Visions of Light
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"The twenties was really a golden age for cinema because the camera was unencumbered by sound and it was unencumbered by all the... devices that accompany verbal dialogue storytelling It really was a visual medium."--John Bailey "Everything had to be told visually and I think when sound came in, that was a great catastrophe for movie-making. I still believe that if sound would have come in ten or 15 years later, I think the art of movies and cinematography would have been much, much higher than even it is today."--Vilmos Zsigmond "Garbo wouldn't have anybody but Bill Daniels do her pictures." "The one I really was inspired on was Gregg Toland. I saw all his films and I remember the first one, that was The Long Voyage Home. It was fantastic. He worked with a depth of field the whole time and lighting was so interesting because he dared to take a lot of contrast in the pictures. And perhaps it was a little too much sometimes, but for a cinematographer, it was fantastic."--Sven Nykvist "The visual style of film noir, I think, has fingerprints going back very early in German Expressionist cinema. They had a sparseness. A visual and stylistic sparseness. What is the bare-bones story? What are the bare-bones facts of the characters? And what is the basic visual information we need to tell the story? And so, film noir developed an increasingly dense and rarefied visual vocabulary that had to do with very strong single-source lighting, slashes of light, dark shadows, low angles... Extremely strong graphic elements that had kind of a primal simplicity to them."--John Bailey "The shift of so-called styles and techniques in cinematography, that happened right around the period of... Connie Hall, Haskell Wexler, Vilmos Zsigmond, Laszlo Kovacs, myself, Gordon Willis, it came about because of the directors."--John Alonzo |
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Visions of Light: the Art of Cinematography (1992) is an American-Japanese documentary film by Arnold Glassman, Todd McCarthy, and Stuart Samuels which investigates the art of cinematography.
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Synopsis
The film is the equivalent of a walk through a cinema museum. The documentary interviews many modern-day directors of photography and they illustrate via examples their best work and the scenes from films that influenced them to pursue their art.
Many known cinematographers are interviewed: Néstor Almendros, John Bailey, Conrad Hall, Michael Chapman, László Kovács, Sven Nykvist, Vittorio Storaro, Haskell Wexler, Gordon Willis, Vilmos Zsigmond, and others.
Among the pioneers to whom they pay homage are Gregg Toland, Billy Bitzer, James Wong Howe and John Alton. The practitioners also explain the origins behind many of their most indelible images in movie history.
Cinematographer interviews
- Sandi Sissel
- Ernest Dickerson
- Michael Chapman
- Allen Daviau
- Caleb Deschanel
- Conrad Hall
- William A. Fraker
- John Bailey
- Néstor Almendros
- Vilmos Zsigmond
- Stephen H. Burum
- Charles Lang
- Sven Nykvist
- László Kovács
- James Wong Howe
- Haskell Wexler
- Vittorio Storaro
- John A. Alonzo
- Victor J. Kemper
- Owen Roizman
- Gordon Willis
- Bill Butler
- Michael Ballhaus
- Frederick Elmes
Filmography
The filmmakers discuss the following films:
Subtitles
One night I was watching the 1947 version of Oliver Twist,
David Lean's Oliver Twist, photographed by Guy Green
We were watching the movie, watching the opening scenes of the film,
of Oliver's mother in labour walking across this dark moor
and my uncle just happened to say, "God, this photography is gorgeous."
And I said, "Photography?"
That's when I learned what a director of photography was
I found out that I was unconsciously...
I was responding to light
In the beginning, all there was was a guy with a camera
There were no directors. There was nothing
There was a guy on the camera and he would shoot these subjects
The subject may be 20 seconds long of a train coming at you, wherever it is
Then actors were brought in
and because the cameramen were basically photographers,
and weren't that facile with performers,
usually one of the performers directed the performers
So, right in the very beginning, you saw that there was the division of duties
There was the director who took care of the acting part,
and there was the cameraman who took care of everything else
The cinematographer's job is to tell people where to look,
to say, "Look at this. She's going to weep and sing the aria," or, "He's going to draw the gun."
Or, you know, "He feels OK, but behind him is an ape. You'd better look at the ape!"
We do some things we don't realise we're doing
until we see the film put together
We did them out of instinct.
We didn't know exactly why
And they work for the picture
And it's very hard to express a reason for it
but it's there
The great cinematographers are able to
understand the stories they are trying to tell
and find those elusive visual images
that help to tell that story
A great DP adds to the material that already exists,
and really works to understand the subject matter
and the language of the director they're working with
I think visually
I think of how, if you turned off the soundtrack,
anybody would stick around and figure out what was going on
There's just every technique, visually
There's a language far more complex than words
I enjoy going onto a stage that's totally black, striking a first light, and saying, "Here we go."
That really turns me on, personally
I wanted to copy...
...simulate what I saw on the screen by the giants and masters
To this day, I still have a reverence of Charlie Lang, Stanley Cortez...
...and Ted McCord, and Arthur Miller...
...and Hal Moore, and Leon Shamroy,
Milton Krasner and all those people
I wanted to be like them
I wanted to do what they did
What you had to have in the black-and-white days,
you had to have a real grasp of what photography meant
Those were the real cinematographers. These people knew photography
The more I've learned, and shot films,
when I go back and look what was done in the teens and the '20s...
Some years ago, I had the very good fortune
to see an original negative print of Birth of a Nation, shot by Billy Bitzer,
who was with Griffith on all of his early films
It was an inspiration to realise what was achieved in that cinematography
We're talking pretty close to the beginning of everything here
and to realise what he accomplished with the equipment he had
and how quickly so many things became much more sophisticated
The '20s was really a golden age for cinema
because the camera was unencumbered by sound
And it was unencumbered by all the...
devices that accompany verbal dialogue storytelling
It really was a visual medium
The early movies seemed to be freer
I mean,
you see like scenes like in Way Down East,
when Lillian Gish is jumping
from a piece of ice to another one,
it's almost a documentary
She actually is doing it
and there is no tricks and no studio
The camera was very free
The camera could move very fast
Cameras were much smaller
and the fact that they didn't have sound
allowed them to shoot very freely
The camera could be anywhere
And the Germans, in the '20s,
were really the cutting edge
Directors like Pabst and Murnau
really took a lot of the formal elements
that came out of German expressionist sculpture
and painting and graphics
and grafted them into film
A lot of European film-makers - directors like Murnau -
came to the United States
The production of Sunrise was a real watershed for American film-making
And that film was startling in every aspect
In its design aspect
Certainly in its use of expressionistic lighting techniques
Character was revealed in Sunrise
through a lot of very complicated lighting changes
and dramatic lighting sources
that were very, very new and fresh in American films
They had crane shots that went for ever and ever and ever
And they had these kind of rigs,
that would be rigged overhead in the studios
This was all very inventive business that they did
They had a fluid camera that would just continue on and on and on
Where we have steadicams and things like that, and Panaglides,
they were doing that some time ago
We're talking 1927
Everything had to be told visually and I think when sound came in, that was a great catastrophe for movie-making. I still believe that if sound would have come in ten or 15 years later, I think the art of movies and cinematography would have been much, much higher than even it is today.
