One night I was watching the 1947 version of Oliver Twist, David Lean's Oliver Twist, photographed by Guy Green. Watching the movie, watching the opening scenes of the film, of Oliver's mother in labor, walking across this dark moor, and my uncle just happened to say, God, this photography was gorgeous. I said, photography?
That's when I learned what a director of photography was. I found out that I was unconsciously, that I was really 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 and a camera and he would shoot these subjects and the subject may be 20 seconds long of a train coming at you, whatever 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. A cinematographer's job is to tell people where to look.
Say, look at this, there's the woman, she's going to weep, and she's going to sing the aria, or he's going to draw the gun, or, you know, he feels okay, but behind him is an ape, and you better look at the ape. We do some things that we don't even realize we're doing until we see the film put together. And we did them out of instinct, and 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're 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 absolutely black and then striking the first light and saying, okay, here we go. You know, that really turns me on personally.
I wanted to copy and assimilate what I saw on the screen by the Giants and by the Masters, and to this day I still have reverence of Charlie Lyons, Stanley Cortez, and Ted McCord, and Arthur Miller, and Hal Moore, and all those, and Leon Shamroy, and Milton Crabb, and all those people. I, uh... 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. When I say those were the real cinematographers, I meant these people knew photography. The more I've learned and the more I've shot films, when I go back and look what was done in the teens and the 20s, like 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 realize what was achieved in that cinematography.
I mean, we're talking pretty close to the beginning of everything here, and to realize what he accomplished with the equipment that 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 seem to be free. I mean, you see 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 was 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.
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, as a lot of the European filmmakers, directors like Moore now, came to the United States.
The production of Sunrise was a real watershed for American filmmaking, and that film was startling in every aspect, in its design aspect, and 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 new and fresh in American films.
They had crane shots that went forever 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. We have steadicams and things like that, and pantoglides.
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 10 or 15 years later, I think the art of movies and cinematography would have been much, much higher than even if 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 center 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 sort of soundproof refrigerator or icebox.
And it took a number of years for... cinematographers to start thinking about ways to free the camera again. If a director as Ruben 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 Maboulyan, you see with Lubitsch, you see some early talkies, you see it with Vidor. I mean, these people refused to be bound to the conventional sound.
And good work was being done. It was more difficult. Alright boys, now Miss Davies, when you come through there...
Once, of course, the camera could be blimped in some kind of a portable device, soundproof. It could then be put on a dolly and the camera could be moved again. And of course it energizes and infuses the whole feel of a film to have a camera that can move with actors, can move counter to actors.
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, a 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 and how they ran their operation. 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, and 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 sometime with Sunday to read the script. I mean, 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.
These people were tested every day as they worked and had to be able to handle different things. I mean, I'm sure they were assigned to their strengths. by studios sometimes, but sometimes they weren't. And I think the system had its good points and its bad points for cinematographers as it did for everyone.
And 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. Mayer was a very smart man. He called the cameraman in and he'd say, look, he says, 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 we learned 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. I think most of the photography out there didn't have that look.
Women stars particularly at that time were very important. One of their own photographers like Garba wouldn't have anybody but Bill Daniels do her pictures. After all, when one may not have long to live, one shouldn't fancied.
But here's a man who'd been very much a rebel filmmaker. Later on went on to make his own reputation as the studio cameraman par excellence and I was I was sad when Garbo died that not many papers mentioned Bill Daniels name because this is a man that That created with her her whole screen persona She noticed a beautiful jobs that were done on Marlene Dietrich, where she would be maybe, if your light is set at a 100-foot candle, she would be at a 110, 15-foot candle. She would have just a little bit more light on her than anybody else, so she would pop out amongst the crowd. 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 under a picture called Desire, and I found out that her face needs a completely different kind of a lighting. A high-key light that could narrow her cheeks down and just make her look well. Sternberg, I think, found that out.
Matter of fact, she almost insisted. She'd say, that's the light up there 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? Oh, Claudette Colbert, yes. Well, she had to be lit on one side, as you probably know that.
We even built the set so that she would be always on one side of her face. And she really did have problems with the other side of her face. Once in a while, I'd get a man star. It's strange, though, when you had both of them had to be lit on one side.
