All language subtitles for Visions of Light.The Art of Cinematography (1992)

(Thunder rumbles)

(Lightning cracks)

One night I was watching
the 1947 version of Oliver Twist,

David Lean's Oliver Twist,
photographed by Guy Green

We were watching the movie,
watching the opening scenes of the film,

of Oliver's mother in labour
walking across this dark moor

and my uncle just happened to say,
"God, this photography is gorgeous."

And I said, "Photography? "

That's when I learned
what a director of photography was

I found out that I was unconsciously...

I was responding to light

In the beginning,
all there was was a guy with a camera

There were no directors. There was nothing

There was a guy on the camera
and he would shoot these subjects

The subject may be 20 seconds long
of a train coming at you, wherever it is

Then actors were brought in

and because the cameramen
were basically photographers,

and weren't that facile with performers,

usually one of the performers
directed the performers

So, right in the very beginning, you saw
that there was the division of duties

There was the director
who took care of the acting part,

and there was the cameraman
who took care of everything else

The cinematographer's job
is to tell people where to look,

to say, "Look at this. She's going to weep and
sing the aria," or, "He's going to draw the gun."

Or, you know, "He feels OK, but behind him
is an ape. You'd better look at the ape!"

We do some things we don't realise we're doing

until we see the film put together

We did them out of instinct.
We didn't know exactly why

And they work for the picture

And it's very hard to express a reason for it

but it's there

The great cinematographers are able to

understand the stories they are trying to tell

and find those elusive visual images

that help to tell that story

A great DP adds to the material
that already exists,

and really works
to understand the subject matter

and the language of the director
they're working with

I think visually

I think of how, if you turned off the soundtrack,

anybody would stick around
and figure out what was going on

There's just every technique, visually

There's a language
far more complex than words

I enjoy going onto a stage that's totally black,
striking a first light, and saying, "Here we go."

That really turns me on, personally

I wanted to copy...

...simulate what I saw on the screen
by the giants and masters

To this day, I still have a reverence
of Charlie Lang, Stanley Cortez...

...and Ted McCord, and Arthur Miller...

...and Hal Moore, and Leon Shamroy,

Milton Krasner and all those people

I wanted to be like them

I wanted to do what they did

What you had to have
in the black-and-white days,

you had to have a real grasp
of what photography meant

Those were the real cinematographers.
These people knew photography

The more I've learned, and shot films,

when I go back and look what was done
in the teens and the '20s...

Some years ago, I had the very good fortune

to see an original negative print
of Birth of a Nation, shot by Billy Bitzer,

who was with Griffith on all of his early films

It was an inspiration to realise
what was achieved in that cinematography

We're talking pretty close
to the beginning of everything here

and to realise what he accomplished
with the equipment he had

and how quickly so many things
became much more sophisticated

The '20s was really a golden age for cinema

because the camera
was unencumbered by sound

And it was unencumbered by all the...

devices that accompany
verbal dialogue storytelling

It really was a visual medium

The early movies seemed to be freer

I mean,

you see like scenes like in Way Down East,

when Lillian Gish is jumping

from a piece of ice to another one,

it's almost a documentary

She actually is doing it

and there is no tricks and no studio

The camera was very free

The camera could move very fast

Cameras were much smaller

and the fact that they didn't have sound

allowed them to shoot very freely

The camera could be anywhere

JOHN BAILEY: And the Germans, in the '20s,

were really the cutting edge

Directors like Pabst and Murnau

really took a lot of the formal elements

that came out of
German expressionist sculpture

and painting and graphics

and grafted them into film

A lot of European film-makers -
directors like Murnau -

came to the United States

The production of Sunrise was
a real watershed for American film-making

And that film was startling in every aspect

In its design aspect

Certainly in its use
of expressionistic lighting techniques

Character was revealed in Sunrise

through a lot of very complicated
lighting changes

and dramatic lighting sources

that were very, very new and fresh
in the American films

They had crane shots that went
for ever and ever and ever

And they had these kind of rigs,

that would be rigged overhead in the studios

This was all very inventive business
that they did

They had a fluid camera
that would just continue on and on and on

Where we have steadicams and things like that,
and Panaglides,

they were doing that some time ago

We're talking 1927

Everything had to be told visually

and I think when sound came in,

that was a great catastrophe for movie-making

I still believe that if sound would have come in
ten or 15 years later,

I think the art of movies and cinematography
would have been much, much higher

than even it is today

We've all seen those sequences
from early sound films

where it's all too obvious
that there's a microphone

planted in a flower vase
at the centre of the table,

cos all the actors are leaning forward,
speaking into it

But I really shouldn't blame you

I'm the son ofyour employer

and that in itself makes me
a low, low scoundrel

If I didn't trust you, I wouldn't be here

So, here we are

Chopped onions?

JOHN BAILEY: The camera can't move at all,
it can't even pan or tilt,

because it's in a huge, soundproof
refrigerator or ice box

and it took a number of years
for cinematographers

to start thinking about ways
to free the camera again

(Dr Jekyll gasps for breath)

If a director, as Rouben Mamoulian did,

cared enough to fight for his mobile camera

and the whole idea
that you could do a sound film,

where you didn't record sound for every shot

or perhaps you would add the sound later

I think you see with Mamoulian, with Lubitsch,

you see some early talkies...

You see it with Vidor

I mean, these people refused to be bound
to the conventional

Good work was being done.
It was more difficult

Mommy!

All right, boys

Now, when you come through there...

Once, of course, the camera could be blimped

in some kind of a portable device,
soundproofed,

it could then be put on a dolly
and the camera could be moved again

Of course, it energises and infuses
the whole feel of a film

to have a camera that can move with actors,

can move counter to actors

Are you giving me the run-around?

# ln the winter that we bring spring to you

The '30s brought in
the full flowering of the studio system

And the leading cinematographers
helped create

what was considered to be a studio look

There was the gloss of Paramount,

the harder-edged look that Warner Brothers
was noted for,

and the glamour that we associate with MGM

In the heavy studio times,

through the '30s, through the '50s,

every studio had its own laboratory

and every studio was trying to make
what they did distinctive and different

And it depended very much
on the group of contract cameramen

and art directors and directors,
how they ran their operation

Quiet, everybody!