We've all seen those sequences from early sound films where it's all too obvious that there's a microphone planted in a flower vase at the centre of the table, because all the actors are leaning forward, speaking into it
- But I really shouldn't blame you
- I'm the son of your employer
- and that in itself makes me
- a low, low scoundrel
- If I didn't trust you, I wouldn't be here
- So, here we are
- Chopped onions?
The camera can't move at all, it can't even pan or tilt,
because it's in a huge, soundproof refrigerator or ice box
and it took a number of years for cinematographers
to start thinking about ways to free the camera again
If a director, as Rouben Mamoulian did,
cared enough to fight for his mobile camera
and the whole idea that you could do a sound film,
where you didn't record sound for every shot
or perhaps you would add the sound later
I think you see with Mamoulian, with Lubitsch,
you see some early talkies...
You see it with Vidor
I mean, these people refused to be bound to the conventional
Good work was being done. It was more difficult
Mommy!
All right, boys
Now, when you come through there...
Once, of course, the camera could be blimped
in some kind of a portable device, soundproofed,
it could then be put on a dolly and the camera could be moved again
Of course, it energises and infuses the whole feel of a film
to have a camera that can move with actors,
can move counter to actors
Are you giving me the run-around?
The '30s brought in the full flowering of the studio system
And the leading cinematographers helped create
what was considered to be a studio look
There was the gloss of Paramount,
the harder-edged look that Warner Brothers was noted for,
and the glamour that we associate with MGM
In the heavy studio times,
through the '30s, through the '50s,
every studio had its own laboratory
and every studio was trying to make what they did distinctive and different
And it depended very much on the group of contract cameramen
and art directors and directors, how they ran their operation
Quiet, everybody!
They learned together and they developed this technique
and they invented the equipment
Everything you see on a movie camera was invented by some cameraman
because he needed to do something
and he didn't know how to do it
and so they had these machine shops and they would just fabricate this stuff
It was a system where people really followed up through the system
You were an assistant. You worked your way up
You followed in the footsteps of the person that you were working under
And so it tended to create a stronger impression of, you know, a particular style,
that we think of as being Hollywood
It was no joke. You finished on a Saturday night,
and Monday morning you started a different picture
Sometimes with Sunday to read the script. They kept you working
You were paid a very good salary, but you didn't get to goof off
and it was only on the very biggest pictures where you might have a long period of testing
So, these people were tested every day as they worked,
and had to be able to handle different things
I'm sure they were assigned to their strengths
by studios sometimes,
but sometimes they weren't
I think the system had its good points and its bad points for cinematographers,
as it did for everyone
I think that today we look back
and sometimes there's a nostalgia
After years of berating the studio system,
now we sort of say, "Gee, but they made so many pictures,
and you had so many opportunities."
Have a drink?
The dominance of the actor and the actress
as the driving engine of the Hollywood movies
dictated a certain kind of vocabulary
that, basically, were medium shots, close-ups, over-the-shoulders
and the principle was to make the actors, especially the leading actor and actress,
look as handsome and as beautiful as possible
When you photographed a star well,
they had enough power to be able to put you under contract
Or, at least, to insist that that cinematographer would photograph them
Louis B Meyer was a very smart man
He'd call the cameramen in and he'd say,
"I don't care what the star goes through,
flood, fire, I don't care, she's got to look beautiful."
This is the first thing you learn,
because this is actually a cameraman's bread and butter
They used to tell the cameraman,
"Put your shadows anywhere, but don't put any shadows on their faces."
They wanted to see their faces
and that was the rule
Most of the photography out there had that look
Women stars particularly, at that time, were very important
and they wanted their own photographers
Garbo wouldn't have anybody but Bill Daniels do her pictures.
After all, when one may not have long to live, why shouldn't one have fancies?
Here's a man who'd been very much a rebel film-maker,
who later on went on to make his own reputation
as the studio cameraman par excellence
I was sad, when Garbo died,
that not many papers mentioned Bill Daniels' name
Because this is a man that created with her her whole screen persona
If you noticed,
the beautiful jobs that were done on Marlene Dietrich
Where she would be maybe...
If you light a set at 100 foot-candles, she would be at 110, 115 foot-candles
She would have just a little bit more light on her than anybody else
so she would pop out amongst the crowd
It sounds funny, but I don't seem to be able to entertain you
I hate to be entertained. Please don 't do it
I shot her on a picture called Desire
and I found out that her face needs a completely different kind of lighting
A high key light that would narrow her cheeks down
And just made her look well
Sternberg, I think, found that out
In fact, she almost insisted. She'd say, "That's the light I'd like to use up there."
Won't you please get out of here?
Now, is that a nice way to talk to the man whose name you bear?
All right, I took your name. So what?
Claudette Colbert, yes, she had to be lit on one side
You probably know that
We even built the set so that she would always be on one side of her face
She really did have problems with the other side of her face
So, once in a while, I'd get a man star
Strange, though, when both of them had to be lit on one side
Now you had problems!
It was the studio look that was pre-eminent rather than individual cinematographers
But there were coming out of that,
you know, really stellar people...
like George Folsey,
like Gregg Toland,
like Arthur Miller,
...who had such strength,
and such individual voice,
that they kind of transcended whatever studio they happened to work for
Today, you look back and very easily recognise a lot of their films from the look,
irrespective of director even
Do you wish anything, madam?
I didn't expect to see you, Mrs Danvers
I noticed that a window wasn't closed...
George Barnes, I admired his work, too. He did romantic work, wonderfully imaginative
and just great-looking
It's a lovely room, isn't it?
The loveliest room you've ever seen
Everything is kept just as Mrs de Winter liked it
Nothing has been altered since that last night
Gregg Toland learned his craft through George Barnes
I think he was with him for many, many pictures
And then Gregg broke away doing his own and did wonderful work
The one I really was inspired on was Gregg Toland. I saw all his films and I remember the first one, that was The Long Voyage Home. It was fantastic. He worked with a depth of field the whole time and lighting was so interesting because he dared to take a lot of contrast in the pictures. And perhaps it was a little too much sometimes, but for a cinematographer, it was fantastic.
