Principal Photography Page 9
Don McAlpine, ASC, was born in Australia. His interest in still photography began when he exhibited in amateur contests. In the late 1950s, he became a teacher of physical education and science in high schools for the New South Wales State Teaching Service. He began to use a motion picture camera to analyze sports activities in his physical education course. While employed as a teacher, McAlpine started working as a freelance news cinematographer. In the early 1970s, he met Director Bruce Beresford and photographed The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, which was McAlpine's first feature film.
The seventies was a flourishing time for the Australian cinema and McAlpine was a central figure in that country's New Wave through his work on The Getting of Wisdom, Don's Party, M~y Brilliant Career, and Breaker Morant.
An early morning telephone call from Director Paul Mazursky led to McAlpine's American film debut on Tempest, followed by further collaborations with Mazursky on Moscow on the Hudson, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, and Moon Over Parador.
In addition to his longtime associations with Bruce Beresford and Paul Mazursky, McAlpine has worked with many directors, including: Richard Franklin, Tom Jefferies, Gillian Armstrong, Peter Collinson, Peter Wener, Paul Newman, Mel Gibson, Roger Simon, John McTiernan, Alan Pakula, Martin Ritt, Ron Howard, John Badham, Phillip Noyce, Chris Columbus, Baz Luhrmann, and Lee Tamahori.
A meticulous craftsman, Don McAlpine brings many gifts to the films he photographs. His lifelong love for the outdoors translates cinematically into crisp images of forests, lakes, and morning skies. His view from down under has brought Australia to the world and has captured America with an explorer's sense of discovery.
SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
Surrender in Paradise
Patrick
The Journalist
My Brilliant Career
Breaker Morant
The Earthling
Puberty Blues
Tempest
Moscow on the Hudson
The Fringe Dwellers
Orphans
Moon Over Parador
Parenthood
Stanley & Iris
The Hard Way
Medicine Man
The Man Without a Face
The Edge
Q: How did you become a cinematographer in Australia?
A: I had a background exhibiting still photography in amateur photographic contests. In the late fifties, I was in the New South Wales State Teaching Service as a teacher of physical education and science in high schools. In my physical education course, I started to use a motion picture camera for analysis of various sporting activities. I worked in conjunction with a lot of the coaches preparing teams for the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, so I became moderately proficient with recording motion on film. When I was schoolteaching, the television news department where I was doing freelance work gave me the nod and suggested I apply for a job at the television station. I went to see the guys in the camera department, who said, "Your work in news is pretty good, but you don't have any technical background." So I raced home and bought two great books: The Principles of Cinematography by Wheeler, a very technical book, which explains the mechanics related to motion picture cameras up to that point in the fifties; and Cox's On Optics which is a Focal Press book. I studied them like a university subject. I went to the interview, and there were five gentlemen, obviously old cameramen-they all looked a bit disheveled. The chairman said, "We know about your work, but there's a note here you're probably a hit deficient on the technical side." I said, "I was told that, and I've done a bit of work trying to help educate myself." They said, "Oh, that's good-why did they change from sixteen or eighteen frames to twenty-four frames when sound came in?" So I started on a long dissertation about the response of galvanometers and the frequency you get as the film goes past the surface. Eventually, I started to look at these guys and they showed either dismay or incredible interest because they had never heard of it, and I realized very quickly I was about to make a complete ass of myself. I wound it up as quickly as I could, and they said, "That's very impressive." They asked me a couple of other questions, I managed to modify the answers down, and got the job. That's the way I got into the business. I was a technical person who got very much involved. I've been involved in theater all my life as an amateur. I didn't get inspired by any great guys. I never went to film school. I went to the film pictures to enjoy them. I never went to study them.
I was a stringer cameraman for television. As the teaching service started to get concerned about my extracurricular activities, I was offered a job as an assistant cameraman in television. So I left teaching. While all this was going on, a ground swell of people involved in film as an expressive form were all over the place, and were very well supported by an experimental film fund run by the government. This all just kept going ahead to the point where one prime minister of the country was so visionary and so well advised that he then decided to start a film bank. One of the people they got back from England to run it was the director, Bruce Beresford, an Australian. The first film financed by this government bank was The Adventures of Barry McKenzie. I'd done some work on award-winning, dramatized documentaries. By then, I had worked my way through television and had become a cinematographer working in current affairs, dramatized documentaries, and small dramas. I then transferred to the Australian Film Unit, now called Film Australia. It is a similar organization to the worldrenowned Canadian Film Board. In a few years there, I became chief cameraman. I was granted leave, and did The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, the first of the films of the Australian New Wave, with Bruce Beresford.
Q: As director of photography on Bruce Beresford's Breaker Morant, Dons Party, The Getting of Wisdom, Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career, and many other films, you were an integral part of the Australian New Wave in the 1970s. What was the film industry in Australia like prior to this period?
