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John Alonzo
“There’s no such thing as just flipping right into becoming a cameraman. For me it was the quality of what I could do plus being there at the right time and being tenacious about it.”
As much as anyone can be, John Alonzo is a student of film. As he grew up in Mexico and later Dallas, Texas, movies were his source of entertainment; he sometimes saw two or three films a day. Although, at the time, he wasn’t viewing films for the sake of cinematography, they certainly played a large part in forming cinematic ideas and concepts that he would later develop in his work.
He first came to Los Angeles to host a children’s show on local television which featured Señor Turtle, a character he had created for a show in Dallas. Señor Turtle found the going considerably tougher in Los Angeles. When the show was cancelled after a short run, Señor Turtle retired and Alonzo turned to acting. In between acting jobs, he earned a few extra dollars by doing publicity photos of other actors. Soon acting was taking a back seat to photography; Alonzo began to devote a great deal of his time to studying the cinematographer’s role. Among his favorite classic Hollywood cameramen were Walter Strenge, Floyd Crosby, Winton Hoch and James Wong Howe.
It was, in fact, the late Howe, or “The Chinaman” as Alonzo affectionately refers to him, who gave him his big break. Howe was shooting Seconds for John Frankenheimer and Hollywood production was in such an upswing that Howe was having trouble keeping a camera operator on the film. Alonzo, who had been shooting documentaries for David L. Wolper, was sent down to the set to help out, even though he didn’t have a union card. Both Howe and Frankenheimer were so impressed with his talent and enthusiasm that they went to bat for him in getting him into the union.
After that, Alonzo’s rise into the top echelon of American cinematographers was relatively rapid, culminating in his Academy Award nomination for his superb work on Chinatown in 1974. With such a calling card, he has been able to pick and choose from the many projects offered to him every year. Recently, he has taken up directing too, making his theatrical debut with FM, followed by several movies of the week for television. He has no plans, however, to abandon cinematography in favor of direction; in fact, on his television films he has skillfully handled both directing and cinematography chores.
I’d like to talk about some of the technical aspects of cinematography.
Fine. I’m not bored with technology. We’re in a marvelous period to be cinematographers, because of the new technology that keeps coming out. We look a thousand percent better to a producer than someone like Jimmy Wong Howe did. Yet they didn’t know what he went through. I mean, that man was running around with a 165-pound camera and here we run around with a 45-pound camera that you can manipulate and move around. Technology to me is not a boring subject. Anything you want to know I’ll tell you, if I can.
Harold and Maude: the film had a sort of dreamy, somber look to it, and I’m wondering how that look was arrived at, and finally how you achieved it?
Well, Hal Ashby really was the instigator of that, as most directors usually are. They instigate what kind of a look they want. I wish that I could do that picture now, with what I know now. And also with the certain reputation that I have now, I could have been even braver than when I did that picture; because that was only the third film that I’d ever shot. And when I met Hal Ashby, I was very impressed with him because he’d done a picture called The Landlord that I liked very much. Haskell Wexler got me the job. He recommended me to Hal. So there I was in the position of really wanting to be gutsy and do something dramatically different. By the same token, I didn’t want to ruin my friend’s recommendation. And I must say Hal was very patient with me, and so I went a little bit but not as far as I would have liked to go. All Hal told me was that all the sequences with Harold in his home should have a certain sort of sterility; sort of clear, clean, pure, no diffusion. The angles were to be more symmetrical; sort of meat and potatoes. And every time we ended up with Maude, it would have a slight craziness to it, just a little kookiness, a little tip (of the camera) up, a little tip down, a little diffusion. Also in the answer print, every time it was Harold and Maude, or Maude, it was a slightly warmer, toastier, softer look. And Harold and his mother and by himself, it was a slightly colder world, maybe a more realistic world to him. I wasn’t as brave then; I wish I could do that again.
Around that time you had, or I guess gained a reputation for working rather quickly and with great mobility. I think that’s one of the reasons why you went on Sounder. The producers thought that you could save some money.
Yes, that was a very inexpensive film. Yes, I do work very fast. I don’t think any picture I’ve shot has ever gone over schedule. But a lot of it is, to give the devil his due, not really so much how fast the cameraman is as what kind of communication and rapport he’s got with the director. If that director is not communicative enough, then you find a lot of very fast cameramen are slowed way down. Now, the quality I have for working fast may be because I came from the world of documentaries. In documentaries I did everything myself. We functioned rather quickly, we had to get in and out, not for economic reasons but for expediency. So the first picture I did was Bloody Mama with Roger Corman, who is a fast person himself. Well, we just communicated very easily. He would say, “Are you ready?” I’d say, “Yes, I’m ready.” Even if I wasn’t ready, I would design something that would work. I was thinking two steps ahead of him. So not knowing any better, I just continued to work that way. Plus, I have tried to keep the same crew all the way through, who help me tremendously. They almost read my mind and they know how we work and how we function.
Now Sounder was what I consider my breakthrough into the big time as far as directors go. Marty Ritt was the first big, established director I ever worked with.
On Sounder Marty said to me, “It must have a lyrical quality,” so you find that most good art is really terribly simple. The basis of good composition and good painting is simplicity itself. And Marty is such a good stager; he stages things so pretty. And I taught him a couple of things that I brought in from my world, and he taught me a great deal about directing. And he did that very fast, and very economically. The picture ended up costing only $860,000. So we did it fast but we had six or seven weeks; it wasn’t like a movie of the week in 18 days.
He had this wonderful joke he performed for us all the time. He had his little trailer that he would park somewhere out of the picture and he’d say, “How long will it take you?” I’d say, “I don’t know.” He’d say, “Well, just call me when you’re ready.” And we’d watch him and just before he’d get to the trailer, we’d say, “Marty, we’re ready.” And he’d turn around and look and say, “You’d better be ready.” We’d never let him get to his trailer.
If you had to analyze it, where do cameramen go wrong when they become slow? I mean, what quality do you have, what makes you fast, what things did you nurture to give you that speed?
Well, my theory, and really it’s just a theory has to do with the fact that in documentaries you make instant decisions because your subject doesn’t stand still for you. So you make decisions while you’re looking through the finder. What is it you’re going to stay with? And there’s a certain bravura, I suppose, in letting the camera roll on someone and knowing that, if you stay on him, that’s better than to pan over here where something more exciting is going on because out of that you might just end up with nothing. So it’s that kind of training, plus the time limits that you have in documentaries. But when I brought that to features, I think that I unconsciously applied it.
Now, the other part of my theory is what might happen to some cameramen—and I don’t know specifically if it applies to all of them—is that you do get to a certain point where you start working on pictures of great magnitude or some very important film, and people go around patting you on the back and saying, “Jesus, you’re great, this guy is terrific. He is fast.” You might start asking yourself “why?” And that will slow you down, you see. It happens. You reach a point when you say, “Wait a minute, why am I so good, what is it about me?” So, as a cameraman, you get there, you look at a set, you start to think about it, you start chewing on it too much and then, all of a sudden, you’re taking too much time. I think that’s what happens. I went through that to a degree, right after I did Chinatown.
On Vanishing Point, you had a film crew traveling over a lot of space and you’re filming a story that keeps moving, that’s episodic. What are some of the problems that the cameraman has to face when shooting a film like that?
The logistics, of course, were tough: the cameras, the heat and the dust. We’d take some great chances; we did some stunts with one or two cameras and never waited to see if the lab would say it was okay. We just went on to the next location. We were very lucky; we didn’t lose a single frame, never lost any negative. For necessity’s sake it was a very small crew; the entourage for the picture was bigger than the crew. I only had two grips and two electricians and myself and a couple of assistants and that was it.
