Principal Photography

  The artistic history of the medium is only a hundred years old-what could be easier to study? It's a piece of cake to seek it out. People say, "That's for art historians, not for artists." I don't think so. You see something, and it causes you to do something else. You may not realize that what is ringing in your head came from long, long ago.

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  Lisa Rinzler

  Lisa Rinzler attended the Pratt Institute, where she first studied painting then switched to filmmaking. Rinzler made a transition to the New York University undergraduate film school, where she began to shoot many student films, knowing she wanted to be a cinematographer.

  Rinzler shot two short films for Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and Reverse Angle, an art journal film for Director Wim Wenders. As an assistant, she worked with Cinematographers Nancy Schreiber (on many documentaries) and Fred Murphy (in feature films).

  Rinzler began photographing documentaries, including World's End, Kitty, No Sense of Crime, Hookers, Prostitutes, Pimps, and Their Johns, and a film on the making of John Huston's last production, The Dead. In 1989, Rinzler photographed Nancy Savoca's directorial debut, True Love. She shot a series of music videos for Director Tamara Davis, which led to Guncrazy, a contemporary, color film noir starring Drew Barrymore. Davis showed Rinzler's reel to young filmmakers Allen and Albert Hughes, Rinzler screened The Drive-By, a Super 8mm film by the Hughes brothers, and this led to an impressive collaboration on Menace II Society.

  Rinzler was director of photography on the Hughes brothers' second film, Dead Presidents, an ambitious production which gave the cinematographer the opportunity to expand her horizons of visual storytelling. She shot actor Steve Buscemi's directorial debut, Trees Lounge, and Three Seasons, the first American feature film to be filmed on location in Vietnam.

  A socially conscious artist, Rinzler tries to vary narratives with smaller experimental projects. She shot Black Kites for Director Jo Andres, based on a Sarajevan woman's journals during wartime. Lisa Rinzler's documentary work informs her feature films, combining nonfiction reality with a heightened cinematic verisimilitude.

  SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY

  Menace 11 Society

  Lisbon Story

  Q: How did you come to study filmmaking?

  A: I had read Suminerhill by A. S. Neill, a book about a progressive school system in England, and thought, "There's got to be a more progressive way to educate people, including myself." I dropped out of high school, but wanted eventually to study drawing and painting. I went to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn as a nonmatriculated painting student. Then, just by fate or luck or both, New York State passed a law saying if you went to an accredited college, you could receive your high school diploma. So I matriculated. While I was at Pratt, I switched to film.

  Q: What caused you to switch from painting to film?

  A: I was painting a lot with motion, suddenly light wasn't the only issue-motion was involved. I couldn't quite get it all in painting. I must have had a dream, because one morning I woke up and said, "That's it, I'm switching to film!" It really came out of light, and drawing, and painting.

  Q: There's a lot of movement in your cinematography.

  A: The human eye and the human being are in constant motion, even when seemingly at rest. When focusing on someone, you are not only seeing them, but taking in, whether consciously or unconsciously, the background behind them and the foreground too.

  Q: Was there any particular movie that captured your imagination as a child?

  A: Madame X, with Lana Turner. I remember nothing of it, except for one shot of a blindfolded woman in a stark prison or hospital-like room that frightened me. That scene had hard light and hard cuts. The image was strong to me as a child. I bet if I saw this film today it would seem far less intimidating. That image may not even be accurate, but that is what shooting is about-perceiving and interpreting, not simply recording the shared common denominator.

  Q: So what did you do at the point you had the revelation to study filmmaking?

  A: I switched to New York University as an undergraduate because Pratt's film department was just so tiny. I did shoot a film there, but I wanted to shoot a lot, and at NYU you could. I shot a lot of terrible films there that were never completed, but it was very hands-on and I got to practice lighting and get comfortable with the camera. Operating a camera felt very natural, but syncing up the right balance of what you wanted the lighting to look like and pulling off the technical end of it was another story. While at NYU, I began working as a technician for free as a second assistant. I had a job once as a Production Assistant and quickly ended up in the camera department.

  Q: When you first entered NYU as an undergraduate, was your goal to become a director?

  A: No, I knew I wanted to become a cinematographer. Everything I did was directed towards cinematography. I never directed a film at NYU, I just shot a lot of films. It was great experience. You have to do it. You can read, you can watch, you can study, and one should do all those things-I do, to this day-but it's the physical reality of doing it that makes a difference. You need to make mistakes to really learn and move forward. When I see the films I shot for Robert Mapplethorpe, I am horrified. The lighting is dreadful and flat, and in one film almost every shot is a zoom-and it will live forever! I was still a student and had no experience. I was at the beginning of learning by doing.

  Q: What did you learn from Robert Mapplethorpe?

  A: Lessons about commitment. Be more into your subject than photographing it. Your subject comes first, photographing it comes naturally, organically, second. I was enamored with him because of his commitment.

