Principal Photography Page 10

  A: It's never the immediate detail. I mean, I had Susan beautifully backlit with the water splashing around her. You can talk about the quality of the light, which was correct for the scene, but I think we had gotten the audience into wanting to perceive her in that way. That's what you're doing all the time. You're creating a situation. If it works, they're seeing more than they're actually seeing. They're seeing more beauty because they feel the beauty that you did at the time. You felt the wonder that emanated from the Cassavetes character. The performances are great, but it's that cumulation which takes it one step into wonderment. So when the audience sees it, they have an entirely different reaction than if the same scene was used to sell Coca Cola. I could shoot that same scene in a way you'd be intrigued and amused, but you wouldn't look at it for that wonderment the situation creates. That's theater. That's what it's all about and we're part of theater.

  Q: How did you work with Director Alan Pakula on the film adaptation of the play Orphans?

  A: To me, it's in many ways the best work I've done in America. Alan Pakula is wonderful to work with, probably of all the directors I've worked with, the one who analyzes each and every part of the film to the near absolute degree. We lived close together in New York. In the morning, we'd pick him up in the car and talk about the scene going to work. We'd arrive, go into an office, and talk about the scene for another hour. Then he'd go and talk with the actors for an hour and a half. I'd go talk with them for a half an hour about how they were going to do it. Then we'd get the principal crew people in and talk for another half hour. After lunch, we'd come back and rehearse the scene in detail. We had a second team of three wonderful actors who mimicked both the dialogue and performances. We set up quite an interesting system of working within that house on Orphans. It was a very complex design. We were endlessly moving through all those rooms. The interior of that house was all a set. You saw an exterior house, which was left as a construction office for a development. They just demolished the whole thing and left this one house. You walk around inside that house, and inside other houses, and then you adapt. You say, "Where would the light come from if I was sitting in this room?" It's pretty obvious here that the light is falling on your face and there's only subdued ambience on this side of my face from a little bit of the practicals upon the ceiling. If I was shooting a close-up of me on a stage and I wanted the audience to believe they were really in this room, it's the way I'd do it. Most times, it really is just reproducing and enhancing reality. You just take reality so many steps beyond the reality the language of the film demands.

  So then we'd start rehearsing the crew about which lights would change as the characters would go through rooms. About four or five o'clock we'd start to shoot a five-minute sequence. We might shoot it once or twice-it could take three-quarters of an hour-and then we'd very quickly do three, four, six, or how many close-ups there were to match that sequence, and we'd finish the day by seven. The efficiency of the work was amazing, even though sometimes the crew would be sitting around for six hours playing cards while we were doing all of this preparation, but it all worked for that particular, enclosed part of the film. We kept on-schedule and made an interesting film.

  Q: What tools are available to you as a cinematographer to enhance the look of the production design and to create a visual style?

  A: The first tool I've got is camera placement, where I place the camera, the height you shoot from. Many times, shooting low-angle can give a character power. A high angle often makes a person feel vulnerable and lost.

  I have the lens. I can have a full-length shot of an actor on an extreme wide-angle lens and it will say something in that situation. It will say something extremely different than a full-length shot of the same actor with a long lens, fifty yards back. You can't lay rules about what these effects will say-it's a feeling, but that angle of view which is created by the focal length of the lens you were using-from taking a real wide view of the situation to a narrow view-is a wonderful tool. You can isolate people from the environment. You can lose people in the environment. If you work by rules, you've lost, but once you raise or lower the camera, you're taking away a normal view. It's a view the audience wouldn't have of that situation if they were there, and you're asking and telling them something differently.

  The camera can move laterally, sideways, or it can stay still. Movement has to be for a reason. It can be a very simple reason-you want to keep up with the movement of the actor. It can be movement to transfer the interest from one area of the scene to another. It's all complex and all related to a particular situation, but it will say something differently than just leaving a camera steady. If you move the camera, you're going to disturb the audience in some way, and the degree you disturb them is something you've got to be very aware of.

  I've got the lighting, which can be a very powerful tool, a very powerful statement. Knowing how to light is an accumulation of a lot of experience. Lighting can reveal a face, hide a face, create any mood.

  The film stock itself is chosen to adapt to the situation. If you're working where there isn't a lot of light and you want to use available light, you have to use a fast stock. For exteriors, you use a much slower stock.

  The degree you expose this stock is another tool. If you overexpose and it's bright, you're making quite a clear statement; underexpose it, you're making another statement. Nowadays, the skill of using film stocks isn't quite as fine as it used to be because the stock was far less sensitive to a wide range of colors and lights than it is now. As long as you basically expose film so that there's a strong image on the negative, then in postproduction you can turn a sunny, day-lit scene into a dark, moonlit night scene. You don't want to have to do that very often, but that's the range you have back in the laboratory.

  Understanding what these movements, what this height, what this lens will do, is the craft. It's like words are to a piece of literature. These are the words I've got and there are a lot of them. They get very complex.

  Q: What are the general principles of working with light?

