Doyle had an office in the old 3M warehouse building that he had decorated with red Japanese lanterns, Chinese murals, votive candles. There were shelves crammed with photography books and works of literature that he carted around the world in shabby suitcases. Late one evening, Night said to Brick and me, “Come here, you gotta check this out.” Night sounded like a fourteen-year-old sneaking around. We slipped into Super Chris’s office, and Night asked, “What does it smell like?” The office had no windows, and the air in it was heavy and musky and foreign. Doyle’s den reeked of…Doyle himself.
Jeff Robinov, the Warner Bros. production chief, didn’t come to the set at all during the forty-five days of shooting. Alan Horn, the president of Warners (as Night finally took to calling his new studio), came once. There was general nervousness about Horn’s visit. Franny, Night’s unflappable driver, replaced his usual shorts with pressed black slacks to pick Horn up at the airport.
When Night introduced Horn to his director of photography, he was prepared for anything. One of Doyle’s specialties was the first impression. Upon meeting Night’s parents, the doctors Shyamalan, Doyle said, “Save me—I’m incurable.” Upon meeting Cindy Cheung’s mother, he said, “You can’t be the mother, you must be the sister,” and started playfully hitting on her. During a party scene loaded with extras drinking fake beer from real bottles, Doyle walked up to a group of kids in for the day and said, “Heinekens all around?” But when he met Horn, Doyle did little more than bow while Night shrugged and said, “He’s the best we could do.”
Horn went into Cleveland Heep’s bungalow to watch Paul do a solo scene. Horn was dressed with a studied casualness, wearing loose Levi’s and an elegant lightweight sweater, the sleeves pushed up to nearly the elbows. Still, he looked like the boss. He took a piece of paper off Cleveland’s desk to make notes to himself. When the scene wrapped, he mimed clapping.
He complimented Paul on his work, and Paul thanked him but did nothing to extend the conversation, as you would expect. Horn picked up on Paul’s uneasiness, wished him well on the rest of the shoot, and Paul trundled off to his trailer. Night took Horn to his trailer to have a conversation about the state of the movie. A small army remained in the bungalow to set up the next shot, rearranging the furniture and the camera and the lights. It was hot and crowded in the bungalow: There were three prop people, maybe eight gaffers and grips, a couple of stand-ins, including Chrismandu, some hair and makeup people, maybe fifteen people in all. Everybody was aware that the boss was around for the day, and some were wondering wryly if Jimbo’s would open that night. There was no chance.
With no provocation, Doyle announced, “Okay, people, why not, already?” He sounded like a schoolteacher addressing an inattentive class.
And then, in one fell swoop, he dropped his beltless lightweight cotton pants to his ankles. To the question boxers or briefs, the answer was neither.
People whooped and one person said in a voice filled with mock pain, “Oh, dude—why?”
Doyle, beaming in the crowded bungalow, did a pirouette and said, “Why not? Why not?”
One of the hair ladies screeched, “He’s got a small butt!”
John Rusk—the movie’s assistant director, a droll bearded man—said, “That’s not all that’s small.”
After lunch, the regulars filed into the screening room to watch dailies. Super Chris was often the last one in, when he came at all, but on this day he was early, standing in the back row as the seats and steps filled up. Two seats were left open, for Night and Alan Horn. John Rusk stood outside the entrance. He could see Horn and Night approaching. There was some shrieking, and John Rusk popped his head in. In the back of the screening room, Doyle had dropped his pants again, this time for an audience double in size.
Lady was Rusk’s fifth movie with Night, and he had an intuitive loyalty to the director. His job was to make sure the trains ran on time, and they did. When he said, “Quiet on the set, please,” there was immediate silence. Rusk knew if Horn walked into the screening room and saw the movie’s cinematographer standing with his pants around his ankles, it might not inspire confidence in the whole Bristol operation. But he let it play out. He couldn’t try to manage Doyle. Nobody could, not even Night. The movie’s DP did another dance, naked to the Lady world, and then pulled up his pants. About a second later, no more than two, Horn entered the screening room. The sober-looking Warner Bros. boss took his seat, and the director of Lady in the Water—a $140 million business, the production and marketing budget combined—sat beside him. The dailies were shown, and they were good. There were no focus issues. Horn clapped again and spread some praise around. Night was running a tight ship. Horn was pleased.
