How Mahlon Todd Williams keeps Legends of Tomorrow interesting

BEVERLY HILLS, CA – AUGUST 02: (L-R) Executive producer Phil Klemmer, actors Brandon Routh, Caity Lotz, Tala Ashe, and executive producer Marc Guggenheim of ‘DC’s Legends of Tomorrow’ speak onstage during the CW portion of the 2017 Summer Television Critics Association Press Tour at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on August 2, 2017 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)

Three seasons in, Legends of Tomorrow is a blast. Culturess talked to cinematographer Mahlon Todd Williams about creating the superhero show’s look.

When Marvel unveiled The Avengers in 2012, superhero teams seemed novel — at least to those unfamiliar with comic book lore. Five years and one more Avengers movie later, it seems you can’t escape them. DC will release the first-ever live-action Justice League film in mere weeks. This summer, a Guardians of the Galaxy sequel hit cinemas, and a Defenders miniseries arrived on Netflix. But, all due respect to those guys, the Legends of Tomorrow are the ones who have it figured out.

To be sure, The CW’s time-travel adventure series had growing pains. Season 1 had a few bright spots (the Soviet Union arc, “The Magnificent Eight”), but it mostly meandered. Then, in season 2, something clicked. The team chemistry gelled, bringing out unexpected depths of humor and emotion. By the end, our band of misfits truly felt like a family.

Mahlon Todd Williams deserves as much credit as anyone for the current excellence of Legends of Tomorrow. If you fail to notice the lighting and camerawork amid the banter and action, well, that’s the point. Alongside fellow cinematographer David Geddes, Williams designed the visuals to transport and immerse viewers, not dazzle them. Yet, his work is nonetheless crucial, helping maintain the show’s infectious energy. With Legends back and zanier than ever, Culturess had a chance to chat with Williams about period lighting, crossing mediums, and what to expect in season 3. (This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)

So, first, how did you figure out that you wanted to become a cinematographer? I read interviews where you talk about being inspired by a Raiders of the Lost Ark documentary. Did that get you interested in filmmaking in general or cinematography specifically?

You know, I was a fan of going to see movies as a kid, and I started working occasionally as an extra. It was the one way I could get onto a set… Even though I was an extra and it was fun, I was too shy of a kid to get in as an actor. I liked the technical side of things — more so, anyhow — and storytelling that way. I loved Raiders. When I saw the behind-the-scenes documentary, they showed the crew and the different parts of the world that they were shooting and some of the logistics that they were dealing with and the rigs that they were building. That caught my attention.

From there, I didn’t know anybody in film at the time. So, what I ended up doing [is] I found a film school in Montreal that would accept me, and I went and did a year of college in Montreal shooting film. I took that and applied to university in Montreal. I went to university for three years and did nothing but shoot short films while I was there. After that, I packed up to come back to Vancouver to live. I thought I was only going to be here for six months. But two weeks after I got back, I got a job as a gaffer at a company that shot music videos in town. Then, two months after that, I got into one of the two unions at the time that had a camera department, and I started working as a camera assistant on set.

Six months later, I kind of had to make a decision about whether I wanted to just try to work as a cameraman or go through the trainee program, which eventually took two years. And I decided to do that because I figured I would be able to work on bigger shows doing a junior job; I was able to see how bigger productions were made. I got to work with cinematographers [whose movies I had seen and loved] and see how they lit and shot stuff. Their process was what I was interested in, figuring out how they created images. From that, I worked probably about 10 years as a camera assistant.

But in between jobs, I would take off and shoot short films, music videos, and documentaries and eventually built up enough of a reel that I began to do drama … All I did was shoot at that point. For probably the next fifteen years, I worked as nothing but a cinematographer.

Is being a cinematographer just a natural progression for a cameraman?

Sometimes. I know there are some cameramen that jump into directing. It was my progression. I wanted to learn those jobs and then get into being a cinematographer. But a bunch of the cinematographers that I still love, when I looked into their history, had shot documentaries, and then they got into doing drama. They never worked as camera assistants. They would operate their own cameras and light their own sets, and that’s just the process those guys took. For me, I was a trainee, and then I was a second assistant and I focus-pulled a little bit, and then I jumped from that straight into working as a cinematographer.

Some shows or projects I work on I operate [my own camera], but Legends of Tomorrow is such a big show with so much to do. I work as a cinematographer, and we have two camera operators that operate 99% of the shots. I’m working with the director creating the look of the shots and the designer helping us build the sets so we can light it in a certain way based on how we want to shoot it.