  A: We work with two sources of light. There's daylight and manufactured light. Sometimes it's a combination of both, but normally in commercial cinema you can't sustain a combination of both because the sun goes behind a cloud and the sun moves. If the sun is shining through a window at forty-five degrees at ten o'clock, it's not going to do that again until ten o'clock the next day. So you just can't rely on that. The source of light all over the world is the sun. There are only two things that can vary it: the topography and surface that reflects the sun, like a green field, a sandy beach, black rocks, the water; and diffusion, mostly being created through a cloud. The sun is quite different in cities. In London, the fog makes the sunlight beautiful, it's like having a big silk, a big diffusion right on the sun. You still get your direct sun, but the shadow areas are just automatically filled. With the dark red earth of the center of Australia, it's the total reverse. There's zero pollution, the sun just beats through like a knife and very little is reflected back. You've got extreme contrasts. Those are the only differences you're working with all the time. I was working here in San Francisco down on a beach by the water with the sun, and a little bit of pollution here did help, but it still is a beast to work with in the sense of being a harsh light. For most film scenes you don't want that harsh light and you're fighting against it. So it really is not quite such a big deal as some cinematographers pretend it is. It's one source in the sky-it does change angle as you proceed to get away from the equator area north and south and with the season, but it's still just the sun and the earth.

  If you're doing an outrageous comedy in full sunlight, like a lot of the scenes in Nine Months, you must get enough fill light in on the actors' faces so you could pretty clearly read what's going on. Of course, if the audience ever gets the feeling there's a light involved, then I feel like I've failed.

  Q: So the art is in making the lighting look as if it's part of the available light source in the sce
ne.

  A: Yes, the mind, in conjunction with the eye, is wonderful at being able to go into shadows. The film hasn't got the physical or mental capacity to do that. So you just try to go up to or somewhere below, but never past that line where it looks like you've lit. This, in actual fact, involves massive amounts of light to make sure it looks like there's no light there. To get the feel of a person walking towards the light if they move forward or back three, four, or ten feet, you've got to have a lot of light a long way away. It's a very expensive and time-consuming process to get that effect.

  Q: What are the qualities of the magic hour, the time of day when the sun is beginning to set?

  A: The light is virtually nondirectional, as it is on a heavy, cloudy day. The light level is very low and the sky brightness relative to the ground brightness gets much closer. So you could shoot the sky and it looks dark. You can introduce illumination, like simply carrying a candle, and it will work if you're game to wait long enough. Magic hour often is an opportunity to shoot a scene over a very wide area that you couldn't afford to light and to convince the audience it's night, moonlight, or a diffused night, because any lights you have on in houses or you prelight will look like lights on at night. One real set-up with multiple cameras is all you ever are going to get with magic hour at the precise moment. It's fun sitting around trying to get the precise moment. It's a real gamble. Your meters can do it, but it gets back to your intuition about what will work. In summer, the sun rises vertically and sets vertically, thereupon, magic hour's shorter. In winter, depending on the latitude you're at, the sun comes at a much more acute angle and apparently rises much more slowly. I don't think there is any more light at either end of the day, except maybe in industrial areas where the pollution level may be higher and diffuse it a little earlier. Most people get worried about shooting magic hour in the morning because they're working away from a window of opportunity. At nighttime, you're working into a window of opportunity. It's psychologically better to start when it is too bright and then build down until the point where it's too dark, and then build up. It doesn't phase me particularly either way. Logistically, you find it's much easier to get a hundred people together at dusk than it is at dawn.

  Q: The sequences which take place in Moscow in Moscow on the Hudson were shot in Germany. How were you able to capture the look of Russia there?

  A: The drama is more important than the truth of the way you work. The story required reasons for the character wanting to leave Russia, and so it was always cold and drafty. It was shot in Munich in the middle of summer. We had five hundred extras, all done in very heavy, cold gear standing in line on a street. We always had the streets shaded, even if the sun was shining, and always underexposed a bit to try and keep that feeling of a solemn, ugly Moscow. Now, I know the sun must shine as brilliantly in Moscow in the winter as it shines in New York, but we're adapting the light all the time to tell a story.

  Q: The scene in which the Robin Williams character defects to the United States was shot on the cosmetics floor in Bloomingdale's. You were able to capture the high-key, glamorous lighting designed by the industrial lighting designer for Bloomingdale's. How did you light this scene?

  A: I only enhanced it a little. Basically, I used the lighting that was there. We had to add a little bit of the overall fill light because there were too many areas of darkness for the film stock to handle. So many of the fixtures there were green fluorescent. We had to either replace or color them with gelatin filters so they didn't look like ugly patches of green through the store. That's all we did. We had to get in at night after the store was closed, so it was fast and furious work, and I mostly used available light.

  Q: The shot of Robin Williams and Maria Conchita Alonso in the bathtub had a lovely romantic quality to it. How did you capture that on film?

  A: We had to create a romantic feel in what was a very down-market little apartment. You can't turn it into an Arabian boudoir all of a sudden. So the illusion I had to create was a scene lit from one practical lamp. I enhanced that with a soft light support, but never got away from the fact that it was that one light. The accumulation of all the efforts that went on before and at that point enhance the scene. So often, high moments in mine and most other people's films never quite have the impact in dailies because there it's just a shot, but in a progression, you've managed to create some magic and that's the wonder of what we do to write it.

