Principal Photography Read online

  Looking! Watching! This is very important. Look at The Best Years of Our Lives. In the best scene in the film, when the man with no arms comes home, there are only three cuts. Now, there's always a cut to a big hand, and crying, and muddled eyes, and screaming, and point of view (POV)-God POV and mouse POV because nobody trusts or knows about emotion. The computer is taking power-you're watching, you're not thinking so much. There's too much importance on perfection-the computer does it. You lose the sensitivity-the humanity.

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  Adam Holender

  In 1984, the late master cameraman, Nestor Almendros, was asked which contemporary cinematographers he admired. His short A-list included Adam Holender, ASC.

  After attending high school in Krakow, Poland, Adam Holender went on to study architecture. A job as a draftsman for an architectural firm led to an interest in photography, and the lure of the darkroom inspired him to join a 16mm film club. Holender entered the Polish Film Academy, where directors Andrzej Wajda and Andrzej Munk were instructors. After the academy, Holender began to work as a camera operator in Poland.

  In 1966, Holender emigrated to the United States, where he was embraced by the New York film community. After working on commercials and other projects, Holender got the opportunity to photograph his first feature film, Midnight Cowboy, directed by John Schlesinger, which won the Oscar for best picture in 1969. This seminal New York-based production continues to resonate and influence contemporary directors and cinematographers. As Joe Buck made his bus journey from Texas to New York, Holender filmed him through the wide-open eyes of an immigrant. Using long lenses and techniques he discovered shooting commercials, Holender created a photographic view of New York as a wondrous new land, but shaded with a dark side.

  Adam Holender has worked with many directors, including: Jerry Schatzberg, Frank Perry, Paul Newman, Joe Brooks, Jerome Hellman, Marshall Brickman, Agnieszka Holland, Taylor Hackford, Nick Castle, Howard Zieff, Wayne Wang, Herb Gardner, and Boaz Yakim.

  A cameraman's cameraman, Adam Holender continues to create images which serve the story and the vision of the film and reflect the world we live in. From Needle Park to Washington, D.C.'s corridors of power, from the stage of a rock `n' roll show and the sanctity of a Polish church to the interior of a funky Brooklyn smoke shop, the camera of Adam Holender captures reality with the gaze of an artist.

  SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY

  Promises in the Dark

  The Idolmaker

  The Shadow Box

  Blue in the Face

  A Price Above Rubies

  Q: How did you become a cinematographer?

  A: I finished high school in Krakow, Poland. Coming from a middleclass family, there were three avenues for any kid to go: one was to study medicine, the other was to study law, and the third was to study engineering. My father was a judge, and I had no interest in law. I hated medicine, so the only thing left was engineering. I started studying architecture. These were hard times. Education was free, but we were all ambitious enough not to want to take any money from our parents. So, as a way of making pocket money, I took a job as a draftsman with an architectural firm. I was sent to photograph a building which was going to be altered. The assignment was not only to photograph it, but also to measure and pinpoint for an architect which direction it was facing and how to go about the alteration. After doing two or three of those jobs, I found myself very interested in photographing architecture. In the following two years, I became more interested in photography than architecture.

  Q: You took those still photographs with no formal training?

  A: No formal training. I started taking pictures on weekends. I made a contact with somebody who had a darkroom. Through photography, I started getting involved in an amateur 16mm filmmaking club. Then I applied to the Polish Film Academy. It was a very tough school to get into. I didn't mention it to my parents. I quietly prepared myself for about six months, and passed the exam. I got in, took a leave of absence from architecture, and spent the next five years in the film academy.

  Q: What was the Polish Film Academy like?

