HALL: Yes, I think so. I think new directors don’t know what the mistakes can be, so they’re willing to try just about anything. They demand a lot from you, and want a lot from you. Filmmakers like Richard Brooks have been through it all, they’ve seen it all; they’ve got a style that they like, and that’s right for the picture.
LM: Here’s the perfect example of appropriate use of black and white: IN COLD BLOOD.
HALL: Well, don’t think the studio didn’t try to get that in color. We were even starting to shoot, and Technicolor had desaturated a film for John Huston, REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE. They had a reel of this film that they brought back to us, and they said, “You’ve got to shoot it this way.” We tried it out, but it looked purple, and it wasn’t very pleasing, so we just continued on. Richard Brooks felt that it was a black and white subject, and I felt that it was best done in black and white also. We got a lot of heat from the studio, but because Richard is a very strong man, he was able to overcome it, and do it in black and white. The reason we did it in Panavision was that first we were going to do it in 1.85. I said, “OK, I want it hard-matted,” and the studio said no, and they spent a lot of money doing a paper on why: how other theaters will be showing it, and your film will be screwed up anyway. So Richard said, “Let’s shoot it in Panavision and be done with it.”
LM: But the prints were by Technicolor.
HALL: Well, that’s because we prefer Technicolor to any other lab, although other people do very good work. It just depends on finding a group of people that know what you’re after, and try for it, and I liked the way they handled things at Technicolor best.
LM: What about the lighting on a film like that? It was supposed to achieve a documentary look, wasn’t it?
HALL: Yes. It was supposed to; it didn’t always—some of it is slicker than it should be. We’d do it differently nowadays probably.
LM: How?
HALL: I don’t know, maybe shoot the whole thing hand-held; not balancing so well . . .
LM: Deliberately not do such a good picture?
HALL: Yeah. It’s pretty good, actually. I’d screw it up more now.
LM: Toward the goal of the picture, saying what it was trying to say.
HALL: Yeah, to make it—I don’t know if that would make it more real or not.
LM: But is it supposed to be real, or merely giving that impression?
HALL: Well, it’s not really real, is it? It’s supposed to give you the impression. But you can certainly get caught up with the drama, and it should be fairly real to you. The photography should help the drama.
LM: Do you think the locations were a big asset to that film?
HALL: Yes . . . don’t ask me why. They made us feel spooky. They should make you feel spooky, when you know that this is really the house . . . I don’t know. But it sure made us feel spooky, and it seemed right to do it that way.
LM: Do you watch your own films?
HALL: Yes.
LM: Because you want to see the finished product, or because you want to learn from them?
HALL: I want to see the finished product. I want to see how it turned out.
LM: Do you learn from watching your own films?
HALL: Yeah; mostly what not to do. Usually always what not to do.
LM: Did you use a different approach to color than you had before on HELL IN THE PACIFIC?
HALL: I was experimenting for a picture that I hadn’t agreed to do yet; I was experimenting with overexposure. I didn’t do it on that picture, but I was experimenting with it on the slates, and on my next picture, which was WILLIE BOY, I started overexposing, and I wish I’d begun a long time before.
LM: It probably would have been effective in HELL IN THE PACIFIC.
HALL: Yes, it would have. It would have been terrific to overexpose the hell out of those jungles, and not use any lights at all. Overexposure just so you can see. It would have funked it up a lot. The trouble with overexposing is that it can look so beautiful—it’s the same trouble with long lenses—it gives a beautiful quality to things. I saw a picture the other night that was overexposed, called AD-ALEN 31. It’s absolutely exquisite, overexposed by two or three stops. It’s too pretty . . . it’s a little bit unreal.
LM: What kind of film would be appropriate for that, then?
HALL: A love story; it would work terrifically. I think he did the same thing with ELVIRA MADIGAN; I’ve never seen ELVIRA MADIGAN but I understand it’s beautiful, with a lot of back-lit, overexposed stuff. I think that half of it, for one thing, is the light in Sweden; in fact, I’m certain that it is. You know, people used to talk about what English cameramen do. Hell, it’s the light. Here we’ve got harsh sunlight to deal with most of the time, and it’s much more difficult than dealing [in color] with soft, clouded skies. And you’ve got that low sun in Sweden, with cloudy conditions, and beautiful hazy soft things. It’s not a matter of what you do, it’s where you are, a lot of times.
LM: Just a point of interest: on HELL IN THE PACIFIC, did you shoot two endings?
