One of the best television shows of the past year is undoubtedly Mike Flanagan’s Netflix horror series The Haunting of Hill House, which also not coincidentally happened to include one of the best episodes of television of the past year as well. Flanagan’s adaptation of the iconic Shirley Jackson novel plays out over the course of 10 episodes, in two different time periods, tracking the points of view of five different characters. That poses a challenge for any filmmaker, let alone a director who is helming all 10 episodes of a TV series himself.

The key that makes Hill House so compelling is not only the richness of the storytelling and characters, but also the striking imagery and visual storytelling onscreen. Flanagan and cinematographer Michael Fimognari honed in on a very specific approach to this series, using color and light to delineate the dual time periods and various characters, resulting in a viewing experience that is profoundly empathetic. It culminates, of course, in Episode 6—“Two Storms”—which is a breathtaking episode of television designed to look like three long continuous takes. Complicating matters is the fact that “Two Storms” takes place in only two locations and time periods, jam-packed with all the characters, and flows from one time period to another in a single, glorious, seamless shot.

With Emmy voting approaching and Hill House up for a consideration in a number of categories (of which it is wholly deserving, I might add), I recently got the chance to speak with Fimognari about his work on the series. He talked about his working relationship with Flanagan, which extends to their previous films like Gerald’s Game and Oculus, and the visual language and rules they concocted for crafting The Haunting of Hill House. Fimognari also dug deep into the making of Episode 6, how difficult it was to light, and how it really was a team effort between all the departments. And with Fimognari due to make his directorial debut on the To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before sequel (he shot the first movie), he talked a bit about directing the follow-up.

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Photo via Netflix

Check out the full interview below. The Haunting of Hill House is now available to stream on Netflix.

So what were your early conversations with Mike like about what the show would look like?

MICHAEL FIMOGNARI: In all the projects that I've worked with Mike on, he has a very clear idea of what his stories are about and also how he wants to visually represent them. And so, it really doesn't take long for us to find their visual purpose. When we sit down and when we start, we don't even spend much time referencing anything else. It's a clear point of view. And so a lot of times it's within the first two days, and maybe this just speaks to us a team, because we tend to think alike in terms of perspective and the way that we reveal these characters truths in a cinematic space. So with Hill House, I think as soon as we started talking about these characters as people who can answer the same question in many different ways, because we've got five siblings and five experiences, and what that means to each of them is very different.

Mike and I have been down this path before. When we did Oculus, that was about a brother and a sister, and they both experienced the same traumatic events. But how they viewed them and how that impacted their adult lives was very different. And when you're presenting that to an audience, you're in the best of spaces, because they're both reliable, and they're both unreliable in that case, in Oculus. And Hill House, from the beginning, that was the way Mike, I think, brought it to me the very first time was he said, "Hill House is Oculus times a thousand."

So when we started getting into that and you start to deal with past and present and how they influence each other, how each character's perspective influences how the story is told, we quickly were able to determine that there were two main aesthetics visually, one that's past, and one that's present. Then within the present, there were different aesthetics as well, mostly because the characters had placed themselves, either by geography or by circumstance, in different pockets of society, or within their own family. By doing so, we then gave ourselves visual rules for each of those situations, and sometimes those situations crossed over.

Sometimes you'd have Theo visiting Nell in California, but Theo's basically spending most of her time in Massachusetts in Shirley's orbit. But when she steps out of it, those rules change a bit. So we had variations on those basic themes, but in a broad sense, we discussed that their childhood in Hill House and that experience of what that meant to them and the trauma of watching their mother break down, and what Hill House represented to each of them was one thing. And largely, that was a cavernous unexplained geography, but there was warmth to it.

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Image via Netflix

There was some kind of strange attraction that always drew you into these spaces, right? But then when you finally got what some of that truth was, there was a cold, dark, dreadful component to it. And when you get outside of that memory and into their present day existence, there's a heavy dose of that coldness to all of it. And so, some of that we layered in, just based on where they lived, by saying, "Hey, when they're in California, there's a ugly yellow quality to this Los Angeles streets that Luke has to survive in." Then there's cold winter iciness to the protective shell that Shirley's put on. And then really probably within two, three days of exploring it, we were like, "Okay, those are the rules." And then from that point forward, we carved it up beat by beat from that.

Wow. The visual language of the show is something that is really impressive, obviously in episode six as well. I was wondering if you could talk about the shot composition, and also were there any specific rules in terms of the visual language in the past and the present in terms of how you were moving the camera and where you were putting the camera?

FIMOGNARI: First, Mike really knows when he assembles his pieces from a story perspective, he knows every bit of what matters onscreen, how the behavior of the cast works, the behavior of the camera. He's a symphony conductor in that way. And he's ahead to where the cut points want to be, how the sound will work, or push camera forward, or pull it back. So our first discussions are always about story and character, and then very quickly turn to, "Okay, and here's how the point of view works in these moments." I don't know that we had any specific rule related to why a camera would move. I think it wasn't broad like that. It was specific to a character's experience and what that point of view we were trying to communicate to the audience might be.