Night heard about his cinematographer’s public displays of nakedness soon enough—the minute Horn went off to make a call. Night thought it was funny. More than that: He understood it. “Chris has a need to create excitement for himself, to be unconventional, to feel dangerous,” Night said. “He needs to see excitement in other people’s eyes. It’s what keeps him alive.”
Night, really, was the same way. He forever needed another person responding to him, to the words he said, to the ideas he had, to the movies he made. He had to be inspiring, and he had to win you over. When it went well—when that first live audience devoured The Sixth Sense; when he cast a magic spell on the Burch guests that balmy April evening—it left Night feeling euphoric. When Night’s connection to other people was muted or nonexistent—his inability to engage the mother and her young actor son in that elevator in New York; the public’s jumbled response to The Village—he would get sullen. You could see his excitement if there was somebody new around, a fresh subject to convert. But if the only people within earshot were Brick Mason or Maddie or Betsy from wardrobe, he was happy to work them over again, too. The biggest difference between Night and Chris Doyle was that Doyle had a need to deaden life’s pains. (Alcohol helped Doyle feel more like Super Chris.) Pain inspired Night.
Night loved working with Doyle. To Night, he was an artist version of Allen Iverson, the star guard for the Philadelphia 76ers, “hugely talented, but not willing to do what the team needs him to do to win.” The challenge to Night was to see if he could inspire Doyle to be something other than what he was.
Night didn’t see anything unusual in the timing, how Doyle was pulling his pants up as Horn was coming in.
“He’s just lucky,” Night said.
It was surprising, to hear that from Night. He was usually so dismissive of luck. A few days earlier, he had gone on a tirade about an uncle who claimed his young son would now pulverize Night in one-on-one because the boy had suddenly shot up to six-two. “That’s completely the wrong message to send him, that he’ll win because he has height,” Night had said. “What’s height? Genetic luck. Tell me when he’s taken over one hundred thousand shots in his life, like I have, then I’ll be worried.” Night was actually angry. He didn’t want his cousin to turn into another soft, affluent American who felt he was owed basketball success merely because he was tall.
Had Horn seen Super Chris naked, the cinematographer certainly would have been fired. The stakes were high that day. The stakes were high every day, yet Doyle was getting it done, getting Night what he needed, making him feel uncomfortable, as he wanted to feel.
“That’s it?” I asked Night. “Just luck?”
“Look,” Night said, “give Chris ten takes. Nine of them, he’s focusing on a flowerpot or some other insanely wrong thing. But one of them he nails. Every time. He’s lucky.”
“I thought your thing is you make your own luck.”
“For me, yes,” Night said. “Chris Doyle is different.”
A few weeks later, Paul was swimming in Story’s underwater cave, ingeniously dropped into the industrial plant’s fifty-foot-high circular water tank. Paul was a good swimmer, and his submerged acting was photographed by a team with a specialty in underwater photography. “It’s amazing how in focus you guys get everythin
g, even though you’re shooting underwater,” Night told them. Doyle and Glenn had nothing to do with the shot.
Nobody was paying any particular attention to Doyle until he stripped down once again and paraded for a long moment at the top of the tank. The shock factor was gone by now, but four or five people dutifully raised their cell-phone cameras to record the moment anyhow. Bhavna was visiting that day, and Night comically shielded his wife’s eyes from the action as Doyle dived in. Once in the water, the skinny-dipping DP attached himself to the movie’s lead actor. Between gasps for air, Paul could be heard shouting, “This is unholy!”
The dozens of men and women working the movie—the crew Night had assembled—represented, collectively, over a thousand years of filmmaking experience. Some were more willing to share than others. Jimmy Mazzola, the prop man, was the most willing of all. Night picked up stuff from him all the time. When he saw Jimmy each day, he’d say, “My man!” Jimmy and Night were on the same wavelength, even though Jimmy was as blue-collar as Night was highbrow. To Jimmy, his vast collection of mechanical butterflies, real butterflies, underwater pens, oversize glasses, and all the rest were the tools of his trade. To Night, they were talismans.
