Film Lighting Read online

  The script is certainly a useful blueprint the cinematographer can use to judge the worth of the project.

  Allen Daviau, ASC

  The first time I see the script, I try to read it strictly as a film viewer. Not as a cinematographer. I really just sit there and say, Tell me a story. I try to be as open as possible. And you read some scripts that are good, good movies; you would enjoy seeing them, but would you enjoy shooting the movie, and would it really be fulfilling to you? What is it that you like to do? Sometimes it is the subject that just strikes you, that you would like to say something about. So I look on the basis of an overall thing: How would I enjoy seeing this film? Would I enjoy having my name connected with it? Would I be proud being part of this film? The second time through, reading as a cinematographer, I ask myself, What are the problems here? What are the challenges? What are the things that I would really enjoy working on in this picture? Does it offer me a unique challenge? Someone said, “The day you go to work and you are not slightly scared is the day you better get out of this business, because there is no challenge left for you.” If you really know all the answers going in, then I do not think that you will do very good work on the picture. Because you should never stop having that fear of the unknown.

  And I think that is one of the things in the script: Does it offer me something I haven’t done before? Maybe it offers me something I have done before and I know I can do better than I did last time, and that is intriguing to me. But perhaps it is truly the unknown. Maybe it is something that I don’t really like to do, and maybe I can get past that. I know that I do not like to shoot dialogue scenes in cars. And I read a script that was an excellent, very funny script, and 25 percent of the movie is four guys running around in a car on real location. When you think that for that much time the camera is basically rigged on the car, when you can never really see what is going on and you are lighting people in the back seat as well as in the front seat, and you are balancing all different times of day—well, it is a real challenge if you like to do that sort of thing. But I don’t know anybody who likes to shoot dialogue scenes inside cars.

  In this case Daviau turned down the job although he liked the script. Since one-fourth of the film took place inside a car, there was no chance that the car scenes could be eliminated. In situations that are not so extreme, it is better to hold off final judgment on a project until you meet with the director.

  STYLE

  Once a cameraman has committed to a project, he/she and the director have to agree on the style of the film. Describing a visual style with words is no small task. Directors and cinematographers have developed many ways to reach an understanding with each other. A creative cinematographer will analyze the structure of the script and will try to see it from the audience’s point of view. At this early stage much time will be devoted to discussions concerning the concept.

  The right atmosphere, style, and visual interpretation will evolve from this process. The cameraman and director will discuss the philosophical premise of the movie—how it should look; what structure it should have; what style of framing, lighting, and color.

  Caleb Deschanel, ASC

  Style starts to emerge as I’m reading the script. I always read the script three or four or five times. Generally, along the way, I discuss it with the director, and then start to come up with an overall visual concept that I seek for the film. It does not mean that this concept is ironclad. Just the way an actor comes up with his character, I think, the cameraman comes up with his way of seeing a movie. Then hopefully you are in sync with the director. It is important to develop an idea about the story early enough, so that at least you will find out whether you think the same way as the director. Otherwise you get yourself in a situation where you are at odds with each other all the time. You use whatever method you can. With Hal Ashby we started out on Being There by looking at a lot of movies together and discussing the script, and then I would also take a lot of still photographs of locations and look at them with Mike Haller, who was an art director, and with Hal.

  For Janusz Kaminski, who over the years shot a majority of Steven Spielberg’s films, the film style is born at the script stage.

  Janusz Kaminski, cinematographer

  The style develops when the screenwriter writes a script. He or she sets the story in certain settings. Is it an urban setting of contemporary nature, or is it an urban setting in the future, or is it an urban setting in the past? You just have to read a script the right way to realize that there is a style that is being suggested by the screenwriter.

  It is not to the point where it tells you how to light or what color to apply, but you are working with a certain genre of the movie. Whether it is a contemporary comedy, a thriller, or film noir, the style is there. Now it is for the cinematographer to give the interpretation. You can have Tom Cruise walking into a dark basement and finding out that somebody is living there. So you have a dark basement, but how far will you take the darkness? In the case of War of the Worlds we were working with lots of colors. It was a little bit of an homage to the old horror movies. So there were reds, there were greens, there were yellows, that kind of stuff. In Minority Report, which is a futuristic movie, there was a void of colors. The images were grainier. The colors were very much desaturated. I was calling it a modern film noir. It was still relatively dark, but we were playing with the color. It was very sleek but not glossy. Again, you start with the script and you are putting your own twist on what the writer is writing. I always say it is all in the script, if you have the ability to read the script and digest the script and send it through your body, through your knowledge, through your mind, and then come up with your own interpretation of the story. What has shaped your individual aesthetics and ability to understand and interpret the story? It’s the aesthetics, it’s everything about you; the way you dress—that’s your aesthetics. The things you like and the way you receive and interpret what is around you shape who you are. And that is unique.

