Principal Photography Read online

  PRINCIPAL

  PHOTOGRAPHY

  PRINCIPAL

  PHOTOGRAPHY

  Interviews with

  Feature Film Cinematographers

  Vincent LoBrutto

  To my uncle, Gino Damiani, and my father, Anthony LoBrutto, for sharing Kodachrome dreams and to Phil Scandura, who taught me that passion for the arts is contagious.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments ix

  Introduction xi

  1. Conrad Hall 1

  2. Gordon Willis 15

  3. Miroslav Ondi-icek 37

  4. Adam Holender 47

  5. Don McAlpine 63

  6. John Bailey 81

  7. Dean Cundey 99

  8. Edward Lachman 119

  9. Garrett Brown 135

  10. Fred Elmes 155

  1. Sandi Sissel 171

  12. Allen Daviau 187

  13. Lisa Rinzler 209

  Glossary 227

  Bibliography 233

  Index 239

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to my parents, Rose and Anthony LoBrutto, for their support and for allowing me to borrow the family standard 8mm movie camera to discover my passion for filmmaking. From overseas and cross-country, my children, Rebecca and Alex Morrison, continue to inspire and motivate me with their own flights of discovery. I thank them for their unconditional support. My wife, Harriet Morrison, aided in research, tracked down subjects, chauffeured, acted as consigliere, and, as always, lent her fine hand to the manuscript. My respect and thanks also to Dr. Manhinderjit Singh for his wisdom.

  I express my appreciation to the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) for their assistance, especially Victor J. Kemper, former president, and Karin Sciaratta. American Cinematographer Magazine made an essential contribution to this project. I thank Stephen Pizzello, executive editor, David E. Williams, associate editor, Christopher Probst, technical editor, and George E. Turner, ASC's history maven, for their kindnesses and professionalism. My gratitude to the International Photographers Guild, Local 600, IATSE, particularly George Spiro Dibie, national president.

  Thanks to Barbara Halperin of The Gersh Agency, Wayne Fitterman of United Talent Agency, Smith/GosnelI/Nichol son & Associates, and to Everett Aison for help in contacting interview subjects.

  My appreciation to Sam Gill of The Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles, Kathy Bowles-Ruediger of the Steadicam Operators Association, the New York University Library, and the School of Visual Arts Library for re search materials. I also thank Saal and Deborah Lesser for special support and use of their office facilities.

  My heartfelt thanks to everyone at the School of Visual Arts, especially Reeves Lehmann, chairman of the Department of Film, Video, and Animation, and Sal Petrosino, director of operations, for their unconditional support and friendship. Thanks to all my colleagues and students for inspiration and encouragement. My appreciation to instructor and cinematographer Igor Sunara, who told me as I was about to embark on this project, "Everyone says,'cinematography is about light.' Cinematography is not just about light. Cinematography is about movement and light."

  Sincere thanks to the entire staff at Le Montrose Hotel in West Hollywood for their hospitality, especially John C. Douponce, general manager, and to John Sawyer for driving skills second only to Kerouac's Dean Moriarty.

  I am most indebted to the thirteen cinematographers who took time out of their busy working and personal lives to allow me to learn firsthand about the art and craft of cinematography. This book would not exist without their knowledge and commitment.

  I respectfully recognize the passing of Stanley Cortez, ASC, and Linwood G. Dunn, who were not able to share their extensive knowledge and experience about cinematography with me.

  My sincere thanks to Michael Ballhaus, Ralf Bode, Fred Murphy, and Robert Richardson, who, by spending many hours sharing with me their passion, knowledge, and experience about cinematography, enriched my understanding and respect for this craft. Time, logistics, and space did not allow me to talk to cinematographer Philippe Rousselot; I thank him for his interest in this project.

  I want to thank everyone at Praeger Publishers for their continued support and the care and attention they provide. Particular thanks go to this book's original editor, Nina Pearlstein, and to Elisabetta Linton, who faithfully saw the project to conclusion. The manuscript was given expert care by the production editor, Heidi Straight, and the copyeditor, Frances Lyon. My thanks to John Bailey for reviewing the glossary and for his expert comments.

  Filmmaking is a collaborative process, as is a book of interviews; again my thanks to all who have contributed to this project.

  Introduction

  The purpose of this book is to allow cinematographers to speak in their own words about the art and craft of cinematography.

  On the surface, cinematography is not hidden in the mysteries that surround the crafts of editing, production design, and film sound. The photography of a film is there for all to see. Audiences have been educated in interpreting photographic beauty and drama and in understanding that images come from light and shadow, but the layers of narrative and the atmospheric and psychological impact imparted by the camera suggest and demand a deeper understanding. This deeper awareness is informed by the role of the cinematographer-this most important cinematic collaborator.

  Without light there would be no image, without movement there would be no motion pictures. Cinematography visually presents points of view and the verisimilitude and artificiality of movement for a narrative or psychological purpose. The camera records the force and subtleties of the actor's performance and places it in context within the physical environment of a scene. Cinematographers interpret a written screenplay in visual images. On the set, they translate the director's vision to a series of shots, long and short and in a catalogue of compositions, angles, and lens sizes so that these pieces can later come together as cinematic storytelling presented in images and sound.

