When Arnau Valls Colomer learned that “The English” would be shot in his native country of Spain, it left him a little confused. “I live in Spain and this doesn’t look anything like it’s described on the script. The director said ‘I’ve been there before and I’ll make it work.’ I was really skeptical,” he tells Gold Derby during our Meet the Experts: TV Cinematographers panel (watch the exclusive video interview above).
He was aware of areas in Spain that had been used for spaghetti westerns but nothing that could replicate the American Midwest but was soon shown a part of the country that was completely foreign to him. “They took me to this part of Spain I didn’t know existed. We basically did this travel that goes from Louisiana to Nebraska in the story between South Madrid to North Madrid.”
“The English,” which is currently streaming on Amazon Prime is set in the American West in 1890. Lady Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt) arrives in the area seeking revenge on the man that she believes is primarily to blame for the death of her son. She meets a man who’s a member of the Pawnee Nation (Chaske Spencer) and soon discovers that the two may have a shared history. The series also stars Rafe Spall, Stephen Rea, Valerie Pachner, Toby Jones and Ciaran Hinds.
When it came to filming the more intimate moments of the series, Colomer says that he and his team followed the basic rules of the cinematic western. “Finding the sunrise and the sunset at the end or the beginning of the scenes and then working out during the day the intimacy shot and the closeups.” With the director being a very visual director, he was always guiding Colomer in terms of positioning and what would best for the wide shots and the closeups. “In the westerns, there’s the hat wall that at the beginning looks like a problem but ends up being the big solution for lighting because you are in the middle of the day and the face is covered by a strong shadow that you can work the light inside the shadow.”
While maintaining the continuity of lighting for scenes was something the crew struggled with, Colomer says that it gave them unexpected moments of incredible poetry and nature. “For example, the night scenes was very tricky to work, how we work in the middle of the plain, how far the light can go.” This led the crew to do a mixture of shooting in natural locations and then bringing the night scenes to the studio and shooting them there by recreating the desert floor and then blue screens in the back. “Trying to replicate the moonlight that’s impossible to replicate in a real night exterior and trying to do it is a mixture of techniques of shooting in the studio and shooting plates of day for night for VFX compositions.”
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