Principal Photography Read online

  A: I had a very good time with her. She's very bright. Harry Stradling put cross hairs in front of a woman's face and bang, that's where the light went. Barbra would prefer the key light right between her eyes, but you can't always get it that way. Harry Stradling lit a movie in a certain way-I don't light that way. If I start lighting actors one way and the movie another it looks stupid. We worked it out very well. I thought Barbra looked great and she was helpful. She will work with you.

  Q: Throughout your career you have captured the many looks of New York City. How would you describe the New York presented in Mute?

  A: The idea was to compress this world Jane Fonda was living in so it was more claustrophobic and had an underground feeling. The villain is like the mad scientist living on the top of this glacier-like building, looking down on all the rest of Manhattan.

  Q: When you are lighting a shot, how do you know how it is going to record on film?

  A: The biggest danger is doing anything by habit. Decide in your mind what you want it to look like on the screen. From a technical point of view, you have to know what to do in order to make it look like that because your eye is selective-film isn't. When you look at it by eye while you're photographing, you won't see what you're going to get in the screening room because exposure of the film you are using is in direct proportion to what you want to see on the screen. You have to know how to do that predicated on how much underexposure, how much overexposure, how much normal exposure. Most art, if you want to call film an art, comes out of craft. A lot of people deny that fact in this business.

  Q: Do you use filters?

  A: I do, but it's like the rest of the philosophy, they're in there when I need to do something, but they're integrated with what's happening on the screen. I've used a lot of filters, you're just not aware of them when you're sitting there watching the film.

  Q: Is that because you use filters to correct something that needs to be corrected?

  A: That's about it. I use a lot of graduates, diffusers, and low cons when I'm shooting, but they're not as defined as the way some other people use them. Often you want to control exposures in skies, even inside rooms. Graduates are neutral-density filters which control exposure, but they're graded. The English call them graders and they're from the top to the bottom. There's more at the top and less at the bottom, so you can place them to control certain exposures, like in a sky. They are technically applicable and very fast, rather than trying to light something to reduce the amount of light. You can use them inside on a window. Occasionally, I'll put color in them, but in general terms I don't. I' m not in favor of a lot of smoke either; a lot of cameramen use smoke. Sometimes it looks like 911. You say, "There's so much smoke. I can't see anybody in the backgrounds anymore!" Atmosphere is very pretty, a limited use here and there is fine, but the actors and the crew are sucking on this smoke for four months. It also holds you up.

  Q: You seem to achieve diffusion primarily through lighting and lenses.

  A: Lenses, lighting-selectivity. In the movies, somebody uses one thing, it breaks out like the plague. I used a brassy yellow in the three Godfather films. That color broke out like the plague on all these period movies. It looked dumb because in the Godfather films that was only one element that was woven into the lighting, the shot structure, the wardrobe, and the sets. People called up and said, "We want this to look like The Godfather-now what do I do?" It's really a culmination. It's everything: art direction, lighting, acting, it's selectivity-it's a whole bouillabaisse.

  Q: What is your photographic approach to a period movie?

  A: Period movies are a tableau form of filmmaking. They are like paintings. If you're going to move, don't move with a zoom lens. It instantly lifts you right out of the movie because it's such a contemporary, mechanical item. It's not right for the turn of the century. Tracking can work. You lay it in at the right level and you're not really aware of it. On a period movie, you should put distance between you and the audience visually. They usually do this great wardrobe job on period movies and everybody shows up with their pretty cars or horses and all the props are great. Then, along comes some guy who's going to photograph this on the very latest Eastman stock and with the very sharpest lenses and when he's done, the visual is so defined, it's so immediate, it looks like it came out of the one-hour photo service. The visual is so contemporary it looks like a party with everybody dressed up walking around in period clothes; it does not put you back to where it belongs.

  Q: The Godfather, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, is a period film which really captures the 1940s. What was your visual approach to the period?

