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  Miroslav Ondicek

  Miroslav Ondi-icek, ASC, was born in the former Czechoslovakia, where he was a child actor in the theater and cinema. He became intently interested with what was going on behind the lens, and began to work in a camera factory and a photo lab. This led to the study of still photography in Prague, and an apprenticeship (through the camera department system) of assistant cameraman, focus puller, and camera operator. Work in a motion picture studio led to Ondficek entering FAMU, the national Czech film school where he continued to study his craft.

  In the sixties, Miroslav Ondricek became part of the Czech New Wave, led by Directors Milos Forman, Ivan Passer, Jan Nemec, and Jiri Menzel. He was director of photography on Forman's Talent Competition, Loves of a Blonde, and The Firemen's Ball; Nemec's Martyrs of Love; and Passer's Intimate Lighting.

  In August 1968, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, and Ondricek left his homeland with Forman, traveling to the United States to photograph Taking Off. He also worked in England with Lindsay Anderson, and was the director of photography on If.... The White Bus, and 0 Lucky Man!.

  In America, Ondfi6ek continued his longtime association with Milos Forman and received Academy Award nominations for his cinematography on Ragtime and Amadeus, which won the best picture Oscar in 1984. OndIIi ek also has had long artistic relationships with George Roy Hill, photographing Slaughterhouse-Five, The World According to Garp, and Funny Farm; and with Penny Marshall on Awakenings, A League of Their Own, and The Preacher's Wife.

  Miroslav Ondficek views his cinematic role as a filmmaker who gets involved with every aspect of a film's visual design. His poetic lighting, delicate camera movements, and rich pictorial renderings translate words into images. Ondricek observes, "You photograph a drama, you photograph a story that you are selling-this is the movie."

  SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY

  Intimate Lighting

  The White Bus

  Slaughterhouse-Five

  The Divine Emma

  Q: How did you become a director of photography?

  A: I was born in Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic. I love movies. I was a child actor and started as an extra, acting in the theater and in a few movies. I was more interested in being behind the camera. It was very difficult to get into the Czech movie industry. I had a good social background, my mother and father had a shop. My family and the officials sent me to working-class people for one year, where I worked in a factory which had many young people. Then they sent me to another small factory, where I worked with still photography cameras. From 1950 to 1953, I worked in a film laboratory, printing, developing, and editing titles and subtitles. I got a really good technical background. Then I went to the Graphic School of Prague, where I studied still photography. I became an assistant cameraman, focus puller, and operator. The studio sent me to FAMU, the Czech film school, in 1956. The film school took four years, and you studied everything: photography, lighting, music, and acting. Milos Forman and everybody went to the film school. In the early sixties after I finished film school, I started to photograph movies. This was the coming of the generation of people who started the Czech cinema.

  Q: When did you first meet Milos Forman?

  A: I knew of him before I met him personally in 1960. By this time, he was a first assistant director and I had become a camera operator. Then he became a director and I became a director of photography. The first movie I made with Milos was Audition/Talent Competition in 1963.

  Q: What were the conditions like in Czechoslovakia when you photographed films like Loves of a Blonde and The Firemen's Ball for Milos Forman, and Intimate Lighting for Ivan Passer?

  A: You must understand that inside a Communist government some things cannot work very well. Loves of a Blonde and The Firemen's Ball were done on real locations. Milos cast real people. My wife's uncle played the father in Loves of a Blonde. Milos said, "He must be in my movie!" Both Loves of a Blonde and The Firemen's Ball were done in a small town of thirty-five thousand people. Everybody knew each other. We were working very free. Milos gives so much freedom to the actors. I like to bring a little life to the screen when I photograph people. I don't like the actor to stand and look. I hate to make marks. Sometimes you have to do it, especially when you have a young focus puller. The maximum is for the actors to be free-it's the only way to work.

  Q: What you are describing is similar to the freedom documentary filmmakers have.

