Principal Photography

  Q: How did you become a director of photography?

  A: When I was born, my father was a still photographer who freelanced for the UPI (United Press International) and AP (Associated Press). He had photographs in Look and Life magazines. He covered the homefront during World War II and took a lot of Rosey the Riveter photographs. As a kid, I would go with him to the darkroom. I had a real fascination with photography from a very young age. I always got cameras for Christmas. In high school, I was a photojournalist for the school newspaper. I went off and started college in 1967. It was a politically active period. I was a tremendous fan of live television broadcasts. I loved people like Sander Vanocur and all of the journalists in those days. I was addicted to the Democratic and Republican conventions and any kind of civil rights activity. My desire was to become a reporter, so I started studying journalism and television. By the end of my freshman year, I realized I still really liked the camera better than anything else, so I got an internship with the local ABC affiliate in Dallas. I would go out with news crews and shoot film. I had majored in what was called "film art." By the time I got out of college, I had done lots of small films, but my real desire was still in journalism. So even though I loved dramatic films, my aim was certainly much more to get involved in documentaries. In 1970, the idea of being in the film business was still tough and remote. The fact I was a woman was really not that big of a factor. There were not that many people doing it. My husband and I moved to Wisconsin where I got a job teaching beginning film production, made educational films for the University of Wisconsin system, and went to graduate school because I felt the way to make it in the business was through education. I finished my graduate degree and taught for three years-I was really ready to do more hands-on work. In the early seventies, New York was really the center of documentary work, so I moved to New York and spent about a year freelancing. I worked for free on a lot of films that ultimately did very well. I worked on Best Boy with director Ira Wohl, which won an Oscar, and with Jill Godmilow (Antonia: Portrait of a Woman, Waiting for the Moon)-I helped her on a few films. Sometimes I shot, sometimes I was an assistant. I got a job transferring sound at DuArt. That first year in New York, I did whatever I could to get by. ABC, NBC, and CBS networks in New York suddenly were being sued because they had no minority people whatsoever in their technical departments. The union put the word on the street they were looking for blacks, Hispanics, and women to come in and show reels to consider membership. I made an appointment. I was twenty-four, and it was overwhelming. The IA (IATSE-International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) was the hallowed halls. I went in. Guys like Sol Negrin were there. They looked at my work, and at the end of the screening they said, "Your work is very good, we would be interested in you coming in as a member." I was walking on the clouds when I walked out the door. Of course, it cost a thousand dollars down, but I borrowed some money, went back, and did it.

  My career has parallelled the women's movement. Two, three years previous to that, I could have knocked on that door endlessly and it would have made no difference. Most of the people who were getting into the IA in those days were the sons and nephews of members.

  By the end of the week, I got a phone call from NBC: Would I come in and work as vacation replacement? I was completely excited and terrified. I called cameraman Tom McDonough (Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, The Day after Trinity)-we were doing Best Boy together at the time-and I said, "They have CP 16s and Frezzolini's, I've never used these cameras. Will you show me how to load them? I have to go to work at seven o'clock tomorrow morning." NBC employed me six days a week for the next three months solid. I made more money than I had ever dreamed of, enough money to make a down payment on my own NPR camera. I got a call from ABC, who said, "We'd like to put you on staff." That was the year they hired people like Geraldo Rivera, Felipe Luciano, John Johnson, Melba Toliver, Joan Lunden, and Rosanna Scarmadella. We did a lot of wonderful stories together. I went with Geraldo to Willowbrook. Shooting network news was a way to work every single day, to stop using a light meter and to just really run with a camera. We were still shooting film. I became one of the original virtual staff members on 20/20 and did a lot of stories with Geraldo Rivera, then I did a lot of 60 Minutes. Because I had my own camera, I suddenly became very sought after by independent documentary people. If you own your own equipment, you can do it for a better rate. You become much more interesting to people when you can donate your equipment. I did this up to 1982. I became more interested in manipulating the image and telling stories. Ed Bianchi, a very well-respected commercial director, called me and said, "I have this director of photography coming over from Germany named Robby Muller (The American Friend, Dead Man) and he's looking for an operator. Since you're in the IA and he's not, if you came in and worked as the standby director of photography, he would love for you to operate for him. Then he can come into New York and work through the IA." So, I worked with Robby for two weeks on this commercial. He loved my work and said, "Wow, you can really follow action." I said, "Maybe it's from documentaries, I've just been used to doing it." Eddie had a real fancy for European directors of photography, so he brought in one after another-great directors of photography. So, intermixed with directing a documentary called Chicken Ranch and shooting a documentary about Mother Teresa, which lasted for about four years, I worked as an operator for various directors of photography on commercials and learned a lot about lighting. I learned a lot about 35mm cameras, even how to use the wheels, which was something terrifying to me in those days. Ultimately, I even got a chance to shoot a couple of commercials with Eddie. Then Robby did The Believers, and he hired me to operate. I got to work with Director John Schlesinger. Then Fred Elmes hired me to operate for him. Haskell Wexler directed some commercials and hired me to shoot, which, of course, was very challenging and a huge responsibility. So all of this led up to my reading several low-budget scripts, but they weren't really interesting enough visually to do until Salaam Bombay! came along. I thought, "I spent my whole life doing documentaries-I can do this film." So, I went off to India for seven months, made ten thousand dollars, and shot a film that really opened up a whole new world for me in terms of being a director of photography.