  A: The idea was, I made the wedding exteriors look like a 1942 Kodachrome.

  Q: How did you accomplish that?

  A: The film stock that was used and the choice of exposure.

  Q: Did you have a tendency to overexpose the exterior shots of the wedding?

  A: Right, what's going on inside being dark, while the wedding is going on outside.

  Q: Was the wedding covered with multiple cameras?

  A: Yes, some of it was. It went on for about a week. I felt most of it needed sun. This extraordinary Italian wedding was going on outside, then inside the house in the dark, the Don was conducting his usual business which is on the dark side of life. So it took a very simple idea, light and dark, and it made good cutting relativity-wise. It's a startling revelation in the opening when you're watching the Don. We hold back a little and then finally, hang, we cut around and Brando is sitting there with his cat.

  Q: How did the studio react to the lighting approach on The Godfather?

  A: Paramount was giving Francis a terrible time while he was shooting the movie. They almost fired him, and I don't think they were too happy with some of the things I was doing. I was being difficult about the way a lot of things should be. Francis wanted to go to Sicily, and we didn't get the money until way, way into the movie because the studio wasn't sure. One day they suddenly woke up and realized they didn't have some exploitation movie on their hands-that's what they wanted to make. When they suddenly realized, "Wait a minute, this is working out a little bit better than we thought," that's when they gave Francis permission to go over to Sicily.

  Q: Was Rembrandt a specific influence for your work on The Godfather?

  A: No, not at all. I like Rembrandt, but more people refer to what I do as Rembrandt than I refer to Rembrandt. It's just because Rembrandt painted in those tones. I have other painters who are more favorable in my mind. I like Sargent and Vermeer, but I don't really relate that to what I'm doing. A lot of directors like to bring pictures to show you. I can understand, it's hard for them to relate to anything because they don't shoot-they direct. The only thing I relate to in art is great light and beautiful imagery. I only specifically tried to reproduce a painting once. On Pennies From Heaven, I had to reproduce a couple of Edward Hopper paintings, Nighthawks and one other, and make them come to life, but beyond that, no.

  Q: Hopper's use of light lends itself to cinematography.

  A: Yes, it does. Hopper, however, and a lot of artists, paint in two or three different perspectives, so it's very difficult to totally reproduce the painting because the perspectives are different. He might paint one perspective in the foreground and an entirely different perspective in the background and something else in the middle. It all goes together nicely as a painting, but as I discovered when I was doing it, it's definitely different.

  Q: The daylight in Don Corleone's office in The Godfather streaks through slated wooden blinds on the windows. How did you achieve this effect?

  A: That was shot in the studio, and it's lit from the outside through tracing paper on the windows. That same kind of feeling happens again in the boathouse in Lake Tahoe in The Godfather, Part H.

  Q: What role did the cinematography play in aging Marlon Brando for The Godfather?

  A: Brando came up with his make-up. At that time, Marlon was a young man, so you have to light old-age make-up i
n a manner where someone looks old. It was properly applied, but overhead lighting helped make it look right and also to make the movie look right. People say, "You couldn't see his eyes." Well, you weren't supposed to see his eyes. You did finally see his eyes a lot. As I would watch Brando talk, my thought was, "I don't want people to see what he's thinking right now, they will in a minute." Brando understood all of this.

  Q: What about Al Pacino's eyes in The Godfather, Part II?

  A: The whole idea was to transpose Brando and Pacino in the boathouse scenes in Part II.

  Q: In that scene, Pacino's eyes are in shadow.

  A: Right, he becomes his dad.

  Q: How many cameras were used to film Sonny's assassination scene?

  A: About six. There were different cuts involved for Jimmy Caan, in the car and when he finally got out of the car. We had coverage that had to be done. You have the intro where Jimmy pulls up and then the shooting starts. The tollbooth is being shot at, there are cuts of the windows breaking, and you had long shots. You had to look at all the schematics where the effects people had laid all of their explosives to know how to lay shots down. It was a lot of shooting in a very short period of time. So you get the most cameras set in the right positions to cover Sonny being shot, and then you have to reset everything to get closer cuts of the shooting because anything really close is in the way of the long shots.

