Principal Photography Page 12
Q: Scarfiotti told me that you and Paul Schrader were fascinated with The Conformist. Why did this film so capture your cinematic imagination?
A: Like all the films I've really been moved by, it's not just the stylistic formalist approach, but the conflict, torment, and the betrayal of the story. The Conformist was thematically so powerful. To find such a personal story told against the backdrop of the great human and social upheaval of Italy in the thirties, but also to keep very close to the perspective of one man's story of loss of his soul was very compelling to me. It was illustrated in a very cool, controlled way, like moving pieces around a chessboard. The way the story was revealed in flashback, with time moving back and forth, was just the most intricately appealing maze. A lot of elements came together in that film: the design aesthetic, Scarfiotti's sense of the beautiful locations and the set dressing, the camera movement, compositions and lighting of Vittorio Storaro. It was a perfect blending of three collaborators working together-just perfect unity.
I decided to become a cinematographer the night I saw The Conformist at the Regent Theater in Westwood. I was an assistant on commercials at the time. We had wrapped early one afternoon, so I went to a five-o'clock screening by myself. I saw the film and was knocked out. I phoned Jim Dickson, the cinematographer I'd been doing all of these commercials with, and said, "Come on down here and see this movie tonight." He said, "I'm getting ready to have dinner." While I was waiting for him, I went in and sat through the movie for a second time. He arrived for the nine-o'clock show and I watched it a third time. I walked out of the theater about midnight. After seeing that movie, I was absolutely convinced I wanted to be a cinematographer. I told Vittorio Storaro that story much later when I finally met him. Vittorio and I have become really good friends since then.
Q: What was it like to work with Ferdinando Scarfiotti?
A: At first, I was very intimidated. Nando was like a god to me, even on the basis of the few films he had done. They were in that Italian style of quiet sophistication. He was very gracious and warm. He had that sense of being able to look at something and totally place it in a critical or aesthetic perspective almost just by virtue of his breeding, but there was nothing pretentious about it-that's what was so amazing. I had studied for a year in Europe. I had been an undergraduate in Austria. So I had started to develop some sense of aesthetics, but I came from a real blue-collar family. We had American pseudo-Colonial maple furniture and knotty pine paneling in our den and thought very highly of it because that was about as far up the ladder as my parents and our friends got. It was only when I went to Europe that I started to see the way the highly refined modernist Bauhaus aesthetic could, in the right context, go side by side with a piece of Baroque sculpture. Nando had absolute confidence in mixing materials and colors. Nando really had a vision of American Gigolo. It was a question of my trying to play catch-up and to photographically do the most appropriate and collaborative work possible. I started to develop more and more confidence. When you're really working "in the flow" of something, you do start to work beyond what you think your own limits are. That was the first time that had ever happened to me. It was only my second picture as a cinematographer and during the course of it, I found tremendous confidence. I suddenly found I was working on a level parallel to Paul and Nando, but able to make my own contributions.
Q: In American Gigolo, there are shots of light streaming through the blinds. Was this a reference to The Conformist?
A: It was a total homage to Storaro, to the scene when Trintignant comes to visit his fiancee. They go into the little sitting room and start to dance, and the light from the Venetian blind starts to move up and down the wall. This also echoes the black and white stripes of her dress. Of course, I had seen the Venetian blind effect in the noir films of the forties, but it had never impressed me as a dramatic or character element. In The Conformist, it was used very expressively. I was intrigued. Nando wanted to use these thin Levelor blinds, which were quite new at the time. Julian Kay, Richard Gere's character, was a man in transition-he never quite moved into his apartment. There were crates on the floor. Things stacked up against the walls which were bare. When I saw that set, with those gray walls with nothing on them, I started to think of how light and shadow and different colored lights would essentially define the apartment each time we were there. In a sense, the light and patterns could become a mirror to what was happening to the Richard Gere psyche-the escalating sense of isolation, paranoia, and entrapment. So I tried to find a way to plot that by using the light on the walls. It was not necessarily always as dramatic as the Venetian blind effect, sometimes it was just flashes or cuts of light. Sometimes it was just the way a light or a color spilled on the wall or a single color used to enhance that feeling.
