Principal Photography Read online

  Q: Did you overexpose the exterior shots outside the bar?

  A: Three stops. I worked right at the edge where the color would shift, but I didn't care if the color shifted-it might be interesting.

  Q: How did you work with Director John Huston on Fat City?

  A: Before the picture started, John Huston asked the production designer, Dick Sylbert (Chinatown, Reds), and myself what we thought the film was about. I said one thing and it wasn't that, Dick Sylbert said another thing and it wasn't that; Huston said, "It's about your life running down the sink without being able to put the plug in to stop it." Is there anything more visual than that? Huston established a way of approaching the story, which was to take all of the scenes and photograph them in one take from beginning to end, cut off the slates, hook them all together, and you'd have a movie. He suggested a few cutaways in order to shorten dialogue if the film was too long. So you'd do a great scene in one shot, telling the story visually as well as you could by approaching the actors with camera movement, choreography, and blocking and then you'd be done. Huston's idea was to make a film following real life without the use of cinematic technique.

  Q: How did that concept affect the way you lit the film?

  A: I lit it realistically, because I had to shoot in every direction. A room was lit with no lights inside, so I could point the camera in any direction and have it lit. I lit it from on top, through windows, and with the actual bulbs you saw burning in lamps. When we would go to work, John Huston would rehearse and block with the actors and then go play cards, backgammon, or shoot pool. I would get on the camera and try and figure out how to cover the scene in one shot-to be close on people when I felt it was important to be close on them, panning if there were three people talking. We didn't have video. Huston trusted me. He would then come in to see what I had done and used or altered it as he saw fit to do.

  John Huston was a great filmmaker. He was one of the greatest storytellers. The only way you can stay alive in film is to be a contemporary soul, because it's a mass medium-it's about contemporary life. You're not talking to eighty-year-old people, your audience is young for the most part. You've got to learn if you put a baby on your lap and you tell it a story, and you put a ten-year-old on your lap and you tell it a story, you're going to do it differently. When John Huston was on Fat City, he stayed contemporary. John Huston stayed contemporary to his last dying breath. He was at the forefront of those who went on and succeeded, time, after time, after time.

  Q: Morituri, produced in 1965, still has a very contemporary looking photographic style. What was the genesis of the visualization of the film?

  A: I was working with Bernhard Wicki, a director who was a strong visualist. He had done books of still photography in Germany and a film called The Bridge. He was used to working in a documentary style. He loved the zoom lens. I learned from him how to use it so you didn't know it was a zoom lens. If you had been in a wide angle and somebody was coming toward you, you'd pan with their body as they got near you and zoom into their body-you didn't really notice the zoom because the body was filling the frame. Then, when that body clears the frame, you're at 100mm instead of 25mm and you don't know you've changed lenses. Techniques like that are very useful to help tell a story quickly without cutting.

  I use the zoom lens quite a bit. I thought I used it fairly effectively in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to take it out of old-time Westerns and create new, modern visuals.

  Q: The shots of the posse stalking Butch and Sundance were very effective in creating the visual impression that the posse was omnipresent. How were those shots accomplished?

  A: I used telephoto lenses to frame long shots on the posse shots to create the feeling of being very close, and at the same time very far from them. It was a metaphor to contemporize the story of joblessness due to technological advancements-bank robbers being put out of business by modern-day superposses and invincible banks. The night scenes were shot day-for-night and then darkened in the lab. The actors playing the posse were carrying sun guns, which are very powerful lights. I said, "No matter which way your horse is going-left, right, or straight ahead-you always know where the camera is, so you just aim that light straight at me." It looked like they were carrying lanterns. It's quite effective. Any kind of lighting is problem solving-how to create the emotion to fit the story. Who are those guys? Where are they? So it was my language that visualized Bill Goldman's words. He was very generous in recognizing my language. It was a terrific script and he's a wonderful writer.

  Q: The sequence with Paul Newman and Katherine Ross riding a bike to the song "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head" is an early example of a music video. How did this come about?

  A: It was kind of obligatory with studios at that time because the "Windows of Your Mind" sequence in The Thomas Crown Affair, which Haskell Wexler shot, had done very well. The scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was just a montage. We didn't know what kind of music, or song, or narration was going to go to it. The director, George Roy Hill, just said, "Here's Katherine Ross, here's Paul Newman and turned me and my camera loose with a long lens. We went out when the light was just beautiful and set up a visual involvement that quickly develops the nature of their romantic involvement. Then they came up with "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head." Burt Bacharach won an Oscar for the song and one for the score.

  Q: The shot which is photographed through a fence is particularly effective. The light is streaming in and you are not acutely aware the camera is moving past the slats of the fence.

  A: Yes, that is pretty magical. When the lens is close to the fence, you have the illusion of not having the fence there at all. It's so good that they cut in the same shot twice. You don't realize it; you think it's a continuation. That's definitely a piece of visual eloquence.

  Q: The color in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid continued the experiments you conducted during the sixties. Did your work in this area grow out of a reaction to the use of overly saturated color during the studio era?