  Q: Salaam Bombay! is a powerful fictional film about street children in India which is directly influenced by reality. How did you work on location in India?

  A: We ended up having principal photography delayed a couple of months because of monsoons and money problems. The director, Mira Nair, and I took time to break the script down and do storyboards. We didn't have a storyboard artist. I drew stick figures, but in thinking the script through visually, it helped me to show the entirely Indian crew, who didn't speak my language, what we were doing. Being in the streets of Bombay without the luxury of money, we followed that blueprint almost exclusively. It also made us really aware we were doing a simple story through a child's point of view and not to get caught up with India at large.

  Q: The light in India has a remarkable quality to it. Can you describe it?

  A: India has a very specific kind of light. When you work in Los Angeles, New York, Ohio, Toronto, Vancouver, or England, you're always going to get a certain kind of light which has to do with where you are compared to the equator, pollution, clouds-all kinds of things affect the kind of light you get. The two most obvious times I've noticed light are in Moscow and India. You can take a lens with absolutely no filtration and point it, and you'll get footage back from Moscow that will be grayish blue, and you will get footage back from India that will be golden. In India, you're quite close to the equator, but you've got so much red dust in the air, ground that is basically red dirt, and buildings that are basically saffron. You have these beautiful golden brown skin tones, and everywhere you look, everything is getting bounced off by something that's in a red hue. So your footage comes back that way. When you're in India, you almost have to work in the opposite direction if you want to go away from a golden color. It's the same
as the way the brown smog in Los Angeles affects the light. You have this dust in the air in India that affects the light.

  Q: Are you very conscious of the specific color and texture qualities of the light where you shoot and how you are going to deal with it?

  A: Oh, absolutely. I just finished doing a pilot up in Toronto. It was supposed to be Chicago in the winter. I said to the director, "My ideal would be to have footage that was gray. Neither blue nor warm, but absolutely gray, as close to black-and-white as you could make it." We were lucky because we had overcast snow. The few times the sun came out, I put blue on the lens and got away from the warm color. Wherever you go, the light affects what you are doing. If it's bouncing off green grass or brown buildings or gray buildings, or if it's bouncing off all of the glass in New York City, you get a different kind of reflection. I was getting very frustrated for a while because I was shooting Pennsylvania in Los Angeles, Chicago in Los Angeles. I'd be doing L.A. for anything but L.A. If you're doing exteriors, you really have to work very hard to make L.A. look like anything other than L.A. Part of the joy as a director of photography is to get to experience all that different kind of light. You can go to a small town in Ohio and make beautiful footage because you're inspired by the difference in the environment. If you are in Los Angeles, and you're constantly going to the Valley, Burbank, or Malibu trying to make it something other than what it is, you have to work doubly hard. If you're in a studio, you can make it whatever you want. You've got a window, it can be sunrise, sunset, midday, overcast, raining, night, you can just play, but when you're dealing with nature, you're not only photographing nature, you're manipulating nature-it can be both exciting and frustrating.