Let's take him aboard!
On your feet!
He did a film for John Ford, The Grapes of Wrath,
which had a very naturalistic feel,
almost a documentary reality
You can take frames from The Grapes of Wrath
and put 'em alongside the WPA photographs
of Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange or Doris Ulmann or anybody,
and it's really hard to tell the difference
He did seem to have an eye for things
and also he was very creative
For instance,
we much later started doing filming with candlelight, for instance, or a match
and he already did it in The Grapes of Wrath
He didn't have the technology we have today
Film was not as fast as it was
But already you get the idea that, actually, the light,
when he's describing that empty house,
comes from the hand and the match
Toland was a gambler
He was a real gambler
He wasn't afraid to try anything
I remember when they were doing Citizen Kane
I was working in the trick department at Selznick and they shot it at Selznick Studio
Is that really your idea of how to run a newspaper?
I don't know how to run a newspaper. I just try everything I can think of
He was working with Orson Welles who was also a gambler
The two of 'em made a wonderful pair on that picture
Wonderful pair
Wouldn't you love to have known what films that Welles and Toland screened together?
And what they enjoyed? Obviously Welles had seen Toland's work and been impressed with it
The idea that Toland understood all the rules he could break
No public man whom Kane himself...
The film opens up with a send-up of the March of Time newsreel
And, I mean, it is done with such loving detail
I mean, in terms of texures and contrasts and dupes and scratching film intentionally
What a wonderful time they had to have
sitting around there, thinking up all of the different things they were gonna do in that film
They must have had a very good trust for one another,
because a director has to kind of embrace their DP, to let them go
And what Toland contributed is so amazing to that film
The deep space
And the camera blocking
It takes a certain kind of director to want to put up with being that demanding on their actors
That's complete choreography of acting to camera
By having the deep focus,
he was able to give Orson a lot more leeway on how he moved his actors
It freed him up
I think that was a tremendous contribution Gregg gave to the film
Be careful, Charles
Pull your muffler round your neck
I think we shall have to tell him now
We always have this problem
with cinematography not being able to carry somebody in the foreground
who's sharper in focus than somebody 20 feet back
Gregg had, for a number of years, been working on new lenses, faster lenses,
that would allow him to pour more light in
and get a greater depth in these scenes
And that's one of the things, I think,
that gave Citizen Kane the kind of dynamics that it had
Extraordinary dynamics compared to other films at the time
In 1948, it played in one of the...
most popular cinemas in Budapest
Exactly one week
And the government just pulled it right after that
The little screening room was packed
because we'd heard Citizen Kane is going to be screened
which was one of the major events, I think, at that time
That was the first time I'd seen Citizen Kane
and I just couldn't believe the magnitude and the magic of film-making
And after a while,
Citizen Kane was like a textbook for us
It's so sad they never got to collaborate again
And Welles' regard for him is expressed, very plainly,
in the end title card of the film, where Welles shared his title card with Toland
Film noir really had its high water mark right after the war
The visual style of film noir, I think,
has fingerprints going back very early in German Expressionist cinema
They had a sparseness
A visual and stylistic sparseness
What is the bare-bones story?
What are the bare-bones facts of the characters?
And what is the basic visual information we need to tell the story?
And so, film noir developed an increasingly dense and rarefied visual vocabulary
that had to do with very strong single-source lighting,
slashes of light, dark shadows, low angles...
Extremely strong graphic elements
that had kind of a primal simplicity to them
We weren't expecting you, Mildred. Obviously
John Alton is really one of the pre-eminent film noir cinematographers
Alton and the people in film noir were not afraid of the dark
In fact, they were willing to sketch things just very, very, very slightly
to see how you could use dark, not as negative space,
but as the most important element in the scene
We all have been influenced by that
in terms of what's important are the lights you don't turn on
Go!
Alton did one picture particularly that I feel is very influential
called The Big Combo
which is a very simple, inelegant film,
that is somewhat brutal in a way,
but which incorporates these very sparse lighting elements and graphic elements
So that it is very much black and white
There's very little grey in that movie
You can take almost any sequence - and certainly the final sequence in The Big Combo,
which has as a single light source, a searchlight going around this dockside
It ends with a gunfight taking place against that
The final shot is a silhouette walking out into sort of a grey dawn
I mean, very stark imagery
You end up at the end of the noir period with a film like Touch of Evil by Orson Welles,
which was enormously baroque and complex in its style,
but was still, basically, a film noir
Told you I brought you up here for a reason
Welles had caused to be brought to Universal Studios
one of these Eclair Caméflex lightweight European cameras
He had a very enthusiastic young operator named Philip Lathrop
and Lathrop got very into hand-holding this
and working with Welles on these compositions
You see some of the scenes and realise how much hand-holding was done,
but it's extremely seamless
That film, in particular, was an inspiration to all of us
because it was a textbook of what you could do
It was shot on a small budget in a short time, mostly on locations,
and again you had,
almost simultaneous with the breakout in France of the New Wave,
you had Orson Welles doing a New Wave film in a Hollywood studio
I think it's continued to be an inspiration to a lot of film-makers
Colour processes were always being experimented with,
from the very beginning of cinema,
even before there was a de facto colour process
Film-makers occasionally hand-painted frame by frame
entire sequences or even entire films
Then later in the silent period, overall tinting for sequences,
like blue for night, amber for dawn, or whatever, was also practised
And then during the '30s,
Ray Rennahan photographed a film called Mystery of the Wax Museum
using a two-colour process,
which incorporated two strips of film running simultaneously through the camera
Ray Rennahan had been doing some gorgeous stuff with the two-colour process earlier,
but when the three-colour process arrived,
and they started to appreciate the fact that this was something quite sophisticated,
the interest in it grew
The process was recognised as startling
It was subtle and beautifully gradated in its tonality
Interest in it immediately grew and led to some of the really crowning achievements
of the late '30s and early '40s in colour cinematography
Another dance, and my reputation will be lost for ever
With enough courage, you can do without a reputation
Oh, you do talk scandalous!
When Gone With the Wind came in,
they started on what they called the new film, a fast film
But everything had to be lit with arcs
And with this amount of light,
it was very difficult working under those conditions
Victor Fleming, of course, used to be a cameraman
before he became a director
and he knew the camera
He knew the limitations
Now, the shot of the station
with all the dummies and the people dead,
we had to have a special crane that came up from Long Beach
It was a long pole that they used, a derrick,
and that was a difficult shot
But I thought that was one of the best shots in the picture
For the people who had done black and white, to go into colour,
it was not only a technical adaption, but it was a philosophical one
Having to learn to see in black and white is a very great discipline
And to suddenly, after years and years
of focusing all of your faculties into being able to previsualise
how a scene was going to appear in black and white,
and suddenly say, "Oh, well, here it is in colour..."
