Principal Photography

  Elmes's association with David Lynch on Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart produced powerful imagery which informed the director's vision. A white picket fence with brightly colored roses against the blue sky, the dim light of a voyeur's gaze, and matches exploding into fire are images that enhance the visual lexicon of contemporary filmmaking. On Night on Earth, directed by Jim Jarmusch, Elmes defined the expanse of five international cities, shooting inside the confines of a taxi. The body of a murdered girl in Tim Hunter's Riv er's Edge is photographed in a matter-of-fact manner which is both chilling and disturbing. On The Ice Storm, directed by Ang Lee, Elmes supplied the photographic metaphor which defined the self-involved characters from the 1970s with frigid blues and a pristine sense of composition.

  Elmes received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for his cinematography on Blue Velvet, and won the award for Wild at Heart and Night on Earth. He got an Emmy award nomination for his work on In the Gloaming, directed by Christopher Reeve. Elmes has also worked with directors Martha Coolidge, Diane Keaton, Franc Roddam, Marisa Silver, and Norman Rene.

  Fred Elmes is a gentle, intelligent man with the gift to capture the dark, offbeat, and ironic visions of cutting-edge filmmakers.

  SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY

  Opening Night (Camera operator with Michael Ferris; director of photography, Al Ruban. Note: Original release withdrawn, re-released in 1991.)

  River's Edge

  Aria (Franc Roddam segment "Liebestod" from Tristan and Isolde)

  Moonwalker (with John Hora)

  Wild at Heart

  Q: How did you become interested in photography?

  A: I started taking still pictures in grade school. My dad had a Leica camera he got after World War II. He wasn't afraid to let me just walk off and use it, which was very trusting of him since no one else's dad let them use their expensive cameras. So he just turned me loose with it and I started taking pictures of everything. I did that all through high school. I was photographer for the yearbook and the local paper. My dad also had a Bell and Howell 16mm camera, so I started to make my own movies. We learned how to do sync sound. I was the editor as well, so I got to learn it all. It was fun. I was really torn between movies and still photography.

  I ended up going to the Rochester Institute of Technology to study still photography. They have several schools, one is very technical and the photo illustration program is exactly the opposite. We had to illustrate music and poetry with photography or make a short film, which seemed to be much more up my alley. I was really headed toward photojournalism. The idea of telling a story or having something that had a beginning, a middle, and an end instead of one picture really appealed to me. It was how to do something with a series of pictures. So I went through the stills program at RIT, although my thesis was a film, to New York University graduate film school for a couple of years, where I was a teaching assistant and made and shot some films.

  Then I realized truly dramatic feature films were what I really wanted to do. They weren't being made in New York. One summer, I drove out to Los Angeles to say hello to anyone I could find and got into the American Film Institute, which at the time was in Beverly Hills. I was there for a couple of years. It was a great introduction to feature films. It was a way to be a student again, not to have a job for a couple more years and just to learn the ropes. Then it was a matter of finding interesting films to shoot which appealed to me. I stumbled on some good ones early on. It was a matter of being at the right place at the right time.

  Q: One of the first directors you worked with was John Cassavetes. How did you meet him?

  A: John Cassavetes and I met at the American Film Institute (AFI). When I first got there, there was an apprenticeship program where a filmmaker was taken into residence. John was the filmmaker. He was going to make a film and people from the American Film Institute were going to work on it. I worked on A Woman under the Influence just for a couple of weeks. John's relationship with the cinematographer at the time didn't work out, so I left with the cinematographer who had hired me, but John and I remained friends. John was at AFI for a couple of years cutting the film and I just stayed in touch. Then, a year later, he said, "I have this other film, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, do you want to shoot it?" which was just my wildest dream. So I walked right in, did it, and had a great time.

  Q: What was Cassavetes's attitude toward cinematography?

  A: John had total disregard for anything technical, and at the same time he had an innate sense about where to put the camera to see the drama of the scene. At the start of the day we would rehearse the scene with the actors. If the scene wasn't working, he would throw the script out and improvise with the actors. He would have the new scene transcribed, the actors would learn it, and then in the afternoon we'd shoot it. Having seen the rehearsal, he and I would talk about where the cameras would go. Sometimes it was a couple of cameras. He seemed to know just where they belonged. He never described why, but it always seemed to make sense for the scene. I learned a great deal about drama from him because he certainly cared most about the actors, about creating a dramatic moment that fit together as a film. It was good for me that he had so little regard for technical things, because that's one of the things I was hung up on at that point. I was a perfectionist. I would say, "No, it has to be this way, the light has to be exactly like this in the camera-period." I would set up a shot. If we were making a very careful pan and John was making an entrance as an actor, he would just nudge me on the way in, and the camera would bobble during this delicate pan I was doing. He'd say, "That's what I want the scene to feel like. It has to have a new sort of energy-you are making it too pretty, too perfect." He wasn't afraid to pick up the camera, shove it in someone's face and say, "This is the feeling, this is the drama of the scene." The character becomes confrontational in the scene. It was a real education for me.