  A: I started in a documentary studio. Before I went into features, I made newsreels and television news. I like documentary pictures very much. I flew to China with Pavarotti just for fun to make Distant Harmony. I like to do all movies.

  Q: Did you operate the camera on Loves of a Blonde and The Firemen's Ball?

  A: Yes, as a young guy I operated myself. I did everything myself: focus, lighting, composing. I like to know the style, the coverage for each scene. I know how it is going to go together. I know which way to go, to a master shot, to a close-up.

  Q: So it's important for the director of photography to understand the editing process.

  A: Yes, because I prepare everything we are filming for editing. The editor can only edit what I am filming. He can't use a master shot if he doesn't have it. He can't make a close-up if he doesn't have it. This is our job. I don't have editors coming to the set to talk about the scene. No, this is our power with the director.

  Q: When did you first work with British director Lindsay Anderson and why was If... shot in black-and-white and color?

  A: I first worked with Lindsay on a short film, The White Bus. At the end of that movie, he had scenes in black-and-white and color. After that, he talked about making a whole movie in color. I wouldn't have liked the whole film of If... to be in color. The homosexual scene when the character is looking down for the young boy, couldn't be too colorful-this is a black-and-white scene. This picture was very hard to design because Lindsay lived in a school like that. It was unusual for me because there was never a school like this in my country.

  Q: You worked in England with Anderson on If... and Oh Lucky Man!. Is the British style of filmmaking different than the Czech or American systems?

  A: Half of Ragtime was shot in England. Actually, the British system is very similar. Truly, there are not many differences between people. When you shoot in France, the French are not so much on coverage. The only differences are between the rich and poor.

  Q: Are filmmakers pretty much the same all over the world?

  A: All over the world. They are poetic and romantic. Of course, it's different if you make a movie in a studio. The studios here are different, because the technical background in computers costs so much. By now, cameras are all the same. In England and in France they use the Panavision camera. I use Panavision.

  Q: Why are Panavision cameras so widely used?

  A: I like this camera because it's quiet. You can hand-hold it. You have a mount front and back. After the years and years I've used it, I haven't had any problems. The color balance is very important for a color picture to give you the best skin tone. With Panavision selected lenses, you can have the lenses match 95 percent.

  Q: How do you know what lenses to use on a film?

  A: For me, a good lens is everything. On most of my pictures, I only use two lenses. On Ragtime, I used an Arriflex BL and only two lenses, the 55mm and 85mm, for the whole movie. On The Firemen's Ball, I only used a 75mm and 25mm lens. On Hair, I used a Panavision zoom because of the music and dancing.

  You and I are sitting here talking. You are not walking and talking in one corner of the room. You are not going to stand up and go to the kitchen. In some movies, everybody must move all the time. "I LOVE YOU!" "I HATE YOU!" Then they stand up and walk out. This is a phoney arrangement. In classic Chinese opera, the characters are in a frame. It is mostly a blackand-white background and only two or three persons make the composition. This is a different culture. Another movie with a lot of camera movement is 0 Lucky Man!.

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nbsp; Q: The camera movement in 0 Lucky Man! is very effective. When the Alan Price group is playing, you are constantly dollying the camera.

  A: Yes, because of the music and a lot of scenes with walking. On a movie like The Firemen's Ball, I wouldn't be moving the camera so much. In Intimate Lighting, people would be sitting at the table and eating chicken and I dollied around 360 degrees. This movement is for me, the cameraman-not for the people I'm photographing.

  Q: Did you design the camera moves for 0 Lucky Man! or did you work this out with Lindsay Anderson?

  A: On 90 percent of my movies, I design the photography. Some ideas come from the script.

  Q: Why was the bombing of Dresden sequence in Slaughterhouse-Five photographed in Prague?

  A: We shot it in Prague because East Germany wouldn't give us permission to film the Dresden scenes. They were shot in Prague with just me and my focus puller, no operator-nothing. The director, George Roy Hill, came to Prague and stayed there for two weeks. We went through the script page by page.

