Principal Photography Read online

  A: We used real Klieg lights, which are huge arc lights six feet in diameter, on a trolley. When we first turned them on with a little smoke to pick up the beam, I couldn't do any lighting because they were so powerful. They would hit the ceiling, which was made of beautiful two by twelve and twenty by twenty wood and canvas, and it would bounce back and practically give me daylight. So poor Richard MacDonald had to paint all that beautiful wood black on top on all three stages so the black would not reflect back down again and ruin the lighting. That was quite an involved endeavor.

  Q: You achieved many striking effects with those Klieg lights. At one point, the out-of-control mob carries the Donald Sutherland character past a blazing arc creating the symbolism of a crucifixion. The seminal image of the film is a shot of the crowd running past the scorching light pouring into the camera lens. How did these images come about?

  A: I came up with the idea of carrying the man in front of the light and people running by. You get this strobelike effect of the shutter going by. Chaos is central to the story at that point. People are not moving like people move. The people running by and the body going up into the light is certainly the strongest metaphor of that chaos.

  Q: What attracted you to photograph Searching for Bobby Fischer?

  A: Searching for Bobby Fischer is a story that interests me. It is about a young genius. It's a wonderful, literate story. It's about competition and what coaches and parents do about it and the conflicts they're in. It's more about the game than being number one. It was a terribly important film in a world that is becoming nothing but competition.

  At first I thought, "We want to be careful we don't do Leave It to Beaver here. We have to find a way not to end up being maudlin TV, and that's what made me go into magic naturalism. It's magical. Sometimes the light created is so strong the person doesn't seem to be walking on the floor-they seem to be floating on the floor because their legs are burnt out.

  Q: The light and color in the boy's room created the magical fantasy relationship children share with their rooms.

  A: Yes, it was a beautiful room. It was a real room. We didn't pull out walls. The camera had to be inside or shooting through the door or shooting through a window. There are contrapuntal visual ideas going on that create a sense of awe about him. I never would have gotten into any of this if it wasn't for the kid, Max Pomeranc, those eyes, and the way he behaved. He's a very special child.

  Q: His eyes were extraordinary. Did you use eye lights to enhance the sense of wonder in his eyes?

  A: No, there are no eye lights at all-he just has the light. He's got this intelligence. The director, Steve Zaillian, cast him because he actually could play chess. So how do you get the intelligence of a chess move in a person's eyes? On certain shots I would watch this kid looking around the board and you'd get the sense that he was just about to discover a move. Rather than wait to see that happen, I'd leave him with the camera. I tried to pick the moment when he was just about to do it. Then I would start slowly to get off of him, so you're leading the viewer to a different idea-a thought process he's having of what to do. Then, there's a flash of a hand coming through to the chess piece. As soon as this hand is flashing through, the camera is now whipping and probably not hitting exactly where the piece is-then catching up to it when he is banging it down. Then it stops in midair, looking at nothing, but slowly drifting back, arriving back at the eyes, again which is to give the idea the thought is developing again.

  Q: Did you understand the significance of the moves? Do you play chess?

  A: Not at all. I would say, "Which piece is he going to go for?" so I would get a focus, because I work very wide open. The lenses are 1.9 and everything is shot at 1.9. The focus on that is extraordinary.

  Q: How did you communicate these complex visual ideas to the camera operator?

  A: I operated myself. I'm pretty good, not mechanically as good as my operator, but he's watching on the video and he sees what I'm doing. Then he does it and it turns out even more wonderful, but it turns out the way I wanted it. None of it is rehearsed or choreographed, it's all photographing real life. Basically, the kid is playing chess and we're doing whatever we want to do with the camera. I take one character, my operator takes another character. I'll go sit on his camera and he'll sit on my camera and we'll pan back and forth as we want. If the director would like something different, he comes and communicates it to us, but basically it's just us playing with the camera.

  I tried to make Searching for Bobby Fischer interesting the same way that basketball is interesting-it's fast break, slam dunk. I'm finding out more and more that the stories I choose have got to engage me on several levels. It's got to get to me on an emotional, and intellectual, and spiritual level. I've got to see something in the story I want to help communicate. So I'm careful about choosing stories now. Unless my heart, mind, and soul are engaged, I don't want to be involved. It's hard work to tell a story. It's not work at all once you have a wonderful story to tell. I call it play-I mean that in a very serious way. You can't wait to get to work. You can't wait to tell the story. You can't wait to see how it's received, because it's all about communicating and it's not just to tell yourself a story-it's to communicate what the writer put down into cinema.

  Q: What legacy do you feel you and your work have left for other filmmakers?

  A: Originality. A freedom of expression. The legacy I would like to be remembered by is the passion I gave to that endeavor, the joyous passion of being allowed to tell stories, being infused with the desire to communicate, and to make movies be more fun to do than anything else in life.

