Principal Photography

  Q: Blue Velvet had a very strong visual style. The shot of the white picket fence with the blue sky and the flowers has a very American look. We think we've seen this shot before, but there is something strangely different. How did that image come about?

  A: The approach came out of the idea right from the very beginning. David and I talked a lot about how Blue Velvet looked and what the progression in the visual style was. It had to start out very American, a very small, ideal little town. Then it descends, and you discovered things. It got a little darker, and you discovered more things. You realized you were seeing the underside of this small town and meeting characters you didn't know existed there, knowing that in the end you were going to pop back up and be in this idealized, perfect world again. So we knew we had both ends, and we knew what we wanted in the middle. Those early scenes were shot at the end of the schedule. We had a good idea of what the middle looked like in terms of the descent, the darkness, how dark it was, what color quality it had, and then it was easy to go back and say, "This is easy, this is sunny, this is ideal." It's a matter of picking the light, using a real white fence, using really bright colored flowers, and just doing it on a bright, sunny day. There weren't really any tricks. We used a polarized filter on the camera-that's the only trick we used. They're fresh flowers and green grass and the light was right. We used what we had, but we knew that's what it needed to be. Certainly, if it was a cloudy day, it wouldn't have worked. We couldn't have shot it. We would have had to wait, so we knew the importance of those images to set up the style. Those were images in David's head, those bright colors were this transition part of the style.

  Q: Dorothy's apartment in Blue Velvet is a very evocative setting. Where was this shot and what was the concept behind how it was photographed?

  A: Luckily, we were able to build Dorothy's apartment. The only set we had was the apartment and the hallway around it. David was very specific: "In this corner of the apartment, this is where she answers the phone. This is where this action takes place and it has this kind of a feeling. Now over here is this really dark corner and she only goes there once or twice, but it has a completely different feeling than any other place in the apartment. Over here is kind of harsher, bright light." He knew that ahead of time. We talked in those terms, both when we built the set and when we talked about lighting it. We talked about how a scene played in a room, what part of the room it played in, the layout of Kyle's view out of the closet doorway when he could just barely see her go down the hallway and then she disappeared. That was carefully built so that you didn't know there was a mystery there. She walked almost out of view, then came back in a little bit, and that was the right feeling.

  Q: The scenes of the Kyle MacLachlan character peering out of the closet were imaginatively done. You had profile shots of him looking, and point-of-view shots in addition to other angles.

  A: Yes, we found a good combination. The visual style we found grew out of the drama of the scene. It doesn't come from a vacuum, it comes from what's happening out in front. It comes from what's written in the scene. The things that were happening out there were very scary and horrific, things nobody had ever seen before, and this seemed to be the appropriate way to bring drama to the visual style-to lift it off the page and make it come alive. It really starts with the drama and it starts with what the actors do-that's really important.

  Q: Were you working with very low light levels in the apartment? You almost feel like you can barely see.

  A: Yes. When we did that first scene where Kyle comes in and the place is dark, I thought we'd really gone too far. I sat there in the theater and said, "I can't see him, how is the audience supposed to see him? I know where he's supposed to be." But David loved it that dark. That was part of the drama, that was why it was scary. We'd already seen it in daylight and we knew where everything was. What you needed to see for a moment was just Kyle's head bobbing around in darkness to get a sense of what it must have felt like for him. I watched people in the audience quiver during that scene, so it seemed to work.

  Q: What was the concept behind the use of the fire images in Wild at Heart?

  A: David had an idea how important it was, but it's not something we talked about. We knew where it belonged. It was all in the script. The credit sequence was about fire. Right from the start we knew all those close-ups of matches lighting and cigarettes burning were right there in the story. That was just integral in the lives of these characters.

  Q: How were those fire images described in the screenplay? Were there clues to you on how to shoot them?

  A: It was really simple: "extremely large close-up of a match striking the paper," or "a match lighting a cigarette." As I read it, I didn't realize it was quite so large. When we came to film them, I lined up a shot that was an inch and a half wide and David said, "I need to see less air around the match head lighting. I need to see it bigger in frame." It works great, it just has so much visual impact. The sound that goes with it makes it kind of magical-it lifts it off the page and makes it a real dramatic moment.

  Q: River's Edge, directed by Tim Hunter, is a powerful film with a strong atmosphere. How did you approach photographing the many scenes in which the dead girl's body is prominent in the frame?

  A: What it really comes down to for me, is it's a good, well-written story. Tim Hunter cast very interesting characters and he really brought it to life. I was saying, "How are we going to do this? I know she's supposed to be naked, but shouldn't she be wearing something? Couldn't she be covered up a little bit?" His approach to photographing the dead body was saying, "No, that's the point, she's naked. That's what the audience is going to see, no clothes, nothing. It's an Edward Weston nude, and that's the way that we're going to approach it." And sure enough, bonk, that's what it was. He really wanted it that way, and that was absolutely the right way to do it.

