Principal Photography

  By this time, I was quite established in commercials. I could work on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis in commercials because initially when we signed, my deal on E. T. was for prep to start in May and shoot in June. As it turned out, we didn't shoot until September because Steven got all embroiled in Poltergeist. Kathy Kennedy would call and say, "We've got to postpone another month" I would go, "Fine," because I could just keep working in commercials. I could do day-to-day work and at the same time, whenever Carlo Rambaldi had a new improvement on the creature, I could run over, see it, and shoot a little test on it. I borrowed a friend's Arri 2C. The original art director had to leave because of all the postponements. Jim Bissell, a young guy who had won an Emmy for his work on Palinerstown U.S.A., came on as production designer. It was just the most wonderful thing in the world, because I was there at the very beginning. That's why I have followed this practice ever since. The cinematographer has to be present at the start of discussions when you're getting into production design, picking locations, talking about where windows are going to be, what the effects are going to be, and all the rest. So I was there from the beginning and spent a lot of time. I was able to just show up whenever something was happening and that made a difference on how the look of E.T. evolved.

  Steven had a beautiful screening room; we would go up to his house, eat Chinese takeout food and look at the work of Storaro, Deschanel, all classic cameramen from the past and the images that we most admired, like Ridley Scott and Derek Van Lint's work on Alien, trying to figure out what made something work. I've never had as long and satisfying a dialogue as I did with Steven, because it was this wonderful relationship with a guy I'd known from all of those years ago. He was coming through in a way which was so gratifying.

  It was utterly fascinating the way we worked out how to light E.T. It was, less is more. Particularly at the beginning of the film, Steven said, "I don't want to see him, Allen." Then, one day I had a test where E.T. came back black, which was, "Well, I've got to see him a little!" You had to translate what Steven meant. You just barely wanted to see E.T., to identify him and know when he's there, but no more than is absolutely necessary or there's no magic to it. So, in the tests we were able find out what that level of magic was ahead of time. Our biggest problem was Steven was so enmeshed in Poltergeist we had to go stand on the set, wait, grab him as he was going by, and say, "What about this?" to get some decisions made up-front. We finally started to shoot E.T. in September.

  E.T. was shot on 5247, the standard 100 ASA stock. Only one shot in the movie, E.T.'s finger lighting up, is pushed. I had to assure Steven it was the brightest that bright could possibly be-that we were getting everything possible out of that little bulb in the finger. Otherwise, everything on that film was straight-arrow, unpushed, normal 100 ASA. We shot E. T. in sixtyone days. Then we did two days of pick-ups the following February. There was one day on location. We did the overlook shot of the valley. It was a zoom dolly with Keys, played by Peter Coyote, coming in on the foreground. We did the nighttime shot of Keys's agents, because at one of the screenings Steven had for his friends, they didn't understand Keys and his relationship with the government. So we had them breaking into the house. We shot a lot of inserts like the flowers in those two days. Steven was just to the wall, not only did he have to do this miracle, he had to do it dead on that schedule and dead on that budget. The final total was $10.6 million, Universal somehow forgave him $600,000 in their heart. That was astounding! But it was brutal. I was going to Deluxe lab every morning at 6:30, seeing the dailies, and reprinting them if they weren't right because it was my chance. We shot E. T. at Culver City Studios. We wouldn't let Steven see dailies there because the projection booth was so bad, the brightness of the image would fluctuate in the projector. I'd go home with Steven after the wrap, see the dailies at his house, and then go home and try and sleep. Thank God it was only a five-day week in town. It was absolutely brutal because Steven was demanding about everything, and he was right to be demanding. We had a crew that was just worn to a frazzle, but the end of the film was just so difficult. Nothing came easily, and it all had to happen so fast. When you're dealing with kids you always have, "You're losing the kids in twenty minutes." The welfare worker is yanking them out of there. When you lost the kids, you were into E.T. close-ups or inserts or shots with the mother. You had to get that work in the course of the day, plus almost all of those interiors were smoked, the old oil-based smoke which looks beautiful but is brutal to breathe. In the morning, you'd fill the stage with smoke. It would stay nice and even and hang there, but in the afternoon the sun had hit the west wall of the stage and it started heating up. You'd come back from lunch, and all of the smoke would want to go in that direction. I can tell you every shot on E. T. that was shot in the afternoon. I could see that smoke moving around. We can't use that kind of smoke anymore-it's illegal, thank heavens-but the substitutes don't work and they're even harder to control. So in recent years, I've tried to stay away from smoke unless it's something where you need to have shards of light coming through windows.