Q: The opening of American Gigolo features a montage of Julian Kay driving to the music of Blondie. How did you accomplish the sweeping movements of the camera?
A: That was before you could do sweep-arounds with a camera remote or a Louma crane. The Mercedes was being towed in the center of a U-shaped plywood platform that we laid dolly track on, and it was pulled by a fortyfoot-long flatbed truck which circled three sides of the car. The studio was very upset because it was an incredibly expensive shot to do and did not represent much of a page count. We did a few shots like that. It was a fairly low-budget film, it was not a film that the studio had any great expectations for. Richard Gere wasn't a star then. Originally, John Travolta was going to play the role. It was after Saturday Night Fever. I believe that John's mother had died and he had to drop out in preproduction.
Q: The pan of Julian matching the shirts and ties on the bed was a very effective shot. How did that come about?
A: That was a very worked-on sequence. Paul used a Pointer Sisters song, and we did shots for that sequence four or five times during the course of the film. Paul kept going back to the sequence. We shot a number of set-ups and they were cut to the song. If Paul felt the rhythms weren't quite right, he would design a couple of more shots. We'd talk about it, look at the cut sequence, and if we had an hour or so while we were waiting for something or we could sneak an hour in at the end of the day, we'd go back and do a few more shots. This sequence became the proverbial telephone booth you carry from location to location. There are some very bad lighting mismatches on Richard Gere. There are two I can think of and I still cringe at. I did closeups of him three or four weeks apart and didn't have a match frame clip. I was pretty inexperienced at the time, I couldn't quite replicate what I had done. So I mismatched the light. This sequence was not storyboarded, it just evolved.
Q: Ferdinando Scarfiotti reconceived the Polo Lounge. In reality, the set bears no resemblance to the actual restaurant. What was the concept behind the photographic look of the Polo Lounge scenes?
A: I've collected photography for the last twenty-five years, and at that particular time in the late seventies I was collecting contemporary Los Angeles photographs by people like Jane O'Neil and Joanne Callis. Jane O'Neil had done a photograph of a closed-down restaurant in Union Station. It had hidden neon lighting on the perimeter, right around the ceiling. It had booths with an art deco feel. The restaurant Nando designed came from that photo. We didn't use neon because it would have been too noisy and wouldn't have been bright enough. So Nando designed the set with a trough all the way around the wall so we were able to put tracing paper up and light from above. The walls were all washed with pink light-that became the dominant light in the restaurant. I filled in a little bit from there. It is supposed to be the Polo Lounge, but, of course, it wasn't anything like it. They wouldn't let us shoot there anyway. They did let us shoot the scenes of Richard walking down the hallway and toward the Polo Lounge-between 2 A.M. and 5 A.M. We were in there with a skeleton crew doing two or three tie-in shots.
Q: Mishima is an intricate film with many stylistic aspects. Did you have an overall concept which helped you to capture the look of the film or did you approach it a section at a time?<
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A: Paul Schrader had been thinking about it for a long time. When he got me involved, he had already decided he wanted the three sections to look different. At one point, we had thought about doing the fiction (novels) section of the film in Sony's then-new, high-definition video. We went to the Sony factory outside of Tokyo, but were not very impressed. We thought it wouldn't begin to capture what Eiko Ishioka's designs promised in terms of the color, texture, and detail. We worked backwards, and said, "The most lush and opulent part of the film is going to be the designed Eiko Ishioka sections which are from the novels. So that should be a lush, brilliant, artdirected section." Working backwards, we decided the historical material would be in black-and-white. We then thought about shooting the events of Mishima's last day in video to transfer to film, but that seemed too gim micky. So I proposed we shoot the last day, from the time that he leaves his house, goes outside the gate and gets into the car, until he's finished his speech on the balcony at Ichigaya, all handheld. Everything in his house on the last day when he wakes up and has breakfast, was done traditionally on a dolly, but as soon as he gets outside the front gate and goes out into the world, it becomes handheld. Conversely, at the end of the film, when he comes back in from the balcony to commit seppuku, from there to the end, all of the shots are totally tableau, frozen, very Ozu. The last shot was a dolly/zoom combination, but all the rest were locked-off tableaus.
