LM: One thinks of Mankiewicz as a literary type of man; did he have a visual sense as well?
MILLER: I don’t think that he knew the visual like Ford, who started before talkies, and had to tell his story visually.
LM: What about Fritz Lang?
MILLER: A great director. He talks my language. I met Fritz Lang very curiously. He’d done two pictures at Fox, WESTERN UNION and THE RETURN OF FRANK JAMES; he had two different cameramen. I had been assigned to do this picture with Fritz Lang, and I never made my mind up about a director until I started working with him. So I was called into the office to meet him; he wore those thick glasses, and he said, “Oh, I’m so glad to meet you.” I said, “Fine; I hope it’s that way when we finish.” So he says, “You must come to lunch,” and as we’re walking through the restaurant, right at the door a guy pulled my trouser leg—it was a cameraman who had photographed one of the pictures with Lang. He said, “You work with this guy three days and you’ll want to wrap the tripod around his neck.” I said, “Is he that bad?w” and he said, “Oh, Christ!” And the other guy chirped in with, “That goddamned sonofabitch!” So I went in to sit down and have lunch with Fritz Lang. Maybe you know this by now, I’m a very ordinary, free-speaking guy. And he said, “I suppose they told you the story about me in Kanab, Utah?” I said, “No, what’s that story?” He said, “Yes, I got all the cattle gathered from all over the country, and then on the morning when we went to shoot I said, ‘Give me all the ones with white faces in the foreground.’ They didn’t tell you that?” I said, “No, they didn’t tell me that.” He said, “Did they tell you when I lined up the telegraph poles, and the next morning came over and ordered the camera put so they were one right behind the other?” I said, “No, they didn’t tell me that.” Then I said, “Well, what gives you such a terrible reputation? Everybody I talk to can’t stand you. I have news for you, Mr. Lang: they talk about me the same way. And if they think you’re a sonofabitch, you have never seen one until you work with me. We’re going to have a jolly good time.” He didn’t quite know what to think of me. So we started to work, and the first shot—the picture was MAN HUNT—is a camera up high over some pine trees, comes down through the pine trees onto the footprint of a man. Then a big German boot steps in. So I figured this all out before Fritz got there; I figured instead of coming down through those trees I’d do it in reverse, so you won’t have to come down and fish around on a boom. He said, “I want to come down and . . .” And I said, “Fritz, would you mind if we did it in reverse?” He said, “What’s the reverse?” I said, “The camera will start down here and move up; I’ve got black threads on the branches so I can move it gently so we don’t break the forest coming down.” He said, “Yes, but how are you going to do the foot?” I said, “You’ll have the man’s footprint in—but you don’t want a mark of this boot that steps in there, so I’ve got some little stones. When the man’s foot steps in he’s going to rest on those little stones, so you won’t have an imprint of his foot. When his foot moves out, I’m going to count one, two, then we’re going to start up.” He said, “You can time this close?” I said, “I think so.” Now, this is a complicated thing to tell a director who doesn’t know what you’re doing. But he knew exactly what I was talking about. We got the camera all set, the guy took his foot out, the other guy’s foot went out; there was the footprint, and we went up. He said to me, “You think it was timed right?” I asked the operator, and he said, “I think we got it.” He says, “Well, we won’t play more with it; we’ll see how good this one is.” And we moved. I got along with this man so wonderfully all through the picture. I think this man is one of the great directors of the business. But everybody’s against him, what a bastard—he never did anything to me. Oh—there was another thing in the picture. There’s a guy in a cave, and he has a little arrow out of a girl’s hat on a rubber band, and he’s going to try to coax this other guy to look through a cave hole and shoot him with the arrow. So I set the camera up and took about four hundred feet of film with the focus in the tunnel, in the thickness of the rocks, and lit them with cross-lights and baby spots. He didn’t say anything about “What are you doing?” We reversed the film, and I made an exposure on this. I had the film up in the camera, and I said, “OK, Fritz, we’re ready.” He said, “Could you tell me, what was this you were doing?” He wanted to learn. I said, “When the guy’s face shows in there, I want his face sharp, but he’s looking through a thickness of the wall, so I want that sharp too.” So I just photographed it very sharp, focused on it, and had a piece of black velvet in the wall. Now, I took the velvet down, and killed the lights that were on the tunnel, and the guy’s face came out, and played the scene. When he saw this on the screen, he thought this was the greatest thing that ever happened in the movies.
On the set of HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY ( 1941 ): John Ford with pipe and dark glasses, then (moving right) Roddy McDowall, Donald Crisp, Sara Allgood, Miller, and Rhys Williams. Sound man Gene Grossman stands to the left of Ford and assistant director Eddie O’Feeney is kneeling at the right.
