about an Armenian story. I need to come up with compelling characters who can take us through the story within the story, and I just haven't been able to accomplish that yet. I feel like I'll only have one shot at it, and if I don't do it well, in a way that's thoroughly engrossing, I'd be doing a disservice to such an important subject. But I keep trying.
AFS: You wrote, directed, and produced every episode of Ripley. How much did the project evolve over the years? How open were you to the way a location, for instance, could bring forth new ideas and shape what you had already written, or how did your time in editing shape the project as a whole?
SZ: Writing an eight-part series is quite daunting to someone like me who has spent his career writing two-hour films. I feel like I'm still learning, having only done it once before Ripley. The writing of the eight Ripley scripts took about 18 months. Then, because we were delayed by COVID, I had another year to think about it all, and to revise the scripts.
They say you write three times when making a film. Once when writing the script. A second time when shooting it. And a third time in editing. This is true.
I'm completely open to ideas the locations inspire. You can't not be. Locations are almost never what you imagine when writing. The action you wrote often won't work in a particular location. The good news is, the reality of the actual location often inspires something better than what you initially imagined. In any case, you have to make it work.
Same with editing. I'm not shy about shooting a lot. I never leave a scene until I know I have what I need. Still, so many good ideas come up in editing, ways of using what you shot in a different way. We had a generous amount of time for editing, the kind of time you have for a feature, which is not the norm in television. It's important to me to have this time because ideas come when they come— in writing and in editing— and can't be forced. Some of the best ideas with Ripley came after more than a year of editing.
AFS: Ripley is a masterclass in nonverbal storytelling. There has been much said and written about the black and white cinematography, and I feel that by stripping away the color, the audience is driven to pay attention to details. There is so much detail that you highlight throughout— such as shoes, the steps, the ashtray— all recurring visual motifs.
SZ: The thing about the black and white is that it was just one of thousands of decisions. And every one of those thousands of decisions was important. The choice to make it in black and white was actually one of the easiest decisions to make. It seemed obvious to me.
I like that you point out these motifs— the steps, the shoes, the ashtray. I might add to them things like the ring, the Caravaggios, Tom's fear of water, the portraits looking down like witnesses to his crimes.
These were all things that began in the writing and were then elaborated on during filming, when locations would be a certain way, like the stairs in Atrani, at the morgue, at the Rome apartment, at Carlo's place in Naples and at the Savona pensione in Palermo— all these M.C. Escher-like stairs everywhere we went.
On a day early in the filming, I was asked, "Another shot of the shoes, Steve? Is that really necessary?" I replied, "Yes, it is. The Ferragamo's will keep coming back in the story. They're a plot point, and an important motif."
AFS: Can you talk about your collaboration with Robert Elswit and how you two communicate so much visually?
SZ: I know what I like in terms of shots and their compositions and spend lots of time determining them. What I don't know is how to achieve the kind of lighting I imagine. Robert does. He's a master of light, and I would be amazed at just how expressively he could light a place, no matter how big it was. Consider the churches. Or the Via Appia Antica at night where there are no street lights or moonlight or any other kind of light. Robert had no trouble with it.
AFS: Can you talk about your approach to filming the episode, “III Sommerso,” specifically the sequence in which Dickie is killed? The entire sequence takes place on a boat, and I’m curious how you approached filming this sequence, and what some of your biggest challenges were.
SZ: I was intrigued with the idea of doing a long suspenseful sequence in such a confined space. It turned out to be very complex, with more setups than any other scene in the show. Easily more than a hundred, with multiple cameras. We chipped away at it patiently, trying not to rush through it, getting all the shots that were needed, which took about a week.
There are different ways you can shoot such a scene:
On the open ocean. In a calmer bay. Tied off to a dock. Or in a tank.
We chose to shoot in a tank, surrounded by green screens, and shot with three cameras, all on cranes so every shot could have the same slight drift, the same feel as being on the ocean. Doing it in a tank is certainly more manageable than the ocean, but it means there will need to be significant visual effects work later to put in the ocean water and dramatic winter skies I wanted. The New Zealand company Weta did the excellent visual effects for the sequence.
AFS: In your adaptation of this story, we also have the luxury of time; what’s fascinating is not how Tom kills Dickie and Freddy, but the amount of time and work that goes into getting rid of their bodies. Tom isn’t a professional killer, but he has to work to clean up his mess. Did that aspect appeal to you, and was that one of the main reasons why you wanted to tell this story in this specific format?
SZ: Yes, this was something that appealed to me from the beginning, from before I even started writing. I saw it as an opportunity to do something one couldn't do in a feature film, since to show the process in this way, in almost real time— twice— would take up half of the entire running time of a film.
And it allowed me to think, to write, and then to shoot entirely in a visual way. Just images and sound. No dialog. No voice-over. No score. Pure visual storytelling.