Are there any particular movies or shows whose cinematography you really like or that influenced your style?

There are tons. I mean, every day I see new projects coming out where I love the work that the cameramen have done. Like, I just saw Blade Runner [2049] on the weekend, which is unbelievable. Just about anything that Roger Deakins has ever shot; I’ve always been a fan of his work. And old-school cinematographers like Conrad Hall and Haskell Wexler and some of the newer guys like Wally Pfister, who’s moved on to directing. There are some other cameramen, like Elliot Davis or Harris Savides. I’ve got a collection of probably 400 DVDs of movies where I like the work the cinematographer did so much that I bought it and kept it for reference…

And some stuff that’s shot in commercials. There’s a French director/cinematographer, Bruno Aveillan. He does a lot of Louis Vuitton ads. He’s got a certain style that’s fantastic and beautiful. A lot of the shoots seem to be all over the world, exotic locations. I use a bunch of stuff that he’s created as references for projects…

We have a fast shooting schedule [on Legends], so we don’t have as much prep as I would love to do. But usually every episode, we do a different time period and a different genre, so you go into something new. You try and find at least two or three visual or style references … Just see how other projects dealt with the same subject matter, some of the techniques that they used, as a starting point. Sometimes we follow it, and sometimes we want to give it our own twist and look.

Going off that, how do you balance riffing off genres with creating a look that’s specific to Legends of Tomorrow?

The one main constant in the show is the Waverider. We set a very specific look for that. And almost every episode, that never changes. So, you come back to that — their base — and you’re back into the Legends of Tomorrow world. How the ship was designed — the materials that were used, the colors of the set, our lighting style — is based on looking like people are actually walking through a real environment. A lot of lighting is actually built into the set itself. So, that sort of dictates the look of that location.

And then you contrast that with the second they get off the ship. When they’re in a Western in the 1870s, we’ll go back and take a look at paintings or photos if those exist for the time period, or sketches. You find anything you can that [lets you know] like, what kind of power source did people have access to? Is it flame? Was it sun? Was there electricity, and what kind of lighting did they have? All those questions have to be answered in the first day of prep.

From that, take that bigger picture and narrow it down to the scenes that we’re shooting and the locations that we have to shoot in and what would be in that location. You get into very specific lighting scenarios that you need to recreate. So, when you’re watching the show, you never need to think about what we did technically. It just feels right. Like, that’s how bright or dark it should be. Light should only come from a fire at this point. Or, if you’re outside, there’s a little bit of torch light or something mixed with it. That’s the general basis of the research we do.

When you’re doing research, how closely do you work with the costume and production designers?

All the departments sort of do their own first research. From that, we have meetings where everybody brings the research that they’ve done. We’ll take a look at the wardrobe; take a look if the color palette is right for the time period; and then the color palette for the sets, the paint that they’re going to use. And we tie in the lighting from the time period — you know, if it’s gas light or Edison bulbs … So, there’s a color attached to each of those. We change our lights with gels to warm them up or cool them down to match those colors and complement the wardrobe that the leads will wear. Sometimes, we request that they don’t wear a certain color because we’re going to be lighting the set in a certain color, and we’d like to have some contrast. The wardrobe department will filter that one color out of the costumes.

You mentioned that you sometimes use photographs or paintings as a reference point. Can you give an example of that?

[For] some of the Westerns that we’ve done, I’ve gone back and taken a look at Butch Cassidy and his gang — photos taken of that and paintings based on those photos. Some of the colors used in those paintings we pulled out as a reference. When we did the [yet-to-air] Vietnam episode, a lot of photos were taken of that.

I guess more for the older time periods, like the early 1900s or the mid-to-late 1800s, we used paintings as references. Or, if we go further back, there are some classic Rembrandt paintings and the lighting styles that the artists used in their actual paintings; they painted in studios, and if it’s daytime, all the light comes from one source, usually a window off to the side — you know, outside the frame of the painting. So, some of the lighting techniques that we use are based on the art that was created at the time and the techniques that were used and also just some of the color palette… We work that into the look of the show to help sell the time period that they’re jumping into.

To go back a little, how do you judge good cinematography?

Good cinematography — I can’t remember who the quote is from that I’m paraphrasing — is cinematography that you tend not to notice. [Ed. note: It’s Roger Deakins.] It’s the correct look for the project or the story that you’re telling, so much so that you just get into the story. You follow the characters. You’re worried about what’s going to happen, as opposed to just looking at the shot and going, “Wow, that’s a really beautiful sunset, or that’s a cool camera move.” All of that slightly pulls you out of a scene or story or a character’s arc, whether it’s a music video or a TV show or a feature.

