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Nestor Almendros

“I start from realism. My way of lighting and seeing is realistic. I don’t use imagination, I use research. Basically, I show things as they are, with no distortion.”

Nestor Almendros visibly flinches whenever anyone asks how he likes being a Hollywood cameraman now. He has to point out that he’s never shot a film in Hollywood. Days of Heaven was shot in Canada, Going South in Mexico, Kramer vs. Kramer and Still of the Night in New York City and The Blue Lagoon in Fiji. But that’s not really surprising since, in his twenty-year career as a director of photography, he has shot film in almost all corners of the world. And while he has never shot a film in Hollywood, he is one of the leading cinematographers in the American film industry: of the five major American films he’s done, three have been nominated for the Oscar in cinematography. And, in 1978, he won for his exquisite naturalistic photography on Days of Heaven.

Almendros’s cinematic roots are unusually deep. Born in Spain and raised in Cuba, he wholeheartedly embraced the cinema as a student; he and his friends were always making short 8mm and 16mm films. They realized, however, that they had to leave Cuba in order to broaden their knowledge of filmmaking. Almendros came to New York City where he studied at City College and met experimental filmmakers Hans Richter, Maya Deren and the Mekas brothers. He returned to Cuba after the fall of the Batista dictatorship and was hired to make propaganda documentaries, which he quickly became bored with, although he considers it was a good training ground for him and it had an influence on his style. But France beckoned: the New Wave was at high tide. In Paris he fell almost by accident into a job shooting for Eric Rohmer. The result of that initial collaboration is that he photographed six of Rohmer’s “Moral Tales.” François Truffaut has used him for eight films while he has worked with Barbet Schroeder on six major films plus assorted documentaries. Even if Almendros had never begun to shoot “American” films, his world reputation would have been assured. An urbane and witty conversationalist, he is a cosmopolitan man of the world and even an author of a book on cinematography. Inundated with job offers after his Oscar win, Almendros would prefer a more leisurely work pace of shooting only two features a year. But now with the demands of both French and American filmmakers for his services, that may not be possible. As in a classic demand-supply relationship, the supply is limited because the quality that Almendros puts on the screen is often hard to come by.

We read an article that you wrote for Film Culture when you were a young cameraman; you were impressed with the neorealist cinematography of G. R. Aldo. We wonder how that’s affected your work?

Enormously. I really owe a lot to Aldo. I think he really was an exceptional case. Aldo was even before Raoul Coutard in using indirect lighting, using soft lighting. And I think that’s because he came to motion pictures from still photography. He came to the cinema not through the usual way of the period, which was to be a loader, an assistant, a focus puller, a camera operator, and after all that, many years later becoming a director of photography. He came straight from still and theatrical photography and only because Visconti imposed on him. That’s why his lighting was so unconventional for the period. He had not come down the same path.

But he really was a source of inspiration. Other films of the period like Open City and Shoeshine made by other cinematographers had an interesting look not because the director of photography wanted it that way; it was due to lack of money. They looked interesting in spite of them. I’m sure that if they had given those cinematographers more money and technical support they would have done something very professional and slick. But Aldo knew he was doing something different. Visually, La Terra Trema is a very modern movie and Umberto D is too, as well as Senso. Aldo photographed them.

It would seem that the cameraman who shot Open City was a cameraman that had been working in a studio situation and then suddenly he had to make do with what he had. Whereas with Aldo, it was different; he knew what he wanted. How does that affect you today? Do you have any basic philosophies about filmmaking?

I always hear Americans say “philosophy” it’s such a big word.

I meant where you start from or your point of departure.

I start from realism. My way of lighting and seeing is realistic; I don’t use imagination. I use research. I go to a location and see where the light falls normally and I just try to catch it as it is or reinforce it if it is insufficient; that’s on a natural set. On an artificial set, I suppose that there is a sun outside the house and then I see how the light would come through the windows and I reconstruct it. The source of the light should always be justified. And when it’s night, my light simply comes from the lampshades or any natural source light that you see in the frame. That is my method. I haven’t invented that, of course. They used to do that before my time, but they used to use hard lights with fresnel lenses. Hard lights only exist in the theatrical world; if you were filming a play or a nightclub, it would be justified. But in normal situations, very seldom do people have spotlights in their houses. When there should be sunlight, then there’s nothing better yet to imitate real sunlight than arc lights, which unfortunately, in many small productions, you cannot afford. I used arc lights outside the prison in Goin’ South to imitate the sunlight falling inside through the windows.

How did you first meet Eric Rohmer and start working on his films?

After I decided to leave Cuba, I chose to come to France because I very much liked the New Wave movies. For three years, I relied on my former profession, teaching language, and I survived. Then by chance, I met Rohmer. To make a long story short, I just happened to be on the set while he was shooting Paris Vu Par. Well, the cameraman left because he quarreled with Rohmer and they couldn’t get anyone, so I said, “I am a cameraman.” And they just tried me and they liked the rushes afterwards. It’s like the story of the chorus girl who replaces the star in the show who has twisted her ankle. Something like that.

Barbet Schroeder was producing the film?

Yes, and Rohmer was directing. I did some of the other sketches as well.

