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John Bailey

"Cameramen don’t necessarily determine the look of a picture as much as the cameraman and director together. It’s a dialogue. For me, the most successful experiences are with a director who already has some kind of vision.”

Due to union seniority rules in Hollywood, most cinematographers are just beginning to hit their stride and explore their potential around the age of forty-five. John Bailey, in his mid-thirties, is making his mark ten years early. After seven features in the last five years, he has rapidly gained a reputation as a cinematographer with fresh insight, invention and the ability to carry it off on the screen. Another Hollywood overnight success? Not when you hear about Bailey’s fifteen years of hustling.

An alumnus of the University of Southern California Graduate School of Cinema, Bailey attended at the same time as George Lucas, John Milius and Randall Kleiser. And while these fellow students were directing films within a few years of leaving the academic halls, Bailey was still struggling to get his union card. In his two years at USC, he shot dozens of student films and later he worked on low-budget productions, always gaining valuable filmmaking experience in the process. After getting his union card, he was an assistant cameraman for five years and then moved up to camera operator on films such as Three Women, Welcome to L.A., The Late Show and Days of Heaven: the traditional Hollywood version of working your way up through the ranks, though for Bailey the process was somewhat accelerated. He paid his dues to become a director of photography, always trying to align himself with cameramen, directors and projects that he felt would be the most beneficial to him in terms of personal growth. He prepared for his DP role by watching, working and learning from every cameraman he ever worked with and now it’s paying off. He is not a slave to any particular style or mode of shooting; stylistically, Ordinary People and American Gigolo are worlds apart. Bailey is adamant about giving every film its own unique personality, trying to let the visual style reveal and reinforce the ideas inherent in the material. In the ranks of Hollywood cinematography, Bailey is a relative youngster, but that’s exciting because he has the imagination, capacity and time to take his visual concepts to the limit in the years ahead.

Boulevard Nights was your first film as director of photography?

Yes and it’s a film I’m very fond of. It came out at the same time as The Warriors. There was a lot of turmoil about gang pictures and violence. The Warriors made all the money and the rest of the films took the heat. Boulevard Nights was totally misunderstood. It wasn’t an exploitation film. It wasn’t as much about violence as about the relationship between two brothers who happened to live in the barrio. I found it very intriguing because, as a personal experience, it was like making a film in a foreign country. We employed a lot of local people; many of the secondary characters in the picture were gang kids. We had people who wouldn’t show up because they’d been busted. It was a sociological experience as much as a filmmaking one. I’m very close to it; it was a nice film for me to have done at that point.

What was it like your first day as director of photography?

I felt very confident because Michael Pressman and I had prepared everything carefully. We had been to the locations. We had worked out a shot list. We knew exactly what we wanted. It was a day exterior so I didn’t have any lighting to worry about but we did do a couple of very nice dolly shots. So it went very smoothly for me.

No anxieties, no apprehensions?

Oh I had a certain amount of anxiety; I do when I start every picture. But it was evolutionary for me. When I did my first show as an assistant, I was probably more nervous than my first day as a director of photography. The first day of my first show as an operator, I remember being very nervous too. It takes about three pictures before you really start to feel confident and comfortable. And sometimes not even then. The first day of Cat People was tense for me because it was a very difficult day on a small set. Certain famous concert musicians, for instance, say that every time they’re standing in the wings waiting to go on stage, they don’t know whether they’re going to overcome the nausea to be able to go out and do it. That’s true for anybody who’s been putting their ass on the line, where you have to go out and perform. If you’re just punching a time clock, then it’s a different story.

How did you originally become interested in cinematography?

I guess it goes back to when I was in college and first started seeing foreign films. This was the early sixties. I started seeing Bergman and a lot of the early French New Wave films, the early Truffaut, Chabrol and Godard. It was a kind of filmmaking unlike anything I’d ever seen. And I realized the excitement was in the imagery more than in what was being said, especially with the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers. I knew I wanted to get involved in film. I finally decided to join the graduate program at USC, which was just starting up. They had their undergraduate program for many years but the graduate program was new. It was a very heady two years. Since it was a new program, they didn’t have a notion of how it should be structured, what the academic requirements were, etc. It was very freewheeling and very exciting. Basically what I got out of it was the opportunity to look at hundreds and hundreds of films. We’d run Museum of Modern Art prints of twenties German expressionist films over and over again, all night long. We did things like that. I was at USC at the same time as George Lucas, John Milius, Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins, Randall Kleiser, Walter Murch, Willard Huyck. After they got out of film school, they really started working in the mainstream of the industry and doing their own films. I was still struggling to get into the union as an assistant.

Did you go into the program with the idea of a career in cinematography or did you just want to be in film in general?

The whole notion of image making and how the image process fit into the narrative line of filmmaking really interested me. And just in the course of looking at all these films—turning the sound off and just watching the shots, running them back and forth—I decided to take a cinematography course. The teacher, Gene Peterson, was a very dynamic and energetic guy who really turned me on to cinematography. He’s not by any means a theatrical cinematographer; his background is in documentaries. But he was so positively certain that films were made by cameramen that he kind of convinced me. That’s when I decided that regardless of what I wanted to do later on, I had to have a firm grounding in what the camera was, how it worked and what its power was. For the two years at USC, I concentrated on shooting student films. When I got out I started working as an assistant at whatever odd jobs I could. It became more and more of a commitment and an obsession. Once I got into the union, I felt at least I was in the ballpark and had a uniform. I might be a batboy but someday I’d be a pitcher. It was just a question of putting in the time. I became aware very quickly that there were a lot of directors of photography that didn’t have the kind of obsession or even the interest that I and some of my friends had. So I felt there wasn’t that much competition; that there were a lot of people hanging on. I decided to try to single out the cameramen, directors and projects that I felt could be the most beneficial for me in terms of personal growth.

What determines a good composition or a good frame to your eye? Is it symmetry, lighting, color, focus? What are the determinants?

I think for any given shot there are a number of elements that, at different times, may have greater or lesser value. If the shot is totally abstract, it’s basically the color. You have to decide what color will recede and what color will assert itself and how you balance them. When you’re dealing with monochrome, it may be just the question of the light. You decide whether you want a very strong back light or cross light, etc. So there’s really no formula for it. The first thing I look at when I set up a shot is the composition; that’s what I analyze first. The important considerations are color, the focal length of the lens, movement, structural balance and focus. Those are the principal elements and I run through them unconsciously every time I pick a shot. I spent four years as an operator and, because of that background, composition is very, very important to me. I don’t think there are too many American cameramen who have real concern with composition; a lot of the foreign cameramen do. If you came out of non-union productions, where you basically operated and lit everything yourself, the last thing you were able to consider was how to compose a shot, especially if you were on short schedules. You were so busy lighting and setting the thing up that composition became sort of an afterthought. Because I had absolutely nothing to consider for four years except to study fifteen different ways to compose any given shot, it became very crucial to me.

But operating was a good preparation for moving up to director of photography?

Yes, it was. Also I was able to dispassionately analyze the styles of different cinematographers. And there are a lot of cinematographers that have either come up through non-union productions or commercials where they have essentially been their own boss from the beginning. They haven’t had the luxury that I’ve had. I was just this morning discussing the same thing about directors. Unless a director has theatrical background from the stage, he hasn’t had the opportunity to watch other directors work. He doesn’t know much about directing films except what he’s learned himself. And the same applies to cinematographers who have essentially had no one else to study, except for monitoring their own work. I’ve had the privilege of working with a lot of cameramen that I thought were very good and I learned a lot from them. So, in that way, it was excellent preparation.

What cameramen or photographers have had an effect on the way you look at things?