One day Jimmy said, “Something you’ll never hear, like from an ordinary guy who just goes to the movies, is somebody talking about the way a movie’s photographed. I only heard it this one time in all my life.”
He then told about working on the movie The Pick-up Artist, in Brooklyn in the mid-1980s. It was being shot by Gordon Willis, the director of photography for The Godfather. A New York mobster made arrangements to visit the set, not to see Molly Ringwald in action or to hang out with Danny Aiello in his trailer or to check in with one of the teamsters but to meet one person: Gordon Willis. “The wiseguy says to Gordy, ‘The way you shot The Godfather, that was something beautiful, never seen a movie better lit in all my life.’”
But it was obvious from watching dailies that Lady in the Water wasn’t being shot like your ordinary mainstream Hollywood movie. Amid his drinking and stomach-kissing and flashing, Doyle was doing luscious work. He often needed a lot of help to get there—especially from Bill O’Leary, the lighting chief—but he got there.
The photography looked timeless. You couldn’t tell what time of day it was, or even the year. Except for the cell phones and Young-Soon’s low-slung jeans, there was nothing modern about the movie. It might as well have been set in the Summer of Love. (Many of the wardrobe choices were bound to the late 1960s, not for psychedelia but for earth tones.) There was something gentle, sexual, and portentous coming through Doyle’s work, like the dune scenes in Summer of ’42. There were days when Night actually felt okay about the movie. One day in dailies, he said, “All right, Maddie—you can call off Roger.” It was an inside joke that everybody got: Night would not need to make an emergency call to bring back Roger Deakins, the toothpick-chewing DP who had shot The Village so well.
Technically, Super Chris was a manager. He oversaw the “camera department,” a group of a half-dozen people he worked closely with and quaintly referred to as “my team.” (Doyle complained that he had only one “yellow” on his team, Yen Nguyen, the camera loader, short, dark, beautiful, and very quiet.) When a scene was being shot, there were two people right beside Doyle. One was Glenn Kaplan, and the other was Ronald “Red” Burke, the dolly grip, who moved the camera as the film rolled. The job requires assured hands, a keen sense of awareness, and ESP. To have the camera in the right place at the right time, the dolly grip has to know what the actors are doing, what the DP is seeing, and what the director is thinking. Night was pleased by how often Red knew exactly where to be. Night, working with Red for the first time, could see why there were movie people who regarded him as the best dolly grip on the East Coast and maybe in the country.
Red, a lifelong Brooklynite, was the old pro of Lady in the Water. His first movie job had been on The Godfather, working under Gordon Willis himself. Sam Mercer liked to say, “Red came in on The Godfather, and he’s going out on Silvertide,” the movie’s high-decibel Dylan cover band. Red had worked on nearly two dozen Woody Allen movies, most of them with Gordon Willis and Jimmy Mazzola, and by the summer of Lady, he had fluffy white hair and a slightly stooped back. Doyle’s nickname for Red was “One Hundred Years of Cinema.” Occasionally, after a good take, Doyle would hug Red and kiss the top of his head through hair that hadn’t been red in years. Still, there was something boyish about Red. When lunch was called, he’d get on a bike with a basket and race over to the food tent, a few hundred yards away, to beat the line. He knew the tricks of his trade.
One day they were shooting a scene in which Paul and Bryce were sitting on a bed. The scene was quiet and intimate and long, and it required Bryce to cry. Night wanted to start the scene with the camera close to the actors and gradually pull away from them—a pullback shot. Night, of course, had no plans to shoot coverage. (No coverage, no coverage, no coverage.) For the scene to work, he’d need perfect performances from five people: the two leads, plus Super Chris, Glenn, and Red. Doyle had to move the camera back and forth subtly between the two actors. Red had to push the camera, with Chris sitting behind it, down a fifteen-foot-long train track at a precise, ever-changing speed. And Glenn had to adjust the camera’s focus over the course of the take.
