The Crown Cinematographers on Recreating Key Historical Moments

As a cinematographer, Adriano Goldman, ASC, knows what it means to shoot your shot. He took a chance at a party, and as a result, he became a director of photography for Netflix’s The Crown, a job he calls “life-changing.”

After lensing director Stephen Daldry’s 2014 drama Trash in his native Brazil, Goldman was at the premiere in Rio de Janeiro when he saw Daldry. Goldman had loved working with the director and had heard he was developing something for Netflix. Goldman wanted in. “I said, ‘What is this thing that you’re doing with Peter Morgan? If you and Peter Morgan are developing something for Netflix, there must be something there.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Well, if you want to do it, it’s yours.’” Goldman pauses, smiles and shrugs. “I didn’t think it was going to be that easy.”

He ended up shooting the pilot, the finale and 26 more of the show’s 60 episodes, across all six seasons. He was nominated for an Emmy five times, winning twice (2018 and 2021). Working with Daldry to create the look of the show, he decided early on that each era would have its own visual style.

“We didn’t want to make it too glossy or glamorous,” Goldman explains. “We  wanted it to be as realistic as possible, not a fairy tale. From the beginning, I knew that whenever the cast changed,  I was going to change the  lenses. Ultimately, I used Cooke Speed Panchro lenses for the first two seasons with Claire Foy [as Queen Elizabeth II]. Very vintage. For seasons three and four, with Olivia Colman [as the Queen in her middle-aged years], I used Zeiss Super Speed lenses, from the ’70s and ’80s. A little bit more modern but still soft and gentle. Then, seasons five and six, with Imelda Staunton [as the elder version of the Queen], we’re on Cooke S4s,  literally progressing through the eras with the glass.”

The way characters were framed changed with the eras as well. In the first two seasons, set in the 1950s and ’60s, “We wanted to be physically close to the actors,” Goldman explains, “and be able to feel the costume texture, not to mention the anxiety and even the breathing. So we did closeups with 40- and 50mm lenses.”

As the story moved into the ’70s and ’80s, the lenses became longer and so did the distances between the cameras and the actors. Goldman and his team moved to 65mm lenses (“one of my favorite lenses for closeups”), then 85mm lenses and as high as 100mm in the most recent seasons. Season six also featured more handheld work. Goldman notes, “Little by little, these subtle changes help the audience to understand the change and the progression in terms of the periods.”

When recreating moments so famous that they’re imprinted on the collective memory, the intention was not to duplicate them but rather “to pay homage — not being absolutely documental.” He adds with a smile, “We wanted to reproduce historical moments with a little bit of our own flavor. You want to create the attitude and the feel of the photograph without necessarily copying it 100%. It gets to a point where, if you’re spot on, even on a show like The Crown, it just feels wrong.”

Goldman, Sophia Olsson (who shot the sixth and final season’s first episode) and Ben Wilson (who shot two episodes of season six) spoke with emmy about how they recreated real moments with the British royal family in the Emmy-winning series’ final season.

The complete version of this article originally appeared in emmy magazine, issue #5 2024, under the title "Moments of Truth."