They learned together
and they developed this technique

and they invented the equipment

Everything you see on a movie camera
was invented by some cameraman

because he needed to do something

and he didn't know how to do it

and so they had these machine shops
and they would just fabricate this stuff

It was a system where people
really followed up through the system

You were an assistant.
You worked your way up

You followed in the footsteps
of the person that you were working under

And so it tended to create a stronger
impression of, you know, a particular style,

that we think of as being Hollywood

It was no joke.
You finished on a Saturday night,

and Monday morning
you started a different picture

Sometimes with Sunday to read the script.
They kept you working

You were paid a very good salary,
but you didn't get to goof off

and it was only on the very biggest pictures
where you might have a long period of testing

So, these people were tested every day
as they worked,

and had to be able to handle different things

I'm sure they were assigned to their strengths

by studios sometimes,

but sometimes they weren't

I think the system had its good points
and its bad points for cinematographers,

as it did for everyone

I think that today we look back

and sometimes there's a nostalgia

After years of berating the studio system,

now we sort of say,
"Gee, but they made so many pictures,

and you had so many opportunities."

Have a drink?

JOHN BAILEY: The dominance
of the actor and the actress

as the driving engine of the Hollywood movies

dictated a certain kind of vocabulary

that, basically, were medium shots,
close-ups, over-the-shoulders

and the principle was to make the actors,
especially the leading actor and actress,

look as handsome and as beautiful as possible

When you photographed a star well,

they had enough power
to be able to put you under contract

Or, at least, to insist that that cinematographer
would photograph them

Louis B Meyer was a very smart man

He'd call the cameramen in and he'd say,

"I don't care what the star goes through,

flood, fire, I don't care,
she's got to look beautiful."

This is the first thing you learn,

because this is actually
a cameraman's bread and butter

They used to tell the cameraman,

"Put your shadows anywhere,
but don't put any shadows on their faces."

They wanted to see their faces

and that was the rule

Most of the photography out there
had that look

(Plays piano)

Women stars particularly,
at that time, were very important

and they wanted their own photographers

Garbo wouldn't have anybody
but Bill Daniels do her pictures

After all, when one may not have long to live,
why shouldn't one have fancies?

Here's a man who'd been
very much a rebel film-maker,

who later on went on
to make his own reputation

as the studio cameraman par excellence

I was sad, when Garbo died,

that not many papers
mentioned Bill Daniels' name

Because this is a man that created with her
her whole screen persona

If you noticed,

the beautiful jobs that were done
on Marlene Dietrich

Where she would be maybe...

If you light a set at 100 foot-candles,
she would be at 110, 115 foot-candles

She would have just a little bit more light on her
than anybody else

so she would pop out amongst the crowd

(Train clatters over tracks)

It sounds funny,
but I don't seem to be able to entertain you

I hate to be entertained. Please don 't do it

I shot her on a picture called Desire

and I found out that her face needs
a completely different kind of lighting

A high key light
that would narrow her cheeks down

And just made her look well

Sternberg, I think, found that out

In fact, she almost insisted. She'd say,
"That's the light I'd like to use up there."

Won't you please get out of here?

Now, is that a nice way to talk
to the man whose name you bear?

All right, I took your name. So what?

Claudette Colbert, yes,
she had to be lit on one side

You probably know that

We even built the set so that she would always
be on one side of her face

She really did have problems
with the other side of her face

So, once in a while, I'd get a man star

Strange, though, when both of them
had to be lit on one side

Now you had problems!

It was the studio look that was pre-eminent
rather than individual cinematographers

But there were coming out of that,

you know, really stellar people...

like George Folsey,

like Gregg Toland,

like Arthur Miller,

...who had such strength,

and such individual voice,

that they kind oftranscended
whatever studio they happened to work for

Today, you look back and very easily recognise
a lot of their films from the look,

irrespective of director even

WOMAN: Do you wish anything, madam?

I didn't expect to see you, Mrs Danvers

I noticed that a window wasn't closed...

George Barnes, I admired his work, too.
He did romantic work, wonderfully imaginative

and just great-looking

It's a lovely room, isn't it?

The loveliest room you've ever seen

Everything is kept just as Mrs de Winter liked it

Nothing has been altered since that last night

Gregg Toland
learned his craft through George Barnes

I think he was with him for many, many pictures

And then Gregg broke away doing his own
and did wonderful work

SVEN NYKVIST: The one I really
was inspired on was Gregg Toland

I saw all his films and I remember the first one,

that was The Long Voyage Home

(Ship foghorn)

It was fantastic

He worked with a depth of field the whole time

and lighting was so interesting

because he dared to take
a lot of contrast in the pictures

And perhaps it was a little too much sometimes,

but for a cinematographer, it was fantastic

Let's take him aboard!

On your feet!

JOHN BAILEY: He did a film for John Ford,
The Grapes of Wrath,

which had a very naturalistic feel,

almost a documentary reality

You can take frames from The Grapes of Wrath

and put 'em alongside the WPA photographs

of Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange
or Doris Ulmann or anybody,

and it's really hard to tell the difference

(Vehicle engine chugs)

(Dog barks)

He did seem to have an eye for things

and also he was very creative

For instance,

we much later started doing filming
with candlelight, for instance, or a match

and he already did it in The Grapes of Wrath

He didn't have the technology we have today

Film was not as fast as it was

But already you get the idea that, actually,
the light,

when he's describing that empty house,

comes from the hand and the match

Toland was a gambler

He was a real gambler

He wasn't afraid to try anything

I remember when they were doing Citizen Kane

I was working in the trick department at Selznick
and they shot it at Selznick Studio

Is that really your idea
of how to run a newspaper?

I don't know how to run a newspaper.
I just try everything I can think of

He was working with Orson Welles
who was also a gambler

The two of 'em
made a wonderful pair on that picture

Wonderful pair

Wouldn't you love to have known what films
that Welles and Toland screened together?

And what they enjoyed? Obviously Welles had
seen Toland's work and been impressed with it

The idea that Toland understood
all the rules he could break

VOICEOVER:
No public man whom Kane himself...

ALLEN DAVIAU: The film opens up
with a send-up of the March of Time newsreel

And, I mean, it is done with such loving detail

I mean, in terms of texures and contrasts
and dupes and scratching film intentionally

What a wonderful time they had to have

sitting around there, thinking up all of the
different things they were gonna do in that film

They must have had
a very good trust for one another,

because a director has to kind of
embrace their DP, to let them go

And what Toland contributed
is so amazing to that film

The deep space

And the camera blocking

It takes a certain kind of director to want to put
up with being that demanding on their actors

That's complete choreography
of acting to camera

By having the deep focus,

he was able to give Orson a lot more leeway
on how he moved his actors

It freed him up

I think that was a tremendous contribution
Gregg gave to the film

Be careful, Charles

Pull your muffler round your neck

I think we shall have to tell him now

We always have this problem

with cinematography not being able
to carry somebody in the foreground

who's sharper in focus
than somebody 20 feet back

Gregg had, for a number of years,
been working on new lenses, faster lenses,

that would allow him to pour more light in

and get a greater depth in these scenes

And that's one of the things, I think,

that gave Citizen Kane
the kind of dynamics that it had

Extraordinary dynamics
compared to other films at the time

In 1948, it played in one of the...

most popular cinemas in Budapest

Exactly one week

And the government just pulled it right after that

The little screening room was packed

because we'd heard Citizen Kane
is going to be screened

which was one of the major events,
I think, at that time

That was the first time I'd seen Citizen Kane

and I just couldn't believe the magnitude
and the magic of film-making

And after a while,

Citizen Kane was like a textbook for us

It's so sad they never got to collaborate again

And Welles' regard for him is expressed,
very plainly,

in the end title card of the film,
where Welles shared his title card with Toland

Film noir really had its high water mark
right after the war

The visual style of film noir, I think,

has fingerprints going back very early
in German Expressionist cinema

They had a sparseness

A visual and stylistic sparseness

What is the bare-bones story?

