The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, based on Maureen Orth’s nonfiction book Vulgar Favors, also excelled in true-to-life casting. Actors Darren Criss, Edgar Ramirez and a blonde-wigged Penelope Cruz bear uncanny resemblances to serial killer Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace and Donatella Versace. Director/executive producer Daniel J. Minahan (Deadwood, Game of Thrones), who helmed three episodes, says: “In this day and age, people can Google things and make their own comparisons, so you need to be vigilant about making sure people look correct, between wigs and prosthetics and makeup. Darren looks remarkably like Andrew Cunanan. And people who personally knew Gianni Versace were astounded by the similarity when they saw Edgar in costume, hair and makeup.”
For all it’s verisimilitude in casting, Assassination displeased the Versace family. In a statement, they criticized the series for being an unauthorized “work of fiction” and objected to an early episode insinuating that Versace had AIDS. Series executive producer Ryan Murphy defended Assassination, citing Orth’s fact-vetted book and additional research as foundation for the show’s reenactments.
Later installments directed by Minahan focused squarely on the murderer. “Authenticity was paramount,” says Minahan, who directed the finale detailing Cunanan’s demise. “The houseboat Cunanan hid in after he shot Versace was dismantled and sunk, but it was well documented by police videos and photographs, so we had a great reference,” Minahan says. “We built an exact replica and moored it at the original location, which is where we staged the final siege with the FBI.”
Assassination dramatizes the designer’s slaying minutes into the first episode, eliminating any suspense about who committed the crime. Instead, the mystery has more to do with how Cunanan became a cold-blooded serial killer. Minahan says, “People don’t realize everything that came before in the life of Andrew Cunanan that brought him to the point of wanting to murder Versace for seemingly no reason.” By moving through time in reverse chronological order, Minahan says, “We’re able to look at the making of a sociopathic monster. And the other story is the way [Cunanan’s early murders] were written off as gay-on-gay crimes. The police maybe weren’t equipped to figure out what was happening and maybe didn’t take it as seriously as they could have.”
Minahan understands the tightrope walk that demands a balance between plausible fiction and hard-boiled evidence. “We’re dramatists,” he says. “We have a sense of what these people’s voices are, the things they were interested in, the hurts they had. You try to dramatize all of that around circumstances and events that you know actually happened. With Versace, I felt an obligation to honor these characters and tell the story as best we could in the way that we reimagined it.”
Episodes directed by Minahan feature extensive private dialogue between Cunanan and architect David Madson. Minahan says, “Through Maureen Orth’s research and our own research, we tried to put ourselves in Andrew Cunanan’s shoes and figure out or try to imagine what might have happened when Cunanan took David hostage and went on the road before he murdered him.”
Minahan worked with Criss to shape a subtext for the actor’s chilling performance. “Andrew was a fantasist, but he believes all those lies,” Minahan says. “Rather than have Darren play them as lies, we played them as truths, which produced, I think, a more interesting performance. Based on interviews I’ve read with people who knew Cunanan, he was known to be generous but also lethally damaged. He tried to present an idealized version of himself, and we thought that was more interesting.”
One of the most disturbing “reimaginings” called for Minahan to restage the murders of Cunanan victims Jeffrey Trail and Madson. “We had FBI reports and a lot of crime scene photographs, so I could see the blood spray against the door, where the blood pooled on the floor, where the body was moved,” Minahan says. “That really helped me determine how to block the whole thing.”
But on an emotional level, immersion in true-crime storytelling can exact a toll, says Minahan, who worked on Assassination for eight months. “You try to focus on the details, but there are moments where it’s absolutely exhausting to be living in the mind of a serial killer. I remember after we shot this very long scene where David’s pleading for his life, a kind of a pall went over the crew.”
Award-winning journalist, a Special Correspondent for Vanity Fair and author of two books. Her best-selling, Vulgar Favors: The Assassination of Gianni Versace is the basis of Season 2 of FX’s 10-part series, American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace. Maureen began her love of Colombia as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Medellin where she built a school the community named for her: Escuela Marina Orth. In 2005, at the request of the Secretary of Education of Medellin who asked her to empower the children in her school to become competitive in the 21st century, she founded the Marina Orth Foundation. It has since grown to include 21 public and charter schools offering computers for every child K-5, STEM, English and leadership training including robotics and coding. | 5 April 2018
Tom Rob Smith writer of the incredible BBC Two American Crime Story series ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ joins us on BUILD Series LDN #ACSVersace | 5 April 2018
Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story returned after its first season, The People Versus O.J. Simpson, with a very different kind of show for its second: The Assassination of Gianni Versace.