Now you have problems. So it was a studio look that was preeminent rather than individual cinematographers, but there were coming out of that really stellar people like George Fulsey, like Greg Tolan, like Arthur Miller, who had such strength and such individual voice that they kind of transcended whatever studio they happened to work for. And you can today look back and very easily recognize a lot of their films from...
From the look, irrespective of director even. You wish anything, madam. I didn't expect to see you, Mrs. Danvers. I noticed that the window wasn't closed.
George Barnes, I admired his work too. He did sort of romantic work. Wonderfully imaginative and just great looking. Lovely room, loveliest room you've ever seen. Everything is kept just as Mrs. De Winter liked it.
Nothing has been altered since that last night. Greg Toland learned his craft through George Barnes. I think he was with him for many, many pictures. And then Greg, of course, broke away doing his own and did wonderful work. The one I really was inspired on, that was Greg Toland.
And I saw all his films and I remember the first one that was The Long Voyage Home. It was fantastic. It worked.
with the depth of field the whole time and the 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. I mean, you can take frames from Grapes of Wrath and put them alongside the WPA photographs of Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange or Doris Ullman or anybody, and it's really hard to tell the difference. He did seem to have an eye for things and also was very creative. I mean, for instance, we much later started doing filming with a candlelight, for instance, or a match, and he already did it in 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 an 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 Studios. Is that really your idea of how to run a newspaper? I don't know how to use a newspaper, Mr. Fetch.
I just try everything I can think of. Working with Orson Welles, who was also a gambler, the two of them 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, and obviously how 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 Cain himself did not support... I mean, the film that 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 textures and contrasts and dupes and scratching film intentionally and all this. I mean, what a wonderful time they had to have sitting around there thinking up all of the different things that they were going to 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 in how he moved his actors and staged the scenes and freed him up. I think that was a tremendous contribution that Greg gave to the film. Be careful, Charles! We'll have to tell him now. You know, we always have this problem with cinematography, not being able to carry somebody in the foreground, if sharp and it focuses somebody 20 feet back.
And Greg had, for a number of years, been working on new lenses, faster lenses, that would allow him to pour more light in and stop down and get a greater depth in his 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... It played in one of the most popular cinemas in Budapest exactly one week, and the government just pulled it right after that.
The whole screening room was packed because we heard Citizen Kane is going to be screened, which was one of the major events, I think, at that time. And that was the first time I'd seen Citizen Kane, and I just couldn't believe the magnitude. and the magic of filmmaking.
And after a while, Citizen Kane was like a textbook for us. It's so sad they never got to collaborate again. And Wells' regard for him is expressed very plainly in the end title card of the film, where Wells shared his title card with Tolan. Film noir really had its high watermark 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. visual and stylistic sparseness.
You know, what's 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 preeminent film noir cinematographers. With Alton, the people in film noir, they were not afraid of the dark. And 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 of the scene. We all have been influenced by that in terms of what's important are the lights that 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 gray in the 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 and ends with a gunfight taking place against that and the final shot is a silhouette walking out into sort of a grey dawn. I mean, very stark imagery.
Ended 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'm not sure I'm here for a reason. Here was Welles who had cause to be brought to Universal Studios, one of these Eclair Camoflex lightweight European cameras.
He had a very enthusiastic young operator named Philip Lathrop, and Lathrop... got very into hand holding this and working with Wells on these compositions. And you see some of the scenes and you realize how much hand holding was done in the film, but it's extremely seamless.
That film in particular was an inspiration to all of us because it was a textbook. What you could do, it was shot on a small budget in a short time, mostly on locations, and again you had almost simultaneously the breakout in France of the new wave, you had Orson Welles doing a new wave film in a Hollywood studio, and I think it's... Continue to be an inspiration to a lot of filmmakers. Color processes were always being experimented with from the very beginning of cinema, even before there was a de facto color process. Filmmakers occasionally hand-painted frame by frame entire sequences or even entire films.
Then later in the silent period, overall tinting for sequences, you know, like blue for night, amber for dawn, or whatever, was also practiced. And then during the 30s, Ray Renahan photographed a film called Mystery of the Wax Museum using a two-color process which incorporated two strips of film. Running simultaneously through the camera.
