'Lessons In Chemistry' Cinematographers Jason Oldak & Zachary Galler

“An interesting thing about this limited series is that it chronicles this woman’s life,” says cinematographer Jason Oldak. “Even the episodes that Zack and I did… they’re in different places in her life and substantial things happen, and I think it gave us the freedom to give our own voice while keeping true to the show.”

“Everybody needs to be able to put their mark on it and make their own decisions,” says cinematographer Zachary Galler. “Once the pilot is done and those decisions are made, and the framework is there, its lovely to be able to work with another DP to say, ‘Take the ball and run with it.’”

Based on the novel by Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry follows Elizabeth Zott (Brie Larson), a brilliant chemist in the 1960s who goes from her job as lab tech to hosting a cooking show titled Supper at Six. On the air, she uses the platform to educate housewives on scientific topics through cooking. In addition to creating the look for the series, Galler and Oldak needed to create a ’60s style cinematography for the Supper at Six program.

“We had so many cool references to look back at that were done successfully, like Julia Child and cooking shows from that time,” says Galler. “Also, our colorist [Ian Vertovec] had just recently done [Being the Ricardos], so I was really lucky that we had a sounding board where we could talk about ideas that worked successfully for that show.” Production design built a full sound stage for the Supper at Six set, including areas for the audience and a control room, but the technical part came in the form of mixing camera formats. “We had our ALEXA mini [camera] and then we had these pedestal cameras… that were period accurate, but we put Lipstick cameras in them to be able to have images on the monitors on the back of the cameras, so we could shoot those with our main unit camera, but then we also had these Ikegami tube cameras that made an amazing image that we used basically to put into any screens where you would see the show as it was in the ’60s.”

Outside of the Supper at Six studio, Oldak says everything was about subtlety. “It was a period and lot of what was in front of the camera was period,” he says, “but we I don’t think we did anything drastic. Our lens choice was strong in terms of the period, but our cinematography was about the subtleness throughout the show.”

“What was important for the show, because the actors were so good, was to just have the cinematography get out of the way,” says Galler. “To be there to help things, but hopefully at the same time the viewer wasn’t noticing it.”

Click the video above to watch the full interview.