Man behind camera helps Breaking Bad look good
NEW YORK — For five seasons of wickedness, Breaking Bad has set viewers faceto-face with the repellent but irresistible Walter White and the dark world he embraced.
With the end imminent, who can say what fate awaits this teacher-turned-druglord for the havoc he has wreaked?
Breaking Bad has been as potent and pure as the crystal meth Walter cooked with such skill. Judging from that consistency in storytelling and in performances, the end will likely pack unforgiving potency.
But one thing is dead sure: It will be beautiful.
Breaking Bad has often been described as addictive, and if that’s so, the look is its own habit-forming drug. Michael Slovis, the series’ four-times-Emmy-nominated director of photography, has been cooking up that look since the series’ sophomore season.
“I go for the emotion in the scene, not to overtake it, but to help it along,” Slovis said. “With Breaking Bad, I recognized very early that I had a story and performances that could stand up to a bold look.”
You would have a hard time finding many stylistic links between Breaking Bad and some of Slovis’s other credits, which include CSI (for which he won an Emmy), Fringe, AMC’s shortlived noir thriller Rubicon, and lighter fare including Running Wilde and Royal Pains.
The action in Breaking Bad is centred in Albuquerque, N.M., which invites sprawling desert shots and tidy manicured neighbourhoods.
The look of the show makes the most of its setting and new technology: In an age of digital video, with the smallest detail visible to the audience, Walter’s battered mobile meth lab could be clearly discerned as a speck against a vista of deserts and mountains. A doll’s disembodied eyeball bobbing in a swimming pool had chilling vividness.
And don’t forget the show’s visual signature: Breaking Bad was never afraid of the dark.
Slovis recalls how, his first week as DP, he was shooting in Jesse’s basement.
“Jesse and Walter are down there cooking meth, and I turn off all the lights and turn the back lights on. There’s smoke and shafts of light coming through the basement door and I go, ‘This is what I came to do!”’
The imagery of Breaking Bad is second nature to its viewers. So when they swoon at the beauty of the desert outside Albuquerque, they may not know the complexion of this badlands was created in Slovis’s camera.
“The desert on the show has a tonality that doesn’t exist in real life,” Slovis said with a laugh.
This colour is achieved with a so-called “tobacco filter” clamped on the lens. “I don’t pay much attention to reality when I light or even when I shoot exteriors. But nobody questions the colour, because it becomes part of the storytelling.”