Pictures courtesy of Nathalie Pitters and Netflix
Cinematographer Nathalie Pittters was recently named a BAFTA Breakthrough. A great honor for her work on the miniseries Channel 4’s Brian and Maggie. Last year, on a Saturday night, she wrapped that acclaimed project and began shooting How to Get Heaven from Belfast on Monday morning.
Pittters brings vibrant, expressive colors to the comedic pitfalls and murderous hijinks in the delightful Lisa McGee–created show. The story follows three longtime friends – Saoirse (Roisin Gallagher), Robyn (Sinéad Keenan) and Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne) – reuniting after the supposed death of their old schoolmate. Conspiracies, chases, and puzzle games ensue.
Pitters shot episodes four through six of the characters adventures, capturing them in the midst of explosions and footchases, not to mention top-tier banter. It’s a rare comedy that’s appealing to the eye. Recently, Pitters spoke with What’s On Netflix about crafting visually engaging comedy.
There’s a hotel bar that almost looks like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory in the early episodes of the show. Based on that location alone, how big and expressive with colors did you want to go in your episodes [4-6]?
I was really fortunate because our block one DP, Ashley Barron, and our block one director, Michael Lennox, set up such a bold and expressive world for myself and for Dan. Daniel Stafford-Clark did block three to follow us [episodes 7-8]. It was such a joy to follow because it meant that we could choose to be naturalistic at times, but we didn’t have to be.
There are moments where tonally in the script, it is appropriate for us to be just with daylight and normal sort of shaping. And other times when you want to throw the crazy colors in there. What was great about it was that usually when a cinematographer is deciding what lighting they want to put in or how I’m going to like this character, we always use the word motivations. What’s the motivational light source here?
Is it the sun? Is it the lamps? Is it the neon sign in the background that we then augment? A lot of certainly modern cinematography, and I think we’ve all learned this from all the greats in the past, is that we’re trying to emulate and then heighten nature.
And this show can have a pretty madcap nature about it.
It’s like throwing in all kinds of mad colors. It meant that I didn’t have to rack my brain and try to think like, oh, but why would I have a red light here? It’s like, fuck it, just put a red light there. Why the hell not? That’s the world we’re setting up is a world where there’s no rules. That’s the situation that these ladies find themselves in. Something has happened way outside of any kind of normal rule that a human might expect to live by.
The characters are getting bits of information at the same time as the audience is getting bits of information. For that reason, I think having such an expressive color palette, an expressive lighting choice was the right choice.
The show goes to wildly different locations, can change tonally, and hop genres, but what was important to keep visually consistent through the series?
The one thing we’ve really wanted to maintain as a visual continuity throughout the whole show was the color and that weird lens, the one that warps the 21 mil. Oh, yeah. Very wide, very warpy. And we loved it. There were times where we’d use that lens. It’d be like, oh my God, I’m literally seeing all my lights. You really had to be creative and clever when you were using that lens.
You can’t hide anything.
It will see you, even if you’re behind the camera, it sees everything. So it was really exciting. [Director] George [Kane] and I made sure to use that as the first shot on our first day because we wanted to establish that continuity from the get go. We wanted to sort of say, we are staying in this world. We have no plans to exit this world. And that lens is used so well in block one and then in my block and in block three to show the airiness of this weird world that these girls keep finding themselves in. We wanted to use it whenever there was a weird thing happening.
What about when you take the characters to Portugal? How’d you want the bold colors to tell that story?
In reality, it was Malta. At the end of that first Malta episode, episode four, a yacht blows up and the girls escape. What I wanted to do was keep the bold lighting color, but train it more towards fire color because I wanted to set it up for the fire at the end. We start with an explosion in mind pretty much with the car. That was a real explosion. And then we end with the yacht that was a VFX explosion, but there were still some real fire elements.
I wanted to take what Ashley had set up in block one with these bold colors and then translate them into something that felt more naturalistic, because it’s a warm color that we find in our homes, but I wanted to put it everywhere because of this fire that happens.
Whether it’s dutch angles, making the world look like it’s turning upside down, were there any staples of the crime genre you really wanted to visually lean into with this show?