LM: Was it a double-exposure then?
MILLER: No—I just took one half of it first, the tunnel, and then the face, on the next exposure. So it wasn’t one exposure on top of the other, but it was two exposures in the one scene. He realized then that I was for him, and I could do no wrong for this man. We’d finish at four o’clock in the afternoon. He’d say, “What should we do?” I’d say, “What should we do? We should go home, Fritz. We got a damn good day’s work.” That picture cost $500,000, when they were spending $2 million [on others]. It was unheard-of. Then they gave him the roust, I don’t know why. If I were to do a picture there’s two guys I’d hire, and they’re opposites. One is Ford, the other is Fritz Lang. Because they save you money. If you give Ford a picture to do, say, “Here’s the script,” let him shoot it the way he wants to make it, and leave him alone. On THIS ABOVE ALL, one of these things I shot, we used almost a half million feet of negative. I always kept track of the cost of photographing a picture, so the amount of film you used was part of that cost. After we finished How GREEN WAS MY VALLEY, I went checking; I went into the camera room where you draw the film and asked them how much film we drew. It was less than 100.000 feet. I said, “You’ve made a mistake somewhere.” They did it again and came up with the same figure. So I went over to the laboratory and asked them how much footage they developed; they came up with the same amount. Less than 100,000 feet. Do you know how much money this saves? All you’ve got to do is let him alone. If you interfere with him, boy, he can screw you up but good. He knows what he’s doing, and he doesn’t want anybody to interfere with him.
LM: Would you say that that’s the formula for a good cameraman-director relationship, that both men know what they’re doing?
MILLER: You never have any trouble. There’s a language you use; I don’t think that making a picture with Ford I would speak to him more than, oh, fifty words in a day. He’d be looking at something and I knew what he was looking for. I’d pick up the camera and come over. On HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY you look: there’s no boom shots, there’s no dolly shots. The camera just pans occasionally; when a person is moving from here, I pan, when they get to here they’re in close-up. I change size when they’re moving. He knew his business; I learned a lot from this man.
LM: But you knew your business too, and that’s the point.
MILLER: Yes, I pleased him, I think, because I wasn’t a nuisance to him. I allowed him to do his thinking without a lot of “Would you like to look in here?” or “What do you think of this?”
LM: Mutual trust and respect.
MILLER : Yes.
THE FILMS OF ARTHUR MILLER
A complete list of Mr. Miller’s short films, from the time he started making movies in 1908 to the time of his first feature film in 1915, would probably be impossible, although Miller recounted a large number of them in his book One Reel a Week. Therefore, what follows is a list of his feature fil
ms, compiled with Mr. Miller’s assistance at the time of our interview. It does not include his work in serials, which provided him with one of his most famous credits, THE PERILS OF PAULINE, in 1914. In the index, director’s name follows the year.
AT BAY—Pathe 1915—George Fitzmaurice
NEW YORK—Pathe 1916-George Fitzmaurice
FIFTH AVENUE—Pathe 1916—George Fitzmaurice
BIG JIM GARRITY—Pathe 1916—George Fitzmaurice
ARMS AND THE WOMAN—Pathe 1916—George Fitzmaurice
ROMANTIC JOURNEY—Pathe 1916—George Fitzmaurice
HUNTING OF THE HAWK—Pathe 1917—George Fitzmaurice
RECOIL—Pathe 1917—George Fitzmaurice
THE IRON HEART—Pathe 1917—George Fitzmaurice
THE MARK OF CAIN—Pathe 1917—George Fitzmaurice
SYLVIA OF THE SECRET SERVICE—Pathe 1917—George Fitzmaurice
VENGEANCE IS MINE—Pathe 1917—Frank Crane
THE NAULAHKA—Pathe 1918—George Fitzmaurice
JAPANESE NIGHTINGALE—Pathe 1918—George Fitzmaurice
THE NARROW PATH—Pathe 1918—George Fitzmaurice
COMMON CLAY—Pathe 1919—George Fitzmaurice
THE PROFITEERS—Pathe 1919—George Fitzmaurice
AVALANCHE—Pathe 1919—George Fitzmaurice
OUR BETTER SELVES—Pathe 1919—George Fitzmaurice
A SOCIETY EXILE—Paramount 1919—George Fitzmaurice
WITNESS FOR THE DEFENSE—Paramount 1919—George Fitzmaurice
Miller and Irene Dunne on the set of ANNA AND THE KING OF SIAM (1946).