  There were three different endings for E.T. We kept shooting end sequences which were real good that didn't end up in the movie, but Steven knew when to quit when he was ahead. The only preview was in May, the film opened in June. It's absolutely the hardest picture ever for me, without question, because this was my opportunity. This was it. If I blew that one, that was it, off into some other land forever. You just don't get another chance like that. The pressure was incredible. What a great director does is inspire you, to say that you are going to achieve something that no one else could achieve. Nobody's ever tried to do this before, and you're acutely aware of that. We knew it was real, real good and real, real exciting, but the idea it became the phenomenon that it did was not what was in our heads. It was just to pull this film off and to make it happen.

  Q: How did you work with Director George Miller on the Nightmare at 20,000 Feet segment in Twilight Zone-The Movie?

  A: George wanted a lot of freedom to deal with the movement inside the airplane. Jim Bissell was the production designer. We took George around L.A. and showed him all the airplane mock-ups. They're terrible just awful. Supposedly, they're for airline commercials. They're not even adequate for that. So we said, "You've got to talk to Warner's, they're going to want to shoot this on an existing airplane mock-up. It's going to look like Airport." He goes "No!" So we have to build it. I talked to him about using Garrett Brown and his Steadicam, and George was very enthusiastic, "Moving camera, moving camera-great!" He just liked the freedom to go all over the place. My gaffer went out and did a whole bunch of research on industrial, low-voltage lighting fixtures that are used in places where you have a very limited amount of space so they don't overheat. Then Jim Bissell designed places so these little high intensity lamps could be put right in the set. We hid fill light sources on dimmer switches on both sides of the overhead pods. We built all this lighting into the plane. We were not thinking in motion picture lighting terms, except for a few specific shots. I had John Lithgow, who is sheer magic. He can run the one hundred-yard dash, hit a mark within half an inch, and get into the light exactly where I need him. I am very prejudiced in favor of theater-trained actors because they have a sense of theater craft and tend to develop a sense of film craft. I can understand there are some types of scenes where actors cannot be burdened with a lot of technical considerations, but there are other times where technical considerations can be really important as to how the actor's performance comes off. The British actor, David Suchet, from the Royal Shakespeare Company who played the key KGB keeper to Sean Penn's character in The Falcon and the Snowman, was somebody with a theater background who had not done much film and wanting to know what he should do, "Now what lens did you say this is? And I'm where? I'm knee figure? Alright," and he'd live in that space. I had the same experience with Annette Benning on Bugsy. Annette Benning had ten years of big-time theater before she did a movie. This lady comes on the
set-pow! take one-she's right there. She knows where everything is. I remember asking Annette, "Do you want me to mention where a light source might be?" She said, "No, just see how I do" She knows. You couldn't light her wrong. She's so beautiful and so aware of where she is in space-talk about just a complete mastery of film craft. I am so appreciative of working with people with that kind of background, it just spoils you. Lithgow spoiled me on Nightmare at 20,000 Feet; once I knew John could do this, it expanded a whole lot of other possibilities.

  I had Garrett Brown on the Steadicam. I had John Toll handholding, he's the finest handheld operator ever. Some shots were better for the Steadicam and some were better for John Toll, each could do their own thing. There's only eight shots that were actually done on a dolly, everything else is either one form of handheld or the other, with the industrial lighting making all of this possible. We now had a high-speed film stock 5293 that had just been introduced. It was a different 5293 than the one used today. It was an experimental high-speed stock. Kodak didn't even know what it should be rated in terms of sensitivity. John Alonzo used it on Blue Thunder. Here we had this stock, which could be anywhere from 250 to 400 ASA. I had run tests of it. Knowing I had this speed capability, we built this set, put in these bulbs, but until we actually shot an exposure test on the set, I didn't know what it could do. So for Nightmare at 20,000 Feet we found out we could shoot at 2.5, which was dangerously open. Eric Engler, who's now a successful cinematographer in commercials, was the focus puller and did a marvelous job because there was so much moving camera, people running to camera, camera running to people, fights in the plane, and all the special mechanical effects which Mike Woods did, and the creature out on the wing. It was all a matter of using this high-speed stock and exploiting it as far as it could go. The beauty of George Miller was that everything stemmed from one mandate. He would say, "Be bold! Be bold! The worst thing is we'll have to reshoot it." We filmed Nightmare at 20,000 Feet in twelve days. The first scene we shot was one night at a little airport out in the valley. It was the end of the movie, when the people come off after the plane has landed. It's all one long Steadicam shot that then went into the ambulance, the rest was eleven days on-stage inside the airplane mock-up. It was a great chance to experiment. It's all a world of illusions. And we didn't reshoot anything!