We also wanted it to feel new and modern. I feel like if you changed your TV to black and white and you watched the show, you’d obviously miss all the color nuances, but you’d still get the same kind of film noir lighting. I think that’s sort of high contrast, lots of depth smoke in the background. We wanted to heighten everything. So the moonlight color is even heightened. I’ve got rain, we’ve got fire, we’ve got explosions, we’ve got everything.
But we also wanted to keep it very Irish and very funny. A lot of film noirs, especially the ones I’ve seen, they’re very serious. No one smiles. So we wanted that but it was really silly and really funny. I mean, the show goes through all these amazing tonal shifts. You’ve got this sort of cult thing then it’s an eerie mystery then. Is it supernatural, then it’s a horror, then it’s a comedy, then it’s a road trip that just goes through all these shifts.
But you’ve got these three women who’ve known each other so long that no conversation is off limits. When we were with the women, it had to be funny, even if it was a serious situation. So when their yacht is blown up rather than going into serious action film mode, we just went into weird comedy mode because, why the hell not?
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Comedy isn’t always the most cinematic space. Usually, pretty standard cutting, framing, and blocking, so was making cinematic comedy a fulfilling job?
Definitely, definitely. I’ve shot some comedy before, and it’s understandable, they’re very resistant to frames being too dark because it’s not funny if it’s dark. Darkness is serious. I remember once being told by an editor, “Lens flares aren’t funny.” He was editing a show I did, and I had a lens flare in there. I remember thinking, why can’t flares be funny? And I think in this show, flares are very funny, and it’s all very serious.
We’ve covered some of the more heightened visuals in How to Get to Heaven From Belfast, but what about the natural beauty of the city and the country? What in Ireland did you want to capture naturalistically?
We were shooting some of the most beautiful places I’ve been to, and I’ve traveled quite a lot in my life. There’s just this raw nature, raw beautiful nature that can be quite unforgiving in places. Lots of cliffs and steep bits. Lots of green. I wanted to show it.
We had such an amazing drone team as well that were helping us a lot with this car driving through landscapes. It is a road trip at the end of the day, isn’t it? It starts in one place, travels everywhere and then it comes back. I really hope that we did justice to the Irish landscapes. They’re absolutely stunning.
How To Get To Heaven From Belfast. (L to R) Darragh Hand as Liam, Roisin Gallagher as Saoirse Cr. Courtesy of Netflix/Christopher Barr © 2025
You studied English Literature in school. How did that influence how you interpret story?
So my undergraduate was English literature with art history. I picked those subjects because when I was at school, I really loved analyzing text. With my English lit teacher, you’d have a poem you spend three or four weeks just talking about every line and every word. I really love digging into the details of it, especially understanding the subtext and the nuance.
And then similarly with art history, you can look at a painting and just go, “That’s nice,” and then keep walking. Or you can look around the edges and then you can identify the composition, the lighting, the light source. Why is there this rosebush in the frame? Does that mean something? Is that related to the family that paid for it? Does that mean some forbidden love?
When I found out that cinematography existed as a concept, I was fascinated. And then when I was like, oh, it’s actually a career. So then it was sort of a laser vision of what I needed to do with my life, because it’s the most fun thing for me to just analyze the hell out of stuff.
You get to bring your literature and history background to your cinematography, right?
I try to bring all of those elements through whenever I’m thinking about character, whenever I’m thinking about in this scene, we’ll go with a warmer light or a softer light or a harder light or a cooler light. And I’m thinking, why do I do that? Why should I do that in this scene? And so, this script was super fun for me because I got to do all my usual things, and then I got to throw some of it away and be like, fuck it. The colors for me weren’t always assigned to an emotion.
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What about when they were?
There’s a scene where Saoirse and Liam (Darragh Hand) are in a trailer, and we made the light red because there’s a little romance brewing between them. There’s a bit of danger happening, too. I wanted to introduce the red in that respect, but then that wasn’t always the case. It wasn’t always, like, red equals love and blue equals this. It was sometimes just your gut instinct. I see these two sort of flirting on screen and being a bit shady, so yeah, it’s going to be red.
It’s a real privilege to do my degree as a career indirectly – but it’s also so direct. I’m not an English literature teacher. I’m not an art historian, but I get to use elements of those to directly positively affect my choices in my job. Not everyone gets to do that, and not everyone gets to do their hobby as their job. I’m really, really happy.
How to Get to Heaven from Belfast is now streaming on Netflix.
