American Primeval DP Jacques Jouffret Paints a Beautiful, Brutal Picture—Overcast Skies and All
"During the shoot, everybody was making fun of me because I spent my day looking at the sky."
Welcome to the wild and wonderful era of Emmy Awards: Phase 1, a time before nomination voting when the arbitrary rules governing what is timely are set aside, and we can discuss projects that were released weeks or months earlier and deserve to be top of mind again. (Sidenote: You can take these as my personal recommendations for viewing until networks start sponsoring content. Life’s too short to write about nonsense without getting paid for it.) American Primeval premiered on Netflix January 9, 2025.
American Primeval has plenty of bravura action sequences throughout its six episodes, but none are quite as technically impressive as the one-shot recreation of the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which a band of Mormons brutally attacked would-be settlers.
In real life, the siege lasted for three days. To convey its brutality, director Peter Berg told director of photography Jacques Jouffret that he wanted it all in one take: scalpings, charging bulls, flying arrows, and all.
Jouffret and camera operator Brett Hurd joined the stunt team in rehearsals and then proceeded to shoot it as often as possible for a half hour every day for the right sunlight. (The perils of shooting an outdoors Western.)
“For me, it was, ‘OK, he's falling down and then the camera turned to the left, and we see that guy coming in from the right side?’” Jouffret says. “I’d say, ‘If you're gonna make it this way, then you're gonna be flat light. Can we flip it, depending on where is the sun?’"
The other upside of the cinematography and stunt teams working so closely together is finding ways to streamline the action. “ The sooner you can bring the operating camera and the stunt team together, [you] solve each other's problems,” Jouffret says. “Oh, you have a dead moment here? I can help you. I'll be focusing over there and come back this way, so you'll have time for that horse to come back this way.’”
While the Mountain Meadows Massacre may be the most obvious technical achievement of the series, the rest of the series wasn’t easy. For Jouffret, there was also the constant problem-solving of filming in practical light.
“The challenge with this project was the fact that it's a period piece. The light? Moonlight. Fire. That's all you have. It’s a variation on the same theme,” Jouffret says. “You're not trying to make it more than what it is. Which fit very much my style of shooting in terms of lighting. I'm much more of a one light source director of photography. I’d much rather start with that.”
Which is not to say that there was no cheating. The light appears to be coming solely from the moon or a campfire, but that’s just the elegance of Jouffret’s lighting design.
“There's lights everywhere,” Jouffret says. “But the intention is you believe that they are all around this fire, and only the fire lights it. Obviously, there's more stuff going on.”
Faking natural light required a huge prep and a rigging crew, even for the simplest glimmer. That adds up in time, especially when base camp was about a 30-minute drive from location—and base camp itself was a 90-minute drive from HQ in Santa Fe.
“If you don't have lighting in the background, they're all gonna go to darkness. You're not gonna see anything. So you have quite a few big lights, depending on the topography where we shooting, if I can take a machine to expose the entire environment around them, and then, you need to bring more light for the fire, because the fire doesn't light enough. Yes, you can bring the fire up, but if you bring the fire up, you are overexposed there, and it means nothing. So you have to keep it actually quite low in terms of intensity and you have to bring stuff on the side, usually a cup light just for that effect.”
At least Jouffret had some control over that lighting. He spent a lot of production staring at the sky, tracking the sun. “You're constantly running with the sun,” he says. “That's probably the hardest part when you're shooting a show that is daytime heavy: You are at the mercy of the weather. During the shoot, everybody was making fun of me because I spent my day looking at the sky. As a DP, I'll shoot a night movie or interior any day as opposed to shooting exterior. Day exterior is by far the hardest.”
Not to mention shooting outside in a New Mexico winter. Everything onscreen in American Primeval feels uncomfortable, from the frozen ground to the chill that seeps through even Betty Gilpin’s voluminous skirts. And enhancing that sensation of physical discomfort are the cinematography’s grim, gray hues.
“ I wanted the audience to feel cold,” Jouffret says. “It's freezing. You don't want to be there. You’re much happier in your living room watching this than being there, and you're gonna have a good time. Get a cup of coffee, maybe a cup of chocolate, and you're gonna be great.”
He took his cues from the costume and production design, which emphasized darker colors. Fort Bridger, the closest thing to civilization in the series, is all mud and rickety wooden buildings; the clothes everyone wears start dark and only get darker as they get dirtied throughout their journeys. “There is not much variation. And those variations are very subtle,” Jouffret says. “So it's all the different gradations. You're trying to always play on the same theme.”
Everything about the look and feel of American Primeval feeds into what Berg wanted to convey about the period: its casual brutality. “This is not the kind of Western that you watch, and everybody seems to be clean,” Jouffret says. “This is not that place. This was hard living. The life expectancy was very short. It was extremely violent. And that's really what Pete Berg wanted to communicate to the audience.”
Jacques Jouffret, ASC, is the director of photography for Gran Turismo, The Purge, Novocaine, and Renny Harlin’s upcoming The Beast. He says he’s not a craft services guy.
This is soo interesting. I've been slowly making my way through the show I I was wondering why colors are so toned down in some scenes. Now it makes more sense.