Ray Renahan said I've been doing some gorgeous stuff with the two-color process earlier, but when the three-color process arrived and they started to appreciate the fact that this was something that was quite sophisticated, the interest in it grew. The process was recognized as startling. It was subtle and beautifully gradated in its tonality, and interest in it immediately grew and led to some of the really crowning achievements of the late 30s and early 40s of color cinematography.
Never dance to my reputation will be lost forever. 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 a 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-like. And that was a difficult shot, but I thought that was one of the best shots in the picture.
I think for the people who had done black and white to go into color, 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 pre-visualize how a scene was going to appear in black and white, and suddenly say, oh well, here it is, it's in color.
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. Jesus leaning on the earth On you, Rupi. Moaning around the house after that mad dog of a man.
Every one of the old-time DP's like Charlie Clark 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 would say, oh yeah we did this interesting effect in the picture and I did this interesting effect and that that interesting effect. When you make a movie, you gotta have a screenplay, a story.
Well, that story really dictates to what we're 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 personalities in it.
As a cameraman, I try to keep the mechanics out as much, 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 really 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.
And 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, 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.
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, oh, he said, very good, very good. And so even now, like when I shoot and I do a shot that I really like, I say, In my ear, the way Jimmy Howe said to me, oh, very good, very good.
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, 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've got Vilmo Sigismund and Laszlo Kovacs and people that were coming from a European tradition and shooting films here, we got an appreciation of a style that was so different from that practiced in the studios.
I think the films of the French New Wave Dave 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. I mean, they would not think anything about picking up the camera and running with it.
You know, 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 Gantz made in 1926, and it has every new idea you can conceive of, you know, even today. With steady cams and everything else.
I mean, he was swinging cameras from ropes and inventing dollies and cranes and doing all sorts of special effects in the camera. You know, cinematographers start studying new things and 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 you a very good example of what you're calling the new style in the 60s. This is Robert Surtees. I mean, he did, what's the wedding picture with Dustin Hoffman? The Graduate.
I remember reading all these reviews. They're going fresh, innovative, exciting, cinematography, blah, blah, blah, new, 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. You always want to get yourself into trouble and see how well you can fight your way out of it. I don't think that each cinematographer can work with each director.
There is a kind of magnetic selection that you do while you're going. There is a kind of journey that you're doing by yourself. It's something you discover that on the same direction you can meet other people. You can meet a friend that you can do this journey. You can meet people that can be your guide for a portion of this journey.
I think Bernardo was one of the most important ones. Before we start the conformist, Bernardo called me, and we started to talk about the conformist, he says, Vittorio, I mean, what we know about that period? Mainly we know that period, the late 30s, through cinema. So probably we have to use everything that has been given to cinema now, through that period, and read from our point of view.
We look at that moment as one of the great masters, I think, in the American film industry. From Bernardo's point of view was Orson Welles, from my point of view was Greg Tolland. Each cinematographer that... They did everything before my time, so I am the sum of all their 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 Zygmunt, Laszlo Kovacs, myself, Gordon Willis. It came about because of the directors.
We started having new directors who didn't want to work in the studio system, you know, wanted to do 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 are exposed to this incredible, incredible vast country which has such a wonderful... ... transition from one area to another.
And just a visual sequence was wonderful. And that's how I learned and got to know the country. And that's magical, you know, to really break down the country and all the civilization 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 especially I worked with Connie Hall for five years. I was his camera operator for five years, and we did some great, 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 endeavor. If the light shone in the lens and flared the lens, that was considered a mistake. Somebody would report that, the operator would report, oh, the sun hit the lens, it flared the lens, it cut.
There was never a fear. I mean, I've shot with Conrad where 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, 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. And Jordan Cronenweth was the assistant cameraman. And the second camera crew was Charles Rocher Jr. and Robert Byrne.
I liked 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 the compound, Lars' compound.
And then they jump in a coal cart and take off during the night, and then they make the jump, and then that was shot at like the last part of day and brought down. Connie was innovative and very daring, but always extremely solid. And he's got, I think, exquisite taste.
And he can make that balance between black and white, color, day, night. And he just looks at it and he just has an innate ability to do that. I mean, I think it's a gift. You're a lucky bastard! I don't think there was a choice about shooting it in color or black and white.
