Christian Sprenger, ASC, has been Hiro Murai’s director of photography since the Atlanta pilot; a collaboration now spanning more than a decade and some of the most visually distinctive television of the past twenty years. His multiple Emmy wins for Atlanta established him as one of the most inventive DPs working in American television, so it’s no surprise that their relationship continues into Window’s Bay.
Widow’s Bay, the AppleTV+ series created by Katie Dippold (and directed across its ten-episode first season by Murai, alongsidee Ti West, Sam Donovan and Andrew DeYoung) is the breakout horror TV event of the year. It follows the beleaguered mayor (Matthew Rhys) of a cursed New England island, as the supernatural history he has spent years dismissing begins to assert itself – just as he’s trying to reinvent the place as a tourist destination. The show has drawn praise for its perfectly balanced mix of horror and comedy, and that relies on Christian Sprenger’s cinematography.
We spoke to him about how he and Murai built the visual language for the series, the secret to getting your audience to lean in, how Jeff Hiller is the goofiest guy around – and why, on a show set on a foggy coastal island, sometimes what you want is a nice, brightly lit bunker.
Contains very minor spoilers for Widow’s Bay including episodes nine and ten.
When you and Hiro were developing the visual language for Widow’s Bay, what was the first thing you agreed on — and what, if anything, took longer to resolve?
I don’t know that we really bumped on things. There were a few things I had suggested for episode six specifically [the 1702 flashback episode, directed by Ti West] — which ironically was not one of Hiro’s episodes — and I was pitching changing formats, changing the camera, changing the whole aesthetic. Our work tends to be understated. We try really hard not to overshadow the story, to support the narrative rather than serve our own aesthetic beliefs. So a lot of those flashier ideas eventually landed as: let’s do that for episode six, or let’s reserve that for the flashback language. Episode six ended up with a different aspect ratio, a different camera format, different lenses, handheld operating — basically fully contradicting the look of the rest of the show. And the flashbacks throughout the season carry a version of that shifted language too.
But the very first thing Hiro and I agreed on was that the show wanted to feel understated and naturalistic, with an aesthetic rooted in the past. We wanted it to be reminiscent of the films it was referencing — Spielberg, Kubrick, Stephen King adaptations, movies from the seventies and eighties. That was probably the first conversation we had: let’s make decisions that reference that nostalgia for the audience.
With the first episode in particular; were The Fog and Jaws starting points in those early conversations, or did they come later?
Right off the bat, actually. When we started talking about cinematography and lighting — what the show wanted to tactilely feel like — The Fog, Jaws, and the first act of The Shining came up immediately. Hiro was really interested in The Shining specifically, because it’s ultimately a brightly lit film. It’s not overly dramatic, not hard long shadows and high contrast ratios. It feels very naturalistic and environmental, and there’s this looming sense that something is off — this sense of dread that builds out of the sheer normality of everything.
Hiro’s pitch was: because we’re dealing with comedy, because the whole concept of the show is this tightrope walk between horror and comedy, what if the cinematography and lighting don’t constantly tip the audience one way or the other? There will be moments where we have to play the hits, but as much as possible we wanted to ride that middle ground. Jaws is another great example — it’s a beautiful film with masterful camera blocking, but it’s not a traditional horror aesthetic. It doesn’t look or feel like what we’ve come to expect horror to look like.
So you worked out ahead of time a visual language that would let you bend towards comedy or horror as needed — a defined toolbox for the show?
Definitely. We put an enormous amount of work into prep just defining what that meant. Once we figured out the why — what it was going to achieve for the audience — then almost all of prep was spent getting more and more granular. And honestly those conversations were happening months before we even started prep. Hiro and I were talking about this probably five months before boots on the ground. So by the time we landed in prep, we’d already defined what this was going to be.
That’s the beauty of a DP-director collaboration that is also a friendship and a long-lasting partnership. You get to have these conversations so much earlier. Both of you are putting it into your brain months before prep, as opposed to a director and DP who’ve never met before having to learn each other’s artistic language from scratch. By the time you’re into production, you’re barely getting into the zone. We’re lucky enough to always be having those conversations almost as Hiro is developing the projects.
