In Reunited, Awards Insider hosts a conversation between two Emmy nominees who have collaborated on a previous project. Here, we speak with WandaVision director Matt Shakman and Mare of Easttown cinematographer Ben Richardson, who previously teamed on the 2014 feature film Cut Bank.
When director Matt Shakman saw Beasts of the Southern Wild in 2012, there was one thing he really wanted to do: meet its cinematographer, Ben Richardson. “I just thought it was one of the most gorgeous movies I’ve seen. Maybe the most beautiful movie capturing the natural world since Days of Heaven,” Shakman says now. So, soon after, they met and teamed up to make Cut Bank, a feature film starring Liam Hemsworth, Billy Bob Thornton, and John Malkovich, and was released by A24 in 2014.
From there, their paths diverged: Shakman, 46, went on to direct TV episodes, including Game of Thrones, The Great, and WandaVision, the latter of which earned him his 2021 Emmy nomination. Richardson, 45, served as the DP on 2017’s Wind River and Paramount TV series Yellowstone. He then worked on HBO’s breakout hit Mare of Easttown, which earned his his first Emmy nomination.
Through it all, they stayed in touch, and in early August reunited over Zoom to discuss their latest work, how they navigated the COVID shutdowns, and how their careers have changed since their breakout hits debuted.
Vanity Fair: What do you remember about meeting for the first time?
Matt Shakman: I remember being blown away by Ben’s talent, but also by how dashing and handsome he was. [Laughs.] Super, super cool arm tattoo. I was like, “This guy’s a real artist. He has an awesome tattoo.”
Ben Richardson: I just remember the first time I met with Matt, just being completely intimidated by how clearly he saw everything he was planning to do, from the creative details, the broadest strokes down to just the absolute minutiae of how he saw individual days going. It really showed me that up to that point, my kind of winging it approach to the job and the career needed to get refined a little bit if I was going to take it up a notch.
When making Cut Bank, what would you say worked well between the two of you?
Shakman: I would say that we survived that really well, because we went to Edmonton, [Canada], which is not known to be a film town, and Ben and I really kind of carried that movie on our shoulders. We had just a very tiny crew and much of the crew had never even worked on a movie before. I remember our key grip was also our dolly grip. Not because he wanted to be but because he was the only one who could be. Ben was just an incredible collaborator and we just got through it. But it was just day after day of just compromise and blood, sweat, and tears.
Jumping ahead to your current series, what you both had in common is that you served in your positions for the entire series, rather than, in the more traditional model of TV, a different director or DP coming in for different episodes. Matt, why was that important for you?
Shakman: It’s such an exciting time, the world of limited series, because I think they exist in this space between television and film. And I imagine with Mare and with WandaVison, they’re approached similarly, almost like a movie from the beginning. So even though it happened to be on what is, I guess, a television platform, it really was thought of as one cohesive story. We were jumping around a lot stylistically, and so having one director, one cinematographer, one production designer, and so on, bringing all of these different worlds together, I think gave it a spine and a through-line and connective tissue that it needed. But I just think in general, whether it’s Mare of Easttown or whether it’s Queen’s Gambit or Underground Railroad or all the incredible things that have been happening this year on television, having a creative voice that’s unified helps to make these stories work to their best, I think.
Richardson: I totally agree. And I mean, what’s interesting about that is I think I had a coffee with Matt shortly after he’d signed on to do that project. And he just mentioned that it was a Marvel project, but I didn’t have any more information at that point. But then when I found out what the conceit was, I literally couldn’t have imagined anyone alive who could do that better than Matt, because throughout Cut Bank even, it was very clear that he really has a soft spot for the vintage style of TV making. So the idea that that project would have been in any other people’s hands, I just think Matt was born to make that particular project in that particular way.
And were there similar discussions around Mare being viewed more as a film as well?