Black and white is a much more immediately abstract medium
It's removed from reality by its very nature
And you're more free to associate drama and tonality and so on
inside black and white,
and I think that's why many of them never wanted to leave it
Those of us who just missed our chance to do black and white,
I look forward to the day when I get to do a black and white picture
I have no doubt it's going to be difficult
and I think that for us, it's going to be going the other direction
Shame on you, Ruby,
mooning around the house after that mad dog of a man
Every one of the old-time DPs,
like Charlie Clarke and Leon Shamroy
and Arthur Miller and James Wong Howe, the people I met and knew,
they really thought of it as a job and they thought of it as a craft
And when you would talk to them about any kind of art kind of thing,
they would never kind of admit to it being art
They'd say, "Oh, yeah, we did this interesting effect in the picture or that interesting effect."
When you make a movie,
you've got to have a screenplay, a story
That story really dictates to what we are going to do
How to shoot it. How to photograph it
How to direct it, how to act it
Everyone is subservient to that
We can go one way or the other,
to get our own ideas in it
but not get our personality in it
Get these papers while they're hot!
- Latest paper here! - Come on, come on!
Keep your sweatshirt on
As a cameraman, I try to keep the mechanics out of it
Not to interfere with the scene
And I try... really try to find the most simple approach in lighting
I don't want my photography to get in the way of the story, of the acting
I'll remember you, honey
You're the one that got away
I worked for James Wong Howe
on second unit camera on a picture called Picnic
I did a number of the game shots
and also the last shot of the film,
which was a helicopter shot
And at that time,
helicopters were not used for photography
The military, and the navy as a matter of fact, just had helicopters
One of the best moments of my life
was when the dailies came on,
which was about three days later
It was Cinemascope at the time
And I was sitting next to Jimmy Howe
And my scene came up,
and it was quite spectacular,
particularly to an audience who had not seen helicopter shots before
And Jimmy Howe said, "Very good, very good."
And so, even now, when I shoot,
when I do a shot that I really like,
I say in my ear the way Jimmy Howe said to me, "Very good, very good."
No, leave room for the cake!
The anamorphic aspect ratio was extremely horizontal and rectangular
And films up until that time had been composed in almost a square format
And now with this rather large and sometimes empty anamorphic space,
it became confusing what to do with the sides of the screen -
how much of it to use
And as you see more and more use of Panavision and Cinemascope
in the late '50s and early '60s,
you start to feel the breadth,
the width of the frame being exploited
in a very exciting way
So, really, when you get to films like Lawrence of Arabia,
you have the same kind of excitement and dynamic energy
inside this very wide frame,
that you had in the more square screen of the '40s
A lot of my generation had been very impressed with films from Europe
We'd had an opportunity to see these
And our pioneers, Haskell Wexler and Conrad Hall and so on,
who were giving us examples of reacting to the European style
and later on, when you got Vilmos Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs
and people that were coming from the European tradition and shooting films here,
we got an appreciation of a style
that was so different from that practised in the studios
I think the films of the French New Wave really influenced me the most
They captured a sense of the life, which was really wonderful,
by loosening up the camera and moving with it
They would not think anything
about picking up the camera and running with it
It had almost a documentary feel...
...and so that sort of quality about it would draw you into the film
in a way that, I think,
a more static camera would not
Which is not to say it's new,
because you go back and you look at Napoleon that Abel Gance made in 1926,
and it has every new idea you can conceive of,
even today,
with steadicams and everything else
He was swinging cameras from ropes
and inventing dollies and cranes
and doing all sorts of special effects in the camera
Cinematographers start studying new things in old things
to sort of invent a new way
I think that there was an evolution
and I think if a lot of these guys had been younger,
that they would have probably shown us a lot of very interesting stuff
I'll give a very good example
of what you're calling the "new style" in the '60s
It's Robert Surtees
I mean, he did...
What's the wedding picture with...
with Dustin Hoffman?
Elaine!
The Graduate
I remember reading all these reviews
They're going, "Fresh, innovative, exciting cinematography...
...Blah, blah, blah!"
Photographed by a 65-year-old man!
Because you have new tools,
the kind of person who is a cinematographer
is always pushing
You always want to explore, to get yourself into trouble
and see how well you can fight your way out
I don't think that each cinematographer can work with each director
There is a kind of selection you do in where you're going
There is a kind of journey that you are doing by yourself
You suddenly discover that on the same direction you can meet other people
You can meet friends. They can do this journey
You can meet people that can be your guide
for a portion of this journey
I think Bernado was one of those, one of the most important
Before we started The Conformist, Bernado called me
We started to talk about The Conformist and he says, "Vittorio,
what we know about that period,
mainly we know that period, the late '30s, through cinema."
So probably we have to use
everything that's been given to cinema up to now, to that period,
and read from our point of view
We look at that moment at one of the great masters in the American film industry
From Bernardo's point of view, it was Orson Welles
From mine, it was Gregg Toland
Each cinematographer, they did everything before my time
so I am the sum of the whole experience
The Conformist is almost a compendium of all of cinema language
It incorporates almost all the design,
photographic,
editorial...
techniques that have been developed
And does so in a very coherent and clear way
The shift of so-called styles and techniques in cinematography, that happened right around the period of... Connie Hall, Haskell Wexler, Vilmos Zsigmond, Laszlo Kovacs, myself, Gordon Willis, it came about because of the directors. You started having new directors who didn't want to work in the studio system. They wanted to go shoot pictures on location. Everything was very exciting and very crazy in those days because we had to make those films very fast. There was no time for it, there was no money for it.
The difference was with Easy Rider,
that we were able to really prepare that production
We took a trip from Los Angeles to New Orleans and scouted a lot of places
And suddenly you're exposed to this incredible, incredible vast country,
which has such a wonderful transition from one area to another,
and the visual sequence was wonderful
And that's how I learned and got to know the country
And that's magical...
...to really break down the country and all civilisation
to these pictorial elements
We were into images a little differently than the old system
The lighting was a little different
We would try things and specially...
I worked with Connie Hall for five years
I was his camera operator for five years and we did some great things, I think
I feel particularly involved in helping make mistakes acceptable
to studio heads and other people
And the audience even
By using them
By blatantly,
not by mistakes or anything, but by endeavour
If the light shone in the lens, and flared the lens,
that was considered a mistake
Somebody would report that
The operator would report, "The sun hit the lens, it flared the lens. Cut!"
