‘Etoile’ Cinematographer David Mullen Dissects His Favorite Shot, Filled with Red Lights and Smoke

Étoile, the Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino vehicle canceled after one season on Amazon Prime, is awash in elegant shots of ballerina pirouettes and the opulent interior of the Opéra Garnier in Paris — which served as the inspiration for the novel The Phantom of the Opera. But it’s one specific shot in the Emmy-nominated episode “The Swap” that cinematographer David Mullen finds more graceful than the others.

In the scene, a negotiation over lunch to swap dancers between a Paris and a New York ballet company, in an attempt to save their institutions, is interspersed with a series of flash cuts to the individual performers onstage.

“The first one was described as a black box theater where the dancer is doing incredible leaps in the air, and that’s all I had to work with,” Mullen tells THR. “We shot against a lot of smoke and colored lighting. … and because these dances that we see are so brief, each one would have a strong color scheme. So it’d be red, yellow, orange, and it went through the rainbow so that they would pop in the middle of this restaurant scene, which was more monochromatic.”

To create a “silhouette against a cloud of lit smoke,” the effects team made a three-wall steam source and Mullen backlit the scene with ground and top lights with a red glare. A Panavision VA lens captured the sequence.