What sort of problems did you have in the desert with the dust?
The cameras can get thrown into worse positions than they used to. An example would be in Vanishing Point, using the Arriflex so much. And to put it in the front of a car and shock the shit out of it. Well, that camera was designed as the gun camera for the Messerschmidt so that was a pretty secure camera, and we used it constantly, because it was a rugged piece of equipment. We were lucky it was just a straight Arri with no sync pulse at all, just a motor. We did have a sync camera, we shot an Arriflex sync camera. I made damned sure that I personally inspected those cameras within an inch of their lives. I went through all of them and it sounds silly to do that but you should do that. Under those circumstances, if I hadn’t done it, I might have suddenly discovered in the middle of the desert that some strange refraction created a fog and ruined my film.
This is in the way of tests, going through and checking the camera?
That’s one thing that a lot of filmmakers don’t want to do. It’s so boring to do that, but it’s something that should be done.
The preparation and the boring aspects of checking scratches on film, checking the light-tightness of the magazine, and the lenses matching, that the motor’s functioning, letting it run back long periods of time with dummy rolls—it pays off, psychologically it pays off. Maybe the guy that rents you the camera says it’s perfect. Don’t take his word for it, make sure it’s perfect yourself.
On such mobile locations as those in Vanishing Point, is it difficult with lighting? It seems like you’re always on the run; do you use one light more, one type more than another?
The lighting was very, very tough on Vanishing Point because sometimes you had to fight the exposure while he was driving the car. It was f2.8 inside and outside it was f16. When you have someone driving a car and, let’s say for the sake of argument, the exposure reads f2.8 on his face and behind and through the windows, the background reads f16. Well, you’re better off under-exposing him a full stop, maybe two stops to f3.5, f4.5, because when you print it, it looks more natural to have him darker than the car and the background will not look as hot.
Now, if you have the advantage of adding a light to it, and if the exterior is f16, and you can bring his exposure up to f5.6 and light him, then expose it down to f8, another stop, another stop and a half. Again you get a sure sense of reality and you’ll never see the light. You don’t know where the light’s hitting; you only see it in his eyes. Also, when you have reflections on the windshield of a car, never expose it the way the light says to read it on the face, always over-expose it. Because over-exposure cuts through reflection on glass. You over-expose it and then print it down. In other words, if you used a spot-meter, the reflection would literally cover up the actor’s face. Set somebody behind a steering wheel and take different exposures and then try it and see what will happen. It’s the fastest way to learn a lesson that I learned the hard way. But it’s an advantage because again it’s expediency. You don’t have to say, “Oh, I’ve got to pump him up with light.” In the old days they used to. Some cameramen still do; they’ll pump up the driver so much, like in Adam-12, or they’ll cover the whole thing to get rid of reflections, which is not real.
You did Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues, where the majority of the actors are black. Black obviously reflects differently than white; that’s a fact of life. Do you have any special theories or special ways that you went about lighting them?
Well, I had a theory. I found it’s not a matter of how much light you put on black people, it’s how little light you put on white people. In other words, you don’t have to burn up Bill Cosby just to see him. Leave him alone, but don’t put as much light on the white person. Expose for the black person and the white person will not be over-exposed. I just used that rule of thumb. There is an interesting facet of photographing black people as there is photographing a lot of us that have darker pigment in the skin. Diana Ross, for instance, had a sort of chocolate kind of quality to her skin, whereas Cicely Tyson had a slight bluish quality to her skin. So for Cicely I would use a warmer light; instead of a blue, daylight fill light it would be a regular tungsten warm light, and it would give her a little warmth to her skin. With Diana Ross having this little warm quality against Billy Dee Williams, her eye light always was a little colder blue to bring her back within the range of Billy Dee. You find that’s true about all black people in the sense that they reflect a certain cast. And the film being very sensitive to blue, it is the one color that you really don’t want to introduce into their faces. I found that just playing around with the light and accentuating the best features of a person as you would do with a white person, is just really the way to attack the problem of lighting black people. And the other theory is not to put as much light on them as you might think.
Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues were both period pieces. One was an urban period piece and the other a rural period piece. I’m wondering what went into your lighting of both those films to enhance the periodness of them.
Well, Sounder was an exterior picture and I tried to give the interiors a sort of available-light quality. In other words light comes in through a window, that’s what the inside should look like. That’s the way it is. And also with the night interiors, we tried to give them a certain available-light quality and let the bugs float around the lamps and all of that. The only difficult thing about Sounder was the beginning; the coon chase. And I called Jimmy Wong Howe on that. That’s how the picture starts at night, chasing the coon. Where does light come from? And I called Jimmy (he was very sick at the time) and I said, “You know Marty better than I and I’m about to give him an idea but I don’t want it to blow up in my face.” And he said, “What’s your idea?” And I said, “My idea is that we shouldn’t shoot it day-for-night just in order to see. The audiences nowadays are too hip and they know exactly what’s going on. Why not shoot it at night and light it, but instead of lighting it from a high angle, light it from very low angles; just straight shots, light through the trees. Make it graphic, a graphic look, because it is the beginning of the picture and you want to set up a certain pace to it.”
He agreed with me: “Tell Marty I said so and if he gives you any trouble, you tell him that’s the way it should be done.” He was a feisty old man; I loved him. So I approached Marty and he said, “Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Try it, see how it turns out.” Chasing and following the lantern very close through the forest, through the trees was very interesting. Instead of really trying to track through the forest with that thing, I sat on a Lazy Susan with a hand-held Arri following the thing very close and asked Paul Winfield and the little boy to run around me; and every once in a while to go around one tree, come back around the tree and back and forth like that, changing sides. And I did a 360° spin and they ran around 360°. Well, when you cut that shot in you can’t tell it’s going around; it looks like it’s going right straight through the forest. And that was it. Also I had lights hidden behind trunks shooting right at them and sometimes right at the lens, but you wouldn’t see the source of the light, you’d just see a flare of lighting. And it added a certain excitement to the whole thing. All those shadows, if you notice, are going straight across, they’re not down. The purist would say, “Well, that’s not source light, that’s the cameraman’s light.” But you must think in terms of the material that applies.
Day interiors were done as naturally as possible. I did use reflectors way out in the distance and shot them through windows so that they would burn up as they went through. But, if you notice, it was really real. I made sure that you were never really aware of a key light on an actor in Sounder. Even if it was outdoors and you had to use an arc for some reason or other, I would use it but the lens had to be stopped down so much that it really had very little effect except in the eyes. So you didn’t have a lit quality, if that’s possible.
So essentially what you did was just try to light it as naturally as possible and any period quality would be picked up from the sets?
From the subject, right? From the behavior and the artwork. See, it’s a good point for all cameramen to take in. It really applies not just to period pictures, it can apply to everything. I’ve seen Gordon Willis do it very well, I’ve seen Owen Roizman do it. What happens is that they take a situation in a room and they look at it the way it really looks and all they do is intensify up to exposure, and then stop it down a little bit more so that intensification doesn’t show. And that’s the best trick I could advise anybody about doing the naturalistic type of photography. It’s like Rembrandt lighting.
I can remember scenes in The Godfather where Willis did that.
Even the silhouette scenes, he had lights on those people. Because of the chemistry and the mathematics of the negative, you must have some light, otherwise it’s kind of greyish mud. He had light on them but he still stopped it down so you didn’t see the light on them and they still were silhouettes. That’s the best rule to follow, if you want the so-called available-light, natural look.