There was never a fear
Conrad would use so little light that you'd barely see anything in a room
But you'd see it
There was nothing safe
Safe was never the word with him
Getting things too dark or not seeing eyes and things like that
Background too hot, windows blown and things like that
that nobody would dare do without getting fired in the slick old days
The second picture I did with Connie
was a picture called The Professionals
Connie Hall was the cameraman
I was the camera operator
Jordan Cronenweth was the assistant cameraman
And the second camera crew was Charles Rosher Junior, and Robert Byrne
I like the work that we did on that
Unfortunately, there was an awful lot of night
And night is always a conundrum in photography. Day for night, I mean
Connie was so good at this,
that we shot night of them escaping from Raza's compound
And then they jump in a coal cart and take off during the night
And then they make the jump and that was shot at the last part of day
and brought down
Connie was innovative and very daring... but always extremely solid
He's got, I think, exquisite taste
And he can make that balance between black and white, colour, day, night
And he just looks at it and he just has that innate ability to do that
I think it's a gift
You're unlucky, bastard!
I don't think there was a choice about shooting it in colour or black and white
There were still 112 pictures being made in black and white that year
That was an easy choice
Doing it widescreen was a harder choice
- Hop in, boys. Where are you going? - Come on. Get in
And we felt that it might be a really wonderful proscenium to present this material in
He was in a fever
The scene where Robert Blake is about to be hanged
and he's talking to the chaplain
It was shot on the stage
We had a rain gutter over the top
It was like coming down. And we had a fan off to the side
which wasn't blowing the rain against the window
but was blowing the spray from the rain against the window
The light hitting his face with this phenomenon happening on the windows,
happened to hit his face one time when I was looking
So I went to Richard and I said, "Richard, watch this on his face now."
And we did another rehearsal
And you can see the water running down and it drips around
and he's talking about his father and it's very sad
He's going to be hanged
But he's playing it very straight
Unemotional
And the visuals were crying for him
I hate him
And I love him
I've had so many cinematographers call me and ask me how I did that shot
Well, I didn't conceive it at all
Richard didn't conceive it. Nobody conceived it
It was purely a visual accident
I think I was more afraid that I couldn't do it the Hollywood way
than I was arrogant or convinced
that my way would be a cinematic advance
So I was trying to...
I was trying to wed the two
So, anyway, I married the SOB
I had it all planned out
First he'd take over the History Department
Then when Daddy retired, he 'd take over the whole college
That was the way it was supposed to be
Getting angry, baby, huh?
What I knew was documentaries
What I knew was the simple way
What I knew is hand-holding
What I knew was how to light realistically
Because most of the time in documentaries,
you work with realistic light
The atmosphere was really different
And I was considered a kid
although I was in my 30s, I guess
No, sir, this is not normal at all
This is the truth. This really happened
I did help somewhat in my knowledge of film cutting
I did help somewhat in my knowledge of how a camera could move
And that also came from my documentary background
I read in Richard Burton's autobiography
that he was against me being the cameraman on Virginia Woolf
because he was afraid that with my gutsy, newsreel-type background
that I would show the pockmarks on his face and would be unkind to him
And that...
Elizabeth took my side and ultimately he was pleased with the results
Some scenes came back when we were shooting in New England,
which somebody at the lab felt was too dark,
and there was talk of firing me
A lot of this I found out later, fortunately
Then I told them I planned that
I wanted degrees of darkness and degrees of fill light,
so that when the early morning light came,
we would have some subliminal sense of a change in time
But there was a lot of heat on that film
I do not think that movies should be made because of the dialogue
I think it should have a good story
The important thing has to be how it is told visually
And dialogue should be like music in a film
You Joel McCabe?
Yeah
Mrs Miller. I've come to see you
McCabe and Mrs Miller was an excellent example of being a partner with the director
Altman wanted to have a special look for this movie
He didn't really know exactly what he was looking for
And then when he started to talk about it,
he said that he had something in his mind like old pictures,
old, faded colour photographs
I doubt if he knew what he was talking about
And I immediately started to experiment with flashing
And I told him about flashing and how we can desaturate the colours
and how he can achieve the faded look
Flashing is basically...
It's almost like fogging the film
Like putting a layer of fog over the negative
So, what happens is the blacks are not going to be really black
It's going to be a sort of greyish
Because the blacks are not as black,
you see sort of into the shadow areas more
It also has another effect. It desaturates the colours
Tell me, any news from down there? It's been a while since...
How many men are there round here?
This here's an interesting town
I, myself, got a little bit tired of this faded look and I started to tell him
that maybe we should not do the whole picture this way, maybe we should have variation,
and he said, "Absolutely not. We are not going to compromise
I'm behind you, I will defend you against everybody in the world
if they come and complain about this look."
And, of course, the studio complained about the look very much
Motion pictures were breaking away from the Hollywood system
And you had the influence of the East Coast
You had the influence of the foreign markets now
And you had directors like Roman Polanski
What have you done to it?
Roman had a magnificent background -
he went to the Polish Film School -
and he had a magnificent background in photography
He understood photography. He understood images
And also with people
And emotions. He was tied with emotions
I won't let you go to no Doctor Hill nobody ever heard of
The best is what you're gonna have, young lady. Where's your telephone, huh?
It's in the bedroom
There's a shot in Rosemary's Baby
She says, "Where's the telephone?"
And Mia says, "ln the bedroom."
And Ruth says, "Oh, good." And she exits
Roman says, "Billy, give me a POV of Ruth."
I got 'em framed perfectly
You see her on the phone talking
I said, "OK, Roman, we're ready."
He comes over and looks and says,
"No, Billy, no. Move, move, move."
Kindly move
And I looked through and I see just the back of Ruth Gordon seated on the bed
And you can't see her face or see the telephone
I said, "But you can't see her." He says, "Exactly."
I said, "Oh, OK."
So, now, we go to the theatre and 800 people in the theatre all go...
To see around the doorjamb
That's Roman Polanski
New York had a style all its own and I call it a street style
It was something...
Because they didn't have the shops, the labs,
the equipment that we had in Hollywood
And it developed its own styles
They didn't believe in diffusion
They didn't believe in what they would do in Hollywood,
when you have to shoot a major motion picture star
It was a situation in which, for reasons of style and money and time,
they went into the streets and shot in real places
And that probably is the beginning
of what is used in our time, as that sort of New York look
Billy Daniels shot a picture called The Naked City
At that time, there was a bunch of new lights that had come up called fay lights
That's how we lit everything - no arcs or anything else like that -
and he shot the whole picture what I call a New York style
Aaargh!