  Steven Spielberg's episode, Kick the Can, and George's Nightmare at 20,000 Feet were fun because they were short episodes and they wanted to be completely different from one another. In Kick the Can, I did a sunset over Scatman Crothers's speech. It starts yellow, orange and gets oranger. We did all the changes with dimmers, and it gets into red orange. It gets redder and redder, and then it fades away just as he's going up the stairs.

  Q: What were the challenges in photographing The Color Purple?

  A: On The Color Purple, Steven Spielberg said, "I want to see faces, I don't want to just see eyes and teeth" Michael Riva was the production designer. We got together and I said, "If we've got enough light on the faces, we've got to be able to have the sets dark enough." So it was keeping the walls, wallpaper, and all the decor down enough so I could pour light in through the windows and not have the sets overpowered by the light which was lighting the people. I could have a really good solid key light. I had Norm Harrison, a wonderful gaffer, on that picture. Norm had these plastic diffusers that looked like shower doors. He had them mounted on wood frames so we could put them outside and send two different directions of arcs through the window-these plastics would scatter the light around. By having darker walls and darker decor, we were able to make the faces stand out. It's actually a lot easier doing a movie with dark-complected actors if everybody's basically dark, but you wound up with the knowledge that it isn't all pigmentation-it's reflectivity. You can have people who have very dark pigmentation, but who have a wonderful reflectivity, the way that the planes of the face are set or the oil in the skin helps kick back light. Ernie Hudson in Congo was a snap to photograph because he's a strikingly handsome man and his cheek bones and everything are on an angle where he reflects the light so spectacularly. At the same time, you can have people that are lighter pigmentation, but that don't have the reflectivity. So when you have all of these different complexions walking through one scene in a movie, you really learn it's all about controlling the amount and the direction of the light.

  Q: Do you have a philosophy concerning lighting?

  A: I am basically somebody who likes to shoot in soft light. I call it the "soft light, sharp lens," school of photography, but in the real world at any given moment there is soft diffused light, then there is hard direct light and they mix, rather than having a religion where you do everything with one or the other. I find it's just easy to develop a language where you can mix the sources as real life happens and then control them, because what you're doing when you're creating an illusion of light in an image is leading the eye to where you want it to fall. Whose face do we want you to be staring at during a given moment? When, in the same shot, do we want your eye to move across the screen to somebody else for a different beat? What are we doing to redirect your eye over there? This is all about composition. Composition is balance and placement. It's using light to emphasize some portions of the frame. This is one of the things you see people trying to accomplish from the very beginning of cinematography, because in the beginning they were only shooting in direct sunlight. Then the film got a little more sensitive and they were covering the sets with cheese cloth or muslin and still working with the sun as the source. It was the only thing powerful enough. The lighting was general, but it could be quite attractive in that softness. As they got to adapt arc lamps and brighter specific sources, they experimented more and more with hard light. You watch Billy Bitzer's progress from the early Biograph films, to what he started doing in Judith of Bethulia, to what he wound up accomplishing on really sophisticated films in the later years. He was really learning as the process grew. Every generation of cinematogra- pliers relearns the same lessons, but with the advantage of newer technology, better film stocks with more latitude and a language of color. When three-strip Technicolor ceased to be the dominant force of color motion pictures, and the color negatives from Eastman, Agfa and later Fuji came in, we learned the language of these films. Just in the course of my career, we've gone from having arcs, which are still wonderful, but now we can work indoors with HMI sources that are daylight color temperature. I can use a practical light source and shoot a scene in available light, but I can also reproduce that look. I can make it look daylight at midnight if I have the right elements. I can make a shot intercut perfectly because I have the tools that can do it. It's learning the language and then personalizing it.