Crime and Punishment: Reimagining Civil War-Era New York for BBC America’s 'Copper'

New York during the Civil War was seething with gang wars, rampant government corruption and violent racial conflicts, which is the dramatic backdrop for Copper, the first-ever scripted series for BBC America. Starring Tom Weston-Jones, Franka Potente and Kyle Schmid, the series revolves around a tough Irish cop trying to solve crimes and keep order in the notorious Five Points neighborhood made famous in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. The team of Barry Levinson (as executive producer/writer) and Tom Fontana (as executive producer, and co-creator with show runner Will Rokos) aims to imbue 1864 New York with the same kind of intense drama that they placed on the streets of contemporary Baltimore in their 1990s series, Homicide: Life on the Street.

Behind the scenes during filming of Copper with (L-R) Dylan Taylor, Tom Weston-Jones and Kevin Ryan as detectives Andrew O’Brien, Kevin Corcoran and Francis Maguire, respectively

The Sweet Hereafter and Exotica, but the scope of Copper is entirely different, reminiscent of long-ago productions that were filmed on huge Hollywood soundstages. A portion of the Five Points section of New York was re-created inside an enormous Toronto soundstage for Copper. Portions of buildings, streets, sidewalks—both exteriors and interiors—stood within this space during production.

Production designer Anthony Ianni created an environment that allowed Sarossy’s cameras to follow people from the street into buildings, and to look out from interior windows onto streets teeming with activity. “Absolutely everything is shot inside the studio,” Sarossy says. “It gave us a lot of control and, of course, we didn’t have to worry about the cold Toronto winter.”

He notes that the electrical department rigged facets of the studio ahead of time. “The gaffer created what he called ‘the sky,’ which was a huge collection of fluorescent tubes that made this overall soft light covering the whole stage. That was our basic daylight, and then we’d add harder light for sun or soft units for night scenes.

“Of course, this is set in a period before houses and streets were wired for electricity,” he adds. “We have some real gas lamps outside and candlelight inside.”

The crew films Tom Weston-Jones as Detective Kevin Corcoran on the set.

The creators wanted to shoot digitally but have a fairly classical, filmic sense about the imagery. Sarossy shot the 10-episode season with ARRI Alexa bodies (shooting ProRes 4:4:4:4 raw) mounted with Cooke primes and Angenieux zooms. He made use of Tiffen Soft/FX filters on the lens, primarily to help smooth out any “digital harshness,” he says. “The Alexa is really good for looking like film, but I felt just a tiny bit of softening helped that effect even more.”

The sensitivity of the Alexa chip allowed Sarossy to make use of period lighting technology—candlelight and gas lamps—for illumination rather than as merely a motivating source backed up by movie lights. He cautions that the quality of this light, while realistic for the period, was not quite as pleasing as one might expect. “We looked at films that used real candlelight,” he says, mentioning the oft-cited use of candlelight by director Stanley Kubrick and cinematographer John Alcott in the 18th century period piece Barry Lyndon. “It was beautiful, but they used a great deal of additional candles outside the image,” he says, explaining that this technique gave those filmmakers the additional light they needed to get an exposure, as well as a significant amount of fill light that would not have been present had the scenes really been lit with only the candles audiences see on screen.

(L-R) Detectives Francis Maguire (Kevin Ryan) and Kevin Corcoran (Tom Weston-Jones)

Of trying to light with just a few candles, he says, “It’s interesting. You might think candlelight is soft, but it’s really one of the hardest sources there is.” So Sarossy complemented the candlelight with some additional soft units gelled to match the candlelight’s color temperature. “Yes, the Alexa can see something lit by just a few candles, but that really isn’t as nice looking as you might think!”

Sarossy, who generally covered everything throughout the 10 episodes with two Alexas, established for the operators a subtly different approach to covering scenes set downtown, in the always-explosive Five Points section, and those in the wealthy part of the city where the rich and powerful congregate. “I tended to use more handheld camerawork in the poorer area,” he says, “and then do more locked down and Steadicam shots uptown.”

Either way, he always made use of the giant set’s scope and tried to show the audience activity going on blocks in the distance or outside the windows. “Even in close-ups, we always tried to capture a lot of life going on everywhere,” he says. “It really gives a sense of this place at a time when it was jam-packed with people.”