Naked City, he went right into their own back yard
and did exactly what they did, and did it
And then you copy those styles
How do you...?
How do you do better than On the Waterfront? You don't
You believe that you were there. You were part of that cold climate
You were part of the cold world
You were part of that whole thing
It had great blacks in it, too
People don't recognise the blacks
All the exterior stuff and the night stuff had great, rich blacks
Look out for the truck!
When we shot in New York, we had to improvise
Everything was done with something at hand, something you might find in the street,
and the shooting is rough and tough
We moved in the streets all the time
I'm walking here! I'm walking here! Up yours!
Dirty and gritty would be my description of it
And it's evidence... pictures like Midnight Cowboy.
Actually, that ain't a bad way to pick up insurance, you know
I always say that Dog Day Afternoon was shot with energy
Every scene has energy from every point of view
From the actors
From the camera and its movement
Once we began to shoot,
there was no question, but that it had to have a semi-documentary look
It had to be real
That the audience was to believe that this was...
...this was not a story
that had happened before that was being filmed
This is a story that's happening right now
And I think we succeeded in doing that
I met Marty
He was interviewing cameramen and we talked
And I had the advantage...
I think it had to be a union film and it had to be in New York,
and it was quite a low-budget movie, Taxi Driver
I had an advantage in that I really had looked at a lot of Godard and European stuff,
so we could begin to talk the same language
And both of us happen to talk very fast, so we could talk the same language rapidly
We shot it really quite economically
We didn't cover...
Marty knew not to cover certain things,
to make a shot which we knew was powerful enough to say everything we wanted to say
Some dolly shot, something
Rather more of it than you think was in the script
Schrader's script was extraordinarily visual when you came to shoot it
There's a lot in there, in Schrader's script, that helps you to figure out what to look at
The big overhead stuff and things at the end
are at least variations on things that were in the script
Several people who, for whatever reason,
had some set of emotions about New York that they wanted to unload,
happened to come together
I think that's the simplest and fairest way to say it
I got The French Connection
Billy Friedkin was looking for somebody to shoot The French Connection,
and they said what we've seen you do is all high-key, fashiony-type stuff
between commercials and this feature
But this has to be a very gritty, New York, street-type picture
Do you think you can do that?
My answer to 'em was, "Well, I'm a cinematographer
I should be able to do anything you want me to do."
And so I shot The French Connection
and after that came out, I was labelled as a gritty, New York, street photographer
You're driving a tad rapidly
Don't worry. I'm a very good driver
I don't think starting a career or pursuing a career in Hollywood on the West Coast
would have permitted me to pursue...
...visual styles that I've pursued over a period of time living on the East Coast
It's just a different...
...world
It was a different film-making world for a long, long time
You're exceptional in bed,
because you get pleasure in every part ofyour body when I touch it
Like the tip of your nose and if I stroke your teeth or your kneecaps...
I assign the big break in American cinematography to Gordon Willis
In that, I think, modern American cinematography comes out of him very much
I just simply pictured things a different way
And in some cases it caused a ruckus now and then
Because it's like saying, "We can't do that, because that's never been done before."
I never did it in that spirit. I just simply did it because I liked it
I want reliable people, people that aren't going to be carried away
I mean, we're not murderers
His imprint on the film was indelible when Godfather came out
I mean, that was a job of cinematography that everybody couldn't help but notice
Bonasera
Bonasera,
what have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully?
A lot of things that I do with overhead lighting,
or a lot of things with that form of lighting,
actually came out of a necessity to deal with Marlon Brando in a given kind of make-up
It was an example of designing something to make one person work
and it was extended throughout the rest of the movie
I got a lot of criticism, because they said, "Well, you can't see Brando's eyes."
There were times in some of his scenes
where I deliberately did not want to see his eyes
So that you saw this mysterious human being
thinking about something or about to do something,
but you didn't really know what the hell was going on
Gordon, the Prince of Darkness
I haven't... examined underexposing a lot, because I'm terrified of it
But with people like Gordon who know just how much to do it,
and all that kind of thing,
he has made an art of underexposure
I may have gone too far a couple of times
I think there was a scene between Al and his mother,
who was played by Morgana King in Part II
I did one scene, I went too far
I think Rembrandt went too far a couple of times!
It wasn't...
the fact that it was so dark
It was the fact that the studio said, "How are we gonna show this at the drive-ins?"
That's the old attitude
You gotta put light in there
You gotta see the people, because of the drive-ins
Well, the drive-ins were going out at that time, so that didn't mean much to us
We're going to Jersey?
When I shot Godfather I, my decision to use yellow in the movie...
The movie was very yellow
Yellow-red. It bordered on this kind of brassy feeling
The reasons for that were because I just thought it was right
But yellow broke out in the motion picture business
related to period movies for a long time after that
It's not one thing that you do
from a visual point of view that makes anything work
The art direction has to be right
The wardrobe has to be right
The shot structure has to be right
And the lighting has to accommodate whatever it is you're introducing
related to filtering, et cetera
So, you can't just do one thing
There's no mistaking Gordy Willis' work
The magnificent thing that was done was the fact that he came back to it after...
several years...
and came right in, and you could put the three together
It's almost like, my gosh, they never stopped making the picture
Which is, I think, a tribute
All cameramen throughout the history of movies have taken risks
My current crop of cameramen probably took more risks
only because we had better toys to play with
We had better lenses. They were sharper and crisper
We could put a camera where nobody had ever put one
Sorry
We shot a scene in Chinatown with a hand-held Pentaflex inside a bathroom
In the old days, prior to that,
it would have been a bathroom on a stage with the walls moving out
and you're stuck
But here, Polanski got a very intimate, spontaneous behaviour from the actors
because the camera was right in there with them
What about it, what?
There's something black in the green part of your eye
Oh, that
It's a...
It's a flaw...
in the iris
That was a risk, a risk lightingwise, to light something like that as if you're saying,
"Here's a major motion picture and I'm lighting it like a documentary."
They'd gotten the idea to do Chinatown in anamorphic
in the 235 aspect ratio
But Roman said to me,
"I want to use modern-day technology to shoot a film about the past,
as it would look like through my twentieth-century window,
I want to see what it looked like back then."