Now, compared to Sounder, Lady Sings the Blues was much different. I guess that gave you more room to . . .
That was more show-biz and you could do more lighting effects. And I went in for color there, a lot of color. Some of the nightclubs had canvas ceilings so instead of lighting the ceilings from underneath, I shot lights through the canvas and put dots of light on the canvas. I tried to create an atmosphere that even the camera may not have seen, but it was an atmosphere for Diana Ross. For example we’d have a window on the set which the camera never saw. But I would put little twinkly lights out there and traffic lights going through so when she looked out the window she could see something. And a lot of times it’s good for a cameraman to do that, and to help the director in that respect. Because sometimes you have actors that really must function in an atmosphere that is not a movie set. Which is another reason I very seldom take walls out in the set—I feel that if I keep the walls in, it keeps the actors in. It makes them think that they’re really in the atmosphere where they belong. And Lady Sings the Blues gave me an excuse to be more bizarre; I threw light in whether there was a reason for it or not, if I liked it. In other words, I never had an excuse. You saw a very cold, dry look when she was shooting herself up in the white bathroom; a tricky exposure. That applies again for shooting a black object in a white room, a dark object in a white room. Again, you don’t take the walls into consideration. Expose for that face of the black person and then you can always print it up or print it down. And also soft light in a white room is much better than hard light. Hard light will bounce the white right back at you. We had smoke effects on that film which I hadn’t done before, and colored smoke wherever possible. For the period cars and exteriors I had a light fog filter to give it a little periodness. In the beginning of the picture I used too much fog, I think.
You fogged the cars to make it not look like they just rolled off the assembly line.
That’s right. I also used nets. When I shot her face I used nets, like hair nets, to put in front of the lens for that purpose. To just take it out of the realm of reality and more into the period piece. When she was very, very young I had fog filters and nets to give it a kind of way-back-when quality. And the colors were simple; it was not overly colorful. It didn’t get colorful really until she walked into the nightclub. Then she saw her new world, which was the nightclub she wanted to sing in.
It seems that you’re one of the few cameramen who give credit to the set designer and the art director and the wardrobe people.
You have the set decorator, the wardrobe designer and also the wardrobe person. They break down scripts just like I break down scripts to shoot. Theirs is probably more complicated in the initial stages. And then they’re at the mercy of the camerman. They really are. And I hate it. I respect fellow artists and I hate it when you don’t utilize what they’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to do. In Harold and Maude the art director gave Maude’s place a boxcar full of detail. They knew that the camera sometimes would never pick up some of the stuff but they were creating an atmosphere, and I was always conscious and aware of that. But when you work with people like Harry Horner, Richard Sylbert and Dean Tavalouris, they had that attitude to begin with. They always figured that they couldn’t go to a cameraman and say, “Get your ass over here and look at what I’m doing.” It really is incumbent upon the cameraman to approach the production designer, and not the other way around, because he is going to be the responsible party for putting that image up there. A very good thing to talk about would be Dean Tavalouris and I on Farewell, My Lovely. Dean had just finished doing the Godfathers. I had just finished doing Chinatown. And here we are doing a period picture again, very similar to what we’d been doing. So we had the task of avoiding copying ourselves, and we also had to work very closely together because I was trying very hard not to make it look like Chinatown and it was very near to the same period; and he was going to try not to art direct it similar to the Godfathers that he’d done. So we were very trepidacious about that. I attacked it first of all by shooting with Fuji film. And that was different. I used a net for the whole thing which I hadn’t done before. I used more color than we had done in Chinatown, with far more reds, blue lights and green lights. And he had a wonderful, wonderful idea of the sheen and polish on the wood that he hadn’t really done as much on the Godfathers. And the sort of abstract way that he furnished rooms was great.
You have previously said that Chinatown was your masterpiece. This is the film where all the elements came together, where everything coalesced. Up to that point in my career, yes, it was the culmination of a lot of experience put to use and it did offer the opportunity to try things I had never tried to photograph.
Could you elaborate on that? What things were involved there that didn’ t come together on pictures before?
I think I said this before; it particularly had to do with Polanski and the way he handled the whole thing. He brought everybody up to a level of competence: the prop man, the production designer, the wardrobe designer, all the heads of departments involved in the movie. He sort of psyched us up to such a degree that we were all putting out top, top efficiency. It gave him a great deal of security to know that when I was going to walk on the set it was going to be perfect. It was a concept that we all had in mind. In other words, none of the little irritations were there like “I forgot to do this or I forgot to do that; there wasn’t enough money to do this.” It was immaculately produced. To everybody involved, that gave us a sense of freedom to really go into the aesthetics or into that realm of trying to create something better in compositions, lighting, and camera moves. We did them with absolute security that everybody else’s job had been finished and was complete and we could be brave and try different things. And Roman would put me to the task many times, not necessarily how difficult it was to light it but rather to light it in a fashion so that it carried a visual look that was even throughout the whole piece.
Polanski didn’t want any diffusion and I guess that caused some problems. Will you talk about that?
Well, the first cameraman hired was Stanley Cortez. And Roman hired Stanley because he had shot The Magnificent Ambersons. They had a big artistic difference, the two of them. Cortez did not want to photograph Faye Dunaway without diffusion and without the proper lighting, and Roman didn’t want that. He wanted to put on film a sort of natural but somber kind of look. And Dick Sylbert had his act together; those sets were brilliant. He had them all designed perfectly. And he had indulged the cameraman, given him places to put giant lights and all of that. It was just a big difference of opinion and so they fired Cortez. And I was called in immediately, like overnight. I read the script on Thursday night; I met with Bob Evans and the producers and I met Roman Polanski on the set on Friday morning to shoot one scene: the barbershop scene. And we had a little dialogue and shot that little scene and quit. Then we went to Bob Evans’s house to look at all of Roman Polanski’s films. The three of us sat there and looked at films; I asked him questions, he asked me questions, and he wanted to make sure that my head was going to be where his was. And I said, “I have no objections to shooting it without diffusion.” I said, I do have a theory and I tried to point it out to him and he went along with it. I said, “In the anamorphic aspect ratio, there’s a workhorse lens called the 40mm lens. The reason I like that lens for shooting and the reason I like to shoot Panavision anamorphic (the anamorphic ratio is 2.35 to 1) is because it is probably the best representation of true human perception.” You and I see—you can check me out on this—we see a great deal with peripheral vision, but our brain can really only compute about 15-20° this way and about 40° this way. No matter what distance you’re at, the angle remains the same. That’s what the brain can really conceive. And also, our brain can see that perspective. That perspective is this room is this size.
The best way for a cameraman to check that out is put a zoom lens on a camera, a 25mm to 250mm lens, or any zoom lens that has that range, look through the lens with one eye at somebody’s face and look at the person’s face with the eye that’s not looking through the lens and then match those images. The left eye sees one size; now keep zooming the lens until the lens gets approximately the same size. And you’re looking at somewhere between a 37 and a 47mm lens. So now this is what I’m saying about the anamorphic process. I said to Roman, “To me the 40mm lens is the best reproduction of what the human being perceives as correct perspective. Really, it’s like a 43-44mm, sometimes a 45 depending on the set.” And I said, “If we shoot the whole picture, as much as possible, with a 40mm lens, we’ll have really a reproduction of the sets the way they are.” Dick Sylbert immediately said, “I know that. If I could get a cameraman to shoot everything with a 40mm, I’d be very happy.”