So in the first five episodes, each episode largely focuses on a single character's point of view. That anchored the choices. That's probably about as detailed as a camera plan, as a philosophy we might have, but Mike knows all of that. Before you even step on set, he'll say, "Now, this is what matters here. This is why we would move on this line of dialogue and end on that line of dialogue." So we are that precise. When we make our shot list, they have that kind of detail in it, where we're looking, when the camera starts moving, when it stops. There are lot of really long monologues throughout the series, and Mike wrote one for almost every episode, and those are written into the shot list, and almost without exception, they don't have bail out cuts. There's no natural cutaway. That is a language of the movie, that we are being told a story. And at times, these characters are telling stories, and we get to sit and enjoy and watch. Almost every one of the cast members has a beautiful long monologue. So there's precision in the choices that are mostly related to point of view, and all of it is decided before we show up.

Digging into episode six, how did that decision come about to do these long takes and to craft this as essentially a play that takes place in the past and the present simultaneously?

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Image via Netflix

FIMOGNARI: That was part of the script. I think that was one of the things that Mike pitched. It was one of the first things he told me about the series was that episode six was going to be one long experience with just a few edits between past and present. And it's in the stage direction on the page in the first script. So it was a challenge we knew going in. And the other thing that's fun working with Mike is that our sets on almost all the movies are built to the blocking and the stage direction.

So Hill House, we didn't get handed a design for Hill House. We handed over really rough, admittedly, floor plans, because we're not architects. Mike and I just sit in a room, and Mike draws the blocking. And we hand over a blocking plan with cameras in it to the art department, and then they build a beautiful thing around that. But the sets are built around blocking. And so, when the sets were built on the two adjacent stages at Screen Gems, they were oriented and designed specifically to the way that Mike wanted the blocking to work. So, again, it’s the same philosophy we were talking about earlier. All of the cameras are precise down to the line of dialogue, how fast they move, where they pan, how many characters in the frame. And so, episode six, that was built over days, and days, and days, and days of starting with iPhones and DSLRs and bringing in second team stand-ins to walk through the dialogue and really refine this process. The goal being that we were going to be a part of this family's grief, and not allow that opportunity for safety, or to blink, or to turn away from something that's otherwise really uncomfortable and hard to go through.

In some cases, they hadn't seen each other in years, and they're all forced into this space. We didn't really want the safety of the ease of editing. That was important for Mike. And then inside of that it was about, "Okay, well, where are they going first, so the behavior was honest and natural? And within this ensemble, whose perspective do we need to be in moment, to moment, to moment?" Some of that was discovery with second team, some of that was discovered with first team. But most of it, honestly, was on the page, it was in the script. So Mike pictured it in his mind's eye and wrote it down.

That's crazy. Well, obviously, it's a pretty herculean feat. What were some of the surprising challenges that you found? I mean, there's the obvious challenges of you have this massive ensemble, and it's probably going to be physically challenging, but was there anything as you got into it and started blocking it and rehearsing it, that you were surprised to find was difficult?

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Image via Netflix

FIMOGNARI: I'm not sure anything was a surprise, but it certainly wasn't any easier. There was nothing about it that was like, "Oh, that wasn't as complicated as I thought it was going to be." It was all a daily exploration. We'd walk away from every day's bit of work with a new set of questions that had to be evaluated and answered. I could look at it from almost every single department's perspective, and say... From a camera point of view, we shot with an Alexa-65, which is a 6K sensor. For all the right reasons, we went with that camera, and its color depth is incredible. We had also used it on Gerald's Game, and so that was the proof for us of what we could do with such a magnificent camera. But that camera's big, and one of the challenges with that is that it's not a little light camera to throw on a Steadicam to float around with. So we had to figure out how to maintain quality over take after take after take. And with the weight of that camera over sometimes 15 minutes or longer takes was an issue.

But also getting a wireless video signal over stages to work, so that we don't drop out in the middle of the take, and go, "Wait, did we get it, did we not get it?" Things like that. So every single person was figuring out these little bumps and bruises, and coming up with solutions to their world.