You shot two or three of the sketches for that film then?

Officially, I shot two episodes but I did camerawork and retakes on all the others. It was in 16mm, and hand-held; it was in that period in which we thought 16mm was going to be the thing. I had a lot of 16mm experience in Cuba plus my underground experience in New York. Later we abandoned 16mm because we realized that we had confused the issue; we had thought that it was a question of millimeters.

What about the first feature that you shot with Rohmer, La Collectionneuse? Barbet Schroeder, who produced the film, said that he had a vivid memory of the shooting and that both you and he were influenced later by the style of that film. Can you explain that?

That film is very important to me. When people ask me what is my favorite movie that I did, I always say La Collectionneuse. On that movie, there was already everything that I did later, in an embryo way, you know. But everything was there already. It’s a movie that I can’t forget. My first was also my best. It’s a landmark for me as well as Schroeder and Rohmer.

It was intended to be done in 16mm; that was when we were giving up fighting for 16mm. We decided to make the film in 35mm but shoot it as if it were 16mm. Because what gives 16mm the look that we like in the movies—it wasn’t the millimeters, it was the way you made them. And of course, those things always go together; the fact that you had a small budget, you had so few lights, forced you to use natural sets and natural light. If you do all those things and just change one—go to 35mm—then you still keep this look and acquire some technical qualities which will make the film more interesting for the audience. So we shot the film in 35mm but we hardly had a crew. Barbet Schroeder was the producer and also, at the same time, a sort of gaffer, grip, superintendent; everything really. I was also loading the camera and doing some of the focusing myself. We did it like we would do a 16mm underground movie, only we were doing it in 35mm. We used the technique of not lighting; we waited for the right light. Like we are sitting in this room here; I like this light here the way it is now so why change it if I had to film it? And with this technique, we saw that the results were not only as interesting as in 16mm but even better because they were not degraded by the inferior quality of 16mm. Also the sensitivity and latitude of the film was greater so we could actually go further.

Use less lights?

We used less lights than we used in 16mm; we practically needed none. And we also realized that most technicians had been bullshitting, you know, and inventing uses for enormous amounts of light to justify their importance, to justify their salaries and to make themselves look like someone who knows a secret, when there is technically very little to know.

That’s the New Wave?

Yeah, but the first New Wave movies—I think that’s where Rohmer was great—they were not that conscious about those things. They were still a little naive, they were undergoing a transition. But I believe we went a further step, thanks to Rohmer.

In general, from the New Wave directors that you’ve worked with, what do you find their attitude to be toward the camera work? How do they deal with it? Do they put a lot of emphasis on that?

They do give a great deal of importance to the camerawork. But, at the same time, they don’t like it to overwhelm the movie, like it used to be. Because, in the past, the cameraman was like a dictator, you know. There was so much time for preparing the shot and so there practically was no time for the actors to rehearse or the moviemakers to make the movie. There was all the business of putting the lights up and it was a big ritual. I think we work faster now than they used to. And that comes also from the reduction of the shooting time in Europe.

But even with all the business of working faster, the directors still wanted good cinematography?

Oh sure, they certainly care a lot about it. The fact that they don’t have an army of technicians any more doesn’t mean that they don’t care about the photography. On the contrary, they dislike that glossy look, that artificial look that films have, especially old French films. The Americans never went that far; the French films of the fifties especially were unbearable in that regard. They were so artificial; actors could hardly move because they had a light on their eyes that was hitting them in a certain manner and the actors had to be there still on that spot and so they had to be acting as if they were mummies because they could not move. Instead of the lighting being for the actors, it was the actors existing for the lighting.

You’ve done a number of pictures with Truffaut; could you describe what your working relationship is with him; what kind of input you have to him and vice versa; what emphasis he places on the camera.

To begin with, Truffaut is one of the nicest persons to work with. He’s a man who believes, like Jean Renoir, that a good atmosphere during the shooting will be good for the film too. On the set, there’s no hysteria, there’s no screaming; everybody on the crew are like family. We are working together to make a movie. Everything goes very smoothly and it’s a work of cooperation. He’s a man who, amazingly for his enormous talent, listens to people who work with him. You would tell him something and he would take it into consideration; he might reject it but it’s not just the attitude of “I’m a genius and I don’t need any kind of help.” He listens to the people who work with him, whether it’s a set designer, assistant director or actor or even a grip. And he will use things that people bring to the movie and use them so the film looks like Truffaut nevertheless. That’s one of his great talents.

The camera, for Truffaut, is much more mobile that it is with Rohmer. Rohmer likes for the characters to move in the frame as in The Marquis of O where they come close to the camera and they go back, back, back to the end of a corridor. And the camera just stays there and they go in and out of the frame. Truffaut, on the other hand, usually follows the actors; he’s always in a sort of medium shot position; that’s his favorite distance. He goes more often to close-ups in certain movies, especially on contemporary subjects. So he moves the camera but it’s hardly noticeable because it’s following the action so closely that it’s justified and it’s almost invisible. In this sense, I think he has learned a lot from the American cinema of the thirties. He admires very much Leo McCarey, Capra and all those people that have this almost invisible camera. That’s for light comedies. But when it comes to drama, then he would have camerawork that is more underlying, where the camera is almost like a character in the film.