  Q: The color in many of the films you have photographed is desaturated. What is the philosophy behind this?

  A: This is my aesthetic-it is like traditional painting. The Firemen's Ball was originally planned to be shot in black-and-white, and I battled for color. I worked with a friend, Jaroslav Otcenagek, who was a very gifted painter. He came up with the idea of using brown, which is the color of the Fascist uniform. I painted the interior walls brown three times because one time there was too much brown/blue and one time there was too much brown/yellow. I worked with Jaroslav Otcenagek and selected every gold color. The original fireman's costume was dark blue, which looked awful. I went to find the fabric to make the costumes.

  Q: So you get involved with the production design of a film.

  A: I am filmmaker-I like to make movies. To light a scene, I must first ask, "What are you photographing?" I don't know why you would pay me just to put the camera on the set and say, "Okay, lighting-put the 5Ks, 6Ks over there" I don't know why I would be there. I don't get jobs like that. I like to be part of the filmmaking process. My son just finished film school in Prague for directing. He made a short movie and he liked to do everything: editing, camera-this is the filmmaker. I am more a filmmaker than anything else.

  Q: When do you like to begin on a project?

  A: I always like being on a movie many months before I start shooting. I was on Ragtime for four months with Milos Forman. When we were in London, Milos said, "Maybe I'm going to do Amadeus in December of 1980." I had three years and got 90 percent of the locations.

  Q: You have photographed many period movies-Ragtime, Amadeus, Valmont, A League of Their Own, and others. What research do you do? How do you learn about the lighting in that time period? Do you look at paintings and photographs from the era?

  A: Yes. For Ragtime, I spent a lot of time studying photography. I stole this period from photographs by the old still photographers-all the old East Side streets, the waterfall-these are all famous black-and-white pictures from the 1890s. How would you know how this period looked? It was the same on Amadeus. The costume designer and I went to Vienna and Salzburg. I looked at the paintings for the hats, the shoes-every idea came from the old paintings.

  Q: What paintings did you look at in preparation for Amadeus?

  A: The French painter, Fragonard, and Shikanedr, the very famous Czech nineteenth-century painter who painted Prague in this period-this is Amadeus. His family had a theater in Vienna which opened The Magic Flute for Mozart. On The World According to Garp, I had my best partner for designing pictures, the production designer, Henry Bumstead. We se lected and looked at photographs. I won't ever forget this gentleman, "Bummy."

  Q: There are many wonderful performances in Silkwood. What was it like to photograph Meryl Streep?

  A: Meryl Streep is fantastic because she is one of those actors who is not thinking about how she looks. She's thinking about her character and the atmosphere her character would create. Many big actors are more careful about how they look-not how to play the character. I enjoy a good performance. Cher was fantastic.

  Q: You often use back light to light an actor's hair and the outline of their body.

  A: This is always realistic. I don't exactly like lighting the background.

  Q: How did you prepare to work on A League of'Their Own, directed by Penny Marshall? Were you familiar with the game of baseball?

  A: Prague has two baseball teams. I never understood the game before, so I went to see baseball games in the Czech Republic for one month and this guy told me everything. Penny called me after Awakenings, and she gave me tapes. I had one and a half years to work on the project. I also looked at a lot of period pictures.

  Q: Where did you get your ideas for framing and composition?

  A: At first, nobody wanted to shoot the film in wide-screen. I pushed for the film to be made in wide-screen. I found many wonderful compositions for wide-screen in a very famous painting from 1925 in the Chicago Museum. I showed it to Penny and she pushed Columbia. They said, "No, no, no," and after months, they said, "Okay, let's go to wide-screen."

  Q: Did you use multiple cameras to film the baseball sequences?

  A: Yes, because you must understand these girls never knew how to play baseball. Also, every actress had many doubles. Geena Davis had a double for running, a double for hitting, a double to go backward, sidewayseverything.

