With their new Amazon Prime series “Étoile,” creators Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino set out to capture the elite level of dance performed at institutions such as the New York City Ballet. The 29 ballets staged for Season 1 feature professional dancers from the best companies around the world and dare to hold the camera on the staged productions for two to three minutes at a clip, allowing the viewer to appreciate the professional artistry being woven into the story.
“It was very important to Amy and Dan to make sure that we were showing the ballet world the way it truly is, which meant at a super high level,” said series choreographer Marguerite Derricks.
The story of two world-renowned ballet companies swapping their most talented artists, in an effort to save their renowned institutions, laid the foundation for a complex and sometimes contrasting set of world-building ingredients. A production that was firmly grounded in the real locations of the Paris and New York City ballet world was also, at its heart, a behind-the-scenes workplace comedy. The look of “Étoile” leans into both the Old World warmth of Paris and the pop art modernity of New York. Even the carefully staged 29 ballets are a juxtaposition of classic productions like “Swan Lake” and the boundary-pushing originals Derricks created for the fictional choreographer Tobias Bell (Gideon Glick).
To pull this all off, the Palladinos would rely on their Emmy-award winning collaborators from “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” including cinematographer M. David Mullen, production designer Bill Groom, and Derricks, who, below, break down how they kept this complex cocktail of ingredients in perfect balance.
The Production Design of “Étoile”
Due to its celebration of the art form, “Étoile” gained unprecedented access to both the New York and Paris institutions, where ballet lovers go to see the world’s greatest dancers. And while access to these real-world locations brings an authenticity to the series, production designer Bill Groom would have the significant challenge of mixing, matching, and building a spatial world that incorporated the fictional story and real world of the New York and Paris ballet.
“Amy and Dan have created a world where we see what the dancers see, and we see the backstage world,” said Groom. “And as a production designer, my obligation is to create the right physical environment that tells the story.”
As Groom explained in the video above, in New York, this meant starting with the recognizable exterior of the Lincoln Center campus, home of the New York City Ballet and “The Nutcracker,” and then having to build interior sets that found a balance between the needs of the workplace comedy’s home-away-from-home sets and the 1960s modern archectiture (complete with narrow floor-to-ceiling windows) that define the famed Lincoln Center exterior.
The fictional Parisian ballet company in “Étoile” was a melding of three different beloved institutions. The National Theatre of the Opéra Comique was used for the exterior, the Théâtre du Châtelet was used to shoot the actual ballet performances, and the Palais Garnier served as both the location and inspiration for the grand interior spaces around the main stage and the heart and soul of the fictional Parisian ballet.
“The Garnier fit Amy and Dan’s idea of the Paris ballet world,” said Groom of the home of the Paris Opera Ballet, which the creators instantly fell in love with while taking a private tour in the early stages of dreaming up “Étoile.”
Shooting at the Garnier for extended periods of time, though, was an impossibility, and in the video above Groom details what is arguably the legendary production designers’s greatest achievement in the series: Building his version of the Garnier warm-up room, which captured its richness of the historical detail, but also making a larger, more dynamic and camera-friendly space that becomes the container for so much of the series’ Hollywood musical magic.
The Cinematography of “Étoile”
Cinematographers Alex Nepomniaschy and M. David Mullen created subtle but different looks for Paris and New York as the series cuts back and forth between the two ballet companies.
“One of the challenges on the show is how to portray the two cities. I thought of it more as an Old World versus New World aesthetic,” explained Mullen. “Paris was Old World, and for me that meant visually more like paintings, given that painterly golden quality that Paris was going to have.”
In the video above, Mullen breaks down how he achieved this with filtration, natural light, and giving interiors an almost period-like feel by emphasizing light coming in through the windows for the Parisian interiors. It’s a subtle contrast to the compositions used to frame New York, which emphasize the city’s geometric shapes and angles.
