How Brilliant Minds visualizes the work of Oliver Sacks with a unique shooting style

Oliver Sacks has an unconventional way of diagnosing and treating his patients.

The legendary neurologist, who is the inspiration for new NBC drama Brilliant Minds, took a holistic approach to his work, seeking to get inside the hearts and minds of his subjects to better understand their challenges outside of a purely medical or scientific setting.

Brilliant Minds stars Zachary Quinto as Dr. Oliver Wolf, a reimagined take on Sacks — who died in 2015 at the age of 82 — that situates the doctor in the Bronx in 2024. Recruited to Bronx General, Dr. Wolf initially struggles to connect with his colleagues (and the group of interns he did not sign up for), while also facing his own mental health and interpersonal struggles. Suffering from prospognosia (a.k.a. face blindness), Wolf tends to isolate himself. But as he brings his unconventional methods to the lives of his patients, he begins to change the minds of those around him.

In tackling questions of neurological disorders and mental health on the show, the doctors often have to step outside the four walls of their hospital. In one episode, Wolf and his interns even go back to high school so as to enmesh themselves in their patient's world. “When you leave the hospital, your journey doesn’t end,” notes creator Michael Grassi, speaking to Entertainment Weekly for our 2024 Fall TV Preview cover story. “You’re still dealing with emotional and physical fallout. Dr. Wolf enters their POV and tried to understand how the patient is feeling. He wants to get into their heart, mind, and soul.”

To that end, Grassi and the production team needed to devise a way to visually render what Dr. Wolf is doing — without resorting to hokey animation or visual tricks. “I don't want this to be the type of show where we're flying into someone's brain and seeing neurons fire,” says Grassi. “Because I don't feel like that's necessarily representing what the patient is seeing and experiencing and feeling. What's really important is for us to be grounded in the experience of the patient as closely as possible. Even the way we approach how we're telling the stories and how we're seeing the patient's POV is very in-camera and tactile. We want to not have it be a visual effects extravaganza, but more told through our camera and our storytelling.”

That most directly impacts the cinematography, and Grassi cites The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as two visual touchstones. But it’s similarly transformed Quinto’s approach to his work, particularly his representation of Wolf’s face blindness. “How do you dramatize neurological disorders?” Quinto asks. “That’s been a unique process, from a production standpoint. Each of our directors use the patient in that episode and their specific neurological challenge to inform the cinematic vocabulary of the show. It’s wonderful that the way an episode looks correlates to the patient and the condition they’re trying to come to terms with.”

Quinto studied the ways that those who suffer from face blindness cope, figuring out how to convey that experience to the audience. Working closely with the directors for the first two episodes, the actor developed a specific physical language. “Someone with face blindness would look at a certain feature of yours — the way that your hair is parted in the middle, or maybe you have attached or detached earlobes, or you may wear some statement ring. There are different skills that people with this condition are able to integrate and sharpen over time so that there's less of an apparent deficit. And these are the kinds of questions that we're asking ourselves, as creative collaborators: How do we bring this to life and make it relatable and make it interesting and make it dynamic in a way that'll keep people engaged?”

While Quinto had heard of Sacks, the actor hadn’t read any of the scientist’s work until he signed on to the show (he expresses a deep sadness over never meeting Sacks). And though Sacks wrote numerous books and papers on his research, Quinto found the most useful insights in Sacks’ writings about himself, including his memoir and numerous essays. “Hearing his voice applied to himself was really valuable to me,” Quinto says. “There is a parallel between what drives [my character] and what drives most actors to investigate, explore, and immerse ourselves into the psyche of another person. To try to do that with empathy, compassion, and understanding. That’s true of Oliver Wolf and was true of Oliver Sacks. What drives the relentlessness of their pursuit on behalf of their patients is a deep empathy and respect for the human experience.”

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These parallels are exactly why Grassi had the Quinto in mind as his first choice to play Oliver Wolf. “He has this inherent intelligence to him,” Grassi remarks of Star Trek, Heroes, and American Horror Story star. “He has always taken big swings with his performances, and they feel so authentic. When I think about Oliver Sacks, I think about somebody who always took big swings as well. It was an interesting mashup of actor and real life. We’ve seen Zach do so much genre. I was really excited to see him play a character that was grounded in a real hospital with real medicine and see him tap into this incredible pool of empathy that he has.”

Fans of Quinto are used to seeing him play someone more interested in taking lives than saving them, which makes Brilliant Minds a major departure for the actor. “Wolf has not got any ulterior darkness to him,” Quinto notes. “He’s iconoclastic and rebellious. He sometimes acts before he thinks. But at his core, he is a good person. That could be a surprise for people used to seeing me play more nefarious characters.”

Brilliant Minds premieres on NBC on Sept. 23 at 10 p.m.