The Emmy winner is joined by cinematographer Nicola Daley to dive deep into standout shots from the visually striking show, a showcase of Moss’s transition from top-tier actor to top-tier filmmaker.
For anyone who’s seen The Handmaid’s Tale, its Emmy wins for both directing and cinematography should be no surprise. Since the Hulu dystopian drama premiered to wide acclaim in 2017, its nightmarish, painterly visuals and stark framing have all but come to define it, along with the rich performances of its Emmy-winning cast. The show has grown bolder in its aesthetic as time has gone on, though—particularly with the addition of one notable person in the director’s chair: Elisabeth Moss.
Moss, who’s won Emmys for both starring in and executive producing the show, has proved a natural filmmaker, combining her layered understanding of performance with an intrinsic understanding of the series’ brutal and beautiful imagery. For The Handmaid’s Tale’s recently concluded fifth season, Moss took even greater charge behind the scenes, helming its first and last blocks of episodes—including the standout second installment, “Ballet.” Set in the aftermath of June’s (Moss) orchestration of the murder of her former abuser, Commander Waterford (Joseph Fiennes), the episode juxtaposes her attendance at a ballet in freedom with the extravagant funeral overseen by Waterford’s revenge-vowing widow, Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski).
But while Moss brought four seasons’ worth of experience to “Ballet,” she was joined by a cinematographer new to The Handmaid’s Tale, Nicola Daley (Benediction). “That balance between carrying on the visual language of the show and being able to bring your own mark to it and your own personality to it is unbelievably difficult,” Moss says. “[Daley], she had so much respect for what the previous cinematographers had done and saw all the things that they had done that were brilliant and beautiful, and was able to just take all of those good things and to bring something of her own into it. That was a very difficult thing to do, but she did it incredibly elegantly.”
Below, Moss and Daley take us through standout shots from “Ballet,” from the remarkable work that went into them to the impressive results.
The Ballet
The episode’s centerpiece is the sequence intercutting the lavish funeral that Gilead throws for Fred with an elegant ballet performance that June attends.
Elisabeth Moss: Before there was even an outline, I was told that there was going to be a ballet. I have a history in ballet, I studied for a long time, and so I felt very personally invested in this, and I was told that it was an option to intercut it with this funeral. It was supposed to be this juxtaposition between the dark and the light—something so inarguably beautiful just in the ballet’s simplicity, juxtaposed with the horror of what’s behind the funeral. But also, they’re both performance pieces; one is a ballet that June is watching and one is the ballet that Serena has created for the world to see.
My first and only choice to choreograph the piece was Justin Peck. He has an understanding of performance and of story that’s really important, and an understanding of visuals and cinematography. Luckily he said yes right away, which was an absolute dream come true, so that was the starting point. And for the ballet, we wanted it to be very simple as far as having one dancer. There was a strong water motif in both episode one and two. [Production designer] Elisabeth Williams had a very strong influence of there being this water theme to the ballet and creating these backdrops, that felt like you were under water and sort of undulated, and had this beautiful almost Monet quality of light and color and blues and greens.
Nicola Daley: Lizzie and I talked a lot about the water theme being a metaphor for June being traumatized, and that feeling of being underwater after what she’d done to Fred at the end of season four. She’s trying to process that. I put moving lights onto Elisabeth Williams’s backdrops and so it gave this feeling that you were underwater.
We did five short ballet sequences, and then one of them, I sort of suggested that we do a beam of sunlight breaking through the water. It was a really brilliant shoot day. We were all buzzing because it was really collaborative with Justin and the prima ballerina who danced. I remember at the end, Lizzie was like, “That’s the best filming day I’ve ever had.”
Moss: It sounds like we all sort of made it up on the day and it was very creative, which it was—but we have never been more prepared for a sequence than we were for the funeral and the ballet. It was storyboarded within an inch of its life. We created animatics for it. Every single frame was put in order on these giant boards that were in my office, which involved me and Nic sitting on the floor literally with scissors and tape and just cutting up storyboards frame by frame and rearranging them. Bradley Whitford was shadowing me at the time, because he was going to direct that season, so of course I put him to work and handed him a pair of scissors and tape, and he was in charge of cutting up the frames that we needed him to cut up.
