Rutkowski on How Partnership Forged the Look of Sugar

 Directed by Fernando Meirelles and Adam Arkin, Sugar follows the private investigator John Sugar (played by Colin Farrell), who is recruited by a wealthy movie producer to investigate the disappearance of his granddaughter.

 "Adam and I had worked on the entire first season of The Americans together," Rutkowski said. "He did a great job on that season, and he really helped mold what that show became. And I worked hand-in-hand with him. I was shooting every episode."

 This bond became a necessity for Sugar. With Meirelles bringing Charlone on as DP, the production team needed a cinematographer who knew the Los Angeles landscape as a creative. With Rutkowski supporting in prep, Meirelles and Charlone crafted Episodes 1 and 2 of Sugar, setting the tone that Rutkowski continued to carry throughout his episodes. 

This new bond allowed each creative team to ferry the show into a contemporary landscape that focused on melding the past and the present via the noir genre. 

 "In the scripts and in the character are built-in references to the film noir legacy, specifically to Los Angeles," Rutkowski explained. "This was in the DNA of the scripts and the show, and I was happy to see Fernando and César embracing their own language. Language they've used on films over the years, which involves a lot of filming, a lot of shots."

 "Not necessarily every shot goes all the way through a scene. Sometimes they'll move the camera position while the actors are going (through a scene), which is not the normal way of doing things, or they'll load the set with other ways of recording, in our case, iPhones."

 This approach created many visual moments that relied on post-production to bring together. And when it all did come together, it weaved a tapestry of story; something that Rutkowski and the creative team used to sway the audience. 

 "If you watch the first couple episodes, it indeed is like quilting or tapestry, where you weave together different strands of the visual to support the narrative," Rutkowski said. "You sort of indoctrinate the audience that the camera can shift point of view at any time, that there isn't a singular aesthetic but a multitudinal aesthetic involved."

 "And then you also help the viewer attune to this idea that you're going to flashback to previously existing entertainment, previously existing, now classic stories, and that it is going to have purpose."

 All of this work wasn't an attempt to create a beautiful cut. Every moment and every shot was a calculated move to build the character of John Sugar and explain why he is the way he is.

Capturing Sugar with the Sony VENICE and VENICE 2

 Often dark and gritty in story, film noir movies are also equally dark and gritty in their visual language. For Sugar, these elements were building blocks that were coerced into something modern, while paying homage to the past. 

 For the series, Rutkowski utilized the Sony VENICE and VENICE 2, which were paired with the VENICE Extensions System. In addition, footage shot on iPhones was used for social media elements in the show and for angles that traditional cinema cameras were too big to capture. 

 "We were using both VENICE (and VENICE 2)," Rutkowski said. "A lot of it was the resolution, and a lot of it was the ability to pump the ASA to higher levels. César has a lighting style that involves working at high ASA, allowing things to be overexposed, and then bringing it back in the color correction."

 "We did not want to just mimic noir lighting. We wanted it to be very much intrinsic to the storytelling and…in a way that maybe doesn't even go very noticed."

 Supporting César’s lighting style was a custom LUT that the team named "K-Lady," which evolved with the show to better fit exterior and interior shoots. Having the Dual-ISO from the VENICE and VENICE 2 gave Rutkowski and César the highlight roll-off they wanted, as well as control over the color. 

 "Through the testing and the LUT process, we were able to come up with something that rolled off the highlights very beautifully and contained a lot of color information without seeming too punchy in the color," Rutkowski said. "There's a really fine balance between showing these colorful California daytimes, especially driving around, and wanting a more refined color palette and wanting to take some of the blue out of the sky and some of the warmth out of the skin, but not get into a neutral, desaturated palette."

 Flexibility was also demanded of the camera system. In some scenes, the team needed to be close to actors while respecting how their likenesses were captured. The combination of high sensitivity, skin tone reproduction, and the VENICE Extension System provided the support that Rutkowski required. 

 "We needed a flexible camera that could be broken apart," Rutkowski explained. "The way the Rialto mode works…handheld could involve being very close to the actor without a big camera body.

 "We were [also] sensitive to being so close to the faces of our leads. You have to be very sensitive to how you record in this medium," Rutkowski continued. "It's different than film. It's different than working in the sort of lower-resolution video formats that a lot of us had worked in before."

 As modern cinema cameras achieve new technological heights, creativity with the visual medium now forces cinematographers to go beyond lighting and composition. For Rutkowski, it's a combination of artistic and technical experience that pushes him to be more aware of what he captures with his frame.

 "It sees everything and it sometimes sees more than you see. So, it's incumbent on the camera person, with not only a sense of taste but also a technical awareness, to come in and say, I'm going to start to contain this genie in the bottle and make it work for me."

Rutkowski on How Sugar Embraces Southern California

While Rutkowski and the creative team embraced the cinematic tools at their disposal, it was the focus on storytelling and making Southern California a part of the visual fabric of Sugar that drove the visual language of the show. 

"It comes down to a point of view on the storytelling and the embrace of making Southern California a part of the visual fabric of the show," Rutkowski shared. "Embracing that, all of Los Angeles has part of this story to tell."

"Even if you go back to reading The Big Sleep, Philip Marlowe travels a lot around different parts of Los Angeles in the storytelling, and it very much mirrors the way the scripts were written for Sugar."