A: Before the seventies, there was no indigenous film industry in Australia in my lifetime. There had been quite a strong film industry in the twenties and early thirties. Then the Americans came in, bought it all up, and closed it down to avoid any competition for their product in Australia. From the early thirties, Australia was used as a location for many films from England. There were sporadic attempts by individuals. Charles Chauvel did a film called Jedda, and there were a couple of other films in the forties and fifties. It all died, it couldn't be sustained as an industry. In the early days, there was always a core of craftspeople, technicians involved in newsreels, in documentaries, which was a pretty lively form in Australia, and in cinema shorts and cinema commercials. When television came in, there were television commercials, but there was really no sustainable motion picture industry. In the late fifties and early sixties, there was strong support for the arts in all forms and in filmmaking in particular. It was an experiment to see if anyone could make a film. I was involved in a lot of these.
Q: What are the principal similarities and differences between working as a director of photography in Australia and America?
A: The biggest mistake I made when I first started working in America was assuming because of our parallel histories as pioneering countries we were of similar background-entirely wrong. The individual in America is supreme, there is far more concern in Australia for the group, the society. In America, much time is spent in excessive organization, which generally becomes a negative force in any creative effort. You're just organized to a point where you cannot show any degree of flexibility. In Australia, we'll organize it pretty well. The classic situation in a moderately budgeted Australian film is that the production office is generally manned by a line producer, one assistant, one accountant, and a runner. That's all that would be set up to organize a film. Here, on quite a modest film, there could be three times as many people as that.
Q: What is the make-up of the camera crew in Australia?
A: Identical. There's the director of photography, an operator, then you must have a first assistant or focus puller and a second assistant or clappe
r/loader. If it's a project that's using a lot of film, then you need a loader to keep the film coming. That is one department that does work almost identically in any country I've worked in. I've had the fortune to work in Australia, England, Germany, France, Italy, and in Asia. Basically, the camera crew is a constant because you need those people. They're the only people who work all day on a movie crew. That's anywhere in the world. The relationship between myself and the operator is personal and varied, but everyone else is performing identical functions, no matter where you are or what language is being spoken. I feel comfortable in the camera department with good people, no matter where I am.
Q: Breaker Morant takes place principally in one room. What were the challenges in filming the courtroom sequences?
A: We turned an old cinema into a stage. That courtroom was made out of plywood and corrugated cardboard. It was a well-designed, but cheap set. Bruce Beresford and I shot most of the graphic, isolated exteriors on a Sunday with nobody. The crew was working incredibly hard. We didn't want to ask them to work on the Sunday. So Bruce and I would just go out with a couple of horse wranglers and shoot the carts going across. A lot of the big, wide shots that gave the film space were shot in a very short time. Basically, it is a courtroom drama. We managed to deceive the audience into thinking it was something much grander. You'll find a lot of energy in the courtroom is borrowed from the scenes we shot outside. We used split diopters and all sorts of little tricks to enliven the courtroom scene. Wherever we could find an excuse to move the camera, we moved it.
Q: What is a split diopter?
A: A diopter is a bifocal lens. It's just cut in half. The screen is split, so you can have half of the shot focusing at ten feet and the other half focusing at four feet. So you can have a man sitting close to you and the person he's talking to, who is much farther away, are both in quite sharp focus-which we did on Breaker Morant. There's a dividing line, but in that film we used the cords that operated the windows as the line. If anyone looks at it closely, you'll see a slightly different focus in the texture of the wall, but nobody does. As long as you don't sustain the shot or push it to a ridiculous point, the audience will buy it. Split diopter lenses are ideal for courtroom scenes because people stay still. You could use them a lot more when you're with a director who will understand they are great to use for that small cut. Most younger directors want the whole scene to go right through, from beginning to end. The actor is going to move across this focus line and you can't use it.
Q: Were the courtroom scenes in Breaker Morant shot with a single camera?
A: All single camera. All of the Australian films were shot with a single camera. Chris Columbus, the director of Nine Months, is basically from comedy, and always has a second camera available. It's often a big compromise for lighting and in detailing both cameras. If you shoot an actor in a place for one camera, then it doesn't work on the other camera. From the actor's point of view in a two character scene, one actor is being presented on one camera and two actors are being presented on the other. I would much prefer to work very, very fast. You can almost work as fast with one camera as you can with two. A second camera certainly has its place for stunts, special effects, high camp, outrageous comedy. We shot stunts on Nine Months with four cameras, but for the bread and butter work, one camera is the way to go. I'm not a strong advocate of two cameras as a day-to-day thing, but if the director insists on it, I've got to do it where I can.
Q: What was the shooting ratio on Breaker Morant?
A: Breaker Morant was about ten to one. Because of economy, we shot eighty-five thousand feet. Since then, in America I've done several films that went over a million feet. We shot movies at eight to one in Australia. When you consider the run up and all the rest, it isn't eight to one of useable film because there's a lot of film consumed in clappers and running down after the scene. Also, you get all those unpregnant pauses.