  2

  Gordon Willis

  Gordon Willis, ASC, is the son of a make-up artist who worked at the East Coast studios of Warner Bros. during the depression. As a child, Willis took a turn at acting and experimented with stagecraft and still photography. During the Korean War, Willis enlisted in the air force and was assigned to the motion picture unit where he spent his four-year hitch making documentaries. In the mid- 1950s, Gordon Willis began to work in the New York advertising industry as an assistant motion picture cameraman. He made the transition to cameraman, photographing documentaries and commercials, and took the leap into feature films in 1970 when he shot End of the Road, based on the John Barth novel and directed by New York film editor Aram Avakian.

  Gordon Willis has a cinematic vision of the world and a photographic aesthetic that is rigorous. He has had an association with a series of directors with diverse personal styles, including Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Benton, James Bridges, Alan Pakula, Woody Allen, Richard Benjamin, and Herbert Ross, on projects as divergent as The Godfather and Annie Hall, but his imprint is indelible in each frame of the almost forty films he has presided over as director of photography.

  Conrad Hall lovingly calls Willis "The Prince of Darkness," and he is on the top of every contemporary cinematographer's list of influential cameramen. A fiercely independent East Coast man, Gordon Willis fits the description of an auteur. His work on The Godfather trilogy and eight films for Woody Allen is legend. Gordon Willis has been nominated for two Academy Awards for Zelig and The Godfather, Part III. In 1995, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematography.

  SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY

  Loving

  The Landlord

  The People Next Door

  Klute

  Bad Company

  The Godfather

  The Parallax View

  Interiors

  Comes a Horseman

  Windows

  Perfect!

  Presumed Innocent

  Q: Over the course of your long career which covers many different directors and film genres, several visual characteristics become apparent. You often capture entire scenes in a single shot. Many times your camera shoots directly into a bright light source in the background and the characters in the foreground are dramatically modeled in shadow. You are known to work with extremely low light lev
els, and frequently position your camera directly in front of your subject as opposed to employing angles. Why do you apply this philosophy of cinematography so consistently to your work?

  A: It essentially comes out of the way one sees and thinks. The trick is to take a sophisticated idea and reduce it to the simplest possible terms so it's accessible, not only visually but philosophically, which I think is the most beautiful. But what happens is people usually take a simple idea, blow it up to a very sophisticated form, and get it all bent out of shape because they feel compelled to do something. Something within the frame has to hold an audience glued to the screen. If that's not happening, you can turn everything upside down, sideways-it's not going to work. So I just approach films that way and most of the directors I've worked for feel the same way.

  Q: So, rather than use a montage shooting style to move images editorially, you like the eye to move things around within the frame.

  A: Actors move cameras. So you're watching the drama as opposed to watching the camera. I've always felt you couldn't really shoot well unless you know how to cut. A lot of people don't know how to cut, they overcover. They shoot a lot of film and end up with fifty pounds of ho hum that has to go into a five-pound bag. That lacks point of view. The editor makes the movie-maybe.

  Q: Do editors tend to like your cinemagraphic style?

  A: If I have any kind of rapport with the director, it cuts together when I shoot something. Editors tend to appreciate this. Whether they like the way it cuts together is something else, but it does cut together-not only mechanically and lightwise, but structurally. I have worked with directors who feel compelled to shoot everything ten ways. It tires the actors out, it tires everybody out-there are too many options.

  Q: Your compositions are so carefully designed. You don't continue to move the camera over a couple of degrees and cover the same scene again and again.

  A: I don't. If I have my way with a director, I won't do it. I'm very open to doing exactly what he or she wants to do. If the director's open, we'll discuss its pros and cons. Out of that comes a certain style of shooting, but it's how you apply it. I take one color of paint and apply it in a lot of different shades for a lot of different movies. Many times it's what you don't do that's more important than what you do.

  Q: In your compositions, you make especially strong use of what classically has been called negative space, the area in between and around the focal point of a shot. Do you tend to think of this space as negative?

  A: While I'm doing it, I don't perceive it as negative or positive, I just like it. One of my favorite things, especially in an anamorphic presentation, is to take advantage of the graphics like using small people in large spaces or taking a huge close-up and stuffing it way over to the right of the screen leaving all this space way over to the left. It doesn't matter whether it's a little intimate drama or a huge Western. Wide-screen photography is not applied simply because you're doing a big movie. It can be intimate. The negative and positive space aspect is not used enough. It's watching somebody come down a staircase way over to the right of the screen and crossing a lot of empty space to go make a cup of coffee over on the left side. That's fascinating to me because it places a person in an environment. Depending on the size you pick, it places somebody in a cozy environment or it places them in an environment which is hostile. There are many ways of dealing with it, depending on the frame size you pick and the lighting you choose, and also what the actors are saying or not saying. You can shoot it another way and pan the guy down the steps, and take him over to get a cup of coffee, and do inserts of all the cups. That doesn't really lead to anything, except many directors are so fearful of getting caught and not being able to cut out of, into, or around it. There are certain scenes where I will tell a director, "I don't think you have covered this enough because this scene runs too long." Well, it doesn't run too long in his mind at that moment, but I'll say, "Six months from now when you're cutting this together you're going to want to get out of here." I find myself talking certain directors into more coverage, not less, but at times it's the other way around. How it finally comes out on the screen refers to the form of shooting: how it's lit, the coverage, the size of the framing, whether it's close or not close, whether it's a long shot, or whether it's a moving shot that takes you around a room for ten minutes. It's what you choose that changes the structure of the movie-selectivity.