Gordon Willis, more than anybody. I don’t speak for everybody my age, but for me he is the preeminent American cinematographer. I think he’s single-handedly responsible for the respect and acknowledgement that cinematographers now have. He has consistently aligned himself with brilliant directors and material. A lot of other very good cameramen have not had that instinct for picking the right directors and the right scripts to attach themselves to. Gordon has. Even those of his films that have maybe been flops, have been interesting films. Photographically, I like his lighting very much; he’s very courageous. He’s obsessed with control of composition to the extent now that I think he’s almost become a still photographer. He doesn’t move the camera anywhere near the amount he used to and when he does move it, it’s very deliberate. As soon as you start to move the camera, you lose control over the lighting and you lose control over composition. It’s just inherent; there’s no way you can prevent that from happening. For me, it’s a tradeoff and it’s a fair tradeoff because I love the excitement of moving the camera. So what I lose in control in the other areas, I gain just by the energy and the momentum of being able to move the camera. Movement makes your job very challenging. If you’ve got a dolly or a crane shot moving from one corner of the room to the other and you’re panning around two hundred and seventy degrees, you have to figure out how the hell you can light the damn thing, especially if you’re on a practical location. You get into some very involved ways of hiding lights. You’re forced to find new ways of lighting scenes all the time; ways that you might not have initially chosen but which can turn out to be very interesting. I respond to that a lot and consequently I like working with production designers who think of their stage sets as practical locations. I know designers like very much to build sets that have hard ceilings; I like the feeling of a hard-ceiling set too. We had a lot of them in American Gigolo. The designer, Nando Scarfiotti, builds a lot of his sets that way. It creates certain problems for me but it also makes me more responsive. It’s challenging. Nando was the designer on Cat People too and we had a lot of hard-ceiling sets again. A lot of the sets were two-story so the bottom floor has to have a hard ceiling and even the second floor of some of the sets had hard ceilings. We shot a lot of low angles with wide lenses so we saw ceilings a lot.

But back to the question about other cameramen, I like Vilmos Zsigmond’s work very much. I like Nestor Almendros’s work obviously. Of the French, I like Pierre Lhome a lot. I love the pictures of Jean Boffety who’s done most of Claude Sautet’s films and a lot of Robert Enrico’s films during the sixties. I’m a big fan of Geoffrey Unsworth. There’s an Italian cameraman, Luigi Kuweiller, who did Elio Petri’s films. I think that probably more European cameramen than American cameramen have influenced me. When I was looking at the Nouvelle Vague films in the early sixties that was the kind of photography that made an impression on me. It was photography that was either in the streets or on real locations and it had a very natural look. When the European cinematographers started using color, they were using a very soft color that was unknown in the Hollywood mainstream at the time. I think the English and French cinematographers in the middle to late sixties had a tremendous effect on what happened to color photography in Hollywood in the seventies. When most productions started going to color, most of the cinematographers who were shooting them were the old guard who were black-and-white cameramen or else they were the high-key color musical type. When color prevailed, they continued to light in the same way: with hard light, a lot of heavy hair light, no top light and real strong fill light on exteriors. I didn’t like that look at the time. I liked the Godard look that Raoul Coutard was doing. Also Henri Decae and the early Truffaut films. I was quite young then and I thought that was real. I thought the glossy, slick Hollywood look wasn’t real at all. I’ve sort of come around now; I look at that type of classic Hollywood film now with a great deal of admiration and respect. But it’s still not really my style although I’ve begun to integrate some of it. The cameramen who were the younger ones at that time when the European look really started to penetrate here—people like Laszlo Kovacs, Vilmos Zsigmond and John Alonzo—were very much in sympathy and accord with what the European cameramen were doing.

How would you define your function as a cinematographer? What is it that you do?

I work for the director. That’s my primary line of communication and my primary responsibility. That’s something I feel I learned from Nestor Almendros. He is, for me, a paragon of the cinematographer who is totally committed to understanding, sharing and evolving a sense of style with the director. He’s not there to uniquely bring the film in on schedule and satisfy the studio. I think preproduction time is extremely important and I just won’t walk into a film two weeks before the start of shooting and have a couple of vague meetings with the director. I like to see a lot of films with the director and talk about style, to go through the script sequence by sequence and, in the case of Schrader, shot by shot, essentially story-boarding what we want to do. It may all change once we get on the set and we see that the scene lays out quite differently.

But you like to lay the foundation beforehand?

I like working on that basis; I like that kind of preparation with the director. The director is really the key to whether the film works or not and if the director’s vision isn’t realized somehow, the film really doesn’t have any chance at all. So that’s where my responsibility is.

So you’re basically implementing the director’s vision?

Yes. Again, I’ve been fortunate enough to work with directors that I think have a vision. I don’t know how I would deal with a director that I didn’t think had one. My one experience with a director that you would not immediately consider a visual filmmaker was Robert Redford. Up until that time he’d been considered only an actor even though he had a tremendous amount of influence and control over all the films that his company did. He really is a filmmaker although most people didn’t recognize it. When I was doing Ordinary People, I would get asked, “You’re working with an actor; what kind of vision does he have?” Well, he had an incredible vision about what he thought Ordinary People should be, not necessarily specifically in terms of shots, but in terms of the tones and textures of the film. He had very clear ideas; he’d spent a lot of time evolving and considering it. He’d bought the book when it was in galleys and had labored over the screenplay with Alvin Sargent for several years. So he had lived with it.

Generally, how much creative freedom do you have in setting the visual look and style of a film?

I think probably quite a bit. I consider it a dialogue with the director. I think a director would be interested in hiring me not because he wanted a specific look. Most of the films I’ve done have had very different looks. American Gigolo was very different from Ordinary People and I shot them back to back. So if I get a call from a director to do a film, it’s because he may have a certain stylistic approach he wants but usually he’s very open to developing that with me. Sometimes I haven’t any strong notion of what I want to do until late into preproduction. On Cat People, Schrader and I didn’t really know what kind of style we wanted except we wanted it to be different from American Gigolo. So we started looking at films. As it turned out, a lot of the films we looked at were twenties German expressionist films. They had a stylized sense of irreality. Even the exteriors tended to look like interiors. We started to focus in on that. We also looked at Cocteau and Franju for a sense of film poetry. The German cinema of the twenties had a very hard edge to it. Cocteau and Franju have certain stylistic tangents with the Germans but by virtue of that poetic French sensibility, there’s a softness there. We tried to integrate the two, to take elements of both. I find that looking at films with the director is the thing that I key off of.

It’s really a good reference point for you?

Yes. For instance, one of the key films for me is The Conformist. Oh, we were talking about cinematographers and I didn’t mention Storaro. Gordon Willis and Vittorio Storaro are really the two that are my idols. I’ve seen The Conformist probably twenty-five times. Schrader and I saw it five or six times while we were preparing American Gigolo. For me, it’s a real treasure chest; it’s almost a textbook on filmmaking. So American Gigolo very deliberately had a lot of stylistic characteristics of The Conformist. We were also looking at Welles. We looked at The Trial several times since it was wide angle and forced perspective. The film that we looked at a lot when we were preparing American Gigolo was Touch of Evil. And one afternoon I watched The Conformist and Touch of Evil back to back. I realized that Bertolucci’s sense of movement, that particular kind of crane movement that he has that totally surprises you and takes your breath away, comes from Welles. There’s an awful lot of Welles in Bertolucci and it’s not immediately apparent because, other than that, they are very different in tone and texture. The poetry of their filmmaking is almost antithetical. Yet the way they move the camera is very similar. If I recall correctly, in Bertolucci’s Before The Revolution, he quite literally stole a lot from Welles. Filmmakers do watch films a lot.

Do you generally like to work with a director who goes off with the actors, leaving the technical details to you or would you rather work with a director who wants some input and interplay back and forth?

I know there are several cinematographers who like that sense of total control; the director works with the actors and he tells the cinematographer the basic kind of coverage he wants and the cinematographer sets it up. I could do that; it’s intriguing in a way. But the irony is that even though you have total freedom, you really don’t have any freedom at all because the only freedom you have is within the context of what the director is going to do with the actors. A director who only works with the actors is not going to come up with very inspired blocking. The blocking is what you key off of for your sense of camera movement and the kind of visual dynamics you have inside of a scene. I’m much more intrigued with working with a director who thinks of blocking the scene with the camera and the actors. There’s a dance and an interplay that goes on. Sometimes it might seem that it would be frustrating to have a director say, “I want this kind of shot.” But, in fact, that isn’t what happens. Usually that’s an initial idea and then by talking about it something quite different may evolve. That happens to Schrader and me a lot. It’s something that neither one of us initially imagined but which hopefully becomes something even better. Really exciting directors see actors as elements inside the film, though the most important ones. Everything else is secondary to performance and the screenplay. But even a director like John Schlesinger, who is very actor oriented, is also incredibly visually oriented. He has very specific ideas about how he wants a shot. On Honky Tonk Freeway we had several very big shots which were costly in terms of production. If something happened, if the actors didn’t hit the mark, if they didn’t do it right so we got the composition, if the light hit an actor in a way other than we had already decided, Schlesinger would sometimes call “Cut,” or we would do another take. He was most uncompromising in getting all the elements to come together. Performance of course was paramount but it had to be in concert with composition, camera movement and lighting. A sense of detail about all those elements and being able to juggle them is what makes a director a filmmaker and an artist.

