Lighting the Darkness: Nick Morris on the Cinematic Style of Sweetpea

Update, August 2026: Sky has released the first trailer for Sweetpea Season 2.

Hey fam! We’re very excited to welcome back our friend and longtime FilmmakersWorld contributor, Nick Morris.
A cinematographer of extraordinary talent, Nick has once again proven his mastery behind the lens with his work on Sweetpea, the gripping Sky Atlantic series that has left audiences enthralled.

The BSC recognised Nick with a nomination for Cinematography in a Television Drama, and more recently, BAFTA honoured him with a nomination for Photography and Lighting: Fiction — well-deserved recognitions of his exceptional ability to craft compelling, atmospheric visuals that elevate storytelling.

With the thrilling news that Sweetpea will continue, we couldn’t wait to catch up with Nick to dive deeper into his creative process, the visual language he developed for the series, and the challenges he faced in bringing this intense world to life.

NERD ZONE! Check out our article featuring the exclusive breakdowns Nick created just for us—you can read it here !

So, let’s jump into the conversation and explore the journey behind Sweetpea with Nick Morris!

Nick, first of all, congratulations on your nominations for the BAFTA in Photography and Lighting: Fiction and for Cinematography in a Television Drama by the British Society of Cinematographers. How did it feel to be recognized by your peers, and what did these nominations mean to you in the context of your work on Sweetpea?

Thanks so much! Honestly, the nominations have totally made my year already.  I was so honored to have the recognition from the BSC, and to hear now that I’ve been nominated for a BAFTA too has completely blown my mind. 

I’ve never particularly sought out this kind of recognition, but knowing that a host of my peers I admire enjoyed it enough to nominate me has actually given me a sense of clarity that I wasn’t expecting.

Working as a DOP in the 21st century often feels like an uphill battle for people’s trust and recognition, all the while being bombarded by the successes of your peers on social media, it’s easy to feel like a fraud or insufficient, no matter how well things are really going. I think these nominations are one of the first times in years I’ve been able to really recognise how far things have come and be really grateful for that. 

It’s particularly special for Sweetpea, because the process of shooting it was such a joy, and it really proved to me that there is huge reward in working with nice people. You inevitably come across difficult characters in your career, and the stress of shooting often brings the worst out in people, so sometimes the process of making a long project like this can be pretty debilitating, and it makes you wonder occasionally if the juice is really worth the squeeze. Sweetpea couldn’t have been more of a tonic for that.

Ella Jones is honestly a dream to work with, she’s incredibly driven and has a unique and detailed vision, but she manages to temper this with such a generous spirit and open attitude that the process is so collaborative and rewarding. Filmmaking is 95% communication and its very easy for the path of least resistance to get a little dictatorial, whereas Ella and all of the producers and execs created a really fertile and trusting environment.

Now that Sweetpea has been announced for a continuation, how did you take the news? What are your thoughts on the opportunity to dive back into this world?

I was thrilled to hear that Sweetpea was being renewed for a second season. Putting something new out into the world always makes you nervous, and broadcasters and streamers make the process cutthroat when they decide what to renew. I’m also happy personally, because a lot of great people spent years getting the first season off the ground, and it’s nice that everyone recognises all of their work.

It’s also really exciting material – anyone who has read the books will know that the TV adaptation draws only very loosely on the written works, but still, there is a huge amount in there for a new season to draw inspiration from. There certainly have been conversations about my involvement for the new season, but I’m afraid all details about that are still under wraps!

Sweetpea features such unique and visually striking imagery. What were some of the biggest challenges you faced regarding cinematography, and how did you approach them?

Ella (Jones) had such a strong vision for the show when I first started talking to her. She wanted it to toe the line of dark comedy in a very specific way that really spoke to me. We landed on something that tried to be as understated as possible, while retaining something just a little bit stylised. In terms of challenge, I think the biggest challenge by a long way was realising this kind of style with the budget and schedule available to us! 

It’s by no means a small show, but certainly we’re on the smaller end of UK Terrestrial budgets, and that comes with a pretty pacey schedule to keep things moving. Shooting in quite a restrained and ‘heavy’ style, with a lot of static and dolly work is just inherently slow and expensive. It takes a lot more time and crew to set things up compared to something more reactive like handheld or steadicam, but it was really important to us that things felt precise and objective.