There were still a hundred... 12 pictures being made in black and white that year. That was an easy choice.
Doing it widescreen was a harder choice. When I say pass me a match. 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 going to make us... It was shot on the stage. We had...
a rain gutter over the top and it was like coming down and I 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, you know what I mean? 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 and but he's playing it very straight, unemotional. But I do.
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 wed the two. I married the SOP. 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, you know?
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 was 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, you know, although I was, I don't know, what was I, in my 30s, 30s I guess. No sir, this is not novel 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've written 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. I'm afraid of 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 thing I found out later, fortunately.
Then I told them my plan, 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. on that film. I don't think that movies should be made because of the dialogue.
I think it should have a good story, but I think the important thing has to be how it is told visually. And, you know, dialogue should be like music in a film. Is this John McCabe?
Yeah. Mrs. Miller. I've come from Bearport 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 we started to talk about it, and he said that he had something in his mind like old pictures, old faded color photographs.
I neither even knew what he was talking about. immediately started the experiment with flashing. I told him about flashing, how we can desaturate the colors and how we 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 grayish. Because the blacks are not as black, you see sort of into the shadow areas more. Also has another effect, it desaturates the colors.
Well tell me, any news from down there? It's been a while since I've been here. How many men are there around here? Well this here is an interesting town. I myself got a little bit tired of this faded look.
And I started to tell him that, Robert, maybe we should not do the whole picture of this film. Maybe we should have some variation, you know. And he said, absolutely not. They 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 really 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 don't let you go to no Dr. Hill nobody ever heard of.
The best is what you're going to 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, in the bedroom.
And Ruth says, oh, good, and she exits. Roman says, Billy. He gave me a POV of Ruth Gordon. I got him framed perfectly. Beautifully see her on the phone talking.
I said, okay, Roman, we're ready. And he comes over and he looks and he says, no, no, no, Billy, no, no, no, Billy, move, move, move, move to the left, move to the left. And kindly move. And I look 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, okay. So now we go to the theater and 800 people in the theater all go to see around the door jam.
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. And it developed its own styles.
They didn't believe in the fusion. They didn't believe in what they would do in Hollywood when you'd have to shoot a major motion picture star. It was a situation in which, for reasons of style and money and time and things, 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. And at that time, there was a bunch of new lights that had come out called Fay Lights. And 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.
Naked City was, he went right into their own backyard and did exactly what they did and did it. And then you copy those styles. How do you, how do you, how do you do better than the waterfront? Don't see you believe it.
It was there you were there you were part of that part of that cold Climate you were part of the cold world you were part of that whole thing was beautiful and had great blacks in it too people Don't recognize the blacks that were but all the exterior stuff the night stuff had great rich blacks 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. Dirty and gritty would be my description of it. And it's evidence that pictures like Midnight Cowboy. Don't worry about that. 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 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.
It was quite a low budget movie, Taxi Driver. I had a certain advantage in that I really had looked at a lot of Godard and a lot of European stuff so we could begin to talk the same language. And both of us happened to talk very fast so we could begin to talk the same language very 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 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 happen to come together. I think it's 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 well What we've seen you do is all high-key, fashion-y type stuff between commercials and this feature, but this wants to be a very gritty New York street type picture. Do you think you can do that? And my answer to him 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 labeled as a gritty New York street photographer. 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, in the West Coast, would have permitted me to pursue visual styles that I pursued over a period of time living on the East Coast.
It's just a different world. It was a different filmmaking world for a long, long time. You're exceptional in bed because you get pleasure in every part of your body. when I touch it, you know what I mean? Like the tip of your nose, and if I stroke your teeth, or your kneecaps.
You know, I assigned a big break in American cinematography to Gordon Willis, and that I think he, in modern American cinematography, sort of 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, you know, because it's like saying, well, we can't do that because that's never been done before, you know. Well, I never did it in that spirit. I just simply...
simply did it because they 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, you know, that everybody couldn't help but notice. Buona sera. Buona sera.
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 makeup. It was an example of designing something to make one person.
and 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 Brando's eyes. 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 like 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. It was played by Morgana King in part two. 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 going to show this at the drive-ins?
