Principal Photography

  On low-budget films, you often only shoot what you need to shoot. Unless you have a very secure director who has a certain degree of autonomy, the bigger the budget, you end up having to do an awful lot of coverage. A lot of people's hands get mixed in the pot, it isn't necessarily the director's cut in the end, and people judge you by the number of set-ups you do per day. In the independent film world, you do one or two set-ups in a day if you have that luxury because you feel you can do the whole scene in one set-up, whereas one wouldn't even consider doing that on most studio films. Just in looking at the dailies, they'd want to know where the close-ups and medium shots are-where all the coverage is. On No Secrets, we had a nineteen-day shooting schedule, which one often does on television movies. I always think of a television movie as showing on a little square box and you only have to light and execute something in a little square box, whereas when you're doing something for the movies that is 1.85:1 or 2.35:1-you've got twice the amount of size. So, to do that size frame in a short shooting schedule is very tough. You have to be really organized about how many shots you're going to do and how to tell a story.

  On a low budget, if we're going to have big daylight-dependent interiors, we have to shoot them at a certain time of day. If you're going to do a great big night exterior, since you can't afford a lot of big lights and a huge set-up time, I do what I call "dusk-for-night" You do a great big vista at night, but you do it during that magic hour and then you slightly underexpose, put blue on the lens, and make it look like night, so it looks like you have a huge night exterior which in fact is really dusk-for-night.

  Q: How long is magic hour?

  A: It depends on where you are. In Canada in the winter, it's about four minutes. In Los Angeles in the summer, it can be an hour. It also depends on what you think of as magic hour. I think of it as that time between sunset and nightfall. I was in Canada once. I had flown in to replace a director of photography on a film. The director and I had both taken over the film, started shooting that day, and he wanted to do a scene at magic hour. I got the crew all organized. We were at an airport, we wanted to see the planes in the background. The director and I we were on a balcony getting ready, and I noticed the crew was snickering. We said, "Okay, we're ready, let's do it!" I would say, if we had five minutes before it became too dark to shoot, it was a lot. It was amazing. It just went like that.

  Q: What are your fiscal responsibilities, and how do you manage the time schedule on a project?

  A: I've begun to see my role as more from the business aspect of show business. Now, when I go in for interviews, I even ask what the gaffer's going to make because budgets are changing. It's less and less obvious what your crew's salaries are going to be and what money is going to be allocated for equipment as you go in for a job. It used to be I would go in and they would say, "You have a forty-day shooting schedule, do you like the script? We like you, do you want the job?" and that was it. Then I pretty much put in an equipment order, gave the names of the crew, and we'd move on. Nowadays, crew salaries vary so much that I often even get involved in how much they're going to pay the crew and when overtime kicks in, because I am as good as the crew I hire and therefore I want to know if I'm going to be able to afford the crew I want when I go out. I never make demands on crews. I want them to be happy when they're working. I also want to know if I call up Panavision, I'm going to have enough money to get the kind of equipment I want. Once I find out from the producer that money is available, then they usually will be pretty clear with me. I've had producers say, "Look Sandi, we have enough money to do X number of twelve-hour days, and I only have five or six days with two or three hours of overtime-this is how tight this budget is." You feel a responsibility to make sure that happens, because as a director of photography, if you start taking the film way over in overtime, whether it's your fault or not, people are going to look at you and say, "What's wrong here?" It is the same way that I look at a gaffer and say, "This is our lighting set-up. Do you think we can do this set-up in forty-five minutes?" If a gaffer comes in to me at forty-three minutes and says, "It's going to take another thirty minutes to get this lighting set-up done," at a certain point I begin to lose faith in the crew. If I agree to do a film in forty days, and in fact it's forty-eight days and the director really hasn't dillydallied a lot or the actor hasn't thrown a lot of temper tantrums, then in fact maybe I should have been a little bit quicker or should have made certain decisions, or I should have said to the director, "I don't think we can do that big a shot, but how would you feel if we did this?" Sometimes you have to negotiate with directors so that you can give the director their shot, and at the same time do it for the producer in the time that you agreed. It's a drag to have to think in such a business fashion, but in many ways that is a director of photography's job. More and more producers expect you as a director of photography not to help a director organize the shots in such a way that rather than shoot to your left down a block of streets that goes for eight blocks, maybe if you shoot off to the right, you see a block and a half. You can make a choice to do something that gives you the same idea, but you can do it in half the time and save a lot of money. It's tough. I don't ever enjoy not giving a director their fantasy. So you have to constantly strike a bargain to do something that makes a director happy, do something that makes a producer happy, and hopefully do something that makes you happy at the same time. Ideally, it is a collaboration.

