The New ‘Cape Fear’ Series Builds on the Martin Scorsese Classic and Brings the Heat

Martin Scorsese‘s 1991 thriller “Cape Fear” is one of the most visually dynamic films to ever come out of Hollywood, a kinetic onslaught of whip pans, zooms, quick cuts, baroque lighting, and off-kilter angles all designed as an extension of the roiling tensions at the movie’s core. When cinematographer Eben Bolter came on board creator Nick Antosca‘s ten-episode Apple TV adaptation, he was simultaneously excited and apprehensive about the challenge of building on Scorsese and cinematographer Freddie Francis’ visual language.

“The 1991 film has so much atmosphere,” Bolter told IndieWire. “It’s Scorsese at his most expressive and playful.” For Bolter, who shot the first episode of “Cape Fear” before alternating with director of photography Celiana Cárdenas for the remaining episode, the key was figuring out how to acknowledge the Scorsese movie’s influence without feeling beholden to it — while also incorporating elements from the 1962 version as well as the John D. MacDonald novel (“The Executioners”) on which all three screen adaptations of “Cape Fear” are based.

Bolter sat down with Antosca and pilot director Morten Tyldum to break down the style of Scorsese’s movie and figure out how to adapt it to a longer format. “The Scorsese film does so much in its two-hour runtime,” Bolter said. “ We’ve got 10 hours, so how do we let the show develop? How do we not just throw all the toys at the screen in the pilot and exhaust the audience visually? Because then it’s almost meaningless.”

Bolter and his collaborators quickly figured out a few guiding principles that drove the style for the pilot and everything that followed, starting with the intention to give the series a voyeuristic quality; part of the unease that the show generates comes from the sense that Javier Bardem’s stalker Max Cady could be watching married attorneys Patrick Wilson and Amy Adams at any time, from anywhere. “ We wanted to use long lens and zoom photography to create the sense that someone’s watching, that there’s a presence far away,” Bolter said. “And we wanted to introduce Max from behind, like a panther hunting its prey.”

‘Cape Fear’Courtesy of Apple

Bolter also decided to employ punchy zooms during the action that echoed the 1991 movie, and added other techniques to the show’s visual library, planted in the pilot and developed over the course of the series. “ I definitely wanted to leave room for the end of the series to go really crazy, and everyone bought into that philosophy,” Bolter said. “Nick, as a showrunner, was incredibly supportive of us taking risks. There was almost nothing too crazy that I could pitch. It was very inspiring and liberating to just look at a location and be like, ‘Okay, do you know what would be cool, is if we started upside down and then did this crazy thing and landed in an extreme close-up on an eyeball.'”

In prep, Bolter created a “visual manifesto” for the show filled with references from films, television, and photography, but he remained open to new ideas and visual opportunities as they arose during shooting. “ As we started making the show, we would update that document, taking images from the show itself,” Bolter said. “When we finished Episode 3, that became a kind of bible for the aesthetic of the show. We could give that to incoming directors to bring them up to speed on what we had done so far, what the show looks like, how we were being expressive, and to encourage them. To say, ‘Okay, here is our little toy box. Go play. Go have fun. Here are all the tools, just imagine crazy shots.'”

Although Bolter prepped meticulously, he tried to leave himself open to as much discovery as possible during the shoot. “In the prep period, we’re just going through scene by scene and on a very basic level saying, ‘What is the story? What are we conveying to the audience using visuals? What does it feel like? What’s the weather doing? Is it hot? Is it cold? Is this a rich family, a poor family? Is this person happy, sad, scared? Are we with them? Are we observing them from a distance?’ We basically just layer that until we get a roadmap of the important information in the scene.”

Following that roadmap, Bolter would seek the right balance between performance and visual style in every scene. “Sometimes the important information is just to let the actors act, and let the performance live, and let’s stay out of the way,” Bolter said. “Other times, we need to bring some atmosphere because there’s not much happening in the scene from an acting perspective, so it’s actually much more about the atmosphere that we can bring with our cameras. Then we start to think about, ‘What’s the special shot? Where can we do something we haven’t seen before?'”

Behind the scenes of ‘Cape Fear’Courtesy of Apple

Indeed, one of the great pleasures of “Cape Fear” comes from its avoidance of traditional coverage — in every scene Bolter, Cárdenas, and the directors seem to be seeking the precisely correct image to express each specific emotion and idea. “It wasn’t ‘wide, medium, close-up,'” Bolter said. “It was, ‘Where is the story? What is the perspective?’ We plot all that out and have a plan going in, and that plan has been stress-tested through prep, and we feel pretty good about it. Then you get to the set and watch the actors do it, and sometimes you throw that plan out the window.”

Bolter was determined to capture the nuances Adams, Bardem, Wilson, and the other actors were finding in their characters, even if that meant compromising his own lighting plan at times. “ The equation I’m always trying to figure out is how much of the aesthetic of the scene is critical to the storytelling, and how much is that going to disrupt or inhibit the performance?” Bolter said. “If it’s two people in a diner and there are five pages of dialogue, and we know that they’re going to want to explore and improvise and things are going be different every take, it’s not really fair to the actors for me to take a long time to set up one perfect shot and then two hours later do the reverse when the performance has gone through 10 different iterations.”

To that end, Bolter was often intent on creating a cross-shooting environment where he could capture multiple actors’ coverage simultaneously and allow them to riff. “The cost to that is lighting perfection,” Bolter said. “You can’t sculpt and mold and make everything as magnificent as you want it, but you end up with a far better scene. And that’s way more beneficial to everybody. There’s no point in having a bad scene with beautiful lighting. I always want to support the performance because I do think it’s the most important element of the visual storytelling.”

Another key element of the visual storytelling in “Cape Fear” is the sense of hot southern atmosphere (the show was shot in Georgia), the cinematography conveys — this is one of the most convincingly sweaty shows or movies since “Body Heat” and “Do the Right Thing.” Bolter was particularly aware of the climate coming to “Cape Fear” straight from a winter beach in England, where he finished the most recent season of “Slow Horses.” “ If you go from winter to summer, you really feel the humidity, you feel the atmosphere, and your body reacts,” Bolter said. And you just notice it. “I became a little bit obsessed about how to best capture that.”

To represent the heat on screen, Bolter collaborated closely with all the departments on set, from art and costume to hair and makeup. “We always wanted to show as much atmosphere as possible,” Bolter said, “so we were always using haze in rooms to create a foggy atmosphere. Even on hot, sunny days, we were always wetting down the sidewalk as if it had just rained. We were wetting the trees, the windows, even if you let it dry off before you roll. I even used a flame bar and a helium bar below the lens, so you create that kind of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ heat haze effect.”

While the costume department added sweat marks and makeup constantly added water to actors’ faces, the art department used a slightly glossy paint on all the locations. “Even psychologically when you’re inside houses, you’ve got a kind of shine to the walls rather than a kind of dull matteness,” Bolter said. “All of these things in combination hopefully created this sort of sweaty atmosphere.” That atmosphere was felt by the crew throughout the 140-day shoot, which required intense physical and mental endurance from everyone.

“There’s a real stamina to shooting television,” Bolter said. “Particularly in the heat, and we were shooting in some pretty severe weather. As an alternating DP, I get little breaks to go prep the next episode, but the crew is there every single day. It was a marathon, not a sprint. It was just all about getting to the finish line.”

“Cape Fear” is currently streaming on Apple TV.