What would “Ripley” be without its transfixing style, from the palpable isolation of a squalid New York apartment to the shadowy charms of ancient Italian streets? Writer-director Steven Zaillian’s acclaimed eight-hour Netflix series isn’t merely a new adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s enduring thriller about an American tourist in coastal southern Italy embracing deceit and murder: It’s a coolly gorgeous black-and-white pleasure bath of sights, shades and textures. Beauty with darkness. Modern touches in ancient spaces.
Art for con artist’s sake. To achieve his vision of a 1960s Italy that would sweep viewers away right along with Andrew Scott’s dangerously impressionable protagonist, Zaillian assembled a murderer’s row (ahem) of design collaborators: Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Elswit, who’d worked with the director on the miniseries “The Night Of”; production designer David Gropman, an alum of Zaillian’s 1993 film “Searching for Bobby Fischer”; and Italian costume designers Maurizio Millenotti and Gianni Casalnuovo. Television The stars of Netflix’s “Ripley,” an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, talk about why we can’t get enough of con artists, how they’ve been duped and all those stairs in the show.
April 2, 2024 Elswit makes no bones about how important everyone’s set contributions were to the look and feel of “Ripley.” “It was such a clear ensemble of decisions based on Steve’s original ideas that we.