We overcame some of those challenges by shooting with 2 cameras all the time, and by keeping one of them permanently mounted on a Ronin 2 that I operated remotely on wheels. That setup lets us cut little corners here and there — the camera stays level and stable, and a grip can quickly mount it on a jib without any reconfiguration or hold it in a corner when needed. In small sets, its also one less human on the floor, and meant we could get our two cameras closer together to be tight to the eyelines.

We shoot a lot of coverage on Sweetpea, and the strategy for how to execute all of the angles in the most efficient way with both cameras sometimes feels like about 60% of my job. We’d often put the dance floor down and then roll two cameras around in a little choreographed dance with the actors to stitch all the coverage together.

The lighting and color palette in Sweetpea are so integral to its tone. How did you collaborate with the director to craft the right look for the series, and what were some of the key elements you focused on to enhance the story?

I think the palette we landed on for Sweetpea is one of my favourite things we achieved. It was a very considered subject between myself, Ella Jones, the director, Simon Walker, the production designer, and Jo Thompson, the costume designer, as well of course as with Toby Tomkins our colorist.

In terms of in front of the camera colours, the intention was always to make something with a very restrained palette, avoiding bright or poppy colours and especially avoiding red in clothing and production design. That colour would eventually be reintroduced selectively in the lighting and gradually become a feature of the world as the murders continued. Jo and Simon created a beautiful world of greys, blues, greens and earthy tones.

In terms of lighting, I was very keen to have a clear and defined use of colour there too. Early on in pre-production, I went on a deep dive into serial killer thrillers, which reignited my love for David Fincher’s Se7en. In general, I love the objective tone to a lot of his films, and the feeling of precision in the camera work, but Se7en and Fight Club have something particularly special. 

In general, Sweetpea is a bit too comedic to lean too heavily on films like that, but instead, I drew a lot from the use of green in the lighting. There is so often a green undertone to the lighting in much of David Fincher’s work, and it pairs beautifully alongside the mixture of cool daylight and tungsten.

We decided it was a great subtly unsettling color that really matched Rhiannon’s character, her slightly off-kilter nature, and the idea that there is something a little bit broken in her. That made its way into a lot of the lighting and production design choices, where we would skew a green into fluorescent fixtures, or use it in the fill lights so the room ambient had a subtle green to it.

The final step in the colour work was the grade, and we spent time in prep at Harbour with Toby finessing a show-LUT that I think had a lot of the essence of Sweetpea baked into it. The primary focus was a late 90s or early naughties film print. Not quite as extreme as the amazing bleach bypass process on Se7en, and more influenced by Fight Club.

We wanted the show to have a sense of nostalgia of a period of filmmaking that we all grew up with, the celluloid Coen Brothers comedies like ‘Burn After Reading’ all mixed up with some of that Fincher-inspired grit. This all equated to quite a specific palette with a deep film print emulation, dense reds, soft greens in vegetation, and rich skin tones.

With Sweetpea being such a distinctive show in terms of both visuals and tone, how did you ensure the cinematography supported the story’s emotional beats while maintaining the show’s unique aesthetic?

The challenge with Sweetpea was always going to be doing justice to its multiple personalities. It needs to have real darkness and jeopardy to make you hold your breath and shock you, but also make you laugh out loud and be a little bit silly.

Our general ethos was to try to let the cast do the bulk of the emotional heavy lifting and to try and avoid labouring the point with anything too heavy-handed in the camera work. With a talent like Ella Purnell in front of the camera, we knew we didn’t need to hammer anything home for the audience. We tried to avoid dramatic camera moves or anything too showy, but instead focus on the little things. I might usually be inclined to shoot singles on quite a neutral lens like a 35mm, but instead we subtly shifted things wider to a 27mm to give things a subtly exaggerated edge. We used a lot of symmetry in a nod toward the rigidity in Rhiannon’s world that she was desperate to break free from. This also served to lend things a hint of the heightened whimsical air we were after.