Generally though, you’ve always worked with someone who’s visually oriented. You haven’t made the choice to work with somebody who’s not visually oriented.

Only Redford. I told him the first time we met, I had a need to do that film that was probably as strong as his. I read the novel when it first came out and was obsessed with it. I was an operator at the time. Redford’s then producer, Walter Coblenz, was an old friend of mine. He had been the assistant director on Two Lane Blacktop, on which I was assistant cameraman. Walter and I had stayed in contact during all those intervening years. He subsequently left Redford’s Wildwood Productions to go off on his own but he plugged me in to Redford. I told Redford, “I’ve got to photograph this film.”

What happened there? Thinking of the cameramen Redford had worked with before, he could have asked Roizman, Willis, Hall or any other number of people. But instead he hired you.

I never asked him why. One thing is I don’t think he wanted a cameraman that was a star. He didn’t want someone who would be an element that he would have to deal with that would distract him from the total control he wanted with the actors. Yet he wanted somebody that he felt could deliver. He’s a very, very articulate and intelligent man. He’s specific in what he focuses on. I think he also wanted somebody that he could have that kind of dialogue with who was a little flexible. Also the absolute conviction I had to do the film may have influenced him. He saw the first Karen Arthur film I did, Legacy, which was shot in 16mm and dealt with a woman whose story was very similar to Mary Tyler Moore’s in Ordinary People. Legacy follows her life one day in summer when her husband’s away on business and her kids are at camp. She breaks down and goes crazy at the end of the day. The woman is compulsively ordered, clean and disciplined very much like Beth in Ordinary People. Redford plugged into the feeling that photography somehow enhanced and expressed something about that woman. Legacy was shot in 16mm so it was a square frame; it was very severely designed and it was a cleanly realized film. That was basically the way I saw Ordinary People looking: clean, severe and having very direct imagery. We talked about Legacy quite a bit.

In preproduction, what kind of conversations did you have about the visual style of the film, of how you wanted to mount the film?

Well, we looked at The Conformist.

Again!

Yes, I ask every director I work with to look at The Conformist; even if we decide it’s flamboyant and totally wrong for us, there’s such energy there and it’s such a springboard for discussion, that it’s always fruitful. Redford found that stylistically it was just too rich for him. He was most closely tuned into the character of Beth. In preproduction he understood that character more clearly than any of the others. So we talked a lot about her, about how the house should be perfect and have no flaws in it but yet it should look askew somehow. He was always calling up images about how you would see something on a table. Everything was right about that table but the positioning of some object on that table was just slightly wrong. He felt that finding things in the house that were just slightly out of context or in conflict would help give a sense of tension to what was going on. I think it wasn’t as closely realized as either he or I wanted.

What experience, unrelated to filmmaking, do you feel has helped you in your career as a filmmaker? I notice that you have quite a great interest in art.

I’ve collected Indian art for many years. Art is very important to me and I spend a lot of time looking at it. American Indian art is very abstract. It deals with all the materials of earth. I learned about American Indian art before I learned about European art. I don’t know that it has any direct influence on me; I just love having it around me. I also collect still photography; I’ve been doing that for about six years. I got involved in collecting still photography because I started buying Edward Curtis’s American Indian imagery. And it just seemed that since I was involved in photography, it was natural that I started studying it. When I was in film school, I spent virtually no time at all looking at photography. It’s only in the last five years that I’ve really methodically collected and studied photography. That’s had a very strong influence on my work because most of it has happened since I’ve become a director of photography.

In what way?

Most of the photographs I have are black-and-white. There’s a control still photographers have over the image that cinematographers can’t have. So by virtue of looking at the design elements in the still photography I really admire, I get ideas and try to think of ways I can take some of those elements and apply them in a cinematic context. For instance—and we’re not talking about fine art photography here—in American Gigolo, because Richard Gere’s wardrobe was Armani, I started looking at a lot of the Italian fashion magazines. I noticed a real strong sense of what used to be called Hollywood hard light being used in the fashion ads. This was at a time when our fashion photography was still very soft and pastel. I started seeing a lot of photography that had hard shadows on the wall; the sort of thing that has become very popular in the last two years. I was very intrigued with that as a style for the film. Schrader and I looked at a lot of vintage fashion photography and decided to use hard light in American Gigolo. We used the shadows on the wall as a compositional element; we made them elements in the frame, balancing Gere’s shadow against his image. Scarfiotti, the designer, deliberately gave Gere’s apartment that grey, monotone look so that we could use the walls to create shadows and light forms. Everytime you see the apartment it has a different look in terms of the kind of light that’s being projected on the walls. The wall itself almost becomes a canvas.

The interesting thing visually about American Gigolo is that it doesn’t look like Los Angeles. At least it doesn’t look like the Los Angeles we see in television series or even other movies. It looks interesting and sensual in American Gigolo. You captured a certain quality of time and place that really hasn’t been seen a lot.

We knew that the interiors were going to be very stylized and have a very specific look; we wanted strong compositions and strong lighting. We felt we just couldn’t go out on the streets and make do with what was there. If we did, it would just make the film schizophrenic. So we spent a lot of time scouting locations. We modified some locations. We shot certain things at a specific time of day. We tried to shoot at the magic hour. When we didn’t have any of that going for us, we tried to find disturbing compositions of rather boring places. For example, there’s an establishing shot of Sotheby Parke Bernet which is a very boring building. But I tried to find a composition that was not normally the way you would frame it. In fact, that whole scene inside the building, with the camera moving from one wall to another, was staged in a way so that it was constantly disorienting. The last shot of that sequence is outside in back of the building but we shot it in the magic hour because I knew that the blue light would look very good against the green lawn. The house in Palm Springs was another very deliberate choice. Paul wanted to have a white facade against the mountains; that way we had the dark blue sky, the black outline of the mountains and the white facade of the house. It was strictly a matter of two-dimensional planes. Again, Gere driving up to that house was a very abstract shot. Also the beach house was picked not necessarily for the strip of beach that it was on but rather because of what was under the house. That row of houses was all on pylons and it had just such a bizarre sense—houses hanging right above the sea. In a sense, it was a landscape of the mind, being under that house and walking along there. The end of the sequence plays with Richard and Nina against some of the posts. The tag shot is of them leaning up against a couple of the supporting pillars of the last house and beyond you see a little cove and a boat. It’s just like it’s the end of the world. It’s at a point where Gere is in total despair; he feels that the world is closing in on him and there’s nowhere for him to go. And yet the shot has an incredible kind of sensual density to it though it’s a very despairing moment in the film. Paul and I were constantly intrigued with that kind of juxtaposition.

On day exteriors, you somehow have to impose your will on the environment. You have to work with what is given. How do you do that?

A lot of times you’re lucky enough to have a director and producer who share that kind of concern. They will want to shoot certain scenes under specific light conditions, such as Schrader wanting to shoot at magic hour. Redford wanted to shoot at a certain time of the year in the Midwest; when the leaves were falling, when the skies were leaden and overcast and you have that almost English light. So that makes it very easy when you schedule those things. But that doesn’t happen a lot. Beyond that, for me it’s a question of finding compositions and movement. There’s not too much you can do to control sunlight. Some cameramen who don’t like hard sunlight will stretch huge parachutes or silks up to filter and soften the light. But that doesn’t fundamentally change anything; you can’t affect the colors or anything. It’s still there. I like harsh sunlight; when it’s very clear and sharp, I like it a lot. There’s a lot of it in Honky Tonk Freeway because everybody is on their way to Florida to find the sun. I made the most of using the hard sunlight. On Continental Divide, we wanted the mountain sequences in Colorado to be very sunny, bright and saturated. We were lucky that we got it; there was little overcast while we were there. The Chicago scenes we wanted to be almost claustrophobically sullen. It was starting to get pretty late in autumn and the skies were leaden and dark. We shot a lot around the Loop. So that the sunlight, when it did come, never much reached us. It was like shooting in the canyons of New York. All day long we had this grey, unappetizing light. I liked that because that’s the way I wanted Chicago to look in contrast to the mountains.