HALL: No, we only shot one ending. The day before we were going to shoot the ending that we shot, we were going to shoot an ending which I had suggested to John Boorman, and he liked it. Then that night, Lee [Marvin] came to him with another ending, which he liked very much. The following day when we were shooting it, he came to me and he said, “We’re not going to shoot that; we’ve got a terrific new ending.” I said, “What? What is it?” He told it to me, and I said, “What’s so terrific about that? Let’s shoot a couple of them.” He said no, so we shot it. This is the very end; I don’t mean the part where they’re getting drunk and all that—that was all planned. This was just the final denouement.
LM: Was there an ending in the original script?
HALL: Yes, but not anything like the present ending, or even leading up to the present ending. The ending in the script had them find two people there when they arrive, Japanese men, and they want to do Marvin in right away, but Mifune says no. So one day they hear gunfire on the other side of the island, and Mifune goes to see what it is; when he comes back, Marvin is lying in the compound, decapitated, and these two guys are sort of sheepishly grinning, knowing they had done something wrong, but kind of proud that they had killed the American. And Mifune, in his rage, grabs the sword and decapitates both of them. That was the ending in the script. The ending that I suggested—well, do you remember the confrontation on the beach, when each imagines the other kills him? I wanted to take the part where they get drunk, and maybe Marvin is reading Life magazine, or something like that, and Mifune wants to smoke, and he grabs a page from the magazine and rolls it up. Marvin says, “Hey, wait a minute. I haven’t finished that page yet!” And what was a friendly thing all of a sudden ruptures into violence, and they’re at each other. It’s just like Mifune imagined Marvin would kill him. Marvin’s knife is out, and he’s got Mifune around him, and it cuts to a close-up, and Mifune falls out of frame. Marvin is left there, and I wanted to see the change in Marvin’s face to “Oh my God, what have I done?”, freeze on that, and go out. That was what John liked, and we were going to shoot. Then Lee had this idea about how he’s always been a guy who has to solve a problem by killing the bad guy, and that he was tired of that—could he solve it without killing? It seemed to John to be the real answer to the story, what he was trying to say: that even if we can’t agree, or get along, we don’t have to kill one another because of it—we can just go away and live separately. And I didn’t appreciate it until after I’d shot it, and then I loved it, because it is the answer, as far as I’m concerned. That was what we tried to say, but because we had so little time to think about it, I think we botched it; we weren’t clever enough in making that a satisfying ending. Which is just a matter of artistry. For one thing, I didn’t know what I was doing; I didn’t understand the concept. The last shot was Mifune walking away, and Lee putting on his tie, and getting ready to leave, or something. And nothing happens—but that’s what John wanted t
o say.
LM: Of course, the final print that went out doesn’t have that ending either.
HALL: I have no idea, because I haven’t seen it.
LM: It was never released with your ending.
HALL: No? That’s why—I’m into directing now—I won’t direct a picture that I don’t have final cut on.
LM: As I heard it, Boorman finished the picture to his satisfaction—
HALL:—I saw it that way—
LM:—and then went away on vacation. After he left, the producer decided he didn’t like the ending, and tacked on footage of an explosion. So as it now stands, Marvin and Mifune are sitting in the house, and there’s just the slightest indication of an argument brewing, when suddenly there is a series of explosions, and that’s the end of the film.
HALL: See what I mean? See why you have to have final cut? Because what you believe in, and what you worked so hard to do . . . Imagine how Boorman feels, or Lee, who thought of it, and believed in it. It just kills you. That’s why you’ve got to get final cut.
LM: Now we come to Richard Brooks again, with THE HAPPY ENDING, which I thought was more interesting photographically than practically any other way.
HALL: That makes me feel better than it would Richard Brooks. But I liked a lot of the things that I did in that picture photographically. It was a change of lighting style for me; I used soft light instead of hard light, mostly all umbrella lighting . . .
LM: What’s that?
HALL: They’re umbrellas which you shoot light into, and they reflect back. Very soft, it leaves no shadows. I used a lot of that kind of lighting. I worked very fast, didn’t try to make anything look too good.
LM: The scene by the fireplace was lovely.
HALL: Well, that’s sort of the old style. The only thing I didn’t like about that picture, from my standpoint, was the fact that because Richard is the complete filmmaker, he doesn’t always involve you in everything that I consider important for a cameraman. He didn’t involve me in the art direction in that picture. He didn’t have an art director; sometimes an art director will be able to help a cameraman—not always, but sometimes. If you don’t have an art director, I feel the cameraman should certainly be involved in picking things that visually might obstruct the story somehow or other. Things like busy wallpaper, that kind of thing. That house that we shot in I hated, because of the wallpapers.
LM: Wasn’t it difficult to shoot in an actual house, like that?
HALL: It was. It’s difficult, but I like it. It’s a challenge, and I think it keeps you from being slick.