If you get the right balance of lighting and camerawork and style … you feel like you’ve entered a world. You get taken on a journey. That to me is great cinematography. You create a world, and when you’re in the movie or show, you don’t really think about it. Maybe after, you remember a certain sequence or something like that. But while you’re in the movie, you’re in the movie and the life of whatever character you’re following.

You’ve mentioned working on music videos and other things. How important is it for a cinematographer to have that kind of versatility?

I personally think it’s great. Like, I love being able to jump between working on this show and going and doing an indie feature or going and working on a short film or going and working on a music video. It’s still telling stories …

A lot of times, it’s more creating a poem visually. On a music video, it is really about getting a feel across, as opposed to telling a specific story. And for me, that’s always fun. It’s always cool working on something that you love — the piece of music or the concept of the video. I did a couple of Drake videos in Toronto and a couple of Weeknd videos. Those guys in particular are super nice and very talented, very smart, and super collaborative about the projects. They create it, and they’re invested in having the video feel and look a certain way. I was there to marry that vision with the technical side — [figure] out which gear we needed and how to physically shoot what they wanted to see onscreen. That collaboration is a cool thing.

[A music video] is a smaller project, and it’s usually only one or two days that you’re shooting it. A lot of the time, you spend a week or even two weeks prepping to shoot one day, whereas we have nine days to prep shooting nine days on our show. It’s a bit of a different machine and different process. But I think it’s good.

Documentaries are great too, because it’s one of those things where you get footage of locations that you may not have total control over. So, you need to figure out what you’re going to do and how to make the best of a location. At the time you’re shooting, it might be 4:00 in the afternoon, and in a perfect world, maybe it would’ve been better to be there at 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning. So, you have to wrap your head around that.

How do you think the skills that you acquired doing those mediums helped you with a show like Legends of Tomorrow?

A lot of the guys [whose work] I grew up loving started out shooting documentaries. I got into doing documentaries mostly because [of that]. Of course, creatively, you don’t have total control over everything. If there’s something that’s not working, if you want to shoot something one way, usually there’s another way to shoot it that could work in your favor. So, it forces you to do that. It forces you to shoot in different parts of the world, during different times of day. You may have to shoot something that before, you tried to avoid doing. But in shooting something that may not have been a perfect scenario in your head, you find out something — a technique or a way to shoot or a look — that you hadn’t thought about.

When it comes to Legends, there are times when you’re setting up a scene, and I know how to light it in my head because I’ve seen something in real life that was close to this scene or [this] location. I can already see exactly where the lights need to be to recreate that look when you’re in the studio. So, when people look at it, it feels like a real location.

Since Legends of Tomorrow is part of the sort-of universe of CW superhero shows, how did that affect its look? How much did you feel like you had to conform to the look of the preexisting shows?

Well, we’re in the same kind of universe, but because we have such big time jumps, we’re not in one city or one location. The rules that those shows may have to live by because it is a world that they’ve created and the characters are living in we can bend a bit. That, I think, is one of the really cool things about our show. We can really play into the fact that you are in Chicago in 1927, or you’re in the middle of the U.S. in the 1870s, or we’re in Vietnam in 1967.

Like, in ’67, we tried to shoot a bunch of stuff like it’s a documentary film crew. We’re chasing the characters around, so a lot of the stuff was handheld. We tried to make it look like that portion of the episode was shot on 16mm film by a cameraman running around. You never see him onscreen, but that was sort of the thought process … We tried to impose those restrictions on how we shot the [episode]. You go to other time periods, and we would never do that exact same thing.

I was thinking about how in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they try to make all of movies aesthetically similar. There isn’t that pressure for you?

Maybe a tiny bit, but not really. Like I said, because it’s a time period show, the producers and creators are really great about us pushing the look of the show. When we [do] Jack the Ripper, we did sort of a Hammer horror film style; we used the techniques that they would have used, or the gear they might have used. The fact that it’s different from Flash and Arrow is looked on as a positive. If those characters came on our show, they send them into our universe, and if our characters step into their show, our characters step into their universe. So, the looks feel separate. Some of it is a little more drastic, and there are things where if you watch all the shows together, there’s a thread through all of it. But our show in particular probably has the biggest change over each episode.