Film Lighting

by Kris Malkiewicz

  Lighting inside the car at night depends a lot on the scene. If the characters are a bunch of heavies, you might use the dashboard light coming up. There is, of course, the problem with the shadow from the steering wheel, and it always looks a little bit hokey. I use a long source rather than a small hard light.

  There is the Lumiline light, which looks like a fluorescent tube but has a filament running through it. They come in 12 and 18 in. lengths. This provides a long source of light, gives you enough light in the face, and when a hand moves in front of it, it does not burn up that bad and it does not give you a really hard shadow. These lamps are used in showcases. They are only one inch in diameter and you can literally tape them wherever you need them. The idea is that you have a big source from a little light. We sometimes use them up high, taped right onto the visor areas. It is far enough forward, high, and complimentary to the people. It gives the exposure, and you really do not know where it is coming from. It is soft since it runs laterally. These lights are 40-watt and 60-watt and they run on 120 volts from a battery pack. We put a dimmer on them, so you get exactly what you want. Color is not that important because at night you have all kinds of color. There is also an inverter available, from 12 volts DC to 120 volts AC. They made it mainly for mobile homes where you can run some appliances from your 12-volt battery. This inverter is good for 700 watts. Clip it on the battery and plug in your lights. The drainage will be about the same as your headlights.

  For lighting people in the back, you may rig some lights from outside the windows and turn lights on and off. And you will have a little fill light from the front. I have done it with little 12-volt bulbs, the ones used for the signal lights. They are fairly bright bulbs. I have very simple tin reflectors for them and you can plug them into your cigarette lighter. They can be taped to the backs of the front seats or on the window frames. They give enough exposure for the faces. You can do a nice job for a night car scene in the studio with a limbo black in the background and just lights flashing by.

  Nowadays in the situation described by Richmond Aguilar, the Lumiline light would be most likely replaced by a Mini-Flo, but the technique described here is still valid.

  Another type of light used for a night car scene is the rope light. These units resemble Christmas lights, but they are contained inside a transparent plastic tube.

  Russell Carpenter, ASC

  We used rope lights in a limousine, with six young actors crawling around in “full-throttle party” mode, in 21. I was in there with the camera, and the rope lights were taped everywhere just outside the frame lines of the camera. They were powered by batteries. And then I had a little fluorescent light, a Mini-Flo, literally held between my knees for fill and I was operating. And that was all the lighting. It was total chaos of course.

  M. David Mullen, ASC

  Some cinematographers will take a rope light and attach it to a white board in a spiral pattern to create a very dim, warm light source that doesn’t take up much space in terms of the thickness of the unit. Rope lights and strings of white Christmas tree lights are also used to augment multiple candles in scenes shot under extremely low levels of illumination; the light created by these strings is very nondirectional and adds to the general ambience created by the candles. Rope lights have also been used inside cars at night because they can be hidden easily along the off-camera edges of the window and dashboard.

  To simulate car movement when shooting a stationary car interior, Jordan Cronenweth suggests the use of a wind machine throwing water on the windshield and windows. It gives a very realistic effect especially in conjunction with light effects created by moving a cardboard with horizontal slots vertically in front of the lamp, to create a streaking light effect.

  Whatever location we are going to use, we should approach it with open eyes and sensitivity. There is a great danger of coming to a location and changing its character through lighting. This often negates the primary reason for going there. Today’s fast emulsions allow us to make good use of the existing, available lighting and therefore to preserve the unique character that each location offers. Under the best of circumstances our lights should just augment it and introduce the nuances required to achieve the mood desired for the scene.

  Chapter Eight

  Learning to Light

  Learning film lighting must, by nature, follow a twofold path. We must know our tools, but even more important, we must learn to see. When I asked the British cinematographer Douglas Slocombe (BSC) what was the most important skill that he had learned over the years about lighting, his answer was “The awareness of light; using one’s own eyes. A child is aware of it—of light reflections in the bathtub, of the shine on the faucet, of a shaft of light under the door.”

  Although we all tend to lose the awareness of a child as we grow older, we can still develop our visual consciousness at almost any age. But we must try to see, to observe how light illuminates our reality, how it plays on things around us. What are the characteristics of the artificial light in a kitchen and in a bathroom? What pattern does the sunshine filtering through the curtains make on the living room furniture and the floor? How are people lit in our favorite restaurants? And how are they lit in church? Then we should examine how other artists see the world. Cinematography did not evolve in a vacuum. We have to study the visual tradition of our medium.

  Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC

  We like to go back to painters. For cameramen, going to a museum is beyond entertainment. You can learn a lot from paintings. Your eyes see different kinds of lighting moods and it is a way to train your eyes and your feelings. You learn to see what painters do in certain situations, how they create mood, how they light, what kind of colors they use. These are the primary sources to work with besides working in real life, keeping your eyes open and seeing things, or studying photographs. Still photographs are very good for us, actually, because they capture real life with certain color effects, certain moods, whether in color or in black and white. For feature film cameramen I think that painting is a more classical way to learn.

  Looking at paintings and photographs allows us to linger. Watching movies, on the other hand, demands much faster observation. In this respect it helps to watch movies without sound.

  Finally, we need to learn by doing. Traditionally, documentaries and commercials have been the training ground for many cinematographers.

  Haskell Wexler, ASC

  I find that I learn the most when working on documentaries. When the budget is minimal, you are forced to look at light as you find it and to make it look good. Fortunately, with the modern fast films there is much less of a problem with exposure. In documentaries you are forced to observe very quickly not just lighting but also framing, because usually you are not able to tell people where to stand or where to walk. So you have to make framing decisions almost instantaneously. And you may have to be able to see right away that, for example, someone who is talking has a terrific mixture of light on his face: perhaps a bluish kicker from the daylight and an overhead light from the warmer light above and a fill light bounced off the table.

  Allen Daviau, ASC

  I found that in commercials I could work with a variety of lighting styles as a lighting cinematographer and that this helped me to get closer to my goal, which was feature motion pictures. And I found that I bet on a good thing, because the variety of experience that I got from commercials was very good.

  Simultaneously with learning to see light, we must develop a thorough knowledge of lighting tools. We must instinctively realize what a given light can do for us at a given distance and angle.

  Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC

  With time you learn to know your tools. You know your lights. When you turn a baby spot on and you flood it halfway, you practically can guess what the exposure is. On exteriors at a given latitude, you know what the exposure will be, say at three in the afternoon, because of your experience. That is why many times you do not need your light meter. You can light with your eye
s, you set the contrast and the mood with your eyes. You do not need a light meter for that.

  A cinematographer needs to keep in touch with the constantly changing lighting technology. When manufacturers come up with new equipment, often a gaffer will alert the cinematographer to those developments.

  James Crabe, ASC

  Every time I work, I am working with crew people who themselves are discovering new things. The gaffer might say to me, “Hey, listen, there is a new light . . . ,” and I will say, “Bring one, and we will see how we like it.” I learn from the crew. No matter how you slice it, it is a very collaborative kind of thing, unlike the freedom that the still cameraman has to go out and be able to record pictures and to show just the ten out of two hundred that he took.

  One of the significant ways that cinematography differs from still photography is in matching shots and sequences. This is the area where learning continues over the years.

  Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC

  I think that most mistakes are made in matching. You learn about matching one shot to another all of your life. The easy part of matching is interiors. On the stage you have all the control. The sun is not moving around, the clouds are not blocking the sun, so the interior is easier, you control everything, but it is still very difficult. What happens with exteriors when you lose the sun, and you have to use lamps to match the previous shots? Now, this becomes a problem of matching!

  The more experienced you become with your lighting techniques, the more flexible you can be.

  John Alonzo, ASC

  I am still learning about lighting. I am still learning that what works for one scene does not work for another scene. You sometimes have to become more inventive as to how you light a particular actor or actress. People are different. I am learning to be more and more flexible, so if it does not work, I am not setting myself a rule that I must key somebody from this direction because that is the best. I become flexible and start finding other ways of lighting them. You start learning that you can do more sometimes with no light. I started learning how to use the newer lights that we have. I do not want to be pompous about it, but it is like being a painter. A painter never stops learning what he can do with color. He may become proficient at it and technically correct, but you never stop until you can make a full circle, like a representational artist who finally makes the full circle to abstraction, who has got so much freedom that he just throws color everywhere and it looks good. That, I guess, is what most cameramen try to finally achieve, until you end up shooting and lighting in such a way that it is almost natural, that it does not look like it is lit. I watch actors, I look at how they talk, which way they move, whether they hold their chins up or down, what it is that they do, so that I don’t say to them, “You must look up because the light is over here.”

  A challenging aspect of film lighting is that after we learn all our tools and become familiar with the most often-encountered situations, the unexpected is bound to happen and we will be asked to improvise. The late James Wong Howe described two interesting improvisations from his long and fascinating career.

  James Wong Howe, ASC

  It happens sometimes that you have to improvise your lighting equipment in the most unexpected situations. I will give you an example.