  Q: Did you use different focal length lenses on the six cameras to get different size shots?

  A: We did, but within reason. You don't want to set long shots and then put on 300mm lenses because it will look that way.

  Q: Did you use reflectors to control the natural light for the exteriors on The Godfather?

  A: I almost never use reflectors; if I do anything, I'll just use a piece of bead board or a white card and bounce that, but on a long scene, usually I'll just set a light. No, there wasn't really a lot of light used anytime.

  Q: In the scene when Michael talks to his bodyguard who is eating lunch in the barn, the door is open, it is very sunny outside, and the interior of the barn is illuminated by a single naked light bulb. Pacino is in shadow because the sun is behind him, but clearly we can see his face by the light falling on him from the bulb. Normally, to get a good exposure for the interior, the exterior would be burnt out. How did you capture this shot?

  A: The film will perform based on what you want to see-overexposure and underexposure of what they technically call the shoulder and toe of the film. If you understand how far you can go with both ends and still get visual registration on the screen, then you can do it. So you boost or reduce light depending on how much of the spectrum you want to watch from top to bottom. You don't want to overexpose completely on the outside. Then you have to set an appropriate exposure on the inside. You may want the inside to feel like it's underexposed. As long as you understand what the film can do after you reach the point of what you want to do when you're lighting-it's math. In order to visualize what it is you have in mind, you have to have the technical capability in your head to make it work.

  Q: Rather than approaching a scene with a formulaic lighting plan, as was often practiced during the Hollywood studio era, you appear to rely on your own visual perceptions.

  A: The studio lighting system in the thirties and forties really was beautiful to look at. A lot of that style came from the fact that cinematographers had to deliver a certain persona of movie to audiences. Actors and actresses had to look a certain way. Warner Bros. and MGM had their own look and their own sound-that's what they delivered.

  Today, people go on location and bring their staff. The staff sets about to redesign, redress, and fix the whole location. You say, "Why are we here?" There's no point being there if you go in and redo the whole place. The trick is, how do we reproduce this? You either take advantage of what's there or you shouldn't be there.

  Q: You really came into the business at a time when the studio system had just been dismantled. The Godfather set a standard that each film had to have its own look.

  A: The Godfather changed moviemaking completely. The whole approach was different. People saw visuals in The Godfather that made it possible to do things today they were never allowed to do. Now, I look at movies I thought were well done and I think the lighting is so bad, a very formulaic, awful lighting. I'm really glad that part's changed.

  Q: What was your approach to the Sicilian sequences in The Godfather?

  A: To photograph the scenes in this special, beautiful, strange, magical, fairy-tale gangster place everybody's heard about. Francis and I discussed the premise. I said, "This place should be sunny Sicily, it should have a dimension." So everything selected there on The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II was done with this premise. If you shoot with that in mind, you make decisions that are pertinent. I had Technicolor Rome develop this material. The look of that laboratory is different than the Technicolor laboratory here. We went to Sicily on both movies at the end of the movie, only on Part 11 we had been shooting for almost a year, so it was exhausting.

  Sunny Sicily. Well, Sicily is not sunny all the time, any more than any other place. We went to Sicily and the weather was so bad. It was like boras and storms blowing in from Africa. We sat there for a whole week. Finally, Francis got fed up. We packed up and went back to the United States. That meant packing the whole company. Trucks had to be sent back to Rome. Everybody had to get on planes and fly back. So we waited for the weather to clear, then we flew back to Sicily and started shooting again. I held out for sun in a lot of places in those movies-all that beautiful period material on the steps in Sicily where Bobby De Niro stabs the old Don needed sun. The Cuba sequences were shot in the Dominican Republic, which was another place I held out for sun. The weather was terrible a lot of the time. You were trying to get the right thing-you do the right thing.