So by the time prep started, Hiro, Cody Jacobs — our second DP — and I basically went through everything, starting with big-picture stuff and getting more and more granular as time went on. What does it look like? What does it feel like? What should the lighting feel like? How much are we referencing the past, and in what way — are we using old lights, or modern lights used in an old way? Eventually Cody and I built a very detailed lookbook that we shared with Hiro, with Katie, and with each incoming director, so that everyone was on board. It defined things down to: at night, when we want moody lighting, what does that feel like? Are we using moonlight motivation? What colour is the moon? It got very granular.
You had multiple directors coming in — including Ti West, who has his own very specific ideas about what great horror looks like. How do you square that circle when someone arrives for a single episode and the lookbook is already built?
For a primary cinematographer who has set the look on a show, that scenario — a director coming in for one episode with a known aesthetic and strong ideas — can be very stressful. I was definitely apprehensive going in, because six months earlier I had pitched a bunch of aesthetic and technical ideas: changing the format, changing the aspect ratio, changing the lens package. All of those decisions were approved and put in place well before Ti West was even involved in the project, let alone hired. I was nervous because we made all those decisions not knowing Ti was going to direct that episode, and it felt almost disrespectful to have made them without the director’s input.
But Ti was an incredible collaborator. He very well could have come in upset or offended, and instead, like a true professional, he understood the decisions we’d made, heard the reasoning, and basically yes-and’d them. He came back with: I understand what you want to do — what if we also do this? My original proposal for episode six was very Barry Lyndon-style, lots of choreographed dolly moves, very structured coverage. Ti’s proposal was: let’s make it all handheld, wide lenses, very close to the actor — let’s feel like we’re inside her head the whole time. He came in and elevated the decisions we’d already made rather than fighting them.
Aesthetically, he did the same thing. When we first met, I explained that I’d been building a parallel lookbook just for episode six — almost like doing a standalone film, but in contrast to the rest of the series. He said: great, I’ll build my own lookbook and bring you those images, and you incorporate whatever works. It was just a fantastic collaboration. He was smart enough to understand the bigger picture, to work within the decisions that had already been made and make them better, make them his, without dismantling them.
On the question of how lit things should be — there’s been a tendency in recent years to shoot night shots with very low available light and work it out in post, and audiences had started to push back on that murkiness. But Widow’s Bay is always very legible. Do you feel like the pendulum is swinging back?
That was another early conversation — Hiro felt that this show wanted to feel more lit than anything we’d done before. We’ve done plenty of projects where people have said, oh, they don’t use any lighting, which is completely untrue. We use enormous amounts of lighting. But we use levels that feel ambiguous, that feel like available light, even though we’re fully in control of it.
My take on what you’re describing is that style — in fashion, art, cinema, lighting — is cyclical. What happened was technology-driven: suddenly we had the ability to shoot in any lighting scenario with no lighting at all. Incredibly fast lenses, incredibly fast sensors, accessible to basically anyone. And because of that, there was this wave of iconic, culturally significant cinematography achieved through that aesthetic. But over time, it became associated with people doing it themselves, people not needing resources. It went from being exciting to feeling ordinary.
Now what’s exciting is almost the opposite. Even though we’re all using that same fast equipment, we’re almost pretending that we don’t have fast lenses or fast sensors. We’re unwinding back to why something like Jaws or The Fog looks the way it does — because they were shot with slow lenses, slow film stocks, and they required a lot of lighting, which gave them this handmade quality. Whereas now that very available-light, murky aesthetic feels, to me, almost artificially generated. Something Hiro was really tapping into — and I was immediately on board with — was this feeling that human beings sat there and made something intentional. They turned lights on and lit things deliberately. I think that’s now the secret to getting your audience to lean in and engage, as opposed to something that, subconsciously, they just check out of.
The show doesn’t underscore its comedy too obviously. The chair-flip moment, for instance, in the Sea Hag episode — the camera is basically static and we just watch it happen. How did you make decisions about shooting the comedy?
When we were reading the scripts in early prep and trying to wrap our heads around the tone, the place we landed was this: anything that felt like an intentional joke, we wanted to step on it — push it down, squash it. And then the things we genuinely found funny, the dumb or goofy moments, we would try to elevate those. It’s almost the opposite of what most comedy does, and certainly the opposite of most sitcom television, where there’s a pattern of landing a laugh every so many seconds per scene.