  Q: It always seems to be cloudy and overcast in the exterior scenes. Did you have to wait for that weather to shoot?

  A: No, River's Edge was a very low-budget film. We had twenty-five days or twenty-six days to shoot, period-no more. That was when the money ran out. We were having trouble because the river we had scouted up in northern California had flooded, our location was under water. So we pushed it back and pushed it back and finally got there at the end of the film, but it was absolutely worth it because the shore had been all ravaged. It gave a whole different landscape to the location that we had chosen months before. The river was still high and very muddy. It looked great, it really became the character it should have been in the film. We knew it should feel overcast, we knew it should not be particularly sunny, but should have a cool feeling. We just played our days in such a way that we could take advantage of the overcast. If it was raining, we felt we should use it. It was southern California in January and February, which was the only saving grace. That's the time when it does rain.

  Q: Night on Earth, directed by Jim Jarmusch, is comprised of five stories, each taking place inside of a cab in a different part of the world. What was the concept behind what each sequence should look like?

  A: We worked hard to talk out how they all hang together as scenes. It is five short stories. They're going to be judged as, "I like this one best, I like that one best," everybody's going to have their favorites-there's no way around that. I really wanted to have a noticeably different style for each film, subtle, but something that people did grab hold. So it was a matter of, "Where do you put the camera?" If you use diffusion on the lens, how much do you use? What was the quality of the light, was it harder or softer? The color of the light certainly was part of it. Jim and I sat down and designed it. "This city looks like this, let's go for this look, let's go for this feeling. This city feels like this, how do we augment that?" In Paris, we chose to use color and play off areas of the city that were colorful. So there was neon, we added more light to the dialogue inside the cab when they were moving. In Rome, we did the opposite, we just took it all the way and kept it all almost monoto
ne and earth tone-yellows and browns. We were working in that palette. So that was designed in, and that was our way to follow through and make each scene distinctive.

  Q: What rigs were used for shooting inside the cab?

  A: What a routine! In every city we would decide what kind of cab it was. We'd find a car that ran and painted it up to look like a cab. We'd find one derelict chassis that had been wrecked, pull the engine out, redo the interior to look like the first one we'd bought, and there we would have our two cars. So we could drive one around the city and photograph it driving by a location in a specific spot or a specific time and shoot out the front windows. We would see it driving about, and the other cab we would tow around the city with the actors in it. I'd be strapped in where the engine used to be, manning the camera and photographing the action as it unfolded inside the car. That was the pattern. We built a lighting rig to fit each cab in the style the photography seemed to demand for that city.

  We went into Italy and they said, "We build our car rigs out of wood, so be prepared." We brought material we could use instead of wood. In Helsinki, they said, "We don't do car rigs, so you better bring everything." So every place had a different approach. It was a wonderfully fascinating study in cultures. There were only six of us who traveled on the film, everybody else we had to pick up locally. So the assistant director, costume people, production manager, camera assistants, and all of the workers were at whatever country we were in. We had to bring equipment we could count on, like the camera and the little lighting equipment we were bringing along from the U.S. That's all we had. Then, when we came to a big night exterior, we would hire more people. We would hire lifts or whatever was needed for those scenes, but only for a few days. The rest of it was pretty much planning. Jim knew the cities, I knew a couple of the cities. We knew what the character of the locations was to be. It was just a matter of going out, finding them, marching our cab through on cue, and doing as much lighting as we could afford.

  Q: Were the city montages in each sequence of Night on Earth scripted? Was each shot detailed in the screenplay?

  A: Yes. Jim knew this when he interviewed me to shoot the film. He said, "There's a section which is the introduction to each city, and there will always be still, very specific, locked-off images to draw the character of the city." There were neighborhoods he liked or images he wanted. Then, in the last image, the cab drives through. It stayed pretty consistently the case. Then we go into the cab and there's the scene, or you see the cab driver beforehand, or we go to the pickup scene where we know there's a passenger who's going to find a cab and somehow they're going to get together. There's the dialogue in the cab. Then, there's a drop-off scene and interspersed throughout there are some point-of-view shots outside the cab where we see a neighborhood and pertinent images out the window. Occasionally, we fall back and we see the cab drive through another very specific landscape. So Jim knew it right from the start. We knew we needed the Coliseum in Rome and the Coliseum in Los Angeles where the car drove by, so we just had to do it. It was really specific, and when we got to each city, we found those shots. We just pounded them off, there's six or seven for each city.

  Q: Jarmusch's earlier films like Stranger than Paradise were photographed in single, locked-off shots. On Night on Earth, he evolved from this very rigorous style.