What are the first things you do when you begin to light a set or location? What are the things that get your immediate attention?

The first thing I look for is a light source, assuming that it’s a scene that warrants source lighting. Or even if it isn’t, I have to have an imaginary source even if there’s no logic to it. I have to find someplace where I could imagine, either on real or surreal terms, there would be illumination. If you’re on location, that’s usually easy because nature speaks to you very clearly. That’s one reason I like to shoot on practical locations. If we were to shoot in this house, I could probably shoot most of the day with existing light and maybe a little fill. It’s a look that’s hard to duplicate on a sound stage.

That natural light look?

Yes. The look you get from a real house or store is hard to duplicate. When I’m on stage, I will try to duplicate it. In Ordinary People, there’s a story point that the meeting that Conrad has with Dr. Berger takes place between four and five o’clock. The time that the story spans is approximately early October until February and that’s basically when the days are getting to be their shortest. One hour of time in the late afternoon goes through a great change of light quality. So each one of those meetings is set up to have a very different light. We started off with an afternoon scene in an overcast light; the second meeting had just pieces of sunlight; the third was a very stylized sunset; the fourth was magic hour with some blue light outside; in the fifth there was full night with an outside neon sign flashing. The last meeting takes place in the middle of the night and I basically wanted to feel that there was nothing on in the room except the overhead light that Berger turned on as he opened the door. I wanted it to have that gritty, grimy feel that you have in the middle of the night with just a single light on. The light source wasn’t in the picture because it was high overhead. It was a coop light like Gordon Willis uses. It was very intense for the center of the room where they sat most of the time. It fell off as you got closer to the walls. I didn’t use any other light so the farther they got away from the light, the darker they got. When Conrad retreated into the corner, he got very dark and gritty looking. Then when they were under it, the light was very hot on top of their heads. So that’s the kind of thing it was in terms of deciding how to light a set; it was all of a piece.

A lot of times on practical locations I’ll run into fluorescents. Rather than turn them off and try to control the light, I’ll usually use the existing fluorescents and supplement them with our own. I love fluorescents. There’s a unique look they have that just can’t be duplicated any other way. The newspaper office in Continental Divide was all done with fluorescents. Fluorescents have traditionally been a bane to cameramen and most cameramen just hate them. But Gordon Willis used fluorescents for the Washington Post sequences in All the President’s Men. That was a stage set and he could have installed any kind of lighting he wanted but he chose to put in hundreds of fluorescent units and place the ballasts along the outside stage wall. He didn’t correct for them in the camera; it was all done in the lab as far as I know. I used to correct fluorescents with filters. Now I don’t. I just let the lab make the correction and they turn out looking quite good. But the fact that you have assaulted the negative—and that’s the only way you can describe it—with that green light that fluorescents have when they’re uncorrected, there’s a residual texture that is very much the way institutional lighting is today. It’s part of an emotional attitude we have about office buildings. To do it any other way just doesn’t work for me; I like that fluorescent look.

Do you pay any attention to lighting ratios and color temperatures? All the cinematography books written for students emphasize them.

That’s a tyrannical old-guard way of looking at photography. While that was pretty much in vogue when I was studying cinematography, it’s been pretty well thrown out now. Color has become such an important dramatic accent that cinematographers deliberately violate balanced color now. But no, I don’t pay much attention to color temperature at all. In fact, I use a lot of gels to alter it. As far as lighting ratios are concerned, I used to do that. I used to light very strictly by ratios because I wanted consistency. I didn’t want one close-up to have a four-to-one ratio and another one a six-to-one ratio and then have to intercut them. Now I just fill by eye. I’ve had that much more experience. Most cinematographers do fill by eye.

What has been your experience with the higher speed Kodak film stock 5293?

The first time I used it was on Without a Trace and I’ve used it to some extent on every picture since then. I used it a lot on The Big Chill; almost all the interiors are photographed with 5293. Then, at the time I was doing The Big Chill, I was answer-printing several other films and I became very critical of contrast and grain problems, especially going through the dupe with 5293. I guess I should have expected it with the higher-speed film but everybody seemed to be so enthusiastic about it when it came out. Plus it looked so good in daily form that nobody anticipated having problems. But we were having so many problems with print stocks that it diverted us from the real problem of 5293. I came to terms with it head on when I was doing Racing with the Moon. It was a period film. I didn’t like the dailies I was getting the first week and I decided to shoot certain scenes using 5247.1 saw a marked improvement because I was using the new modified 84 print stock. So I used very little 5293 on Racing with the Moon. Looking back on it now, I think the 5247 stock is far superior; it’s got more latitude, it’s less contrasty, it has much less grain and it holds up better through the intermediate dupe. I’m trying to avoid using 5293 but that’s a moot point now because it’s been discontinued and replaced with 5294, which is supposed to be a little bit faster. Now I’m using some 5294 for the first time on The Pope of Greenwich Village but I’m not particularly enthusiastic about it. I’m only using it for night exteriors. I’m going to continue to use 5247 as much as I can.

So right now you feel that 5294 has limited applications.

It’s axiomatic that the faster the film, the grainier and contrastier it’s going to be. I use it on night exteriors; most of your frame is black anyway so you don’t notice the grain. But I rate 5247 at 200 ASA and most of the time that’s enough for me. In any place where I have a controlled light situation, I don’t need any faster film than that. I don’t like to stop down very deeply anyway because I use nets and if I stop down beyond f3.2 or f4, the pattern of the net starts to show with the wider lenses. So I have very little reason to stop down to f5.6 or f6.3, which I would be forced to do if I were using a faster film.

Is there a noticeable difference between scenes shot on 5247 and 5293?

Yes, especially in The Big Chill. If you started looking at the answer print with a critical eye, you’d be able to tell right away which scenes were 5247 and which were 5293. It’s very apparent, especially when one comes right after the other and they are both interior scenes. But there’s such a lag period involved here. You shoot with a new stock and you don’t have a chance to really confront the end result until you answer-print it a year later. By then you’ve shot another couple of films.

Have you had any experience with lightflex?

No, I haven’t used it because it basically does something to the film that I normally don’t want to do. Essentially, it flashes the film. A very primitive type of light flashing system that flashed white or colored lights on a piece of glass in front of the lens was used by Freddie Young on a picture called The Deadly Affair in the mid-sixties. Then an English cameraman later perfected the system and initially used it to introduce an overall color haze in certain scenes of Young Winston. According to the color of light you flashed through the gels, you could change the color from scene to scene.

Is this a process that is going to replace flashing?

I think flashing has lost some of its mystique, partly because it requires extra handling of the negative in lab and that’s dangerous. Most of the time people use flashing in a situation which they could control if they just used a little more fill light. For example, sometimes on a night exterior, I’ll get a big 12 foot by 12 foot silk and put a 10K through it maybe 75-100 feet behind the camera. Now that’s introducing real light into the scene and it’s not affecting the black sky. But when you flash, you affect everything on your negative including all your blacks. I don’t like that. I like blacks to be very rich. There is one situation where I might use it and that would be one where I had extensive day exteriors with hard sunlight and I wanted them to be less contrasty but I couldn’t use any fill light. For instance, if I were doing a scene in a jungle where I had to go in with a very small equipment package and I couldn’t fill the scene, I would probably use something like lightflex.

What about the Panacam? Have you used it?

Only in demonstrations. I think it’s marvelous. What I like about it is that it’s designed for cinematographers; it was made for people who don’t have a highly technical electronic background and who approach their work as photographers. It’s very much like a Panaflex. It takes Panavision film lenses, filters and matte box. You essentially have the feel of using a motion picture camera not an electronic camera as such.

It brings the two worlds together?

I think it does. It’s a major breakthrough in terms of breaking down the rather artificial barriers between film and video because the two areas are going to get closer and closer as technology improves.

The feeling is that the quality of video will increase as more film cameramen become involved in video because they will bring more of a film look, in lighting, to a video production.

That’s definitely happening. You look at English video and they’re lit, photographed and framed with almost a film sense because they’ve had film technicians working in both areas. Here, it’s only recently that video has been exposed to film technicians and artists. I think a lot of cinematographers are interested in working in videotape.

Have you heard anything about the Skycam, a new piece of equipment invented by Garrett Brown, who previously perfected the Steadicam?

