High-powered desperation hilariously sits center stage in AMC’s The Audacity. As clever and entertaining as Succession, the Jonathan Glatzer series should be a dark horse among the Drama branch at this year’s Primetime Emmy Awards. There to capture the egotistical absurdity is cinematographer Richard Rutkowski who does some visual engineering so innovative that it would impress the higher-ups in Silicon Valley.
All along the first full season, The Audacity and its characters subvert our expectations and make us question their motives. When I think of Silicon Valley and when the area burst in the 90s with the creation of the internet, I imagine sleek offices or clean workspaces. Rutkowski wanted to show many things visually with the realm of this new modern area, especially as it pertains to how The Audacity‘s characters project wealth and status. If you want to act godlike, perhaps you need to make your surroundings play the part?
“It was important to acknowledge that Duncan and Lily have a lot of money and that Duncan has become a multimillionaire,” Rutkowski says. “Maybe he will become a billionaire, and he’s trying to stay in that tax bracket. The Felders live in an arts and crafts, and they are less rich with everything in their world a little bit frayed at the edge or down to the heel. We wanted to play with the strata of wealth, and some parts of Silicon Valley would surprise you in their normalness. A drugstore is just a drugstore or a grocery store is just a grocery store. That’s why with Bardolph, we had a lot of fun that he takes this enormous backyard and turns it into a playground for war games–I jus thought that was the funniest thing. He is so tone-deaf, because he’s so rich and insulated that he can’t understand that Tom Ruffage is actually traumatized. At the end of the shoot, I shot for about four or five days in Silicon Valley, and that really helped capture the verisimilitude of the way the Valley looks.”
Episode three, the threat of the California wildfires revs the narrative into a stressful gear, and it feels all the more dire because of how recent the destruction was. With the sky an ominous orange-red, Zach Galifianakis’ Carl Bardolph is approached by Billy Magnussen’s Duncan Park to discuss a venture together, and it’s a great example of the visual language highlighting a larger theme of the show. Some men think they are so powerful and so influential that they can avoid the truly disastrous wrath of nature.
“The title of the third episode is ‘Valley of Heart’s Delight,’ and that is the original name of Silicon Valley before anyone called it that, and episode eight, “Granfalloon,” is taken from Kurt Vonnegut,” he says. “Vonnegut created that word to describe a useless assembly of people, and Jonathan [Glatzer] wanted that. Like many of us, Jonathan had tragedy in the fires in Altadena and the Palisades, and I know half a dozen people who lost everything. He wanted the look of episode three to capture that feeling of an acrid, dangerous sky as it’s getting worse and worse and worse while the people are so egotistical that the last thing they do is acknowledge that nature is their master. They go out and do their thing, and they ignore it all until the very end when Duncan goes into this restaurant. No one else is on the streets and no one is driving. Bardolph is sitting and talking to Duncan alone in this diner in order to have this sort of apocalyptic conversation. Jonathan said it very well when he said that the world is on fire and our leader is happy.”
One of the coolest visual tricks is when the finale, a truly great episode of television, stacks two very different parties on top of each other. Duncan is prepared to speak at a tech forum where he will have to defend his new company’s controversial new programs while another party, the Las Altas’ Winter Gala, is unfolding downstairs. The look of each party could not be more different than one another. The gala has softer blue tones and might represent how Sarah Goldberg’s JoAnne is trying to keep her cool with the accusations of blackmail floating around while the blood red of the tech forum feels directly in line with how a tech bro would want his work to feel strong and important.
“I had such a great crew with a lot of coordination with Alexander Buono to try and pull off what was arguably too short a schedule by a couple of days,” Rutkowski says. “That watch code is intentionally very masculine and sort of bold and iconic like a dangerous TED Talk. The celebration with the children is colored like Liberace, and Duncan finally gets his spotlight. His wife, at the same time, is about to receive a spotlight for giving away plenty of their money, but her spotlight comes at the most inopportune moment just when it’s revealed that Duncan is not the father of their daughter. You’ll notice that, throughout the season, there’s this emphasis of people using the word ‘cuck’ like when he’s fighting Orlando Lee. That fed to the big revelation at the end.”
When it is revealed that Duncan is not the father of his teenage daughter, Jamison, it’s all on Magnussen’s face. He cannot throw money at the problem. He can’t intimidate or persuade someone away from the truth. The entire room, if they are in the know, is looking at his back and Rutkowski keeps the camera tight on Magnussen’s face with the spotlight illuminating the back of his head almost like a halo.
“It’s a total visual allegory, because he’s looking at a screen,” he says. “Remember what he is trying to sell a whole nation? You’re going to see yourself on a screen–isn’t that just a tragedy? You’d rather curate your image on a screen than accept a person in reality. It’s such a good metaphor, if you ask me, and we always knew we were going to have Duncan looking at camera in the privileged point of view. Maybe only the interviewer gets to see that moment on his face, but we, as an audience, feel very personal to it. Similarly, at the big gala downstairs when he walks in a confronts Lily, only they know what the other is thinking, They look at each other in a private point of view with the spotlights on there. That’s very much the connecting piece. That shot is all about their relationship.”
As the emotions are running high, Jamison runs to a train station and stands on the track before being saved by Tess. The locomotive on the tracks feels imposing, dangerous, and massive, but Rutkowski reveals that there wasn’t even a train there at all.
“You have to realize that the train, in that sequence, is the third spotlight,” Rutkowski says. “Each member of that family finds themselves in a spotlight by the end of the season, but they all find them for very different reasons. We wanted a Caltrans train as closely as possible. In Canada, we can’t put any real train on the track, not only for cost reasons but sensitivity to safety at all costs.
We took a pickup truck, the kind that runs on a rail, and we built a vertical rectangle frame on it before we backlit the frame with blue screen lighting. That frame had diffusion material and a double layer behind it, a number of tubes, a stair tube set to blue light for a blue screen. But in the circumstance of where we first see her, it only needs to be a silhouette, so we had punctured the screen and placed very simple lights at the top. It was, I think, an ACL at the top with a couple of LED lamps at the bottom, and we made them into the exact format that a true Caltrans train has with a very bright spot at the top to shine in her face. We parked it about 200 feet away and when we just starting having it reverse because all this structure was on the tailgate of the truck It started reversing towards her, and there as something eerie about the way it bounced along on the rails. We made a train with a tall rectangle piece of fabric with headlights.”
The Audacity is streaming on AMC+.