There was an intention for Mishima to have different styles very much from the beginning. The story starts in 1930, when Mishima is five years old, and goes until the last day of his life in November 1970. In terms of the lighting and camera style, I wanted the black-and-white sections to reflect what would have been the evolving contemporary look of Japanese films. So I shot the early material with Plus X with hard lighting in very high contrast and very static compositions. As Mishima got older and we followed him through the forties, fifties, and the sixties, I went to higher speed film stocks with softer light and more camera movement. I used Double X for the last few years. This tonal subtlety doesn't read very well on video cassette, which is about the only way to see the film. It even got lost in the release prints when the picture went into general release-the black-and-white scenes all had to be printed on color stock because it had to be single-strand. The color stock did not capture the subtlety of the black-and-white. But we did have two prints made for festivals. The print shown at Cannes was black-and-white and color, spliced together. So all of the black-and-white material was actually on black-and-white stock and it was glorious to see.
Q: Has black-and-white stock changed since the studio era?
A: Yes, black-and-white doesn't look the way classic black-and-white looked because they've diminished the amount of silver in black-and-white stock so much. The silver is the key to luminous whites and absolutely black blacks.
Q: The sequences in Crossroads which take place at the crossroads where the devil tempted Robert Johnson have a mythic quality to them. How did that location come about and what was your visual approach to it?
A: The director, Walter Hill, is incredibly well-read. I was very interested in his knowledge of classical storytelling and Greek mythology. He sees so much in archetypes and applied it to Crossroads. I've loved blues music for years. Walter's an incredible blues fanatic, so we bonded right away. We looked at a lot of crossroads, lucked out and found the one in the film. It was in the middle of farmland outside of Greenville in the Delta. We were on a crane or a scaffolding to get the right angle. There was one solitary tree which was actually there. It almost looked like it was art-directed into position, but it was actually there.
Q: In the Line of Fire was a big production. What was it like to work on it?
A: By choice, I've not done very many big effects productions, so for me it was a real departure. The only other big film I'd done was Silverado. I had never really been interested in big genre films, but when Wolfgang Petersen sent me the script, I was fascinated with the moral dilemma, the battle of good and evil. I told Wolfgang, "What really interests me about this film is not all the chase scenes with helicopters, motorcades, and the air force. I've never done anything on that scale before. I know I'll enjoy it, but the heart of this film is the series of phone calls between Clint Eastwood and John Malkovich. If we can do a movie within a movie where those phone calls essentially lay out the film and tell the story, that is the challenge. They have to be visually compelling and all different. If those aren't done well, they will be so isolated and surrounded by this huge flow of space and material." So that's what I was most challenged by.
Q: The sequences in Ordinary People where the Judd Hirsch and Timothy Hutton characters meet for therapy sessions are also like a movie within a movie. How do you visually approach these kinds of situations within a film?
A: In Ordinary People, they had to meet after his swim class somewhere between four and five o'clock. It takes place from the beginning of the fall semester, past Christmas into the winter, when it verges from twilight into night. I proposed to Robert Redford to use the logic of the way light would change over these four months, starting with full daylight, going into sunset, then a late twilight, and into a full night at the end. I plotted the lighting to represent the changing season.
Q: How did you light the climactic scene when the boy goes to see the doctor late at night after his friend has committed suicide?