  Q: There was so much controversy over his work, but he also did a wonderful series of photographs of flowers.

  A: The flowers were beautiful. He also did this amazing work with color. It was almost like a music video sense of color, it was very saturated. It was fashion, and never hyped to the public the way his celebrity portraits, his flowers, or his S&M male erotic work was, but it was amazing and it affected my cinematographic education. Now you see tons of oversaturated music videos, but he was doing that in stills and it was affecting my lighting style.

  Q: What did you do after studying at NYU?

  A: I assisted two people: Nancy Schreiber in documentaries, and Fred Murphy as a second assistant in features.

  Q: What did you learn from working with Fred Murphy?

  A: Fred was really my mentor. When I was beginning on my first job as a second assistant on a feature, Fred had me diagraming his lighting set-ups. I'm not as classical as Fred, but there was a great beauty in getting to diagram and study his work that closely. It made me look at every lighting unit. Why is that unit there? I worked for Fred for a long time as a second assistant. I was a much better second assistant than I was a first. First assistant is immensely technical, looking at the wrong end of the lens, figuring out focus. I wasn't too inclined towards that.

  Fred taught me about being on the set. He is such a gentleman, a large part of being a director of photography is administrative. It's dealing with the production aspects, equipment coming and going-the politics of people and set etiquette. It's handling a lot that isn't the actual photography itself. It's dealing with time pressure and people leaning on you. I really observed his gentleness, but his steadfastness. How to ask for what you need. A lot of being a director of photography is having to fight for what you believe. In the beginning I had to fight more than I do now, although there's still a time in every day where I feel something might be better for a shot one way and a director feels it might be better another way. It's my job as a director of photography to persevere without hammering it to the point of infuriating them. When I prep a feature, I am astonished by how the last thing I get to do, which is to visualize and then write notes for a scene, is always the most single-handedly important thing. Production has so many questions in order to prepare for the location, special equipment, and additional dayplayers required, etc. Once the technical and
logistical part is cleared, the final conceptual planning gets its final moment before jumping into the fire and committing that concept onto film.

  I was also a first assistant on many documentaries, which was a great experience. That taught me a lot, not just technically and about working quickly, but also socially-it was invaluable. So I got some of each world because if I wasn't working on a feature with Fred, I was working on a documentary with Nancy Schreiber. It was very schizophrenic, but that was a great education.

  Q: How did you know when to make the transition to director of photography?

  A: A time came when I said, "I've got to shoot, I can't assist!" I was getting too old-there comes a time where you have to go for it. I really didn't like working as a first assistant. I got used up. I was literally falling asleep at night in the bathtub, looking at my Samcine calculator worrying about whether some hard dolly shot would be in focus the next day at dailies. It was so stressful, and I was just dying to shoot. I had a lot of my own opinions and ideas. I was constantly looking and just wanting to be doing it. I bought an Aaton camera with the money I made as an assistant. In those days, when you started shooting, you'd shoot for free. I remember saying, "Do I want this record or do I want to eat?" because there was just no money anymore, it had all gone into this camera. I got to a point where I said, "I can no longer assist because people are seeing me as an assistant, I have to shoot." In 1984, I was assisting Fred Murphy on Key Exchange, and two weeks before the end of the film I got an offer to do a very low-budget 16mm feature. Fred said, "Go ahead, go do it."

  Q: You shot Guncrazy, which was Tamara Davis's directorial debut. What is the responsibility of the director of photography on a director's first feature?

  A: To help them put onto film what they see in their mind's eye. Some directors are highly visual, and others are more inclined towards the actors. Some are both. It's our job as a director of photography to help them know a little bit more about cinematography as part of the language, part of the expression in telling the story. To show them that visually, cinematography can help to express an emotion, a mood, an idea, a concept. There's a lot of, "What do you think of trying this?" A lot of, "Is this the way you want it to feel? If it is, why don't we work with this type of light, this type of camera movement." It is the director of photography's job to enhance the director's vision.

  Q: What films did you and Tamara Davis screen prior to shooting Guncrazy, which is a contemporary film noir?

  A: We screened the original Gun Crazy (1949, directed by Joseph H. Lewis). Tamara's film wasn't a remake, just a name in homage only, but there were some really amazing sequences shot in cars in the original. We screened a lot of James Cagney films like White Heat, and expressive black-and-white films like The Night of the Hunter. We were influenced by a modern French New Wave film, Godard's Breathless. When you shoot a feature in twenty-four days, you can't afford to have a lot of coverage. You have to plan your shots. You commit it to film, it has a life of its own. You don't get to second guess. In editing, you can at least change something if it doesn't work. I haven't had the luxury to light something one way and then have a change of mind and start over entirely after seeing it. There's just not that kind of time. I'm in many situations where we light something, look at it, don't like it, and we start turning lights off. It almost invariably gets better. So that teaches you to commit, to work fast. You have to read the script, think about the feeling, the emotion and psychology of each scene, break it down, come up with an approach beforehand, agree upon it with the director, do it, and move on to the next one.