I’ve seen a demonstration tape. The Skycam is a camera that hangs down on a rod from a series of pulleys or rollers and these run along wires. The wires are supported at three or four different points. Through a remote controlled system of these wires, this camera moves in all the axes that you can think of. Hovering above the ground, it can go up and down. It can move along any north-south, east-west axis or anything in between. It can pan and tilt. It’s essentially free hanging. It’s operated through a video monitor where you control the focus and the iris. This thing can go from ground level to however high you have the wires; so it can do anything a helicopter can without rotor wash. It can start right on a close-up of somebody, pull back up in the air, move around them, drop down behind them, etc. It’s really extraordinary and I think it’s going to be used a lot.

Is it any more trouble than, say, laying dolly tracks?

I think initially it might be because these poles and wires have to be rigged. But it gives you total freedom of movement with the camera; you can make moves that have never been done before.

How closely do you monitor what the lab does?

Very, very closely. Whenever I’m in town, I usually go in to the lab in the morning before the shooting call and see a high-speed projection of the dailies. I do that almost every day. When on location, I have daily phone conversations with the lab. I like working with Technicolor lab because so far my contact with them has been very, very good. The labs are technically pretty much the same; it’s then a question of the feedback and service. When on location, you’re very vulnerable. You phone in and ask about the dailies. If you’ve got somebody that’s halfway intelligent at the other end who knows what you want, you know where you stand.

What kind of advice would you give to a student in dealing with the lab?

I think the most important thing is to get a tour of a lab to understand what happens mechanically to the film and how different the parameters of control are from a custom still lab. You have to realize that the responsibility is in your hands not in the lab’s. What the lab delivers is a standard-issue item. In terms of daily one-light prints, anything that you want to have on the film, you have to build into it. Any effect you want, you’ve got to do at the time you’re shooting. It’s a very simple realization but it’s one that doesn’t happen until quite late in the game with a lot of cinematographers. You’ve really got to be responsible for controlling the elements that you put in there. The more you understand how a lab works, the better off you’re going to be. It’s like any business; if you talk to people by their first name, you’re going to get better service than if you’re arrogant.

A lot of times when a film is being answer-printed, the cinematographer is on another film. I’ve been very insistent about answer-printing every film I’ve shot. It’s very important. If your dailies don’t have pretty much the look that you want the finished film to have, it’s very hard to get it in the answer-printing, even if you are there. By then the director and the editor have become used to what it looks like and they become very resistant to changing it.

Gordon Willis’s philosophy, at one time, was give the lab something in a narrow range so the lab will have less opportunity to screw it up.

I try not to work on the edge and give them a thin negative that they can’t print up. I try to work with very strong printing lights so that there’s good density in the negative. If I want it to be dark, it’s dark not because I haven’t got any negative left but because I’m printing on a printer light high enough to dig into it. If I do run into any problems I’ll be able to print it up. So you have to play it both ways. I try to give a director as balanced a look as I can in the dailies because I think it’s important that he be able to evaluate whether the film is working or not. If you’re trying to study a sequence from a dramatic standpoint and you’ve got one shot that’s a stop hotter than the shot after it or one shot is green and the next is blue, then it’s very hard to concentrate on the dramatic values.

How much do you use filtration?

Very little—basically if I’ve got a lighting condition that I can’t control the way I want to. If I want a softer look on an exterior and it’s a very hard light and I can’t silk it or tent it in, then I’ll use a low-contrast filter or a light fog filter. I don’t really like to use either of them because I feel they soften the image in a way that’s not a controlled softness. Filtering is sort of a compromise. In terms of color filters for interiors, I prefer to do it on the set lights because you can be more selective. In other words, if you put a coral filter in front of the lens, the whole frame is going to have that degree of saturation. If you do it on specific lights and you leave one or two lights with a clean, white reference, it makes the part of the frame that’s colored more dramatic. When you’re dealing with exteriors of course, and you want an overall color look but you can’t shoot it at the time of day you want or under the light conditions you want, then you’ve got to use something. That’s about the only time I really use color filters.

I use nets a lot; I have a series of them. I shoot a sharp negative and when I want softness I try to build it into the lighting. I don’t use diffusion filters because they tend to break up that sharpness. It makes the image muddy. But very light nets, especially for close-ups, can soften an actress’s or actor’s face. It’s not to flatter them so much but rather it’s so that you aren’t distracted by certain physical problems that make-up can’t cover. Also if you use diffusion with one of the actors in the scene, you have to do it with all of them, maybe varying the degree. In Ordinary People, whenever I used a net on Mary Tyler Moore, I used one on Donald Sutherland too. In fact, most of Ordinary People was shot with a net, even the exteriors. I normally don’t use nets on exteriors because when you stop the lens down as far as you do outside you tend to see them, especially on a panning shot against the sky. But we were shooting under very diffused light and I was shooting exteriors sometimes at the same stop as the interiors. The nets were helpful because it gave the film a very uniform look.

Is there a different approach to lighting a black person as opposed to a white person? I’m thinking of Bill Duke in American Gigolo.

There’s a scene where Duke and Gere are on the steps at the back of the nightclub and it’s lit with blue light. I probably had two and a half times the amount of light on Bill Duke that I had on Richard. Some black people happen to take a lot more light, some don’t. Duke did. It was difficult doing two-shots. I find that’s a case where meters go out the window. On Cat People, I worked with Annette O’Toole, who has red hair and is very fair-skinned. She sometimes took half the light that I expected. I’d get her lit at what I considered key and she jumped out from everybody else. So you have somebody like Duke at one extreme and O’Toole at another. Finally you just have to look through the finder and evaluate it by eye.

Have faster film, faster lenses and other technological advances changed the way you do things? It has for some of the veteran cameramen, but you’re much younger than they are.

Probably not for me so much. Already when I did Boulevard Nights, Panavision had their Ultraspeed lenses and I shot a lot of things on the streets of East Los Angeles where the key lights were practical lights such as store front windows and neons. I used fill light that essentially balanced that. A good deal of that film was shot wide open with Ultraspeed lenses. Now I use the Ultraspeeds and stop down to where I might with more normal lenses. I shot a lot of Boulevard Nights at f1.4, f1.6; never more than f2 for the night exteriors. Consequently it has a very real look. When you’re out on the street at night like that and you’ve got five or six different light sources coming in, you can use them and get an incredibly rich look. But as soon as you turn on one theatrical light, you overpower it all. Then you’re back to lighting for movies again.

Do you prefer working on a sound stage or a location?

I like both.

Is one more difficult or challenging to you than the other? Are there any distinctions to be made there?

No. Some practical locations can be enormously painful, others are easy. It seems most of the recent films I’ve done have had significantly more stage than location work. Cat People was almost all stage because it’s very surreal. It’s a designed film and you only get that kind of control on the stage. Except for two days, Boulevard Nights was all on practical locations. Honky Tonk Freeway was a mixture of both. I think films are coming back to the sound stage more and more, for example, One from the Heart and Pennies from Heaven. They’re almost prophetic of how films are going to go back to a very designed, controlled look with a sense of filmic reality rather than naturalistic reality. Just out of sheer perversity at this point, I think I’d like to do my next film totally on the streets.

How do you maintain consistency from set-up to set-up?

If you’re on a sound stage, it’s very easy. I try to work at the same f-stop all the way through a scene. It’s easier for communication. The gaffer knows, unless I tell him otherwise, that he’s working key to a certain level. And we set everything else by eye. The balance is determined by the amount of fill light. That gets to be a subjective rather than a mathematical thing. When I first started I would set fill light by the light meter but the dailies that came back wouldn’t always look consistent. So I began to realize that there are a number of factors that affect the apparent consistency of the fill light such as where the actors move in the room, what’s behind them and how much of the key light is actually hitting them. There are just a number of factors like that you have to evaluate as the shot moves. So I found that I very quickly got rid of the mathematical aspect of it and I tried to train my eye. It was more difficult in the beginning but now I find that most of the time I come pretty close. It’s something that’s very hard to hit right on because there are so many variables from day to day.

Your films are real consistent. You are able to maintain a certain look from beginning to end.