  Many years ago we were making a Zane Grey western down in Arizona, and in those days we did not have electric generators out on location. We had to light everything with reflectors. On this particular occasion the director wanted to go up the side of the mountain to get a full-figure shot of an actor on horseback looking down into the valley. He said to me, “Jimmy, leave the reflectors here, we will just get a long shot silhouetted against the sky. We will take only the camera and our lunches up there.” So we did. We went with a reduced crew and we shot the silhouette of the rider. But the director said, “Oh, Jimmy, I am sorry, but I’ve got to have a close-up of him and a shot of the valley where he is looking. It wasn’t in the script but action dictates it.” So I said, “Well, look, we left all the reflectors down there and I don’t have any lights.” “Will it take long to get them up here?” he asked. I said, “Yes, we have to send the men down and the reflectors are very heavy to carry up. Do you have to have this close-up?” He said, “Yes, I have to have it.” I suggested that we could shoot the close-up later somewhere else, but the director insisted on having it done up there.

  This was in the days before we had paper cups, and there were a lot of tin cups in which we were drinking coffee. This gave me an idea. I asked one of the crew, “Vic, how many tin cups can you pick up and hold in your hand?” “Oh,” he said, “I can hold maybe four or five.” I said, “Fine, see if you can hold eight or ten cups and reflect the sun on the face. And I need about four or five fellows over here with cups doing the same thing.”

  They couldn’t hold the cups still but it was all right, and on the screen it looked like the sunlight was coming through the leaves and giving an unsteady broken pattern.

  Another time I was doing the picture Air Force. This was a story of sending nine B-17 bombers to Hawaii. They got halfway there when they heard over the radio that the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor. But as it was a routine flight, they had just enough gas to get there. So they had to land although the tower told them that the field had been bombed.

  We were down in Florida. We duplicated the field and I had my lights all set up. We expected nine B-17s to come in about quarter of seven. Two or three hours before that time we were ready to photograph. I asked my electrician to start the generator and light up to see if everything was going to be all right, as these B-17s were to land only once. Well, the generator broke down. I have no lights. I go to my director, who is Howard Hawks, and say, “Howard, we are in trouble.” He says, “What?” so I explain, “The generator broke down.” He says, “What do you mean, ‘we are in trouble,’ that’s your problem. I am not the photographer, I am just directing this picture.”

  So I went to my special effects man. I always had him carry flares for emergencies. I asked him how many flares he had. He said, “Oh, Jimmy, I have two or three boxes of three-minute and one-minute flares.” So where I had my lights set, I took the reflectors out of them and mounted the reflectors on stands. In front of them I had sticks in the ground with a flare on each of them. I then had them all wired up and we tried one out. When we hit the switch, it ignited the flare. At quarter of seven the B-17s came in. Just when they were close enough, I gave the signal, the man hit the switch, and all the flares lit up. They flickered and the smoke came through, and you could see the B-17s with their headlights penetrating through the smoke. The flickering flares reflected on their wings and fuselages. Of course, the airfield was supposed to be bombed and on fire, so it all fitted beautifully. It was much more effective than if I had the electric lights. They would have been too steady. Well, we saw it on the screen. Hawks said, “Jimmy, this is great! Now we can send the generator back home. We can save a lot of money and we don’t need the damn thing, because it is breaking down and we will finish the picture here with flares!”

  Such unexpected improvisation helps us to keep fresh and open to new things. But even without such emergencies, we should try to start every picture with the benefit of our past experience and still with a very fresh and inventive attitude.

  Conrad Hall, ASC

  After you have done a picture, you forget everything you have ever known, so that you become a child again or an infant or a void into which the new picture creates a whole new evolvement, a whole new growth, a whole new development, so that you do not have to keep doing the same thing all over again. In other words, you take yourself back to ground zero. Of course you cannot unlearn what your brain knows. But I mean it emotionally, I mean that you just become scared again, as if you do not know anything. Instead of having a sense of arrogance that makes you feel you are the master, you feel like the opposite. I never felt on top of it. I never felt that I knew so much that I could sit back with a cup of coffee and it would all tu
rn out wonderful. I always felt that unless I work really hard at it and pay really close attention to it every second of the way, I may not end up with something that somebody would like.

  When we are learning the tools and training the eyes, we must not lose sight of the reason we are learning all these things: to communicate.

  Allen Daviau, ASC

  When reading scripts, you have to be true to yourself and ask the question, Do I really want to have my name on that?

  This last question is perhaps the most important question that a cinematographer can ask himself or herself. It is a question about the ultimate self-esteem of an artist. Let us never forget that our talents and our skills can be used to convey base values as well as noble ones. The choice is ours.

  Notes on the Contributors

  Contributors who are no longer with us, but whose memory is always alive:

  John Alonzo, ASC

  James Crabe, ASC

  Conrad Hall, ASC

  James Wang Howe, ASC

  Philip Lathrop, ASC

  Alexander MacKendrick

  Robert Wise