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Luke Kirby & DP M. David Mullen Talk Stepping Inside The Ballet With Amazon’s ‘Étoile’ – The Process

Luke Kirby and M. David Mullen talk 'Étoile' on The Process

For actor Luke Kirby, stepping into Étoile, the ballet-centric Amazon series from his The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel collaborators Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino, meant stepping inside a new world of performance — not just the high drama of an elite dance company, but the physical and emotional experience of a world in motion.

“When you watch a ballet, you’re just sitting in one place,” says Kirby, who plays Jack McMillan, the artistic director whose New York Metropolitan Ballet participates in a novel talent swap with the Paris Opera Ballet. “To kind of get inside of a ballet is a whole other thing. To be inside the swirl of it is really remarkable.”

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Helping to bring this world to life was cinematographer M. David Mullen, a longtime collaborator of the show’s creators who worked with Kirby on Maisel and here found himself pivoting from lighting stand-up sets to pirouettes and pas de deux.

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“There’s always been musical elements over the years in various projects I’ve done, particularly Maisel…But ballet specifically, I’ve never done before,” Mullen tells Kirby in today’s episode of The Process. “So I watched a lot of ballet on YouTube and documentaries. Alex [Nepomniaschy], my other DP, he’s been going to ballet on his own, so he knew it more than I did. But together we went to the Met to watch some ballet and look at ballet movies and stuff.”

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Kirby notes that, appropriately for a show about ballet, the choreography for Étoile felt like a “dance,” as actors looked to stay in sync with the camera team over the course of the complicated walk-and-talk oners for which the Palladinos are known. The interesting thing to Mullen, in figuring out how to light ballet sequences, was realizing that ballet lighting tends to be “for the most part not too fancy.”

Says the DP of lighting in the ballet films he reviewed, “It was often about creating a mood on the set and then just sort of sculpting the bodies of the performers, so you could see their shape and form, but there wasn’t like three million cues and dance lighting the way you could get in some Broadway show numbers.” He says more “expressive” lighting only came about when dealing with “more experimental dance pieces” lit by Natasha Katz.

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In conversation with Kirby on Étoile, Mullen offered a sense of the meticulous planning and improvisational flexibility required to pull the show off, citing an Episode 1 scene featuring Kirby’s Jack and Lou de Laâge’s star ballerina Cheyenne Toussaint as an example. In the scene, Cheyenne arrives in New York to work for the New York Metropolitan, as part of the talent swap, before getting into a long, heated exchange with McMillan.

Check out the whole conversation between Kirby and Mullen, featuring the in-depth scene dissection, above.

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