And as far as diffusion was concerned, I was perfectly willing as long as he was willing, you see. You do have that situation sometimes, where you have a producer or a director say, “I want her to look ravishing. I don’t care what you do.” But up front we understood that we were going to try to photograph raw beauty and Faye Dunaway is not difficult to photograph without any diffusion. Plus Roman had another thing which I thought was very interesting. He liked putting the camera very close to the performers, right on top of them. Now that’s an intimidating thing to any actress who is so beautiful. Well, it added to her performance, I really believe, it made her nervous. Because here is this camera; here I am on top of her with a camera. So my task was to angle the camera in such a position where I got the least amount of distortion. And Roman never questioned me on that. I would try to line up the camera dead center to her eyes so at least her close-ups did not distort. We even shot some with the 40mm lens which is really dangerous.
And you tried to put the camera where?
At an angle. In other words, where the film plane is parallel to the plane of the face. If you move the camera one way, you distort the chin; if you move it another way, you may distort the forehead or the nose. So you have to find just the right height and watch it very closely.
In Repulsion he used that to great effect especially toward the end of the film.
There was reason in everything that Roman did. I, of course, had a ball with it, because it was giving me a chance to do a certain kind of lighting. We put ceilings on all the sets. We sprayed them, we put lights through them. We used black-and-white drops outside instead of color drops. So it looked like the city was washed out; there was no color outside through the windows. And Roman showed me about perspective again. He said, “That backing back there is out of whack. Tip it this way so when we look through the lens it’ll straighten up or tip it this way to back it up.” I mean, the man’s brilliant as far as his technology is concerned. So I learned a great deal from him and I taught him a great deal about composition within that aspect ratio of 2.35 to 1. You don’t have to fill the edges of the screen. You do it with lighting if you want to fill the edges, or let the edges go. And then it looks more like an old-fashioned view camera when you look through the viewfinder. The edges are dark but there’s the center. It’s a D. W. Griffith kind of bright center and dark toward the edges. So he liked that, it appealed to him. Another thing to consider for a cameraman is that there is something to be said when you use symmetry, composition. A close-up of you, for instance, using a 40mm lens and with the window moldings back there; if you’re shooting slightly down, those window moldings will climb a little bit this way. If you’re slightly up, they will do something else. So it’s always best to try to shoot straight on; keep that symmetry going wherever possible. And if you notice, a lot of artists, when they paint something, will sometimes bend a tree so that it’s parallel to the frame that they paint it to. And I used that unconsciously in Harold and Maude and in almost all those pictures because I’ve studied art. Since you have a “hard matte” to work with on the screen, if there’s a wall or building to the edge of the screen, I make sure that the gap is not like this or like that, but it’s perfectly parallel. In other words, the edges of your information are parallel to the edges of the screen. It’s a subconscious thing, and I think that people will like it. They won’t know why; but wherever possible you do that and try to straighten it out.
There are certain directors that always shoot at eye level. Bresson’s films are always right at eye level.
It’s effective. Also just because one person is standing and one person is sitting, you don’t have to shoot the person sitting down from the point of view of the person standing up. It’s quite legitimate to drop down here and let that person look at the top of the screen. It’s legitimate to be parallel up here and let that person look down the screen. It works. Only when you want to do a Kubrickesque type of situation where you want that distortion. I did a lot of that in The Cheap Detective. I copied all the great old films and copied shots and so on. But that’s an important thing studying composition for the 2.35 to 1 format; for the spherical format it’s a little more square, it’s a little different. And there you’re locked into using the wider angle lenses. Farewell My Lovely was shot with the wider angle lenses and in spherical as opposed to anamorphic.
It seemed from reading your American Cinematographer article that you like to use a lot of lights; you don’t have any problem with lights, using as many lights as you need or want. With some other cameramen, it seems their attitude from the beginning is the least amount of lights as possible. Would you say that’s true?
Not really, in reality I like to use very few lights. I mean, that’s one of the problem things. On Chinatown they had a 40-foot van full of lights that I never used; I just got rid of it. The budget savings were enormous. They had lights strung up all along the catwalks and I got rid of them; I don’t need them. In the morgue scene with Jack Nicholson, all I had was one chicken coop coming straight down and a light on the camera, so that wherever he went you would never see the shadow. That, to me, is no light at all.
A “chicken coop?” What is that?
A “chicken coop” is a very old type of lighting fixture. It’s a giant sort of box with these great big bulbs that are painted silver on the bottom. The wattages of the bulbs are enormous and they’re screwed up into the coop which is painted white so it reflects and gives you a soft top light. Then there is a piece of chicken wire across the bottom to protect the actors from the danger of breaking glass. It’s a device that’s been around for years. So we used a chicken coop and we put a black skirt around it so it just became a soft pool of light from the top. And the only front light I used was a light mounted on the camera itself. The shadow from that light went directly behind the actor and you’d never see it.
But I don’t like to use a lot of light, depending on the picture. On The Fortune, we used a tremendous amount of different lighting. I was using a great deal of light in the background as opposed to on the actors themselves. I was sort of painting with light, really changing the aspects of the little bungalows and so on. I used a lot more individual, small units and so the amount of light was greater. I don’t like to use a lot of light because it has an effect on the actors when they have a tremendous amount of light on them. You lose a certain amount of reality. You’d be amazed at the difference in a performance when an actor has to go to a regular lamp and one lamp lights the whole scene. They get the feeling that they’re really where they’re supposed to be. It’s psychological plus it also has a very interesting look. Gordon Willis proved that.
But it’s wrong to think that because you’ve got a lot of paint you’re going to get a good painting. You can have a wonderful painting with just one color. I mean, children can show you that in a child’s drawing. They’ll stick to particular colors and it looks wonderful. Picasso loved to do that. On Lady Sings the Blues I had a lot more lighting. On Black Sunday, for the effects that I had to have on the sound stages because of the front-screen and rear-screen projection, I had a tremendous amount of lighting. But that was to bring up a key. And I totally disagree with the philosophy of the old cameramen that you take a giant 10K and then put a Christmas tree in front of it. What do you prove? Just that you’re very clever at using one light to do the job of five or six other lights? I’d rather just key the person with one light there, put another light over here, you know, and then a little backlighting wherever possible.
Do you believe that source light is a sacred commandment? Or is it like painting?
No, it’s like painting. Rembrandt never gave you a source light really. If you look at his work very closely he’s got a lot of stuff coming from different directions and you don’t know why. It’s not important. Jimmy Wong Howe is the one that told me that. He said, “Source lighting is only for the American Society of Cinematographers conventions.” He said, “You do it any way you want to. Do what looks the best.” Source lighting is totally impossible in some situations. For example, a dark bedroom at night with no light on; where’s the light coming from? Certainly not by moonlight. And if you really tried to reproduce the moonlight effect through a window it looks like daylight. So what do we do in movies? We put a blue filter on it and say, “Hey, it’s moonlight.” It should be done to the taste of the cameraman, the way he thinks. There’s no such thing as a rule or a commandment about that.
We understand that Norma Rae was shot 99% hand-held. What sort of lighting problems did you encounter?
Tougher ones because the camera wandered around everywhere. And being in practical locations, we couldn’t necessarily hang lighting units from up above. In the factory, it was all fluorescent lighting so again, we mounted a light on the camera. I had a very clever gaffer who could adjust the dimmer on it if an actor got too close. In the houses and other places where we had to go hand-held, Marty and I would talk about it and he would give me a corner to work in and I could light from that direction. Or I would light through the windows if it was daylight and just let them burn up. Now when I was shooting an actor directly against a window, I would neutralize or neutral density the window to balance it out. But most of the time, when the actor was away from the window, I’d take the neutral density out and let the light coming through the window be the key light and use white cards to balance it. It presents a lot of problems because with a hand-held camera, you never know where it’s going to be. It’s also tough on the sound man because he doesn’t know where the headroom is all the time with the boom. So the sound man had to use radio microphones all the time just to cover himself.