  Viewing movies together is the most immediate way of having some common points of reference when discussing style. Good knowledge of a wide range of painters and photographers is the next important step in facilitating the communication between the director and the cinematographer. Being able to describe a certain style as one resembling that of a given painter or knowing where to look for examples of a palette of desired colors helps immensely in arriving at a mutually understandable idea for the visual look of the film.

  John Alonzo, ASC

  Every situation is different. For pictures like Sounder or Conrack or for a picture like Norma Rae, I did look at some paintings and some books and drawings of the South to get an idea of a kind of look. I would show them to the director and I would say, “What do you think of this Andrew Wyeth or these Shrimpton paintings, does this give you any thoughts, is this the kind of look that you are thinking about?” He says yes or no. So I use those. In pictures like Blue Thunder or Black Sunday there is really no artistic or aesthetic design to those pictures. It is a matter of recording what actually happens.

  There is a wide spectrum of directors with diverse backgrounds and experience. Therefore, the collaboration with the cameraman will take various forms. Some directors will need more help than others in developing the visual sense of a scene.

  Conrad Hall, ASC

  So many directors don’t know anything about film. They are wonderful writers, they know a lot about life and the human equation, and people have given them the opportunity to translate that into a film. And they don’t know what to do. They are so insecure. They wander around the set and a lot of them don’t pretend, and then some of them pretend. It depends on the director you get. Others are people who are knowledgeable visual artists as well as artists in every other sense. You work with them differently. They know exactly what they want. They need you less.

  The directors who require the most from cinematographers are the first-time directors.

  Adam Holender, who often works with
first-time directors, puts them in two basic categories: the literary ones who write their own scripts and often do not quite know how to translate their ideas into a visual form, and the new directors who come from other technical positions such as assistant director, producer, or editor. People in this second group are usually more experienced technicians.

  Adam Holender, ASC

  Like every other collaboration, working with first-time directors depends a lot on the personalities involved. But one typical problem to be aware of is the degree to which the cameraman assists the director in matters other than cinematography. At a certain point in the production the invitation to offer suggestions may not exist anymore, but the cameraman may not know when to stop. The director grows weary of advice, and such help may start to annoy him.

  Another potential problem lies in the director’s not understanding that certain visual concepts require certain disciplines, bring certain limitations. The first-time director may see these limitations as shackles. He may also have to be convinced that certain risks should be shared. If the director does not take advantage of the cinematographer’s knowledge and judgment, the result may be a mediocre product. This is sometimes referred to as “television mentality,” where the range of artistic possibilities on the scale of one to ten becomes, say, four to six.

  Most cinematographers are very much aware of the creative discipline necessary to maintain the established style and to serve the story in the best possible way.

  SERVING THE STORY

  Serving the story usually comes down to serving the director’s concept. Though the cinematographer has an important role in the production, the principal storyteller at this stage is the director.

  John Alonzo, ASC

  I make it a rule of thumb that I am to interpret the director’s concept. It is a very strict rule with me that I do not allow myself to get so in love with the frame and the lighting that it subordinates what the director is trying to do. And if I spend six hours lighting a set that looks beautiful to another cameraman but does not mean anything to the story, then I am not doing my job for the director.

  The power of cinematography lies in the immense possibilities of interpreting reality even within a given concept. The cinematographer’s function is to transform an artificial environment into film reality. Lighting, optical image manipulation, choice of film emulsion or video cameras, and film or video manipulation in the laboratory and/or during the digital intermediate are all tools the cameraman uses to create the photographed reality.

  Caleb Deschanel, ASC

  You need a certain sense of reality, but in fact you are doing a movie and you are making a statement with the light and with the composition and camera movements and all those things at your disposal as a cameraman. Your first impression should be that it is real for the story. But you can get away with an awful lot. What Vittorio Storaro did in One from the Heart with colored light was incredible. To an extent, it was a reality but it really was hyperreality. It carried beyond conventional reality, but you accept it because of the nature of the story. There is no reason why you cannot carry that sort of thinking to even more realistic settings. Obviously as an audience you do not want to be taken out of a scene by some extreme photographic element, but you certainly want it to carry you along. There are things you can do where you exaggerate reality and create a sense of life; if you would truly study it, you would realize that it is not real, and yet your mind accepts it as being real. I think that is really what you are going for. You are going for a way of taking the greatest advantage of all the tools that you have at your disposal to create the drama, to amplify the drama. Sometimes it means exaggerating things enormously and getting away with it because the audience is carried away by the scene. You can switch key lights and you can change the level of lights and you can dial one light off and one light on when someone moves, and you can do things that, if you were to analyze them, wouldn’t make sense at all. But if you are telling a story and you are in sync with the story, then you can get away with an awful lot. I think that the best camerawork does that. It will make these judgments, it will stretch its “reality” for the sake of telling the story.