  Q: How do you get so much clarity of detail in your full shots? The viewer doesn't feel the need to get any closer to the actor.

  A: In some instances you can't see the actor well, but the emotional structure of the scene is working-there's great clarity in that. To perceive exactly what is happening without getting any closer-that's the trick. The director will say, "We can't shoot this one shot with him standing in the room with his back to us--I need coverage here!" We shoot it, and then we do all this coverage of him crying and retching. You see it in the screening room and the strongest cut is when you don't see this man's face at all. You just see him standing there and you know what's going on. It's emotionally more gratifying to watch it that way than to go in and undo everything with all these cuts. It's like watching somebody die in a movie. It's devastating to see this little figure fall down in a large field-it's relativity. I'm a great believer in big and small, light and dark. It's how you cut those images together. When people in a movie are talking to each other and the dialogue is good, it may be an interesting movie, but it may not move you to certain places you ought to go.

  Q: What is the concept behind your tendency to have the camera shoot directly into a light source?

  A: A window or a doorway is very good-there's a certain power in not actually completely seeing for a moment. In Klute with Jane Fonda there was a scene where she was up against a window. It was more interesting to play it that way and then at a given moment you go around and see her, rather than looking at her all the time. You can see into the image a little bit there; you've got to be careful of a dead silhouette because then it becomes a cutout-although I've done that and I like it. When you finally see her, what you want is a revelation.

  Q: That scene is riveting. It allowed the viewer to witness the absolute fear of the Bree Daniels character as she is confronted with the killer. How did Jane Fonda feel about the low light approach you used?

  A: When she first saw it in the screening room, she said, "You can't see it!" I said, "No, wait a minute." She was great, she realized we had done this in a certain way and we would get around to the other side. Emotionally it's very effective on the screen. Jane was wonderful in it.

  Q: She was, and I don't think she ever looked better on-screen. There are no beauty shots in Mute, no eye lights, hair lights-all of those Hollywood star glamour techniques which had been used for decades were stripped away. How did you achieve your results?

  A: It depends on where you put the key light. A key light is a primary light source, the one that gives you the primary exposure to do the scene. In traditional Hollywood moviemaking, the key light, whether it's from a window or a lamp, would be put on the star and be the primary source of light on the set. You can have three or four keys stretched around a big set. Even when something is not exposed or defined as a key light, there's always a key light in my mind.

  Q: So the window in Klute was lit with little more than a key light to simulate the light coming through the window?

  A: Yes, the primary light was a window, and that's what you use. There are other lamps used related to seeing in the shadows which you don't necessarily read on the screen, but they're there to do what's necessary. I'm not a great lover of back light. It's pleasing, it's very pretty to look at in conjunction with other things-a girl has pretty hair, you get a back light. It came out of the early days of black-and-white photography in order to separate actors from the background, but then it became an aesthetic too]. I never really used it in black-and-white either. When you're shooting in blackand-white you're working in values. You're working in blac
k, white, and grays. When you separate someone from a background you're doing it in values, darker background, lighter foreground, or vice versa-I prefer that. Back light is glitzy and high-tech, people love it. They use it on television. It's pretty. Every time I set a back light I hate it. I turn it off unless it's the sole source of illumination, like when an actor moves from a front light into a back light and that's all there is-that's kind of interesting.

  Q: The window scene in Klute is lit in natural back light.

  A: Right, you just use enough fill light so you can just barely see into their faces-sometimes.

  Q: Do you tend to take different lighting approaches to each actor in a film?

  A: Yes, what you really want to do is to photograph the movie, but you have to be cognizant of the people that are in it or you're not doing your job properly. There are some people where you could put up a light and no matter what, they look great. On Mute I was always cognizant of where to put the key light with Jane Fonda and where to put it with Donald Sutherland. In some situations you have to make changes so that they look better. Jane was easy because she was beautiful. All actors worry how they look. There are times where they don't care whether they look good or not, depending on what the scene is. If you really have an outstanding looking girl in a movie, it makes life a lot easier because it doesn't matter where you put the key light. No matter what happens, they look terrific, but there are others where you are spending a lot of time. When the movie becomes subservient to the lighting of the star, you have lost the battle. Then you're going to hurt the movie because every decision you make about lighting is predicated on what she or he is going to look like.

  Q: You photographed Barbra Streisand for Up the Sandbox after she had worked with veteran Hollywood cameraman Harry Stradling on many pictures. What was it like to work with Streisand?