That's the old adage to say, you can't, you gotta get, you gotta put a light in, you gotta see the people, you gotta see the people, because of the drive-ins, the drive-ins, the drive-ins. Well, the drive-ins were going out at that time, so that didn't mean much to us. You going to Jersey? When I shot Godfather 1, 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, etc. So, you can't just do one thing. There's no mistake in 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 he 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 that were sharper and crisper. We could put a camera somewhere where nobody would be able to put a camera in, you know.
Oh, sorry. We shot a scene in Chinatown with a handheld Pentaflex inside a bathroom. Is it painful?
You know, 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 kolansky was able to get a very intimate spontaneous behavior from the actors because the camera was right in there with them what about it what something black in the green part of your eye oh that it's um it's flawed in the iris that was a risk a risk lighting wise to light something like that as if you're saying well here's a major motion picture i'm I'm lighting it like a documentary. They had gotten the idea to do Chinatown in anamorphic in the 235 aspect ratio.
Because 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 20th century window. to see what it looked like back then. It meant that we shot it close to the Fay Dunaway this size, but 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 Mulray. So my challenge was to light her as beautifully as possible. So I walked around a lot of times with a handheld key light.
If she moved this way, I moved the light. You never see 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 handheld shot when I didn't agree with him. You know, I'd say it's going to be distracting, but he was right. He 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.
He forced him to hit that mark. If he would hit that mark, he would do the scene over again because he wanted that sort of voyeuristic kind of look. I mean, this mind was 24 hours a day at 78 RPMs thinking.
Hello, Claude. Where'd you get the midget? You know, 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 intend to shoot the picture, trying to decide, A, what kind of equipment to take, how we would go about it.
The land you're watching now, still going, still going! Spielberg said, I want to nail this down on a tripod. I don't want it wandering all over the place. And 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 what I think I will try is to hand-hold the picture. And he couldn't believe I really intended to do that. OnJaws, somewhere in one of those endless interviews that he gives, Steve says, and it was a joke we used to have on the set, that it was the most expensive handheld movie ever made, because once we went out on the ocean, it is true, that almost all of it's handheld, because they didn't have steadicams and things in those days.
I don't think it would have worked anyway. It was a great piece, frankly, a very fine piece of operating. I think if you look at it and think it was all handheld and figure out how we did it, no, I'm quite proud of it.
And it was a great, it was like being the MVP or winning the Triple Crown. It was very, 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 a...
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.
And I want you to learn to sing more. If you do that wrong, I'll put that down. I'll get you.
All right? I love you, but you're so wrong. He told me it would be a very visual movie.
He said that the film will be a visual film and the story will be told through visuals. Very few people really want to give that priority to the image. You know, usually directors give the priority to the actors and to the story, but here the story was told really through images. 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 in a period movie, the light has to come from the windows. That's how people lived. Magic hour is an euphemism because it's not an hour, it's about 20...
25 minutes the most is the moment when the sun sets and after the sun sets before it is night the skies have light but there's no actual Sun and the lights are 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 that color 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, we shot 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 marvelous movie like Sunrise, a silent movie, and the scene when they're looking for the girl in the lake, supposedly, dawn.
And they go with lamps, and those lamps, they give no light. They're just, they're props. They're props, and then the audience has to believe that 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 Mallett called me up and said, look, we want you to come up here and do this picture, Nestor has to go. I was dying to go. I did some handheld shots with the Panaplex in Days of Heaven.
The opening of the film in the steel mill, I did. Personally, handheld with a deflection. I use 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 10 minutes and 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 was not 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 10 rounds, Judge Rossi, 8-2, La Mata. Judge Murphy, 7-3, La Mata. Oh, well, if you look at the Raging Bull, I based it very specifically on life. Magazine photographs, the sort of big still photos of the 40s and particularly on Ouija.
That's what people of my generation and Marty's, who are 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. You know, Jake... knock somebody out in 24 frames and then he's like this and he walks over to a neutral corner in 48 frames all in the same shot and then he comes back into it because we made a kind of rule that when we were actually fighting we would try in the actual fights we would try to do it 24 frames i mean we tried to cheat it when it got really uh operatic 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 Overcrank stuff for when he's in the corner or in this case when he is not actually fighting but breathing against the ropes and when he goes back into the real time of fighting again we would 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 we one was all going to be I can't mean it one was all going to be Like this and like this and like that with a fairly long lens. One was going to be all following him around.