We did a lot of setups of Steadicam following the dancer, and it was really incredible to watch what quite literally became another dance, between the Steadicam operator and our ballerina, and how the camera would move around her. It was incredibly difficult and challenging. Never seen anything like it.
The Funeral
The epically scaled funeral comes about as a result of Serena’s demanding that her late husband be appropriately honored by Gilead amid the media frenzy surrounding his death. Pulling that off proved difficult for several reasons.
Moss: We had five cameras and a drone for the funeral. The hardest part was working out really specifically when we were going to do what. Any director or DP that reads this is going to be like, “Well, yeah, obviously that’s your job.” [Laughs] But it was very tricky to work out what we were going to shoot when and in what order. It’s directional and it has to do with the sun and it has to do with the extras and you need time and all of this stuff. But we did it— and we did it in less.
Daley: We didn’t exhaust all the extras, who bless them were standing outside in winter in Toronto. It’s pretty hard work. The VFX guys who did the crowd replication and filled out the crowd—we actually used Unreal Engine in a weird way, because they scanned the area, the square where we were filming, and then they put a model of a normal person and then could replicate them so they could see how many people filled up the sidewalk and then Lizzie could get a really accurate idea. We also went to the place, didn’t we, Lizzie? And six people across stood in the middle of the road and we worked out how many people could walk together.
Moss: We weren’t able to have enough extras because we were still in COVID protocol times, so we really had to be very specific about how many people you could use for each shot.
Daley: We talked a lot about the Gilead camera crews, and what cameras would they have because they’re filming it for the world to see, so would they have a different type of cameras? And then we were like, “Well, they wouldn’t have grainy news cameras. It’s Gilead.” So they ended up having the same cameras that we shoot on, but we had slightly different lenses. Then all the camera operators and the grips had to dress in costume, so they found it quite fun. And if they had beards, they had to shave because, you know. We watched Prince Phillip’s funeral as reference as the biggest state funeral that we could find.
Moss: We were delighted to see in Prince Phillip’s funeral that they used Steadicam. That gave us license to then use it for some of our Gilead camera footage. But it was tricky. The style of the show is so specific and is so beautiful; we had to then mix in this Gilead feed, this Gilead camera footage, but we didn’t want it to look bad in the show. We had to sort of find this middle ground of it being slightly more conventional. We don’t really do a lot of panning in our show, but these cameras would pan, and those cameras were there almost the entire time. We just kept changing the lenses on them so we could just as much footage as possible at all times of that funeral. I remember one setup where all five cameras were going and the drone and I was sitting at the monitor watching this and I swear to God, I’ve never been happier in my life. I was like a pig in shit, I was so happy.
The Men
The wake for the funeral is held at the Putnams’ home, which is in need of a personal handmaid. The teenage Esther (Mckenna Grace) is selected by Ann Dowd’s Aunt Lydia as the most likely candidate to take that slot, and in this moment walks into the Commander’s office, encountering a group of powerful men in a scene deliberately modeled after the painting Homage to Delacroix.
Moss: This is a mirror image of a painting that I saw in Paris at the Musée d’Orsay. I was like, “These are the men in Putnam’s office. This is how we should shape this.” I’m very proud of this shot because of that reference. I love the way they all just look so absolutely terrifying.
Daley: Yeah, and the negative space above is really disturbing. It’s this space of what will happen in here, and it’s got a slow push in on them as Esther walks into the room. It’s Esther’s POV of all these eyes looking at her. Disturbing. Lizzie, when we went on to episode 10, we talked a lot more about slow pushes in and pulls out and how you exactly build tension in an episode. But here those slow pushes in at the beginning, which then turns into handheld later in the scene, makes you feel like uh-oh, something creepy is going on here—to start with.
