Principal Photography

  A: I worked with Godard, but he never talked to me about an image. He talked to me about the idea of the image. So that creates a different framework. If people just talk to you about the aesthetic of an image, that's not really getting to the meaning of why you do something.

  Q: The use of visual references seems to be an element of the filmmaking process that is going to be with us as we approach the next century.

  A: It's part of our culture. Visually, in the art world we're always building on our own history. So the aesthetics become part of former aesthetics-things repeat themselves. Certain styles in the sixties are becoming in fashion now, like the cinema verite school of Jean Rouch and Chris Marker in France, and D. A. Pennebaker and the Maysles brothers in the United States. The idea of taking a handheld camera, a small tape recorder, and capturing life became a reaction to the cinema's ability to falsify the world with commercialized gloss and stylized cliches. The audience is more willing to see things about themselves that they can believe in.

  Q: How does technology affect cinematic concepts?

  A: Technology goes hand in hand with aesthetics. For example, in the fifties the black-and-white television show Naked City was shot outside of a studio on actual locations-on the streets where the reality became more important to the stories and the lighting was more naturalistic and rougher. On the Waterfront, shot by Boris Kaufman, was also important in this semi documentary style, where the camera and lighting became motivated by the actions and the performance. They were abandoning the black-and-white stylized studio lighting approach of Hollywood for the stories and streets of New York.

  Q: You have photographed many documentaries. Has it had an effect on your work?

  A: All films are really in a sense documentaries. Everything comes together for that one moment, happens in that one moment, and cannot be reproduced. No performance is exactly the same. The movement of the camera, the light, how the actors hit their marks isn't exactly the same as in a former take. The director and cameraman are really the first audience, and I love to respond to those moments. That's why I like to operate the camera. Films live in real time.

  Q: During the 1980s, you were on the forefront of the postmodernist film style. How did you develop the visual style of Desperately Seeking Susan, a film largely responsible for defining this movement?

  A: The script was a kind of a 1940s screwball comedy. The director, Susan Seidelman, Production Designer Santo Loquasto, and myself wanted to convey the underground post-punk scene, which had developed more of a sixties sensibility. I was trying to interpret where the New York scene was in the eighties. I always admired Midnight Cowboy, shot by Adam Holender, which became a statement of the New York attitude in the late sixties-a sense of alienation. I really thought about how Midnight Cowboy affected me as a viewer, and how people saw New York through the eyes of Ratso Rizzo and Joe Buck, the cowboy.

  Q: How did you utilize color in Desperately Seeking Susan to create that downtown New York look?

  A: I referred back to German expressionism by pushing the colors. I made the mercury-vapor fluorescent lights greener and the natural tungsten sources in the street warmer by enhancing those colors motivated from the practical sources. Also, I used contrasting colors, something one learns about in pop or op painting. A lot of the sets were only in two colors. They were contrasting because one recedes, one advances. So that could give depth, shape, and form to the image. For instance, using yellow against blue-one's a warm color, the other a cool color. Those would be contrasting colors versus complementary colors which would be yellow, orange, and red that would blend together. So by using those colors and working with the production designer, Santo Loquasto, we reenforced that visual idea. The sets, the wardrobe, everything attempted to have an abstract expressionistic feeling in the storytelling. A director like Ingmar Bergman had already utilized similar techniques in the films Cries and Whispers and The Passion of Anna, where he used sets in one color palette to create a psychological setting for the viewer. Claude Chabrol had also used color as a symbolic and psychological framework for his films. In art school, I studied Josef Albers, a painter and theorist who experimented with color and how people psychologically reacted to certain colors and combinations. So all those things went into it.

  Later, in Less Than Zero, I played with two complementary colors versus a contrasting color. In regard to lighting, I wanted to invert day and night because the characters lived in a world at night. So even the day became more of a night existence for them. Also, there was a heightened, drug-related experience. The light was very sharp, very hard, very crisp, and the camera movements were more kinetic.

  In Mississippi Masala, the color was more naturalistic, except for certain scenes in the Asian world, where certain colors had symbolic meaning in the context of their culture.

  Q: Did you use gels on Desperately Seeking Susan to achieve the color effects?

  A: Yes, by using gels on the lights I could mix and separate the colors to give depth and contrast in the frame. If a wall was painted a very warm color like orange, I lit the wall with a complementary gel to that color.

  Q: Light Sleeper also had a complex color approach to the lighting. What was the concept behind it? At times you had two different colors going in different rooms.

