Principal Photography

  Q: What was it like to work on an epic production like Empire of the Sun?

  A: I was very acutely aware during Empire of the Sun that they weren't going to make many more like this. You're not going to get to take all these people around the world and shoot this kind of film. We made it into Shanghai with little to spare, because another year and there would have been skyscrapers all over the place. So we got in and captured something. My parents had gone to Shanghai in 1939 on their around-the-world trip, which they did by freighter. Boy, did they see the old world at the last moment. So I had seen the pictures in their scrapbook. Norman Reynolds (Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark), the wonderful production designer on that film, had all these pictures of what Shanghai looked like in 1940. The research department had dug out British Movietone newsreels of the same bridge where we were going to shoot a riot scene. They got the dailies-the British can research this material so well. They had the raw footage. This riot is going on, the police are beating the bejesus out of this crowd, and here is this sixteen-year-old clapper boy holding a slate saying, "Take five"-bang and he runs out of this shot. The camera tilts up and there is this mayhem going on. We screened this newsreel the night before we're going out to shoot the scene. So we had a chance to capture Shanghai just before it disappeared. We got to do so many things in that film.

  Q: What was the concept behind how you photographed the flashbacks in Avalon, directed by Barry Levinson?

  A: One of the things that really struck me right away when I read the script was that here you had a period film with period flashbacks. So you had period within period. You're dealing with something which starts in 1948, goes to 1952 with flashbacks to the teens and the twenties, then one in the thirties. How do you provide a visual identification for these time periods that distances them from this other period, because you had to have a look that said, "Yes, this is the late forties, early fifties." You also had to say, "Yes, this is 1914, 1917, 1924." Those of us who weren't there remember those years as the silent film era, and what did the silent films look like? I had wanted to use stretch printing in a commercial ten years earlier. The commercial was for a bank, "In 1910, when we first opened our doors .. Silent films were shot at all kinds of speeds, but theoretically, sixteen frames per second was the mean. When you restore a silent film, you print every other frame twice to give you twenty-four frames per second, so you don't get this herky-jerky, speeded-up look. I said, "This is great. It doesn't look herky-jerky, but it has this strange little jutter in the movement and as people cross the camera. It has this look of a restored piece of film." They didn't understand it. It scared them. The guy at the optical house destroyed the whole project when he said, "If you stretch printed from sixteen to twenty-four frames, it's the same as if you shot it at twenty-four." "No, it's not. But if you're going to talk yourself out of the business, sir, you just did." So I didn't get to do it in the commercial, and it was right forAvalon. I didn't even say anything to Barry. I did a whole bunch of tests. I tried tricking the Eastman color emulsion by shooting through heavy color filtration and printing the color filtration out. The film is too good, I couldn't mess it up as much as I wanted to, but at the end of the day, my girlfriend was out at Panavision and I used her as a subject for the color tests. In the very late afternoon, I had her walk our dog from the street, up to the camera, turn, pick up the dog, and sit the dog down. I shot it at twenty-four frames per second and shot it again at sixteen frames per second. I'd gotten the agreement from Barry and the producer, Mark Johnson, to be able to process at DuArt lab in New York. They knew Don Donigi very well. DuArt has their own optical department. So DuArt could do the stretch printing and keep the color matched to the rest of dailies. I sent this back to Don and he printed the twenty-four frame shot. Then he took and stretch printed the sixteen-frame shot, matching the color to the twenty-four frame shot. One afternoon when we were down in Baltimore scouting locations, I took everybody into a downtown movie theater and showed Barry the color tests. Then I said, "Here's what I'm thinking about for the flashbacks of when Sam comes to America." He immediately saw what I was doing and said, "That's great! That looks familiar." I said, "Yes, you've seen it many times in restored silent films, newsreels, and documentaries, you've just never seen it in color before" And he said, "Right, we'll do it!" It's wonderful when you get the director to back you on an idea. Some people said, "Shouldn't we cover it both ways?" and Barry said, "No, that's great." We did one test to see how it worked with the fireworks. It worked great. As things crossed back and forth across the camera, you noticed it even more because it would have that jutter effect. One of the things Barry did that was very interesting was to place sync dialogue lines over the stretch-printed images. The young Sam looks at the guy with the big shoes and says something like, "What a country!" Barry sunk that line up with Armin Muller Stahl's voice and put it in the mouth of the young Sam. It wouldn't stay in sync for long. but you could do it line by line. The whole opening of the film, all the way through the wedding and the other flashbacks, just set Avalon in a different era. The opening flashback is a very theatrical moment, the fireworks are dying out in the sky, you see the glow of Sam's cigar, then the smoke comes out. On the puff of smoke, we started bringing up the whole room on dimmers-it pulls back, and Sam's telling this story to the grandchildren. So you have an opening of the film that really establishes you're going to do some traveling back and forth in time. That film is about memory and how we remember the past. There's a great line like, "If I knew things would disappear so fast I would have remembered better." It's just wonderful.

  Q: What was your approach to the visual style in Bugsy?

