Cinematographer Matt Ball talks to The Contending about working with Stanley Tucci for the second time on NatGeo’s Tucci in Italy.
Matt Ball’s job is pretty incredible. As a cinematographer, not only does he get to travel around Italy shooting amazing food and architecture, but he also gets to do it with Stanley Tucci.
NatGeo’s Tucci in Italy marks Ball’s second project with the Academy Award nominee, after Netflix’s Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, and I had a chance to chat with him about what it’s like lighting this new series.
The Contending: You’ve worked with Stanley Tucci before. What makes this series different? Did you want to do anything different with its look?
Matt Ball: Hard to say! I guess this one might be more involved. Before we went to Venice or to Rome — you do the kind of big city things. And now we go out into the countryside; we get into a bit more detail than we’d done previously.
The Contending: That’s so interesting. With so many locations, what kind of lighting considerations do you have to think about? Especially when it’s outdoors a lot! I imagine that can be stressful.
Matt Ball: It can be, and also at the same time, it’s not. We try not to light anything, unless we’re in a deep, dark cave. We try to go in natural light, for several reasons. Primarily it’s to put people at ease. If we go in as a big crew, because the people we’re working with are not actors, they’re not used to having the three cameras pointing at them, and if that happens to anyone, they start performing for the camera, or they stop and say, was that okay? So, we try to be as small a unit as possible, keep the people at ease. If we’re outside and it’s blazing hot sun in the middle of the day, if we can find a bit of shade to shoot in, great; if not, we’ll just go with it, and we shoot what we have to shoot. We try to make the story more important and make the people more important, rather than the consideration of it has to be picture-perfect; we’ve always tried to treat the story as the most important thing.
The Contending: The show opens with all that Tuscany marble. What was it like shooting that scene? I feel like it could easily looked washed out but it doesn’t. It’s gorgeous.
Matt Ball: It was amazing, I mean, when we went there, I think it was quite a grey day, and like you’re saying, you’re thinking, oh no, we’re just going to shoot all this great big white marble on a grey day — there’s going to be no contrast to it. But it’s so vast, and the scale of everything kind of takes away from everything there. Just the sheer scale of it was breathtaking, and I think that’s what comes across. The cameras we were using are so good now with things like that, so capable, rather than 15 years ago, or 10 years ago.
The Contending: What’s your working relationship like with Stanley?
Matt Ball: Yeah, we do have a kind of shorthand. The crew we work with has been with us for quite some time, and we know what Stan likes; we know what the show is meant to be like, we’ve all got the same attitude, we all want to do the best job we possibly can.
When we did the, and the Carrara place, where we did the lardo in the marble, where they store it in the marble, or cure it in the marble, that place was tiny, and that was hard to shoot — to get Stan in, the two guys, and the cameras, enough to cover it all. We try to do everything in one take and try not to go back and cover anything again if we can, all to try and keep it as natural as possible. We don’t contrive anything, so having that shorthand with the whole crew is really useful.
The Contending: What’s the key to shooting the food? How do you make it look so good? Even with flies outdoors!
Matt Ball: You’re shooting in Italy — we’re super lucky because everything’s really, for the most part, I think it’s beautiful in Italy, the food is always going to be beautiful. Backlight everything — that’s the best way for the food. Then you’re fine. Food is a spine that holds the stories together, so we try to get really nice shots of the food, but sometimes it might be in a kitchen, where there are really bad lights everywhere, and sometimes the food won’t be looking the greatest at any time. We just shoot what we can. When we get really nice dishes and we get them outside, if we can get some nice soft light onto them, it looks fantastic, and we do that as much as we possibly can. I’ve done a lot of food stuff in my time, so I feel quite fortunate.
The Contending: The show has a cinematic vibrance to it. How much of that is Italy versus lighting tricks?
Matt Ball: Well, it’s sunny, most of the time, so it’s about trying to find the right positions with the sun, and sometimes we can. There’s a nice scene in the TAA episode (Trentino Alto Adige), where Stanley’s walking down a hill, and he’s backlit with light through the trees. It’s all snowy, and that is just perfect, it’s really nice. We don’t want him walking into bright sunlight from the shade, or we try to shoot with the light as much as we can. We can’t have him be in this dark corridor and then come out into the bright light, so let’s try to move it to either the dark corridor, or we’ll try to control as much of that as we possibly can, without compromising anything.
The Contending: What was it like filming the Medieval piazza race? How did you get access to that?
Matt Ball: I think our producer deserves all the credit for getting access to everything there. They were quite strict on what we could and couldn’t film. We turned up, and we had been given this group of people we were going to shoot the table scenes and cooking scenes with, and then we were told we could film the practice day of the race, which we did. We had a balcony, looking down, to shoot everything, and then we had a couple of cameras in the crowd to get the atmosphere, and the people walking by. Things like that were just fantastic. What a wonderful experience to have.
Tucci in Italy is available on Disney+ and Hulu.