LM: Many cameramen today are frustrated because they aren’t called in to work on a picture until very late in preparation. What has been your experience?
HALL: I’m usually—I insist, really—on being on for quite a bit beforehand. I believe that it benefits the director for me to be around him, to know what he’s trying for—just to be with him when you’re not under the pressure of the gun, so that I can more clearly reflect what he actually wants when it comes time to do it. And he can have the benefit of your ideas beforehand, rather than when you’re actually doing it. Because if he’s got too much to think about at that time, with actors, and all of that kind of thing, and suddenly you start arguing with him about something, he doesn’t need it.
LM: Do you think the formula for a good picture is preparation?
HALL: Yes, I think it definitely is. All the ones that look unprepared were usually prepared the hell out of. It’s very difficult to get an “unprepared” picture that works by going out unprepared.
LM: TELL THEM WILLIE BOY IS HERE is the first picture you did, then, with desaturated color.
HALL: Well, I did some desaturation for day-for-night effects in HELL IN THE PACIFIC, took the color out and made it more or less black and white. They didn’t quite come up to my expectations, but that’s because nobody asks you to come in and take charge of that aspect in order to follow through. If somebody would insist, “I wouldn’t get a print of this picture unless the cameraman was here to give us his views on it”—that’s what the producer should do, but he just wants to get you off the payroll as quickly as possible. Even if you don’t want to charge anything, by that time the editor feels it’s his, and that kind of thing, and so a concept you might have had is not executed the way you wanted it to. Nobody ever prints a day-for-night shot correctly for me. They want to see too much, and they always wreck it. Then you have the argument about “If you can’t see it, what good is it? If you can’t see Paul Newman, it could be just anybody there.” And I say, “No, it’s not, because you know it’s Paul Newman, you know it’s not Charlie Bronson all of a sudden because it’s dark.” And if the darkness helps tell the story, why does it have to be seen so well? Anyway, I did some desaturation for the day-for-night stuff there. Then on WILLIE BOY I also did desaturation for the day-for-night . . .
LM: How do you accomplish that?
HALL: They take the color out of it, in varying degrees. It’s a filter process, so they can control the amount of red, yellow, and blue that goes into it, and they can make a black and white of the color print. Then they run that with it, and they can take out the various colors and bring in the black and white and control it all electronically, until you get what you think looks like night, which hopefully is something which is monochromatic.
LM: Did you use it throughout the picture?
HALL: No, just in the day-for-night sequences. The rest of the picture, the exteriors are overexposed, which I really like, and I’ll probably do that for all my exteriors from now on, for a while, until I find something else to do. It gets rid of that sickly color look, which I hate. I hate color, really, because it has so many more chances to go wrong than black and white. Black and white doesn’t have any chance to go wrong.
LM: What about exterior lighting, especially in a desert locale such as you had on WILLIE BOY?
HALL: Everybody’s talking about going out to do a picture without any lights, and I’m going to do it too. That’s what I want to do, someday.
LM: But what kind of lights are necessary in the desert?
HALL: You need to put light where there isn’t light.
LM: In the desert? It seems to me that other than reflectors . . .
HALL: Well, reflectors are very tough to use on the desert. Often there is a lot of wind, and you can’t use reflectors in the wind. They bounce all over the place—you need a person to hold each one, and it’s not worth it. It’s better to have a light. So you use lights to fill in shadows, and things like that.
LM: And now we come to your Academy Award winning endeavor . . .
HALL: That was the biggest surprise in the world. I wanted it earlier!
LM: Did you feel another picture was more deserving prior to this?
HALL: I thought I had it on IN COLD BLOOD, but they knocked me out of the box, they took the category away. It was the only black and white nominated that year. I probably would have voted for another film; I probably would have voted for BATTLE OF ALGIERS that year. Anyway . . . it’s nice to have one of those things. I like it, I like the way it looks on the mantel. I don’t know what it means, but it’s nice.
LM: The color in BUTCH CASSIDY is very rich.
HALL: Very rich, that’s the way Fox does it, and DeLuxe too. I overexposed a lot of that picture, and they just brought it back again. But I didn’t think that it needed to be completely desaturated in that picture. The treatment of it was not serious, and therefore there was no need to be dramatic in your lighting and such.
LM: What about the practical as well as artistic problems in showing the tracking party?
HALL: ‘That was done with radios. It’s very simple; you take a guy, and send him to a plateau a mile away and get a long lens on.
LM: In some cases the timing was so perfect as to be incredible—one shot where Newman and Redford are coming over the rocks, just before they leap, and the posse is seen off in the distance through a little clearing at the exac
t split second they’ve left . . .
The Art of the Cinematographer Page 25