Phil Abraham’s Emmy chronology–spanning seven nominations and one win–traces a career evolution that entails more than just going from one acclaimed drama series to another, namely from HBO’s The Sopranos to AMC’s Mad Men. It also marks his transition from Emmy-winning cinematographer–nominated four times for The Sopranos (2000, 04, 06 and ’07) and winning for Mad Men (’08)–to now being an Emmy-nominated director for the second time, first in ’09 for Mad Men and again this year.
“The amazing thing about an Emmy nomination is that it represents recognition from your peers,” he said. “To have my peers in the world of cinematographers and now those in the directors’ world vote for me is quite a humbling honor.”
Abraham was with The Sopranos for its entire run (1999-2007), sharing cinematography duties with Alik Sakharov. During the final season of The Sopranos, Abraham diversified into directing by taking the helm of an episode. “I asked David [Sopranos creator/executive producer Chase] for an opportunity to direct and he surprised me by saying yes,” recalled Abraham. “I didn’t look at it as a career move by any stretch of the imagination. I was very close to the show, knew it and the characters very well. I felt part of one big family and it seemed a natural evolution for me to spread my wings a little bit by directing.”
In between the last two seasons of The Sopranos, Abraham shot the Mad Men pilot for its creator/executive producer Matthew Weiner, who was also executive producer and a writer on The Sopranos. “Matt’s the reason I’m on Mad Men. He brought me in for the pilot and then the series though we had a bit of a waiting period as we were committed to the last season of The Sopranos.“
A lot came together quickly on that pilot, noted Abraham. “I remember Jon Hamm [who portrays Don Draper on Mad Men] telling me that his experience on the pilot was kind of humbling because he realized immediately that he was working with people totally on their ‘A’ game. We were on our ‘A’ game because we had all worked together for 10 years or so on The Sopranos. We brought many of those people in so we were able to hit the ground running.” (Draper has received five Emmy nominations as Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for Mad Men, the most recent coming this year.)
After the successful pilot, Abraham eventually went on to shoot the first five episodes for season one of Mad Men. Weiner then gave him the chance to direct that season’s eighth episode. “Then I went right back to my day job as a cinematographer,” recollected Abraham.
With season two of Mad Men came two more episodes for Abraham to direct. “Then the dam broke and I was getting calls to direct, which I happily accepted.” Beyond Mad Men, those directorial gigs in recent years have spanned episodic work on such series as Breaking Bad, The Killing, Sons of Anarchy, Hell on Wheels, The Good Wife, Missing and The Walking Dead.
As the helming opportunities emerged, Abraham initially envisioned a career directing TV while continuing as a cinematographer whose focus would be on feature films. But then reality set in. “You get booked so far in advance in TV that your schedule gets set. You don’t get booked for movies that way at all. So even as movie opportunities came up [as a cinematographer], I found myself booked many months ahead as a television director.” The last feature Abraham shot was the Chris Columbus-directed I Love You, Beth Cooper in 2008.
At the time Abraham was on the set of the Columbus feature, Chris Manley, ASC, had begun shooting the second season of Mad Men. “He’d call me when I was on the movie and we’d talk about his transition to Mad Men,” said Abraham. “We didn’t get so much into the work and the technical aspects. I was probably more helpful to Chris’ transition in terms of the personalities involved, how to deal with Matt [Weiner] and [executive producer] Scott Hornbacher.”
Manley has since earned three Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Cinematography for a Single-Camera Series on the basis of Mad Men, the latest coming this year for “The Phantom” episode.
Meanwhile it was “The Other Woman” episode that earned Abraham his current Emmy nomination for Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series. He said of the episode, “It had a particularly finely crafted script where all the characters were set in motion with their internal motives kicking in to react to the situations posed. It all played out in a naturalistic way which is true with Mad Men in general–but particularly with this script, there were nuances in performance and as a director you have to make sure those beats and moments play properly and resonate.”
Speaking of Mad Men and Madison Avenue, Abraham is represented as a director for commercials and branded content by Recommended Media.