COUNTERFEIT—Paramount 1919—George Fitzmaurice
ON WITH THE DANCE—Paramount 1920—George Fitzmaurice
HIS HOUSE IN ORDER—Paramount 1920—Hugh Ford
THE RIGHT TO LOVE—Paramount 1920—George Fitzmaurice
LADY ROSE’S DAUGHTER—Paramount 1920—Hugh Ford
IDOLS OF CLAY—Paramount 1920—Roy William Neill
PAYING THE PIPER—Paramount 1921—George Fitzmaurice
EXPERIENCE—Paramount 1921—George Fitzmaurice
FOREVER—Paramount 1921—George Fitzmaurice
THREE LIVE GHOSTS—Paramount 1922—George Fitzmaurice
THE MAN FROM HOME—Paramount 1922—George Fitzmaurice
TO HAVE AND TO HOLD—Paramount 1922—George Fitzmaurice
BELLA DONNA—Paramount 1923—George Fitzmaurice
THE CHEAT—Paramount 1923—George Fitzmaurice
KICK IN—Paramount 1923—George Fitzmaurice
THE ETERNAL CITY—First National 1923—George Fitzmaurice
CYTHEREA—First National 1924—George Fitzmaurice—Color sequences
TARNISH—First National 1924—George Fitzmaurice —Collaboration with William Tuers
IN HOLLYWOOD WITH POTASH AND PERLMUTTER—First National 1924—Al Green—Collaboration with Harry Hallenberger
A THIEF IN PARADISE—First National 1925—George Fitzmaurice
HIS SUPREME MOMENT—First National 1925—George Fitzmaurice
THE COMING OF AMOS—Producers Distributing Corporation (PDC) 1925—Paul Sloane
MADE FOR LOVE—PDC 1926—Paul Sloane
EVE’S LEAVES—PDC 1926—Paul Sloane
THE VOLGA BOATMAN—PDC 1926—Cecil B. DeMille—Collaboration with J. Peverell Marley, Fred Westerberg
THE CLINGING VINE—PDC 1926—Paul Sloane
FOR ALIMONY ONLY—PDC 1926—William DeMille
NOBODY’S WIDOW—PDC 1927—Donald Crisp
VANITY—PDC 1927—Donald Crisp
THE FIGHTING EAGLE—Pathe 1927—Donald Crisp
THE ANGEL OF BROADWAY—Pathe 1927—Lois Weber
BLUE DANUBE—Pathe 1928—Paul Sloane
HOLD ‘EM, YALE—Pathe 1928—Edward H. Griffith
THE COP—Pathe 1928—Donald Crisp
ANNAPOLIS—Pathe 1928—Christy Cabanne
THE SPIELER—Pathe 1928—Tay Garnett
THE BELLAMY TRIAL—MGM 1929—Monta Bell
STRANGE CARGO—Pathe 1929—Benjamin Glazer and Arthur Gregor
BIG NEWS—Pathe 1929—Gregory LaCava
THE FLYING FOOL—Pathe 1929—Tay Garnett
SAILOR’S HOLIDAY—Pathe 1929—Fred Newmeyer
OH YEAH!—Pathe 1929—Tay Garnett
HIS FIRST COMMAND—Pathe 1930—Gregory LaCava—Collaboration with John J. Mescall
LADY OF SCANDAL—MGM 1930—Sidney Franklin—Collaboration with Oliver T. Marsh
OFFICER O’BRIEN—Pathe 1930—Tay Garnett
SEE AMERICA THIRST—Universal 1930—William James Craft—Collaboration with Allyn Jones
FATHER’S SON—Warner Brothers 1930—William Beaudine
THE TRUTH ABOUT YOUTH—First National 1930—William Seiter
BAD COMPANY—Pathe 1931—Tay Garnett
PANAMA FLO—RKO 1932—Ralph Murphy
BIG SHOT—RKO 1932—Ralph Murphy
YOUNG BRIDE—RKO 1932—William Seiter
OKAY, AMERICA—Universal 1932—Tay Garnett
BREACH OF PROMISE—World Wide 1932—Paul Stein
ME AND MY GAL—Fox 1932—Raoul Walsh
SAILOR’S LUCK—Fox 1933—Raoul Walsh
HOLD ME TIGHT—Fox 1933—David Butler
THE MAN WHO DARED—Fox 1933—Hamilton MacFadden
THE LAST TRAIL—Fox 1933—James Tinling
THE MAD GAME—Fox 1933—Irving Cummings
MY WEAKNESS—Fox 1933—David Butler
BOTTOMS UP—Fox 1934—David Butler
EVER SINCE EVE—Fox 1934—George Marshall
HANDY ANDY—Fox 1934—David Butler
LOVE TIME—Fox 1934—James Tinling
THE WHITE PARADE—Fox 1934—Irving Cummings
BRIGHT EYES—Fox 1934—David Butler
THE LITTLE COLONEL—Fox 1935—David Butler
IT’S A SMALL WORLD—Fox 1935—Irving Cummings
BLACK SHEEP—Fox 1935—Allan Dwan
WELCOME HOME—Fox 1935—James Tinling
PADDY O’DAY—Fox 1935—Lewis Seiler
WHITE FANG—20th Century Fox 1936—David Butler
36 HOURS TO KILL—20th Century Fox 1936—Eugene Forde
