How ‘Magnolia’ influenced ‘Baby Reindeer’ cinematographer Krzysztof Trojnar [Exclusive Video Interview]
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Weronika Tolfiska, who directed the first four episodes of “Baby Reindeer,” knew exactly who she wanted to shoot the Netflix series, her friend and frequent collaborator Krzysztof Trojnar. At the time, the cinematographer was doing second unit photography for “1899” and Tolfiska, who was in the midst of interviewing herself for the show, wasn’t sure if she could interview Trojnar. “Somehow seeing the other DPs and credits that some people that were suggested for it, she said she would love to interview me and that’s how it all started,” Trojnar tells Gold Derby (watch the exclusive video interview above). “They gave me a script and once I read it, I think it was one of the best scripts I’ve read so far in my life. You couldn’t really get out of that story. It was so interesting.”
Trojnar, who was only given the script for the first episode, was unfamiliar with Richard Gadd‘s one-man show from which the series is adapted. Based on the Gadd’s real experience, the series follows struggling comedian Donny (Gadd), who finds himself stalked and harassed by a woman, Martha (Jessica Gunning), after giving her a free drink at the pub where he bartends. As the series progresses, Donny’s own past trauma comes to light. “When I was interviewing, they kind of told me where it was going,” Trojnar says. “But based on the first episode and knowing then that the scripts were sort of at finished stage because in TV, that’s not always the case, I was like, if this episode is like that, I’m only dying to know what’s going to happen after.”
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Like the play, “Baby Reindeer” features a lot of voiceover by Gadd, a huge influence on Trojnar. He listened to the audio track of the play in early prep and was taken by the pace of Gadd’s voiceover. “When I heard it, you kind of knew where you were going with it in a way — this intense, fast-paced, relentless journey,” he shares. “We knew it would be a first-person point-of-view story. The point of view really matters because it’s Donny in the center. He’s in the center of the story but the whole show is about him finding his way to getting some exposure. The initial conversations were around how do we portray that, how do we frame him always in the middle, and put Martha as this intruder and create this sort of unsettling, intense feeling of, first, Martha’s intrusion but also this hectic world of Donny’s.”
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Trojnar utilized push-ins and pull-outs to create that sense of freneticism and claustrophobia. The non-montage push-ins were planned thoroughly with Tolfiska and are also an homage to “Magnolia” (1999). “We’re big fans of ‘Magnolia, so I’m sure that was definitely a reference. I don’t know if we got that perfect with it, but that was definitely on our mind.”
Trojnar lensed the first four episodes of the seven total, and the fourth is a pivotal one in the series. A flashback reveals that when Donny was trying to make it in Edinburgh, he was groomed, drugged and raped by Darrien (Tom Goodman-Hill), a successful TV writer. The first half of the episode is hopeful and full of optimism before the tone and its visual language do a complete 180 after Donny is taken under Darrien’s wing. One of the most gorgeous shots comes after Darrien’s drugged Donny, who is laid out on the couch bathed by a golden light from the window above him.
“We were talking about the idea of spotlight. Even in Donny’s voiceover, he uses it a lot as in the kind of the spotlight and also the desire of finding himself in the spotlight. But in the story, that spotlight takes different roles. As much as it’s literal during the comedy shows, it also somehow hints when Donny looks at Martha in the pub and Donny walks in London on the street and approaches the camera and appears more in light,” Trojnar explains. “In Episode 4, we thought, OK, well, there is this street light outside. And we never wanted to make the drug scenes over the top. And I think the voiceover kind of suggests it, but if this street light, when he takes all these drugs, then that kind of starts to appear more than what it is. So we replaced the light with the same color but much stronger, more spotlight character. That was kind of the motivation from the drugs, where he sees that street light as a spotlight for himself.”
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