Hemingway & Gellhorn Feature filmmaker (The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being) Philip Kaufman has seen his first major foray into television, Hemingway & Gellhorn, earn him an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Directing for a Miniseries, Movie or a Dramatic Special. The HBO film scored 14 other noms, including for Outstanding Miniseries or Movie, Outstanding Cinematography (Rogier Stoffers) and Outstanding Single-Camera Picture Editing for a Miniseries or Movie (Walter Murch).
Yet while he’s gratified by all the nominations, what’s most satisfying to Kaufman is feedback he’s received from outside the entertainment industry regarding the movie, which explores the romance and assorted other facets of the relationship between Ernest Hemingway and war correspondent Martha Gellhorn who are portrayed, respectively, by Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman. “Two of Gellhorn’s children–her adopted son and a stepson from a later marriage–loved it, one telling me ‘you captured the essence of my mother,'” related Kaufman who additionally cited letters from Caroline Moorehead, a noted historian with insights into Gellhorn, and from Susan Beegel, a leading historian who’s chronicled the life of Hemingway. Both gave glowing reviews of how the movie depicted the famed author and his journalist wife.
Kaufman noted that Beegel was excited as a scholar over scenes in which the characters were inserted into historic archival footage from their own time. This, she observed, could help to revolutionize epic historic movies going forward. This particular aspect was covered in an earlier installment (Part 3) of SHOOT’s “The Road To Emmy” series in which we tapped into the expertise of Chris Morley, visual effects supervisor at Tippett Studio on Hemingway & Gellhorn.
“One of the first challenges,” said Morley, “was bringing director Philip Kaufman up to speed as to what can be done utilizing visual effects. He has been at the forefront of thinking outside the box. He used a lot of stock footage [years ago] in The Right Stuff for example–and then in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, where there was stock footage coupled with shooting reverse angles. Walter Murch cut that work together seamlessly. For Hemingway & Gellhorn, we worked on a third angle, placing actors [even more deeply] inside the footage. We experimented a year before principal photography, looking at archival footage, picking plates, going out as a small rag-tag team and shooting all these tests. We had a locations manager stand in for Hemingway, an archival footage lady stand in for Gellhorn. We did some composites and showed Phil, opening up a new creative world of possibilities for him–which at the same time we had to reign in because of the fairly modest budget being in TV and not feature films. We all had to think creatively.”
Morley also cited the efforts of Tippett matchmove supervisor Chris Paizis who used computerized cameras to line up angles of the archival footage and then match those angles on set to have “perfect perspective.” This and other creative applications helped to put, said Morley, “the suspension of disbelief into play…You see Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman with FDR, and through a suspension of disbelief, the audience finds the scene clever, fun and charming.”
Indeed there are tools and resources that Kaufman learned about, that he didn’t have at his disposal back during the days of The Right Stuff and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. For the latter, Kaufman created the illusion which looked all too real of placing Daniel Day Lewis and Juliette Binoche in the midst of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. “There are now new and different ways to realize your vision with historical footage as a backdrop,” noted the director who credited HBO with buying into the concept.
“HBO had a slogan–‘It’s not TV, it’s HBO,'” recalled Kaufman. “And their willingness to make this more than a television movie, for it to be more a feature film, made all the difference. We had developed this project [Hemingway & Gellhorn] for about nine years and when we first brought it to HBO, we actually took it to what was their feature film division at the time. When we finally began considering doing it for television, HBO was on board with me to keep this project like a feature in size and scope even though we had budget limitations. They were open to shooting it all in San Francisco, recreating the looks of eight countries there and matching scenes to archival footage, placing our characters into historic backdrops. We called it ‘nesting’ our actors into the past. The wardrobe, makeup and body styles of the extras had to be just right so that they would fit in. We held to the truth of the past. It was incredibly exciting and challenging. It felt like we were on a college campus on set or location every day, constantly learning. It’s great to have all these artists with high IQs learning all the time on the job. It’s an energizing, inspiring experience.”