PIGSKIN PARADE—20th Century Fox 1936—David Butler
STOWAWAY—20th Century Fox 1936—William Seiter
WEE WILLIE WINKIE—20th Century Fox 1937—John Ford
HEIDI—20th Century Fox 1937—Allan Dwan
THE BARONESS AND THE BUTLER—20th Century Fox 1938—Walter Lang
REBECCA OF SUNNYBROOK FARM—20th Century Fox 1938—Allan Dwan
LITTLE MISS BROADWAY—20th Century Fox 1938—Irving Cummings
SUBMARINE PATROL—20th Century Fox 1938—John Ford
THE LITTLE PRINCESS—20th Century Fox 1939—Walter Lang—Color
SUSANNAH OF THE MOUNTIES—20th Century Fox 1939—William Seiter
THE RAINS CAME—20th Century Fox 1939—Clarence Brown
HERE I AM A STRANGER—20th Century Fox 1939—Roy Del Ruth
THE BLUEBIRD—20th Century Fox 1940—Walter Lang—Color
JOHNNY APOLLO—20th Century Fox 1940—Henry Hathaway
ON THEIR OWN—20th Century Fox 1940—Otto Brower
THE MARK OF ZORRO—20th Century Fox 1940—Rouben Mamoulian
BRIGHAM YOUNG, FRONTIERSMAN—20th Century Fox 1940—Henry Hathaway
TOBACCO ROAD—20th Century Fox 1941—John Ford
MAN HUNT—20th Century Fox 1941—Fritz Lang
THE MEN IN HER LIFE—20th Century Fox 1941—Gregory Ratoff
HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY—20th Century Fox 1941—John Ford—Won Miller his first Academy Award
THIS ABOVE ALL—20th Century Fox 1942—Anatole Litvak
ICELAND—20th Century Fox 1942—Bruce Humberstone
THE MOON is DOWN—20th Century Fox 1943—Irving Pichel
THE IMMORTAL SERGEANT—20th Century Fox 1943—John M. Stahl—Collaboration with Clyde DeVinna
THE OX-BOW INCIDENT—20th Century Fox 1943—William Wellma
n
THE SONG OF BERNADETTE—20th Century Fox 1943—Henry King—Won Miller his second Academy Award
THE PURPLE HEART—20th Century Fox 1944—Lewis Milestone
KEYS OF THE KINGDOM—20th Century Fox 1944—Henry King
A ROYAL SCANDAL—20th Century Fox 1945—Started by Ernst Lubitsch, completed by Otto Preminger
DRAGONWYCK—20th Century Fox 1946—Joseph L. Mankiewicz
ANNA AND THE KING OF SIAM—20th Century Fox 1946—John Cromwell—Won Miller his third Academy Award
THE RAZOR’S EDGE—20th Century Fox 1946—Edmund Goulding
GENTLEMEN’S AGREEMENT—20th Century Fox 1947 —Elia Kazan
THE WALLS OF JERICHO—20th Century Fox 1948—John M. Stahl
WHIRLPOOL—20th Century Fox 1949—Otto Preminger
THE GUNFIGHTER—20th Century Fox 1950—Henry King
THE PROWLER—Universal 1951—Joseph Losey
Interview with HAL MOHR
Hal Mohr is another outstanding cinematographer whose interest in the field developed at an early age. As his conversation indicates, he had a wide variety of jobs in the motion picture business before deciding to remain a cameraman. This gave him an unusually fine background and provided him with the knowledge he was able to use for so many years thereafter in developing ideas and technical devices. Having won two Academy Awards, for A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM and THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, Mohr did not rest on his laurels, and continued to create as a cameraman through the 1950s, in television commercials as well as feature films. Although he shot several TV series, he is the first to admit that the medium does not permit cameramen to display their artistic talents to any great degree. Increasingly inactive in the 1960s, Mohr reaffirmed his great skill and imagination in 1969 when he was hired as photographic consultant on Alfred Hitchcock’s TOPAZ, one of the year’s most visually striking films.
The Art of the Cinematographer Page 11