What are the bare-bones facts
of the characters?

And what is the basic visual information
we need to tell the story?

And so, film noir developed an increasingly
dense and rarefied visual vocabulary

that had to do with
very strong single-source lighting,

slashes of light, dark shadows, low angles...

Extremely strong graphic elements

that had kind of a primal simplicity to them

(Woman laughs)

We weren't expecting you, Mildred. Obviously

John Alton is really one of the pre-eminent
film noir cinematographers

ALLEN DAVIAU: Alton and the people
in film noir were not afraid of the dark

In fact, they were willing to sketch things
just very, very, very slightly

to see how you could use dark,
not as negative space,

but as the most important element in the scene

(Gunshots)

We all have been influenced by that

in terms of what's important
are the lights you don't turn on

Go!

(Gunfire)

Alton did one picture particularly
that I feel is very influential

called The Big Combo

which is a very simple, inelegant film,

that is somewhat brutal in a way,

but which incorporates these very sparse
lighting elements and graphic elements

So that it is very much black and white

There's very little grey in that movie

You can take almost any sequence - and
certainly the final sequence in The Big Combo,

which has as a single light source,
a searchlight going around this dockside

It ends with a gunfight taking place against that

The final shot is a silhouette
walking out into sort of a grey dawn

I mean, very stark imagery

You end up at the end of the noir period
with a film like Touch of Evil by Orson Welles,

which was enormously baroque
and complex in its style,

but was still, basically, a film noir

Told you I brought you up here for a reason

ALLEN DAVIAU: Welles had caused
to be brought to Universal Studios

one of these Eclair Caméflex
lightweight European cameras

He had a very enthusiastic young operator
named Philip Lathrop

and Lathrop got very into hand-holding this

and working with Welles on these compositions

You see some of the scenes and realise
how much hand-holding was done,

but it's extremely seamless

That film, in particular,
was an inspiration to all of us

because it was a textbook of what you could do

It was shot on a small budget in a short time,
mostly on locations,

and again you had,

almost simultaneous
with the breakout in France of the New Wave,

you had Orson Welles doing a New Wave film
in a Hollywood studio

I think it's continued to be an inspiration
to a lot of film-makers

(Birdsong)

Colour processes were always
being experimented with,

from the very beginning of cinema,

even before there was
a de facto colour process

Film-makers occasionally hand-painted
frame by frame

entire sequences or even entire films

Then later in the silent period,
overall tinting for sequences,

like blue for night, amber for dawn,
or whatever, was also practised

(Crowd cheering)

And then during the '30s,

Ray Rennahan photographed a film
called Mystery of the Wax Museum

using a two-colour process,

which incorporated two strips of film
running simultaneously through the camera

Ray Rennahan had been doing some gorgeous
stuff with the two-colour process earlier,

but when the three-colour process arrived,

and they started to appreciate the fact
that this was something quite sophisticated,

the interest in it grew

The process was recognised as startling

It was subtle and beautifully gradated
in its tonality

Interest in it immediately grew and led to
some of the really crowning achievements

of the late '30s and early '40s
in colour cinematography

Another dance,
and my reputation will be lost for ever

With enough courage,
you can do without a reputation

Oh, you do talk scandalous!

When Gone With the Wind came in,

they started on what they called the new film,
a fast film

But everything had to be lit with arcs

And with this amount of light,

it was very difficult
working under those conditions

Victor Fleming, of course,
used to be a cameraman

before he became a director

and he knew the camera

He knew the limitations

Now, the shot of the station

with all the dummies and the people dead,

we had to have a special crane
that came up from Long Beach

It was a long pole that they used, a derrick,

and that was a difficult shot

But I thought that was
one of the best shots in the picture

For the people who had done black and white,
to go into colour,

it was not only a technical adaption,
but it was a philosophical one

Having to learn to see in black and white
is a very great discipline

And to suddenly, after years and years

of focusing all of your faculties
into being able to previsualise

how a scene was going to appear
in black and white,

and suddenly say,
"Oh, well, here it is in colour..."

Black and white is a much more
immediately abstract medium

It's removed from reality by its very nature

And you're more free to associate
drama and tonality and so on

inside black and white,

and I think that's why many of them
never wanted to leave it

Those of us who just missed our chance
to do black and white,

I look forward to the day
when I get to do a black and white picture

I have no doubt it's going to be difficult

and I think that for us,
it's going to be going the other direction

# Leaning on the everlasting arms

Shame on you, Ruby,

mooning around the house
after that mad dog of a man

Every one of the old-time DPs,

like Charlie Clarke and Leon Shamroy

and Arthur Miller and James Wong Howe,
the people I met and knew,

they really thought of it as a job
and they thought of it as a craft

And when you would talk to them about
any kind of art kind of thing,

they would never kind of admit to it being art

They'd say, "Oh, yeah, we did this interesting
effect in the picture or that interesting effect."

When you make a movie,

you've got to have a screenplay, a story

That story really dictates
to what we are going to do

How to shoot it. How to photograph it

How to direct it, how to act it

Everyone is subservient to that

We can go one way or the other,

to get our own ideas in it

but not get our personality in it

MAN: Get these papers while they're hot!

- Latest paper here!
- Come on, come on!

Keep your sweatshirt on

JAMES WONG HOWE: As a cameraman,
I try to keep the mechanics out of it

Not to interfere with the scene

And I try... really try to find
the most simple approach in lighting

I don't want my photography to get in the way
of the story, of the acting

(Horn honks)

I'll remember you, honey

You're the one that got away

I worked for James Wong Howe

on second unit camera
on a picture called Picnic

I did a number of the game shots

and also the last shot of the film,

which was a helicopter shot

And at that time,

helicopters were not used for photography

The military, and the navy as a matter of fact,
just had helicopters

One of the best moments of my life

was when the dailies came on,

which was about three days later

It was Cinemascope at the time

And I was sitting next to Jimmy Howe

And my scene came up,

and it was quite spectacular,

particularly to an audience
who had not seen helicopter shots before

And Jimmy Howe said, "Very good, very good."