  A: Yes, it grew out of the first early color processes like WarnerColor, which were very saturated. When color first came out, people wanted to see it colorful. I personally found the excess strength of color revolting. When I look out in the world, the colors with back light atmosphere and everything are all washed out. Desaturation was basically what I saw color to be. I strived for it and learned how to do it by overexposing. Then you could print it back to recoup the amount of color and hue you wanted.

  It had to do with observing color beauty such as Sven Nykvist would produce in Ingmar Bergman films-this incredible light. We are making films here in California and we also have incredible light, but it's harsh light. We're in a desert. The fact that we made a garden of it doesn't mean the light has changed. We take that harsh light and use it appropriately. If you have to do a romantic story in Los Angeles, how do you do it? There's the idea of softening the light by overexposing it to the extent that it would affect the sharpness of the image. I sometimes overexpose it, 2, 2'h, 3 stops and that would destroy some of the sharpness, so the edges between contrast would be softer. You learn how to make beauty out of harshness.

  Q: You photographed The Professionals, In Cold Blood, and The Happy Ending for Director Richard Brooks. How did you first come to work with him?

  A: There's a man I love-and I learned more about film from him than anyone that I've worked with. He was a great storyteller-not a contemporary storyteller, he was still stuck back in the forties and fifties. He was stuck in a good way. The Professionals was my first film with him. Tommy Shaw (assistant director and producer) and I had done The Wild Seed together. He worked with Huston and Brooks a lot and he brought me to Richard's attention. We had a shoot-out right to begin with. I put too much dust in a scene and you couldn't see anything. Richard was yelling and screaming at me. I thought to myself, "I don't really need this, I'll just take a walk on this one" I waited until we reshot it. Then I thought, "How are you ever going to learn a
nything if you give up before you have a chance to prove to him that you're worthy of being listened to?" So I decided to stay, and it was the best move of my life. He had a lot to offer filmically. We disagreed a lot, but you did what Richard wanted you to do. He was an auteur. You didn't help Richard as much as you would have liked. So whatever I got done, he could take a lot of credit for-like all of those amazing transitions in In Cold Blood that are so wonderful. That's all Richard.

  Q: At the end of In Cold Blood, before the Robert Blake character is to be executed, he talks to a priest about his father. It is raining outside and it begins to look like tears are running down his face as he continues to tell the story rather dispassionately. How did this powerful cinematic effect come about?

  A: Robert Blake rehearsed the whole scene in an empty set; it wasn't lit. When I was lighting the scene, I had a stand-in where Bobby rehearsed the scene. I wanted it dark inside. I kept the light pooled where the chaplin was sitting because he was reading from the Bible. We needed that light, but I kept it very localized; I didn't use it to light up the room. I had been to a real prison where I saw these strong lights outside in the prison yard-they're on all night long because they don't want anybody climbing walls. So I used a strong light from outside the window to come through. We had rain coming down as I was lighting. I had a little wind machine on, and it was taking some of the spray and creating a mist on the window. As the mist became heavier and heavier, it became heavy enough to form a drop which started running on the window. Instead of the drop running quickly, it moved slowly through the rest of the mist which hadn't formed droplets yet. It created these avenues for the bright light outside to come in. I saw the stand-in looking out the window and I said, "Richard, come and look at this," and he knew immediately what we had. I said, "Make sure Robert Blake stands there and doesn't move an inch." Richard told him to just take his place against the wall and say his lines. Robert Blake was very flat-all the emotion was in the visuals-but that counterpoint, that irony of remembering the father, is a very powerful moment of cinema. It was an accident I saw, and used, and capitalized on the moment. That's what I like to do. Often times the gaffer will turn on a light and I'll say, "Stop! Don't do anything else!" Did I put it on and point it in a certain direction?-not at all. It happened to hit, and I saw it. It's the same way when I'm making mental notes visualizing how light effects me emotionally. I make a note of it and then use it. I do it when I'm in the situation of lighting. Vittorio Storaro and Gordon Willis are real artists. They're people who plan. They're conceptualizers. I don't conceptualize, I extrapolate from other people's conceptual input-the actors, the production designer, the director, the writer, for sure-and all of that flows through my veins like blood. 1 pick out those things that are happening and then I throw in my own bit of invention, but it wasn't thought of a week before. I read the script the first time to get broad conceptual strokes, but I work out of the moment. I've got to wait for the actors to do something. They're too important to those characters to tell them where to stand or how to do something. I couldn't do that. I need to watch them, then maybe I can suggest. I'd rather watch them interpret the story, then I can quickly come up with ten different ways to see it-do it all in one shot, break it up in ten shots, close, far away, moving, nonmoving-all those things are happening organically with me and the story, the characters, the place, the light, the time of day, and everything else that's in motion. Everything is so interdependent. If you plan ahead, you're eliminating the possibility of finding the accident and using it. Actors capitalize on things all of the time: "Let me try it this way, c'mon let me try it that way." I seat myself in the story and the emotion of the characters. The rest of it is space you've got to fill up.