If you had to give advice to a young student or cameraman about the lab, what kind of advice would you give?
I’d say learn everything you can about the lab because laboratories are not unlike a lot of the highly technical people that you meet sometimes in life. They can razzle-dazzle you with technological mumbo-jumbo, you know, especially if they don’t know who you are. And a lot of times it’s done just to impress themselves, but a lot of times it’s done just to sort of get rid of you. “The lab will fix it,” is a common cliché. There’s no such thing. They can, to a degree, help you but any filmmaker, cameraman, director or producer, should really know the goings-on in a laboratory; how it functions and why it works the way it works and what your limitations are. Even if it’s just a simple thing that you know that they have a printer scale of 0-50 lights and the preferential exposure is a 25 light. Then if you just know that much, when the man says you printed at 26, 27, 29, you know what he’s talking about and you should know that those three lights refer to the cyan, magenta and yellow colors. If you know just that much already, the lab can’t bullshit you. You should also know the inner workings of their back-end of the picture, back-end of production. Why they have to make the CRI [color reversal internegative] in a certain way. What’s a CRI? And why can they only give you so many release prints? Because as a cameraman, if you’re going to give them a very delicate negative to work with because that’s what you want, you must tell them; most of the time they say don’t do that because we may not be able to give you a release print. You will be able to come back and say, “Yes, you will. All you have to do is make me the best CRI in the world, make three of them if necessary. I don’t care how many you have to make but protect my original and don’t touch it.” If you didn’t do that they would talk you into shooting the picture differently just to accommodate them. That’s happened to me many times even at this stage of my career now where the MGM lab tried to tell me how to shoot Casey’s Shadow. And I said, “No, you’re wrong. I’ll expose it the way I want to expose it because I know it can be done.” Also on The Cheap Detective it was the same way. The bottom line is the MGM lab lost The Cheap Detective because they couldn’t come through.
We’ve heard other people say that there is no substitute for a strong director. That the director’s strength filters down to everybody and it makes everyone feel secure.
Sure. I totally concur. The director is the leader of the thing, supposedly the man in charge. Although the cinematographers are more and more becoming the titular heads of the crew. They are in a sense the right arm of the director. They supply the spit to get the crew to do what the director wants. The director doesn’t have to be strong technically; he doesn’t have to know if he wants a particular 75mm lens here. He can just say, “I want a shot this size here.” Now he relies on your competence and knowledge to know what lens to use for that shot. But he polices the creativity of everybody; unless he does that people are left floundering. You know, all of a sudden you have inconsistencies, from hair dressing to wardrobe. The director really has to be very strong in communicating exactly what he wants and in being faithful to what he has said and not wavering because the minute he wavers everybody sort of feels that lean, and it’s not good. It’s not good when a cameraman suddenly gets a reputation of being the guy who really helped to direct a picture. I’ve heard that about some cameramen. Or the guy who was really in charge was the cameraman and the director sort of followed him around. That’s not the way the system is designed.
That’s what people have said. People we’ve talked to that have been in situations similar to that have said that invariably their camera work suffered because if they had to pull the director along they didn’t have time to do what they wanted to do and should have been doing in the first place.
And it’s not fair; it’s not fair to the cameraman. Because you have a situation where you like the project and the director says, “Help me out.” Sometimes they say that, “Help me out, I don’t know what to do here.” Well, your concentration goes now into his realm of creativity and yours has to suffer somewhat. I don’t like to be put into that position. That’s probably why I’m more selective now as to who I would work for. Marty Ritt is my mentor, my hero; if I can get on a Marty Ritt picture every time, I’ll be very happy.
Talking about Martin Ritt, is there any special spark of creativity when you have worked with a director a few times? Is there some kind of electricity or is it you just work together really well, that allows you to produce such good work?
Marty is the only experience I can give you as I have worked for him more than anybody else. I’ve done six pictures with him. What happens is, I can’t really describe it. It is a chemistry situation. It’s just something that functions. I have a tremendous love for the man and his talent. He has a tremendous amount of respect for anybody that knows what they’re doing, and that already opens the door for anybody to be creative. And I can’t tell you what it is; all I know is that if he called me to do a picture tomorrow and I have another picture going, I’ll drop the other picture and go with him. Because I know that under his auspices and guidance, I will have total freedom to just go as far as I want to photographically. Plus he also, in his own way, teaches me a great deal about directing, which I want to learn about. He teaches me a great deal about the discipline of filmmaking and I find myself making sure that when I compose a shot it isn’t a self-indulgent thing; it isn’t a cameraman’s shot but it’s something that’s appropriate to the story and he brings that out in you. I think maybe that’s what happens with a lot of other relationships like that. The director and cameraman are almost equal in stature but yet each one knows his position. I don’t know what else to tell you about that. It’s not easy to be articulate about it.
It’s a tough thing but there’s a lot of people out there who want to break into the industry. Can you say what’s the best way, or the way that worked for you?
Everybody’s gotten in differently. For me, it was a matter of being there at the right time and being tenacious about it. That should apply to everybody who wants to get into the industry. There’s no such thing as just flipping right into becoming a cameraman. And this really sounds boring, like an old cameraman talking, but if someone had told me in 1969, “You got to shoot Black Sunday,” I would not have been prepared. I would not have known how to do that. So that somehow God gave me the thing to do at the right time. Bloody Mama showed me I could do that kind of picture and Vanishing Point was still within the realm of reality for me. By the time I went to Get to Know Your Rabbit, I had two pictures under my belt; enough to control people, enough to know how to work stage lighting. Sounder was very tough. Lady Sings the Blues was tougher, and so that by the time I got to Black Sunday my control of the technology was totally secure.
I was in the union retroactive to 1964, but actually did not become a union Group 1 until 1966. And in three years time, by 1969, I was shooting a picture, and that’s very fast. And I’ve not been out of work since. But a lot of that has to do with the quality of what I can do, and a lot of it has to do with being tenacious enough to study and to learn. Because I didn’t go to school, but I don’t say that you shouldn’t go to school. If you go to school, you get a lot of that out of your way. But if you want to get in, go to work, if you can, for a documentary house or go to work for a commercial house, public television but whatever you do, don’t stop shooting. Keep shooting and teaching yourself, go out and do it even if it’s just a still camera you’re using, develop your own stuff, look at it. That taught me a lot. I learned a lot. Get books like, hopefully, this one. It will provoke questions. I give a lot of cinematographers’ manuals to people, not because they’re necessarily the Bible but they will provoke questions. Why use a neutral density filter? Why? Why an 85B as opposed to 85 A or 85C? The book doesn’t tell you, but if you look at it and you see this guy is using a 23A and a 20 something 5 red and blue filters to shoot day for night in black and white—why? And it gets the, saliva going and gets all of these fundamentals into a nice secure place so you can say, “I know it.” Now someone says I want to shoot this kind of picture and you’ve got the technology out of the way and you can get into the artistic realm.
That goes back to what you were saying about being able to look at a situation and make decisions. You’re secure because you’ve been there. And therefore you know what you’re doing and you do it. So, like you said, I guess that takes time.
