By Iain Blair
Paris Barclay is one of television’s most successful and honored directors. A two-time Emmy Award winner, he’s directed nearly 200 episodes of television, including such series as The West Wing, ER, Glee, CSI, The Shield, Scandal and NYPD Blue. He received his ninth Emmy nomination for an episode of the Netflix show Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.
Paris Barclay
The 10-part true crime series, created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, dramatizes the life and death of notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer (Evan Peters). It received six Emmy nominations. Barclay’s nod was for Episode 6, “Silenced.”
I recently spoke with Barclay about making the harrowing show, the challenges, his love of post and the importance of sound.
What were the challenges of directing your episodes — 6 and 10 — and how did you prepare?
I got the scripts a couple of weeks before I had to start official preparation, so I was able to ruminate on it and imagine it. What I kept coming back to was music — not the music that would play on the show but the whole thing as a kind of musical system. That was my private touchstone. I didn’t really express that to everyone else, but I’m also a composer, and I think of things in terms of beats, silences and crescendos, and the blessing of different instruments. So I tried to sort of play it like I’d play a score that I loved. That was the over-arching design.
Then we got technical, and there was a period of thousands and thousands of meetings. What would the slice of meat look like that appears in the final scenes? That was probably seven meetings just for that. How would we do Tony’s story, and would it be different in terms of the style we were doing for the rest of the show? How would we be able to bring Evan to that period and also a brighter mood than we see with him in the past? So in meetings with Ryan and the writers and producers we gradually hashed out all of these things, bit by bit. And then we changed them, constantly, because that’s the way it goes.
Talk about working with your DP John O’Connor.
He was my DP on both episodes, and we began working on the template that had been established on the first episode by director Carl Franklin and DP Jason McCormick. Jason was sort of our visual stylist for the whole series, and working with Ryan he conceived how the show would look. He left the rule book — basically, one page of different visual rules we had to adhere to, which we then had to deviate from. It was great to have the rule book, and we used it like I used the music. It became something that we blocked in and out depending on the scene and the circumstances.
The show has a great look. What cameras and lenses did you shoot on?
We shot on the Sony Venice, and we used the Blackwing 7 series of lenses created by Bradford Young and others that have that very particular patina and have that bokeh and certain fall-off and glow. And, of course, those lenses were undoubtedly tweaked by Jason to make sure they were exactly what we wanted. I believe we used two sets of the Blackwing 7 series of lenses, one that was a little bit more traditional in the Blackwing style, and one that was a little bit moiré distorted that we used in certain moments.
Tell us about the shoot.
We shot it all here in LA at Raleigh Studios, and the shooting schedule depended on various factors. So while I was shooting Episode 6, we were also cleaning up parts of Episode 1 and other episodes, so the schedule went a bit longer than usual.
I shot for about 18 days on Episode 6, and Episode 10 was a bit more efficient, shooting for about 14 days. They were definitely longer than normal TV as we shot cinematically, and it takes extra time to do all the setups and get the beautiful look we were hoping for. I think we did get the look we wanted.
Did you start integrating post during the shoot?
Oh yeah. I was super-fortunate to have Taylor Joy Mason as my editor. She was brilliant and came up with lots of great ideas. We were on the phone a lot about the things I was delivering, and she was trying things that were somewhat experimental and not necessarily in the traditional style of the show, which opened it up.
For instance, like the flutter-cutting between Dahmer and Tony when we go back to him telling his parents he met a good friend, and then we go back to the club. That was a real editorial collaboration from the get-go. Then there was the strobe lighting that made it intermittent and allowed us to go back and forth between experiences. Taylor and I were talking all along, and also talking about sound, as it plays such a critical role in this. We recorded sound everywhere, but then it was a matter of, which scenes are we really going to drop the sound out of?
We didn’t plan to use sound everywhere, but at least we had it – and thank God we did as some of the scenes that had been scripted as silent actually ended up with dialogue in them, and some of the scenes that had dialogue ended up without it. So it was a constant back and forth process, which lasted all the way through to the final mix.
How involved were you in all the post and who was on the team?
I was already involved in another Ryan Murphy series, The Watchmen, so I had Alexis Martin Woodall, president of Ryan Murphy Productions who’s brilliant in post, and she’s a former post supervisor, and is our secret weapon.
Then there’s Regis Kimble, who’s the post supervising editor, and he cut some of the episodes and also worked closely with all the editors to make sure the tone and style and look were consistent. Not every show has this, but having Regis was a godsend.
Then Todd Nenninger, a producer and post supervisor, was doing everything from dealing with the editors and the colorist to the VFX houses and locking in the sound on a day-to-day basis, and we’ve worked together on every Ryan show I’ve done going back to Glee. And he works closely with Scott James, the co-producer. They’re the people who actually executed my dreams on the stage and traveled this thing from start to finish, and I trust them completely.
I was already involved in another Ryan Murphy series, The Watchmen, so I had Alexis Martin Woodall, president of Ryan Murphy Productions, who’s brilliant in post. She’s a former post supervisor and our secret weapon. On some shows, I worry about post, but this team always makes things better. And directing this was very interesting from a post perspective, because Episode 6 starts with a very different look. It’s generally a brighter, sunnier look, and even the nights are not quite as dark and quite as yellow, because we’re living in Tony Hughes’ world. So the club scenes are more alive and have more vibrant colors. But then, as Dahmer intrudes into this world, we began to come back to some of the visual vocabulary, color and style that you associated with him before.
So when he considers crushing the pillows and trying to drug Tony, you see it go back to the style you’ve gotten used to. He’s center-punched in the middle of the frame in very tight focus, and the colors of yellow and despair that we’ve associated with him come back. And all that ends up with the final scene where we’re surrounded in the darkness of his apartment by dank yellows, until finally he’s enclosed completely in black. And the orchestra’s playing the cello line intermittently though the entire episode, and that cello line keeps getting stronger and stronger until at the end when the cello becomes a bass, and the sound drops out of the bottom. So all that’s part of the mix of that particular episode.
What was involved in terms of VFX?
There were very few visual effects in Episode 6. The main ones were for the baby in the first scene, to keep it animated and alive, as some of the baby footage wasn’t of a real baby. We also did some production and period clean-up. This was done by Fuse FX.
For Episode 10, where we see Dahmer being killed in prison, we used a lot of VFX to make it all as vivid as we needed. We had to change his face a bit, add blood and sometimes detract blood, so all that was a VFX surgery and redo to make sure it was all balanced and worked the way we wanted.
What about the DI?
Doug Delaney at Picture Shop was our final colorist, and he did all 10 episodes in the series. He’s brilliant. For instance, he brought in some of the brighter tones that lifted Tony Hughes’ world and all the optimism and took it back to Dahmer’s yellow, dark world in the end.
You’ve directed so many great shows. How do you rate this experience?
It was the most challenging because of the subject matter and my personal feelings about Dahmer, and the complexities of dealing with deaf actors, and also the sound issues.
The sound team from Formosa Group handled the sound mix, and we had a great team — supervising sound editor Gary Megregian, and re-recording mixers Laura Wiest, Jamie Hardt and Joe Barnett. This was really a sound show, and that made it more complicated than Glee with all the music. So you ask, exactly when do you lose the sound, and what replaces it? What about creating the sound of what a deaf person might hear? They created this roar that had a feel and flavor to it, that wasn’t quite a plane or air, that had to be imagined by people, and they did a terrific job.
Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.