  Q: The director of photography really has to be a student of light. Are you constantly studying the quality of light wherever you go?

  A: Very much so. I've done films that are entirely night or 90 percent night, and you can't help looking at the way light comes in windows at night without the lights on. You start looking at how the moon shadows are. I can't tell you how many scripts I've read that start out with "moonless night" and you go, "What is this, a moonless night in the woods?" You become a complete student of light. Recently, I was doing a lighting workshop, and Allen Daviau talked about how everywhere he goes he's become a complete student of the way light falls on the face, the way ambient light or practical light affects people. If you're lucky enough to work on films where you can truly play with natural light-it's great fun. You also become a student of lenses and film stocks, so you know exactly how to re-create something the way you saw it. If I were to take a lens and shoot you right now, it might not come back the way it looks to my eyes. So you have to learn how to add just enough fill light or just enough key light to make it look like it looks to the eye, and in turn will look very natural to the audience.

  Q: How did you come to work with contemporary horror master Wes Craven on The People Under the Stairs?

  A: Wes had asked me to work with him before, but our schedules had not clicked. I admired him as a filmmaker tremendously. I'm not particularly a fan of horror films, but when I read the original script for The People Under the Stairs it was the story of a little black kid from a poor family who discovered a little white girl who was being kept captive. He saves the kids from the evil parents and gets money for his family. It was a modern-day fairy tale. It didn't have that much of a horror element involved in it. As we started shooting, Wes couldn't help himself. He had to add a disembowelment scene and many other horror elements. One day, I was looking through the lens and said, "We need more blood here," and he said, "See, even you got involved in this." I made it very clear to him I knew nothing about horror films. I was very involved in telling the story and shooting it in a style that Wes said was very different from any way he had worked before. He had worked in a slightly more garish horror style, and we lit The People Under the Stairs differently. It didn't necessarily have the look of a horror film. Wes wanted a really, really dark movie. The Universal executives were looking at dailies, and I felt an automatic need to be able to see things within the darkness, which is very difficult to light. One day, when we were doing all the scenes in the basement, Wes said, "I SAID DARK! I WANT IT DARK AND I MEANT DARK!" So we really had to come to an agreement as to what level of darkness Universal would accept and Wes would accept. It was fun to be able to work as dark as possible and still be able to see an image.

  Q: The area where the people under the stairs live was lit in a dramatic and visually exciting way. What was it like to work on these sequences? It looks like there was barely room enough for the camera to move.

  A: There barely was. We designed it to be only wide enough to get a human body through. We couldn't even get a Steadicam through there. We used the AbyssCam camera that was designed by Clairmont Camera for The Abyss. Basically, it was an Arri 2C mounted on a Pogocam with an element from the Steadicam to help stabilize it and a video monitor on top so that you didn't look through the lens. You looked at a tiny video camera, and you could run through there at high pace so that we could actually create this sense of things being very narrow. If it had been any wider to be able to accommodate a Steadicam, you wouldn't believe you were actually in between the walls of a set.

  Q: Who was the camera operator on these sequences, and what is a Pogocam?

  A: I was the operator on the film, so I did most of it. A Pogocam is a stabilizing rod you put on the base of a camera so it is not bending back and forth. The camera is stabilized in an upward/downward motion. You can mount whatever camera on top of it you want. You can either put the camera on the bottom or the top, and then you just hold the rod and run with the camera. I've used it in several films, Drug Wars: The Camarena Story and Full Eclipse. Sometimes I didn't want it to be completely stable like a Steadicam, I wanted that little edge that you get from running full out, but if you don't use something like a Pogocam, the camera jerks too much. So the Pogocam is actually a wonderful in-between. On TheAbvss sometimes they did Steadicam, sometimes they ran through the submarine with just the Pogocam.

  Q: In The People Under the Stairs, there's a reaction shot of the evil brother where a forward and backward movement of the lens is occurring at the same time. How did you execute this shot?

  A: This is the shot that Alfred Hitchcock developed for Vertigo. You zoom and dolly at the same time. This is something Wes uses in every film. It's actually very tough to do. You design a shot so you're either zooming in or zooming out, depending on what works, and dollying in the opposite direction. If you're going to zoom in to get tighter, then you dolly back simultaneously. You must end your dolly and end your zoom at exactly the same time. The image stays exactly the same size, but your background changes. Wes loves this shot. Everyone calls it the Vertigo shot.

