A lot of people don't know how Directors
work in television where you have
different Directors on different days. In
other words, you had to pitch your
lighting concept to whom? The Producers?
Well, usually when I start a project,
mostly my meetings tend to be with the
Director and most of the Directors I've
been lucky enough to work with come in
with ideas about how they think it
should look. The Director of a pilot,
along with the Producers, casts all the
Actors along with the Cinematographer
and the Production Designer and the
Wardrobe people and everybody else. You
try to create the look and the feel of
that show - that's the intention of the
pilot. I had worked with Mark Mylod who was
the Director of the pilot of The Affair
when I did the pilot for Once Upon a Time,
the ABC show, with him, and I had done an
Entourage with him, so we have a
background. He trusted me, and I
trusted him. He's a great visualist and great
Director, and so when I came on to The
Affair pilot, he and I would discuss how
it should look. We discussed
everything from the lighting to the feel
of it. I bring in usually pictures or
images to show that I think represent
how it should look and he has ideas and
we talked a lot about lenses. Like, for
example, Mark's idea was that there was
an intimacy achieved with a wider lens
close-up image than a telephoto close-up.
Now from that point on, then I become
kind of the carrier of the look. And the
the filter choices, lens choices, lighting,
the production assumes that now I'm
going to shepherd that, even though many
episodes will be directed by different
Directors. The other Directors come in
and they're gonna, you know, they're gonna
look at the show and they're gonna try
to get a sense just from looking at it.
Like what is the feel of it? They're
gonna be thinking about what lenses are
these guys using, you know? Look at what
kind of staging are they doing? There's a
very practical reason to have more than
one Director. Number one is that in
order to prepare each episode
you need time to do that. And so
what's happening, so say for example
Jeffrey Reiner is directing episode
three. Well, while Jeffrey's directing it,
John Dahl, another one of the great
directors we work with, he's prepping
episode four while Jeffrey is directing
episode three. Now sometimes what they do,
a Director will do an extensive prep at
the beginning so they can do two or
three episodes in a row. Also the other
thing is, it's exhausting to direct!
In a sense like a 10-hour series
like The Affair is like directing five
two hour features in a row, with no break.
In fact, and that's why most, not most but
many, television shows have two DPs so you
can alternate. And then you can prep
shoot, prep shoot, prep shoot, yeah, that
means that you can do forever! And it
depends on the nature of cities. If
you're shooting largely in a studio then
it's a lot easier. If you're shooting
like The Affair does on locations, then you
end up showing up a location that you've
never even seen and now it's 7:00 a.m.
and they go, "we've got to get this scene off"
and you're like looking around going
okay, where can I put lights? What
do I need to do? You have to think of it
at that moment, just when you woke up!
Okay if you're shooting on a stage, if
there's a new set, you just walk over and
look at the set at lunch. It's not a big
deal. A compromise you can make that some 
shows do is there's a tech scout.
Where you would take off a day or two of
shooting, so you have someone else shoot for
those two days, while you scout. You go on
the tech scout. So, you're not
participating in choosing the location,
but you are getting able to at least see
the locations and discuss with the
Director what shots they're thinking of
in advance.
The last episode of The Affair was done
in Paris, and I like almost everything we
got in there. I love shooting there. I
love what we did. We did a lot of small
intimate things with very few lights, and
then, one of my favorite things was a
long dialogue scene walking along the
Seine river at night. And it was a big
setup and I was able to prepare it
the way I wanted to. I went there several
times, figured out exactly how I was gonna do
things and gave the Director freedom to
do what he wanted in terms of staging when the Actors got there. And I'm very,
very happy with how that came out. The Affair is all about love and it's a tragic love story
so it's lit, hopefully, that way.