And so, even now, when I shoot,

when I do a shot that I really like,

I say in my ear the way Jimmy Howe said to me,
"Very good, very good."

(Laughter)

No, leave room for the cake!

The anamorphic aspect ratio
was extremely horizontal

and rectangular

And films up until that time
had been composed in almost a square format

And now with this rather large
and sometimes empty anamorphic space,

it became confusing what to do
with the sides of the screen -

how much of it to use

And as you see more and more use
of Panavision and Cinemascope

in the late '50s and early '60s,

you start to feel the breadth,

the width of the frame being exploited

in a very exciting way

So, really, when you get to films
like Lawrence of Arabia,

you have the same kind of excitement
and dynamic energy

inside this very wide frame,

that you had
in the more square screen of the '40s

A lot of my generation had been
very impressed with films from Europe

We'd had an opportunity to see these

And our pioneers, Haskell Wexler
and Conrad Hall and so on,

who were giving us examples
of reacting to the European style

and later on, when you got
Vilmos Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs

and people that were coming from
the European tradition and shooting films here,

we got an appreciation of a style

that was so different
from that practised in the studios

I think the films of the French New Wave
really influenced me the most

They captured a sense of the life,
which was really wonderful,

by loosening up the camera and moving with it

They would not think anything

about picking up the camera and running with it

It had almost a documentary feel...

...and so that sort of quality about it
would draw you into the film

in a way that, I think,

a more static camera would not

Which is not to say it's new,

because you go back and you look
at Napoleon that Abel Gance made in 1926,

and it has every new idea you can conceive of,

even today,

with steadicams and everything else

He was swinging cameras from ropes

and inventing dollies and cranes

and doing all sorts of special effects
in the camera

Cinematographers
start studying new things in old things

to sort of invent a new way

I think that there was an evolution

and I think if a lot of these guys
had been younger,

that they would have probably shown us
a lot of very interesting stuff

I'll give a very good example

of what you're calling the "new style"
in the '60s

It's Robert Surtees

I mean, he did...

What's the wedding picture with...

with Dustin Hoffman?

- Elaine!
- (Glass rattles)

The Graduate

I remember reading all these reviews

They're going, "Fresh, innovative,
exciting cinematography...

...Blah, blah, blah!"

Photographed by a 65-year-old man!

Because you have new tools,

the kind of person who is a cinematographer

is always pushing

You always want to explore,
to get yourself into trouble

and see how well you can fight your way out

I don't think that each cinematographer
can work with each director

There is a kind of selection
you do in where you're going

There is a kind of journey
that you are doing by yourself

You suddenly discover that on the same
direction you can meet other people

You can meet friends. They can do this journey

You can meet people that can be your guide

for a portion of this journey

I think Bernado was one of those,
one of the most important

Before we started The Conformist,
Bernado called me

We started to talk about The Conformist
and he says, "Vittorio,

what we know about that period,

mainly we know that period, the late '30s,
through cinema."

So probably we have to use

everything that's been given to cinema
up to now, to that period,

and read from our point of view

(She laughs)

We look at that moment at one of the
great masters in the American film industry

From Bernardo's point of view,
it was Orson Welles

From mine, it was Gregg Toland

Each cinematographer,
they did everything before my time

so I am the sum of the whole experience

(Latin rhythms on radio)

JOHN BAILEY: The Conformist is almost
a compendium of all of cinema language

It incorporates almost all the design,

photographic,

editorial...

techniques that have been developed

And does so in a very coherent and clear way

The shift of so-called styles and techniques
in cinematography,

that happened right around the period of...

Connie Hall, Haskell Wexler,

Vilmos Zsigmond, Laszlo Kovacs, myself,

Gordon Willis,

it came about because of the directors

You started having new directors

who didn't want to work in the studio system

They wanted to go shoot pictures on location

# JIMI HENDRIX: If Six Was Nine

Everything was very exciting and very crazy
in those days

because we had to make those films very fast

There was no time for it,
there was no money for it

The difference was with Easy Rider,

that we were able to really prepare
that production

We took a trip from Los Angeles
to New Orleans and scouted a lot of places

And suddenly you're exposed
to this incredible, incredible vast country,

which has such a wonderful transition
from one area to another,

and the visual sequence was wonderful

And that's how I learned
and got to know the country

And that's magical...

...to really break down
the country and all civilisation

to these pictorial elements

We were into images a little differently
than the old system

The lighting was a little different

We would try things and specially...

I worked with Connie Hall for five years

I was his camera operator for five years
and we did some great things, I think

I feel particularly involved
in helping make mistakes acceptable

to studio heads and other people

And the audience even

By using them

By blatantly,

not by mistakes or anything, but by endeavour

If the light shone in the lens,
and flared the lens,

that was considered a mistake

Somebody would report that

The operator would report,
"The sun hit the lens, it flared the lens. Cut!"

There was never a fear

Conrad would use so little light
that you'd barely see anything in a room

But you'd see it

There was nothing safe

Safe was never the word
with him

Getting things too dark or not seeing eyes
and things like that

CONRAD HALL: Background too hot,
windows blown and things like that

that nobody would dare do
without getting fired in the slick old days

(Shouting)

WILLIAM FRAKER:
The second picture I did with Connie

was a picture called The Professionals

Connie Hall was the cameraman

I was the camera operator

Jordan Cronenweth
was the assistant cameraman

And the second camera crew was
Charles Rosher Junior, and Robert Byrne

I like the work that we did on that

Unfortunately, there was an awful lot of night

And night is always a conundrum
in photography. Day for night, I mean

Connie was so good at this,

that we shot night
of them escaping from Raza's compound

And then they jump in a coal cart and take off
during the night

And then they make the jump
and that was shot at the last part of day

and brought down

Connie was innovative and very daring...
but always extremely solid

He's got, I think, exquisite taste

And he can make that balance
between black and white, colour, day, night

And he just looks at it and he just has
that innate ability to do that

I think it's a gift

(Tyres screech)

You're unlucky, bastard!