We were very precise with camera movement, and strove to only move the camera with the actors, holding a frame and moving to maintain it, or allowing the actors to walk into a close-up rather than moving the camera. We also wanted the framing choices to serve the editorial style – we opted to shoot dialogue ‘inside the eyeline’, ie never over the shoulder, to let the editors play more cleanly with the comic timing. Framing like that also serves to bring that wider lens closer to the performers, which brings perspective into their faces and works really well with the slightly heightened tone.

Certainly when you read a scene its easy to be flooded with all sorts of ways to hammer home an emotional beat with a camera technique, or the quirk of a lens, but I think the best decisions we made in setting up the show were in creating a set of rules that immediately throw most of those options out of the window, I think the restrictions are what give something a cohesive voice.

Looking ahead to the continuation of the series, are there any new challenges or exciting opportunities you’re anticipating from a cinematographic perspective?

The next season could really go anywhere! Season 1 left things on a real cliffhanger, so I’m itching to find out what happens to Rhiannon from there. The final episode of Season 1 is very transformative for her, so I imagine there is a lot of scope for her character to grow and develop into Season 2, so I imagine the cinematography will follow!

Outside of Sweetpea, you’ve worked on various projects with unique visual styles. How do you balance your cinematographic style with the needs and vision of the director for each project?

I think all cinematographers have to be a little chameleonic by nature to avoid being pigeonholed into one particular style, and I really see how regular and varied collaborations help you grow as an artist. The throughline I think is always your own taste in every moment and decision. I think it’s the thing that allows so many of us to be working alongside each other and putting out such distinct work. I know for a fact you could put 5 cinematographers in the same set with the same director and you’d come out with 5 very distinct scenes.

I certainly have styles of filmmaking I am drawn to most, and others that I’d need leading toward, but certainly recently I’ve found how much progress and growth can come out of being challenged creatively and pushed toward things that might not initially suit your tastes. 

I think over the last couple of years I’ve learned a lot about approaching things with ‘authenticity’. I’ve cringed myself out saying that because it’s such an awful therapy-ism that’s overused so much these days, but certainly from the perspective of creativity, it’s been a bit of a revelation. It’s increasingly easy to be surrounded by endless images made by other artists and filmmakers that are unbelievably beautiful, or very on-trend, that are super easy to reference.

I think it’s an important part of any process to reference other work or other sources, but it’s also very easy to fall into a habit of copying or imitating or combining references into a kind of collage or pastiche. That can produce passable work for a while but I think the imitation can suck you dry, particularly because the copy is never as good as the original; it’s always lacking heart. I’ve gradually tried to take the emulation out of the process, and approach the image-making process in a bit more of a present and reactive way.

I try and imbibe the heart of what the director and I like about X or Y and then forget about it, and see what comes out in the moment.

As a cinematographer with a growing body of work, what do you hope audiences take away from your work on Sweetpea, and what’s next for you in terms of your career and future projects?

I think Sweetpea is a really fun show, it’s whimsical and funny, and emotional and exciting. I just hope people watch it and have fun. I hope people don’t really notice my work on it at all to be honest and are just carried along with the story, but if they do then I hope it’s in a subtly nostalgic sense that’s all a bit 90s and classic.

Currently, we are just putting the final post-touches to my first feature film Pillion (BBC, BFI, A24), directed by Harry Lighton, which is all very exciting. Its a big departure from Sweetpea – a very unconventional love story, starring Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgård, who were both wonderful to work with. 

I’ve got a few pans in the fire for the year to come, and I’m really excited for when I can share what we’ve got cooking!

If you want to dive into Sweetpea’s breakdowns, check out this article!

About Nick Morris

London-based cinematographer, represented by XO Management in Europe and CAA in the US. Credits include Mood (BBC Three), Everything Now (Netflix), the whole of Sweetpea Season One for Sky Atlantic, and Pillion (BBC, BFI, A24), directed by Harry Lighton. His work on Sweetpea earned a BSC nomination for Cinematography in a Television Drama and a BAFTA TV Craft nomination for Photography and Lighting: Fiction.

Thank you, friends, for reading our insightful interview with Cinematographer Nick Morris! We’re incredibly grateful to Nick for all the value he has shared with our community over the years.
If you’d like to dive deeper into his work, we invite you to check out another magazine article dedicated to him.