As in The Story of Adele H?

Yes, or in The Green Room in which the camera does actually describe things and underline them. Big dolly shots, big camera movements come from the geography of the place (location) instead of in the editing. He is the master of the “plan-séquence.” That’s a French expression. It does not really indicate a master shot because a master shot implies you’re going to do close-ups and insert them on that master. His conception of a shot is such that it’s just the way it’s going to be and there’s no other way to fill in any close-ups. The camera will go from one character to another or will move to another room, all without a cut. He tries not to edit. If he can keep it all in one shot, he’s very happy.

What sort of problems does that style of shooting present to you?

Well it does present some problems and some advantages. One of the problems is focus, for instance. When the camera is moving all the time, it is quite difficult for the focus puller; he has to keep following and keep the correct distance. Also it presents a problem for the camera operator, which is me, because in Europe I do operate the camera. At every moment in every camera movement, there has to be a composition that looks good. So it’s like making a thousand compositions in a very short period of time. On the other hand, you have an advantage in that you have no problem about matching. When you’re editing and you’re going from one shot to another, you have to make sure that the eyelines are right, that the lighting is the same for every shot of the sequence. When you do a “plan-sequence,” it takes a long time to prepare; you might do one a day, but you save time in the long run too.

The shot may make up several minutes of the finished film.

Well, in the editing of the film, there is less work to do because the whole thing is preedited. So you work the whole day and you only do one shot, but you save all the time in the editing later.

Monte Hellman whom you worked with on Cockfighter said that you were fast; that it was one of the first things that came to his mind about you.

Good, I’m glad he said that. I don’t boast about being good but I boast about being fast.

He said, “Of course he’s good; you’ve seen his films, but the thing you don’t know is that he’s also very, very fast.”

The reason being that I light very little. For a cameraman, most of the time is lost in lighting. Well, very often I go to a place and I realize that it is very nicely lit as it is. So what we do is we choreograph the actors in relationship to the existing situation and it’s easier that way. I think that by spending too much time in lighting, you end up being mannerist. And that’s something I learned from a short experience that I had with Roger Corman. Right after I made La Collectionneuse, we made a film in Europe that was produced and codirected by Corman; Daniel Haller was the other director. It was called The Wild Racers. It was an insignificant movie. But the importance of that experience was we learned to work very fast. It’s a twofold area; we realized that because you are faster, you are not necessarily worse in cinema; and because you take a long time to prepare something, it’s not necessarily going to be better. With every shot you take time somehow; some shots you take longer than with others. But, on the whole, you just have to go ahead and shoot and follow your intuition. Sometimes if you think too much you sort of lose the intuition and the natural flow.

But still you get the wonderful compositions; how do you achieve such quality and still work with such economy? It does seem like a contradiction.

If it is so, I guess it also has to do with the fact that I come from reportage, from newsreels, documentaries, and television and that was my training ground. If you would measure the amount of film that I shot in my career, the ones that people know are just the part visible of the iceberg. I shot an enormous quantity of film in Cuba for television and newsreels; also for school television in France. That’s a lot of footage; that keeps you in training.

So it’s your training as a documentary cameraman that gives you that intuition?

Also, every situation that you face in a new movie, you have faced it before. It’s not new to you. And that’s the reason why I could make five feature films last year. Whereas the year that I made La Collectionneuse, that was the only film I made and it left me exhausted. It’s because you learn to work faster and, I hope, better.

What about now that you’re working in Hollywood?

I haven’t worked in Hollywood. Days of Heaven was shot in Canada. Goin’ South was shot in Mexico. Kramer vs. Kramer was in New York. But I know what you mean by Hollywood.

So you shot none of that in a studio?

Well Days of Heaven was totally on location but they built sets on location. On Goin’ South, we used the sets of the western town that John Wayne had built in Durango. It doesn’t make too much difference whether you shoot in a studio or a natural set if the sets are reconstructed. The only difference is that you can go from the outside to the inside on a natural set, which is, by the way, one of the things that Truffaut likes. And you can’t do that in a studio. Truffaut likes to always link the exterior with the interior. You often have people going from the outside into a house in one shot like in The Wild Child. So that people can really see the connection between the interior and exterior. It also makes the people participate in the film. It’s not like the films made in the fifties, where you would have an exterior shot really on location and when people crossed the doorway, suddenly you were on a studio set and it was very obvious.

So you’ve really never made a film in the studio environment?

At times I have, like Madame Rosa. The apartment scenes were shot entirely in a studio in Paris. Now I haven’t shot in a Hollywood studio but I’ve seen films being made in Hollywood and it’s not too different from our way of doing things. Only in Hollywood, you have more hours, more gaffers, more grips, more coffee and more doughnuts.

Do you have a preference for studio over location work?