  You have to make choices-hopefully good ones-because there are dozens of different ways of telling the story. There are a lot of rules that help govern that. When you do comedy, it's nice to have two people together so you can watch their interaction without having to cut from one person to the other. I look at a scene and say, "We don't want to break this up. We want to watch them do it," or, "This deserves studying each character and observing how they react to one another more specifically than maybe a two shot would." When I'm visualizing, I don't always think about the camera doing something other than watching actors behave and observing thoughtfully. That's a perfectly legitimate and an important thing for the camera to be doing-not showing itself off in any way by moving this, that, and the other way. All the decisions you have to make about when to move, how close, should you be emotional or should you be very quiet are instinctive with me. I just know when to move the camera and when not to move the camera.

  Q: Electra Glide in Blue had a very striking visual style. The film was directed by James William Guerico, who at the time was the producer of the rock group Chicago. How did you work with this first-time director?

  A: James Guerico grew up in Chicago, Illinois. His father was a projectionist. When James came out of school he would go to the theater, look at whatever was playing, and fall asleep in the back row until his father finished work. So this guy had seen an exorbitant amount of movies and knew a lot about movies. He liked detail, so we learned how to extrapolate the scene by picking up the elements of it and not going to the heart of the matter to begin with. It was shot anamorphic-it gave you a huge proscenium presence.

  Q: The film is structured in a montage style. Were the shot units written into the film or were the scenes broken down on the set during the shooting?

  A: Some of it was scripted, like: "He puts on his cuffs," "He puts on his shirt." The rest of the time it was choosing shots.

  Q: What was your concept of the use of color in Electra Glide in Blue?

  A: I don't try to stylize a film too much. Electra Glide in Blue is the strongest example of stylization because I was trying to sell James Guerico on pastels and he wanted rich color. I shot some tests. I was overexposing two or three stops. This was after Butch Cassidy and I was going in that direction more and more. I thought, "Oh boy, out here in the desert it would be wonderful." The tests came back, and you never saw a longer, sadder look on a director's face in your life. He didn't say anything. We said we'd meet for dinner. I got a telephone call from the production manager and he asked if I would stop by James Guerico's room before we met for dinner. He had put up a whole bunch of postcards on a bulletin board and said, "You know Conrad, I don't know about losing all of this beautiful color. This is what I like." Here were these shots with donkeys and cactus with blue skies so blue that you wanted to throw up. I said, "Why didn't you get Bill Clothier (The Horse Soldiers, Cheyenne Autumn)? He's the guy that does this kind of rich, beautiful, colorful, and sharp kind of photography. I like to interpret light, shadow, and sharpness to create different moods. I consider this false because this is not the way I see the desert." So we shot some more tests and I didn't overexpose too much. He got happier as soon as he saw some color come back in. I started the picture with a saturated look and then I weaned him away from that look by sneaking the colors into more of a pastel, desaturated sense which I felt the story belonged in. By the time we were in our second week, I was doing exactly what I wanted to do and he was liking it. But the film is much more saturated than I normally would have made it, because he liked it that way. So what could you do-I went with the director.

  Q: The last scene in Electra Glide in Blue is a long take of the Robert Blake character after he is shot on the road. The camera, positioned on the back of a vehicle, pulls away from him in slow motion and seems to track back endlessly until the environment of the desert overwhelms the frame. How was this shot achieved?

  A: That was a thousand feet. We started in slow motion at ninety-six frames a second. We had Bobby Blake falling and rolling after he was shot. He starts to sit up and then the camera pulls away to leave him sitting in the middle of the road. We drove back very fast shooting at ninety-six frames. The driver was in low gear and whoosh we were up to sixty miles an hour in seconds. We change
d the film speed without changing the exposure. We were going faster and faster and it would get lighter, lighter, lighter, more surreal, mystical, and spiritual. Then a black crow flew across, and James William Guerico couldn't bear not to freeze frame, which I thought was very moving. It meant something to him. Crows are a very spiritually meaningful bird in Indian lore.

  Q: The climax of The Day of the Locust takes place in the 1930s at a big nighttime Hollywood premiere. A riot breaks out and the expressionistic paintings of the central character, who is an art director, come to life. The contorted images and the presence of engulfing flames create the metaphor that the evils of Hollywood are bringing on the end of the world. How was this emotional and visually intense sequence created?

  A: It took a couple of weeks to shoot. We started with 750 extras for quite a number of days, then we dropped to 500, to 250, to 125, then to practically nobody at the end. A lot of that sequence was storyboarded so the director, John Schlesinger, could visualize it. The idea of bringing the painting to life was thought up by John and the production designer, Richard MacDonald (The Servant, Exorcist H: The Heretic, Altered States). They got an acting company, built these masks, and got them to work together in a dance of horror. So all of that was planned, choreographed, and rehearsed. I put it in the context of shooting through heat waves. I put a lot of flames between. I made my own special effects, but it's all collaborative.

  Q: The giant Klieg lights used during that period to advertise a movie premiere and bring awesome glamour to the event were a central image in the scene. How did you create this lighting effect?