Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545302
www.postmagazine.com 13 POST MAY/JUNE 2026 hear what this new take was on it. When Celeste and I first started talking about it, and I was kind of pitching my idea of what the show might look like, it was great, because our interests really aligned very easily and quickly in terms of this new inter- pretation, but then also staying true to the satirical tone — let's call it 'silliness' of the original film." Jim Flynn: "I did the pilot. And I did [104], which is the festival. And then I did [107], which is the pen- ultimate episode. The way I got involved is through the pilot. Nzingha Stewart was the director and I've worked with her a couple of times, most recently on a Netflix series called From Scratch, which has Zoe Saldana, who travels to Italy, falls in love. I don't want to spoil it, but it gets sad. When Nzingha got this, she had me meet with Celeste and the rest of the team, and we all got along real- ly, really well. Like Jonathan, I remember the movie very, very fondly, and I was curious how they were going to match that sort of tone...They really kind of made it their own and I'm really, really proud of what we were able to do tonally." Jonathan, how did your vision align with the show's production design, which essentially cre- ates the perfect neighborhood, where everything is so clean and colorful? Jonathan Furmanski: "Actually the camera & lens choices — there was not a lot of heavy lifting in making that decision. I try not to go into any proj- ect thinking, 'I'm going to use this combination.' I'm not one of those DPs…I seem to want to use some- thing different on every show that I do. And again, that's not like a thing just to be different. It's just more like going in with an open mind and think- ing, 'Okay, let's figure out what this show wants to look like?' Part of that is talking to Celeste and Nzingha, and talking about what is the language of this show going to be? I do a pitch…way before I'm even hired, about the look, but I'm creating that in a vacuum, so to speak. It's really trying to find the way that my ideas and Celeste's vision and Nzingha's vision. and everybody else's visions, all kind of align. "I basically spent a little bit of time testing at Panavision, and we ended up finding a set of lenses very quickly that felt like they gave that kind of clari- ty that you were talking about. We weren't going for a vintage look at all. This is a modern-day story and we didn't want it to look like it's some other time and place. But the lenses had a little bit of personal- ity, which I thought was important to have…I wanted the lens to add something to the equation, but not to the level that it becomes distracting. "Panavision makes it easy because they're really good at it. And then in terms of the broader look and tackling that, and concerns about that, production design, of course, plays a humongous role in what everything looks like. The show would not look like what it looks like if it wasn't for Susie Mancini, who was our production designer, and her entire team, who were spectacular. Then I just had to start thinking about, 'We're going to be spending so much time in these spaces and locations. How can I come up with lighting plans and solutions that enable us to kind of do a lot of different things? And what are ways that we can keep the interest going through eight episodes of television where we don't feel like we're just repeating ourselves over and over and again?' Those are all the things that I kind of kept in mind initially — keeping it feeling fresh through what was 16 weeks of photography." What were the Panavision lenses ultimately paired with? Jonathan Furmanski: "We used the (Arri) Alexa Mini LF. I love the Alexa. I've worked with it for years. We chose the Mini LF for two reasons: one was just in terms of reliability and its color pipe- line, and how it renders things like skin tones. You can do a lot of work to make any camera give you the look that you want, but it's a little bit more of a turnkey solution from a camera perspective. I still spent a couple of weeks building our LUT and coming up with our color pipeline. And then the LF The show was shot using Arri's Alexa Mini LF with Panavision lenses.