Yes, I think when we were younger we fought the wrong battle for 16mm as much as we fought the wrong battle for natural sets. I am more eclectic now. There are situations where natural sets are excellent; in other situations they are useless. For instance, in Madame Rosa, about two-thirds of the film took place in that apartment; in Kramer vs. Kramer, two-thirds of the film also took place in an apartment. There’s no doubt that you can control the lighting better by being on a set, especially when you have long scenes. If the scenes are very short, if they are vignettes, like in La Collectionneuse, I agree it’s good to have natural light because it falls very nicely and you just cut to another scene. But when you are shooting a very long scene (with natural light) the light is falling a certain way like it’s falling in this room now; but in an hour from now, the light will be falling differently. So paradoxically, a natural set will sometimes give a non-realistic feeling to the audience because the lighting will change from shot to shot. There will be no continuity. You want to get a smooth continuity and there’s nothing better than a studio for that, especially for those long scenes. My Night at Maude’s was also shot partially in the studio. Maude’s apartment was a set and there’s no doubt that it helped the actors to be relaxed. When the actors have to perform long sequences and a great deal of dialogue, if they are disturbed by traffic in a street or a helicopter passing over and you have to call “cut” every minute because the take is no good for sound, then the performers get in a bad mood; all the stopping and starting is disturbing them. When you are in the studio, you control your work; you are comfortable and the actors perform perfectly.

What film do you use in Europe; do you use Kodak?

We use Kodak Vincennes as opposed to Kodak Rochester; Vincennes is the town in France where they make it.

Is it the same film, the same emulsion?

Kodak says it is but we know it isn’t. It’s a little softer I think. In theory it’s exactly the same but something is slightly different.

I thought possibly you used Agfa or some other European stock.

No, I haven’t used Agfa; I’d like to make some tests with it. I’ve seen the Fuji film. In fact, it’s unfortunate that Kodak practically has a monopoly in this area. Because it’s like a painter had to have only one palette; it would be interesting to use other things. The problem is that the other things might not be as good.

How do the labs differ?

The labs are better here. For one thing, they are cleaner, much cleaner. And that’s very important; what always infuriates me is white spots on the film done in French labs because of all the dust. The air extractors are not good enough; the transportation of the film from one room to another is not carefully done. People in the labs are underpaid, of course, so they don’t work as well. Also the opticals are badly done in Europe. Whenever there is a dissolve, it’s not very good. But in America, they are very well done. When I see the work that was done by the lab on Days of Heaven, it just absolutely amazes me; I can’t believe it. What the MGM lab did was incredible and I’m very pleased with it.

You’ve done a number of documentaries with Barbet Schroeder. What can you say about the shooting of Idi Amin Dada?

I could say we came to a point which is interesting as journalism and cinema. Taking into account that it was journalism, you had to be unobtrusive; the smaller the crew is, the better. We knew that Idi Amin was very temperamental and that he was not going to be bothered. So we just had to be as invisible as we could. We knew what we were shooting was so exciting that there was no place for aesthetics. We had to do photography that was more intelligent than beautiful, more functional than aesthetic. We did very little lighting because we had a very small kit for lighting and we lit everything ourselves without electricians. We hand-held the camera very often. That time, we were using 16mm; I think that’s where it should be used, for that kind of thing and not for fiction. But for that kind of movie, we could have never done the film in 35mm. It would have been impossible.

One scene where you went into the meeting with his aides—I can’t believe he allowed you to film that.

Well, he was actually quite proud of showing that. He told us we could shoot for five minutes only. But then, when the five minutes passed, he didn’t acknowledge it, so we just remained there and he never said anything about it. So we just kept shooting. And he actually got very excited about that sequence and he was probably very proud of it. The only problem I had there, from the point of view of lighting, is that their newsreel people were also shooting and they were throwing their light intermittently all over the place. I had set all my lights in advance and suddenly my light reading would change completely and that was a big problem for me because it suddenly got overexposed or underexposed.

The footage we shot was of course very much longer than the film itself because Idi Amin repeated himself a lot; he said the same things for about three hours. We shot all the ministers in the meeting to use as cutaways. But I wasn’t very well located, so that the one minister who was killed 15 days later was precisely the one I had not gotten a shot of alone. I just got him in a panning shot. Then we learned that 15 days later he was found dead on the banks of the Nile. When Amin was talking to him in the meeting, he was telling this man how he had not done his job well. Little did we know what was to happen later. But Amin wasn’t actually looking at him. He was talking to the air so we had no way to know which man he was admonishing. Well, we found out about this man’s death back in Paris when we were looking at the rushes. So we had the laboratory freeze the frame on this man. Now when the film came out, Amin wasn’t happy. So he tried to exercise censorship by taking hostages. He put the French residents of Uganda in prison. It’s the first time that this kind of censorship has been perpetrated in the history of the cinema. So that by this taking of hostages Barbet was forced to cut the freeze frame and the phrase about his murder from the film.

Goin’ South was only Jack Nicholson’s second film as a director. Was he anxious about taking on that role again?

He’s a total director. He was very excited, not nervous but very excited and very pleased and happy to have the chance to direct. He really enjoys directing as much as acting. He enjoys acting a lot too; you can tell, he’s got such fantastic energy and enthusiasm and he communicates this to the whole crew. Everybody follows him as a real leader.

Did he depend heavily on you for the visual look and style of the film?