Doyle spent an hour or more setting up the shot, with Chrismandu and Jacqueline standing in for the two leads. It was being shot inside a warehouse that was dark, dead, and stuffy, except for the chilly patches where cold air was piped in through a giant hose. The catering table looked tired, with the cap off the peanut butter jar and a knife stuck in it. Plastic water bottles, their labels peeling off, were floating in a bucket of half-melted ice. Doyle was in his own world, seemingly obsessed with placing Chrismandu’s head in a certain position so that Cleveland Heep’s shadow would fall on Story’s delicate face, even though it would be there in only a few frames. But the big thing, the pullback part of the shot, Doyle never rehearsed.
When he finally had the shadows and light where he wanted them, the actors and Night were called in. Night didn’t want to rehearse with Paul and Bryce. He knew he would get the most emotion in the first or second take. They knew what to do—they had practiced the scene well in the basement rehearsal room. Night was worried about wearing them out. And when it came time to roll film for the first take, Paul and Bryce hit all their notes. But Night felt that Doyle’s camera work was jerky, and Red’s pace, uncharacteristically, was too fast. “I’m not feeling the love,” Night said. He felt no love on the second and third takes, either. And then the takes started getting bad.
Red was either too slow or too fast; he paused too long in the middle or not long enough. Sometimes he knew things weren’t working—in the middle of one take, he mouthed an “Oh, shit.” On other takes, Night told him. Doyle wasn’t making things easier, panning too far left and too far right, as if the actors’ ears were the most important things in the shot. (Whether the shots were in focus—Glenn’s work—Night wouldn’t know until he saw dailies.) In between takes, Red was watching replays on a monitor to see what the camera was seeing, with Night next to him shaking his head in a slow burn. Red was off his game on a shot that would normally be second nature to him.
By the ninth take, Paul was fighting boredom, and Bryce was looking cried out. Night, with some hostility, said to Doyle, “You go so far right and so far left, you lose the entire mood of the scene—why don’t you just lock it down?” Lock the camera in place, with the two faces in the frame, and do no panning at all.
Super Chris looked emasculated. This time somebody else had denuded him. He walked away for several minutes. When he returned, he refused to make eye contact with Night or to respond to anything he said. When Night, desperate, resorted to the language of wooing, Super Chris, dead serious, said, “Aren’t I allowed to be quiet?”
They shot an eleventh take, a twelfth take, a thirteenth take. The actors were getting more and more tired
, though between takes, with the tension swelling like a bad sprain, Paul watched intently. Red, the old pro, was white-faced and unnerved. None of Night’s usual charms were working. For once, his spectacular vitality seemed manufactured. He’d say, “Cut!” “Great!” “Awesome!” “Let’s do another one right away! Fast, fast, fast!” But it didn’t seem like anyone was feeling the love. At last, on professionalism alone, the takes improved, and Night felt he had something he could use. If there wasn’t, he could reshoot, but Night regarded that strictly as a last resort.
The vision Night had for the scene hadn’t played out. He had the shot in his mind and the shot on the storyboards, and then real life intervened. But what he had was okay. He could use it. More work would only make it worse. Night quietly called for lunch. Red, feeling defeated, slowly walked to the big white food tent.
At lunch, Red sat with Jimmy Mazzola, Bill O’Leary, and some of the other New Yorkers. Somebody said, “You did a good job in there.”
“The director didn’t think so,” Red answered.
He wasn’t using Night’s name. He knew nothing about the success of The Sixth Sense, didn’t know that Night had directed it. Red didn’t go to movies, he only worked on them. Red said the problem with the pullback scene was that the mechanics of it should have been figured out in rehearsals, either with the stand-ins or with the actual actors. Either way, he would have learned what mark to hit on what word. “Bad planning—that was the whole problem,” Red said. The director had embarrassed him. He wasn’t used to that.
He considered himself a mechanic, even if others did not. He believed most of moviemaking was mechanical. “For the life of me, I can’t understand how he’s using Chris Doyle,” Red said. There was Brooklyn in his voice. His hands were folded placidly on the lunch table. He believed Doyle could be a DP who orchestrated the setup of the shots without actually operating the camera. Red had seen that done on other shows, and Night had, too. On The Sixth Sense, Tak Fujimoto was the cinematographer, and Kyle Rudolph operated the camera for him.
The Man Who Heard Voices Page 23