Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1525212
David Rogers, center, and Joshua Raymond Lee, right, appear with production designer David Gropman at a Netflix event in Los Angeles in May 2024. P H OT O : N E T F L I X 29 F A L L Q 3 I S S U E F E A T U R E By Kristin Marguerite Doidge W hen the audience first meets the grifter Tom Ripley in the epony- mous new limited series drama, "Ripley," he's dragging a dead body down a long flight of stairs in the dark: clunk, clunk, clunk. The sinister moment draws us in — and somehow, seemingly makes us complicit in the crime. But it wasn't scripted that way. The m o m e n t i s a n e x a m p l e o f h o w w r i t - er-director Steven Zaillian (who won an Academy Award for his script for "Schin- dler 's List") opened himself up to the possibilities of reworking his own material in post-production. "This flash forward is something we discovered in post that could serve as a lodestar to signal to the audience where w e w e r e g o i n g w h i l e s i m u l t a n e o u s l y buying us some time to set things up at the slower pace that the cinematography and the direction dictated," said picture editor Joshua Lee. The series, which is based on Patricia Highsmith's bestselling Tom Ripley nov- els, is set in the winter of 1960. Its stylish eight hour-long episodes focus on Ripley (played by Andrew Scott) after he's hired by a wealthy man to travel from New York to Italy to convince the man's vagabond son "Dickie" (played by Johnny Flynn) to return home. Ripley's acceptance of the job is the first step into a complex life of deceit, fraud, and murder. Fellow picture editor David O. Rogers, who previously worked with Zaillian as first assistant editor on his critically acclaimed 2016 HBO miniseries, "The Night Of," said that Zaillian began as a picture editor himself and therefore was not only open to deviating from his own script and rework- ing it in post-production, but was fearless in doing so. Episode 1, for example, significantly changed from the script in order to get the audience to the infamous boat scene (in 'From the beginning, we were on borrowed time.'