I think that’s what kids nowadays can do; shoot film, borrow cameras, do whatever they can but keep shooting. If you can get a fairly decent film together, there are enough people in this town who will look at it and that’s a way to get into it. Then if you have the fortitude to stay in a loading room, if you have to be in a loading room—be in a loading room. Whatever way you can get in because there is a tremendous need for new cameramen in the industry. The old ones are not being accepted by the new directors, you know. The new guys, the kids coming out of UCLA and USC that are directors, they don’t want to hear from an old cameraman. They want a Zsigmond, they want a Kovacs, and if there’s a better one coming up, they want him. They want Michael Chapman or they want one of these new guys who are coming up. Fujimoto, they want him now, because he’s done something. Also because he relates closer to them; maybe they are on the same level intellectually. I intimidate certain new directors, you know, and so does Gordon Willis and people like that. You get a new guy who calls you up and says, “Do you mind shooting this for me?” Well you can hear in their voices; they automatically assume that I’ll say, “No” or “Here’s the way you do it, kid.” I don’t do that. I have worked with first-time directors and I don’t think a single one will tell you that I have ever ramrodded him in any way whatsoever. I may have coaxed them to do better, but that’s the reason they would go for newer people and there’s a need for those people.
You can go to work for commercial houses that have a union/non-union situation. You go to work for their non-union situation. You must make a pest of yourself. Otherwise you ain’t going to get anywhere, they aren’t going to come to you, and that’s always the advice I give. The union is not that difficult. First of all, it’s not a hiring hall. They don’t get you the job, so don’t make them a bad guy right off the bat. Use them.
What about documentary work? What did that, in a nutshell, basically teach you that would come in really handy later on in features?
What I learned primarily from documentaries was coverage. In documentaries, a lot of times, you are forced to cut the material yourself, but when you have a situation, an event happening and you are documenting it, obviously you can’t be at both places at once with one camera, so you must make the decision of how to cover it kind of like a master shot. When the event is over with, somehow find some other element that is the cutaway from when you were out of focus or whatever and if you learn that, it applies to features, even better. If you really know that, you can make a feature run much faster. You can say to the director, “Here’s a place you can cut.” The most important thing you learn is how to think on your feet. Which is really the basis of what a good cameraman is: to be able to think on your feet. The one thing it does not teach you, because you’re by yourself and you don’t have a director, is how to handle people. But that you can evolve in projects when you work with other people doing your own films. You can learn how that cameraderie has to be established by going on sets. The egos in this industry are so horrendous that you really should study how not to behave, you know what I mean?
On your first feature, Bloody Mama, how did it feel that first day and you were finally the DP, you were to run the crew. How did you prepare for it?
I didn’t know anybody in the crew. Roger Corman was a major producer and he was directing. I got my crew just from the recommendations of the American International people. And so when somebody would say to me, “Well how many 10Ks do you want?” I really didn’t know. So I kept my cool as much as possible and tried to visualize from what I had seen at Fox, the behavior of the cameramen, and what I had done in documentaries; out of that came a behavior where I made, thank God, the right decisions. So I talked to Roger; he said, “I want a very raw, cold look. I don’t want anything glamorous.” And also I went to the lab. At that time the lab had nothing to do with me because I was nobody and they said, “Well, do some tests and we’ll develop them for you.” Well, I didn’t have the facility to shoot tests and I didn’t get a chance to test anything. So I really went very unprepared, and the crew I got was not the world’s greatest. They were the ones who wouldn’t cross the line; the electricians wouldn’t help the grips, etc. But because I came from documentaries I was physically doing work myself and that was against the rules too. But Roger kind of liked that. He liked the fact that I climbed up a ladder and set a light and did this and that. Eventually I charmed the crew into kind of joining me a little bit and they liked the idea. So maybe what I was doing was whistling when I was afraid, you know what I mean. Because there’s no such thing as not being able to do it, unless you’re totally ignorant about it. I can’t tell you that I was cocky and confident. You know I was scared that I would make a mistake and waste people’s money. But the nice thing about Roger was that he didn’t focus on it. He saw the dailies. I expected something like, “This is not right and that is not right,” and all that. He looked at them and said, “Okay, John. Very good. Thank you.” So I said, “Okay, if that’s the attitude, I’ll just keep on doing what I’m doing.”
I suppose if you had a more insecure director, it could be very easy to blame things on you.
Or a new director who needed a lot of help. I would not have been able to give him as much help, at that point. It was a good experience for me. As I say, it was something that I could handle, at that time. The technology that I knew was just enough to handle that picture. Of course, you had damn good actors who were in control. And I did a lot of hand-held in it because I was an expert and was very secure at that. Roger loved it. He never really worked with anybody who did a good hand-held job; so I did it, again violating the rules of the union because the operator that I had couldn’t do it as well as I could do it.
As you advanced in budgets with each picture, did it present any problems to you in the sense that you’re working on a $600,000 picture and the next picture is suddenly S1½ million? Or were they all at increments that you could handle?
Let me tell you this. I’ve never been aware of the budget from the point of view that I say, “Well, I’ve got enough money, I can do this.” I try to do everything as economically as possible. Because I know that appeals first to the production manager and producer. They love it. The cameraman says, “Well, forget the 10Ks, we can do it with two 5Ks, it’s cheaper.” Well, I never have to get into that point with them because I’m always very cost-conscious. If I have the money and it does not have a bearing as to what equipment I’m going to use, I tell them what I need, you know. Then they tell me, “You can’t afford it.” Then I say, “Okay, we’ll go in this direction.” On Black Sunday I had to have 35 arcs and they said, “John!?!” But I said, “There is no other way of doing it.” I said, “Check me out, check out the technology. You know there’s no other way of doing it.” And they said, “Okay.” So there’s no problem. And because of that attitude, I think that’s one of the reasons I probably get along well with production people. With Norma Rae I did not take a generator. I took four electricians and four grips. It’s a 5-million-dollar picture; I could have taken more. I could have taken more lights to cover myself and to make sure that if I needed something I had it. But I knew that I didn’t need it, you see. I always make sure the production manager, the director and the producer are aware of that because as long as they know that about me, they know that I’m not bullshitting them when I suddenly say to them I need $55,000 today for lighting. They’ll say, “Okay, you’ve got it.” There’s never a question about that. And my crew has been taught to do the same thing. Never over-order. Don’t do what they call “protect the cameraman” bullshit. Just order what you think is necessary. Because one of these days you’re going to run into a nice young Francis Ford Coppola who’s got a little movie he wants to make and wants to make it for a nickel and, if you don’t know how to do it, you know, you’re just fooling yourself. You’re going back in reverse. I’ve seen Billy Fraker shoot very tiny, cheap movies and very big movies and so have I, and the budgets have always been a point. The only thing I’ll fight for in a budget is the crew’s salary. Because I work with such small crews, I want them to be paid for it.
This may not be a fair question, but is the cameraman who shot Vanishing Point the same cameraman who shot Norma Rae?
I think so. I know a lot more now. I know a hell of a lot more now. I wish I knew as much when I shot Vanishing Point. It would have been a lot better. Whenever you have a quality that is good, you try to maintain that good quality all the time; sometimes it means cutting into yourself a little bit, cutting into your own ego. To knock your ego down, to go back to your roots to what you were really good at. The bravery of hand-holding the camera not because you want to show you can do it but because that’s the way to do it at that moment; not doing it because I’m Mr. Big and I have to show off. The guts to say, “I’m sorry, Marty, it’s going to take five hours for the shot.” In Vanishing Point, I was able to say that because I didn’t know any better, but now I know not to say that to certain people because it will scare the shit out of them. But the bravery, the guts to say, “That’s it; no more or no less, that’s the best shot and that’s what we should do.” The guts to say to Marty, “It’s 2:00 in the afternoon, the light is totally wrong.” When I did Vanishing Point I didn’t know any better and I thought you could say that but I found out later that you couldn’t do that; you could get into a lot of trouble by saying that to a director or producer. With Marty, because of our relationship, I’m able to do that because we were going for quality. But the no-generator idea took a lot of guts. To do a major picture like Norma Rae with very little light and no generator was not a grandstand move on my part, it was just an impulse I had. I knew it could be done and it disciplined me to do the lighting in a certain way. I wouldn’t have the convenience of big lights. I thought that would give a picture quality no one else has done recently.