Anything that read or felt like a joke in the performance, we tried to play as flat and dry as possible — nothing from the camera that could help make it funnier. And then there’s a sequence in episode nine — we call it the lighthouse sequence — which is basically the dumbest joke. If you recall from episodes two and three, there’s this laboriously stupid running bit with the lighthouse guy. Episode nine has a callback to that same joke, happening at night in a storm, and it required three overnight shoots, three different sets, poor man’s car driving, rain towers, wind, the works. It literally feels like a scene out of Jurassic Park, and it is ultimately for this completely stupid little joke. Our producers were genuinely confused about why we were spending that kind of money on it. But I think that ended up being the approach: you invest fully in the technical execution of a moment that is completely ridiculous, because the contrast between the commitment and the absurdity is exactly what makes it land.
The chair flip works on the same principle. That whole sequence is so dumb and weird and genuinely funny that our concept was: make it as scary and unsettling and frightening as we possibly can. If we play it flat, those farcical pop-ups and the chair flip just make people roll their eyes. But because you’ve built all this tension and then you cut it with something so silly, it creates this weird, interesting balance.
I wish I could say we sat in a boardroom and designed this genius idea, but honestly it slowly evolved over hundreds of conversations over about six months — through editing, through sound design, through colour. That razor’s edge between comedy and horror was always the central discussion, from when we were pitching to Apple, through production with the actors and producers, and all the way into post with the editors and the music team. Threading that needle was the key to building the whole show.
Can you think of an example where you were working with a particular horror subgenre and made a deliberate decision to do the non-obvious thing?
There’s this storm sequence in episodes nine and ten where a Nor’easter-level storm hits the island and everyone is driven into storm shelters. As we were designing those sets, the initial gut instinct — mine, the production designer’s, probably everyone’s reading the script — was: they descend into this shelter that hasn’t been opened in forty years, let’s make it feel like an old rickety building, basically the basement of a haunted house, and light it extremely moodily so that right off the bat you feel the setting is deeply unsettling.
Where we actually landed was quite the opposite. We made it a large, utilitarian space with nothing atmospheric attached to it — nothing that felt spooky or scary on first sight. That was very much philosophically inspired by The Shining, where you’re introduced to this hotel and it’s sort of beautiful and interesting, but ultimately it’s utilitarian. It’s just there. And slowly, over the course of the film, you realise it’s a terrifying place.
With the shelter, it’s what’s inside it and what’s happening between the people in it that starts to make things feel uneasy. It’s a story happening inside a blank space. And then as that story evolves, the lighting starts to change — starts to reflect what’s happening — rather than announcing itself as a scary location the moment you walk in. In the script, I think we all read it and thought: okay, we know how to light a scary storm shelter. It was many conversations with Hiro, all of us sitting down together, that got us to this concept: it has to be introduced as a neutral experience that turns south over the course of the story.
Over the course of the two episodes, the storm is progressively knocking out the power — there’s an underlying storyline about a very old, outdated power grid — so we worked lighting changes and fluctuations into the script tied to story moments. The lights along the perimeter of the space were imperceptibly dimming and going darker throughout those two episodes, eventually turning off entirely. You first see the space totally flatly, evenly lit. By the end, there’s really only light in the dead centre, so it becomes considerably moodier and higher contrast.
We also changed lenses as it progressed. We carried two lens sets — the main package and a set that was considerably messier and softer — and we started incorporating the messier set as the story escalated. And lensing generally got a little longer and narrower, which made things feel more claustrophobic. Hiro’s concept was that everyone in this shelter is being held somewhat against their will, and everything should feel like it’s getting increasingly claustrophobic — that’s what’s happening to the characters, and the cinematography needed to support that.
So the shelter becomes the whole show in microcosm: everyone trapped in one location, under pressure?
Exactly.
Can you talk about your lens choices for the show more broadly?