I have the assistant keep a shot-to-shot log book which gives the f-stop, the filtration, whether there were any nets, the focal length of the lens, etc. A lot of times you can’t complete a sequence on a given day. Maybe you have to come back and finish it three weeks later but you want everything to match. The only way to really remember that clearly is to keep a log book. Also you may have shot and wrapped the picture and then three months later the director decides he wants to pick up some extra shots or an additional sequence. If you don’t have those notes, it’s very hard to match.

With the majority of the cameramen using the same film, the same equipment and the same printing stock, do you think that leads to more of a homogenized look? Isn’t it getting harder and harder to make something look “different?"

There are parallels in painting or still photography. You have Cartier-Bresson, André Kertesz and Gary Winogrand—three very different kind of still photographers, all of whom use basically the same kind of camera, an old non-reflex Leica. It really has very little to do with the equipment. Unless you’re in a situation where the kind of camera you’re using only allows you to use two or three lenses. That can make a difference. But ninety-nine percent of the films are shot with Panavision equipment and you can have any range of lens you want. So it really has nothing to do with the equipment. Cameramen don’t necessarily determine the look of a picture as much as the cameraman and the director together. It’s a dialogue. For me, the most successful experiences are with a director who already has some kind of vision.

The younger cameramen have not been locked into the old apprenticeship/journeyman system where you learn to do something this way and you repeat it because that’s the way it’s been done for thirty years. So many of the younger cameramen, under forty-five or so, have come in from other areas as opposed to that system. They each have a unique way of looking at things. If anything, I think it’s easier for cameramen to shoot in different styles. Back in the old days and even up until the middle sixties, sometimes it was very hard to tell who the cameraman was that shot the picture. The films of many of the cameramen were almost interchangeable. It’s not just the cameramen either because the directors all tended to work in the same way too. As idiosyncratic as cameramen are becoming in their styles now, the directors have also developed very personal styles.

What kind of relationship do you have with your crew? What should a cameraman do to nurture a good relationship with his crew?

I think respect is really the key. I try to hire the best people I can find, not just technically but in terms of personality and cooperation. So much of the job has to do with administration, communication and personality. When people live in such close contact for a long time, it’s important that they get along because they’re spending more time with each other than they are with their families. I want to let them do their jobs and not step on their toes. The more freedom you give the individual crew member, the harder he’ll work and the more committed he’ll be to the film. I really believe it’s a collaborative medium.

So you’re not too autocratic?

I try not to be. But just as the director has a strong conviction about the dramatic and narrative values, the cinematographer has to have the same conviction about the overall photographic values and, to a greater or lesser extent, all the designed visual values. The production designer or the visual consultant is not usually on the set that much. As with Nando on the films we’ve done, I become his eyes and ears on the set. So I tend to be very strong when we want something a certain way that we have discussed. But I try to assimilate everybody’s point of view because you never know where tremendously wonderful ideas come from. I don’t believe in the autocratic approach though I believe very much in the auteur concept of filmmaking.

I would think that everybody in your crew would have a basic idea of what you want and they try to stay within that realm without going off the deep end.

Sometimes exactly what you need is an off-the-wall idea. Because even if it’s not an idea you want to consider, it may force you to think in a slightly altered mode. It might bend your own perception to come up with something even better. Most of the time now, I’ll ask the operator, “What do you think? How would you like to frame this?” and basically look at his idea before I show him what I want. I used to always show the operator the composition I wanted and then ask him whether he liked it or saw something different. Now I try to ask him first because it puts him in a position of being a contributor rather than doing it the way I want it. Sometimes I get some terrific surprises.

How important is photographic style in determining the success of a picture?

That’s really hard to say. In the case of Honky Tonk Freeway, almost none at all. The design of the film was terrific; Nando did a fabulous job of catching a certain gone-crazy pop Americana. I’m happy with my work in it. The critics, however, have trounced the film. I think it’s one of those films that five years from now somebody may look back on it and say, “Why did that film take such a beating; it’s kind of interesting.”

I don’t know; I think maybe the technical credits don’t really matter that much, except in a case like American Gigolo, where so much of the style was the content. I think that if the photographic style, the design, the music and the wardrobe had not been all complementary, the film would have really suffered. In Ordinary People, I think it enhanced the film a lot but I still think it would have been as powerful a film as it was without it. Take another film that I think had the same kind of impact on people, The Great Santini. In terms of the technical level of execution, The Great Santini is a much simpler film. But a lot of people were very moved by it and had the same kind of dramatic experience. I think that’s basically why people go to movies. It’s a typically Hollywood conceit that we think the packaging of the film is so important. If the sound is muddy and incomprehensible and the photography out of focus then you’ll have a problem. For instance, as much as I like John Cassavetes’s films, the lack of technical values, especially in his earlier films, made it very difficult for an audience to put up with what was going on.

Along the same lines, how do you think the average audience perceives the cinematography of a film?

I don’t think they pay much attention to it. What they notice are pretty exteriors, you know, postcard photography like sunsets, mountains and oceanscapes. A lot of the response I get on Continental Divide is about how beautiful the mountains were. The part of the film I’m most satisfied with is the claustrophobic segments in downtown Chicago around the Loop at night. Cinematographers and the general audience are looking at very different things when they talk about photography.

You’ve worked with an interesting range of directors with diverse backgrounds. What talents and abilities do you regard as essential in a director and in your working with him?

A strong narrative sense is the most important. The director is the custodian of the story the same way the actor is the custodian of his character. An actor can’t be expected to go beyond his own character and understand the whole weave or the whole pattern of the film. A cinematographer can’t be expected to. Even the writer, who is hardly ever around, is fairly insulated from the day-to-day goings on. It’s really the director who has to understand the unfolding of the story. Most people go to the movies to see a good story. That’s the most important thing. Schlesinger is a very good storyteller. Despite the inherent difficulties with the script of Honky Tonk Freeway, there’s a very intricate weaving of the characters, especially as they all come together in the scene in the fish restaurant. Schlesinger knows how to do that and all his films have that same kind of quality. Redford had a tremendous ability to focus in on the details of unraveling the story. So much of the strength of Ordinary People comes from very specific detailed behavior. And Redford has an incredibly incisive eye for gesture and nuance. That’s part of the whole success of that film. That non-verbal storytelling is a part of storytelling too. A lot of the really wonderful moments in Ordinary People go beyond the dialogue, as good as it is, into little quirky things, especially with Tim Hutton’s character.

A director’s awareness of photography, design and even editing is really secondary, assuming that he gets proper coverage. A good editor and a good cinematographer will be sure he gets that.

What films are you the most happy with and why?

As films or as photography?

Both, as a total piece and as to your work.

As a total piece, I guess Ordinary People is the most satisfying for me and not simply because it won so many Academy Awards. It represents the kind of film I want to make. It’s humanitarian filmmaking. For me, Ordinary People was the strongest synthesis of all the filmmaking elements. I was so pleased with what Redford and I were able to do photographically, within the context of not distracting from what the story was about.

Stylistically I’m very, very happy with American Gigolo because it was the first piece I did where I felt I had enough freedom to do almost arbitrary things. Things that would not be distracting but would flow into the whole feeling of the film. I’m very happy with Honky Tonk Freeway. Structurally, it was the most complex film I’ve ever worked on. It was really like fitting together the parts of a puzzle. Every day it was fascinating to me to watch how Schlesinger was going to pull it off. It was a very ambitious undertaking. I am amazed, given the density and complexity of the film logisticially and character wise, just how much of it did come together.

Honky Tonk Freeway looked like it had an incredible amount of logistics involved.

Just moving the equipment from one place in the country to another was difficult. There were a tremendous number of car mount scenes and they are infuriating because it’s so hard to get the camera exactly where you want it. It’s hard to shoot from one vehicle to another and to coordinate the movement of the vehicles. It’s very difficult to shoot moving cars at night and not make the lighting look artificial. We had a couple of involved rain sequences at night which were difficult. It’s hard to create the illusion of rain and depth with moving cars on the freeway. After you have the lighting roughed in then you have to light the rain as a separate element. It’s the first complex rain sequence I’ve ever done. Schlesinger was totally uncompromising. He’s used to creating depth in his pictures; usually as far back as you can see in the frame, there’s something happening. That’s the way he wants it and rightly so. It was a real challenge for me to work in depth the way he wanted.

On Honky Tonk Freeway was there a lot of second-unit work? I’ve always wondered on a logistical film like that how much work you do and how much does the second unit pick up?

There was more second unit work on that film than anything I’ve ever done.

