LM: Then you went over to Fox and did a lot of pictures there. The first I have is WILD GEESE CALLING. Was that with Rouben Mamoulian?
BALLARD: No, no, but I did work with Mamoulian on LAURA. We shot 75 percent of that together, and it was going so well that everyone wanted to take credit for it—and it was all Mamoulian. Finally he was taken off the film, and Otto Preminger came in with another cameraman—but even there he had it easy, because Mamoulian had set every scene. Preminger used his basics, and refilmed just a little. But pretty soon I got out of that, I didn’t want to be under contract. They couldn’t understand it at Fox; they said, “We’re paying you more than we’ve ever paid anyone else,” but I didn’t have any choice of films and I was getting tired of having to answer to so many people.
LM: But you did THE LODGER at Fox, which was quite impressive.
BALLARD: Yes, that was top black and white photography. But you know, when you’re under contract to a studio like Fox, you’re trying to please the studio, then you’re trying to please the producer, and the director, and maybe the star. And some guys can sit on the fence, say one thing to one person and another thing to another. I can’t do that, I always have to speak my piece. That was why Toland was so great—he only had to account to Goldwyn, and Goldwyn would give him anything he wanted. Anyway, I’d always wanted to do fog the way I did it in THE LODGER. Before then it was always a gray haze. I did it with the fog in spots, with black and white definition still coming through. And when they ran the rushes I got hell for it; the producer said, “I’ve lived in London, and the fog doesn’t look like that.” I said, “You may have lived in London, and the fog doesn’t look like that—but that’s how it should look.”
LM: What about ORCHESTRA WIVES?
BALLARD: There again, you were able to do something with it because you had preparation. Every number was shot with a particular style. I prepared with orchestrations, and I had a musician label them for me so I knew just when it was loud, and soft, and when the trumpets were coming in. John Brahm started that picture, and worked very closely with me on it. I think the numbers are done as well as any musical numbers I’ve seen. Archie Mayo finished it, and brought nothing to the picture—he couldn’t bring anything to it because he wasn’t prepared.
LM: Did you start working in color at this time?
BALLARD: I turned down color, because I didn’t want to work with the color men. You know, you always had to have one or two consultants with you, and all they wanted was plenty of exposure for their negative. You couldn’t control the photography with them around. Finally I had to do color, a few years later, but I also got 3D at the same time. That was on INFERNO. But we did straight 3D, no tricks, we just shot it normally, and I lit it the same way I would light any picture. It was released flat here, because by that time the fad had died out, but in England it was 3D and it went over great. One of the men over there said that if it had been the first 3D picture, they might still be making them. When it was done Zanuck looked at it and added a few gimmicks, like a roof falling in, and someone throwing a lantern at the camera, but there were only two or three, and the rest of the picture was straight.
LM: What happened when you left Fox?
BALLARD: I free-lanced.
LM: You did a lot of pictures with Merle Oberon that were considered quite lavish at the time . . .
BALLARD: Well, you know, it was wartime, when no matter what they shot they filled the theaters, and so they made this stuff, and it was big, and beautiful, but it was crap. But one of them we did was quite good.
LM: BERLIN EXPRESS?
BALLARD: Yes, that was the first film we made in Europe after the war. Everything was in ruins, and we shot it all on location, for real. You know, everyone thinks all these techniques with hand-held camera are something new. We used hand-held camera in that, and it was a German camera that had just come out; I bought one, and the results with it were excellent.
LM: Pictures are always so much better using real locations, but some cameraman seem to favor process screens. How do you feel?
BALLARD: Oh, I hated process screens, I always tried to avoid them. Even on MAGNIFICENT MATADOR I used as little as possible, and it turned out quite well.
LM: I have no credits for you in 1949 and 1950; why is that?
BALLARD: Well, I was living in Europe at that time and I didn’t work. I skied a lot, and lived all over. I guess some of it has rubbed off, because my son is now at Aspen.
LM: Then you came back to Fox, just around the time that CinemaScope was coming into use.
BALLARD: I didn’t shoot in Scope for a while. Fox formed a separate company, called Panoramic Productions, and had all these people they had under contract making pictures flat. One of the films I did at that time was very fine, THE RAID, a really excellent picture, then we did another called WHITE FEATHER. Eventually I did Scope.
LM: Did it bother you?