“New York had to have more of a modernist, almost pop art quality to it — flatter, stronger colors, stronger shapes,” said Mullen. “Lincoln Center is a major location in this series, that early 60s modernist architecture style became a signature look.”
With 29 staged ballet productions in Season 1, one of the biggest challenges was how to stay true to the theatrical light design of classic ballets and balance it with the needs of the camera and visual language of the series.
“The main issue I’ve found over the years with theater lighting is that it’s all hard. Our solution has been to take the theater lighting in the grid above and intersperse it with some softer LED light that could be color mapped to match the theatrical colors, so that we have a blend of soft and hard lighting,” said Mullen. “So when we need to go into the dialogue scene and take down the hard spots and bring up the softer LEDs, it’s not a time-consuming switchover.”
For each ballet, Mullen said the key was to put himself in the mindset of a real lighting designer and the conventions of how to light ballet, which he used as a jumping off point before transitioning into the needs of the TV series. Mullen pointed to “Romeo and Juliet” in Episode 1 as an example.
“‘Romeo and Juliet,’ it’s a balcony scene at night. It just seemed to make sense that it’d be in moonlight with a little warm light on the balcony,” said Mullen. “And then while [Jack, played by Luke Kirby] is watching, he imagines Cheyenne (Lou de Laâge) dancing in the park and a very strong, golden backlight appears on Cheyenne, and I had the lighting designer create a cue that turned the whole set into a reddish sunrise effect, with all the blue backdrops switched to red. So it’s clearly a fantasy at that moment onwards. It’s no longer the reality of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ anymore.”
The Choreography of “Étoile”
In creating a show grounded in their love of ballet, the Palladinos would start collaborating with their long-time choreographer Marguerite Derricks at the script stage. Derricks would also assume the additional role of producer, as both dance and the dancers would be the foundational building blocks of the entire production.
“The very first thing is bringing this quality of dancer that you truly see in the ballet companies to our show,” said Derricks.
The Palladinos wrote specific roles for established dancers, with Robbie Fairchild playing Larry, Unity Phelan as Julie, Tiler Peck as Eva, and David Alvarez as Gael. But the majority of the fictional New York and Paris ballet companies were filled with dancers from the best companies around the world — not an easy task considering the months-long production and the schedule of under-contract dancers at institutions like The New York City Ballet. Derrick’s challenge was even more difficult, with the goal of capturing the subtle differences between the Parisian and New York style of dance.
“The French dancers have a different way of moving than the American dancers,” said Derricks. “I was very careful to do it the French way and I had the right people around me to make sure. My dancers would say, ‘Oh no, they don’t round the arm, they bend it.’ The difference was so slight, but it’s a detail, and details were important to the authenticity.”
Actress Lou de Laâge trained with Derricks for months to prepare for the role of Cheyenne Toussaint, billed as the world’s most celebrated ballet star.
“Cheyenne is a bad ass, and I thought of her as an athlete, not just a dancer,” said Derricks of choreographing Cheyenne’s hard charging, sliding, punk-like explosion at the end of the Episode 1 dance. “Lou worked hard, she learned all of the choreography for these numbers, and then we had Constance [Devernay] who did the main dancing for her, and if you see the dance sequences, it’s seamless.”
Top ballet dancers are athletes, with incredible physical strength and skill. Like sports athletes, they need time to prepare and let their bodies recover.
“We know about the body and how many takes we have, and so it was all about the preparation,” said Derricks. “Amy and Dan and [producer] Dana [Ghilbert] made sure that I had the time I needed to prepare and rehearse with the dancers. We made sure that we had it locked and ready to go when we got to set.”
Derrick’s biggest and most rewarding challenge on “Étoile” was choreographing the original pieces for the cutting-edge and eccentric Tobias, billed as an up-and-coming Justin Peck-like boy genius.
“There’s some amazing out-of-the-box choreography out there [in] ballet,” said Derricks. “So if I didn’t push the envelope with Tobias, I think it would be a big mistake.”