  I've never had a luxurious schedule, so I have to be very careful. You have to be organized, ideally you've had the time in preproduction to do storyboards and if not storyboards, shot lists. In most features, you end up doing storyboards. In television, that's a luxury, so you end up doing shot lists. Sometimes I do all of that, sometimes the director does all of that, and sometimes it's collaborative. It's different collaborating with each director, but ideally you know going into a day, if not a week, what it is that you're trying to do. Often you don't meet that goal, but if you've got a planned-out shot list or storyboards, then by lunch you can say, "It went so well in the master that I don't think we need this shot," or "We did this close-up and then panned over and picked up something else, so we don't need this shot." You can cross things off as you go, or maybe the weather changed. Maybe an actor got weird on you and you've lost some time, or maybe some equipment went down. For whatever reason, you can adjust as you go, but certainly, if I know that I'm doing an involved choreographed master and I'm going to cover three pages with one shot, then we might bite the bullet and say, "Okay, this is a three-hour lighting set-up with rehearsals," but then we might do twenty-five takes. This is the only shot we're doing, so we're going to spend this much time doing it. You might even spend the whole day. Whereas, if you have a scene you are going to do in a master, two or three dolly shots and then five close-ups, then you know you are not going to use that whole master. If you spend all morning lighting, it's a waste of time because in television especially, they'll go to close-ups. So I've learned to allocate time according to what is going to really be used in the finished product. Ideally, you are in sync with your director, so we try and work it out accordingly, but what's frustrating is you spend so much time on a master that when you get to the close-ups you don't have time to really mold and work the light around the actor's face, knowing full well that close-up is probably going to be used more than the master. I try to make sure I have plenty of time to do that shot. The time you have to be most organized is when you're working with children in terms of how much time you spend lighting and executing, because you're going to lose that kid in five hours every day. By the time you get to your fourth hour, the entire set starts to panic. So the best lesson as a director of photography is to learn to organize work-on children's films, you learn real fast.

  Q: How do you balance lighting actors with different skin tones?

  A: I happened to have worked a lot with mixed racial casts, it's very hard. My biggest challenge ever was a commercial I did with Whoopi Goldberg and Helen Hayes, arm an
d arm. Black actors require more light. There's nothing worse than to watch a film where all you can see of a minority actor is their eyes, it's an injustice to the actor not to be able to see their expressions. I meter in a grey scale. I assign various skin tones on my grey scale and make sure I have each actor in a certain place on that spectrum. You basically assign seven stops. I try and make everything fall within those stops. It's tough. I've had to limit the black actor as to where they could go. I hate to say, "You have to hit this X." But when you add an additional key light for the black actor within a scene where all the other white actors are, the actor must hit that spot to be able to get into that key light-it's always a real challenge. You try to do it subtly, as to not make people feel you're having to do something special for them. Most actors who are experienced are real aware of getting into the key light and what will happen if they don't cooperate with you-you just learn as you go.

  Q: Do most actors really have a good side of their face to photograph?

  A: Oh, it's very real. I've had actors come up to me and absolutely say they will only be shot from one side, or that they want the lens at a certain eye level. They want it above their eyes, they want it below their eyes. I like actors very much. I would only work very hard to make them look good because if they look good, I look good. It's hard to work with an uncooperative actor. Very often, the ones who need the most help are the ones who are the least cooperative, but I think it's because they might be insecure. Most actors are extremely appreciative of your help if you explain things to them. When you work with young actors, you have to teach them how to stand, how to walk, how to keep their chins up, and how to look, but if you put too many limitations on them, they'll often get upset with you. They fear it interferes with their acting, but people absorb light differently. They need diffusion on different levels. You end up with actresses who are older than the actors and therefore you need to give the actresses a bit of help-it's part of the challenge.

  Q: During the studio era, cinematographers used heavy diffusion on a close-up to make an actor look younger, and often the shots did not match with the close-up of the other actor in the scene, which wasn't utilizing diffusion. What tools are available today to defuse a shot and at the same time have it match?

  A: In the old days, people only worked with hard light and there was no diffusion on the lights. They put diffusion on the lens. These days, the lenses have gotten so crisp. You see so clearly that we put diffusion on the lenses just to soften the look of the lens itself. We go out and test lenses and get the sharpest lens available and then we put on diffusion to make it softer and more appealing to the eye. If I feel an actress or actor is a little bit older, or a person has pock-marked skin or deep lines or dark circles under their eyes, I add a bit of warmth to the light. There's all kinds of reasons, not necessarily age. Some actors, for example, have blue-black skin, others have red-black skin, so you add a bit of warmth to the light. You can put one single piece of diffusion in front of a light, you can put two to three pieces of diffusion in front of a light, and the light gets softer as you go. You can bounce the light and it will be softer. You can bounce the light and put a piece of diffusion in front of it, it's softer yet. So the softer the light, the softer the look on the face. If the light is very soft, then it wraps the face and you rarely have to add very much diffusion. So, in the old days, where they might have put a Mitchell C on for the woman and a Mitchell A on for the man, nowadays you can put one piece of diffusion on for a twenty-year-old actor, three pieces of diffusion on the light for a fifty-year-old actor, and accomplish keeping the same level of diffusion on the lens. If you're going to go up only one step, like a ProMist) to a ProMist V4, you're not going to notice that much difference when you look at it on the image. You can also take a light around to the side of someone with no diffusion on it. I don't care how old that actor is, it's going to be harsh and they're going to have lines on their face. You bring that same light slightly around to the front a little bit high and put two or three pieces of diffusion in front of it in varying distances, and it's going to be a very soft, wrap light and it makes all the difference in the world.