One was going to be steady cam. He started in the dressing room. He walks all the way with him. We lit the whole thing and he stands on a big crane and the crane lifts him up in the air and all that. It was great fun.
It was wonderful fun. And it was an example of that thing that Marty can really do like no one else. Know what the emotional...
Storytelling the 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 and so powerful emotionally that it'll get you from A to B without any coverage, without any worry. Photography is a single art, like painting, like writing, like music. Cinematography is a common art. I think it's not an art form that can be expressed by one single person.
Of course there is a director, which is like the main author of the entire common expression, because having several persons that express themselves in the same art form, everybody can go in different directions. writer to the musician to the production design for the person assigned to the cinematographer to the editor someone should be responsible Poglese now was was really closing chapter very specific not only because was the the longest it was the most far away was the most difficult what the most expensive was the most dangerous movie I've ever done, but also probably the most emotional one. Mainly the first section of my life was mainly dealing with light, with all these possibilities that light has to express itself.
To show on screen the incredible source of light that the grid generates on the grid lamps into the jungle. Very sharp light, very soft light. Very warm light, very cold light.
Very artificial, very natural. 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. It was always the utmost thing in my mind.
And they were always great. Vittorio would always kind of egg me on. He was always very cute.
He'd always go, Steve, we're stuck here with all this stuff. He says, you can go out with this camera and this little unit, you can get all this great stuff. He says...
do something wonderful he says 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 match to kind of mesh seamlessly with what he did i understood that on how could be important to travel to go into another country to to use another language to use another industry and to interchange energy There was one idea that came to my mind. There was a possibility to make an analogy between the life and light. The journey that Puyi was doing into himself could be represented by a different stage with a different stage of light, different colours. The first time he was cut in his own vein, and he see for the first time red.
Red is the colour of the beginning, the colour when we burn. He was burning on see the blood. He was remembered when he burned as an emperor.
And we go into the scene when the people with the torches are ready to pick up him. When we see orange in the picture, it's the orange, the warm color of the family. It's the color of the Forbidden City. And I was using all the lights around the Yankui to give the feeling of family, of warm, of maternal embrace.
Yellow. is color of our identity when we can't conscious is the color that's being represented the emperor is the the color that more leads the light the more represent the sun itself Green is knowledge. We see green for the first time only when the tutor is coming.
He brings a green bicycle. It's the knowledge of something. Up to that moment, Puyi...
He was living in a forbidden city. He was living in a kind of forbidden color for him. He didn't know anything about one section of the color spectrum.
Green, blue, indigo, violet. He knew only red, orange, yellow. The emperor shouldn't know anything.
He should know only a portion of it. Because knowledge can hurt him. I support...
...feeling and his way of seeing and I re-import once again other experience back to him, back to Italian cinema, back to last tempo and I understood that at that moment that cinema really has no nationality. There are different ways to work with a director. I have this wonderful working relationship with Marty Scorsese, which I think is the most visual director of other directors I work with.
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. So he describes the shot, like close-up, tracking shot.
And when it's getting a little more complicated shots, then sometimes either he makes a little drawing how he wants it, or he has a reference to another movie. So he says, why don't you look at this shot and this in this movie? Something like this we should do here.
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 like 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 it... 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, what's going on. I mean 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 Morty 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... To find ways to extract it and 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, you know, 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 and 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 color is it? And we just could bounce ideas around for a couple of years, which was great. I mean, you don't often have this.
The first thing that Spike said to me about Do the Right Thing, he said, this film is gonna be 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.
But we had a one block in Brooklyn that was going to be our studio. And we could control the color, we controlled the color of the costumes. We renovated some of the houses there and determined what colors were going to be there.
So it is, it's manufacturing the reality, heightening the reality to get the audience to feel a certain way. 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 times 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. 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 range and get in front of the camera quite a bit. And when he does that, it 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. Often times we're asked to imitate others. 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.
The DP's who really do something different every time are the most amazing. I think today in motion picture technology we're really at a precipice, at a jumping off point into a kind of an unknown but possibly very exciting future. In the same way that the 50's when CinemaScope and widescreen, Cinerama, Technorama, 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, 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.