What a Spider Can Teach Cinematographers About Film Noir

Cinematographer Darran Tiernan tells IndieWire about reversing 25 years of training to craft a bold visual style for "Spider-Noir."

You can choose whether to watch Nicholas Cage do a truly bang-up Humphrey Bogart impression in the color version of “Spider-Noir” or the full-on black and white version of the Prime Video series. Series cinematographer Darran Tiernan hopes you check out both versions, but the director of photography leapt into the tale of “The Spider,” aka gumshoe Ben Reilly (Cage), for a different reason. 

Tiernan knows how to photograph a tortured detective in a fedora (“Perry Mason”) and how to craft the comic book atmosphere of a rotten metropolis (“The Penguin”). A cinematographer can wait their whole career, though, to do a proper film noir.

“One of my daughters said, ‘You’ve been manifesting this your whole life,’ and I went, ‘Yeah, I probably have,’” Tiernan told IndieWire.

The brief for “Spider-Noir” that Tiernan may or may not have manifested was for a black and white series first, before the word came down from on high for Tiernan and colorist Pankaj Bajpai to make the show color compatible as well. But the addition of the color version actually opened up some freedom for Tiernan and his fellow DP Peter Deming to be even more graphic and immediate than mainstream modern cinematography tends to be, leaning on film noir’s German Expressionist roots and the often low-budget creativity that powers noir storytelling. 

“I was reversing 25 years of being a cinematographer to go back to film school, where you only had three lights and where were you going to put them. And they were always tungsten,” Tiernan said. The camera department on “Spider-Noir” wasn’t poorly stocked, but Tiernan did give himself some deliberate lighting limitations in order to try and find those moments of creativity, and also expressive flexibility, in how the camera treats Ben, his Girl Friday assistant Janet (Karen Rodriguez), sinister mobster Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson) and mysterious dame Cat Hardy (Li Jun Li), among others. 

Mainly: A lot more old school tungsten light, and a lot fewer LEDs.

“There’s a beautiful cinematography book called ‘Painting with Light,’ by John Alton, from 1948. It’s one of the first cinematography books, really. There’s a chapter about film noir, and it’s so on-the-nose about what it is and how you use it,” Tiernan said. “With the male characters, we pretty much did that lighting. But the female characters you would light in a slightly different way because that’s the way they did it.” 

Tiernan and the entire “Spider-Noir” team were spoiled for reference points, from what the cinematographer calls the startlingly modern camera style of Otto Preminger in “Fallen Angel,” to Orson Welles’s bravado to go where nobody else will go in “Touch of Evil,” to Jacques Tourneur’s alluringly dreamy segues in the often hard-bitten “Out of the Past,” and even the “Kubrick before he was Kubrick” brilliance of “The Killing.” 

A touchstone for Cat Hardy, in particular, came from how Welles’ “The Lady from Shanghai” treats Welles and Rita Hayworth’s characters. Tiernan was excited to embrace a shift in aesthetic from Ben, who hasn’t had a good night’s sleep or a shower since “Across yhe Spider-Verse,” and Cat, who has a slightly more ethereal presence.

“I didn’t want to have a huge shift, but I appreciate what they were trying to do, that language,” Tiernan said. “All the filters they used, the beautiful Dior stockings on the back of the lenses, all these things that they were trying out to get a particular feel.” 

“Spider-Noir” has to shift back and forth between its central mystery and the show’s more unabashedly comic book elements, which also required Tiernan and the camera team to build in some flexibility in how the look of the show would change and how either motivated or expressive the lighting would be. Tiernan said that the challenge really gave him an appreciation for the show’s actors and the distinctiveness of their faces when photographed with a film noir sensibility.

“We’d watch blocking rehearsals, and consult with the VFX team, and we’d have ideas of where the camera was going to be, and some amazing ideas just came out of watching their performances. Each one of them is very different in their own way,” Tiernan said. “You’ve got Brendan Gleeson’s beautifully vicious mob boss, and Karen Rodriguez, Lamorne Morris, Jack Huston — they’re all so good at being in that character and understanding the world, and they all had a love of film noir.” 

That love of film noir powers both versions of “Spider-Noir” — Tiernan’s main comp for the type of color he wanted to evoke and that he had to work very closely with the art and costume teams to achieve is, no big deal, “Vertigo.”

The point of a noir story, Tiernan discovered, is the ability to be very graphic and find compositional ways to not just evoke a character’s inner turmoil or conflict, but make the look of the whole world connect back to it. Not so unlike a web. 

“When you’re doing something visual, if you’re allowed to be very graphic with it, it’s very immediate,” Tiernan said. “ I’m really pleased with both versions, and that we managed to pull that off successfully.” 

“Spider-Noir” is now streaming on Prime Video.