  Q: What is the responsibility of a second-unit crew?

  A: Second unit is photography without principal actors because, technically, anytime you have a principal actor in a scene, you must have the firstunit director. Second unit might mean sunrise/sunset shots, the action sequences of a film, additional photography, reshoots-all kinds of things. I've worked second unit on shows where you work right alongside first unit. When David Watkin accepted the Oscar for Out of'Africa, he said, "Thank you. So much of the footage you have seen was not shot by me, but was shot by the second-unit director of photography"-which was all of the beautiful aerial footage of Africa. So, doing second unit is a fabulous job. I used to joke and say I wanted to start a company called Second Unit Inc., because you get to go out and do all the beauty shots, have a long lunch, not have the stress of the first unit, and have a good time. It's really an important part of the film because it's the cohesive thread between all the acting sequences.

  Your job as a second-unit director of photography is to imitate the photography of the first unit so that it's a seamless picture. You talk to the director of photography, find out what kind of filtration, what kind of lighting, what stock they used, whatever you can possibly find out because, in fact, this is not your movie, this is the first-unit director of photography's movie and you're there to supplement what they do.

  Q: Is the credit, additional photography, similar to second-unit work?

  A: It could be, or it could mean the director of photography had another commitment and they had to leave early and you were brought in to finish the show. It could mean you shot four weeks out of a ten-week schedule, so the person that shot six weeks got the main credit. It can mean anywhere from eight weeks to one day of shooting. It means that you were an additional cinematographer on the film.

  Q: What cinematographers do you admire?

  A: James Wong Howe was just a tremendous influence. By the time I was getting in college, I started admiring Sven Nykvist (Fanny and Alexander, The Unbearable Lightness of Being) tremendously, and Nestor Almendros (My Night at Maud's, Days of Heaven). Then I got very much into Robby Muller and Haskell Wexler, and I became lucky enough to operate for them and got to know them very well. I just run out to see whatever Bob Richardson, John Seale, and Vittorio Storaro (The Conformist, Apocalypse Now) shoot. There are so many good directors of photography out there now that I'm just floored by. I'm just amazed, really, at the work that people do. My work and my style tend to be rooted in reality. The directors of photography I admire are the ones who even though they have tremendous technique, you don't notice it and their photography doesn't get in the way of the story. I'm not a real fan of cinematography for cinematography's sake. I like to see a movie that's seamless and where the photography is an element which tells the story but doesn't stand out on it's own.

  Q: Where do you see your personal future headed? Are you going to work strictly in features or will you return to documentaries at times?

  A: The business has changed a lot. In the not-so-distant past, people reached a certain plateau and they could stay there. I find it very sad when I go to ASC meetings and I'm sitting there having dinner with some of the greatest directors of photography in history, many of whom haven't worked in many, many years because they can't get a job. The business is so much a business. When we were editing Chicken Ranch, I remember having dinner with a young woman in London. She was twenty-five years old and she was going on and on about this director who was going overbudget. She was the associate producer. She just couldn't believe it. Later, I found out she was talking about Bernardo Bertolucci. As a director of photography, you're truly just a commodity in the Hollywood mentality. I have a lot of European friends who, even though they came to Hollywood and could make a lot of money, they chose to go home because in Europe they could work on low-budget films, but they w
ere artists. They were respected and could have their families, their lives, and could just keep working. Here, so much has to do with money and the flavor of the month. What I think is hard these days with having an agent and having desires to keep working is you do tend to go back and forth between television, features, and commercials. If I had my druthers, I would just do features, but that's a luxury very few of us are afforded and we end up doing what we do for all kinds of reasons. I try to at least have some scruples about the work I do and to choose the work properly. I just recently went off and did a television movie because I thought it was a wonderful story about a schoolteacher who in midlife decided to go back to teach in a ghetto high school and try and keep kids out of gangs because his younger brother was murdered. It was a wonderful story; it was better than any scripts I've read for features in a long time. Nowadays, so many of the feature scripts I read are action/adventure and a lot of times, television movies are dealing with women's issues or stories that affect people's lives more. I would love to think I could just do one feature after another-that's the ideal. For what I do, it offers the best rewards, but I'm going to keep working. I love to work. When you are a director of photography, you can only do your job when people have millions of dollars and they ask you to come along for the ride.