  A: In the days of black-and-white, a cinematographer had to see shades of grey, black, and white the way the film saw it, through the wardrobe of the particular set. In the same way, you have to see color and color temperature the way the film sees it, not just the way it looks to the eye. In Light Sleeper, I was trying to create two worlds: the world of the Upper East Side, which was more designed, lush, and homogenized; versus the street, which was about mixed lighting with different color temperatures, fluorescent, mercury-vapor all colliding. In the scene where Willem Dafoe goes back with his old girlfriend to the Paramount Hotel to make love, I created the ambience of Vermeer's northern light replicating the Vermeer painting hanging over the bed. After making love to his old girlfriend, played by Dana Delany, she tells Willem, "Never call me. Never write to me," as she is dressing and leaving him in bed. I wanted to leave him visually in the sensation of being rejected, abandoned, and cold. I came up with the idea of a neon sign out the window. When I did tests, the color I felt could best evoke that feeling was green. So I used the deepest emerald green, and as the con trast or opposite of green is magenta, it enhanced the viewer's perception of the color. I motivated the magenta by the tungsten lights left on in the room. So mixing the magenta against the green, for me emotionally, gave a very eerie feeling of his loss. I'm always looking at colors, not for decorative reasons, but for reasons I feel can work emotionally to the portrayal of that character's situation.

  Q: In Light Sleeper, the characters lived by night. In the interiors, you were never sure whether it was day or night. What was the concept behind this?

  A: That's what we were trying to create. We were saying their world was nocturnal. It was always lit from practical sources, and you only knew if it was day or night when you saw Willem Dafoe outside the apartment. The director, Paul Schrader, also wanted to create a sense of paranoia and isolation by using the camera to follow Willem's character through the streets from above-creating a feeling of oppression or being pursued. Those were all psychological elements we tried to search for in the storytelling that would create the atmosphere. Paul Schrader and I looked at early Antonioni films that we greatly admired, La Notte, Eclipse, and L'avventura. We studied how he created a psychological state through architectural space. Antonioni is a master of framing and composition, moving the camera to depict the alienation of his characters in their worlds. Antonioni also uses the device of unconventionally breaking screen direction to create the effect of his characters emotional displacement through editing. Schrader understood this, and liked the device. He felt it could work in the cafeteria scene between Dana Delany and Willem Dafoe, where the camera jumps the line between their cuts and jars the audience so it visually conv
eys the separation between the two characters who cannot resolve why they are not together.

  Q: What was it like to work with Dennis Hopper on Backtrack?

  A: I had a great experience working with him. Dennis always knew where he wanted to put the camera because of the actor's point of view in the scene. Thirty-five or 40 percent of that film was shot on a Steadicam. He never wanted to interrupt the mise-en-scene; the movement of the performance in the scene. It made it much more difficult for me to be lighting so many different rooms and areas and still create a look. He never once looked through the camera, he knew in his mind's eye where the camera should be to tell the story. He said Backtrack was "A gangster film about the art world." Dennis is a big art collector and a painter himself, he understood the different sensibilities about art and images. When I first met with Dennis to talk about Backtrack, without saying too much he showed me On the Water front. I realized what Dennis was conveying to me was the simplicity of telling the story and that the camera should be motivated by the performance.

  Q: What is the visual style of Backtrack?

  A: We were doing a version of the film noir classic Out of the Past by the director Jacques Tourneur, within an eighties art world. The film took place in Los Angeles, Seattle and New Mexico so I picked different artists who were emblematic of those worlds. I referred to Georgia O'Keefe for New Mexico. One of her prominent paintings was of a church in Taos we used as a backdrop in the film. In Los Angeles, we used references to Ed Ruscha, those were all games we played to create these different worlds. Jodie Foster's character was based on the artist Jenny Holtzer, in which you see her truisms in Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) signs that became a very Go- dardian element.

  Q: Mississippi Masala was photographed in a much different style from the films we have been discussing. What was the photographic approach here?

  A: Mississippi Masala, which I did in the early nineties, was created in a naturalistic style. We were documenting the expulsion of East Indians from Uganda by Idi Amin in the early seventies. The film's context was really about the loss of your roots and cultural identity. It's also an interracial love story between Denzel Washington and an immigrant girl, played by Sarita Choudhury. We went for a period documentary style, contrasting Uganda in the seventies to a contemporary American South.

  Q: What was the nature of the light you were trying to capture in Uganda versus Mississippi for Mississippi Masala?

  A: For the Mississippi scenes, we went with a more saturated primary color palette. I shot tests on different film stocks and went with the newly introduced ASA 50 Daylight Kodak film 5245, a very fine-grain saturated rendition that created what I call juke box colors. In Africa, we found Fuji stock to complement the use of greens, umbers, and naturalistic colors against the Asian and black flesh tones. At the time, Fuji seemed to have a lower contrast and a softer feeling, to differentiate the seventies time period in Africa against contemporary Mississippi, which we wanted to be more of an American commercialized perspective.

  Q: When you print the release prints on Kodak stock, do you still get the qualities of the Fuji negative?

  A: You still get similar qualities from Fuji because the actual colors respond to the Kodak stock. The color rendition and subtleties of Fuji would be more enhanced making it on Fuji intermediate negative and printing it on Fuji print stock than on Kodak at that time. Today, Kodak has such a fine interpositive and internegative stock in 5244 that if I were to use Fuji, I would prefer to print Fuji on Kodak stock for release prints.