  A: I enjoyed my experience with Warren Beatty very much. It was a project he had wanted to do for some time. It was a challenge for everyone. We had a meeting with Warren, the director, Barry Levinson, and the producer, Mark Johnson. My theory about how to shoot Warren for this role was you could put the light on his look, shade around his forehead so that you really emphasized his eyes. He's a great-looking guy, plus he's a pro. He knew what we were going after. It was finding a look for him. Once that was done, I made the look work for everybody because it was a very forties style. I said, "We're taking modern-day film stock, lenses, and lighting equipment and then using them the way a cameraman would have used them in 1945." That was the visual concept of the picture. It worked for lighting all of the people. It was the look of the film. I switched from being a sharp lens, soft light cameraman to going to more of a hard light, soft lens. I used a greater diffusion base, put rear nets on all of the lenses, and used mild Tiffen ProMist filters in front. It really gave me a chance to do some shots as they were done in the forties in terms of floating flags on people's foreheads and keeping the light chopped up, yet having a contemporary feel. I sometimes even got Warren to let me use soft light on him. He hadn't liked what soft light had done in the past. We did some scenes that were not all hard light, but I always like films to be naturally sourced. This is our school. This is how all my heros think-James Wong Howe, Haskell Wexler, Conrad Hall, Vilmos Zsigmond (The Deer Hunter, Heaven's Gate), Laszlo Kovacs (Easy Rider, Shampoo), Vittorio Storaro, and all of the people who formed the philosophy of contemporary film lighting. There's nothing new. There was soft lighting in the teens by using muslin. David Watkin's (Chariots of Fire, Out of Africa) work on Help in 1965 is a soft light movie. It's absolutely brilliant. David Watkin was doing his own thing then, but sophisticated soft lighting really had its rebirth in this country out of advertising photography of the fifties. In America, more soft light got into the movies because commercials were being directed by people who'd been illustrative still photographers. For still photos from the fifties into the sixties, they used Northern light, a single-source approach to lighting. Then, as they saw the big magazines starting to fade in the sixties, they made a transition into commercials. So you had these guys shooting commercials with interesting light quality. Directors in Hollywood would sit at home at night, look at co
mmercials, come on the set and say, "I saw this commercial last night, now why can't we do that?" It was like, "You can't control soft light." But the new cinematographers came along and found a way to control it. They found different ways of working. So we got this look which defines most of contemporary cinematography. We go through phases. It's great to use hard light for a homage to a period. It also serves very practical purposes and it's easier to create certain kinds of moods. You always look to try something you haven't done. You've got to stir yourself up to change your ways when you get a chance on a project that really calls for it. Going from Bugsy to Fearless is a perfect example of shifting gears and doing something totally different to the look of the picture. It's great when you have a dialogue with a director you've worked with before, and he says, "Okay, what are we going to do this time? What's the look of it?" On Avalon, Barry Levinson and I looked at all kinds of movies, but I showed him a laser disc I had of Jam Handy industrial films from the forties and fifties. There was one from 1945, shot in Kodachrome about "Your advertising impact with color billboards." It was shot in Chicago in the winter. There were all these people walking around in black coats, black suits, black cars were parked everywhere, everything was grey, black, and a little bit of brown, and there were these color billboards screaming out. So I said, "Ahhh, old Kodachrome, Barry." "Yeah, old Kodachrome-that's it!" That literally was our point of departure for the majority of the look of Avalon. On Bugsy, I said, "I've been looking at a lot of 1940s films. We're just going to go with our general feeling of the mood of forties films and not overly film noir. Film noir is a term that's been used too much. I'd love to do a forties film in that genre and not light it anything like the film noir type of lighting.

  Q: What are some of the challenges presented by shooting on location? A: Sometimes you run into films where you're shooting in the tiniest rooms. The room in Fearless, for the scene where Jeff Bridges comes to visit Rosie Perez for the first time and she's sitting on the edge of the bed, was very small. I had to suspend a very large light pointing straight down outside the window between two apartment houses and that would bounce up from the floor. In Bugsy, Barry Levinson fell in love with this old craftsman house out in Pasadena, a beautiful place where we shot the scene when Bugsy comes to visit Jack Dragna and Bugsy clips one of his thugs. That whole scene was shot in a tiny place because Barry had fallen in love with it. I just had no place to put anything in the room itself. Just on the edge of the frame, lights had to move during shots and flags had to come up, this light had to be covered over and a dimmer had to come up here. I had to change the f-stop as the fireplace came back into frame. Nobody notices all of this because they shouldn't. It's what you do, you develop equipment that will allow you to work in circumstances when it's impossible or impractical to build it. Sometimes you need to be able to shoot an interior scene in a neighborhood so that you don't have to shoot in a bad light in the middle of the day. Shooting in good light outside is about playing "Let's make a deal" with the production board, so you can find an interior or something that doesn't hurt to be shot in the middle of the day. So you can be there for the great light when she walks out onto the front porch at sunset and tells him the real secret of everything that has been going on. You say, "We've got to shoot this at 5:30. We've got to!" "Well, we'll have to move all of the trucks" Negotiating where the trucks park is one of the major things you do, particularly in New York. "Where can we shoot this scene in the morning? Can we shoot under the cover of these trees at midday? Can I come out in the late afternoon to shoot this?" This is all negotiated, and you've got to carry all of this in your mind. You're constantly asking yourself, "What is important?" Sometimes we're probably guilty of just wanting to make everything so perfect and so gorgeous, but sometimes you've got something in your mind you know is going to make an image work and it's really important to you. You have to listen to that and you have to fight for it. You don't always win. Somebody said to me, "Look, you walked away from a shot where you lost and you had to shoot it in bad light and it didn't work. The great take was out of focus and then the other take is just okay" It's just like the quarterback who's thrown an interception and been tackled on his own five-yard line and walked off the field with the crowd booing, but you've got to shake it off and come back for the next series and be up to marching down the field again. It's the same way. You can't let your losses get to you when you're on a film.