  The cinematographer reports to the director and, with the production designer, is a member of the triad who create the visual style or look of a film. The director of photography is the head of a department including the assistant cameramen, camera operator, electrician, gaffer, and grip.

  During the studio system, cinematographers primarily worked in blackand-white and.created the rules for Hollywood filmmaking that lasted until the mid-sixties. Conventions such as back light, which added pictorial beauty; diffusion, which eliminated flaws in the face; low angles, which created size and importance; and eyeline-matches, which linked the composition of one actor to another became the cinematic language filmmakers embraced to present their narratives.

  The cinematographers in this volume helped rewrite the cinematic language used to make movies. During the sixties and seventies, cinematographers began utilizing natural light and more portable equipment to create contemporary images. Handheld camerawork, desaturated color, flares, the zoom lens, and the invention of the Steadicam transformed the formal aspects of the craft as filmmakers began creating a new kind of cinema which reflected our rapidly changing times and technology.

  These interviews, conducted over a five-year period, represent a wide spectrum of artistic and technical accomplishments which embody cinematography in commercial and independent filmmaking. They are presented in an order that attempts to give a historical, developmental scope and to assist the reader in seeing the many connections among these diverse individuals and their work. Individual selected filmographies contain the majority of the subjects' feature film credits. They do not include uncredited work, additional photography, television, music video, and commercial credits. Cinematographers apply their craft in a multitude of ways. The discussions here
on the art and craft of the feature film embrace the elements which face the cinematographer on all moving-image projects.

  From the landmark single-shot films of the Lumiere brothers to the digital imagery of a cinema entering its second century, the camera has captivated our gift of vision. The true magic of cinematography is a synthesis of chemistry, science, and art that in combination bring images to the screen. Now, let us listen to the men and women who are both alchemists and artists-they make movies.

  1

  Conrad Hall

  Conrad Hall, ASC, the son of James Norman Hall, coauthor of Mutiny on the Bounty, was born in idyllic Papeete, Tahiti. Inspired by the tradition of his literary father, Hall was first interested in becoming a writer, but while attending University of Southern California (USC) he switched from the journalism program to the cinema school. There he encountered Slavko Vorkapich, a pioneer in the use of montages during the Hollywood studio system, who headed the department and became Hall's principal mentor.

  After graduating in 1949, Hall formed Canyon Films, a production company, with two colleagues from USC. When Canyon produced the feature film Running Target, the three partners drew lots to determine the producer, director, and cameraman-Hall cast his fate and became a cinematographer. The experience allowed him to enter the International Photographers Guild. Once in the union, Hall began to work as an assistant cameraman for many outstanding directors of photography, including Ted McCord, Lee Garmes, Burnett Guffey, Ernest Haller, Robert Surtees, and Floyd Crosby. After stepping up to camera operator on the TV series Stonev Burke, Conrad Hall became a director of photography, inaugurating a career that has influenced a generation of cinematographers.

  Conrad Hall's distinctive photography on The Professionals, In Cold Blood, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Day of the Locust, broke from the tradition of his Hollywood roots and helped to create a contemporary photographic aesthetic for a new kind of American movie forged in the sixties. Hall experimented with desaturated color, lens flares, overexposure, and many ground-breaking techniques to bring a pictorial realism to the stories he loved to tell with his camera. His work on John Huston's Fat City remains a landmark in cinematography, capturing the dim glint of a barroom glass and the glare of an oppressively hot afternoon which envelops the fate of a down-and-out boxer.

  Conrad Hall has worked with many fine directors, including Richard Brooks, John Huston, John Boorman, Bob Rafelson, Michael Ritchie, and John Schlesinger. He has been nominated for an Academy Award eight times and won the Oscar for cinematography on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In 1992, he received the ASC Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1995, Conrad Hall received the Lifetime Achievement Award at Camer- Image '95, the International Festival of Cinematography.

  SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY

  Morituri*

  Harper

  The Professionals*

  Cool Hand Luke

  In Cold Blood*

  The Happy Ending

  Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here

  The Day of the Locust*

  A Civil Action*

  Q: Storytelling has always been important to you as a filmmaker. Your father, James Norman Hall, was the coauthor of Mutiny on the Bounty. What influence did he have on you as an artist?

  A: I inherited that sense of being a storyteller from my father. He used to tell me stories when I was a kid. I was fascinated. I'd be sitting on his lap and he read me "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," all the way through. So I had a great respect for how I felt when he told me stories. I tried literature, but it's not my language. I realized there was another language; all you had to do was learn how to use it and you could be as fine a storyteller as my father was. I've just been spending my time learning how to use that language. I'm not an academic soul. I am a storyteller, and whether you use music, pictures, drawings, or literature to tell your story, we're all the same kind of people. We have to communicate. We have this sense of urgency to tell somebody a story that will make them feel one way or another. I had some good beginnings. I had Slavko Vorkapich and all those wonderful teachers at USC-people who gave us the principles with which to speak in this new cinematic language.

