Station Eleven, adapted from Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel of the same name, takes place in the aftermath of an apocalyptic event where more than 99 percent of the population has perished and the world as we know it has come to a grinding halt.
The series moves between year zero when a mysterious pandemic takes hold and year twenty where we follow a traveling symphony performing works of Shakespeare and meet those who have survived.
Yes, watching a show about a deadly pandemic while COVID-19 remains an active part of our daily lives is difficult, particularly for those of us who have lost loved ones. Station Eleven hits close to home. But I’d argue the show acts as a kind of catharsis, it’s about so much more than a pandemic.
Creator Patrick Somerville, a writer on HBO‘s The Leftovers, explores some of those same themes with Station Eleven. The show is not interested in the stereotypical beats of a survivalist horror drama, but rather Station Eleven is about art—what it means to create art and how we use it to heal.
For years, TV aficionados have called The Leftovers one of the best and most underappreciated shows ever made. Let’s not make the same mistake with its spiritual sibling. Station Eleven is beautiful— emotional, and deeply impactful. The very best of what prestige TV is meant to be.
Steve Cosens served as director of photography for four episodes [2, 5, 9, and 10] of the 10-part HBO Max mini-series. He joins Awards Daily to answer five burning questions about Station Eleven’s themes, his favorite scenes, and using natural light to capture lush landscapes.
Awards Daily: Station Eleven is about art and humanity in the aftermath of an apocalyptic event. What was it like to work with these themes during the COVID pandemic?
Steve Cosens: The show got started in Chicago. They shot episodes one and three and then the pandemic hit. They moved the show up to Toronto when they eventually came back like a year later. I took over as one of the directors of photography. So, the machine had already started to roll by that point. I had seen the first two episodes and I thought they were beautifully shot. The first two episodes had an aesthetic that I really felt akin to. I felt like this was a show that I could just move on to without thinking too much about how I was going to match the look. For me, it was like Christian Sprenger, the original DP, and I were speaking the same language.
It was a challenging shoot with COVID in Toronto. We were always following this traveling group of actors and musicians, so the crew was on the road to new locations almost weekly. We were a large crew trying to move quickly and at the same time trying to fuse the creative with the logistics of the show. One of the most challenging aspects was keeping the integrity of the show alive while constantly being faced with challenges due to COVID, a tight schedule, and being on location for several months in the Toronto winter.
There’s a line in the first trailer, Frank [Nabhaan Rizwan] says, “This strange and awful time was the happiest of my life.”
While we were shooting, we all knew we were working on something so beautiful. And we all really felt like, “Okay, this is a really special show.” So, We were all really committed. Because we were right in the midst of COVID while making a show about a pandemic, it always felt really close to home. And I would say often we would feel quite emotional seeing some of the scenes play out— it felt like we were living the story that we were telling.
AD: For me, Station Eleven feels like watching the best art-house cinema play out on television; Terrence Malick comes to mind. You mentioned working within the established visual palette. What else can you tell me about your approach?
SC: It was important to me to use natural light. And to manipulate that natural light to soften it, or cut it or diffuse it. It was important to me to have simplicity and sparseness in the cinematography and that it didn’t feel slick. I’m sure I can speak a little for Christian and Daniel Grant, the other DPs, in that we wanted to have this more natural feel.
One of the show’s themes is that nature in the future is not inhospitable. So unlike a lot of other post-apocalyptic projects where you see nature as being kind of burnt out, and gray, and all the landscapes have been fried—this landscape was lush and alive. So it was important for me to have the lighting take its cues from and embrace nature.
It was especially important for me to have really rigorous framing and have more of a kind of graphic sensibility when it comes to the composition and nice clean lines. When you say Station Eleven has an art-house sensibility, I would say that comes down to Patrick Somerville, the creator; he really allowed me to kind of run with it. And really embraced the aesthetic that I was bringing to the show.
You know, I graduated from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver. I come from an experimental film background, and I would say that’s part of my DNA. I prefer more artful films and Patrick allowed me to bring what I like to do, really.
AD: What were your favorite scenes to shoot?
SC: I would say all the winter material that I shot up north of Toronto was challenging to shoot, but I love shooting in nature, the aesthetic, the starkness of figures against dead trees and snow, all of those sequences were a joy to shoot. And we got blessed with having heavy snow and falling snow when we needed it.
Moving with the traveling symphony when we’re in the woods and capturing all those amazing horses and traveling wagons was amazing. The production designer [Ruth Ammon] did an amazing job.
My favorite location, and my favorite episode, is episode nine when Jeevan [Himesh Patel] goes to the abandoned K-Mart and is met by all the pregnant women. It was important to director Jeremy Podeswa that we would be able to constantly move fluidly in that space. So, it was a challenge in that I wanted to be able to sculpt the light in there but also make it feel like they had intermittent power. So, we outfitted the ceiling with about a hundred 8-foot Astera fluorescent tubes that I could control and dim up, dim down, and turn off. And it allowed me to sculpt the light on the fly. It was a beautiful space. The birthing scene gets me every time.
AD: Can you tell me more about how you manipulated the light for various scenes?
SC: Yeah, for the interior, we found this amazing old cottage that you see in the show. I was so excited about shooting all of the material and that we chose that space. One of the reasons was that the cottage had that great covered porch that you see in a couple of scenes, and I was able to just use natural light or diffused natural light in that space. And it was really quite beautiful and turned out well.
The large condo space that the two brothers and the young girl live in for a month, was a set. We designed almost a 280-degree backdrop to go all around. And we designed the lighting so that we could have different times of day and different temperatures of daylight so that we could have sunrise and sunset. Daniel Grant and I worked hard on that to make it feel as natural as we could so you could really feel the outside light coming into that space naturally. I’m really proud of what we did there.
The airport was also really cool. It’s not very often that you actually get to shoot at a real airport. The Toronto Pearson airport has this whole wing of their airport that you can rent. And we were the first production to take advantage of having this whole chunk of the airport where we could literally pull up an airplane to one of the jet bridges. We could really take advantage of where the light was throughout the day, and I could raise and lower the blinds to create contrast in that space.
AD: Station Eleven moves back and forth between the beginning of the pandemic and 20 years in the future. How did you visually differentiate those worlds?
SC: Yeah, I would say color was a really important aspect of the show. It was important for us that it became more colorful as the show moved into the future. But we didn’t want all the stuff that we shot in the future to feel like a different show.
It is a tricky balance to just find the right palette to segway from year zero up to year 20. And, that was something we talked a lot about with Ruth Ammon and Jeremy Podeswa—what are the colors that carry through? What’s the saturation of the year 20 stuff?
That was a big part of the world-building because we knew that the series was going to be jumping back and forth in time. So, how do we separate these two worlds but make them feel integrated at the same time? A lot of that was in the production design. A lot of it was in the costumes, and part of it was in the photography—in the color palette that we embraced and also the color correction that we did in post-production.
In the future, I would say the color palette is warmer. It’s a bit de-saturated but definitely warmer. We would pull out colors in certain scenes just to feature them a little more prominently.
It was important for Patrick Somerville too. He wanted the vegetation to feel more lush. But for me, it’s always a fine line between the green being ‘digitally green’ versus lush. So we spent a lot of time trying to find the right saturation for the green, so that it felt rich and not CGI.
All 10 episodes of Station Eleven are streaming now on HBO Max.