  Q: Did you shoot a lot of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie handheld?

  A: A lot of handheld. A lot of crazy things I wouldn't have tried, like mixing a handheld shot with a dolly shot, chasing somebody down the hallway with a handheld camera, then cutting back to a very wide shot and just showing the whole drama unfold as a set proscenium camera. Cassavetes seemed not to care, yet there was something else that took over when he designed the scene. He had this innate sense of how the drama would play and what gave him options in editing to make it play the most powerfully. He really considered himself a dramatic filmmaker. It was about the acting. It was about creating the moment that could be the most powerful. He certainly was a very powerful personality and a great actor himself. He could manipulate situations. He could do anything that was necessary to make an actor give the performance he needed, and actually the same was true on some level with the crew. If he needed more out of the camera operator, out of the crew for whatever reason, he had the power to do that. He would intimidate you. He would make you laugh, he would make you cry-he would rise to the occasion and make it happen-that was his style of filmmaking.

  Q: So Cassavetes was directing you as the cinematographer.

  A: He directed everybody. He was really in control of things, even though he acted in a crazy fashion sometimes and it appeared to be chaos. He got things he needed out of situations. He always said, "You guys are lucky, you're young filmmakers, you could do anything you want. You could take the camera out on the street and shoot anywhere you want. I used to, now I can't do that anymore. They follow me now, I can't get away with it. Now you guys have to go do that." Shadows and Faces were all on-the-fly productions. He was right, now that he was a bigger filmmaker no one would let him get away with it. He had to make a proper film and rebelled constantly against making a proper Hollywood sort of a film. He just hated it-too many strings attached.

  Q: How did you light the club in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie?

  A: We actually went into that Gazzarri's club eight or nine different times to light it because we couldn't go and stay there for the whole film since they had sh
ows at nights. They had to take our gear out and we could only work certain days, for certain hours. So we went in there on eight or nine separate occasions during the course of the production of the film, which you just never, ever do on a film. We lit it many different ways and many times, but what we really wanted was to make it look seedy. We wanted to capture some sense of the underside of these two-bit Hollywood Boulevard gangsters who were trying to be somebody bigger than they were. It was grainy and gritty. People walk into shadows and scenes get played in shadows-this appealed to John a lot. That's the cue we took. The club had to have a seedy look. That was the home of these characters, and that felt right to me. The dressing room was a narrow, little room. We really wanted everyone to look good in there. We wanted the lighting to be seamless, and that's why there are these bulbs around the mirror. The same is true with Gena Rowlands in Opening Night. You have those situations like dressing rooms where the glamour is important, but out on the stage of the club in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie-anything goes. There was this blasting red light from one side and a blasting blue light from another side-that was the kind of glamour which belonged in that club, and that's what John really wanted.

  Q: Cassavetes did not cover a scene in the classic fashion. In The Killing of a Chinese Bookie where the gangsters take Cosmo Vitelli, played by Ben Gazzara, to a coffee shop, the camera is very close on the men as they talk around the table. Was there any coverage shot on this scene?

  A: No, there wasn't. It was one of those situations with five or six people around a small table, and we would just let it roll. Every take was a full tenminute camera load of film, partly because the scene tended to ramble, but also because John wanted to allow people the option to experiment. So it started with the script and it opened up from there. We'd reload, he'd talk it through again with the actors. We'd pan over and do somebody's close-up, but then run the whole take out on that person and not be afraid to do it. There was no formal coverage. John really wanted to create situations where things could happen by chance and we would be there to catch them, but it all came from the scene. It all came from what the actor did. Every last John Cassavetes movie was driven by the drama of the scene, which is why I loved him and his films. There was always the drama. He was just an original talent when it came to looking at film in a new way. There was nobody like him. There were elements of cinema verite, documentary, and even elements of Hollywood movies, but certainly in his own way, his own fashion, and completely with his own rules. He also used nonactors to a fair degree. He was not afraid to put people in uncomfortable situations, situations where you could see them cringe but, boy, they cringed for all the right reasons and it was so very believable.

  Q: A good portion of the play within Opening Night was shot on stage in front of a live audience. In many of the shots, the audience is prominent in the frame. What was the concept behind this?

  A: We needed an audience-that was integral. They knew they were part of it, and we just planned it all with that in mind. Certainly, there was more shooting of just the actors without the audience. John rehearsed with the actors beforehand, and they all knew the scene before we started shooting. So we just used our days with the audience wisely and got the most mileage out of them.

  Q: Were those scenes shot in different venues?

  A: Yes, there were two different theaters. There was one smaller theater, then one bigger theater. That was an experience because I certainly had never done anything on that scale. It was a big deal. Then there was all the backstage action that goes on.

  Q: Did you try to light the scenes so they looked like theatrical stage lighting?

  A: Yes, John really wanted it to feel like theatrical stage lighting. Again, he didn't want glossy Hollywood lighting. Certainly, there were shots where people had to look beautiful and look great, but he was just so opposed to the sense of a Hollywood movie that he rebelled against it. He didn't want anything to do with it. Theatrical lighting seemed to fit just fine for him.