Q: Breaker Morant concludes with a military execution scene which takes place at dawn. Was any additional light utilized to photograph that sequence?
A: The firing squad scene was shot over two mornings at dawn. There was no lighting involved at all, it was all sunlight. I insisted everyone be there an hour before sunrise. The hour was in case one of the trucks broke down. Everyone was there precisely one hour before and they were standing around waiting. It was cold. Of course everything worked perfectly, so they got a bit angry, but it was a fine scene. It was shot with military precision. I had two cameras. The whole scene was rehearsed in my mind, with the crew and the director. It was all virtually single shots, and we just moved to another situation. Within those half-hour breaks, we achieved up to twelve different camera angles. It was very, very fast. I must admit, I was a bit tense because that film was on a very limited budget and we only had those two mornings. We didn't quite have the star system you've got here, but Bryan Brown was sitting on the chair discussing his motivation with Bruce as the sun was coming up. I yelled at him that his motivation was I'd smack him in the mouth if he didn't shut up and get on with it. That's something you certainly couldn't do in Hollywood. Then the scene putting the bodies into the wagon was shot about an hour after. We were trying to keep that same morning light.
Q: Don's Party had many characters and complex blocking. How did you and Director Bruce Beresford work out the camera positions?
A: Don's Parry was shot at night in a real house. Alongside every scene in the script we had a floor plan of that house. Each actor was given a color so we knew exactly where each and every actor was at any given time in the film. A character would be drinking at the bar for a half an hour of the film-then he walked over and stayed talking to this girl for forty-five minutes. Every time that corner of the room was seen, he would have to be talking to that girl. Everyone was in place for every angle.
Q: It sounds like the actors had to be very precise in their blocking.
A: It was pretty rigorous. Improvisation is a luxury I became involved in when I got to America. Most Australian films haven't the budget. Mrs. Doubtfire was miles and miles of improvisation, but you'd find probably 80 percent of the film was still the original script. There are improvisations within the original script and working with a talent like Robin Williams, but it's amazing, often even with all that work it still gets back to the script. That's the only way a movie hangs together.
Q: You've worked with two wonderful improvisational actors, John Cassavetes in Tempest and Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire. Is there a differ ent approach in filming the work of an actor when you don't precisely know where they are going to be at any one point?
A: Yes, that situation is an occasion where two cameras are justified because you may be on a close-up, then right alongside of it you sneak in a camera shooting wide. Then, if the actor goes bananas you've got a chance of keeping up with him. If you're too tight, it just gets very distracting. If the actor is moving fast, that's the classic place where two cameras locked side by side works quite well. If you can't really anticipate what's going to happen, then two cameras are great.
Q: How did you get the assignment to photograph Tempest, directed by Paul Mazursky?
A: Tempest was my first big American film. I'd shot a couple of films in the Philippines and an American movie in Australia. I got a call in the middle of the night from this guy, Mazursky. He rang me at three o'clock in the morning because he got the time wrong. I said, "It's three o'clock in the morning, I'm thrilled you rang. Ring me back in fifteen minutes, I'll get up and have a cup of coffee and I'll be able to talk to you." In the interim, I managed to get a book out and found out who Paul Mazursky really was. He rang me back, and we struck a deal there on the phone. He said he would pay me to meet him in Athens, Greece for two weeks and if we got along together, he'd keep me on the movie. The script was a little strange to me. I didn't fully get some of the American cultural background to the characters. We met formally and had a lot of discussions. From that point on, I started to understand what the movie was about. I ne
eded Paul to interpret some of it. The topography of the places we were shooting was something I'd never seen before. So because of my lack of knowledge and experience, I did have to develop a vision. Of course, by the end of the two weeks I could see the movie and we shot it.
Q: What was the visual concept of Tempest?
A: It had to fulfill the John Cassavetes character's requirement of a magical place. The whole place had to have an illusion of reality to take him away from the life we'd seen him live in New York. It had to be that mystical place a lot of people were trying to escape to. It was a fulfillment of the midlife crisis of the character. The audience had to feel the infection of that place in Greece as Cassavetes might feel it. There had to be a slight feeling of opulent excess in New York. The balance between those two places were the two sides of the scale of the film.
Q: What photographic elements helped to create the magical world in Greece?
A: The light-it's cloudless. We had a lot of trouble getting cloudless skies. We'd shoot scenes, and in the afternoon the clouds came. It was supposed to be an idyllic world for this man who had lived in a terribly delineated square, boxed world of New York. There were quite brilliant, massive slabs of color and totally irregular shapes. The production designer, Pato Guzman, and Paul flew along half the coast of the world searching for that little magic bay that created the illusion. That bay was a beautiful spot. They didn't arrive at a bay and say, "We'll turn this into it"-that was that place.
Q: The scene where Susan Sarandon, who plays mistress to the Cassavetes character, and Molly Ringwald, who plays his daughter, sing "Why Do Fools Fall in Love" in the water is a gorgeous moment. The two women have a special enchanting beauty about them. How did you capture this on film?