  Q: You use the technique of rack focus in Guncrazy, where the camera switches from one point of focus to another within a shot. What is the purpose of a rack focus shot?

  A: It means directing the viewer's attention exactly where the director and the director of photography think it should be. Pulling focus for the most part is and should be unnoticeable, but a real specific rack focus is to rack attention from one thing to another. Racking between lines isn't so psychological. If you can't hold your depth of field, you're forced into racking between lines. It still happens to me at some point on every film. I don't much care for it. I do like a specific psychological focus shift, it's like saying, "Look here, look there."

  Q: Nancy Savoca's directorial debut, True Love, captures a sense of truth about the Italian American community in New York. What research did you do on this project?

  A: That's a compliment to Nancy Savoca. I went up to the Bronx and asked her to really take me through the whole script, really tell me how do you see it-take me into this world. Then, once we started location scouting, I was so taken with the visuals, with the homes of people. What a person has in their homes, the colors they paint their walls, the objects, really says a lot about their character. The Italian American homes in the Bronx were really exciting for me. They are dark and rich, the light was trying to come in from the outside, but was controlled by dense curtains. Locations have history and vibration, they speak loudly in a very quiet way.

  Q: True Love is a dialogue-driven film. How did you and Nancy Savoca bring visual storytelling to it?

  A: Through working with backgrounds. What's behind a person is telling you something consciously or it's affecting you subconsciously. These real-life backgrounds were crammed full of exciting information. They weren't moving, but they were speaking. So, since there was an immense amount of dialogue, I thought, "That's a way we can get a visual sense into this film!"

  Q: How do you photograph someone in their environment and make the background part of the scene?

  A: Choices are at hand every step of the way. In a feature, you're working with the production designer to create the backgrounds. What color? What fabric? What texture? Is it wool? Is it cotton? Is it shiny? Is it satin? Does it have a pattern? What color is the wall? What hue of that color? In a feature, you work with a background by creating every millimeter of it, every inch of every space.

  Q: In the pizzeria sequence, you achieved a good balance between the exterior light coming through the window and the interior light. How did you approach this?

  A: Balancing exterior and interior light is something directors of photography do every day. Realistically, a pizza place is lit with fluorescent light. We took artistic license in turning the fluorescents off. The characters are close enough to the window that it would be daylight. We wanted to see through the window, we did not want a whited-out background. The film is about people in their neighborhood, so you want to see life going on in that neighborhood. So the exterior can be two stops hot, but it can't be five stops hot. It's building up your interior light to hold the balance to the exterior light and keeping it a natural feeling.

  Q: How did you first meet the Hughes brothers and come to photograph their first feature, Menace II Society?

  A: I had shot a lot of black-and-white rap videos for Tamara Davis, D.O.C., and MC Lite. The Hughes brothers had seen those, and an Elizabeth Taylor commercial for White Diamonds which I had shot in Mexico. I saw a Super 8mm film they made, called The Drive-BY. I just loved the roughness, the economy, and the cleverness with which it was shot. I liked the visual style. Working on a lot of rap videos, I was around young black culture, so my eyes and ears were open to that subject matter. I was staying at Tamara's house in Los Angeles on some project, and I met the Hughes brothers there by chance. I said, "Look, if you ever want to do a Super 8mm film, I'll shoot it for you. I love your work." Within six months, suddenly Menace II Society was on the burner and going to happen. I said, "Great, I want to do it, I'll be there." It was a low-budget film, around $2.7 million. It was a thirty-five-day schedule, and off we went.

  Q: Both Allen and Albert Hughes direct their films. How did they work with you on Menace II Society and Dead Presidents?

  A: Allen Hughes worked with the actors and Albert Hughes worked with me in terms of the camera and the lighting. Albert is very interested in camera style. They confer and agree. Albert and I spent a lot of
time in preparation shotlisting and storyboarding, more so on Dead Presidents in terms of storyboarding, but on Menace II Society we made an entire shot list, mine was maybe six scenes. They are a team. They agree or disagree and they work it out until they agree. Their areas are pretty specific. They both over lap in terms of having say, but at one point they make a commitment to a vision. Allen went to a lot of acting rehearsals while I was sitting with Albert doing shot lists and shot design. People always think it's hard to work with two directors; for me it isn't. They are both directors. In Menace II Society, I wanted to do a lot of handheld. I said, "Look, it's raw, it's urgent, there's a beauty to it." I was thinking about John Cassavetes's films, or more recently Nick Gomez's film, Laws of Gravity. Having come from handheld out of so much necessity, the Hughes brothers wanted to try the tools of the trade. There were times it was completely appropriate to use Steadicam and at times it wasn't.

  Q: Menace 11 Society really captures an aspect of the black community in the seventies. How did you and the Hughes brothers approach the period in this film?