HALL: I don't think there was a choice
about shooting it in colour or black and white

There were still 112 pictures
being made in black and white that year

That was an easy choice

Doing it widescreen was a harder choice

- Hop in, boys. Where are you going?
- Come on. Get in

And we felt that it might be a really wonderful
proscenium to present this material in

He was in a fever

The scene where Robert Blake
is about to be hanged

and he's talking to the chaplain

It was shot on the stage

We had a rain gutter over the top

It was like coming down.
And we had a fan off to the side

which wasn't blowing the rain
against the window

but was blowing the spray from the rain
against the window

The light hitting his face with this phenomenon
happening on the windows,

happened to hit his face one time
when I was looking

So I went to Richard and I said,
"Richard, watch this on his face now."

And we did another rehearsal

And you can see the water running down
and it drips around

and he's talking about his father
and it's very sad

He's going to be hanged

But he's playing it very straight

Unemotional

And the visuals were crying for him

I hate him

And I love him

I've had so many cinematographers call me
and ask me how I did that shot

Well, I didn't conceive it at all

Richard didn't conceive it. Nobody conceived it

It was purely a visual accident

I think I was more afraid that I couldn't do it
the Hollywood way

than I was arrogant or convinced

that my way would be a cinematic advance

So I was trying to...

I was trying to wed the two

So, anyway, I married the SOB

I had it all planned out

First he'd take over the History Department

Then when Daddy retired,
he 'd take over the whole college

That was the way it was supposed to be

Getting angry, baby, huh?

What I knew was documentaries

What I knew was the simple way

What I knew is hand-holding

What I knew was how to light realistically

Because most of the time in documentaries,

you work with realistic light

The atmosphere was really different

And I was considered a kid

although I was in my 30s, I guess

No, sir, this is not normal at all

This is the truth. This really happened

I did help somewhat
in my knowledge of film cutting

I did help somewhat
in my knowledge of how a camera could move

And that also came from
my documentary background

I read in Richard Burton's autobiography

that he was against me
being the cameraman on Virginia Woolf

because he was afraid that
with my gutsy, newsreel-type background

that I would show the pockmarks on his face
and would be unkind to him

And that...

Elizabeth took my side
and ultimately he was pleased with the results

# Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Virginia Woolf? Virginia Woolf?

Some scenes came back
when we were shooting in New England,

which somebody at the lab felt was too dark,

and there was talk of firing me

A lot of this I found out later, fortunately

Then I told them I planned that

I wanted degrees of darkness
and degrees of fill light,

so that when the early morning light came,

we would have some subliminal sense
of a change in time

But there was a lot of heat on that film

I do not think that movies
should be made because of the dialogue

I think it should have a good story

The important thing has to be
how it is told visually

And dialogue should be like music in a film

You Joel McCabe?

Yeah

Mrs Miller. I've come to see you

McCabe and Mrs Miller was an excellent
example of being a partner with the director

Altman wanted to have
a special look for this movie

He didn't really know
exactly what he was looking for

And then when he started to talk about it,

he said that he had something in his mind
like old pictures,

old, faded colour photographs

I doubt if he knew what he was talking about

And I immediately started
to experiment with flashing

And I told him about flashing
and how we can desaturate the colours

and how he can achieve the faded look

Flashing is basically...

It's almost like fogging the film

Like putting a layer of fog over the negative

So, what happens is the blacks
are not going to be really black

It's going to be a sort of greyish

Because the blacks are not as black,

you see sort of into the shadow areas more

It also has another effect.
It desaturates the colours

Tell me, any news from down there?
It's been a while since...

How many men are there round here?

This here's an interesting town

I, myself, got a little bit tired of this faded look
and I started to tell him

that maybe we should not do the whole picture
this way, maybe we should have variation,

and he said, "Absolutely not.
We are not going to compromise

I'm behind you, I will defend you
against everybody in the world

if they come and complain about this look."

And, of course, the studio
complained about the look very much

Motion pictures were breaking away
from the Hollywood system

And you had the influence of the East Coast

You had the influence
of the foreign markets now

And you had directors like Roman Polanski

What have you done to it?

WILLIAM FRAKER:
Roman had a magnificent background -

he went to the Polish Film School -

and he had a magnificent background
in photography

He understood photography.
He understood images

And also with people

And emotions. He was tied with emotions

I won't let you go to no Doctor Hill
nobody ever heard of

The best is what you're gonna have,
young lady. Where's your telephone, huh?

It's in the bedroom

There's a shot in Rosemary's Baby

She says, "Where's the telephone?"

And Mia says, "ln the bedroom."

And Ruth says, "Oh, good." And she exits

Roman says, "Billy, give me a POV of Ruth."

I got 'em framed perfectly

You see her on the phone talking

I said, "OK, Roman, we're ready."

He comes over and looks and says,

"No, Billy, no. Move, move, move."

Kindly move

And I looked through and I see just
the back of Ruth Gordon seated on the bed

And you can't see her face
or see the telephone

I said, "But you can't see her."
He says, "Exactly."

I said, "Oh, OK."

So, now, we go to the theatre
and 800 people in the theatre all go...

To see around the doorjamb

That's Roman Polanski

New York had a style all its own
and I call it a street style

It was something...

Because they didn't have the shops,
the labs,

the equipment that we had in Hollywood

And it developed its own styles

They didn't believe in diffusion

They didn't believe in
what they would do in Hollywood,

when you have to shoot
a major motion picture star

It was a situation in which, for reasons of style
and money and time,

they went into the streets
and shot in real places

And that probably is the beginning

of what is used in our time,
as that sort of New York look

WILLIAM FRAKER: Billy Daniels shot a picture
called The Naked City

At that time, there was a bunch of new lights
that had come up called fay lights

That's how we lit everything -
no arcs or anything else like that -

and he shot the whole picture
what I call a New York style

(Gunfire)

Aaargh!

Naked City, he went right into
their own back yard

and did exactly what they did, and did it

And then you copy those styles

How do you...?

How do you do better than On the Waterfront?
You don't

You believe that you were there.
You were part of that cold climate

You were part of the cold world

You were part of that whole thing

It had great blacks in it, too

People don't recognise the blacks

All the exterior stuff and the night stuff
had great, rich blacks

Look out for the truck!

When we shot in New York,
we had to improvise

Everything was done with something at hand,
something you might find in the street,

and the shooting is rough and tough

We moved in the streets all the time

I'm walking here!
I'm walking here! Up yours!

Dirty and gritty would be my description of it

And it's evidence...
pictures like Midnight Cowboy.

Actually, that ain't a bad way
to pick up insurance, you know

(Cheering)

I always say that Dog Day Afternoon
was shot with energy

Every scene has energy
from every point of view

From the actors

From the camera and its movement

Once we began to shoot,

there was no question, but that it had to have
a semi-documentary look

It had to be real

That the audience was to believe that this was...

...this was not a story

that had happened before
that was being filmed

This is a story that's happening right now

And I think we succeeded in doing that

I met Marty

He was interviewing cameramen and we talked

And I had the advantage...