Music also helped contribute to attain the desired scope and feel as composer Javier Navarrete from Spain was hired to write a sweeping musical score.
But the key core element still remains actors’ performances, affirmed Kaufman, citing Kidman and Owen as “professional, great together on screen and tireless no matter what we managed to throw at them.”
The final result does play like a feature film–and actually screened as such at the Cannes Film Festival. “I believe it’s the only American film made for television that was admitted to Cannes,” smiled Kaufman.
Rogier Stoffers Part of the learning experience cited by Kaufman included the process and adjustments that were behind “the brilliant work” of cinematographer Rogier Stoffers who shot for the first time with the ARRI ALEXA digital camera. Stoffers had collaborated with Kaufman before on the director’s feature film Quills starring Geoffrey Rush and Kate Winslet.
“Rogier embraced ALEXA which for me too was something new,” said Kaufman. “It was one of the many new tools and approaches we adopted for the movie and Rogier is a prime example of someone who was able to learn the new technology and run with it.”
Stoffers related, “Hemingway & Gellhorn was my introduction to ALEXA and I loved it. It made sense, given the amount of visual effects we had to do and it worked out really well. I love the latitude and the natural face tones the camera gives you. And now, a year and a half later, the camera has even more possibilities like feeding it your own LUTs and soon, recording full 2K on the cards.”
Stoffers’ challenges included finding locations in the Bay Area that could double for those needed for the storyline across multiple continents and that could lend themselves to the recreation of distinct eras. He also had to capture camera perspectives that would match those of archival footage so as to facilitate a seamless blend of actors into those historic backdrops ranging from streets in New York to locales in Havana, even D-Day battlefields.
Among the key Bay Area locations Stoffers was grateful to have found was an abandoned train station in an isolated part of Oakland. With considerable work and clearing of assorted logistical hurdles, the station doubled on film for Madrid’s Palace Hotel circa the 1930s during the Spanish Revolution, an integral ground zero story location where Gellhorn became not only a war correspondent under fire but also Hemingway’s lover. The hotel also became a makeshift hospital to tend to the wounded Loyalists.
“The biggest challenge–which was behind finding the right locations throughout the San Francisco area, the use of archival footage and green screen–was trying to preserve this notion of feature film scope given our limited budget,” said Stoffers. “Everyone pulled together and that’s why it was go great to see so many of these people get nominations.”
Besides Outstanding Miniseries or Movie, those nominations (within the Miniseries or Movie categories) span such far ranging Emmy categories as Leading Actor and Actress, Supporting Actor, Directing, Visual Effects, Cinematography, Editing, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Music Composition, Art Direction, Costumes, Makeup, and Hairstyling.
This marked the first career Emmy Award nomination for Stoffers.
Stoffers’ filmography also includes such features as Death at a Funeral, The School of Rock, The Secret Life of Bees and The Vow.
At press time he was about to embark on a romantic comedy in Canada, The F-Word directed by Michael Dowse and starring Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan.
Repped by Claire Best & Associates, Stoffers has cinematography roots in Holland where he lensed hundreds of TV and cinema commercials.
Amidst his long-form endeavors, last year Stoffers returned to the spotmaking arena, taking on select assignments for such clients as Best Buy and Foster Farms Chicken, the latter directed by Geordie Stephens of production house Tool.
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Editor’s note: This is the sixth installment in an 11-part series that explores the field of Emmy nominees and winners spanning such disciplines as directing, cinematography, editing, animation and VFX. The series will run right through the Creative Arts Emmys ceremony and the following week’s primetime Emmy Awards live telecast. The remaining installments of this series will appear on SHOOTonline and in our weekly email newsletter, The SHOOT>e.dition.
Click here to read The Road to Emmy, Part 1
Click here to read The Road To Emmy, Part 2.
Click here to read The Road To Emmy, Part 3.
Click here to read The Road To Emmy, Part 4.
Click here to read The Road To Emmy, Part 5.
Click here to read The Road To Emmy, Part 7.
Click here to read The Road To Emmy, Part 8.