  Q: What was it like to shoot in a jungle for Predator?

  A: The real problem in a jungle is the old cliche, "You can't see the forest through the trees" If you are in a real jungle, then the back wall of where you're working is about ten feet away from you. That's all you see. As it thins out, you might get to twenty feet. So you can't work in an absolute real jungle. You've got to work in modified jungle, in which you have a lot of people cutting out a lot of the undergrowth. We shot Predator in Mexico. Most of the jungle in the film was replanted. You have to select the areas you want. You've got to put the light twenty feet away and it's obliterated by trees before it reaches the subject. If you put the light near the camera, it would look like you were shooting a home movie because the foreground trees are always going to be stronger lit than the background trees. So I just didn't bother lighting. I went in with a fast stock and 99 percent of the time we used no lighting at all for the daytime sequences. That requires a certain amount of skill in exposing and adapting as the day goes by-it's real tricky.

  Q: What is involved in shooting a night exterior?

  A: It's not much of a problem in an urban situation because there are always streetlights, shop lights, and you enhance and support these lights. As soon as you get outside an urban situation, you really are in a problem. When somebody walks through a forest at night, you can pass them two feet away and you'd never see them. So you really are extremely limited, moonlight is the only excuse you've got. You can see a beautiful moonlit night out on the desert or in the mountains for miles. It's obviously a reflected sunlight, but it's impossible to reproduce that. So at night you have to limit your depth. The only way of getting any real depth in these situations is magic hour. Thelma and Louise is an example where they tried to start this language of there being streaks of light going out into the desert and accepting it as night because there was nothing else they could do. It was an element that was logically ridiculous, and whether it worked aesthetically or not depends on the viewer. You've got to have something you can light. There has to be some sort of a background, or you are just lighting air.

  Q: The finale of Patriot Games is a long, involved scene when the terrorists attack Jack Ryan's house. It culminates in a boat chase on the ocean. The entire scene takes place at night. This must have been a real challenge.

  A: It's a rainy night, so moonlight is eliminated. We're at a house where there's a party going on and there are some outside lights, but then the plot says the terrorists pull the power. So you now have a situation in which it's totally black. All you can do is deceptively bring in soft ambience which would never be there in a million years. I mean, you could actually go out in that yard at night and take the lid off the magazine of the camera, handle the film, put it all back, and nothing would be exposed on the film. So you do have to go back to just absolute blind tricks. What you do is say there's some moonlight around and an ambient glow that sometimes exists at night, and you enhance it to the point where you can actually see what's going on. In that situation, I have to use an awful lot of soft light. A lot of shots were done at magic hour so there was still some level. Then they run out along a cliff at night-once again, you couldn't see a foot in front of your face, yet you've got to show the audience where they are. So you just sneak in an ambient level of light. Then they get on a boat and head out to sea. There's lights on the boat, but they wouldn't light up that much either. So you create a whole ambience at sea in the night. We shot it in the parking lot at Paramount Studios.

  Exterior night in which there are no ambient lights used at all is
an area that nobody has actually resolved satisfactorily. It's one of the few conventions we're still working with. The audience still accepts it, even though it should be black-you can't see an inch in front of your face. You still have to see what's going on-otherwise you could just put black film in the projector and put voices over it. I've given you the worst-case scenario, but they're the basic problems you have as a director of photography at night. It's the most unsatisfactory area I've come into, because I'm a guy who really tries to enhance reality-but reality flies out the window in those night situations.

  Q: How do you work with directors?

  A: I'm very much a supporter of the director, and I expect the director to support me. I very much feel it's his vision I have to interpret-if he has a vision. Some of them don't have a vision, so I have to put one in. A lot of the earlier cameramen had their vision and just did it. It was a way of doing things in those days because there was so much more mystique about their craft than there is now. Now, anyone can get a Hi8 camera and get a pretty interesting image. More and more of the directors have had some training in the field, so they're aware of what you're doing very clearly. Some of the directors in the fifties and sixties weren't that aware, and guys like James Wong Howe could do what they did. You couldn't get away with it today. The collaborations are intense. We sit side by side all day now watching video, endlessly discussing where we are, where we've been, and where we're going. So communication is endless sometimes, but good. I'm commenting as much on the performance as the director is commenting on the lighting and camera placement. We collaborate. There's an awful lot of crossover.

  Q: Should a cinematographer have a visual style of their own?

  A: I find "style" carried to a point can become totally boring visually. If somebody says, "What style are you going to shoot this movie in?" my answer is, "The only style I have is the style that suits the script." You do keep a concept of what the basic script is all about. Comedy might be a bit brighter than a heavy drama, but I see many scenes in heavy drama where you want a visual relief. You should get away from what you've been doing to make some real statement about what you're going to do, otherwise if you just keep it down in the same "Johnny-one-note" all the way through, it's boring.