HBO’s Barry continues to dazzle critics and audiences alike into its third season. For its third season, the dark comedy received 14 Emmy nominations, pushing its series total to 44 nominations with six wins so far. Cinematographer Carl Herse, making his debut this season lensing multiple episodes, received one of those nominations, reflecting his creatively thematic work on the season finale “starting now.”
In that episode, Barry’s (Bill Hader) streak of luck appears coming to an end. His long-time girlfriend Sally (Sarah Goldberg) fled Los Angeles, leaving Barry behind in the process. Agent Albert Nguyen (James Hiroyuki Liao) confronts Barry as he’s burying his latest victim and demands that his assassin life come to an end. Most damning, however, is Gene Cousineau’s (Emmy-winner Henry Winkler) stunning betrayal of Barry, eventually leading to Barry’s arrest as season three closes.
Herse captures all of this season-culminating action with intriguing camera angles and shot set-ups that underscore the themes of the scene. His greatest contribution in the episode, in my humble opinion, is the brilliant closing sequence where the audience believes Barry has snuck up on Jim Moss and will sadly shoot him. However, Barry is surprised by a swat team who sneak in from Jim’s backyard. Herse’s camera and lighting capture the moment brilliantly as the swat team creeps in from darkness into the light of the scene. Nothing feels artificial. Nothing feels extraordinarily staged. It’s just blissful, brilliant, and Emmys-nominated camerawork.
Here, in an interview with Awards Daily, he talks about his initiation into the Barry world, made even more intricate thanks to delay incurred during the COVID pandemic. He also talks about constructing his Emmys-nominated episode and the wonderful touches he brought to the material working with director Bill Hader.
Awards Daily: What kind of partnership did you have with Bill Hader as a director?
Carl Herse: Well, it was really interesting because we first met at the end of 2019. We had a lot of mutual friends that put us in contact with each other. Because we started prepping the show before COVID, the initial meetings were just about figuring out where we aligned on things like tastes, the kind of films we liked, and what influences might be applicable to season three. Then, with the COVID shut down, we wound up having this strangely long prep period where we just kept in contact over months of sitting around at home and watching lots of films and sharing ideas. There was this really fortunate long period of just getting to know one another, not only on a professional level but on a personal level in a way that often doesn’t really happen. This was a really nice, long period of prep.
Awards Daily: So, you’re Emmy nominated for episode eight, which is the season three finale. What was it about that episode that spoke to you in terms of your Emmy submission?
Carl Herse: For the most part, we tried to treat the entire season like one long story, and so every episode had a lot of standouts. I feel that, in episode eight, every story just comes to a head in a very interesting way. Bill wanted to tell the story by not offering a lot of parallel editing. It was constructed in a more linear way, rounding out Sally’s story and then rounding out Hank’s story and then eventually getting to Cousineau and Barry’s story. I feel like that allowed us to express with the camera a lot of really interesting dynamic visuals that I felt best evoked the tone we’d been striving for over the course of the whole season. There wasn’t much exposition. There wasn’t a lot of dialogue scenes. It was really a lot of sequences that were visual and leaned into this line between comedy and really more tragedy. That just felt like the best expression of the tone we were going for in this season.
Awards Daily: I want to dig into some of these shots a little bit more, but let me just start back at the beginning of the episode. There’s a 10-second shot that picks up from episode seven where Barry is previewing his afterlife. That sequence has a very gray, muted color palette which appears to be picked up again. When he’s digging the hole to bury the body of the guy that Sally killed. Was that your intent?
Carl Herse: Yeah, before I even came on the show, the concept around visually what the ocean represents, what water represents, and what the desert kind of represents is that water is like salvation. Water is potentially purgatory, but it’s a sense of redemption and hope, and the desert is in the end and darkness. What that sequence in episode seven and eight is meant to evoke is that Barry takes himself to these places that are giving him some sense of optimism. He’s obviously harmed so many people around him that water’s been poisoned a bit. For the tree, we wanted to kind of mirror the gray landscape and also show you the difference between this and the first episode where we’re at that same location and there’s a lot more vegetation in the frame.
It’s definitely a dark tone for those moments, but there’s still a little bit more life in the environment. Whereas when we get to the final scene with Albert and Barry at the tree, we’re in this kind of alien landscape where we specifically frame out trees, vegetation, and anything other than our main anchoring tree. Otherwise, it’s just hillsides that are dead and dying and brown. That was all very intentional the way that we wanted the sequence towards the end of feel like it was just being kind of stripped of life. Barry had, for two seasons, been kind of getting away with much of the crazy, brutal world that he’s led in LA, and now he doesn’t really have anywhere to go.
Awards Daily: The scene between Jean Cousineau and Jim Moss, the interrogation scene. That is essentially a 2-hander, and the camera gradually closes in on those two actors and makes it more claustrophobic. What kind of complexity do you have as a cinematographer in capturing a scene like that?
Carl Herse: The thing that’s really nice about this show is that we front-load so much of the experience with prep. We really talk about what the scene is going to be about and what the shots are going to be. Bill has a very interesting way of shot designing his scenes so that they’re really puzzle pieces that only click together in one arrangement. It’s always really impressive to me how well the sequences turnout. Most directors capture a ton of different information. They get two shots, they get singles, and they build in the edit whereas Bill likes to shoot very linearly. So, each shot leads from one to the next to the next. I think that works really well for our more dynamic sequences.
For this scene, what was really helpful to me was just knowing that there’s would be that one shot where I could work with the production designer and build the garage set in a way that was advantageous to lighting so that we didn’t have to have any lights in the room. The actors were in a completely neutral space that was not cluttered with gear. We were able to strategically put a couple of windows that allowed us to light the scene and keep everything outside of the set so that Bill could just work with them because we knew that this was going to be a really heavy scene for both Henry and for Robert [Wisdom who plays Jim Moss]. So really, our approach there was just create the simplest environment and let the actors work. Usually, when you do a scene like this, you get so many pieces of coverage that the actors either get really worn out or they kind of refrain from going to the darkest emotional place. They don’t want to be crying for half a day or shouting and losing their voice. So you get this weakened performance. Whereas with Bill, we show up on the shooting day and everyone knows what they’re doing. We’ve talked through the emotional beats, and the actors know the tone of their performance. When you’re seeing everyone in the same frame all at once, no one is holding back waiting for their piece of coverage — everyone has to be dialed in all at once. That helps the whole cast, the whole ensemble.
Awards Daily: What is your favorite shot in this episode?
Carl Herse: I think my favorite shot is also probably the simplest, which is the last shot of the episode. The thing that we were always trying to strive to do with the show is tell the story in the simplest way possible. Usually, that involves really complicated camera rigging or lighting or prep because you’re trying to create a simple shot that has to move through space in a way that requires a lot of thought. In the final moments of the episode, what this entire season has kind of been about is redemption and whether or not a person can revise their own human nature. Ultimately, once Barry’s caught, it doesn’t change the fact that he’s done all these terrible things and that he’s hurt people around himself and that Moss is still alone.
So, to be able to take a very dynamic episode and end it with this quiet moment where you see the cacophony of police lights, detectives, and personnel and let that kind of dissipate over a long period of time until it’s just silence. Once all of that distractive visual stuff is out of the way, you realize that the only two things you’ve seen in the frame are Moss standing alone in his yard and the picture of his daughter who is gone. To me, that is just such a powerful image. From a storytelling perspective, I think it really drives home what this season is about — that redemption does not account for consequences. This character is still in pain despite winning to some degree.