It meant that we shot a close-up of Faye Dunaway this size
The lens was no more than two-and-a-half feet away,
which was very intimidating
But Roman used that as a directing technique, to intimidate the character of Evelyn Mulwray
My talent was to light her as beautifully as possible
So I walked around a lot of times with a hand-held key-light
If she moved this way, I'd move the light. Roman loved that sort of thing
because he came from the Polish school where they had to do things that way
And forcing me to do a hand-held shot, when I didn't agree with him
I said, "It's going to be distracting." But he was right
We would do things like force Jack Nicholson to hit a certain mark,
and have the camera just behind his ear, and format it that way
You'd force him to hit that mark
If he wouldn't hit that mark, we'd do the scene over again
Because he wanted that voyeuristic kind of look
His mind was 24 hours a day at 78 rpm, thinking
Hello, Claude. Where'd you get the midget?
Not on how to make things complicated, but how to make things better
When we undertook shooting Jaws, we were sitting on the lot at Universal,
3,000 miles from where we intended to shoot the picture,
trying to decide what kind of equipment to take, how we would go about it
Watch him now! Starboard! Starboard!
Spielberg said, "I want to nail this down on a tripod -
I don't want it wandering all over the place."
I said, "Steven, that is not the way to make a sea picture,
because people will be throwing up in the aisles if you do that...
...so, I think I will try to hand-hold the picture."
And he couldn't believe that I really intended to do that
On Jaws,
somewhere in one of those endless interviews that he gives, Steve says...
It was a joke we used to have on the set -
that it was the most expensive hand-held movie ever made
On the ocean, almost all of it is hand-held,
because they didn't have steadicams in those days
It was a great piece, a very fine piece of operating, if you look at it
If you think it was all hand-held and how we did it
I'm quite proud of it
It was like being the MVP or winning the Triple Crown
Baseball metaphors come easily to operating
We kept the camera at water level whenever we could
and it isn't something that you will see immediately,
but after a while you begin to feel that that shark is maybe just under that water
And by keeping the camera down close to that water, we built into the picture
a kind of atmosphere or feeling that we wouldn't have gotten any other way
I noticed that almost in every country, cinematographers come from another country
There is an attraction to the exoticism
A foreigner, whether he's from Europe or from any place,
has a fresh eye to look at another country
And perhaps he distinguishes, he sees better what's interesting about another country
I really liked staying with you. You were so much fun. I love you, OK
I want you to be really good. I don't want you to do anything wrong
If you do, I'll come back and get you. All right? I love you
He told me it would be a very visual movie
He said that. The film will be a visual film
The story will be told through visuals
Very few people really want to give that priority to the image
Usually, directors give the priority to the actors and to the story
But here the story was told really through images
Hey!
In the period movies,
there was no electricity -
at least before electricity was invented -
and in consequence there was less light
Period movies should have less light
And I think a period movie, the light has to come from the windows
That's how people lived
"Magic hour" is a euphemism, because it's not an hour. It's about 20 or 25 minutes at the most. It is the moment when the sun sets. And after the sun sets, before it is night, the skies have light. But there is no actual sun.
and the light is very, very soft
and there's something, as you say, magic
It limited us to 20 useful minutes a day
But it did pay on the screen
It gave some kind of magic look to it, a beauty of it, a romanticism
Something that colour could do much better than black and white
At the time of Days of Heaven, which was 1976,
when we shot the movie -
the film came out in '78 or '79,
but we shot it in '76 -
film was not as sensitive as it is today
Today you can actually shoot with a kerosene lamp with actually kerosene flame
But at the time, we had to put an electric bulb inside those lights
But the important thing is that, actually, the light was coming from the lamps
That was what I think was modern
Because you see any other movie of the old times
like, for instance, a marvellous movie like Sunrise, a silent movie,
and the scene when they are looking for the girl in the lake, supposedly drowned
And they go with lamps and those lamps, they give no light. They're just props
They're props and the audience has to believe they give light
But they were just very weak
On Days of Heaven, I had the privilege of seeing footage that Nestor shot in the lab
Because Nestor knew he had to leave to go with Truffaut
And so, when Terry Malick called me up and said,
"We want you to come up here and do this picture, Nestor has to go,"
I was dying to go
I did some hand-held shots with the Pentaflex in Days of Heaven
The opening of the film in the steel mill, I did... personally hand-held with the Pentaflex
I used some diffusion
Nestor didn't use any diffusion on it
The moment I see a movie that...
I start seeing a movie that has a fog filter,
I usually stay ten minutes, then I leave I think that's enough
I hate that kind of thing, because it's so easy
I felt very guilty about using the diffusion
And it wasn't that heavy diffusion,
but I remember having that feeling of sort of violating a fellow cameraman
But now Nestor knows I'm on film or tape
After ten rounds,
Judge Rossi, eight to two, La Motta
Judge Murphy, seven to three, La Motta
If you look at Raging Bull, I based it very specifically on Life Magazine photographs,
big still photos of the '40s
That's what people of my generation and Marty's,
though he's younger, remember fights as
They remember them as big flash photos in Life Magazine
We were really showing off
We panned 360 this way when he went that way
We started at 24 frames, and then we went to 48 frames
and then back to 24 frames
Jake knocks somebody out in 24 frames,
and then he walks over to a neutral corner. And 48 frames, all in the same shot
We made a kind of rule
that when we were actually fighting, we would try...
In the actual fights, we'd try to do it 24 frames
Although we tried to cheat it
and it got really operatic towards the end with Sugar Ray Robinson
But, in general, we tried to make the actual fight time be in 24 frames
And...
save the overcrank,
the really overcranked stuff for when he's in the corner,
or in this case, for when he is not actually fighting, but breathing against the ropes
When he goes back into the real time of fighting, we go back to 24
We had about...
God, I don't know, dozens of fights
And we had a different style for each one
And one was all going to be...
One was all going to be...
like this and like this
With a fairly long lens
One was going to be all following him around. One was going to be steadicam
He started in the dressing room
He walks all the way. We lit the whole thing
And he stands on a big crane and the crane lifts him up in the air
It was great fun. It was wonderful fun
It was an example of that thing that Marty can really do like no-one else
Know what the emotional story-telling shot is really going to be,
and that you don't need to do anything but this one shot
And it's so good and so evocative, it's so powerful emotionally
that it'll get you from A to B without any coverage, without any worry
For the Middleweight Championship of the World, 15 rounds!
Photography is a single art
Like painting
Like writing. Like music
Cinematography is a common art
I think it's...
It's not an art form that can be expressed by one single person
So, of course, there is the director,
which is like the main author of the entire common expression,
because even if several persons express themself in the same art form,
everybody can go in different directions
So, from the writer to the musician,
to the production design, to the costume design,
to the cinematographer, to the editor,
someone should be responsible
Just go by like you're fighting! Don't look at the camera!
Just go through! Go through!
