‘Sirens’ Cinematographer On Light, Dark In Netflix Hit Show

Molly Smith Metzler’s new miniseries Sirens took the top spot on streaming charts after debuting last Thursday to positive reviews and audience scores. I spoke with cinematographer Gregory Middleton about filming Sirens, and the balance of light and dark – literally and metaphorically – in the Netflix hit show.

Metzler’s original play Elemeno Pea served as the basis for the much-expanded streaming series Sirens, which Metzler showruns. The miniseries adaptation stars Milly Alcock (who recently wrapped filming on the upcoming Supergirl movie from DC Studios), Meghann Fahy, Julianne Moore, and Kevin Bacon. Nicole Kassell directed episodes 1 and 2, Quyen Tran directed episodes 3 and 4, and Lila Neugebauer directed episode 5.

Sirens Calls

The series explores the relationship between two sisters over the course of a few days on an island of wealthy socialites, where nothing and no one are what they seem to be and secrets are hiding everywhere. Along the way, it’s about class and social divisions, familial and sisterly relationships, and relationships (including social ones and work ones, as well as friendships or romantic ones) between men and women, women and women, men and men, employers and employees. Oh, and dreams and (versus?) reality.

But at the heart of it all is the concept of the sirens, mythical beings who are either – depending on which version you hear – deceitful monsters who hypnotize men into crashing on the rocks of reality, or innocent women trapped in world of men who make bad choices and then blame the women for the failures.

But which version is true? Is it one, the other, or some complex combination? Are any of them true, or is the nature of myth to turn truth into fantasy that explains the human condition in ways we don’t merely understand, but perhaps also prefer? Our myths teach us, they explain the world, but they also tend to uplift us (or humanity, which in our own eyes is each of us of course) and to tell us the version of stories most helpful and most likely to be acceptable to us. Who makes the myths, then, decides the lessons.

Which is what ultimately makes Sirens so interesting, and much deeper layered than even some of most of the positive reviews seem to fully appreciate. There’s subtext, and then there’s subtext beneath the subtext. Keep peeling, the onion goes deep.

It’s not merely what you see, but what you don’t, and those two will absolutely switch places without warning or necessarily drawing attention to themselves. There are moments of overt themes and layered meanings in shots and scenes and how they speak to other moments in the story, yet also many more subtle moments and things we aren’t meant to even notice at all but which influence and affect us all the same.

Sirens Answers

To dive into the visual complexities and ways in which Sirens is always saying more than whatever is being “said” in a given scene, and how you’ll find and take something different away after rewatching episodes, I had a chance to speak with Sirens acclaimed cinematographer Gregory Middleton (episodes 1, 2, and 5), whose Emmy-nominated and Emmy-winning past work includes HBO series Game of Thrones and Watchmen, as well as Emmy-nominated work on the Marvel Studios series Moon Knight., all of which has a special place in my own heart.

Indeed, to that point, I will add a personal note here that my initial interest in Sirens stemmed precisely from the fact Middleton and Zoë White (Emmy-nominated for work on Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Hold Your Breath, as well as photographing Marvel Studios’ Werewolf by Night and the finale of HBO’s The Penguin) were photographing the project. All of their work mentioned here is beloved by me, including for the terrific cinematography and breadth of unique approaches in each project.

I will be publishing a second portion of this interview this week, with even more insights and exploration of how Sirens’ themes manifest visually and through characters.

So without further ado, here is the first part of my in-depth interview with Gregory Middleton – and if you haven’t seen Sirens yet, here’s your official spoiler warning, because we discuss details of the plot including the story’s ending.

MARK HUGHES: So let’s jump into the setting real quick. The mansion and the island play such an important role, with this lavish backdrop. But it’s like a maze everyone is trying to navigate to varying degrees of success, and it’s compartmentalized, but it’s always this giant backdrop. Even when it’s in a contained space, you’ve got these big windows and this natural lighting. Can you kind of talk about that general first?

GREGORY MIDDLETON: Yeah. I mean, there’s a few things like visually, which one is also meant to contrast a lot to where the kind of more shut in sort of life that just happened that Devin, you know, making face character has and what Simone came from, which is more like, you know, closed in colder light and kind of, you know, boxed in by the trauma kind of hiding from the world a little bit as someone with addiction issues and everything else and past trauma has.

And so the visual appeal of it being bright and open and also like the idea was to make something kind of aspirational to that.