  Q: When did you discover your medium was the camera and film?

  A: It was the minute I shot film. In film school we had to shoot and edit a little story out of one hundred feet of 16mm film. I had a concept. I shot it, put it together, and looked at it on the screen coming at me bigger than life. It was very heady to feel that power so early on.

  Q: You have been a major influence on a generation of contemporary cinematographers. Beginning in the sixties with films like The Professionals, Cool Hand Luke, In Cold Blood, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and in the seventies with Fat City, The Day of the Locust, and Marathon Man, your work helped to pioneer a new kind of cinematography employing desaturated color, natural light, and a sense of artistic realism in American filmmaking. What was your training and what motivated you to break the rules to discover your naturalistic and expressive approach to cinematography?

  A: I studied with all the great cinematographers: Ted McCord, Ernie Haller, Robert Surtees, Lee Garmes, and dozens of others. They were the inventors of film. I started studying film at USC in 1947 and graduated in 1949. That's half a century from the beginning of film. So I was working with the first line after the inventors of cinema. They established rules and regulations that were awesome. They were also demanding. You had to conform to a rigorous standard. People weren't breaking many rules, they were all trying to make it look super-nice and not necessarily very real. I got my first chance at a union job from Leslie Stevens on the TV series Stoney Burke with Jack Lord, but he was having a hard time selling me as a cinematographer. So he made me a cameraman for the second unit and I hired Bill Fraker to be my operator. I made a deal with Ted McCord that he would shoot the first six episodes and then move on. Ted didn't want to do television, he did it for me.

  If Ted didn't like the light when we were outside and dealing with close-ups, he would take all of the light off. Then he would bring in arcs and other lights and relight it to his satisfaction, which was totally unreal to me. One day he had an angina attack and they said, "Conrad, you've got to do it today." I thought, "What's wrong with the sun? Is there no way to make the sun acceptable other than take it away and make it what you want it to be?" So I just used the sun. I learned whether I liked or didn't like something from watching other filmmakers, but basically I learned from watching light and detail about life. Wherever I went, I was making mental notes. I have a computer right between my ears and it paid attention all the time.

  You develop a visual language. I soon learned I could take flares and out-of-focus shots, which used to be called mistakes, and use them creatively to appropriately enhance and beautify the story. I observed naturalistic and realistic sensibilities and bit by bit I became more adept at breaking the rules and still telling the story well. When I'm into a story, I'm just pulling out from my experience. It doesn't mean that I don't love Gauguin, Rubens, Hopper, and all of the great artists, but I've never made a study of any kind. The story influences you more than the individuals you work with. The story is what takes the director to a different place.

  The language of film is still not developed, it's only a hundred years old. We're still learning to speak. I've been paying good attention to it using the rules people before us discovered to be true. I learned them at USC from all the wonderful professors I had, but they didn't tell you how to tell a story-they just told you what would happen when you used these rules. They left them up to us to use them.

  Q: Did you have to fight a lot of battles with producers and studio executives over your experiments in low-light photography and desaturated color?

  A: You do get a lot of harassment from producers and studio heads who don't understand. On Fat City they said, "The photography is too dark, we can't see anything. What will the drive-ins do?" On Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, I had to face the black suits at Unive
rsal who said, "It's too dark, we can't see Redford properly." So you have to sit there and suffer through the ignorance of their assessments. You know when it gets to the final print it will be wonderful. You have to tell them that. It causes a lot of strain, but I became strong as an operator working for Ted McCord. He didn't like to go to the dailies. He sent me to watch them on a Sam Goldwyn Jr. picture, Huckleberry Finn. The director, Michael Curtiz, would lay into Ted's work: "This photography stinks! We have to do this all over again." I thought, "Wow, it's wonderful!" I would have to fight with Michael Curtiz to defend Ted McCord. I developed a strength which I later used in my own work. Often, directors say the photography is wrong when really it's the acting. I was brave enough to tell them it was the acting, not the photography. We'd have shoot-outs, but I got it said, and more often than not we didn't reshoot. When you try to change the norm, you run into all kinds of people who have no sense of growth.

  Q: Fat City visually captures the world of a down-and-out boxer played by Stacy Keach, with bleached out, overexposed exteriors which create the atmosphere of a hot, oppressive environment in contrast to the underlit bar interiors that allow the denizens to survive, lit by the dim glint off glasses and bottles of alcohol. Those sequences really capture the way people see in bars and create an ambience for the actors to reveal the psychological depths of their characters. How were they photographed?

  A: What you have observed in bars is what I have observed in a bar. I tried to portray what occurred between Stacy Keach, the fighter, and those people in the bar. It was glaringly bright outside. The camera follows him through the bar door until he stops to adjust his vision to the darkness within-only the sound of voices and clinking glasses penetrate the frame beyond him. This was achieved by not lighting the interior. As the scene progresses, I wanted to elevate the visibility so it would be, in fact, what everybody experiences in a bar when they come from a bright outside. It's dark when you enter, blown out when you leave.