I think it had to be a union film
and it had to be in New York,

and it was quite a low-budget movie,
Taxi Driver

I had an advantage in that I really had looked at
a lot of Godard and European stuff,

so we could begin to talk the same language

And both of us happen to talk very fast,
so we could talk the same language rapidly

We shot it really quite economically

We didn't cover...

Marty knew not to cover certain things,

to make a shot which we knew was powerful
enough to say everything we wanted to say

Some dolly shot, something

Rather more of it than you think
was in the script

Schrader's script was extraordinarily visual
when you came to shoot it

There's a lot in there, in Schrader's script,
that helps you to figure out what to look at

The big overhead stuff and things at the end

are at least variations
on things that were in the script

Several people who, for whatever reason,

had some set of emotions about New York
that they wanted to unload,

happened to come together

I think that's the simplest and fairest way
to say it

(Persistent car horn)

I got The French Connection

Billy Friedkin was looking for somebody
to shoot The French Connection,

and they said what we've seen you do
is all high-key, fashiony-type stuff

between commercials and this feature

But this has to be a very gritty,
New York, street-type picture

Do you think you can do that?

My answer to 'em was,
"Well, I'm a cinematographer

I should be able to do
anything you want me to do."

And so I shot The French Connection

and after that came out, I was labelled
as a gritty, New York, street photographer

(Tyres squeal)

You're driving a tad rapidly

Don't worry. I'm a very good driver

I don't think starting a career or pursuing
a career in Hollywood on the West Coast

would have permitted me to pursue...

...visual styles that I've pursued
over a period of time living on the East Coast

It's just a different...

...world

It was a different film-making world
for a long, long time

You're exceptional in bed,

because you get pleasure in every part
ofyour body when I touch it

Like the tip of your nose
and if I stroke your teeth or your kneecaps...

I assign the big break in
American cinematography to Gordon Willis

In that, I think, modern American
cinematography comes out of him very much

I just simply pictured things a different way

And in some cases it caused
a ruckus now and then

Because it's like saying, "We can't do that,
because that's never been done before."

I never did it in that spirit.
I just simply did it because I liked it

I want reliable people,
people that aren't going to be carried away

I mean, we're not murderers

His imprint on the film was indelible
when Godfather came out

I mean, that was a job of cinematography
that everybody couldn't help but notice

Bonasera

Bonasera,

what have I ever done
to make you treat me so disrespectfully?

GORDON WILLIS: A lot of things that I do
with overhead lighting,

or a lot of things with that form of lighting,

actually came out of a necessity to deal with
Marlon Brando in a given kind of make-up

It was an example of designing something
to make one person work

and it was extended
throughout the rest of the movie

I got a lot of criticism, because they said,
"Well, you can't see Brando's eyes."

There were times in some of his scenes

where I deliberately
did not want to see his eyes

So that you saw this mysterious human being

thinking about something
or about to do something,

but you didn't really know
what the hell was going on

Gordon, the Prince of Darkness

I haven't... examined underexposing a lot,
because I'm terrified of it

But with people like Gordon
who know just how much to do it,

and all that kind of thing,

he has made an art of underexposure

I may have gone too far a couple of times

I think there was a scene
between Al and his mother,

who was played by Morgana King in Part II

I did one scene, I went too far

I think Rembrandt went too far
a couple of times!

It wasn't...

the fact that it was so dark

It was the fact that the studio said,
"How are we gonna show this at the drive-ins?"

That's the old attitude

You gotta put light in there

You gotta see the people,
because of the drive-ins

Well, the drive-ins were going out at that time,
so that didn't mean much to us

We're going to Jersey?

When I shot Godfather I,
my decision to use yellow in the movie...

The movie was very yellow

Yellow-red.
It bordered on this kind of brassy feeling

The reasons for that were
because I just thought it was right

But yellow broke out
in the motion picture business

related to period movies
for a long time after that

It's not one thing that you do

from a visual point of view
that makes anything work

The art direction has to be right

The wardrobe has to be right

The shot structure has to be right

And the lighting has to accommodate
whatever it is you're introducing

related to filtering, et cetera

So, you can't just do one thing

WILLIAM FRAKER:
There's no mistaking Gordy Willis' work

The magnificent thing that was done
was the fact that he came back to it after...

several years...

and came right in,
and you could put the three together

It's almost like, my gosh,
they never stopped making the picture

Which is, I think, a tribute

JOHN ALONZO: All cameramen throughout
the history of movies have taken risks

My current crop of cameramen
probably took more risks

only because we had better toys to play with

We had better lenses.
They were sharper and crisper

We could put a camera
where nobody had ever put one

Sorry

We shot a scene in Chinatown
with a hand-held Pentaflex inside a bathroom

In the old days, prior to that,

it would have been a bathroom on a stage
with the walls moving out

and you're stuck

But here, Polanski got a very intimate,
spontaneous behaviour from the actors

because the camera
was right in there with them

What about it, what?

There's something black
in the green part of your eye

Oh, that

It's a...

It's a flaw...

in the iris

That was a risk, a risk lightingwise,
to light something like that as if you're saying,

"Here's a major motion picture
and I'm lighting it like a documentary."

They'd gotten the idea to do Chinatown
in anamorphic

in the 235 aspect ratio

But Roman said to me,

"I want to use modern-day technology
to shoot a film about the past,

as it would look like
through my twentieth-century window,

I want to see what it looked like back then."

It meant that we shot
a close-up of Faye Dunaway this size

The lens was no more
than two-and-a-half feet away,

which was very intimidating

But Roman used that as a directing technique,
to intimidate the character of Evelyn Mulwray

My talent was to light her
as beautifully as possible

So I walked around a lot of times
with a hand-held key-light

If she moved this way, I'd move the light.
Roman loved that sort of thing

because he came from the Polish school
where they had to do things that way

And forcing me to do a hand-held shot,
when I didn't agree with him

I said, "It's going to be distracting."
But he was right

We would do things like force Jack Nicholson
to hit a certain mark,

and have the camera just behind his ear,
and format it that way

You'd force him to hit that mark

If he wouldn't hit that mark,
we'd do the scene over again

Because he wanted
that voyeuristic kind of look

His mind
was 24 hours a day at 78 rpm, thinking

Hello, Claude. Where'd you get the midget?

Not on how to make things complicated,
but how to make things better

When we undertook shooting Jaws,
we were sitting on the lot at Universal,

3,000 miles from where
we intended to shoot the picture,

trying to decide what kind of equipment to take,
how we would go about it

Watch him now! Starboard! Starboard!