  Q: What was your approach to the action sequences in Full Eclipse?

  A: We shot the opening nightclub sequence with five cameras. My basic theory is to be organized, know what you want, and hire a bunch of great operators who are really into it, because they find great shots for you. My real job as a director of photography in action/adventure is to light it in a loose enough fashion for the actors to be able to move within the sets and to know exactly how much smoke, gunpowder, or whatever it is you need to accomplish the shot. You're going to have to use a lot more light than you're used to because you're going to do ultra slow motion. You have to listen to the stunt men to find the right angles to pick. From the angles they are shooting from, camera operators often have really good ideas of how to shoot something. You'd be surprised how many directors get lost when action scenes come up. So they turn it over to the stunt coordinator. As a director of photography, you may love doing the drama or the love scenes, then suddenly you have three days of guts and glory and it's, "Let's get through this one way or the other." I fall somewhere in the middle. It's fun to do all that fast action, but if it's car chases or gunfights, usually the stunt men who design the shots have very good ideas about how to cover it
. If I'm working with a director who doesn't particularly want to storyboard, I almost always insist we at least storyboard the action sequences because it can become awesome on the day you are doing it. It's really good to think it out and say, "We need a wide shot, then we need a close-up, then we need the gun, then we need the face, then we need the reaction, then we need ..." That way you go into it knowing what you need and you can then have a pep rally with your camera operators and say, "I need you to cover this." You get it all done that way, mixing in a bit of handheld to give it rough edges.

  Q: Is there video assist on each camera?

  A: Not always. Usually you'll have video assist on your main camera, but not always, it depends.

  Q: So, when you don't have video assist, you don't really know exactly what you've gotten until you see the dailies?

  A: No, but you have a pretty good idea. I'll look through every camera to check every angle to make sure what I'm getting.

  Q: Using the tools of your trade-lighting, lenses, and framing-how did you make a low-budget film such as No Secrets look richer than it's meager bank account?

  A: As a general rule, from the budget of $1 million to $7 million, my tools are basically the same. I might be able to afford a more experienced crew with $7 million than I can with $1 million, but generally in terms of the camera, the lenses, and the Iights, your tools are roughly the same. You get more time with more money, but on a low-budget film, there's a lot of care taken in choosing the locations you're using. I've often tried to get big shots on low-budget films by saying very clearly in preproduction, "We need to shoot this at a certain time of day or else we're not going to get the shot" If you're in a great big room that has three huge windows, and you see the sun is going to come up in the East in the morning and the windows face east, you must do that scene at nine o'clock in the morning or you cannot do the scene, because if you wait until afternoon, it's going to be too dark and there's no possibility of getting a couple of Musco lights and doing the shot. We did it that way on Salaam Bombay! and No Secrets. Certainly, your actors very often are working for scale. On a $10 million film, you've got a $7 million above-the-line project because your actors are getting a lot of money, production is getting a lot of money, the script may have been in turnaround two or three times-it's amazing how the money gets eaten up. Sometimes I'll think, "Oh, great! I get a lot of money so I can go in here and do something." In fact, I end up with a $1 million below-the-line budget to go out and do that film. Whereas, on a $2 million film, you probably also have a $1 million below-the-line budget because you're working with actors on scale, producers who are working for percentages, and directors are less experienced and not getting very much salary. So, you actually have to really get to a considerably bigger budget before a director of photography feels more money. There is, however, a tremendous difference between a twenty-day shooting schedule, a thirty-day shooting schedule, or a fifty-day shooting schedule in terms of what you as a director of photography can ac tually accomplish because you have much more time to light. Again, that isn't necessarily dependent on budget because a lot of independent films offer less money to the crews, but the crews do them because of the subject matter. I've done $14 million films that had forty-day shooting schedules. I've done $800,000 films that had fifty-day shooting schedules, and I've done a whole lot of $2 million to $4 million projects that had twenty-day shooting schedules. The People Under the Stairs had a relatively decent budget and shooting schedule, but we had enormous special effects, so a lot of the budget got eaten up in special effects.