In 2018, journalist Patrick Radden Keefe published Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, a combination of true crime and political analysis of the region’s difficult recent history. In 2024, the book - already hugely well-received - was adapted into a nine-episode series by FX and distributed by FX on Hulu and Disney+. Cinematographer Stephen Murphy, BSC, ISC, photographed the final two episodes with a brief to differentiate those historic periods while helping to maintain a working environment conducive to material covering difficult, recent real world events.

Murphy’s involvement came via producer Cass Marks, with whom Murphy had worked previously. “We’d worked together on Atlanta, the production was looking for a DP to come in and do the last two episodes, and my name was put forward. The production designer worked on Atlanta, too, and a lot of the production team. There was a lot of overlap, and that was a great experience for me. I was aware of the book, I knew of the director’s work, and it was an interesting period for me as an Irish person.”

Seven episodes in, the series had established its gradually changing tone, and Murphy was keen to ensure the final two episodes maintained that intent. “They’d been shooting the first seven and they knew the series started with a lighter more romantic tone, and it gradually got darker and darker. For my two episodes, because there was a time shift as well as a darker storyline, they knew they wanted to enhance the darkness through the images. They were shooting interesting, moody stuff.”

Murphy’s immediate impression was of a story already served well by that approach, as well as by a hugely capable cast including Maxine Peake, Helen Behand and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor. “A lot of the story is dealing with truths and half-truths, and truths from one perspective over another. I find it fascinating. The cast they had already were brilliant, and the people they were casting were equally brilliant.”

Such a character-driven piece, Murphy suggests, would demand a careful approach to lighting people. “For me, a lot of the time, it was about modelling of light on people’s faces, how much of a face you reveal, how much of the second eye you reveal. It becomes about portraits, and making it interesting even if it’s someone’s kitchen, someone’s lounge.”

The resulting team effort particularly involved production designer Caroline Story, whose work encompassed at least two time periods. “You’re working with the production designer - where you put the windows and what textures you put on the walls. Most of my episodes were in the nineties, leading up to the ceasefire, and there’s some flashbacks to the seventies. For our particular episodes we had a bit of work on our Belfast backlot. Our designer knew we’d have to build a huge backlot because you were dealing with period Belfast which doesn’t really exist anymore, and blowing things up and setting fire to them.”

Even so, with much of Murphy’s work on location, Murphy was keenly aware of the privations of working in real-world environments, particularly given the desire of director (and executive producer) Michael Lennox to keep on-set necessities as unobtrusive as possible. “Mike was really keen to preserve as much space on the floor as he could for improvisation. He likes to find the scene as he’s shooting it. We talked about The Insider that Dante Spinotti shot for Michael Mann - not always on a dolly, not always on a steadicam.” Similarly, Murphy’s approach combined techniques. “We might start on dollies, we might do coverage handheld then get up close and intimate with wide lenses.”

Facilitating Lennox’s technique required an approach Murphy describes as “lighting spaces, not faces. I think Harris Savides said that, and a lot of cinematographers try to practice it to some degree. Rather than thinking about everything on a shot-by-shot basis, you’re trying to keep your bigger light sources outside the set, outside the windows. You know you’re going to have to clean up the closeup with some extra light, an eyelight, but thinking about it that outside-in fashion also helps with consistency.”

Given the need to depict a changing time period - and unusually, for the later episodes of a serial production - Murphy’s choice of equipment was not prescribed by that used on previous episodes. “The cast was different, locations were different, time period was different… I pitched that we’d change the lenses. We kept the Alexa 35, but I switched from Cooke S4s to Leica Summilux for the nineties scenes, and for scenes with the younger cast I went back to the S4s. It’s a subtle difference and there’s scenes where I’ve decided to use Cookes rather than Summilux.”

Murphy lit the series’ considered moodiness almost entirely with LED lighting. “If we needed large HMIs we we’d use them, but by and large we tried to stay with LED. We had most of it on the truck, and access to a lot more… for the vast majority of what we did, we were trying to avoid the sun and playing with overcast qualities of light.” With this approach in mind, Murphy built high-power lights from multiple smaller units. “We would make three and five head units - Vortex maxibrutes, which were very flexible and incredibly easy to set up and power. We were trying to stay in that world a lot of the time.

Keeping such a world realistic, Murphy goes on, demands a certain dedication to the accidental. “There’s a tendency at the moment to over-massage or over-finesse things, but reality isn’t like that. I work quite hard to get a slightly random quality to the lighting so it’s controlled, but it’s not totally controlled because you don’t have total control when you’re on location. What sells a stage as real life is the little mistakes.”

With that in mind, Murphy also used a carefully-controlled amount of mist “as a contrast tool, rather than to look like smoke in the room. It doesn’t just control contrast; it’s also what it does to the colors, muting them in a really nice way. I also use it knowing I have quite a contrasty lighting ratio. In the grade you crush the shadows a little bit.” Notoriously, the airborne effect varies as people open doors and move around, but “our effects crew did a really good job with the atmos. [If] you’re on a stage you can control the access points to the stage, if you know you’re going to have problems with atmos.”

Murphy tended toward underexposure, an approach he has long favored. “I do that for a bunch of reasons, but mainly because I want to control the image. I’m not too sold on the idea that you expose then print it down. I think the sensor that way is much more interesting. Underexposure is my friend. I’ve done a couple of jobs on the Alexa 35, and if anything I think the more interesting thing is how much it’s protecting the highlights.”

The project enjoyed the still-unusual benefit of HDR monitoring, using SmallHD’s OLED reference displays, though Murphy kept his monitoring choices simple. “Block one had designed a couple of LUTs. I took a look at those and picked one of them. I try to stay with one LUT if I can, maybe two. I would call it a very straightforward print LUT.” Crucially, being able to see a preview of the HDR result allowed Murphy to correct potential problems, particularly around, in bright highlights, before they happened. “It allows me to see the things I’m going to see in post, in the grade. Say I‘m inside and we’re looking outside, we have a bunch of lights outside the window. In SDR it’s all blown out, but in HDR you can see it’s a light. It’s about solving those problems.”

No matter how much expertise and technology is involved, though, live action filmmaking is a sufficiently complex endeavor that serendipity will inevitably play a part. Murphy remembers “one scene we did - the final scene, the murder scene on a beach, which was absolutely wrecked because of the weather. There was a sequence we had to do at night on the south coast of the UK, on a stretch of beach which happened to coincide with a storm which forced us to drop all of our cherrypickers and lights.”

“We had to think of another lighting solution on the fly,” Murphy muses, “and as a result we ended up doing something that became one of the best-looking sequences. We put the machines at ten feet, at stand height, and lit most of it that way. Luckily, we had hired a Tommy Bar rig [and] because that has enough space for the wind to flow through, we could keep that ten or fifteen feet off the ground. That was our soft toplight. We literally relit on the night. All the electricians were running around like crazy with all the lights on stands behind dunes, but the end result was fantastic and was much better than what we’d planned!”