The main package was a combination of Olympus OM Zuiko lenses — early eighties Japanese lenses that I’ve used a lot over the years and really like. We used them as our large-format lenses on Atlanta seasons three and four. What I like about them is that they’re built to something close to modern specs, but they’re still from that older era of lens design — still somewhat built by hand. They sit in between a modern lens and a true vintage lens. They’re not loudly announcing themselves as vintage, but they’re still soft, with these warm glow highlights and beautiful flares. About seventy-five percent of the show was shot on those.
Then we carried a set of lenses called Tamashii, rehoused by Alex Nelson at Zero Optik. The Tamashii are a combination of several different vintage Japanese photo lenses that have been Frankensteined together into a matched set. They’re similar enough to the Zuikos that we could use them interchangeably without it feeling like a jarring jump, but they’re considerably messier and softer, with a mushier quality that was really helpful in certain scenarios — the drug trip sequence in episode five, for instance. In episodes nine and ten I used them specifically to differentiate two characters: all of one character was shot on the Tamashii, and all of the other on our normal set. It was like having a specialty paintbrush you reach for when you need it.
I think episode six and episode five, which is the drug trip episode, are probably our lensiest episodes. Episode six was shot on the ARRI Alexa 65, framed for 1.43 IMAX, on these Todd-AO spherical lenses that the ASC pulled out of a museum and had rebuilt for modern cameras. They were used on The Sound of Music, on Cleopatra — they have an incredible legacy and then basically hadn’t been touched in fifty years. Brad Wilson at Keslow Camera messaged me in the middle of production and said we have these top-secret lenses that might be great for your show, and so we coordinated with Shelly Johnson, the ASC, and Alex Nelson at Zero Optik to get them ready. We were the first production to ever use them.
As for why vintage lenses in general — to me, they’re fundamentally a contradiction to the hypersensitivity and sharpness of digital sensors. When you’re trying to reference an aesthetic of the past, the vintage lens is one decision that subconsciously allows the audience a nostalgic connection to what something looks like. Ninety-nine percent of audiences would never consciously identify the difference, but the way things are out of focus in the background, the way a face is rendered on a certain focal length — because of how the technology existed in the seventies and eighties, there’s something that some part of someone’s brain is going to recognise. Not a specific film. I didn’t expect episode six to look like The Sound of Music. It’s more of a spiritual idea that someone’s brain is going to recognise the feeling.
You mentioned that episode five is one of the more lens-heavy episodes. Was that Cody’s?
That episode was Cody’s. Cody Jacobs has been my gaffer for more than twenty years — he’s worked on literally everything Hiro and I have done together. On Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Cody started working as a cinematographer when I started directing on that show, and he shot all of our reshoots. So when we were building Widow’s Bay, we collectively decided he was the perfect collaborator for the second DP slot, because beyond loving and trusting him, he understands the Hiro-Christian playbook better than probably anyone else out there.
I very much wanted him to become his own DP, not feel like he had to stand under my shadow, and so we were closely collaborating and bouncing ideas off each other the whole time. A lot of times when you have multiple DPs, one takes the lead and the other is essentially supposed to copy. I very much did not want that to happen. When I first read that episode, I thought: this is going to be the best-looking episode of the show, it’s written right into the script. But I can’t take full credit for how it looks — that’s very much by Cody’s design.
Was there a particular shot where your use of focal length really made a horror moment pop?
In episode six, we played around a lot with lenses and focal length and proximity. There’s an 18mm Todd-AO, which on the ARRI Alexa 65 is essentially the equivalent of a 10mm — so when we used it in extreme close-up on Betty Gilpin, we were shooting an ECU that felt almost like a fisheye. There are a couple of moments like that, and when you’re watching the scene, the cut to that lens just shocks you. It’s not necessarily a horror beat, but it’s such a fun and jarring moment.
And then almost the opposite end of the spectrum: there’s a sequence where Betty walks through the house holding a single candlestick, lit purely by that candle, shot on a longer lens — either the 60 or 75mm Todd-AO. Everything in front of and behind her is out of focus, and because the only light source is in her hand, her face is lit but everything else falls almost completely off. It became very compressed, very simply just about her. That was already an emotionally loaded sequence in terms of where we are in the story at that point, but shooting it that way — that lens, that light, and Betty’s performance — brought the whole thing to another level. I remember filming it and thinking: this is exactly what we talked about, exactly what we wanted. We were all celebrating when we got it.