  A: It was a fantastic school. Having been asked to meet with students at colleges in California and New York, I still have not found a comparable institution. It was a tiny school, there were forty-seven students in two departments-directing and cinematography-in all five years. Every professor and instructor was a leading working professional, so by the time you were through you were accepted as a member of the profession. It was not a question of, Will you be able to find work? rather which group do you want to be affiliated with. The disadvantages were, sometimes the professor was involved in filming for three, four, or five months. If you wanted to have his input, you had to get on a train or in a car and drive for a few hours to the location where he was shooting. You had to wait for him to finish his day. Then he would spend an hour over dinner with you going over your problems. If you got there earlier, you managed to hang around the set, so you saw how it was done. It was a much closer affiliation between theory and practice than any other school I have seen since I left Poland.

  Q: Who were some of the professors?

  A: Some of them were quite well-known. Among directors, there was Andrzej Wajda, and Andrzej Munk, who was quite influential among cinematographers in my years. The dean of the cinematography department was Stanislaw Wohl, an extraordinary human being and a fantastic teacher. Without him, I don't think I would have an understanding at all of what to do. Kurt Weber, who is now teaching in Germany, was there. I became his camera operator after I finished studying. There were many others.

  Q: Did you enter the academy as a cinematography major?

  A: Yes, one had to make a choice between directing and cinematography from the outset. I remember having this conversation over a cup of coffee with Wohl, who was the dean of the school. I asked him what he thought-having done both cinematography and directing. He looked at me and said, "Cinematography is a profession, directing is a hobby."

  Q: Did you start your professional career in Poland?

  A: Yes, I finished and got my master's degree in cinematography, then I started working as a camera operator. I came to the United States in 1966, with an extremely limited ability to speak English. I didn't have many contacts, money, or relatives. It took me a few months to stand on my feet. I had two visas-for Canada and the United States. I wanted to see what it was like, and it just so happened the late sixties were terrific in New York.

  Q: Did you have aspirations about working in Hollywood?

  A: I knew absolutely nothing about it. I didn't know the difference between what production was like in Hollywood or New York-even that was a discovery to me. I didn't go to Los Angeles for two years, and then I discovered that whole industry.

  Q: So you became part of the New York film industry first?

  A: Yes, it was just a wonderful atmosphere to be accepted into, and I'll always remember it fondly. People were extremely generous and kind to me.

  Q: How did you arrive in New York?

  A: I came the conventional immigrant route, by boat. My boat was not allowed to pull into the United States, so it came through Montreal along the St. Lawrence River, and I took a Greyhound bus from Montreal to New York.

  Q: Just like Joe Buck, the character Jon Voight plays in Midnight Cowboy.

  A: Yes, that image of Joe Buck seeing the skyline of New York from the bus was the image that I remember. The bus came through the Lincoln Tunnel-that's how I saw New York for the first time-and we managed to do it in the film. There's something to be said for being sensitized, being fresh, and seeing a place for the first time, as opposed to growing up somewhere and being so used to elements you no longer notice them.

  Q: How did you get the assignment to photograph Midnight Cowboy?

  A: It was my first feature in the United States. I happened to be lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time. I was a twenty-eight-yearold kid from Poland who was suddenly doing a lot of commercials
in New York. John Schlesinger, who had a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) background, came to New York to do this picture and either heard of me or saw some of my work in Europe and started inquiring about me. They called Roman Polanski, a friend who put in a good word for me. They were trying to decide between two actors to play Joe Buck, Jon Voight being one. They built a small set on one of the stages downtown, on Fourth or Fifth Street on the Lower East Side. There was another cinematographer who was going to shoot the first day. They asked me to come in to shoot the second day on the same set with the second actor, who happened to be Jon Voight. I didn't feel all that comfortable walking in and taking over the other cinematographer's crew-by then he knew that I was a competitor. They liked what I did and offered me the job.

  Q: Midnight Cowboy is a very American film, although it was made by a British director and photographed by a Polish cinematographer. It's American in theme, but you contributed a European visual sensibility. Joe Buck was from Texas; he had never been East before, and you captured the emotions of discovery. Did the director, John Schlesinger, allow you to contribute visually to the film?