  Q: What are some of the different ways a director covers a scene'?

  A: Steven Spielberg will walk away from a master shot of a scene without getting what I would consider a really good master, or a perfect one. He'll say, "Don't worry, we're going to be over here when that happens. I know we're going to cut to her listening and we are going to be able to use the beginning of take seven and the end of take nine-it's not going to be a concern." Even when he does a scene all in one shot, he always shoots what his editor, Michael Kahn, calls a hinge, which is somebody looking at what's going on. So if he doesn't get a perfect all-in-one take, in an emergency he can cut to that person just listening, then cut back into completion on another take and make the scene work that way. So Steven has that kind of assurance. Barry Levinson is very much more into what he has to take into the editing room, supplying himself with ammunition in terms of how he can create a scene. His major concern is getting the performances he wants while they're still fresh. That's why you wind up using two cameras with Barry. On Avalon, when we were working with kids, it's completely understandable. Kids will only do something a certain way one time and so you do work with two cameras. But multiple camera is a very mixed deal because you gain on one hand and lose on the other. For the cinematographer, it's just agony because you're always compromising the lighting in some way. Often times you wind up with two shots, neither of which is correct. If you put cameras side by side and one is just shooting closer, it's not going to be a good cut. You're going to need another cut yet to get you back. The two cameras jockey in position, and neither one is in the correct place. So there are times when it works. Steven Spielberg uses multiple cameras really well and sparingly. He always wants to carry the second camera, but he doesn't mind letting a week go by without using it for anything. In fact, working with Steven is where I started in the practice of having the B camera operator do some second-unit work on the film, because the production manager is always looking to throw the second camera crew off the picture because they're not doing anything. You always have to find something for them to do so that the B camera operator is there when you want to bring him in to get a shot. Every director is different, you find you bring different things to the party. The laser disc has been most wonderful to be able to investigate a whole filmography of a director before you start a film with him. So you can go to John Schlesinger and say, "Now John, in Marathon Man, what did you really .. "It's amazing what the recall is like when you can ask the question from a filmmaking perspective as to why something was covered a certain way. Often times, you find out certain things were shot just to fix something that wouldn't work. You ask questions, and the solutions that are found aren't apparent from just looking at the film. Watching other people's movies with directors is always an inspiration. The night before we started Empire of the Sun, Steven and I were sitting in the Ting Yua Sheraton in Shanghai, watching Kubrick's Paths of Glory. We kept freeze-framing scenes of the men in the underground bunker-there's a light bulb burning and it's flying the faces of the people. We were saying, "In 1957, no one was allowed to get away with that." What a picture. There was a picture I saw in high school that really convinced me that there was a lot of good work to be done.

  Q: What is your relationship to the technology of cinematography?

  A: I love to harness a complex technology in the service of art. I love the technology, but it would be meaningless without a worthy creative goal. There's just something about the alchemy of taking all of these strange devices that form motion picture technology and putting them in the service of a vision. As a ci
nematographer, our toughest job is to find the dream inside the director's head. Some directors are extremely articulate at expressing some aspects of it and not of others. Some directors are not articulate at all, and it takes a real voyage of discovery to find out what their intentions are-that is what makes it fascinating. A lot of times, I find the most direct way of doing this is looking at films together; usually the best thing is somebody else's film, nothing that either of you were connected with. Also looking at art, looking at photography, looking at clippings, pop music videos-all these different things you can find and say, "Ahhh, something like that!" I remember Spielberg asking me one time, "Now, is that smoke or a filter or both?" And you go, "Hmmm, I think it's both." You do that kind of exploration and find ways of expressing something in a different way. Your knowledge of the technology is extremely important, but it is of small import, compared to your knowledge of human beings, your ability to communicate and influence others-to sell your ideas or a way of doing things to the director. Then you turn around and make your crew very enthusiastic about executing those ideas, even though that might be a formidable task. It's a neverending quest for the knowledge of how you're going to accomplish something new. The technology changes so rapidly, but certain things stay very much the same. It's the balance of loving the old and the new. You have to appreciate the past and anticipate the future, but you're always making movies in the present and knowing how they will resonate down the line. Films you are sure will be absolute deathless wonders are very dead even before they are in the theaters. Certain films you're wrong about, but the idea that you're willing to keep trying things is the most important aspect of it. I do really feel that a lot of beginning film people do not study the history of the medium enough. The history of the technology is for all the people who are going to be involved.