You and Hiro have been working together since the Atlanta pilot. On Widow’s Bay, what’s a good example of simply continuing the language you’ve built together — and what required you to do something genuinely new?
I don’t think we specifically went in and said: let’s not copy ourselves too much. There were definitely moments on set where we’d laugh and say, that’s definitely an Atlanta shot. We had this running joke that if a shot had a lot of extra headroom, it was an Atlanta shot — so we’d joke about not doing too many of those. But it was all in jest.
I think part of what the Hiro-Christian language has become is that I’m now involved as a producer as well as DP. I’m involved almost before a DP would normally come on, and I stay involved well past when a DP would normally leave. I’m in every visual effects meeting, every review session; I’m watching cuts throughout post. And Hiro and I are both incredibly fortunate to work with Caitlin Waldron as our post supervisor, who has figured out how to structure post-production so that we get multiple passes on each episode — multiple bites at the apple on colour, on visual effects — in a way that I would never normally experience on a television show. That’s entirely down to how smart she is at scheduling and delivery.
So I love to say it’s the Hiro-Christian language, but truthfully there’s this whole team of collaborators — in production and in post — who have been there across all these projects. It really is a family we’ve built. And part of my job from the producing side is making sure new people coming in understand how and why that family works, and how to support it creatively, rather than arriving and saying: I’m going to bring my own people in and do it my way.
The location work — shooting across multiple Massachusetts locations for three months to create one coherent fictional island. That must’ve posed challenges.
The biggest challenge was simply marrying all of the locations together and making them feel like one island. The technical side — the invisible visual effects work that glued things together geographically — was handled by a team that was absolutely extraordinary. The harder part was the conceptualisation: figuring it out in our heads, building the puzzle.
In our production office, I requested a location board that ran basically the entire length of one wall of the stage — probably seventy-five feet long. Every time we chose a location, we’d put it up with big photos so we could start to truly visualise what the island looked like as a place. I did a lot of research to find a real-world island equivalent to base it on, and every time we added a location, Steve our production designer, Hiro and I would stand in front of that board and ask: could we see this bar being in this town? Could this house be on a cliffside near this cove? And slowly we built a map of the island — this part is hilly, this part is flat, this part has tall trees, this part has rocks — to justify in our minds how all these Massachusetts locations spread hundreds of miles apart could become one coherent place.
The technical side of the water work was its own challenge — we had a big marine department, lights on boats, renting out oceanside properties to park lighting rigs. But the real heavy lift was the conceptualisation. Getting the island to exist as a real place in all of our heads first.
Is there one shot from the whole project you’d single out as the one you’re proudest of?
The lighthouse sequence in episode nine. The whole sequence, I’m very proud of, because it was shot across several weeks, probably seven or eight locations all glued together, and it required a great deal of planning, visual effects, and multiple units. But there’s one shot in particular where Tom Loftis climbs up to the lighthouse in the middle of the storm, steps outside not realising how intense it is, and the camera does this large, fast cinematic pull back to reveal this massive storm system about to engulf him. It was shot in our parking lot at the end of a very long day. All departments just came together — the set build was extraordinary, we had storm lighting effects, rain, wind, Matthew’s performance was incredible, the grip team built this incredible dolly jib arm operation — and we did two or three takes and it just came together a million times better than any of us had anticipated. Everyone was stunned. I went home that night feeling genuinely accomplished. Then we added visual effects and sound design and it became one of my favourite sequences in the whole series.
And finally — who in the cast was most fun to work with?
That is the hardest question. I mean this in all sincerity: I genuinely cannot choose one person. We had such an unbelievable cast. Matthew Rhys is one of the sweetest, most talented actors of all time — such an incredible gentleman and such a pleasure to work with. But every single cast member was just so lovely. Every time you’d watch whoever was in the next scene walk onto set, you’d think: great, we get to do a Dale Dickey scene now. They were all so fun and so enjoyable — just a legendary cast.
Jeff Hiller probably made us laugh the most on set. He was the funniest, goofiest guy around. But honestly, it was just an incredible cast across the board. We could not have asked for more.
Widow’s Bay is available on AppleTV+ now