  Q: Production Designer Dean Tavoularis (Apocalypse Now, Tucker) and his art department did an amazing job in transforming New York's Lower East Side into turn-of-the-century Little Italy for The Godfather, Part H. What was the contribution of the cinematography in achieving this period look?

  A: I perceive period in a flatter light. Francis kept saying when it's in the sun it looks more period. Although there were some pieces that were in the sun, most of it was done in the shade because the values were better. There was not as much light in the period interiors. People go through books and look at photographs of Ellis Island and that's their only real reference point. If you combine your reference point with what you feel, many times you come up with something which seems real. You've embellished it to make people perceive it as real-it's not real at all.

  Q: The shots on the boat carrying the young Vito Corleone as it approaches Ellis Island are beautiful and poetic. The light has a whited-out quality. The sequence appears to have been photographed in a fog.

  A: They're all flat, there's no sun. There's the basic lack of contrast. It's a softer imagery and the light is flared. The imagery is softer and not as defined, but quite beautiful.

  Q: How did you accomplish the shot of young Vito on the boat where we can see the reflection of the Statue of Liberty on him in the glass porthole?

  A: Dean Tavoularis was kind of stumped with that. He said, "The Statue of Liberty?" I said, "Just do a big, black-and-white photo blow-up of it. We'll put it outside the window and I'll do something with it." It was done in Rome.

  Q: Where did you shoot the interior of Ellis Island?

  A: That was a fish market over in Trieste. The apartment house scenes were done in Rome. Part of it was done in Los Angeles, part of it was done in New York-it was shot all over the place. The scenes with De Niro on the rooftops were stretched over a long period of time because the weather wasn't good. The sun was out and we had to match the other shots.

  Q: The shots on the roof were very effective. Your compositions were straight on, framing De Niro in profile as he ran from roof to roof.

  A: Right, it's a tableau form.

  Q: What d
o you mean by a tableau form?

  A: It is more of a proscenium style-theater-like.

  Q: Where did you shoot the scenes in The Godfather, Part III which are supposed to take place in the Vatican?

  A: There's another good use of people in space. That was done in a castle, north of Rome. It was a very old, big place with a moat around it. That place is high, from the windows to the moat on the ground. To put in the lighting, we had to scaffold the whole side of this castle. The lights were about three to five meters outside the window.

  Q: What was the challenge filming the newsroom studio set in All the President's Men?

  A: Reproducing the real newsroom. There were eight- or nine-foot ceilings-all fluorescents.

  Q: Were they standard fluorescent tubes?

  A: Yes, the tubes were Cool Whites. The green was removed in the printing. You have fluorescents now that burn at the Kelvin the film is designed for. At that point, they weren't available. If, however, you are going to shoot a scene in a huge supermarket, you are better off to just match up two or three units on the floor for fill light with the same fluorescents that are there, then print the green out in the laboratory, because that's a lot of fluorescents to change. It's labor intensive, it doesn't pay just shoot it and correct it in the lab.

  Q: In All the President's Men there is a great overhead back-tracking shot on Woodward and Bernstein in the library as they research the Watergate case. It is the kind of visual storytelling which makes you feel the camera is revealing something emotionally. In the sequence, it looks like the editor divided the shot into three segments linked by dissolves. Was that originally a continuous shot?

  A: Yes, it was one continuous shot. The idea was, Woodward and Bernstein were looking for "a needle in a haystack." There was no way to get a crane in the Library of Congress. Also there was no way to get high enough with a crane. We put a winch and a cable in the top of the Library of Congress, and that winch actually pulled the camera up. It was done with an Arriflex and some stabilizers to keep it from shaking. That was done before we had video assist. I figured out on paper how much we'd see at a given distance. The grips had a guide line to guide it visually, because it had to go up more or less at an angle. My assistant built a radio-controlled focus system.