He doesn’t depend on anybody; he has his own ideas. But he relied on me a lot; he listened to me a lot and he was happy to have my viewpoint on things and it really worked wonderfully well. It was a fantastic experience.

Was the mine shaft sequence in Goin’ South lit totally with those lanterns?

Yes, basically. There was a little help with some soft light. But just a little because I wanted to give the impression that those lights were actually petrol lanterns and that the mine was very dark. So you had to guess more than see, which also made some of the crew unhappy because they built that mine set and they were questioning whey they should build such a good set if it was not going to be seen.

But I was lucky enough that Jack Nicholson agreed with me; that it was not necessary to see it; that you could show a beam here and a little stone there and guess about the rest. And that would be much more realistic than knowing exactly how the mine was laid out.

And, in that scene, Nicholson was wonderful because he was carrying the lantern and he understood very quickly how the lantern had to be at eye level so that the faces would be seen. Also by waving and shaking the lantern, you would see patterns of light. So he actually did it, he was lighting for me. He was acting but, at the same time, he was a gaffer. It was wonderful. And I asked him if he would mind doing that, explaining to him how it would look better. I asked him if it hampered or handicapped his acting and he said, “Quite the opposite, it helps me due to the fact that I’m thinking of something else so I can act better.” It’s really an ideal thing for a director of photography to have an actor like that.

Some of the scenes were very dark, at least by American standards; I’m thinking of an early sequence in the jail where all the faces are very dark. Was that intentional?

Yes, definitely. I like arc lights very much and we used arc lights there to imitate sunlight coming into the jail. Now I don’t like arc lights outside to compensate, you know, when they use it on exteriors. That I hate; I never do that. But I wanted to use arcs in that scene and Nicholson like the idea of the jail being very sordid and very dark. And then the faces sort of emerge from the darkness and come into this stream of light. He staged the action for that as you could see. So, in that scene, Nicholson himself was almost backlit, almost invisible and only those who came to visit him in jail would be seen. It was an exciting scene to do actually. In fact you’ve mentioned the two scenes that I prefer in the movie, from my point of view and the point of view of my work: the mine and the prison.

What was your aesthetic approach to the timing of Goin’ South?

I did the timing but unfortunately I did not do the final timing because I had to start another movie. I’m not that happy about the final release print of Goin’ South.

On that film, we agreed that we would like the photography to have a very warm feeling. So instead of having the 85 filter on the camera, which is the normal one, we used an 85B filter, which is slightly warmer. The location in Durango didn’t really look like as much of a desert as we wanted it to be, so by using the 85B we made it look more dry. So the plants, instead of being totally green, looked slightly more yellowish and orangish. The first print that the lab did on its own appalled both Nicholson and me because they had color-corrected and subtracted that. We had to tell them to put the warm colors back in.

About those scenes in the desert, did you use any fill light or white cards?

No, the desert is also very easy to shoot because the light bounces off things naturally. It’s only when you have lots of green, the green of nature, that it becomes difficult because green absorbs the light and then there is no bounce or fill light.

Another scene I had great trouble with was the sequence with the gallows because we were having some very stormy days. Sometimes it would be sunny and five minutes later it would be cloudy. So matching shots was really a nightmare. I don’t know if you noticed it but some shots really don’t match at all. It was a very long scene, shot over a whole week, and we could not stop production just because it didn’t match. What we did to get around that was shoot very tight on the action so you don’t see that it’s so cloudy outside: by doing that you can hide the fact that the weather conditions have changed. You get by, although it’s not perfect.

Of course, Nicholson cared more about the performances and the story rather than the lighting in that sequence. Because of that, we didn’t stop shooting; and he probably was right about that for what it was.

What about the experience of working with Terrence Malick?

Days of Heaven was a fantastic experience also. He’s an artist from head to toe. Every little molecule in him is an artist. For a director of photography to work with him, it is the treat of your life. Because he’s very much oriented to photography, more than any other director that I’ve ever met. And he knows more about photography than any other director I’ve named. He could have actually filmed this movie and done it very well. He knows about light and mood. He knows that a light can be almost like an actor; that it will give a scene a feeling that is as strong as a good actor. He gives great importance to it.

We shot a lot of film; we shot under very exceptional lighting conditions. We very often shot in what he called “the magic hour.” We would prepare and wait the whole day, then we would shoot at the time after the sun set. We had about twenty minutes there before it got dark. We would just shoot frantically to make use of this beautiful light.

You would have to open the lens up further and further as the light began to go?

Yes. We started with the normal lenses and we would change to the fast Superpanavision lenses which open up to f1.1. Well, first we went to a f1.4 lens, then there was one lens, a 50mm, that opened up to f1.1, so we would rush to get the 50mm and put it on as the light went; then we would pull the 85 filter off to get another stop and then as a last resort we pushed the film. So we expanded this 20 minutes to 25 minutes of shooting time. Of course, we were quite determined to match everything. And it gave a quality that I don’t think has ever been seen in movies. Because you don’t know where the light comes from; it’s a strange type of light. The quality of the skin tones is very extraordinary. I allow myself to boast about it because I credit that to Terry; I just helped him in achieving what he wanted.