Moss: One of the biggest things that I’ve learned as a director about the visual side of things is, for us on Handmaid’s, we tend to do one unusual thing that isn’t conventional and isn’t how you would normally shoot something. For example, in this shot, as Nic mentioned, the amount of negative space on top is unusual. So there’s always something that makes it just slightly unique and not conventional. We’re pushing for that in every single frame, every single setup.
Our actors are incredibly collaborative and receptive. They know the show so well and they understand the visual side of the show so well, so they’re a director’s dream in the sense that, most of the time, one or all of them will say, “Where do you want me?” There isn’t often a lot of, “Oh, just wander around the room and improvise something.” We don’t really do that. It’s so stylized and the framing is so specific. With this, all of these men were perfectly fine with me being like, “You’re here, you’re there. Put your arm up there. You sit there, don’t sit there, don’t look at me.” I was incredibly specific, but they understand what it is that you’re going for. I showed at least a few of them the painting. All of our actors, including me, really embrace that on our set because we understand that sometimes we’re going for a tableau that is important to the story.
The Feeding
When Commander Putnam is introduced to Esther, he is creepily enamored with how young she is. What follows is an even more unsettling scene, captured with classically stark Handmaid’s beauty, where he feeds his potential handmaid-to-be a chocolate.
Moss: It was a very interesting experience being on the other side of this scene because I’ve shot this kind of scene so many times on Handmaid’s. I’ve been that girl. McKenna Grace did an unbelievable job. She was so beautiful in this sort of horrific scene.
Daley: Even though it’s one of the most disturbing scenes, it’s kind of like, is it okay to say this is one of your favorites? [Laughs] This was my first week on set, I think. I was just super excited that I was there—like, oh my God, look, they’re dressed as Handmaids! I was really interested in contrast as a character in the scene. It’s the light and dark. That’s why we pulled the curtains a little bit and had these shafts of light coming through. It’s the freedom that’s just outside that Esther can’t get to because she’s now trapped in here with this awful man.
Moss: We made the choice to go handheld on Esther at a very specific moment in the scene when she is left by Aunt Lydia and that’s the moment that we go into this handheld closeup. It’s a classic Handmaid’s thing that we do, and again, I’ve been on the other side so many times. So much of the story is told with the contrast as a character, like Nic is saying. Their body language in those windows and their silhouettes in those windows and how tiny she is and how tall he is—it’s told through light, and that is just, I mean, chef’s kiss to Nic. The Holy Grail, I think.
The Handmaids
The theme of chocolates continues into this cliff-hanger of a climax to the episode, in which Esther shares chocolates with fellow handmaid Janine, a hero of the series. The tone of the scene is initially warm and friendly as they bond, but in a moment told through a subtle but crucial camera move, Esther’s energy changes abruptly—and it’s revealed that the chocolates they are eating may be poisoned, as blood spatters.
Moss: This scene is probably the one, besides the ballet and funeral, I’m most proud of because it was a big swing and a very tricky camera move that involved also crossing a line. I didn’t want to cover the scene any other way, so it was very important to me that this shot worked.
Daley: We were sitting in an office, jamming on how we were going to do this because the way this scene’s written is, it changes halfway. We worked out that we would do this slow push in that then, when the scene changes, we’d cross the line and then go into Esther on this complicated crane shot that was very tense. Here we’re two girlfriends talking, but then something shifts and then it’s like, “Oh, shit.”
Moss: It starts quite wide and it does one of my favorite things, which is when a camera starts to move in so slowly that you don’t even notice that it’s moved until it’s halfway there and then you realize that the camera’s been moving. It makes you feel like something is about to happen and you don’t know why. Just when you feel like you know where you are, this incredibly complicated crane move shifts to the right. Timing-wise, it had to be perfect because it had to land on Esther at exactly the right moment, as she starts to shift in her dialogue and sound a little bit more ominous. I love just that marriage between story and performance—the camera helping you to tell that story.
