Spider-Noir DP on Crafting the Nic Cage Show in Two Formats

You might assume that “Spider-Noir,” the streaming series that takes Nicolas Cage’s character from the Oscar-winning “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” and plops him into a flesh-and-blood mystery, would lack the visual oomph of its animated counterpart. After all, that film had a unique texture that emphasized its comic-book origins. You could practically smell the ink coming off the screen. How could the comparatively tame live-action landscape ever hope to compete? 

But “Spider-Noir” — which recounts the story of Ben Reilly aka The Spider (Cage), a World War I veteran coaxed back into super-heroics in Depression-era New York after a wave of strange villains enters the criminal underworld — had a trick up its well-tailored sleeve. When the series premiered earlier this year on MGM+ and Prime Video, it was presented in two separate, distinct formats: a black-and-white version, emphasizing the inky shadows of the film noirs that inspired it, and a color version (dubbed Tru-Hue Full Color) with a bold, jazzy look influenced by the Technicolor films that would follow film noir’s heyday. 

This, it turns out, was more than simply colorizing black-and-white footage (or vice versa), as Ted Turner did on his cable stations so many years ago. Instead, it was an all-consuming, hyper-specific process that fell to the show’s cinematographer, Darran Tiernan. 

Tiernan is a talented DP who knows his way around both moody noirs, having photographed HBO’s excellent, damnably short-lived “Perry Mason” revival and comic-book adaptations including the Emmy-winning HBO Max limited series “The Penguin,” an extension of Matt Reeves’ “The Batman.” Not that anything prepared him for the challenges of “Spider-Noir.”

Initially, Tiernan said, the plan was to shoot the series only in black and white. But an hour into his first day of prep, an edict came down from on high: Could they ready a color version at the same time? This led to a meeting of the minds with Tiernan, showrunners Oren Uziel and Steve Lightfoot, costume designer Trayce Gigi Field, production designer Warren Alan Young and director Harry Bradbeer (who oversaw the first two episodes).

“That began a research-and-development process to see how we could do it,” Tiernan explained. Uziel insisted that they would only make a color version if they were as excited about it as they were about the B&W version, but finding a plan that thrilled them took months and involved all departments. 

“As we were moving through the process of discovering what colors worked for black and white and color, I supplied them with cameras with the same color science and monitors that we were going to use while shooting, so they could check their own work and compare,” Tiernan said. This allowed the teams to “constantly have evolving conversations about, Does this look right? Does that look right? Will that work?”

The process, he said, was “incredibly collaborative” and integrated, which helped him assuage any concerns that attacking both the black-and-white and color versions simultaneously would water down one or both “Spider-Noir” variations. 

“I didn’t think about it too much because we were all striving to find the solution,” Tiernan said. He was aware that lighting in film noir was distinct and “wanted to be truthful and authentic to that,” while also imagining the scene in color. Instead of picking a color image and seeing how it would look in black and white, Tiernan said, the process was reversed. The color version had to be supported by the black-and-white one. 

“Everybody having that thought process really helped us get to the point where we were confident when we were shooting that we were doing the right thing for both versions,” he said.

This story first ran in the Down to the Wire Comedy issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.