‘Griselda’ cinematographer Armando Salas: ‘There was this incredible energy on the set’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
“We wanted to create a unique world that the audience bought into and lived in the reality of this character,” explains Armando Salas, the Cuban-born cinematographer for the six-part Netflix biographical crime drama “Griselda.” “We wanted people to feel absorbed into the world of Griselda Blanco.” That world looks as if it was filmed in Miami in 1978, found 46 years later and put on the air when in fact it was shot primarily in Long Beach, California in 2022. The washed-out period details and tone mirror the era when Blanco – a Colombian mother who transformed herself into a drug “queenpin” – ruled Miami as one of the first cartel leaders to bring cocaine to the United States. The limited series stars Sofia Vergara of “Modern Family” fame in her first dramatic role. “We spent a lot of time thinking about the look and feel, something based on reference material but that was our own unique twist on that time period.” Watch the exclusive video interview above.
One of the inspirational keys that determined the “Griselda” developmental look inside Salas’s lens was a surprising one, based in an old school technology that emerged in the late 1940s: the Polaroid camera. “It was these Polaroids that Andres Baiz, our director, was taking in pre-production,” Salas recalls, “and we started essentially staging the scenes of the show using his Polaroid cameras. We picked and chose the best of those images and I started to see that the Polaroids were doing this really great job of distilling the image down and had a very painterly effect. And then I took the top 20 images to my colorist and we started creating a look designed around the look of those shots. That was kind of the starting point of the conversation of the look and feel of our digital film negative for the show.”
Mind you, there is only about a 15% to 20% success rate on Polaroid images, Salas adds. The rest don’t make the cut. “There’s an unpredictability to it,” he says, “but there’s a tonality that’s really beautiful on skin tone, but then there’s these peaks and valleys in color. So you have these saturated pops of certain frequencies of color that the Polaroid dyes can actually reproduce. It’s about unifying the looks.” That, in tandem with contributions from set dressing, wardrobe and production design, led to a unifying theme in the color palette for what would be the uniquely aged look of “Griselda.” It was the result of four months of meetings prior to the first say of filming and making sure everyone was on the same page on tonalities of color and approach.
The distinctive look also evolved based on where the character of Griselda is in the story in terms of her success or failure and essentially “her station in life,” Salas emphasizes. “Every chapter, she’s in a wildly different place, with her success and eventual downfall. It’s a very warm and inviting look when she has a thriving small business. It becomes a little more lavish and extreme with pockets of darkness and over-the-top color when she’s becoming the godmother of the cocaine trade. And of course then we have her downward spiral in the later chapters.”
But it was equally important to Salas that the different looks be subtle so the craft of them wasn’t front and center and overly noticeable. “If we’re doing our jobs well, you’re fully absorbed in the performance at that moment,” he points out. “The same goes for the lighting and the overall compositions. The idea is that we’re focusing the eye, we’re curating the world for you so we’re not taking you out of the narrative at any time.”
None of his camera work would have mattered had the acting performances not soared. Fortunately, he stresses, they did, beginning with Vergara’s dynamic work as Blanco that created “this incredible energy on the set,” Salas believes. “Sofia had this tireless work ethic and boundless energy and was completely humble and full of joy. It inspired everybody to just do the best they could do to make this project successful. Between the hours (Vergara) spent putting on the prosthetics and on set, she was incredible. It made a tremendous difference for all of us, in every department.”
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