How did the advances in lenses and film speeds change the way you do things? I mean, over the past ten years, they just keep getting better and better.
Oh, dramatically. When Panavision designed the so-called PSR camera, which was much lighter than the Mitchell, right away they designed a smaller dolly and it wasn’t necessary to have the giant dolly. They came out with speed lenses and it was a big rage for a while to shoot with them. And then almost immediately came the Panaflex, the little tiny camera, and the speed lenses. The laboratories, TVC in New York and Deluxe and Technicolor here in Los Angeles, all were into experimenting and have accomplished a great deal in development of film, to the point where you can force a picture two stops. The Cheap Detective was forced two stops all the time. Black Sunday was forced one stop all the time and sometimes two. On Norma Rae, all the interiors were at a process of 600 ASA and done by Deluxe. Instead of doing it by time and temperature, they do it chemically, similar to the TVC process but much better quality. It’s terrific quality. Now in the beginning, when all these advances came up, faster film, faster lenses, we would go out and shoot available light at f1.1 or f1.2, and we’d say, “Oh, it’s terrific.” Of course, a lot of things were out of focus because there was no depth of field. Now I’ve been working more on pictures where I don’t necessarily use less light. I keep the same amount of light but I stop the lens down more. I mean, you see it in The Cheap Detective and it’s a very subtle thing. But because I forced it two stops, most of my average shooting in interiors was f4.5-f5.6, which gave the anamorphic lenses more depth of field than people are used to seeing. Things were in focus.
If you shot it normally, you’d have so much light in there to get a f5.6 that you’d burn up the actors. If you forced it, it was grainy. And also the Panaflex in Chinatown proved to be invaluable. You can put the Panaflex in a bathroom without taking the walls out and shoot scenes in there. I mean, it’s not only a dramatic advantage to the director but it’s also a physical advantage for the cameraman. So in the last ten years there have been radical changes.
All of this is challenging the filmmakers. Fortunately for us, the filmmakers are new people, like Francis Ford Coppola, people that are up with that technology. It’s very difficult for directors that come from the old school to get used to it. Marty Ritt, with whom I’ve done six pictures, has kept up with the times. I mean, he loved it. Norma Rae we shot 99% hand-held. There’s maybe four shots that are not hand-held in that picture. Now there’s a director from the so-called old school who has got the guts to do it. I’m not saying that others are not around, they just haven’t had the opportunity. Maybe they haven’t had any of us to work with.
What has been your experience with the new higher-speed Kodak film stock 5293?
I shot all of Scarface with 5293; all of Crosscreek was with 5293. I’ve had very good experience with it. The interesting experience with 5293 was doing Crosscreek; we were shooting in mostly daylight situations and using a high-speed film outdoors. Normally you don’t need high-speed film for that. But we were able to use it very effectively in the swamps under the trees where it’s very dark. The 5247 stock would not have been enough in that situation unless we had a lot of light. Shooting in the swamps, you see daylight way in the distance but mostly it’s shadow inside. 5293 picked up good detail in the shadows and did not let the distant sunlight overexpose too much. It was very valuable to me. We were able to use it in the wee hours of the day or in the morning; we just kept changing the ratings for the appropriate exposure. Of course, we stayed with the same film stock at night. I knew what the film could do at night and that was no problem. The question was basically if it could hold up as well and be equal to the quality of 5247 on day exteriors. And I found that it was.
I also understand that the 5294 stock is now out; this stock is supposed to be a refined version of 5293.
I have used it. It’s probably a little bit finer-grained stock. I find that the latitude is very good; if forgives you for over- and underexposing a bit. It doesn’t make an enemy out of you if you make a small mistake. I think that with the 5294, Eastman is legitimately saying that it should be rated at an exposure index of 400. That would be a good mean exposure for it but you can, as I have done, go up to 2000 indoors and at night. And you can rate it down to 125.
You wouldn’t be shooting exclusively with 5294 now necessarily?
Oh sure, there’s no reason to use 5247 anymore.
You mean this is a better film in all respects?
Yes, if you look at Crosscreek and Scarface, they don’t look any different than if they had been shot with 5247. Where I rated 5293 rather high at 2000 ASA, it looks like 5247 pushed one stop. But that’s not objectionable. I would use it overall because I think it’s great. The nice thing that Eastman has done is now they have come out with a compatible print stock so that it’s able to pick up the subtle nuances of the 5293. The only case where I might not use the new film stock is if I was doing a picture with a tremendous amount of opticals, with layer upon layer of negative going to be laid on top of each other. Then I might go with 5247 because of its finer grain. I think 5247 is still a very fine piece of material but why start out using it on a film and then find you can’t shoot with it because you run into some dark sequences?
Have you had any experience with lightflex?
I haven’t tried lightflex yet. I’ve done my own version of lightflex, which is what Ozzie Morris did on Oliver Twist and those movies back then. What you do is put a controlled amount of light on a net in front of the lens to give a certain washed look to the print. I did a little bit of that on Backroads and The Cheap Detective. But now they have lightflex which is an actual unit that goes on the matte box and it has absolute control over the amount of light that you can expose to it. It’s a very effective way of getting a certain look. But I haven’t had the occasion to do a picture that called for that type of thing.
Will it replace flashing? Do people still flash film?
I think a few people still do. But it would replace flashing; I would prefer it over flashing because I would have absolute control. I could look right through the matte box and know exactly how much light I’m putting on the film. I’m curious to see what 5294 would look like if you flashed it. I know I will probably experiment with it on the next picture I do.
You’ve also had some experience with the Panacam.
I used the Panacam a great deal to do some of the video sequences for Blue Thunder. I’m very impressed with the camera especially because it uses all the Panavision lenses. It’s very much like a motion picture camera except that it’s recording on video. A lot of the video cameramen are very happy with the idea that the video designers have now made a camera that’s more comparable to the movie camera.
The idea is that the quality of video will improve as more motion picture cameramen cross over and do video with this type of camera?
That’s the hope. I just did an MTV thing for a rock group. But they wanted it done on film because they wanted a “film look.” Some of the things on MTV are very creative and almost all of them are done on video. It would be interesting to see some of them done on film because the opticals would be much better. There is a quality that the lighting cameraman for cinematography brings to his work that the electronic cameraman doesn’t because he’s restricted by the electronics. But now people like myself and others I know are doing some video things. We don’t know the rules; we don’t know any better so we light it as if we’re shooting film. Then we get together with the engineers and see how we can overcome the problems. And most of them are quite open and cooperative about it.
The technology should not control the art. The art should control the technology. The technology should be for servicing the art and not vice versa. TV and video has a tendency to control the aesthetics because of all the electronic technology it deals with. I know it doesn’t have to be that way because otherwise we wouldn’t have Masterpiece Theatre and those things that have been so beautifully done in England with the electronic system. I know that it can be done here. In the future, I can see a lot of episodic television being done with the Panacam on video because the quality will be just as good if not better. It would help bring the cinematographer’s techniques into the video realm and episodic TV would look ten times as good. It wouldn’t be so flatly lit and so boring to look at.