Tracing the murder of the Miami-based designer Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramírez) by serial killer Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), this season of American Crime Story looks and feels quite different from the first. Written by Tom Rob Smith, who spent years researching the subject, and based on Maureen Orth’s book, Vulgar Favors, the season opens with the titular event outside Versace’s opulent Miami mansion and then progresses backward in time, following in the murder spree that preceded that gruesome event. Penélope Cruz also appears as Versace’s sister Donatella and Ricky Martin as his lover, Antonio.
“The first rule with Ryan is we always want to be different tonally, visually, in every way,” explains Ryan’s frequent collaborator, cinematographer Nelson Cragg ASC, who shot the entire O.J. season of ACS and the premiere season of Feud. Cragg handled cinematography for the first two episodes of Versace, and also directed the second. “Ryan did not want to do another courtroom drama. I shot O.J. on longer lenses. It was a lot of courtrooms and offices. We used a lot of close-ups. It didn’t require the same kind of scope.”
Cragg explains how the conception for Versace was different. “These are larger-than-life people and contrasting worlds,” he says. “It’s a larger-than-life house. His world is full of opulence, beauty, symmetry. And Cunanan’s world is raw and infused with emotional and moral bankruptcy.
"That’s how we structured the first episode—the beauty and brightness and colors Versace surrounded himself and the much more down, scattered look of Cunanan’s environment.”
It would be clear even with the sound off what the characters and themes of the season are as we’re introduced to Versace in his home (shot in the actual mansion he called home, now a working hotel). “Versace’s world is very controlled, built, designed, and loved,” Cragg says.
Contrast obviously comes from the locations—Versace’s palatial home compared to Cunanan’s seedy hotel—but Murphy and Cragg also like to enhance the visuals formally and conceptually.
“I wanted most of the shots of him at home to highlight that symmetry. Most of them are symmetrical compositions with crane moves that are straight up or straight down. It called for shooting with wide lenses and sweeping moves. First and foremost, the wide lenses are to show spaces. The real house Versace lived in and the best way to do that is be really wide—12mm, 14mm, maybe 16mm and 18mm. And on cranes to show space.”
Meanwhile, the murderer’s disjointed behavior in obviously poorer areas of South Beach, is covered in a less ordered, less formally pleasant way.
While later episodes would use sets on the 20 Century Fox lot and some Los Angeles exteriors to stand in for other cities, these first two shows, cross-boarded and shot like one movie, were filmed in and around South Beach to capture the location’s textures, colors and contrasts.
Cragg, production designer Judy Becker, costume designer Lou Eyrich—all frequent contributors to Murphy’s work—planned out their approaches in preproduction based on early discussions with Murphy.
“When led by an auteur like Ryan, it comes out and these great teams do so much research and create huge boards with color palette. We don’t so much talk about all these ideas,” he says, “as feel it as we go.”
Cragg utilized Angenieux Optimo lightweight 15-40mm zooms and Zeiss Ultra Primes for the season. The cameras—ARRI Alexa Mini and SXT Plus shooting at 3.2K ProRes 4:4:4:4 —were often mounted on 30- or 50-foot Technocranes with various three-axis stabilized heads. In more confined spaces, the crew would use smaller telescoping cranes, such as the MovieBird.
As with other Murphy projects, shooting days are built around the idea of creating multiple setups concurrently to bring in a significant amount of material per day. “We’d always have three cameras,” Cragg says, “but one or two of them would usually break off and set up additional shots all over the Versace mansion. That’s how we got so much done on a tight schedule. We had Penélope Cruz and Ricky Martin in different rooms of the mansion doing very emotional scenes. The Versace mansion is a working hotel and we shot there and all along South Beach was in the middle of tourist seasons so it was very expensive to shoot there.
"I think I’d only work that way with Ryan,” Cragg notes. “He’s the master multitasker. With Ryan, he’s going to write as he goes. He’ll see something or a room he likes and he’ll create scenes based on things he sees.”