I would say, for me, as a DP, the one challenge that I spent every day on was making sure that the lighting had shape to it for all of the moments of the episode when you watch it, because the actors are incredible, and the dramatic tension is through the roof. And you've earned that through watching five other episodes as well. It's not something you're thinking about as far as the lighting goes, but in every episode we were seeing 360 degrees, maybe not all at once, maybe not in a full rotation, although that's happened sometimes. In every shot, I should say, you do have to explore every corner of the space. Any principle of lighting will tell you there's going to be a side that doesn't look good if you're making the other side does look good. And so, managing that cue by cue was the biggest challenge for me, and tons and tons of credit deserved for the camera, lighting, and grip departments for working out those cues, so that then behind all of that there's a board operator gently bringing up these different lighting cues and floating in bounce cards and walking around with little fill lights, and to the cast too, for trying to—like you were saying, it's basically a stage play. But going through the stage play, there’s super emotional heavy lifting going on for the cast, but meanwhile you've got an operator, a dolly grip, somebody pulling two chairs out of their way so they can get into position, somebody with a bounce card, all this chaos, and a bit of a light show going on. If you were to step back and look at it, the ceiling is a grid of lights that are all fading up and fading down, just so that you're always on the dark side of the face.

Oh, wow, that's really cool.

FIMOGNARI: Yeah. When you step back and look at it from a bit of distance, I'm sure it looked like chaos. But once you're in the middle of the shot, it feels a bit fluid. But the lighting, on a daily basis we would go in with second team and with cast, and we'd walk it. And I'd walk it with the gaffer and say, "Okay, so we're going to turn on this light, this light, this light. Take these four out." And we experimented and played. And the lightning helps hide some of that when you're in the house, because you have strobes and you have bits of shadow. The Hill House helps you get away with it, but the funeral home really doesn't.

The funeral home by design is meant to be this contained box, almost like a coffin, where you're just trapped inside four walls. Only one far wall has windows on it. Only in the entry foyer are there two windows, where you get some shape to the lightning, but the rest of the space is all just pop light that's changing direction and intensity as they're moving through. And if at any time one of those cues is off, it would reveal itself. You'd be like, "Oh, there's a light turning on, on that wall, and that makes no sense." So my hats off to the crew for pulling off some magic.

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Image via Netflix

Well, you've also got, I believe, in the middle of a take the power goes out, and so the lighting completely changes, so it's not only just subtle changes. How did you go about navigating that?

FIMOGNARI: That was a philosophy that we built as part of the look of the show. And so, Hill House in general, if you explore its architecture, has few windows available to let in natural light, and they're always on the fringes of the spaces. Once you get into the heart of the house, the less and less access light has to penetrate. And so, when you're standing in the center of the main hall on the second floor, or the first floor, really, there are no windows. But the dread and the fear contained in whether you think you see something in the shadows, is all about walking those halls at night. And this is one of those things that Mike and I talk about all the time, going, again, back to Oculus, the concept of what it's like to see in the dark, and we all know what that phenomena is like.

We know what it's like to wake up in the middle of the night and be looking for the light switch, or just to go get a glass of water late at night, and you just see shapes. You don't really see the detail of what's in the room, and that allows you the space to think you saw something else. There's a delicate position that cinematography's in, in that regard, which is you've got to communicate emotion and story logic and behavior while also communicating that these people can't see in the dark. And those are two things that don't always want to work together, because you're also fighting technology, which is that some people are going to watch this on their beautiful big flat screen at home, some people are going to watch in their laptop. And the contrast of those things are very different. The color space of those things are very different.

You have to protect story and character and emotion, but yet also the truth and the creepiness of what it means to walk around in the dark. So we spend a lot of time working in really dark tones of gray for the graphic purposes. And it's one of the best challenges of telling stories like this, which is, how do I see in the dark and allow the audience to feel that dread, but not understand it so much that they have all their questions answered? And so, we've done this on all our movies, on Ouija, on Gerald's Game when the Moonlight Man is coming out of the shadows. You just see enough to make your heart pound, but not too much, to feel the dread. And Hill House is full of that, and that's what allows us to put ghosts plainly in sight, but you never see them, but it's all tonal values. So it's a lot of testing with art department and set dec to say, "This stain on that wood, in this lighting, and that wardrobe, it's on that wood against that curtain and it all needs to blend in this very similar shape and gray, so that when you create that feel that you're in the dark at night, you understand it, but you don't know exactly what you saw. You can't determine it."

And so, when the power goes out, that's an extension of that philosophy. We have lots of scenes in Hill House where the lights are out, because the lights are just out. When we built the lighting for the house, we designed it to have LED panels and very dense diffusion on every panel on the ceiling, so it's all super soft, almost liquid light top light. And in my opinion, top light is the most invisible of all the directions as it relates to seeing in the dark, because as soon as you put a light on at eye level, you feel its shadows more. You can see the shadows on the adjacent walls, and you start to understand where a light is coming from. And that's a dead giveaway that it's not seeing in the dark. So top light seems to be the best version of that, and as long as it's a bed of consistent top light, you stop thinking that it's coming from somewhere, and then you're moving in those gray areas.

