Film
Cinematographer James Whitaker has built a career grounding big ideas in images that favor atmosphere over flash and character over spectacle. That sensibility serves him well on the darkly comic HBO series DTF St. Louis, a seven-part mystery about loneliness, desire and murder in the American suburbs, which reunites Whitaker with frequent collaborator Steven Conrad.
“Steve called me for his TV show called Patriot,” Whitaker says, which the two connected after Conrad saw Whitaker’s work on Thank You for Smoking. Whitaker had done films and television pilots but was wary of committing to a full series. “The first thing that gets thrown out the window in television is the cinematography, because all they care about is making a schedule, putting as many cameras as you can on the shot at one time,” Whitaker says. That maximum-coverage approach was exactly what he wanted to avoid, so Whitaker proposed breaking a few rules. “Let’s try to make it a one-camera shoot where we can really pay close attention to all the lighting and all the compositions and make them as close to perfect as we possibly can,” Whitaker says. That philosophy helped define a decade-long collaboration between Whitaker and Conrad with Patriot, Perpetual Grace, LTD and now DTF St. Louis. The HBO series centers on a love triangle between a group of restless middle-aged adults: TV weatherman Clark Forrest (Jason Bateman), his coworker Floyd Smernitch (David Harbour) and Floyd’s wife Carol (Linda Cardellini). When Floyd turns up dead, two detectives uncover a trail leading to a scandalous dating app that allows couples to secretly pursue affairs.
Whitaker says the Conrad partnership works best when both artists maintain creative continuity from beginning to end. “That’s definitely our preferred methodology: for him to direct all of them and me to shoot all of them,” Whitaker says. “It’s literally about continuity. It’s about having those two brains working on every single frame and blocking every single piece of action that happens with the actors to get the story tight and hopefully put across on screen what we’re going for.” If the collaboration provides consistency behind the camera, the visual challenge of DTF St. Louis was something else entirely. The story unfolds largely in ordinary suburban spaces — environments Whitaker initially worried might feel visually flat. “First and foremost, I really wanted it to feel heavy and dark,” he explains. “I was very worried about being able to do a suburban, ordinary life drama… where the photography wasn’t gonna be uplifted by something that existed in society itself.” Previous projects had built-in visual drama: Patriot utilized the architecture of Paris, while Perpetual Grace, LTD leaned into Western landscapes…