And that was a big design choice from Nicole Cassell, who was the director of the first two episodes and John Peno, the production designer, was to try and make something like that that would be very like a real announcement of both the style and of kind of weird openness and there’s nowhere to hide in this place in some ways, even though it’s big and expansive, it brings nature in and a lot of things, which gets of course twisted a bit later as we find out more about the intentions and what the characters are really like and why that’s why the space is sort of it’s sort of a faux openness, if you know what I mean, and a faux thing to aspire to.

But that’s the big to make it visually quite contrasting. So you can sort of see why Simone is like, when she is there, it’s like a very big relief to the place that she came from in some way.

MH: One of the things you’re not drawing attention to that you’re doing, but part of the way through the show I realized, is we’ve got this island where everything is so bright, and we like to say, “light reveals the truth,” but it can also be blinding. And at first there’s this very bright light of day on the island with all of these lies hiding underneath, and the gritty, dark real world where we think of secrets hiding is where we’re initially seeing truth. But then you kind of begin to cross them as the story progresses, so as time goes on it switches, and that was so well done – I’m talking too much–

GM: No, no, no, you’re you’re getting to an interesting point.

MH: I’m like, so you write that in a way where you write the arcs first to do that, or is it letting it just scene to scene? Developing like that’s complicated as hell.

GM: Yeah, that’s a big question. I’ll go over the process of it afterwards, but visually about the sort of intent thing you’re discussing, first of all the blinding thing was sort of something intentional.

There’s a moment where Michaela first comes into the house when she comes back, and Simone has just rushed back from her boyfriend’s place and is like “Everyone’s not ready, the flowers aren’t ready,” you know, the big smoothie and all that kind of business. It all seems kind of a nice, almost like a a fun rush, because the boss is coming to town. Although it’s quite sinister in a weird way, what’s happening, but quite bright.

And when Michaela comes in, we deliberately did a thing where we kind of blinded the camera when she came to the door. I put a light behind her on the ground, and we can see a little flash of light because she’s coming from the bright outside, and it’s very bright anyway.

But we deliberately did something to make it like this little, you know, almost blast of light there. Because the other big theme and thing is being sort of mesmerized, the idea of the siren call is something that is hypnotic in a way. And so we’re using that light to kind of just dazzle somebody a little bit. And being dazzled is similar, a similar sort of feel [to hypnotic]. So that was a deliberate choice.

I think as the story got more grounded, as more serious scenes came up, we did introduce a lot more contrast in the lighting as this show went on. And that was in process as we were filming, discussing that, especially as we got towards the last episode.

In the episode that Zoë [White, cinematographer for episodes 3 and 4] shot, there’s quite an extensive dream sequence in episode four, which I really love — which is something that I really was hoping to shoot myself. But there’s an element where we get into more mixed reality, and a bit more serious, then we can play with some more serious tones and then also play more like two sides, not all bright and cheery. There’s always a bit of two sides going on.

MH: Yes. I appreciate so much that use of the brightness and the the fact that we get a lot of dream sequences and a lot of misinterpreted moments and we have the flashbacks coming and the way that the soft that that softness and the the the way that the colors it can make it hard to tell when you’re like, are we in real life or not? And then Bruce is there and in the scenes that you shoot with him. I’m out of order on my questioning, but this is my favorite line of thought about it, is the way that interplay of reality, not knowing what’s real and what’s not. And it speaks to the truth of the characters, in so many different ways.

GM: There’s some really wonderful cues and performance, too. And, you know, Molly’s incredible writing of these interesting and kind of in some ways odd characters, but some ways kind of, you know, deeply troubled characters. And they also kind of are all involved in a sort of an interior self-deception.

There’s a moment in, I think it’s in episode one where Kevin Bacon is up in his tower there, in a kind of lighthouse tower. And he’s looking down, he’s watching Michaela and Simone together, stretching. And with the way Nikki cut this episode with the editor, you can see he’s kind of hypnotized by it a bit. We can see he’s literally in his tower hypnotized.

And he’s also in the dark a little bit, because we’re not sure if he’s under the spell or not yet, in a way. And there’s something about that, also keeping a bit mysterious. There were elements to play with, the kinds of lighting or the way to treat characters lighting-wise, that help to poke the story along a bit, even though it is sort of uniformly quite upright and apparently, you know, shadowless type of a glowing pastel, perfection place.

I mean, the incredible costume design, all the colors everyone wears, and the feel of the actual mansion and location of the field, is like this kind of perfect kind of place you want to be. And yet, you know, the first time we see Kevin, he’s sitting up there in his mansion, and he’s very in the dark, kind of looking down. and it’s like “Is he hypnotized, or is he just not even sure what’s going on?”

MH: This is something else that I noticed, the change as the different arcs cross, and then they start heading in different directions. But you’re shooting some of those scenes with Simone and Kiki where you’re holding for that an uncomfortably long extra moment. And, you know, there’s a tension between them that you keep feeling.