  Q: How did you approach exterior light when you were shooting the baseball sequences in the stadiums?

  A: I fought with Mr. Greenhut, the producer. He wanted to cover the baseball scenes from seven o'clock in the morning until 7 o'clock in the evening. I had a very big battle every day. I had a very good time preparing the film. I stayed in the stadium throughout the day and saw how far the shadows would go. I designed it so the hitter always had back light. On a sunny day, the catcher is working in back light all of the time and looks into the light. It is very difficult to catch the ball. The shade moves over the people sitting in the seats. For the whole morning, the people in the stands had sun in their faces and the shade came in the afternoon. Nobody ever started a baseball game at seven o'clock in the morning. I shot the stars in the dugout in the morning. Eddie Quinn is the best grip in the world, he made me a roof to cover the sun. Baseball is the one game in the world you cover in 360 degrees. It is played all over the grounds.

  Q: Is it difficult to light for multiple cameras?

  A: Of course, sometimes we can't use multiple cameras because of the shadows. How are the lighting conditions? How big a background do you want-especially for this movie because the stadium always looked full. Penny and I only had a full stadium for two or three days.

  Q: You have worked in many parts of the world. Does each city have its own light?

  A: Yes, exactly. I very much like working in New York. You can tell what hour in the day it is by the shadows. When you are crossing Madison Square Garden, you know by the light that it is one o'clock. On fifty-seventh Street in October, you will see a fantastic sunset. It's a simple city to recognize. The position of the light south to north and west to east is wonderful. It's gorgeous. You have wonderful back light on the East Side in the morning. This is why I like New York very much.

  Q: What filmmakers have most influenced your work as a cinematographer?

  A: Ermanno Olmi, Robert Bresson, Akira Kurosawa, Truffaut, Godard, Fellini, Antonioni-I grew up in this culture. This is my generation. I had the great chance to see Charlie Chaplin film The Countess from Hong Kong. He was filming at Pinewood Studios. Lindsay Anderson wrote him a letter. He said, "My cameraman is from Czechoslovakia and he would like to visit you in the studio." Chaplin invited me. I sat behind him for two days and watched what he was doing. This was a big benefit. Everybody was acting, but reacting. He had absolutely fantastic energy. His eyes were like two flames. I have never forgotten his wonderful energy.

  Q: Where do you think filmmaking is headed in the future?

  A: I am a
little worried about the new generation. Nobody has the time to listen to a story. How many people sit and read Shakespeare? Look at Broadway, many plays don't have one verse, only music. Movies mostly look like a clip. They go very fast. The movies have lost the romance. Nobody has the chance to watch the camera. The director says, "Good," and you say, "Good." There are no dailies the next day. Sometimes you see the dailies after three days, sometimes one week. You look and you say, "Good." The director doesn't have the time to watch the dailies. Everything is on video. You watch dailies at home on tape. Most cameramen are like a technical factory. You say, "How is the acting? How does it look? Does it match?" You know how wonderful a movie can be when you pick the backgrounds and the people walk perfectly. Now people don't take care about the continuity. The director doesn't say, "Please, again." You must say it, and nobody takes care if the actor has a jacket or no jacket, or if they looked left to right or gave a good look. No, it's only time. I'm very skeptical. Everybody said radio would finish the live orchestra. Everybody says because of movies nobody goes to the theater. I hope this panic time will finish and people will say they would like to go and watch a marvelous story. I like a movie to have time, like somebody sitting and looking-you know that they are thinking, but now nobody trusts the actor's performance. If an actor has a scene where they are sitting in the distance, everybody says, "What are you shooting? It has to be close-up!" This is ridiculous. You have the position of the hand, the whole body-this is the feeling of a movie. I hate movies where everybody has big close-ups all the time. I like to focus a movie. Why do you have a cast, if no one trusts this cast? You photograph a drama, you photograph a story that you are selling-this is the movie. Why do you have big close-ups?-this is television. I have talking heads on my television set in my home all the time.