In your experience, what kind of work is relegated to the second unit?

Almost anything that does not involve dialogue and principal actors could be considered second-unit work. Certainly stunts could be considered second-unit although the crash that ends the film was all done as first-unit. Also explosions, inserts and basically non-people kind of things are second-unit. Any time you’re dealing with one of the principal characters, even if they’re not speaking, I consider to be first-unit work.

Do you have any control over how the second unit turns out its footage?

Absolutely. I try to have the second-unit people see dailies with me as much as possible so that they understand where their footage fits in and what style I’m going with. I have a close dialogue with them regarding lenses, filtration and angles. If it involves lighting, a lot of times I will send the best boy or one of the prinicipal electricians from the first unit to supervise the lighting of the second unit.

Harsh sunlight dominates the scenes in Honky Tonk Freeway. You were really going for that look.

That was the whole point. There was a sequence where all the vehicles crossed the bridge into Florida; it was a series of helicopter shots where they all come together. We wanted a very sharp-edged light, almost etched. The bridge that we picked was essentially an unfinished bridge. There were no side railings, no lines painted, no detailing of it at all. It was just this band of concrete over the water. It was the white concrete, the dark water and this tremendous pure blue sky; it was a very primary look that we were going for. It contrasted with the other locations.

You probably shot most of the scenes during the heat of the day, between ten and two?

We sure did. A lot of times, cameramen will want early morning and late afternoon light. I wanted midday light. I wanted it straight down, hard and hot.

Did you have any problem with harsh shadows? That kind of light tends to look ugly if you don’t know how to deal with it.

We had tremendous problems. I used a tremendous amount of fill light. I used arcs like I’ve never used arcs before. I like to go very soft with arcs, like through tracing paper. But there were times that I had to put them right behind the camera, pump them in and burn the actors up. I hated to do it.

But there’s no other way.

There’s no other way. If the background isn’t important, you can open up and expose for the highlight a little bit and burn out the background. But John and I wanted a very clean, dense background. John understood what it took to accomplish that. A lesser director would have given me a lot of problems with that. But John knew how it had to be. I’m always very apologetic to the actors when I do that because some of them have very sensitive eyes. It’s not like the old days when if you wanted to be an actor, you learned to put up with it or otherwise your career was shelved. Today, actors tend to be very intolerant of the technical problems sometimes. But I find that if you explain the problem to them in advance, most of them are more cooperative.

How do you choose your projects now? You’re in between films and you’re reading a lot of scripts. What are the determinants?

First of all, it’s the script. The more experience I get the more I see that a problematic or mediocre script in the hands of a brilliant director is still going to have problems. A brilliant script in the hands of an okay director can still be a very good film. I’m coming to have more and more respect for what that script is and whether it can be successfully wrought or not. And if it isn’t, what chances it has of being pulled together before you start shooting. Sometimes I’ll read a script that I’m very attracted to but it seems to have problems so I have to take a calculated guess whether those problems will be straightened out before we start shooting. Because the other thing I’m absolutely convinced of is that a script that is not whipped into shape by the time you start shooting is never going to be right. The problems of shooting are so overwhelming and so all-consuming that script problems never get worked out while you’re making the movie. So ideally, I try to find a script that is already all there; a script that works. Then if the director is somebody that I feel also understands the material and is someone who I can respect and get along with, it’s a very easy decision to make. It’s also very easy to dismiss bad scripts that are going to be done by bad directors or directors that I consider to be problematic.

What makes a cameraman worth what he’s paid?

Well, a cameraman takes a lot of heat. The cameraman is really the focus of most of what happens when you’re on the set shooting. The director can insulate himself with the actors; in fact a lot of times, the director is expected to be above it all and somewhat aloof. There are a lot of directors who insulate themselves from the technical problems of filmmaking. But the cameraman is there on the set. He’s got to keep his crew happy. He’s got to effectively coordinate all the shot-to-shot elements of getting the work done with every department. He’s got to be in touch with the production elements—the assistant director, the production manager—in terms of what’s happening tomorrow and the day after. He’s got a tremendous responsibility to the producer and the studio to make the film consistent on a day-to-day basis and deliver it with the kind of professional gloss that’s expected. Today there’re so many first-time directors coming from all different areas and they really don’t understand the elements of filmmaking. Finally, it’s the director of photography who is expected to carry the ball.

So what you’re saying is that the director of photography really has an incredible responsibility all the way around.

Absolutely. I think it’s important to detail why the cameramen get the kind of money they do. If things are not working, he’s the first guy to get axed. In other words, if the picture is in trouble, they’re going to fire the cameraman before they fire the director. You know, the way to scare the shit out of a director is to fire the cameraman. It serves as a warning to the director. That happens a lot.

There’s the other side of the coin too. You have the director who has a very strong sense of how he wants the film to look. Maybe it’s a fantasy that he’s somehow got into his head and isn’t based on any real technical expertise on how film is exposed. However, the director has this notion and the director of photography may or may not be able to deliver that. It’s a tremendous responsibility. There’s a real kind of amorphousness to it. A lot of times the director will say, “I kind of want it to look like this.” What does that mean? But still you have to deliver it. All the departments, from set decoration to wardrobe, come to dailies to see if their stuff is photographed in a way that’s satisfactory to them. So it all focuses back down on the cameraman. He’s the guy that gets the praise or the heat.

You operated for several years. Do you feel that there’s a lot of unconscious material expressed in the photographing of a picture? For example, you may not logically be able to explain why you choose to shoot a scene at a certain angle, but you just instinctively feel it’s right.

Yes, in a way. But because I spent those years as an operator where I had to study the frame so much of the time and consider the fifteen different ways any given shot could be framed, I became very deliberate and very analytical about making those choices. When I was an assistant cameraman, I was very analytical about where the focus should be and when it should jump from one place to another. That all accumulated as baggage when I became a director of photography. So I don’t find a very high level of unconsciousness for me. Now it may be very intuitive for a lot of other people. But in so far as I have the time to reflect, I do try to consider as many options and elements as I can. I feel that I’m very deliberate; I don’t arbitrarily put a 35 mm lens on the camera. To me there’s a big difference between a 29mm, a 35mm and a 40mm lens. There’s a very strong difference in what they can do. Especially when you stop to consider that if you have the room in a set, the difference between using a 29mm and 35mm lens is just the difference between moving forward or backward two steps. You get the same field size. If you’re on a dolly, where you can easily move the camera up and down, you can spend a couple of minutes deciding exactly how high or how low you want to put the camera. There are just all these variables. I have an unconscious checklist I go through; that part of it, in a sense, is unconscious and intuitive. I run through a ritual almost of elements I consider every time I do a shot. I do it much more so in setting the camera position and choosing the lens rather than the lighting. Once you have established what the source of the light is, you basically spend the rest of the shots in that sequence making it consistent. So you follow almost a predetermined guide that you’ve established at the beginning. You’re filling in the blanks. The mechanical setting up each shot photographically is very, very deliberate.

Where it doesn’t become deliberate is when a cameraman and a director decide to slap on a zoom lens and then shoot ninety percent of a picture with it. What you tend to do is that wherever the camera roughly happens to be, you leave it right there, zooming in or out for your frame. So by not considering the focal length of the lens, you don’t consider whether the camera should be three inches further left or right or six inches higher or lower. I find that by using fixed focal length lenses I’m forced to deal much more methodically with every element of selection.

How have you found working with Paul Schrader, the nominal leader of New Wave Hollywood, if there is such a thing?

By directing, Paul has had to confront some of his demons. Paul is an introverted person and directing is not an introverted experience. So I’ve seen a tremendous evolution in Paul from American Gigolo to Cat People. Paul has been growing outward and facing the world around him a lot more. That might be one of the reasons he decided to direct. Writing is a very solitary experience obviously. I have a good relationship with Paul; we get along terrifically. We love the same filmmakers: Bresson, Franju, Renoir. Paul’s grasp of film history and film aesthetics is more profound than anybody I’ve ever worked with. It’s nice for me to be able to deal with that directly and not have to worry whether or not I should mention to this director that this scene is similar to a sequence in Beauty and the Beast or A Man Escaped. Paul and I can talk about that. As a matter of fact, we look at a lot of films before we start production. Preparing for a film with Schrader is almost like going to film school.

Do you yourself have any aspirations to direct?