But the length of those shots and the framing of those shots, [later] instead of the two of them where you can see Simone and she’s almost mesmerized by Kiki and under that spell, and they’re both contributing to that spell, and they’re in the shot. But as it progresses, and with the sisters as well, we get increasingly, you know, we’re getting the over the shoulder shots or the the different perspective shots, and how well the framing of those work individually and then also across the series, the complexity of it… really impresses me a lot.

GM: Oh, thanks. Thanks very much, Mark. I think one fascinating thing about a show that’s this big, that’s like a five hour story, is that you do develop as you go. As much as we try to map out concepts as we go along, they do develop over time.

So we start to see, oh, now we’ve done this, so it feels right to do this scene this way. And then you start to develop instincts as you progress, as you’re filming, about the way to approach a scene and sort of see which techniques work or what what what generates the right feeling, once you’ve done a scene before. And that process is very exciting.

One of the few concepts that we came up with early, that me and [director Nicole Kassell] came up with was the use of this more first-person camera. We’re kind of like in the Zoom meeting now, we’re looking at the camera in that context. Which was the idea of being in the gaze of a siren, or being mesmerized yourself, and putting the audience in that place to let them go in and sort of see the first-person view of somebody who is either mesmerizing them or being mesmerized — or you know, in a sense it’s a bit of self-seduction.

And to do that technique, that’s something that I’ve done [before]. You know, it’s not a new technique or anything like, it’s been around for a long time — probably most famously in the last 30 years, Jonathan Demme used that in The Silence of the Lambs when Hannibal Lecter is talking to Clarice, and also in other scenes in that film where it becomes very much more Clarice’s point of view, where the men are looking at her, they’re all looking at the camera, and she’s looking out at the world.

But in this case, it’s two characters kind of engaged in a little bit like, hey, let me look at you. And it’s like, you can’t escape someone’s gaze when they’re right in your face and they’re right in your eyes. And putting the audience in that position was something we tried to do at key moments, and we started to plot when those would be…

But there’s one scene, a longer scene in the bed with Kiki and Simone when she sneaks into her bed, she [Kiki] is taking over her life and becoming [Simone’s] best friend and confident and everything, and you know kicks her sister out. And I really wanted them to be able to see each other in that scene. So I thought it’d be nice to be able to actually act that way, so you really would feel like you’re in the middle of this scene.

We still have a technique — it’s a bit similar to what’s done in interviews, like I know Ken Burns does it for some of his documentaries — where we use a beam splitter. And what we did was, we put two cameras through a mirror so each camera would look through the mirror at their actor, and we set their faces up at 45 degree [angles] so they would see each other in the mirror.

So they’re lying down a little piece of fake bed, each of them, kind of like in the master shot where they’re lying in bed together face to face, you know. And then we move them and put them at 90 degrees to each other, and they can each look in the same mirror and see each other. But behind the mirror, two cameras look through the mirror at them, so they look like they’re looking at each other. To them it’s totally normal, and to us, it’s it’s they’re looking at us.

But that means they can actually play the scene, or they can overlap dialogue, and they can act to each other. It’s kind of because, you know, [Kiki] is trying to keep [Simone] awake in that scene, trying to tell her to eat and it’s okay if you haven’t told me everything, she’s very being very nosy. And Simone is being a little bit evasive, but also like I just really want to go to sleep. But you get the feeling of what it’s like to have this pressure put on you by the incredible Julianne Moore, in this thing where she’s really looking at you, you know, and it turned out wonderfully. It was great.

But that came out of just the idea that maybe they should look at [each other], that we should give the audience the experience of being in this position. And that turned into doing a whole scene that way, which was a really interesting way to put yourself in this very odd scene. Because it’s an odd scene to be in, it’s odd to be suddenly participating in when you are the other character, which I think really, really helped the audience feel a bit more unnerved and, you know, more involved in the uncertainty of what’s happening.

MH: Can you talk about some of the inspirations that you brought? For example, there were some Stepford Wives kind of moments, that felt like a wink toward that. Were there others (if that was even one of them at all)?

GM: There was a bit more of that in prep with Nicole. And we did have a few more, and the idea of, “Isn’t everyone on the island is a little bit off off kilter?” Like they’re all in this life of just being a bit in their own world. And we did we put a couple more in there. Not all of them survived the edits through the process. But there were a few things like that, for sure.