  I shot different parts of Mississippi Masala with different makes of lenses to lend itself to different styles. After having done many tests, I found different makes of lenses have different characteristics in relation to color, contrast, and sharpness and could affect the image much like filters. In Africa, I used Cooke Speed Pancros, which are softer, warmer, and more forgiving. They have a certain roundness of shape to the image due to their older style optics. Those lenses were designed over thirty years ago, the elements were hand-grounded. They are not as precise as newer Zeiss lenses, which have a very flat feel and are critically sharp in a very clinical way. I used those lenses for the Mississippi portion to contrast America and Africa. So for me, it was the combination of using different film stocks and different sets of lenses that created the different looks and feelings in the film.

  Q: Why do films produced in other countries look different than American films?

  A: If there are contributing differences between Hollywood studio films versus American independent and smaller European sized productions, then it becomes more of an attitude and point of view to the storytelling. Not to say there aren't European-style productions that don't emulate American sensibilities, like Subway and Le Femme Nikita by French director Luc Besson. In my experience and perception, European directors search for a visual language of their own, while in Hollywood one is expected to create many possible options in coverage and multiple angles to tell the story in the editing room. In smaller budget films, one does not have the time or the resources to create these options, and sometimes these limitations can be a strength. For example, a performance can be played between two actors in an orchestrated two-shot, which can have the advantage of creating the performance in real time. Different countries seem also to perceive colors differently in their films. Many contemporary French films seem to have a cooler bluish look to them. In part, it's the quality of the light they use and the way they print their films. German films seem to have an analytical, microscopic look to them, partly due to Zeiss lenses that have a very sharp and unforgiving crisp look to them. The English filmmakers like Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, and Alan Parker, who came out of commercials, created their own stylized three-quarter-edge light look with smoke or rain. Only when I photographed London Kills Me in England did I understand why they created their own photographic look in films. England, during the winter months, has five or six hours of daylight if you are lucky, so you are always put in a situation where you have to create your own supplementary light, which in turn creates an aesthetic. Even when you're on real locations in England, you're sometimes forced to create your own daylight, which becomes a clean daylight three-quarter-highlight-edge source. This exterior hard-edged look influenced the interior look of sets, a chiaroscuro effect of light and dark on the actors and settings. It's a look that many talented British cinematographers like Peter Suschitzky (Privilege, The Empire Strikes Back), Peter Biziou (Pink Floyd-The Wall, Mississippi Burning), and Michael Seresin (Fame, Bird-y) created.

  Q: How do you approach photographing an actor's face?

  A: People say the face is a landscape. No face takes light the same. So I like to look at a person in life and see how they look under different lighting situations, and light the environment in relation to that specific face. I create a world for the actors and then capture the face in that environment. There are actors and actresses who like to make demands on the cameraman to create their own image. Barbra Streisand, for instance, always looks like she's in a different movie than everybody else because she has requirements about the way she wants to be photographed, whether it serves the emotional visual context of the story or not.

  Q: How do you know how much light it takes to photograph an actor's face properly?

  A: I use a spot meter for most of my interiors, then evaluate different people's complexions against the set for exposure, mood, or feeling for the scene. You finally get into the zone where you get to know the film stock and light you're using, and with trust and experience you can see by eye what it's going to look like on the film. I used to think of it as a calculated risk, but it's really previsualizing. If I knew exactly how everything was going to look, it would be boring. One has to take risks and place yourself where you are able to take chances. You need a director and crew to take that risk with you, or you just take it upon yourself.

  Q: You used the term "zone" in discussing how you light. This is a method developed by the great still photographer Ansel A
dams. How does it apply to lighting for motion pictures?

  A: You figure out the exposure range of the negative from your highlights to shadow detail, your film stock, the light meter, and the lab. What you are doing when you're lighting a set is really creating a type of zone system, a range to the negative that creates your desirable look or mood to the scene. The high-speed film stocks have become so good today that the film can see what your eye sees in low-light situations. I worked with the French director Jean-Luc Godard, who doesn't like to use any lights, or very minimal amounts to augment the practical lights on the set. It's where you put the camera and the understanding of how to control what you see. Any cinematographer is going to understand how to use an exposure meter, but it is how you interpret the light to create an image. Eventually, you get to a point where you don't rely on your light meter as much as on your eye. The light meter might be a disadvantage because it might make you fall back on a certain look you're trying to get past. Falling back purely on a technical aspect of exposure and contrast, you might lose the happy accidents that happen. It's not to say you don't use those things, you do use them, but there's a certain place where your intuition and experience takes over-that's what we're all working towards.

  Q: How does a cinematographer develop an eye?

  A: When I started out, I walked around and saw everything in a frame. I looked at how light fell, then later tried to understand how I could recreate that. It's important to become aware of what's around in your own environment. Another way to develop your visual awareness is to study films. You become sophisticated enough to look at a film and analyze it visually, and you are left with how you're affected by the images in the context of the story. That's what we're talking about. I don't think it's good photography if people walk away from a film more aware of the photography than the story. There are many well-photographed films that aren't good films, and there can be a great film that's not well photographed. It's when you have both elements working together, in films like Searching, for Bobby Fischer directed by Steven Zaillian; Kieslowski's trilogy Red, White, and Blue; and Wong Kar Wai's Fallen Angels and Days of Being Wild that it is such a revelation.