Spielberg said,
"I want to nail this down on a tripod -

I don't want it wandering all over the place."

I said, "Steven, that is not the way
to make a sea picture,

because people will be throwing up
in the aisles if you do that...

...so, I think I will try to hand-hold the picture."

And he couldn't believe
that I really intended to do that

On Jaws,

somewhere in one of those endless interviews
that he gives, Steve says...

It was a joke we used to have on the set -

that it was the most expensive
hand-held movie ever made

On the ocean, almost all of it is hand-held,

because they didn't have
steadicams in those days

It was a great piece,
a very fine piece of operating, if you look at it

If you think it was all hand-held
and how we did it

I'm quite proud of it

It was like being the MVP
or winning the Triple Crown

Baseball metaphors come easily to operating

We kept the camera at water level
whenever we could

and it isn't something
that you will see immediately,

but after a while you begin to feel that
that shark is maybe just under that water

And by keeping the camera down
close to that water, we built into the picture

a kind of atmosphere or feeling
that we wouldn't have gotten any other way

(Screaming)

I noticed that almost in every country,
cinematographers come from another country

There is an attraction to the exoticism

A foreigner, whether he's from Europe
or from any place,

has a fresh eye to look at another country

And perhaps he distinguishes, he sees better
what's interesting about another country

I really liked staying with you.
You were so much fun. I love you, OK

I want you to be really good.
I don't want you to do anything wrong

If you do, I'll come back and get you.
All right? I love you

He told me it would be a very visual movie

He said that. The film will be a visual film

The story will be told through visuals

Very few people
really want to give that priority to the image

Usually, directors give the priority to the actors
and to the story

But here the story was told really
through images

Hey!

In the period movies,

there was no electricity -

at least before electricity was invented -

and in consequence there was less light

Period movies should have less light

And I think a period movie,
the light has to come from the windows

That's how people lived

"Magic hour" is a euphemism,
because it's not an hour

It's about 20 or 25 minutes at the most

It is the moment when the sun sets

And after the sun sets, before it is night,

the skies have light

But there is no actual sun

and the light is very, very soft

and there's something, as you say, magic

It limited us to 20 useful minutes a day

But it did pay on the screen

It gave some kind of magic look to it,
a beauty of it, a romanticism

Something that colour could do
much better than black and white

At the time of Days of Heaven,
which was 1976,

when we shot the movie -

the film came out in '78 or '79,

but we shot it in '76 -

film was not as sensitive as it is today

Today you can actually shoot with
a kerosene lamp with actually kerosene flame

But at the time, we had to put
an electric bulb inside those lights

But the important thing is that, actually,
the light was coming from the lamps

That was what I think was modern

Because you see any other movie
of the old times

like, for instance, a marvellous movie
like Sunrise, a silent movie,

and the scene when they are looking
for the girl in the lake, supposedly drowned

And they go with lamps and those lamps,
they give no light. They're just props

They're props and the audience
has to believe they give light

But they were just very weak

On Days of Heaven, I had the privilege
of seeing footage that Nestor shot in the lab

Because Nestor knew he had to leave
to go with Truffaut

And so, when Terry Malick
called me up and said,

"We want you to come up here
and do this picture, Nestor has to go,"

I was dying to go

I did some hand-held shots with the Pentaflex
in Days of Heaven

The opening of the film in the steel mill,
I did... personally hand-held with the Pentaflex

I used some diffusion

Nestor didn't use any diffusion on it

The moment I see a movie that...

I start seeing a movie that has a fog filter,

I usually stay ten minutes, then I leave
I think that's enough

I hate that kind of thing, because it's so easy

I felt very guilty about using the diffusion

And it wasn't that heavy diffusion,

but I remember having that feeling
of sort of violating a fellow cameraman

But now Nestor knows I'm on film or tape

(Bell)

(Crowd murmur)

After ten rounds,

Judge Rossi, eight to two, La Motta

(Cheering)

Judge Murphy, seven to three, La Motta

CHAPMAN: If you look at Raging Bull, I based it
very specifically on Life Magazine photographs,

big still photos of the '40s

That's what people of my generation
and Marty's,

though he's younger, remember fights as

They remember them as big flash photos
in Life Magazine

We were really showing off

We panned 360 this way
when he went that way

We started at 24 frames,
and then we went to 48 frames

and then back to 24 frames

Jake knocks somebody out in 24 frames,

and then he walks over to a neutral corner.
And 48 frames, all in the same shot

We made a kind of rule

that when we were actually fighting,
we would try...

In the actual fights, we'd try to do it 24 frames

Although we tried to cheat it

and it got really operatic towards the end
with Sugar Ray Robinson

But, in general, we tried to make
the actual fight time be in 24 frames

And...

save the overcrank,

the really overcranked stuff
for when he's in the corner,

or in this case, for when he is not actually
fighting, but breathing against the ropes

When he goes back into
the real time of fighting, we go back to 24

We had about...

God, I don't know, dozens of fights

And we had a different style for each one

And one was all going to be...

One was all going to be...

like this and like this

With a fairly long lens

One was going to be all following him around.
One was going to be steadicam

He started in the dressing room

He walks all the way. We lit the whole thing

And he stands on a big crane
and the crane lifts him up in the air

It was great fun. It was wonderful fun

It was an example of that thing
that Marty can really do like no-one else

Know what the emotional story-telling shot
is really going to be,

and that you don't need to do anything
but this one shot

And it's so good and so evocative,
it's so powerful emotionally

that it'll get you from A to B
without any coverage, without any worry

(Bell dings)

ANNOUNCER: For the Middleweight
Championship of the World, 15 rounds!

Photography is a single art

Like painting

Like writing. Like music

Cinematography is a common art

I think it's...

It's not an art form that can be expressed
by one single person

So, of course, there is the director,

which is like the main author
of the entire common expression,

because even if several persons
express themself in the same art form,

everybody can go in different directions

So, from the writer to the musician,

to the production design, to the costume design,

to the cinematographer, to the editor,

someone should be responsible

Just go by like you're fighting!
Don't look at the camera!

Just go through! Go through!

Apocalypse Now was really a closing chapter

Very specific

Not only because it was the longest,

it was the most far away,

it was the most difficult,

it was the most expensive,
it was the most dangerous movie ever done

But also it was probably the most emotional one

Mainly the first section of my light
was merely dealing with light

With all these possibilities the light has
to express itself

To show on screen
the incredible source of light,

the great generator with lamps,

into the jungle

Very sharp light, very soft light

Very warm light, very cold light

Very artificial, very natural

Both.
All the time, I was working with the opposite

Francis was shooting Apocalypse Now
in the Philippines

And he called me up

and he wanted me to come over
and photograph the second unit

Every time I went out, I tried to do it
in the spirit of the way that they would do it

That was always the utmost thing in my mind

And they were always great.
Vittorio would always egg me on

He was always very cute

He'd go,
"Steve, we're stuck here with all this stuff

You can go out with this camera
and you can get all this great stuff

Do something wonderful. Give us some ideas."