I’ve got myself committed slightly in that direction. A year ago I denied it even while I was trying to work to make it happen. I’ve optioned a novella. It’s not something that I’m just entertaining; I’m actively working on it.

What is attracting you to directing as opposed to what you’re doing now? What more is there for you in it?

It’s the total experience of making a film, of making a statement. It’s dealing with my own perception of the world and the way we live in it. And finally, a cameraman can’t make any direct comment about that. I mean, he can through his choice of images but you really make your statements through characterization. It’s not that I have an overwhelming urge to make the jump just for the sake of doing it. It’s that there are very specific stories I want to deal with. I love photography and I don’t expect to ever give it up. If I’m fortunate enough to direct a film, I might find it a totally disillusioning experience. But I want to try it once. And if I’m successful, I would still want to continue shooting. I can imagine that there are a tremendous number of films I would be attracted to as a cinematographer but that I would never want to direct. For instance, I would love to do another picture that had the scope of Honky Tonk Freeway; but as a director I don’t think I would want to do something with that scale. I’m very interested in more intimate relationships. So it’s the ability to have the best of both. Also by virtue of having a craft, I can go out, get a job and work. It’s not just a question of supporting yourself but rather the satisfaction you have of working day by day. A cameraman goes out every day and does his job. A director today has become a writer, producer, editor and everything else. So much of his energy is taken with putting all the elements together and getting ready to shoot that the actual shooting of the film is only a small part of it. For a director to take a project from infancy to maturation may require several years. I don’t know if I can take that because I like production. I don’t know if I have the temperament to deal with all the other things you have to deal with to get the project done. I know directors who would love to be able to do two pictures a year but instead are able to do one picture every two or three years.

Could you give me a thumbnail, one-paragraph sketch of your artistic and aesthetic approach to each one of your films? What were you trying to do photographically?

Boulevard Nights for me was primarily an exercise in nighttime street photography. Most of the film takes place along and around Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles. Those cars have a very magical feel; I wanted them to kind of dance, to come alive and sparkle. The scenes with the gangs I wanted to have a much funkier look. So within the element of nighttime street photography, I wanted to deal with the textural difference between the gangs, who were the have-nots, and the car club people, who were the haves. And that’s exactly the dichotomy manifested in the relationship of the two brothers. Chuco was a gang kid and he walked most places while his brother Raymond, who used to be a gang kid, had this incredibly manicured car. It was part of the dramatic chasm between them, part of what kept them from really being able to communicate and understand each other.

American Gigolo was basically an exercise in high-tech chic. Not high tech in the sense of architecture but high tech in its lifestyle and totally urban in its sensibilities. There’s no sense of nature in the film at all; what little is there is incredibly manicured. Unlike Boulevard Nights which had a very realistic street look, I wanted the nighttime look in American Gigolo to look very manipulated. I wanted the light to look as though everything was artificial. There’s a lot of arbitrary use of light and a lot of arbitrary compositions and camera moves in the film. It’s a study in artifice finally. Richard Gere’s lifestyle is a style of artifice, of packaging and presentation. Paul and I tried for a visual style that reinforced the superficialness of what you see is what there is.

Ordinary People was an exercise in restraint. It’s a film of very intense, almost hermetic, human drama. It has a boiling test-tube quality to it. Test-tube in the sense too that there’s a scientific, kind of detached point of observation. The camerawork and the lighting are self-conscious enough and remote enough so that you kind of sit back from the cauldron you see in front of you. Some of the most powerful moments with the actors have a detached feel photographically. Or, at least if not detached, then certainly a feel of not being obtrusive. It’s the feeling that you’re privileged to sit there and watch it but you’re not thrown and pulled into it in a way that makes you feel viscerally distraught. It’s an observed film; it has a certain coolness to it. I tried to color balance the film in a very cool way except for the opening montage which has an autumnal feel to it.

Honky Tonk Freeway was restrained chaos in the sense that it could have been a mishmash of. unrelated incidents. But Schlesinger had a strong sense of how it should all weave together and how the sequences should dance. There’s a lot of camera movement in the film, even more than American Gigolo, but it’s camera movement that is buried and tries to be seamless. It’s restrained chaos in the sense that I tried every way I could to keep things pulled together and unified and still be faithful to the very strong eye that both Scarfiotti and Schlesinger had, looking at the American landscape as two foreigners would look at the more visually bizarre qualities in American life on the road. I tried to enhance that as much as I could. It’s so easy, in films of that scope, to be visually all over the place. But Honky Tonk Freeway is a very disciplined film in a funny sort of way. The characters are so out of control that you couldn’t afford to have a film style that was out of control because that would just create confusion for the audience.

The approach to Continental Divide is what the title connotes: geographic segregation. The whole point is that here are two characters that are just about as different as they could be. You have a very urban being who is totally involved in the world of newspapers and who would probably pass out the first time he breathed fresh air. On the other hand, you have a woman who has very pointedly escaped all that and has become a recluse high in the mountains. So you have the contrast of the open expanse of the Colorado Rockies and the very closed, claustrophobic world of the Chicago Loop. I tried to juggle those two different visual styles. I tried for a very strong sense of street energy around the newspaper office. We did a tremendous amount of dollying. Michael Apted loves to move the camera and the streets of Chicago are perfect for that. In the mountains, even though the characters are hiking around a lot, the camera is hardly moving. The camera is much smaller than the landscape. When you’re looking at impressive mountains, the only way you want to look at them is just stand back and look.

Cat People is a myth and a dream. Paul and I worked toward a style of photography that on the surface seemed to be real, almost kind of quotidian in its matter of fact aspect. But it had an overtone, an evocation of a dream-like state. So the camera, when it’s moving, is floating. There are a lot of crane moves. So it just wasn’t a question of the camera moving laterally but on a crane, where it’s up, down and floating around. There’s almost a detached point of view in a lot of Cat People, where the camera is lighter than air. The characters are also kind of drifting. The whole film is somehow in a cloud. That’s not to say that the photographic style was diffuse. We didn’t want to get into a heavy fogged or diffused look. We used the sense of movement and surreal lighting for that. There are a lot of low camera angles and a lot of non-realistic lighting. It is expressionistic in the real sense of the word not just in terms of long shadows but in terms of the colors. More than any other film I’ve worked on, I really tried to go for a painterly use of light. In all my other films I’ve tried to use a very realistic basis. In Cat People I tried not to.

How would you advise a student who felt he had talent in this area? Would you recommend the same route you took? Or are there many paths to the goal?

There are many roads. I think that several of them can be pursued at once; it’s not necessarily just a linear progression. It’s very important for everybody to explore the maze of his mind. Shooting, and the actual work of making a film, is very important. Any kind of opportunity to shoot, to learn and to experiment is very important. But I think there also comes a point where, if you’re talking about trying to get into the mainstream of the industry, you’ve got to make that commitment. I was basically very satisfied with the route I took. I don’t necessarily recommend it for other people. But I think there is something to be said for the apprenticeship system. Assuming you’ve reached a point that you understand who you are and that you’ve spent some time working and shooting, you can try to get involved in mainstream film production at the bottom of the scale. You can start as a loader, become an assistant, become an operator and spend whatever it takes—six to ten years—to thoroughly learn all the elements. People are so impatient today. But you only get one chance, especially if you’re a director. If he screws up on his first major film, it’s going to be a long time before he’s heard from again. Even more so for a cameraman. If you jump in before you’re ready, you may get in way over your head and not work again for years. Preparation is really the keynote. You prepare and learn by watching other people. I learned from every cameraman I worked with when I was an assistant and operator. Because once you’re doing it yourself there aren’t too many people you can learn from because you’re on the line all the time. I think a lifetime commitment to learning and studying still photography, painting and all the graphic areas is real important. It’s a constant process. In a sense, you’re a student for your whole career. It’s important to keep that disposition. I think that the same kind of questioning that you do when you’re first starting, where every shot is a new experience, is important to do all the way through. It’s not a skill that you’re learning where, at a certain point, you’ve learned it all.

I think that film schools are well and fine. I find that most of what you get out of film school can be gotten without going to film school. It’s another link along the chain, though. I’m wary of film schools to the extent that they seem to foster a sense of arrogance more and more because of the success of so many people who have come out of film schools and become incredibly successful. There’s a developing arrogance on the part of film students to think that they’re going to come in and teach the industry how it’s done. I think that’s a mistake.