Richardson: Absolutely. These larger, long form projects are being approached like a movie, and that also relates to the way they’re being structured schedule-wise. The interesting thing about Mare was we had so many characters and so many locations that we had to cross board and block shoot the entire show. So we were doing things in week one and two for episodes one through seven. With all characters, we’d go to one location, shoot that location out, sometimes try and shoot out characters to get actors off the schedule. And I think it was absolutely imperative that there be just one controlling group of voices to make that happen, because I don’t know how the hell you would have kept any consistency without.
So those are the advantages of this format, but what were the disadvantages of being the only director or the only DP for something this big?
Shakman: Pure exhaustion, I believe.
Richardson: I don’t know what you did, Matt. We started out at 104 and after the COVID shutdown, we bumped it up a bit, we ended up doing 119 shoot days. And there comes a point where you have no concept of life outside of the work. The weekends are just to recover and to plan the next week’s work. You literally lose all sense of perspective other than the work you’re doing—which is not a terrible place to be for people who love doing the work, as I and Matt do.
Shakman: Yeah, we were about the same. I think we were about 121 days all in. And when we came back post lockdown, we were shooting 6-day weeks and so we got a very short post-production period. And so that was just incredibly hard on the body.
Richardson: What I find interesting about being that involved in something that heavily for that long, and this is kind of unique, is that, you get into a kind of zen state. You just reach this point where you’re all riffing off each other’s ideas. It just becomes one of the most rewarding experiences I can imagine for a filmmaker, in much the same way I imagine, not that I’ve ever done this, marathon runners find some kind of zen fortitude at a certain point. it just becomes this very pure experience.
You’ve mentioned that the COVID lockdowns shut down both your productions. What was that like for you?
Shakman: Well, for us on Wanda, it happened at a weird time. I turned out to be kind of a fortuitous time—not that there can ever be a good time for a worldwide pandemic. But we had finished our shoot in Atlanta and we had moved back to L.A. because we wanted to shoot on backlots. You create a fake sitcommy backlot, and they only exist in L.A. so we wanted to shoot here. Then the lockdown shut us down. So we just pivoted right into post-production and getting all of our ducks in order for when we would go back to shooting in Los Angeles, whenever that could be. And then it took about six months for all the safety protocols to get worked out and then we were able to jump into it. And had not had that time to really move the effects along and start to lock some cuts, I don’t think we would’ve been able to deliver the show by its release date in mid January.
One other thing that’s interesting about this conversation is that we shared Evan Peters [who is on both WandaVision and Mare of Easttown], so we were just saying “when can we get Evan?” Because I think Evan’s first priority for Mare, so we just begged to get him and he’d fly in for 24 hours and be exhausted. He’d do his fake Pietro sitcom thing and then go back to the purely naturalistic Mare performance. It’s kind of an unbelievable transformation.
Richardson: That really is. I mean, that really does speak to him, and I’m sure you found him as wonderful as we did, but also just to how crazy the process can make any of the people involved.
We had a similar experience. We got a lot of work done on the edits with the material we had. When we did get shut down and in mid-March we had a little over 50% of all seven episodes in the can, which gave everyone a lot of time to really look at the arcs, see what was really working. And there weren’t any radical changes to the script, but there was a gentle refocusing of what was most important, partly because as we headed back with all the COVID protocols, we were aware we had to reduce certain things. I’m sure you’ve found, too, Matt, you weren’t able to have many background actors. We weren’t able to go to as many locations—we had to try and do more on stage or do things in limited controllable locations.
Shakman: Agreed, yeah. And it’s funny, we rebuilt our finale probably seven times during that lockdown. We were going to do that anyway, but we would have been doing it more on the fly and maybe we would have gone back to do some additional photography, but instead we were able to come up with a plan that we really like so that we could execute it. And everyone was pivoting to safe places to shoot. They didn’t want to shoot on the street and impractical locations, they all wanted to shoot on backlots here in Los Angeles. So we lost the backlots that we had reserved to shoot Wanda on and had done an enormous amount of storyboarding in previous for those specific locations. And even just a couple of weeks before we started shooting, we didn’t really know where we were going to land. We ended up at the Disney ranch and they have a backlot there, but very different from where we had planned to shoot, which is at the Back to the Future Universal backlot. So we had to completely throw all of these well-made plans up into the air and start over. But you get through it, you know, that’s what you have to do.