  A: He did, and the producer, Jerome Hellman, contributed an enormous amount to our freedom of expression. We went for a long, six-week trip to Texas and Florida to learn about America. John came from London and didn't know much about it. I came from Poland, and we didn't know where the Joe Bucks of this world came from. The screenwriter, Waldo Salt, Schlesinger, and myself went for the longest drives through Texas, you can imagine trying to see what it looked like. We'd get up in the morning, have breakfast, fill up the gas tank, start driving, and watch the speedometer going from fifty to sixty to seventy to eighty, and the gas gauge going from full to empty, over and over again. Through all of this, we got a sense of what Texas looked like. Waldo Salt was writing the script. Both Jerry Hellman and Schlesinger made Waldo an integral part of this creative process. Whatever happened on that trip, Waldo would immediately adapt it, come up with new pages, and talk about it with John. That style of work continued, not only on locations, but even in the studio in New York. Very often, Schlesinger would stage a scene and we would have a question. We would call Waldo to come in, record it on a tape recorder-then we would break for an hour. They would go upstairs and rework the scene, and inevitably it was better.

  Q: Was it difficult for you to work with a seasoned crew, fixed in a lot of their old work methods?

  A: Not only that, but it was pretty much unheard of for a twenty-eightyear old kid who didn't have any track record to suddenly take the key position of cinematographer. So there was a little bit of tension, but we overcame it.

  Q: I understand you had some struggles in convincing the crew to use a reflex camera.

  A: Right. I came from Europe, and we were used to reflex cameras. I just liked looking at the ground glass, which is an actual frame. The guys who were working in New York were used to the old Mitchell cameras with a rackover system with a finder. If you moved the finder to the left or the right, you weren't seeing the frame, but they felt uncomfortable doing the picture with a reflex camera. I tried to convince them, and they were dismissing it as an amateur way of doing a major motion picture, so we ended up having two cameras. We compromised. Wherever I felt accuracy was needed for me to look at the shot, we used a reflex camera.

  Q: What was the size of the crew on Midnight Cowboy?

  A: It was an average-sized crew-by today's standards it would be small. To put it into perspective, it cost $3.1 million in 1969. Today, on that kind of a schedule for as many days as we shot, it would probably be a $25-30 million picture.

  Q: Where were the interiors shot, and how did you achieve a natural light look throughout the film?

  A: We had gone to enough abandoned buildings to see what the light looked like. The interiors were, to a large extent, studio interiors. One of the trickiest things was to match the exteriors and the interiors shot on the location with interiors done on the stage. The street for the exterior of the tenement building was in downtown New York, somewhere in Soho. The staircase where Joe Buck carries the refrigerator was in an abandoned building. However, from the point when he opens the door and they walk into the apartment-it's all studio. I really spent an awful lot of sweat trying to make that part of the same look. I am most proud I succeeded in doing that. Remember, that was a day and age where all the emulsions and lenses we have today were not available. It was still 5254 negative, and it was not as easy to work with.

  Q: Was rear-screen projection used for any shots inside the bus as Joe Buck travels from Texas to New York?

  A: No, some shots were handheld, we also used a dolly. The flashbacks of Joe Buck's life were mostly done handheld, and I operated the camera myself.

  Q: The exposures on the bus are so naturalistic. How did you light these sequences?

  A: Today's lighting equipment and emulsions would make it much easier to do. I was mixing the light. I was exposing either for interior or exterior, depending on what was happening outside or inside the bus. I either gelled the window or adapted more light inside. It was very tough because the temperatures on the bus were really high, especially in Texas and Florida. It was ninety-five degrees outside; by the time you turned those lights on, it was 120 degrees and the make-up would flow down.

  There was a wonderful man, Otto Paolony, in Deluxe Laboratory in New York, which is no longer in existence. Without him, I wouldn't have been able to do it. Every time I had a problem or I wanted a clear-cut assessment, even from distant locations, I talked to Otto at seven o'clock in the morning and he would say, "You got it, there's nothing to worry about." I would say to the production people, "Let's strike this set, let's move on," without seeing it-I knew.