  Often the sets or the location will dictate the visual approach to the story. Or it may even come from the cinematographer’s aesthetic taste at the given time.

  Haskell Wexler, ASC

  What happens photographically springs a lot from what is demanded of the photographer: what kinds of films are being made, how much time it takes to make them, what the sets look like, what the subject matter is.

  Style comes from where you are personally. Right now as I am talking to you, I would love to shoot a scene where there is a real bright hard sunlight just cutting through on the furniture and on the clothes. The faces are almost dark. If you are in this kind of mood when you read a script, you may actually talk yourself into believing that this particular script would look best this way. It may or may not coincide. You have to bear in mind that you are not the total maker of the film. You will have to talk to the director and the art director and anyone else who has invested in it.

  Cinematographer Conrad Hall dealt with two very different visual concepts when photographing Fat City, directed by John Huston, and The Day of the Locust, directed by John Schlesinger.

  Conrad Hall, ASC

  In Fat City, the idea of extraordinary tonal variations was like a style for a picture. The interiors—bars and places like that—were very, very dark, so you have a sense of blackness. And then when you come outside, I made the exteriors all very bright and glaring, like a lizard who comes from underneath a rock, a salamander that is blind because it has been hiding underneath a rock, it has not seen the light of day. I wanted the light to be harsh and strong and abusive. And so you go for the range, you go for the contrast. You go for the soft, dark, muted effect inside, and then when you come outside, you go for the bright, brilliant harsh tones. And when those things are cut together, they create a kind of emotional sense, which is productive for the storytelling.

  You approach every project from the spirit of the film. Once you get the spirit of the film, then that determines everything for me.

  On The Day of the Locust the decision to have it all shot in a warm, golden tone was made right away. Those are the broad strokes. You decide whether you are going to make this a gritty, documentary kind of look for the film about the 90 percent of people who fail in Hollywood, which is what The Day of the Locust is about: people who approach the flame and never get anything but burned. Just 10 percent are working and doing good and thriving in the heat of the flame. So that is a hard story. You could do it gritty. Black and white would be wonderful, because it is a period piece. Sometimes I think that is what we should have done, now that I look at it. That is not what we decided to do. The decision was to make it golden to create not their reality but their dream. So you saw them living in their little apartments and they were happy living in their golden dream of maybe making it one day.

  John Alonzo describes another example of lighting in opposition to the subject matter, for stronger impact.

  John Alonzo, ASC

  We are going to try to do Scarface in soft light because Brian [De Palma] wants it this way. It is a drama, a melodrama. It is violent and very dramatic, but he does not want to light it that way. He wants to light it soft and pretty. As he said to me, I don’t want to telegraph that I am going to do something violent. I want the frame to look pretty, and the people to look pretty. And then we see that they are violent people.

  Alonzo brings up another extremely important aspect: the consistency of a visual look.

  John Alonzo, ASC

  You have an overall picture, an overall script, and then you go from A to Z. Very few pictures are shot in chronological order. The hardest thing is for you to keep a certain style going, so that when you put the picture in chronological order, it has a nice even flow in lighting, in composition, and in the camera moves. This is my realm, my jurisdiction. I
f you do not pay attention to that, if you are just lighting each scene as if you are lighting a Rembrandt each time, you are going to have a checkerboard effect. You will not have a consistently smooth picture. It may be totally acceptable but it definitely influences the audiences. The audience will think that something is not quite right. This is a brightly lit shot, this a soft light and this is harsh light, this is flat light, and so on. Every scene should be approached with regard to what part it plays overall. Simple things—you are inside a room and the sunlight is coming from a certain side, over this man’s shoulder. If you take him outside three, four days later and the sun happens to be on the other side and it is a direct cut, then you say, Wait a minute, what do I do? Now you have to work with the director and the operator, try to angle him so that the sun comes from the correct side, or you duplicate the sunlight from another direction. Put a silk over the scene and shove in an arc to make the sun come from the side that will match the previous shot. Sometimes people do not think about a problem like this, and the result is an amateurish way of handling it.

  Dante Spinotti, ASC, feels that serving the story starts from a clear visual idea.

  Dante Spinotti, ASC

  I think that the most difficult thing is finding the right way of doing things; in other words, having an idea before you start working on an image. If you have a visual idea, then everything is easy, then there are no difficulties. If you can imagine this particular shape in your head. And the shape has to have a reason, be a part of language that is the language of the whole picture. If I were a painter, it would be finding how this particular picture is going to look and figuring out in my mind that there is going to be a good reason why it is going to look like that. It has to be tight down to the whole concept. Is it period? Is it dry? Is it wet? Is it romantic? Is it dramatic? So when you combine all these and you figure inside yourself what the look of this particular shot or scene is going to be, then everything is easy. That is the most difficult part.