How did Terry Malick communicate to you how he wanted Days of Heaven to look? How did he explain it to you?

He was very clear about it; he talked to me by phone because I was in Europe making a film when he contacted me. And we prepared the film by phone. I read the script and took some notes and we talked a lot by phone about the look of the movie. Then when I got to Los Angeles and later to Alberta, we talked more at length. But he insisted from the very beginning that he wanted to shoot some scenes of the film in this “magic hour.” He wanted to know if the film stock was capable of doing it and I said, “Absolutely, I’ve done it before.” We did some tests in the area (Lethbridge, Alberta) before we started shooting. We did tests that involved pushing the film and shooting after sunset. We found the tests very convincing; it looked good so we went ahead.

But that was his main concern: to use that type of light in color, which hasn’t been done too much. In black and white, of course, Orson Welles used that type of light in the first part of Touch of Evil and there have been other black-and-white movies that utilized it.

We also talked about the colors of the set and the clothes. We didn’t want too many colors; we leaned heavily on browns and period colors, colors that were not bright because historically they were not bright in that time. Patricia Norris got old clothes and old textiles, so that the clothes wouldn’t have that synthetic quality that they now have.

So it sounds like Terry Malick knew very specifically what he wanted?

At the same time, nothing was that rigidly planned. We would find things on location also; there were many things that would just happen. As we were doing the film, we would be finding things. There was lots of improvisation in the shooting, in the acting and all respects.

For instance, there would not be a call sheet that went into great detail as to what we were to shoot that day. Our schedule was dictated by the weather, the conditions and the way we were feeling. This made some people on the crew, which was basically a Hollywood crew, unhappy.

Who determined which sequences were to be shot in the “magic hour” and which ones were not?

Well, it had to do with the logic of it. For instance the scene in which Richard Gere has a fight with a worker who asks him if his sister is keeping him warm; well that scene takes place at lunch time in the fields so obviously it could not be the “magic hour.” So there’s a logic to it. And also we shot at the “magic hour” when actually, in the movie, it was supposed to be dawn or dusk. But that’s a known fact—that farmers wake up very early to do their work. So we shot in the “magic hour” for both sunset and dawn sequences. It made sense, it wasn’t gratuitous. And some scenes, like the scenes by the river with Brooke Adams, they had to be shot at the “magic hour” because it was supposed to be after work. So it was all justified by the logic of the script.

Did you use any filters or put anything in front of the lens?

No, not at all. We didn’t use any filters or any diffusion; we wanted the image to be very sharp and crisp. We didn’t use any fog filters either. We sometimes took out the 85 filter in order to gain one stop in exposure, a supplementary stop. In doing that, of course, the image becomes bluish. In some situations, like when Richard Gere and Linda Manz are roasting a chicken in front of the fire, it worked very well and we left it as it was without color correction. It all became very blue, you remember? And the only thing that has color is the fire and the sparks of fire. But in other scenes, we had the lab correcting the color so it wouldn’t be so blue and so it would match with the rest of the film.

How did you go about shooting those night exteriors, especially the scene where they have the celebration around the campfire?

For that scene, we used a new technique, at least as far as I know. We used propane bottles with burners to simulate the light of the fire. I mean, normally when you shoot a scene that’s supposed to be firelight, you have a spotlight and you wave and shake pieces of clothes or plastic or something in front of it to imitate the flickering of flames. But that always looks very phony and ridiculous. So since my technique has always been realism, I thought why not go to the real thing and use real fire? So we had the bottles of propane with the burners and we put them as close as we could to the faces of the people, but out of range of the camera. We lit it exactly as we would light it with electric light only we used a flame instead. And that light had the real flickering, the real movement and also the color temperature because it’s very warm and has its own kind of reddish quality that you don’t get in electrical light. You know the scene when the fiddler is playing and all the people are dancing? All that is lit with propane.

And of course that made the gaffers, the grips and the prop men unhappy. No one knew whose job it was to handle the propane. The electrician would say, “That’s not electricity so why should I be lighting with that; it doesn’t belong to me.” The prop man would say, “Why should I be handling these bottles? This is lighting.” Nobody wanted to take care of it. It was confusing.

Concerning that night sequence with the grasshoppers and the fire, did you enhance that light? It looked perfectly natural.

The fire was shot actually as it was. It was real fire. No enhancing, no nothing. In fact, if you light fire, you spoil it. Because if you overlight a scene where there is fire, then the fire doesn’t give the proper effect. We did some tests, of course, and we saw that it looked better that way; that it looked better without any kind of “enhancement.” Then when we had scenes of people’s faces looking at the fire, we would use the flame of propane bottles in order to control the effect.

What about that great sequence right before the burning with all the lanterns and commotion?

That was in the script actually; Terry had the idea of people carrying lanterns. The problem is that when people carry lanterns in film, they usually light nothing. Because the lanterns are just props, you see. But we wanted the lanterns to really light the scene. So what we had were some battery belts with electricity hooked up to the lanterns which had warm color bulbs in them so that it would give the color temperature of a flame; not white light. What was important was that the people were carrying lanterns that actually did give light; it doesn’t matter whether it was a real flame or electricity. What we wanted was that those lanterns would actually lead and that they would be believeable.