Like we had three kids who were twins or triplets. And also the way everyone dressed. It was like, everything should be off. So Devon visually is completely different than everyone else in this place, in her costume design and treatment and her makeup and everything else. Like she has nicks on her knees and cuts on her arms. She’s just, every part of her is such a great creation. And Megan Faye does an incredible job with the character. And that was one thing, the “fish out of water” thing. The other was a Hitchcock inspiration in some ways.

I’m trying to think of some other films we discussed that were along those lines, I can’t remember all of them now. But the biggest one was trying to figure out the psychological space.

MH: Vertigo? Rear Window?

GM: Yeah, there’s a there’s an element of being, of voyeurism. That was something that we talked about a lot. So Vertigo came up and Rear Window came up for sure. Because there’s a certain voyeurism, which is part of a coveting gaze to things sometimes. And also, making sure that gaze also felt like, you know, not just in a sexual way.

This element of just like, “I want this, I want this place.” Like, when Simone says to Michaela about her sister, she says, well, she makes me sad. I don’t want to be sad here. And so everything is around not feeling sad.

So it’s maybe suppressing emotion the entire time, which is not healthy. But there’s a certain amount of coveting of stuff. And there’s also like, the staff has the opposite experience, just realizing they have more regular lives and they just put up with that to put up with. It’s a good job pays well, Peter (Kevin’s character) takes care of people.

But there’s an element there of just, “What do I have to do to get through this day,” you know, with the insanity of the way Simone runs everybody. So there’s trying to maintain that gaze in the story, too, which is not a voyeuristic one so much, but just that this is impacting other more regular people who just have day jobs.

It’s not just a story about the rich, you know, the rich people in this world don’t just affect themselves, they don’t just emotionally hurt themselves. It’s like, there’s real people in this thing. The staff are not invisible. And that was a really important part, I think, and that’s something that Nicole was quite focused on when we were making the show…

We went through quite a gamut of references. Because for me, one of the most interesting things about this project was, it was such an incredibly interesting mix of tones, and something that Nicole and I discussed was a really challenging one to try and find. To find the right balance between comedy and partial mysticism and, you know, a bit of scary stuff.

And also, how threatening it should feel, how off it should feel, but also it’s funny. And people when they’re deceived can be very funny. I laugh a lot when I read the script, like I’m howling sometimes. And characters like Glenn Harrison’s character, Simone’s boyfriend, he’s just a gleeful idiot. Like he’s not malevolent, he’s just kind of clueless and dumb in a way, like emotionally. And he ends up behaving and saying things that are hurtful and terrible, like a bit of a self-centered childish character. But he’s not evil.

But evil things are happening. Like things that are really not nice are happening. But are they happening out of just sheer ignorance? Or is it, you know, some more malevolent happening? Like, is Michaela really a siren? Is there like, you know, these are the real effects you’re having on people.

So try to find that tone in every way with the design being quite over the top and, you know, being very pronounced, was a really interesting thing to try to discuss. And one thing that came about was our references became so varied, that’s one thing I remember, we were going through all these things we’re looking at like, “They’re all over the place.” It’s like so many types of references because it’s touching on so many genres that it became quite a puzzle. That’s why I think I can’t think of it, as we went through like so many. Hitchcock being one of them, though.

MH: Yeah, it was one of the most fun things about watching, was because it’s so many different genres mixed into it and you see it navigated visually, and how it’s blending together. In particular, I really appreciated that, and the Hitchcock [references] — some of it’s not hidden, but then some of it is. And you have to kind of wrap your head around and think about it in a complicated way. So it’s like it’s multiple layers as you think about it.

GM: It’s one of these things where, even though we have strong visions, I just want to be making sure we give the audience the experience of being in the story, that was important, and not to look at this from the outside only. That’s the biggest thing to take away.

Thank you to Gregory Middleton for sitting down to share his thoughts and experiences with me.

Notice throughout the interview, Middleton frames the work and its effectiveness within the context of collaboration and group effort, instead of centering himself for credit and praise (which he richly deserves). His answers and explanations always mention other cast and crew, and his own choices and work are framed as building on the work of greats who came before. I appreciated how this opened up every exchange to broader relevance and artistic insight, and put his particular points into an easier larger creative context. It also reflects how much Sirens was a collaborative artistic effort, and how much the series benefits from that organic approach.

You’ll see more of all of this plus much more – including a terrific exploration of just who and what a siren is, and how the film visually manifests its various interpretations and themes – in the second half of this interview this week, so stay tuned and check back soon.

All five episodes of Sirens are released on Netflix, so perhaps we will hear word soon about whether a second season is in store or not (which would presumably be an original story written for the show, since the original inspiration is a standalone play with a specific source of inspiration). Meanwhile, if you’ve already seen Sirens, then you can find out more about its surprise ending here.