He gave me all this encouragement
to do whatever I wanted to do

And yet I felt very responsible that what I did
had to mesh seamlessly with what he did

VITTORIO STORARO: I understood...

...how it could be important to travel,
to go into another country

To use another language

To use another industry

To interchange energy

There was one idea came to my mind

There was a possibility to make an analogy
between the life and light

The journey that Pu Yi was doing into himself

could be represented with the different stage...

with the different stage of light.
Different colours

The first time, he was cutting his own vein,

and you see for the first time red

Red is the colour of the beginning

The colour when we're born

He was borning

See the blood

He was, remember, being born as an emperor

We go into the scene when the people
with the torches are arriving to pick up him

When we see orange in the picture,

it is the warm colour of the family

It is the colour of the Forbidden City

I was using all the lights around the young
Pu Yi to get the feeling of family. Ofwarm

Of maternal embrace

Yellow...

is the colour of our identity

When we come conscious

Is the colour it represents the emperor

Is the colour that more leads the light

That more represents the sun itself

Hoi!

Green...

is knowledge

We see green the first time
only when the tutor is coming

He brings a green bicycle

It's the knowledge of something

Up to that moment,
Pu Yi was living in the Forbidden City

It was kind of a forbidden colour for him

He didn't know anything about
one section of the colour spectrum

Green, blue, indigo, violet

He know only red, orange, yellow

The emperor shouldn't know anything

Should know only portion of it

Because knowledge can hurt him

I export our feeling...

in his way of seeing

and I re-import once again
all the experience back to him

Back to Italian cinema

Back to Last Emperor

And I understood that at that moment
that cinema really has no nationality

MICHAEL BALLHAUS:
There are different ways to work with a director

I had this wonderful working relationship

with Marty Scorsese, which, I think,
is the most visual director

of all the directors I've worked with

When we start a movie,
he knows what he wants. It's in his head

The way Marty works
is that he gives you a shot list

It's basically to determine the rhythm of a scene.
What he wants

He describes the shot. Close-up. Tracking shot

And when it's getting
a little more complicated, shots,

then sometimes he makes a little drawing,
of how he wants it,

or he has a reference to another movie

He says, "Why don't you look at this shot
in this-and-this movie?

Something like this we should do here."

Father,

why have you forsaken me?

I remember a shot
that Marty hasn't done before

And he wasn't quite sure if it would work

There was a shot in Goodfellas, when De Niro
and Ray Liotta are sitting in that cafe,

where he finds out that if he goes to
where De Niro tells him to go,

he will be killed

That this is the end of their relationship in a way

MOVIE VOICEOVER:
I got there 15 minutes early

and I saw that Jimmy was already there

MICHAEL BALLHAUS:
And what we did is that...

We did a tracking-back, zooming-in shot,

where the frame actually did not change

It starts on a two-shot,

and we pulled back and zoomed in,

but the background changed totally

And this was something
that is quite interesting,

because it tells you a story

You just start thinking, "What's going on?"

Something is changing here,
but they still sit there in their booth and talk

But the world around them changes

And I think this is something that I really like
to do, and then Marty loved it

It's a matter of bouncing ideas back and forth

I mean, certainly, you know, it's never easy

It's never perfect

There's always disputes
about how light or dark it should be

How tight a close-up should be

Well, Eraserhead was a film
that was in David Lynch's mind

right from the beginning

And, I think, my job as the cinematographer
became to find ways to extract it and to...

...to have him explain
how it should look in great detail

How the camera should move

What the mood
and the feeling of the light should be

We found that we could say
this is a dark corner,

and it's not just dark,

it's very, very dark

And we would talk about how dark was dark

# BOBBY VINTON: Blue Velvet

# She wore blue velvet

I think the advantage of Blue Velvet
was that we had a lot of time to think about it

David had written the script for a studio

It didn't get picked up to be made

Nothing happened for a while

and so I read it and we talked

And we would talk about...

what's the small town look like?

Have you ever seen one like this?

What do these characters do in this town?

What's Dorothy's apartment look like?
Since we spend so much time in there

What's the feeling of it?

Because so many strange things
happen in that place

What's it look like? What colour is it?

We just could bounce ideas around
for a couple of years, which was great

You don't often have this

Radio Raheem!

The first thing that Spike said to me
about Do the Right Thing,

he said, "This film is set
on the hottest day of the summer

How do we make the audience feel heat?"

Dealing with it in a realistic treatment,

I don't think would have done it

We had one block in Brooklyn
that was going to be our studio

And we could control the colour

We controlled the colour of the costumes

We renovated some of the houses there

and determined
what colours were going to be there

It's manufacturing reality,

heightening the reality,
to get the audience to feel a certain way

Yo, Ahmad!

I think Do the Right Thing was the first film

where I really had the luxury
of waiting for the light

A lot of the time I spent planning certain scenes
to be shot at certain times of the day

because the film takes place in one day,

on one block...

...where changes in light
are going to be very obvious

You the man. I'm just visiting

I think Spike trusts me a lot

I think the trust has grown

I think it's really vital to him,

because he does have to give up the directing
reins and get in front of the camera quite a bit

And when he does that,
he relies upon me to be his objective eye

The director is going to be
the author of the performances of the film,

the story of the film

The cinematographer is the author
of the use of light in the film

and how that contributes to the story

CALEB DESCHANEL:
Suddenly you're aware of the fact

that things are not exactly as they seem

In other words, you create a representation of it

and lots of times, that representation

is more emotional than it is real

Oftentimes, we're asked to imitate others

and it's always a little bit disconcerting

to be asked to completely imitate another film

I think we all learn from other films

and try and emulate
certain DPs who are very good

But the DPs who really do something different
every time are the most amazing

I think today in motion picture technology

we're really at a precipice,

a jumping-off point into an unknown
but possibly very exciting future

In the same way that, the '50s, when
Cinemascope and widescreen Cinerama,

Technirama, all these new formats,

really shook up the whole way
we were looking at films

We have that opportunity now

Someone once said
that the lighting and the look of a film

makes the pauses
speak as eloquently as the words

That you have moments in films that happen
because of what is there visually

How someone is lit or not lit

You put something
in an audience's mind visually,

and they will carry away images
as well as the words

Subtitles by ARAVIND B
[by_agentsmith@yahoo.com]