  Q: You have collaborated on several films directed by David Lynch. How did you first meet and come to work together?

  A: I met him at AFI, right at the same time I met John Cassavetes. David was doing this odd film called Eraserhead. A cinematographer named Herb Cardwell had started the film when it seemed like it was going to be a much shorter, scheduled project. Herb had to go, and they needed somebody to come in. So Herb actually shot the first couple of months of photography and I shot the last couple of years. It went very slowly, but we were really there to get what David wanted. When I first met him, David asked me if I would be interested in picking up the photography on this film. He seemed to like me and I liked him. He said, "I'll show you some scenes from the film." I had no idea what to expect, but he started with the easy ones and then we eventually saw the baby footage at the end, which was, of course, very shocking. It was a good relationship. I enjoy it still. We're still friends.

  My view of photography and filmmaking was much more akin to David's, so we saw eye-to-eye on the approach to visual style. I started Eraserhead and had to take a break. I went off and shot The Killing of a Chinese Bookie in the meanwhile, and then we came back and finished Eraserhead. So I have these two completely divergent styles during this same period, and it was very good for me to see these completely opposite sides of the coin. They are two very distinctive filmmakers. They're both driven to make films the way they do with the degree of detail and aesthetic that they have, but just opposite. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Eraserhead are both very powerful films.

  Q: How did David Lynch communicate the unique visual style of Eraserhead to you? Did he use photographs, paintings, or films to express it?

  A: We never really looked at films or photographs. We actually talked about the mood of things, about how the room looked, and how the light was. How much shadow was on his face, how much you could actually see in the background, and how much it was going to disappear. There are very few day scenes in Eraserhead, but they have a different character. Sunlight wasn't acceptable. We could only go out and shoot on heavy overcast days, otherwise we couldn't shoot those scenes. It's very specific language we learned along the way. We both felt out what seemed to be required. There weren't catch phrases.

  Q: So many films have a seminal shot. The image that immediately comes to mind in Eraserhead is the close-up of Henry with his hair backlit and the particles flying in the air. How was that shot created?

  A: That was an image David had in his head. When Henry goes through this change and pops out the other side, it's kind of in space, but they're not stars, they're sparkles. David always described it as "Little sparkles behind him." We just had to find a way to make them float out there and then have this wash of light come over his face. It was one of the most distinct images out of the film. David always spoke out of mood and of going to another place.

  Q: How did you create the lighting atmosphere in the scene with the neighbor next door? There is an eerie effect of how her eyes registered in black-and-white.

  A: The scene between her and Henry was done in very low light levels. It was meant to be extremely dark and very soft. That's really what we found worked, so we went with it.

  Q: What black-and-white film stock did you use on Eraserhead?

  A: It's Kodak Double X negative. We did some testing with make-up, with wall color, with different effects. I never shot in 35mm before. I'd shot black-and-white, but not on a big film like this, so it was a real learning experience. From the Rochester Institute of Technology, I had enough technical knowledge to come into it and be able to talk to the lab intelligently: "What I'm seeing is not what I think I should be seeing. How do we go about fixing it?" I could keep up the relationship fairly intelligently, but we all learned as we went along. There were problems, shots we wanted that we didn't know how to solve. We would get somebody's number, somebody referred us. We'd call up and say, "We're from the AFI and we're making a student movie. How do you do this effect?" and they say, "We do it t
his way, we buy one of these, and we assemble this..." Then we say, "How do you do it if you don't have any money?" and they say, "Well, back in the old days .... and there inevitably would be some simple solution everybody had disregarded or just discounted because it wasn't so easy or it wasn't so good anymore, but it was cheap. We just did cheap, simple solutions that the handful of us who made the film could do.

  Q: What kind of cameras did you use?

  A: We used several, we used an Eclair CM3 with a blimp for sound scenes. It was a little like a tank, a small car. We used an Arriflex camera for wild shooting. For some of the effects, we used a Mitchell because we needed pin registration. Most of these either came from the AFI or were borrowed. There wasn't a lot of money to go and rent extravagant amounts of equipment. The AFI was very good to us. They let us use equipment for a long time, but the strings were pretty tight and there was only so much we could do when it actually came to cash dollars. It was a long period of time because that was the way David was most comfortable. We didn't need a big crew. Most of the film is really one or two characters in a room, so it was pretty simple production-wise, and that was the best way to get the look David wanted. Nobody imagined it was going to take a couple of years. We all hung in there. Having started on it and spent so much time, we all really wanted to see it through. David was driven. He felt certain there was an audience for Eraserhead. It played at the Waverly Theater in New York at midnight for a long time. It opened at Filmex at a midnight screening-the audience was speechless afterwards. Then it was picked up by a distributor and the print went to the Waverly Theater in New York. For the longest time that was the print of the film-there wasn't money for more, there wasn't a need for more at the moment-so there it was.