A: I used a very hot central light above the table where they sit and almost no fill. The only fill I used was what bounced off the floor by reflective cards. When Tim Hutton got up and walked into a corner away from that light, instead of having supplemental light I had a small light for a rim so it wouldn't go completely muddy. The logic was: if they were right in the center, they were very bright; outside of that, they were normal; and if they were in the corner, they were dark. It was as though there were a single-source light. There wasn't anything fancy or artistic about it. The feeling you got out of the scene is that he walked in, turned on the light switch that lit the light in the center of the room, and that's it. It's very severe looking, but I felt it was right. The emotion and the drama in that scene is edgy. It's such a fever pitch, it's so highly charged, you wanted something very elemental. Even though it's not elaborate or glamorous lighting, the absolute bare bones quality really served the high emotional pitch very well.
In the same way that In the Line of Fire had the phone calls and Ordinary People had the meetings with Judd Hirsch, Groundhog Day had the light motif of coming back to that knoll where they had the ceremony every day, over, and over, and over again. Trying to make that scene the same and yet different was very intriguing.
Those are the kinds of things that interest me as a cinematographer. People want to talk about "What color gels did you use?" and "Do you like Primo lenses?" and "Why did you shoot this film in anamorphic?" To me, this is not the essence of cinematography. When you're talking about important films seen by a large number of people and you want them to have some emotional reaction, they really don't care whether you use Primo lenses or what color gel you use, but insofar as you use those things to bring forward and illuminate an emotional, moral, or a dramatic state-that's important to talk about.
Q: There are many large-scale scenes in In the Line of Fire. Was it necessary to employ multiple cameras?
A: Not as much as you would think. There were some, but most of it was one camera. I've never been excited by the use of multiple cameras. The arrival of the president at the Bonaventure Hotel was shot at magic hour, so we had a very short window of light. I wanted the canopied lights to be bright and for it to be bluer outside. We only had about twenty-five minutes to shoot, and there were seven or eight shots to do. We had five cameras set up strategically so I was able to get two set-ups for each camera. That's the only scene which had extensive multiple cameras. When you're shooting in different directions, it's always a problem trying to hide the cameras. A lot of people line them up like ducks when they shoot three or four cameras and just
change the focal length of the lens.
Wolfgang Petersen is a very technically dexterous director. He's got a tremendous sense of cinematic flow and movement, every shot contributes something to the sequence. He knew what he wanted. I didn't have to do as much thinking as I normally have to do, because he had things so well planned. We had a lot of time, we had a good schedule. He would prefer to have one camera get the right angle than to have three cameras get compromised angles, so our mode of working was very compatible.
Q: Clint Eastwood is a movie icon. In the Line of Fire was a departure for him. He plays a heroic character who has a strong romantic link to the Rene Russo character. How did you approach photographing him in this role?
A: I photographed and lit Clint in a style he doesn't ordinarily have, because he wasn't directing the movie. He's legendary for being very efficient and quick in the number of takes he does and the simplicity of the set-ups. Clint said a few things to me on In the Line of Fire when he thought I was taking too much time. During the rooftop chase, when Clint is running up to the edge of the precipice that Malkovich has already leapt across, Clint runs up, looks down, and decides he's not going to make that jump without backing up. There's a point-of-view shot where the camera moves up and looks over the ledge. It was a dolly shot and I wanted the camera hung out over the front of the dolly shooting straight down, even back a little bit to make it seem vertiginous. I said to Wolfgang, "This should be a disorienting shot. This is going to take a little bit of time to do," and he said, "Do it." Clint came up and saw the dolly track set-up with the camera pointing straight down and he said, "What are you doing?" I said, "It's a point-of-view," and he said, "Jeez, grab an Arriflex and just lean over and shoot it." I'm sure it would have been fine for him, but the fact of the matter is that I couldn't have shot straight down and I couldn't have done it smoothly. Also, we were shooting anamorphic. The shot lasts three seconds, but I think it's a very disorienting and disturbing shot when you see it on-screen. If I had been shooting for Clint Eastwood, he may not have wanted it done that way. But that's a director's choice. He has a different aesthetic from mine and it's an incredible one. Look at a film like Bird, it's masterfully made the way the story is told.