Kyle Wullschleger (‘Only Murders in the Building’ cinematographer) on a ‘bright and sunny’ tone shift

“We wanted the tone to shift,” says cinematographer Kyle Wullschleger of “Only Murders in the Building” season 4. The hit Hulu whodunnit has long oozed a cozy New York City charm, but the latest murder mystery takes the main characters to Los Angeles as their podcast receives a feature film adaptation. The Hollywood theme of Season 4 allowed the cinematographer to take big swings with his camerawork. We spoke to Wullschleger as part of our “Meet the Experts” TV cinematographers panel. Watch the video interview above.

“The idea of ‘bright and sunny’ came up a lot,” recalls Wullschleger of the show’s excursions to balmy California. One of his favorite sequences within this tonal shift came courtesy of a sizable one-er where the cast arrives in what appears to be New York, only for the camera to slowly reveal that it’s the “Only Murders” film set on the Paramount lot. “You know kind of immediately that something is off,” he explains of the complex extended take, “it was such a pleasure to step it up and do that.”

Wullschleger also had tremendous fun with Episode 6, titled “Blow-Up,” where he was able to introduce a found-footage style of filming to the series. The entire installment is shot as if it’s a documentary helmed by the bizarre in-series film directors: The Brother Sisters. “The Brother Sisters are close to my age, at least in the show,” reveals the cinematographer, “And so as we go through their own history, the cameras that they used along the way for that was really fun for me because it applied to some of my own experience growing up, getting in touch with technology.”

The standard camera setup for the series was ditched entirely for this episode, and in its place was handheld cameras, classic equipment, and secret static spy cams. The unorthodox setup gave the entire episode a true found footage energy, and fed the concept that everything the viewer sees is actually coming from the eye of a pair of off-beat film students. “It was really, really fun because at the end of the day, you want it to feel like it just happened,” explains Wullschleger, “but there was so much work going into making sure that it just felt like it fell off the truck.”

Elsewhere in our conversation, Wullschleger also discusses his journey from camera operator to cinematographer and paying homage to legends Errol Morris and Sergio Leone.