I think it's a good point because the show is extremely cinematic. And there are a lot of shows and movies that move around in the dark, but they don't look very good, and you can't really see. And that's one of the things I really loved about the series is that it does look good in the dark. But also, as you said, obviously you’re making this for Netflix but are you saying you're consciously thinking about the fact that people are watching this on their laptops, but also on television, and trying to make it work for both?

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Image via Netflix

FIMOGNARI: We're aware of it. When we're lighting and lensing any scene of any kind, there's a bit of game that goes on, where you're trying to anticipate the most cinematic best quality version of what you do, because that's what we care about is the highest high, right? But we don't want to put ourselves in a situation where the audience is lost because they don't have enough information. When we do the grading, we always look at it in the best monitors in the darkroom, and we say, "Well, this is the way it's supposed to look, and we're going to protect that." But I do protect in the exposure for the times when I might just need to give it a little extra, just so we don't lose the tear on the face, or the emotive response that the cast is giving, because sometimes the image itself won't tell that story. You need the performance to tell that story.

This is the gift that I'm given by having Mike as a leader, who says, "This is what matters in this moment." Is that I can light to the intention of a shot. When you describe we have confidence to go in and execute a thing, part of the confidence comes from Mike saying, "Here's what this is about." And sometimes that's strictly about the image. It's about the silhouette in front of the wall, and the image is what's going to make you jump.

But then sometimes it is just about the reaction of the actor, and the aesthetic is the background. And we have to know which note we're playing to serve that. And that's, I think, how we are able to sit in the room and protect for good calibrated monitors and people watching at night with their lights off versus somebody who turns it on at noon and leaves their windows open.

Now, to be fair, I've turned on Hill House just to see how possible it is to watch at noon with the windows open, and it's a hard watch. It's not meant for that. It's not meant for you to watch it on your iPhone in your car, or on the subway. And I think you're probably missing a lot if you're going to watch it that way, but it is something that we think about, because we want everybody to enjoy it.

I know the show's been renewed. I was curious, do you know if you're coming back for season two?

FIMOGNARI: Mike, I know, is all in on everything. He's had a ton of stuff going on. And so, I don't yet know the plan for season two, but I know that we're finishing up Doctor Sleep now, which is awesome, and I'm so happy about it. That's where my head is right now, is getting color done for Doctor Sleep. So I don't know the schedule for season two, but I know it's exciting, and I know it's an awesome thing that's coming.

I am super excited for Doctor Sleep, but I know you can't say much, but I'm curious if you could tease, just visually what the approach was for that?

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Image via Netflix

FIMOGNARI: Oh, man, I am excited to talk about Doctor Sleep, but I can't say anything about it. I will say it's not like anything Mike and I have done before, and it's exciting. It's going to be cool.

That's really exciting. And then obviously you're directing the To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before sequel, which I really loved your work on the first movie. It was something that was really striking to me. How have you found moving into directing this time around and what can fans expect from the sequel?

FIMOGNARI: I've really enjoyed it. I mean, I guess the quickest answer I can give you is that I really try to find projects based on my connection to story and character, but also equally about the people who are telling those stories. So I know they're very different genres with completely different characters and worlds, to be going between Hill House and To All the Boys and Doctor Sleep and Gerald's Game. They don't really cross over very easily, but they do for me, in the sense that they're told by storytellers who really, really care. So Mike is invested at every level with his characters and his stories, and so is Jenny Han, who wrote the novels for To All the Boys I've Loved Before. And working with her, and working with Matt Kaplan, who I've worked with for years, going back to my first small Blumhouse feature a long time ago. They're people who really care about the stories that are being told. So with Jenny Han, and Matt Kaplan, and Robin Marshall, those three and then Sofia Alvarez, who wrote the screenplay for To All the Boys.

I had such a fantastic time on the first movie, and when they asked me to take on the second one, I said, "Of course." This is the universe I love, and I love these characters. And I love the cast, and love the collaboration. So it's another perfect fit for me.

Awesome. Well, I'm very much looking forward to that. And I mean it sincerely, congratulations on Hill House. As I said, it was one of my favorite shows last year, and I think “Two Storms” is just an astounding piece of television, especially for film geeks like me, just on a technical level, that thing is just really a joy to watch.

FIMOGNARI: Thank you, I appreciate that. I don't take it lightly. We didn't take it lightly then. We’re geeks too, you know? We enjoyed in the moment. You never know when something is going to land or not when you're doing it and when you're taking risks. I admire and respect so much the filmmakers who have taken on challenges like that. There's the amazing single camera, long takes in Children of Men that I've admired and loved for a long time. You always want to be a part of something that's rewarding on a daily basis, and Mike gave us all that chance. And I have never experienced something that on a daily basis focusing on that episode, where the entire crew, every single person, was a part of it existing and coming to life. I've never witnessed it. And you're all gripping your seats watching the cast perform their minds out, and watching the crew pull of miracles. It was a cool thing to be a part of.

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Image via Netflix