Behind The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Dazzling, Innovative Cinematography

By David Canfield

How do you keep up with Amy Sherman-Palladino? It’s a question that M. David Mullen, the cinematographer on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel since its pilot, has had to ask himself again and again. The showrunner previously best known for Gilmore Girls and Bunheads writes with an iconic swiftness both in the pace of her dialogue and the energy of her scenes, and it takes a gifted DP to not only execute that style competently, but also with a level of beauty. Mullen has accomplished this with a seeming effortlessness even though, in reality, figuring out how to not fall behind Sherman-Palladino has taken plenty of innovation and risk-taking. Mullen has been nominated for lensing each of the Maisel’s five seasons, winning twice, and is now up for the widely acclaimed series finale, “Four Minutes.”

The ’50s- and ’60s-set show, centered on a New York housewife named Midge (Rachel Brosnahan) who goes into stand-up comedy after her marriage falls apart, has been admired by the industry since its inception for the impeccable craft behind it, from the playful costumes to the powerhouse performances. Visually, its cinematic signature became a specific kind of single-take shot, or “one-er,” that not only kept up with but enhanced the verve of Sherman-Palladino’s scripts. Here, Mullen takes us through a handful of his favorites from over the years—each of which was part of an episode Emmy-nominated for its cinematography.

Maisel became known for its ambitious single takes—and way back in the pilot, for which Mullen received his first nomination, the show completed its first, in the dizzying sequence where Midge tells her parents that her husband, Joel, has left her.

M. David Mullen: This was the first complicated blocking with actors that more or less played in a one-er, that Amy had warned me about in prep. She was quite concerned. I understood that this would have to go from the living room to the den to the foyer, back to the living room without a cut. I wasn’t too worried about it except that this was a location, not a set; these period apartments in New York often are…protected. So I went to that location, I kept walking around going, “How high can I get a light in the ceiling without it being visible as I back up into the next room and see that ceiling in the background?” Luckily, our key grip was able to rig these LED blankets very tight to the ceiling so that you don’t see them as you back up the camera into each room and look back at the previous room.

We rehearsed this with the space taped out on the floor, and then we rehearsed on location and then we shot it. Now this is just something we do every day on the show, that I don’t even think twice about—having to light 360, go through every room of the apartment set—so we would never have this discussion preproduction. It would all come out of just blocking on the morning.

Amy doesn’t like close-ups. So the trick with the camera is to back into each position and land wide enough that you’re not to do a close-up even when you’re in a tight room without having to resort to very wide angle lenses, which again would’ve exacerbated the problem of seeing the ceiling in the background and seeing the lighting rig. I was determined to make this work on a normal wide-angle lens. When we actually recreated this location onstage, the one thing I noticed when we were filming was that this building was not completely straight. If you were in the living room or the foyer and you looked down the length of the apartment, everything bent to the right. It drove me nuts trying to line up shots and have the lines be straight. But also when Rose goes down the long hallway and we’re supposed to see her disappear into different rooms, the camera had to actually be way to the left side of the foyer just to see down the length of that hallway.

The second season opens with Midge demoted to Switchboard Operator at the department store B. Altman, over the fallout from Joel leaving her—a reveal which Mullen accomplishes visually in a neat bit of camera trickery. The episode won him his first Emmy award.

Amy wanted to do this shot where we start out on the main floor of B. Altman and follow a letter being delivered into a mail slot, go down the mail slot, and then follow the letter past the switchboard room, and then enter the switchboard room. This was a set, so there would be a hidden cut when we plunged from the ground floor to the basement through the mail slot. The upper-floor shot was a Steadicam move.

The next concern was that [in the switchboard room] Amy wanted the camera to keep up with Midge being pushed from side to side. She said, “She kicks off the chair, the camera has to go with her and not be late.” She was worried that our cameras weren’t going to be fast enough, so there was talk about whether we had to do this with a cable cam device, but it just wasn’t practical because we see the entire ceiling of the space and we would’ve had to saw off the ceiling, the door arches, everything to make it one open rooftop. So we convinced Amy that we were able to keep up with Midge even with just the handheld gimbal, because once we saw the size of the room we realized that even if she kicked off full force from one side and rolled to the other side, it was only four or five feet. We could cover that move even by swinging our arms with the camera. We didn’t even have to take a step with the camera in the initial move to keep up with her.

I was worried about the camera getting caught on a cable, a hand hitting the camera, the camera hitting the nose of the switchboard operator, and then the camera shadows from the lights I had to install on the switchboards to light their faces. Because we see the entire room, the room had to be self-lit basically. And I looked at some reference photos of real switchboard rooms—these are actual real switchboards we got from a historical collector and got them working—and I noticed some of the historical references that sometimes switchboard operators had desk lamps because they had to take addresses and phone numbers down. So I asked the art department if there’s any way they could give me tiny lamps for each operator, and they ended up carefully mounting a bare light bulb to the historic prop.

Maisel takes Miami in another Emmy-winning episode from Mullen, which took great cinematic inspiration for this vibrant shot, which takes viewers through a bustling, colorful club before landing on a shot of Midge and her series-long love interest, Luke Kirby’s Lenny Bruce, sitting at a table together.