So we had some smokey color on the lanterns and so on; there was a prop man who did some research on it and we did some tests. Later on I used that technique again in Goin’ South on the mine scene. If you have real lanterns with real petrol, they really give so little light that it doesn’t read; the film doesn’t register.

But that was the extent of your lighting in that sequence?

No, I had some fill light, too. We had some machines making smoke and I used some back light in order to make the smoke appear quite strongly; otherwise the smoke wouldn’t have been visible. I had some front light also, but very little. I used the front light in a way that the lanterns that the people were carrying would actually do the lighting job.

What percentage of the film would you say is shot with natural or practical light?

Almost all of it. There was very little lighting. Only the scenes at the end where the jealous husband goes up and finds her in the room; there we had a couple of lamps with lampshades in the room but we did some lighting there also. But the lighting was always justified because it was coming from the direction of the actual light. Also when you had views of the house from the outside at night, of course that was artificial light in the windows. We needed it stronger than it was in reality, but not by much; it was very close to the truth.

When we had day scenes in the house, it normally was window light actually lighting the scene. We had done some tests; some with artificial lighting and some without and Terry liked it better without the lighting and I did too. So the window light would be the light that was doing the job.

And you would prefer to use the natural light anyhow?

Well, it’s always been my thing. I did a lot of that in The Marquis of O but this movie gave me a chance to do it again, even more so. Rohmer, you see, doesn’t like high contrast; he doesn’t like black backgrounds, he wants you to see things. So with Rohmer, although I had the window light doing the job, I had to put some fill light up so that the backgrounds could be seen. On the other hand, Malick liked to leave things the way they were, which, of course, made me very happy.

That would also be responsible for the skin tones; they had a sort of soft, glowing quality to them.

Yes. At the same time, the scenes had to be staged with the consideration that the depth of field was very small. And that’s where a director like Malick is very important for that kind of movie. The lens is wide open so that the actors would be in focus at one point and then go totally out of focus at another point in the same scene. But Malick was very much aware of this; he would stage the scene so that both of the actors would be in the same focal plane.

In Days of Heaven the colors are very saturated; what causes that effect? What were you doing to give it that saturated look; is it because of “the magic hour”?

I suppose so and also because we had to push the film.

How much?

One stop only. Also things vary from lab to lab. That film was developed in a provincial lab in Vancouver called Alpha Cine and they did a very good job. So it gave a different quality to the film. Otherwise, both Days of Heaven and Goin‘ South were shot with the same camera and the same lenses; so was Kramer vs. Kramer, and the results are different there also. It has to do with the light of the place and the quality of the landscape. Canada is not the same as Durango, Mexico, you see.

On Kramer vs. Kramer, can you comment about your aesthetic or photographic approach to the film?

It’s a contemporary movie and it takes place in an Upper East Side apartment, upper-middle class; also there are scenes that take place in skyscrapers with long views of New York. We use restaurants and courthouses as locations too. It’s very banal, it has to do with things of today. So, in that way, the film looks more like Bed and Board or Chloe in the Afternoon, which are the other two contemporary movies I’ve made. It looks a little like The Man Who Loved Women too.

Normally when you make a film about a contemporary subject, people think you should not care too much about the visual side of it. Normally they are done more quickly and more carelessly. There is no set designer, no costumer; you just shoot things as they are. But, in this film, fortunately we have done things with time and research. Robert Benton wanted to come from Piero della Francesca, amazingly enough for a contemporary subject; but that was the painter we studied to begin this movie. We looked at a lot of frescoes and books.

As the film went on, I found that the objects in the film have no connection with Piero della Francesca; we had the colors and we tried to match the colors on the walls and clothes, etc. But, little by little, in the middle of the movie, I began to get interested in David Hockney. Then, just the other day, I was very happy to find out that David Hockney admires Piero della Francesca a lot and he actually considers himself a follower of his. So I was not that far off. I’ve been searching through David Hockney lately because he uses contemporary things like chairs, cactus in a pot, lampshades and windows; things that look like things that are in this movie. That’s my source of inspiration now.

But it’s done very carefully. I have time to do it and I’m never rushed.

By the way, just as a point of reference, the painters we studied for Goin’ South were Maxwell Parrish and Maynard Dixon. In Days of Heaven we used the photography of the period as is indicated in the credits. In Claire’s Knee, we used Gauguin; in Adele H. we used Victorian painting.

So you communicate a great deal through reference to the other visual arts?

Yes, I think using painting is very important because it gives a reference to the director, the set designer, the costume designer, etc. In The Marquis of O, for instance, we used German romantic painting. Sometimes you have movie references. For The Wild Child, our inspiration was Griffith and black-and-white movies of the past.

It’s always very useful to have a reference to give a style to the movie; otherwise the film would just go into so many directions.

What about contemporary American cinematographers? Whose work do you look at; whose work do you admire?