  Q: Did you overexpose the color flash-forward sequences in Midnight Cowboy to give them a slightly surreal quality?

  A: Those flash-forwards to Florida were overexposed two and a half stops.

  Q: How did you approach the flashbacks?

  A: Some of them were shot in black-and-white. Some of it was not overexposed in terms of overall exposure, but it was the contrast of light-for example, the effects of policemen's flashlights. Those were extremely hot. It was meant for a shocking wake-up, jarring light, but the negative wasn't overexposed.

  Q: The long-lens shots of Joe Buck which gave the impression he was surrounded by a sea of people in New York were very effective. Where did you get the idea to use that technique?

  A: I must give credit for that kind of thinking to the year I spent shooting commercials in New York. When we were doing those commercials in the sixties, we were not constricted by advertising agencies and crowds of people standing behind us. We were allowed to fool around, and by doing so, I discovered a lot of wide lenses I had never used before and close-focus with wide lenses, something I had never done on films in Poland. We would remove the screws from the lens holding the focusing ring, to focus it much closer than the lens was intended, in order to do a fingernail shot. We played a lot. Once I discovered Schlesinger was open to suggestions and was looking for an unorthodox approach, we would talk about it and out of this came long lenses, wide lenses, and all those things that were not so commonly used then as they are now.

  Q: Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight have two very different kinds of faces. How did you approach photographing them?

  A: Lighting was a problem because Hoffman's skin pigmentation was much darker, he had an olive tone. Jon Voight's skin was quite white, with much more pink in it. He was also very sensitive to sunlight-two hours in the sunlight during the shooting and his color would change. When you're shooting a sequence for the whole day, or two or three days, you're in the lab worrying. Suddenly, in progression he's much pinker here and there. Also, Jon would reflect light much more, so I had to watch out for that. We didn't have any special filters or lenses for either Jon or Hoffman. We did it with light. I tried to keep a little light off of Jon Voight because of his skin coloration. Hoffman could take any of it very easily.
r />   Q: The neighborhoods in the beginning of the film are attractive and upscale. As the characters begin to plunge into despair, New York becomes dingy, and it moves into a cold, nasty winter. Was this a deliberate and conscious concept?

  A: It was dictated by the script. John Lloyd, the production designer, did a wonderful job pacing that progression. Joe Buck was a young man who was coming from Texas, expecting the riches of New York to come his way, and as the story progresses, it's sliding down and down and eventually ends up in the horror of them going on this bus trip to Florida. So the selection of locations, the color of the sets, the choice of make-up, wardrobe, Dustin Hoffman's beard, all reflected the same thing-which was dictated by the progression of the script. If it isn't structured by somebody at the very beginning, it's a miracle if it happens at all. If it is structured, and somebody takes care to follow it up and understand it, the chances are somebody will receive it. Ninety percent of success or failure does not happen on the day you shoot-that has to be planned. Even if you prepare to 100 percent of your ability, you will end up giving up 10, 15, or 20. You will realize only 80 percent of that 100. If you prepare only 50 percent, you'll end up with 15 percent.

  Q: Midnight Cowboy was restored for a twenty-fifth anniversary rerelease. What were t:he challenges in making a new release print of the film?

  A: The studio which made Midnight Cowboy ceased to exist. The negative wasn't properly stored and the internegatives were screwed up. When we were redoing the answer print, there was only so much we could do with the picture to revive it, but we were able to take a mono soundtrack recorded twenty-six years ago and, by the use of digital technology, we were able to transcribe each one of the instruments separately and make a stereo soundtrack out of it. It really is remarkable how many sound technology advances they have made and we are nowhere with the visual end of it. They were trying to make a new answer print of Cool Hand Luke. That negative was even more destroyed than ours. Every time someone buys a studio which has vaults, somebody says, "How much does it cost? Just get rid of it!" They move it to some storage facility. Depending on how films are stored on the shelves for all of those years, whether it is up or down, some reels hold up fine and some reels don't. Humidity, heat destroys it more.