Have you seen the reel on the Skycam?
Yes, the Skycam is a Garrett Brown invention that Panavision is developing a lightweight camera for. It was just marvelous to see the things that this camera can do; it looked like it was literally suspended in air. It’s a very ingenious design of poles very high up that suspend the camera. It’s gyroscopically and radio controlled and it does everything but make martinis. I see a great value to it; you could use it in sequences where you couldn’t lay a dolly track. For instance, in a battle scene or something with a great many people, where you want the camera to travel around at people’s eye levels and then move all the way up and see the entire overview.
Do you think it’s quite a bit of trouble to set up?
No, it’ll go through the same growing pains that the Steadicam and the Panaglide went through. In the beginning, everybody overuses them like crazy; now they are starting to use them properly. The Skycam is going to have the same problem. It’s going to be used like crazy until some good, intelligent directors use it appropriately. For example, the Steadicam was used very appropriately in The Shining but it was not necessary in many other films I’ve seen. The visual is such an important aspect of our business that when a new piece of equipment comes out, it has a tendency to be overused. But it has to go through those growing pains otherwise you never discover what its limitations are.
I think the same thing with the 5294 stock. Cameramen are a little more conservative about the film because they get used to one thing and they don’t want to change. But as they start to discover the value of 5294 and how versatile it is, you’ll see more and more people using it and eventually pushing the film to its limits. I went to 2000 ASA on it and I think that’s about the limit on it. I did do some tests at 4000, 6000 and 10000 ASA and got an image, believe it or not!
Didn’t you use the 5293 stock on Blue Thunder?
Yes, but we didn’t have enough for the whole picture. We used it for some of the night sequences with Roy Scheider on Hollywood Boulevard, we used it for the scenes inside his apartment and we used it for some of the process photography in the helicopter where we’d get a lot of depth of field. I rated it 1700 ASA and got an f5.6 stop which gave me more depth of field. We wanted to use it for all the night photography but we couldn’t get it.
That was your first experience with the 5293; how did you feel about it at that stage?
I loved it. I did some very extensive tests on it. At that time Eastman was a little hesitant for this film to be used in a major motion picture because they really weren’t sure of the kind of animal they had created. And it would have been very risky had it been a failure. But I felt very confident, once I tested it, that it would be good.
The end of the picture, with all the slow-motion night photography of the train crashing into the helicopter, was a once-in-a-lifetime shot. There was no gambling there. I had to shoot high-speed cameras with very little light and I had to rate the film at around 1600-2000 ASA. And we got a very good image out of it. If we had not been able to shoot that scene with 5293, we would have had a full day’s rigging of lighting just to get the lights bright enough for an exposure at 76 or 96 frames a second. We would have to have had an awful lot of light for that. So it was a godsend to have 5293 for that purpose.
It’s been a long long time since cameramen carried any weight whatsoever. And I think that gives rise to everything in this book because it’s a subtle change that people haven’t caught up with yet.
Well, cameramen, at one time, had a great deal of power in the studios. People like Leon Shamroy. When they were under contract with the studios, they had a tremendous amount of power. But it wasn’t directed in the right direction, I don’t think. Because in those days a director went to Fox and he had a film to shoot. He didn’t ask for the cameraman, the studio said, “Leon’ll shoot that one for you.” And that was it. And the director was the slave of the cameraman because of the technology and the enormous time that it would take to do pictures like that. I mean, I remember when I was at Fox for about six months as an assistant. I remember walking on sets with Leon Shamroy and the director literally changing the shot for the convenience of the mechanics. In other words, Leon would say, “You can’t do it that way! Put him over there! Move him over there, it’s much easier to light from here.” And that was totally against Francis Ford Coppola’s philosophy, against any of the younger guys today. They revolted, and I don’t blame them. The mechanics should adjust to the artistic, to the aesthetics, not the other way around. That is a rule, as far as I’m concerned. There should be no such thing as the cameraman saying to the director, “You’ll have to change your staging because I can’t shoot it through a hot window.” You should have the knowledge to say, “Okay.” And if you’ve got a reflection problem, solve it. If the director is asking for a total impossibility, you must be articulate enough to say why it is. But not say, “Put it over there.” You say, “Where would you like to do it? I can’t do it here; can you find another spot to do it in?” That’s the way to approach directors. So now you’re finding a resurgence in the power, so-called “power of cameramen,” because you are dealing with newer directors and younger directors and people that are interested in not just the artistic but also the mechanics. And you find that most of us really trying to satisfy that ego are getting more into the director’s rice bowl, so we can understand where he’s coming from. And as a result, we’ve become a more viable instrument for the director, so they give us a little more credit. And you find directors really wanting Vilmos Zsigmond or Lazslo Kovacs to shoot their picture and they are going to bat for them. So that’s okay with me, because it’s really back where it should be. As you know, the first directors were cameramen. Now it’s leaning more in that direction. There’s a great collaboration. There’s no ego problem either. Roman Polanski and I had no ego problems. I didn’t have any ego problems with Mike Nichols. And Marty Ritt and I certainly don’t have ego problems. We respect each other’s ability, that’s all there is to it. In the old days there used to be that sort of thing but for a valid reason. The director didn’t get along with the cameraman because he was at his mercy.
He wielded the power and would tell him “No,” and that would be that. That’s interesting because it becomes apparent to us that there were subtle changes that took place in Hollywood maybe ten years ago that are just now starting to have an effect to the point where people can say, “Well, you know, it’s really changed.” Now you’re really starting to see things done differently and this is one aspect of it.
Well, you’ll find the 15-20 of us that work all the time. We are hired and we attend rehearsals. We’re there to watch where the head is going. That was unheard of. That had never been done; where a cameraman was hired in advance enough and asked to be present at rehearsals, just to be on the sound stage where they were walking through the scenes. And most of us now are dealing with art directors and wardrobe designers. I walked in to see Edith Head on Pete and Tillie. I went with Marty Ritt to see Edith Head about the wardrobe for Carol Burnett. She was very funny. She said, “I haven’t seen a cameraman in my office in 15 years.”
How do you choose your film projects?
By the quality of the script. That’s sometimes more important than the director. I feel that if the script is there, then the next thing is I meet the director. He interviews me and I’m interviewing him at the same time.
Do you plan to go into directing exclusively now? Will you still work behind the camera? What’s your approach in that area?
No, not exclusive. I’ve done CBS Movies of the Week; I want to do some more of those. I would like to do some features as a director. I don’t want to stop shooting; I like it too much and I’d be very frustrated if all I did was directing. Because it is frustrating to a degree, especially the post-production aspect of it. But as long as Marty Ritt’s alive, I’ll probably sit around and wait for him to shoot some more movies. Now I can limit myself as to who I work for. I have enough offers to direct so that I don’t have to worry about where my next job is coming from. I like directing very much; I like shooting and directing even better.
On this Movie of the Week, you wore both caps; you directed it and you shot it too. Was your attention divided? How did it work out?
I found it to be very easy. I used my regular crew and they know what I want as a cameraman. So I can give them the set-up and I can go away to work with my actors; then they call me when they’re ready. I come back in, watch my actors go through it, maybe change the lighting a little bit and then we start shooting. I’ve found it easy to do that. My concentration was 90% towards my actors and 10% towards my cinematography which just fell into place. It wasn’t difficult at all. It might be difficult with a strange crew. In certain projects it might be difficult also. I might get into a very heavy dramatic piece where I really should have a cameraman do it so I can deal more with the script and the actors. But I’m not going to give up cinematography.