I think we’ve seen a great renewal in America in the last twenty years [in cinematography]. A tremendous renewal because they had come to a dead end. I admire very much Gordon Willis, of course; he’s a great artist. I admire Chapman (Michael), a very good disciple of Willis. Here on the West Coast, there’s Haskell Wexler, who worked a bit on Days of Heaven after I left because I had committed to do a film with Truffaut. Since I was committed to it before, it was Haskell who shot about two weeks of filming after I left. It worked out fabulously. Then of course, the Hungarians are very good too; Laszlo Kovaks and Vilmos Zsigmond are really fantastic. Adam Hollender is also a great cameraman; Alonzo is very good too. Also Butler is very good too and Conrad Hall. There are a lot of great cameramen here.

Can you comment on the way American directors work as opposed to their European counterparts?

The Americans use much more film; they use thousands of feet of film and get much more coverage. They cover everything from every possible angle; they do many more takes of a scene. There are many more scenes that are never used. In Europe—and when I say “in Europe,” my experience is very limited, I am always faithful to the directors I work with and that is Truffaut, Rohmer and Barbet Schroeder—anyway, they don’t shoot too much film. They don’t do much coverage. It only takes Rohmer eight days to edit his films. Eight days! All Rohmer does is, since there is no coverage at all, splice one sequence after another and so the film is almost done. So that the rough cut and the final cut are very similar. All they do is cut a little here and a little there. So that you can say the film is really all there in the rough cut. So when I say eight days, I mean eight days for the rough cut.

Whereas here, with Days of Heaven, it has been about three different movies; they edited it one way, then they reedited it again another way and then they cut scenes and added still other scenes. It’s totally different here. On Goin’ South, Jack Nicholson had three editors working simultaneously on the film. One would be editing the gunfight, one would be editing the love scene and one would be editing something else, all at the same time. We don’t do it that way and so our films are perhaps more personal and more individual. Which doesn’t mean that Malick or Nicholson or Monte Hellman aren’t individuals, they are. I admire them for their ability to do their own thing in spite of all the obstacles. It’s amazing. When you think of the past and the enormous pressure of the producers and studios and when you see that every John Ford picture had a signature, had a style, it’s just amazing. How did they do it?

What about the actors and actresses here? Do you think part of the reason for shooting a lot is on their account?

The American actors are much more energetic than the Europeans. They go through many hardships. In Days of Heaven, Richard Gere fell 15 times on an icy river for 15 takes without much protection; I really admire that. He did it himself and he never protested it at any time. Nicholson does the same thing too.

American directors shoot too much, I think. I don’t think it’s necessary, at least not to that extreme. Sometimes producers want them to do it because if you don’t shoot enough they think they will not have a good film.

But then again, the cheapest thing you have to work with is film; that’s your smallest expense on a film.

But then, on the other hand, you have a tremendous amount of film. And it takes more time for editing; you have too many choices, you have too many angles. With many of the films that I’ve seen in America, I have the impression that they’re always cutting for no reason; it’s just because they have another shot of it. The films have the tendency to all look alike because they all go through the same method of shooting. It comes out as if it were made by computers. A computer could actually make a movie; it could see how many camera positions you can have for the scene; ask the computer and it will tell you.

Then by having all these choices, the editors also chop up the film too much. You have to have a close-up here and an insert there, a long shot here, an establishing shot there and it becomes too mechanical. It becomes just a mechanism and it has no personality, the film has no style. I believe in limitations and discipline.

Possibly the Truffauts and the Rohmers are more secure in their visions; they know exactly how they want it?

I believe the director should know in advance and not afterwards on the editing table. He should edit his film in his head already. In Hollywood, that’s the way it used to be a long time ago. But of course all these things are theories; and some people with other theories might get a good film. Good films get made in every possible way and sometimes under great pressure.

We understand that the last film you made with Rohmer, Perceval, was quite different from your previous work. In what way?

The film was totally made in the studio and Rohmer did not want a realistic look at all. So that’s totally breaking with my tradition. And, I must say, at the beginning, I was totally lost. In the first two weeks, I had to do many retakes because it was really very bad and I didn’t know where I was going. I had to relearn everything again; because Rohmer wanted a look that was not realistic, not naturalistic. He wanted it purposely to look artificial. Having been a realist all my life, it was really quite hard. On the sound stage, we had a whole cyclorama with castles made of plywood, trees made with plastic, painted grass and backgrounds. It had to be reconstructed light. And also Rohmer did not want something that would have direction of light because he was getting his inspiration from the miniatures of the Middle Ages; and the miniatures had no shadows, they only had color and form; there was no direction of light and no perspective. So we had to have light but, at the same time, with no direction and it couldn’t be flat either. So I used arc light and it was really hard.

Also, you know, people have not been working in the studios lately, especially in Europe, so studio lighting has almost become some kind of lost art. It’s a secret that was buried with the people who used to do it; it hasn’t been passed on. Of course, they were working in black-and-white and we are working in color, so even if you research the old books, it doesn’t totally work the same.

So it was very exciting and anguishing too because I was afraid of really goofing it.

It was a big challenge?

Yes, that’s right. Unfortunately the film hasn’t been a big commercial success in America.

Would you say that it was your most difficult film?

Yes, I would say that this is the most difficult film I’ve made. Because even my first film, La Collectioneuse, like all first films, was very difficult but still there were points of reference. But Perceval, it was total invention.