  A: He has. He made a big leap in Night on Earth, because all of a sudden he decided there could be cutaways. So you could actually see somebody roll the window down and toss a cigarette out, like Roberto Benigni does, or you could see somebody adjusting the radio. That was alright for him and he loved having them, but it's still a proscenium sort of film. Each one of those cabs is just this little bitty room. One of the reasons he went to cabs is he figured there would be a great deal of control. He would have the actors captive, they're not going anywhere, but he didn't quite count on the production end and the difficulties involved. Certainly, there's a great deal of control for him with the forced situation of two people in a car who don't know each other and he just loved it.

  We did the same thing in every city: we'd come into town, we'd go off and start to scout locations. We had the cast set, but we'd cast the minor characters, and then we'd be building the cab having found the locations. He would do a couple days of rehearsing in every city and then we'd start shooting. That was just the way it had to be-it's a very low-budget, very little film.

  Q: As a cinematographer, what is your relationship with the actors on a film?

  A: It's a matter of learning what the actors need. It's a matter of learning their style and giving them the room to perform, to make it easy for them so the director gets the most out of them. It's a matter of being ready, not taxing them anymore than you have to, being ready to go again right away. Those things are very important because it's a matter of momentum. It's a matter of building, getting a scene going, building it up, and then stepping back and letting it play itself. You're just incidently the photographer who's watching it all unfold. You're not intervening, you're there watching what's been set up and worked out beforehand. It's really important to me to do all this work ahead of time, but not to prevent it from happening. You're there just to augment it and help it along.

  Q: What do you look for in a project?

  A: I don't think there's a genre better than another. I love them all. I admire so many directors, from Martin Scorsese to Stanley Kubrick-there are just so many. I love watching films. I grew up on foreign films, they were my mainstay because I was the projectionist in a film program. I saw them all in the sixties and seventies, so it was a great education for me. I need to find projects that are fascinating, that make me think. I like doing films that are compelling, that transport me to somewhere else, where we get a chance to try something new, to visit a place I haven't seen before.

  I've been fortunate that many of the filmmakers I've worked with have these desires. They're driven to make films that take people to a different place, that move people in a different direction, or are different than they've seen before. Certainly, David Lynch, John Cassavetes, Tim Hunter, and Jim Jarmusch have that. Cinematography is a job that can be either boringly technical or magical. I was never trained to be that technical, so I guess it couldn't be boring for me. It has to be magical. The quality of the light has to do something for the drama that makes it arrive and live. I've been lucky to meet directors who have that same desire, who are able to communicate to me so I have all of the clues, because I realize as I go along, I don't do it by myself. The chemistry that has to happen just doesn't happen every time. Most of the ideas in the films I have shot are not my ideas-they're collaborative. They're the director's ideas translated through me to the crew, who have their own way of solving problems, who add their part to it, too, and it all gets mixed together. So it's the people I communicate and deal with on the crew who help to lift it off. It's my relationship with the actors and how comfortable I can make them feel in a dramatic situation that helps elevate it above a mundane scene and makes it a little bit magical. All of that mixes in to get not just one person's vision-it's everybody together.

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  Sandi Sissel

  Sandi Sissel, ASC, was raised in Paris, Texas, a proper cinematic location for a cinematographer. She became enthralled with photography watching her father, a freelance news photographer, develop his pictures in the darkroom. Sissel worked on her high school newspaper as a photographer. The politicized atmosphere of the sixties inspired her to study journalism and television. In college, she received an internship with an ABC-TV Dallas affiliate, which provided her the opportunity to gain experience working on a film crew.

  Sissel moved to New York and established herself in the documentary film community, working on Ira Wohl's Oscar-winning Best Bo's, and with filmmaker Jill Godmilow. After getting into the cameraman's union, she worked for the NBC and ABC networks shooting news stories on a variety of investigative and social issues. Her participation in a series of important political documentaries-Th
e Wobblies, Seeing Red, Witness to War, Americans in Transition, Before Stonewall, and Chicken Ranch-and her experience as a camera operator for Robby Muller, Frederick Elmes, and Haskell Wexler informed her later work as director of photography in fictional feature films. In 1998, Sissel recieved the Women in Film Crystal Award for Cinematography and a Kodak Vision Award for excellence in cinematography and support for other women pursuing a career in her field.

  Sandi Sissel demonstrates great range in her work in documentaries, television, commercials, and theatrical films. Her resume includes the miniseries The Drug Wars: The Canzarena Story, the TV series The Flash, and reportage on 20/20 and 60 Minutes. She has been a camera operator on No Nukes and The Believers, and has contributed to the documentary Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang and a segment for NBC's Saturday Night Live. From the relentless, unblinking camera eye probing the underside of legalized prostitution in Las Vegas in Chicken Ranch, to a Pogocam whizzing through the claustrophobic tunnel of The People Under the Stairs, to the golden light of India in Salaam Bombay!, Sandi Sissel is a seeker of truth, a storyteller, and a filmmaker.

  SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY

  Calling the Shots

  Heaiw Petting

  Rising Son

  Double Switch