Richardson: And ultimately that’s one of the fun things, is to plan and then have your reality changed and plan again, and then have your reality changed and plan again, because by the time you get there, you realize you really have got to the essence of what the original thought was.
The other thing these shows have in common is the viewer was kind of figuring out things as the show goes along. How much thought went into giving away enough or not too much when planning these shows?
Shakman: So much. We knew we were sort of playing chicken with it because we started with dropping you into a sitcom reality and then continuing that in the second episode. And then continuing that again in the third episode. And it really was like “how long can we stretch this conceit before people who love Avengers movies are just frustrated and beyond belief?” So it was really fun. We wanted to make sure we have very specific moments where the reality would break so that the viewer could start to put it together like a mystery, a puzzle box, and realize that there was a greater reality and some of the bigger truths of the show would trickle into it. And these Twilight Zone moments would kind of disrupt the sitcom reality.
I love watching things week to week. That’s how I grew up. I think that there’s a lot of fun in waiting, and I think especially for a mystery like Mare, like Wanda, where you want that week to be able to think about what you’ve seen and come up with theories and test them out. You want to talk about it with your friends and your family. And I think there’s something to be said for the community that comes up around a show in the conversation.
Richardson: There was something in those early days with the first episode or two of Mare out in the world where people were desperately trying to get information. But there was an actual sense of community built up around it. And I watched it happen, and I saw it happening with Wanda as well, where people start to enjoy that little bit of time to digest, to rewatch, perhaps, to rethink. And I think in terms of what your original question was, that actually was maybe one of the scarier things, was the knowledge that people would have a full week between episodes in Mare to really get into the weeds and try and dissect what they thought were the outcomes.
Shakman: And it was fun to see the response online, the fan response, memes, TikTok videos that happened around Wanda, and I’m sure around Mare. I especially love the Saturday Night Live “Murder Durdur” skit.
Richardson: [Laughs.] I could not have been happier. When that happened, it was just this wonderful realization of, “oh, people are really watching this.”
Shakman: We had a WandaVision drag brunch that was posted on the internet and everyone dressing up like characters in the show. And that felt like we had made it, you know? We were like, “Yeah, we’ve done it. We’ve made a cultural contribution.”
Matt, you’ve just signed on to do the next Star Trek film. Do you think because of WandaVision you’re getting different or bigger opportunities now?
Shakman: Definitely it has made for a big change for me. And I think just over the last couple of years, it’s been a wonderful evolution. I wouldn’t say that it was overnight, but I’ve been lucky enough to get a chance to work on some really great projects. Game of Thrones and then being able to do the pilot and produce The Great for Hulu and then going to WandaVision, that it’s been a wonderful couple of years of being able to tackle different challenges and things that play with tone and style and genre in different ways. And I’ve learned a lot. I’ve gotten to stretch a lot as a director. And then that has definitely opened up different opportunities as well.
Ben how about for you?
Richardson: I would say it’s almost more a personal thing, like Matt was saying. I would also say ask me again in a year or two, but as of right now, I already actually knew what I was doing this year and I’m in the thick of it [with Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone prequel]. I was lined up for that. And actually looking back over the last few years culminating in Mare, I have ended up pretty much working back-to-back on a number of relatively long-form projects. I haven’t really noticed a specific change in the shape of the external sense of my career or my work, but what I have noticed is just my own personal growth. I’m really just enjoying running with new skills, new ways of working that I’ve developed over these past few years. And that in itself has been the best reward for me.
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