Cragg definitely approves of this approach: “It’s good for performance and the speed of the set,” he offers. “We get a lot of material each day. I don’t like long, laborious lighting setups. I don’t feel they ultimately help tell the story.” That said, he notes, “With Ryan’s show you do want a lot of scenes nicely lit and glossy, especially the Versace portions.”
The solution he and gaffer David Kagen came up with had to do with lighting day interiors from outside as much as possible and using smaller, energy-efficient LEDs inside.
“Of course, we couldn’t break anything or do anything to the walls with these million dollar mosaics or doors with hand inlaid marble,” Cragg recalls. “We would light the mansion from the outside when we could,” Kagen adds. “We’d have big HMI units outside mixing with the natural sunlight but the mansion is so beautiful and has natural light from the big windows a lot of it we didn’t need to add too much light.”
Inside, they’d bounce Source 4 Lekos into unbleached muslin and for larger spaces, ARRI Sky Panel and Litegear/Quasar LED units and some homemade units Kagen and crew built, particularly to fit in small spaces. Despite the mansion’s restrictions and abundance of irreplaceable artifacts, Kagen credits the team’s avoidance of disaster on, “a skilled union crew who knows how to navigate any setting without damaging things.”
Although much of the season beyond these first two episodes is set in other locations throughout the country, the look and feel of that South Beach mansion permeates everything that transpires, it represents exactly the kind of success and validation that Cunanan desperately craves in his own malignant way.
In addition to the filmmakers’ use of the real location and the department heads’ extensive research and design, Cragg also enlisted the help of colorist Kevin Kirwan of Encore in Hollywood, “to help us get those coral colors and pastels of Miami from the time period—the warm reds, the pinks, the specific look of Versace’s robe. I’ve worked with Kevin on Ryan’s shows for a long time and we have a kind of shorthand when we work together.”
Cragg was able to choose his successor for the remainder of the season and proposed British cinematographer Simon Dennis. “I’ve known Simon for 10 years,” Cragg says. “I really like his lighting. He did some episodes of [Netflix’s British ‘20s-era crime series] Peaky Blinders and the work was great, really atmospheric. He’d never done American TV so it took some convincing with producers but once they talked to him and saw his reel, they were convinced.”
Of the season’s unusual structure, Cragg admits, “We weren’t sure if it would work. I think it’s interesting and unique to tell the story in reverse. It adds to the sense of dread because you meet these characters that you know are going to die. But I think it works.”
He goes on to explain how inspiring he found Murphy’s conception of the series as a “bright thriller,” noting, “The closest thing I’ve seen is The Talented Mr. Ripley. We wanted to tell very dark story about homophobia and gay culture, AIDS and persecution, and being in the closet in that time period and we liked the idea of all that happening in 1990s Miami with the bright pastels and its strong sunlight contrasting with darkness that’s happening in the story.”
[…] One of the things that became clear to him during this process is that he doesn’t want to be “just a showrunner” anymore. “It’s just not interesting for me to sit in a room for eight hours a day with my mind as a sieve pouring out ideas,” he says. Nor is he interested in waking up to a daily ratings report card. “I felt that frustration even with [The Assassination of Gianni] Versace, which I think is one of the best things I’ve ever done, but you couldn’t win because it’s like, ‘Well, it’s no O.J.,’” he says, referring to the first installment of American Crime Story, which smashed ratings records for FX and cleaned up on the awards circuit. “So, the Netflix way is an interesting way because it’s a purely creativity way. It is simply ‘Your show is doing great’ or ‘Your show is not doing so great.’ That’s it. It’s not a humiliating ‘Your show is down 30 percent.’”
Fans waiting for him outside his hotel, two concerts completely sold out, leading actor of one of the most shocking series that can be seen today on TV and yet Darren Criss is kind and funny when we arrive. This time he visits Mexico City to present his musical project “Computer Games” with his brother Chuck Criss. This was a bit of what we talked about right before his concert in the capital.
Tell us how you started the Computer Games project with Chuck.
Chuck and I are brothers, we grew up together, we were roommates for years, we always played music while we grew up, basically our day consisted of going to school and then rehearse for a while at home, him on the drums and me with the guitar. After Chuck joined a very good band called “Freelance Whales”, I think the last time he played with them was here actually in Mexico maybe in 2011 more or less.
Ricky Martin explains how the LGBTQ community is represented in “American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace” and discusses aiding hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico. | 2 April 2018
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