Apocalypse Now was really a closing chapter
Very specific
Not only because it was the longest,
it was the most far away,
it was the most difficult,
it was the most expensive, it was the most dangerous movie ever done
But also it was probably the most emotional one
Mainly the first section of my light was merely dealing with light
With all these possibilities the light has to express itself
To show on screen the incredible source of light,
the great generator with lamps,
into the jungle
Very sharp light, very soft light
Very warm light, very cold light
Very artificial, very natural
Both. All the time, I was working with the opposite
Francis was shooting Apocalypse Now in the Philippines
And he called me up
and he wanted me to come over and photograph the second unit
Every time I went out, I tried to do it in the spirit of the way that they would do it
That was always the utmost thing in my mind
And they were always great. Vittorio would always egg me on
He was always very cute
He'd go, "Steve, we're stuck here with all this stuff
You can go out with this camera and you can get all this great stuff
Do something wonderful. Give us some ideas."
He gave me all this encouragement to do whatever I wanted to do
And yet I felt very responsible that what I did had to mesh seamlessly with what he did
I understood...
...how it could be important to travel, to go into another country
To use another language
To use another industry
To interchange energy
There was one idea came to my mind
There was a possibility to make an analogy between the life and light
The journey that Pu Yi was doing into himself
could be represented with the different stage...
with the different stage of light. Different colours
The first time, he was cutting his own vein,
and you see for the first time red
Red is the colour of the beginning
The colour when we're born
He was borning
See the blood
He was, remember, being born as an emperor
We go into the scene when the people with the torches are arriving to pick up him
When we see orange in the picture,
it is the warm colour of the family
It is the colour of the Forbidden City
I was using all the lights around the young Pu Yi to get the feeling of family. Ofwarm
Of maternal embrace
Yellow...
is the colour of our identity
When we come conscious
Is the colour it represents the emperor
Is the colour that more leads the light
That more represents the sun itself
Hoi!
Green...
is knowledge
We see green the first time only when the tutor is coming
He brings a green bicycle
It's the knowledge of something
Up to that moment, Pu Yi was living in the Forbidden City
It was kind of a forbidden colour for him
He didn't know anything about one section of the colour spectrum
Green, blue, indigo, violet
He know only red, orange, yellow
The emperor shouldn't know anything
Should know only portion of it
Because knowledge can hurt him
I export our feeling...
in his way of seeing
and I re-import once again all the experience back to him
Back to Italian cinema
Back to Last Emperor
And I understood that at that moment that cinema really has no nationality
There are different ways to work with a director
I had this wonderful working relationship
with Marty Scorsese, which, I think, is the most visual director
of all the directors I've worked with
When we start a movie, he knows what he wants. It's in his head
The way Marty works is that he gives you a shot list
It's basically to determine the rhythm of a scene. What he wants
He describes the shot. Close-up. Tracking shot
And when it's getting a little more complicated, shots,
then sometimes he makes a little drawing, of how he wants it,
or he has a reference to another movie
He says, "Why don't you look at this shot in this-and-this movie?
Something like this we should do here."
Father,
why have you forsaken me?
I remember a shot that Marty hasn't done before
And he wasn't quite sure if it would work
There was a shot in Goodfellas, when De Niro and Ray Liotta are sitting in that cafe,
where he finds out that if he goes to where De Niro tells him to go,
he will be killed
That this is the end of their relationship in a way
I got there 15 minutes early
and I saw that Jimmy was already there
And what we did is that...
We did a tracking-back, zooming-in shot,
where the frame actually did not change
It starts on a two-shot,
and we pulled back and zoomed in,
but the background changed totally
And this was something that is quite interesting,
because it tells you a story
You just start thinking, "What's going on?"
Something is changing here, but they still sit there in their booth and talk
But the world around them changes
And I think this is something that I really like to do, and then Marty loved it
It's a matter of bouncing ideas back and forth
I mean, certainly, you know, it's never easy
It's never perfect
There's always disputes about how light or dark it should be
How tight a close-up should be
Well, Eraserhead was a film that was in David Lynch's mind
right from the beginning
And, I think, my job as the cinematographer became to find ways to extract it and to...
...to have him explain how it should look in great detail
How the camera should move
What the mood and the feeling of the light should be
We found that we could say this is a dark corner,
and it's not just dark,
it's very, very dark
And we would talk about how dark was dark
I think the advantage of Blue Velvet was that we had a lot of time to think about it
David had written the script for a studio
It didn't get picked up to be made
Nothing happened for a while
and so I read it and we talked
And we would talk about...
what's the small town look like?
Have you ever seen one like this?
What do these characters do in this town?
What's Dorothy's apartment look like? Since we spend so much time in there
What's the feeling of it?
Because so many strange things happen in that place
What's it look like? What colour is it?
We just could bounce ideas around for a couple of years, which was great
You don't often have this
Radio Raheem!
The first thing that Spike said to me about Do the Right Thing,
he said, "This film is set on the hottest day of the summer
How do we make the audience feel heat?"
Dealing with it in a realistic treatment,
I don't think would have done it
We had one block in Brooklyn that was going to be our studio
And we could control the colour
We controlled the colour of the costumes
We renovated some of the houses there
and determined what colours were going to be there
It's manufacturing reality,
heightening the reality, to get the audience to feel a certain way
Yo, Ahmad!
I think Do the Right Thing was the first film
where I really had the luxury of waiting for the light
A lot of the time I spent planning certain scenes to be shot at certain times of the day
because the film takes place in one day,
on one block...
...where changes in light are going to be very obvious
You the man. I'm just visiting
I think Spike trusts me a lot
I think the trust has grown
I think it's really vital to him,
because he does have to give up the directing reins and get in front of the camera quite a bit
And when he does that, he relies upon me to be his objective eye
The director is going to be the author of the performances of the film,
the story of the film
The cinematographer is the author of the use of light in the film
and how that contributes to the story
Suddenly you're aware of the fact
that things are not exactly as they seem
In other words, you create a representation of it
and lots of times, that representation
is more emotional than it is real
Oftentimes, we're asked to imitate others
and it's always a little bit disconcerting
to be asked to completely imitate another film
I think we all learn from other films
and try and emulate certain DPs who are very good
But the DPs who really do something different every time are the most amazing
I think today in motion picture technology
we're really at a precipice,
a jumping-off point into an unknown but possibly very exciting future
In the same way that, the '50s, when Cinemascope and widescreen Cinerama,
Technirama, all these new formats,
really shook up the whole way we were looking at films
We have that opportunity now
Someone once said that the lighting and the look of a film
makes the pauses speak as eloquently as the words
That you have moments in films that happen because of what is there visually
How someone is lit or not lit
You put something in an audience's mind visually,
and they will carry away images as well as the words
See also