BALLARD: No, not really, although Scope certainly isn’t composition size—you’d never see a painting worked out that way; you’d like to have more top and bottom. But a good picture is a good picture, it doesn’t matter if it’s in 8mm.
LM: Was there any ratio you particularly favored?
BALLARD: I like 1-7.5, 1-8, almost the old screen ratio, best. I have no objection to Panavision, but it requires you to carry around so much equipment. We used Panavision on THE WILD BUNCH and we were lugging around a roomful of different lenses and things.
LM: You did PRINCE VALIANT in Scope with Henry Hathaway; I read that doing the picture in CinemaScope bothered him a lot.
BALLARD: I don’t think anything ever bothered Henry a day in his life.
LM: Was there an advantage to working with a director as much as you did with him?
BALLARD: Well, it’s difficult to work with Henry Hathaway and get good photography. It’s all set up 1-2-3-kick with him. I like Henry a lot, but . . .
LM: Did you have to circumvent him to get what you would want?
BALLARD: Yes, you know, I’d say, “Say, Henry, I like your idea of doing so-and-so,” and things like that. But I seemed to get along with all these guys who had tough reputations, because I was honest with them. I remember once Henry started shouting at me—which he does all the time, and you can’t beat him because his voice is always the loudest—and he finished up saying “. . . and I don’t want you fooling around like that again.” Then, as he was turning away, he muttered, “Even though it did make a better shot.” I remember everyone told me how tough John Farrow was. The first day on a picture I did with him I came onto the set and he had the camera all rigged up. I moved the camera twenty feet, and said, “Take a look at this, John, I think you might like it better.” And he did. It was just that no one had ever had the nerve to do anything like that before. He turned out to have an excellent visual sense—he liked anything a camera would like.
LM: Should an actor be conscious of the photography in a film?
BALLARD: No, an actor shouldn’t be concerned with that. An actress should care about how she looks—I mean, I would be the first to say, “God, she looks lousy” if that were the case. They should only be conscious of their own work.
LM: Do you remember A KISS BEFORE DYING?
BALLARD: I’d like to forget it. That was in the second group of pictures made under that independent Fox banner. I went out location-hunting with the director, and we found a small town that had everything we wanted. There was a library that was just perfect, the light was just great as it naturally was. So I asked the production manager, “Have you tied up all these places so we can shoot there?” and he said, “Don’t worry about it.” So when we got there we found that none of the buildings we’d wanted would let us shoot—after all, it was about a killing in a university, they’d all read the script. So there we were, day after day with no place to shoot. We’d use a patch of space near the library one day, part of a public park the next.
LM: Did free-lancing provide you with the kind of pictures you wa
nted to do?
BALLARD: No, but it let me work half the time for double the money. Plus I had more time to myself. When you’d be under contract, you were supposed to work forty weeks with twelve weeks off. But you’d be on call all the time. I remember I checked with the studio and said I wanted to go to Palm Springs. They said fine, go ahead. No sooner did I get there than they were on the phone saying, “Come back, you’ve got to do a test.” I said, “I just got herel” They said, “You’ve got to come back.” And then on top of that the guy who sent for me didn’t realize I was in Palm Springs or he wouldn’t have asked for me. So free-lancing was a lot better.
LM: This was around the time you started working with Budd Boetticher, wasn’t it?
BALLARD: No, I’d done something with him before, but at this time he called me to do BUCHANAN RIDES ALONE, which originally had been a Batjac property which he’d bought from John Wayne without his knowing it. And everyone thought it was great, Wayne said it was the best story he’d had in years and he was angry at having let it go. So one night I took a plane out to the location, and Budd handed me the script. I read it before I went to sleep, and the next morning I went to him and said, “Have you read the script?” He said, “No, I only read the original treatment and I assumed . . .” I said, “You’d better read it, it’s the worst piece of crap I’ve seen in years.” He went away and read it, came back and said, “You’re right.” So he started rewriting it at night, during lunch breaks, all during shooting. He was still working on it during lunch hour on the last day we were shooting it.
LM: Wasn’t LEGS DIAMOND the film where you deliberately made the film grainy?
BALLARD: Yes, we wanted to go for an authentic atmosphere for the 1920s where the film was showing. So after seeing some of the rushes, the producer went to Boetticher and said, “I thought you said Ballard was a great cameraman—this looks like it was shot in 1920!” And Budd said, “It’s supposed to look like it was shot in 1920!”