AFS: I am very interested in Tom’s personal spaces and the spaces he inhabits and occupies and how that evolves over the series: his apartment in New York, the various hotels he stays in, his room in Dickie’s villa, and most importantly, his apartment in Rome, and later, his place in Venice. Tom spends much of the series trying to elevate his class, as he is surrounded by the wealthy, who have had everything come so easy to them. Can you talk about how you and your production design team approach how Tom interacts with the places he inhabits and how that evolves over the series, especially how by the time Tom is in Venice, he feels like he belongs in those wealthy homes?
SZ: David Gropman is a very talented and dedicated Production Designer.
At the beginning, it was just the two of us and our location managers, going all over Italy, looking for the places for the scenes to play out— in Rome, Venice, Naples, Palermo, and the Amalfi Coast. We spent many months doing this, for something like 200 eventual locations.
These locations could not just be good places to shoot in. They had to accommodate the scripted action. Some wouldn't work for that reason. They just didn't lay out right in that regard. Other places we found would be different than what I'd imagined, but would end up working better.
Like Tom's apartment building. So much of the action in Episode 5 of Tom coming and going and dealing with Freddie wanted the suspense that comes with the closeness of his landlady's presence (and her cat's). For that reason I had always imagined a small lobby comprised of just her office, the elevator and wraparound stairs. We looked and looked and looked in Rome and couldn't find that.
Instead, we had this building with a long entry tunnel that led past an office to a large courtyard and garden, which in turn led to a separate wing of the building with an elevator and stairs. So, stuck with that, I rewrote all the action to play out in that disjointed configuration, and I think it ended up working out better.
(I actually did happen upon a building that had the correct layout— but it was months later, after we had filmed all the apartment scenes. I couldn't believe it).
For Tom's palazzo in Venice, we looked at several. All were quite stunning, but Palazzo Polignac, where we filmed, had an untouched, almost haunted feel to it. You could sense the generations of people who had lived and died in it over the centuries.
For a long time we couldn't find a suitable villa for Dickie. Then, when not looking for it, I happened to drive past a place while on a brief vacation in Capri. I learned that it was called Villa Torricella, and that it had a very interesting history. I never thought we'd be allowed to film there, but we were.
Apart from the many locations, David built some major sets on the stages of Cinecitta: Tom's New York SRO room, hallway and communal bathroom, his Rome apartment interior, his dreary Pensione Savona room, Marge's Atrani house interior, and all the train platforms, and train compartments.
These elaborate sets were designed by David, and set decorated by Alessandra Querzola with such attention to detail that the actors always felt they were in a real place, which of course is important for performance.
AFS: How much of the opening and closing sequences were planned beforehand, and how much was discovered in the editing room? I am specifically curious about the prologue with the body, and the impeccably crafted montage sequence of Tom at the end with the final title card.
SZ: The opening scene was shot for Episode 5. Using it as a prologue was an idea that occurred during editing, and not at the early stages of editing. As I mentioned before, I feel having a good amount of time for editing is very important. The idea for that scene as a prologue happened many months deep into the editing.
Same thing with the ending. I always knew I wanted to end with Tom and Caravaggio, separated by 350 years, both sitting with glasses of wine, admiring their paintings. That, and I wanted to convey the idea that Tom sees in Picasso's cubist figure deconstructed pieces of his own invented personas.
But exactly how to edit it took a lot of work. Josh Lee was the editor who worked on that final sequence. We returned to it over and over. At one point I said to him, "Josh, you know, this will be the last thing we'll be working on when they come and take the show away from us to air it." And it was.
AFS: The written word is such a big part of this series. Tom is always writing letters, and is always scanning newspapers to see if he needs to pick up and run to another location (and you brilliantly show Italian text changing to English on screen).
SZ: The changing headlines was another one of those you-need-enough-time-in-editing for good ideas. And it was more difficult to achieve than one might think. Jason Tsang with Assembly did those visual effects.
AFS: The final episode in Venice is also such a fascinating storytelling moment because Tom (as Dickie) sends a suicide note to the woman who manages the apartment in Rome, and he has to rely on her showing the note to the police. Can you talk about how you use writing through the series and how important writing is in the story itself, and how you sort of deviate from genre norms with the suicide note and find a new and different way of revealing the note?
SZ: I think the suicide note is the most clever and complex of all of Tom's schemes. It takes the ability to write in someone else's voice, the foresight to see several steps ahead like in a chess game, and a deep understanding of how people think and will react. And patience. In the script, at the moment McCarron produces the letter, the script reads:
Al takes an envelope from his pocket and sets it on the coffee table between them. It’s addressed to Signora Buffi, from R. Greenleaf, postmarked Palermo. All Tom can think is, "What took her so long to take it to the police," but he merely opens it and takes from it the letter that he, Tom, wrote to her as Dickie.