This is a recreation almost exactly of a shot in I Am Cuba, which is a black-and-white Russian movie. I had to watch the clip from I Am Cuba and try to redesign on paper the camera move and the set pieces around the camera move. The length of the bamboo curtain, how it curved off and made a sort of figure-nine; how far the bar was from the bamboo curtain; the shape of all that so that our department could then rearrange the set to match the space that I Am Cuba created.

Only the first minute of this shot is from I Am Cuba, because we keep going. Their shot goes past the bar area to a group of men talking; our shot goes past the singer onto the band, and then onto the dancers in front that we suddenly magically see, which we hadn’t seen before. And we spin around and then we pick up a singer again and he takes us to the table where Lenny and Midge are sitting.

This was all shot as a one-er on a very wide-angled lens because that’s what I Am Cuba had done. But when we got to this table moment, Amy said, “I think I need to cover a reaction shot of Midge and of Lenny. Two singles.” I had to watch which take she selected, because we were just manually queuing the color cues from cyan to pink and back again, and then to yellow to pink. I didn’t know from take to take whether, when we land on them talking, they were in pink light or cyan light—and at which line of dialogue it switched over. So I asked Amy to actually select the tape she was most likely to use, and then I played it back for the dimmer board operator. We were able to match the coverage to the wide shot.

In the fourth season, Midge takes a job as comic emcee at the Wolford, a burlesque club in Manhattan. In the season finale, for which Mullen received his fourth nomination, this precisely choreographed shot zoomed through a typical performance at the venue, spotlighting each of the dancers, seemingly, without a cut.

The question was, How do we do this shot? It’s very hard to coordinate elaborate moves because you’ve got to have multiple people time themselves, and Amy prefers talking to one operator. And I know she’s always happiest when we could do things with a Steadicam. So I asked Charlie Sherron, our key grip, if there’s any way we could hide a crane platform behind the set that [camera operator] Jim McConkey could step backwards onto, be lifted up to the second floor, and then dollied on while riding the crane to the other end of the set, be lowered, be disconnected, then step off and then back out again. So we had to build a wooden ramp to allow Jim to walk up onto the tongue of the stage, which we put carpeting on, and it’s sort of darkly lit, so you don’t really focus on it, but there is this ramp that he goes up onto the stage and then he walks into the room.

In this still frame, you can actually see the arm of the crane diagonally behind that pink mirror on the bottom-left corner. Charlie Sherron had to take a chain saw, cut away part of the set to make room for the weight bucket of the crane. So the bucket is to the left. The base of the crane is on the floor behind that curtain. So a grip steps off, Jim steps on, it lifts off, it gets dollied across, lowered again, a grip steps back onto the crane, and Jim steps off it again. At this point, visual effects had to paint out the crane in the second position because there was no way to dolly it completely out of view.

I wanted to rehearse this once without any performers because I needed the choreographer to see how long we were in each room because it seemed that this was particularly a shot that, once we go into the first room, all the dancing going on in the other room was off camera. You want to see this dance at that point, one room at a time. We had to know what beats of the song were in the first room, second room. We had this time to go across the top of the roof of the set so Amy added these sunbathers up there, then we landed onto the third room and then boomed down to the last room. The choreographer saw the move on an empty set once we figured out how we were going to do it, then she adjusted the choreography to the timing of the music. We didn’t know if this scene would be all in one shot because the length of the song, but once we did the rehearsal and we played the song over the loudspeakers, it pretty much timed out exactly the time it took to go to each room and down at a normal speed and back away again and the song faded out. So it timed out perfectly, and we knew it could play as a one-er.

Sherman-Palladino told Mullen that she wanted a few virtuosic one-ers to cap the series in its finale, given the visual template established over five seasons. Here was perhaps the hardest to execute: a scene in which Abe (Tony Shalhoub) simply tries to hail a cab in Manhattan. Set to a soaring score and rapidly paced, it’s utterly Maisel*—and immaculately executed by Mullen, nominated for this episode.*

This is something that had to be rehearsed in advance because you don’t want to spend all night tying up Central Park West trying to figure out the shot. So we had a dozen cars in our parking lot at Steiner Studios in the daytime, and we labeled all the cabs—cab one, cab two, cab three, cab four—and we figured out it was four lanes, two lanes going in opposite directions. We taped out where the side street was and how big the sidewalk was and how wide the street was. It was all marked by the art department with traffic cones and stuff, and we timed out the dialogue and figured out where each car needed to be to time out with the dialogue and whether a row should cross behind the car, in front of the car, and which sides of the car they should run.

On the night of shooting, one issue I had is I knew all the lighting would be coming from high overhead from streetlights and things, and I was worried about not seeing lights in their eyes because Abe was wearing a hat. Normally I would put a light on the Steadicam, except it’s not a Steadicam, it’s a little handheld device that you couldn’t mount a light to. Plus I was going to hand it through car windows, and I didn’t want a light bulb going through the car window. I also couldn’t run an electrician with a handheld light alongside the camera because the gaps between the cars were so narrow. They’re just wide enough for one person to run through, not two people side by side. They would have to suddenly duck behind a car and then pop up again. In the end, what I ended up doing was taping LED cards to the bodies of the camera operators—something like a two-by-two card of LED lighting to their bodies with a battery pack, and that was what filled in their faces. In the end, it wasn’t as necessary as I thought, because I hadn’t taken into account all the car headlights that would all be turned on. [Laughs.]

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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