LM: How would you describe the atmosphere working for Walt Disney on THE PARENT TRAP?
BALLARD: Well, the head of the photography department sent for me. I’d known Disney before, had him out to the house for dinner several times. Going out there, I met this fellow who took me on a bicycle all around the studio and introduced me to all the various people—always on a first-name basis. It was like being accepted for a country club, and after a week I guess I’d passed the test, and they were taking me to see the Big Man. On the way down the hall, Walt stepped out of a projection room and said, “Oh hello, Lucien,” and the other guys nearly died. They never dreamed I already knew him. Anyway, Walt always had his films done first on a storyboard, and they’d worked out this whole film using an English process, much like the old blue-backing process, to get the twins into various scenes. It involved double-exposure with the backgrounds and it was very complicated. Plus, when you were shooting, you could never tell the girl which light to look into or anything. I told them it was too complex, and asked instead for a double. Usually they sent relatives out for assignments like that, but I told them this time I wanted a real double who really looked like Hayley. Finally I found a girl who was the same height, had the same features—everything was the same except her eyes were a different color, but I was able to compensate for that. And at several figures away, you couldn’t tell the difference between the girl and Hayley. So I did a lot of over-the-shoulder shots, and threw out most of the vapor shots; I think we only had two double-exposures in the film. Then in the one party scene they were throwing things and with the pie in the face you couldn’t tell the difference anyway. But Walt made me put some of the trick shots back, because he, just like Hughes, liked technical things.
Ballard (with scarf) and Sam Peckinpah check a shot for RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY (1962).
LM: You also did some TV work for Disney; was that much different from shooting a feature for him?
BALLARD: Well, the budget and time is a lot less, even at Disney, but I always tried to do TV as I would a feature—of course you’re shooting in bad light, with a tight schedule, but often I would wait for light, and they would die, but I’d say, “Don’t worry, we’ll get it on schedule.” Disney wanted to put me under contract, but I wouldn’t go, and after I did a lot of TV over at Four Star, Dick Powell wanted to sign me. I told him that whenever I’m free I’d be happy to shoot something for them, but I wouldn’t sign a contract. I did two segments of THE WESTERNER there with Sam Peckinpah; they were the first things he’d directed.
LM: And then of course you did RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY with him; that’s a beautiful film.
BALLARD: It would have been prettier still, but we only had twenty days, and it snowed. But I was with Sam on every aspect of that, preparing the film—from the costumes to the locations—that’s always the best way to do a film.
LM: There was a very striking close-up in that, one of the first shots of McCrea, shot straight up into the sky.
BALLARD: Well, that might have been because we couldn’t show the water towers and other things in the background at the Metro lot. You know, you can’t always do what you want to do—everything in this business is a compromise. I’d have to see the film again and look at the shot, but chances are we had to do it because of necessity.
LM: Did you try for a documentary look on THE KILLING?
BALLARD: It was just my own style of contrasty black and white. I didn’t think Kubrick was much of a director at that time, but I was impressed with his screen treatment.
LM: That was a quickly made picture, wasn’t it?
BALLARD: Yes, and like so many other films these days I was called in very late. Today they want to wait as long as possible, they don’t want to put you on salary. But I feel that I can save them money by being in on a picture from the beginning; I think I contribute a lot more than photography to a picture.
LM: I think THE SONS OF KATIE ELDER is a much underrated Western; it’s really quite well-done.
BALLARD: It was a good picture. Hal Wallis’ pictures are always well-prepared. He’s a commercial producer, but he knows what he’s doing. I remember the first picture I worked on for him, the production manager took me around and showed me one of the sets, and I said, “Well, you’ll have to get rid of those curtains, and I want a different color chair . . .” and the man said, “But Mr. Wallis has okayed this set,” as if he were saying, “But God has okayed this set.” So I said, “He may have okayed it, but you can still tell him that I want to get rid of those curtains . . .” And sure enough, he did. And after a few days, after seeing the rushes, Wallis came to me and said, “Ballard, I like your work very much.” On TRUE GRIT he came right to me and planned out certain photographic shots; every once in a while Henry Hathaway would stop and say, “Well, this is Lucien’s shot,” because it had been ordered by Wallis. We had big lenses, zooms, hand-held camera in that film, and you hardly ever have that with Henry—he never even dollies.
The Art of the Cinematographer Page 21