Masters of Light. Dennis Schaefer

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СКАЧАТЬ out is put a zoom lens on a camera, a 25mm to 250mm lens, or any zoom lens that has that range, look through the lens with one eye at somebody’s face and look at the person’s face with the eye that’s not looking through the lens and then match those images. The left eye sees one size; now keep zooming the lens until the lens gets approximately the same size. And you’re looking at somewhere between a 37 and a 47mm lens. So now this is what I’m saying about the anamorphic process. I said to Roman, “To me the 40mm lens is the best reproduction of what the human being perceives as correct perspective. Really, it’s like a 43-44mm, sometimes a 45 depending on the set.” And I said, “If we shoot the whole picture, as much as possible, with a 40mm lens, we’ll have really a reproduction of the sets the way they are.” Dick Sylbert immediately said, “I know that. If I could get a cameraman to shoot everything with a 40mm, I’d be very happy.”

      And as far as diffusion was concerned, I was perfectly willing as long as he was willing, you see. You do have that situation sometimes, where you have a producer or a director say, “I want her to look ravishing. I don’t care what you do.” But up front we understood that we were going to try to photograph raw beauty and Faye Dunaway is not difficult to photograph without any diffusion. Plus Roman had another thing which I thought was very interesting. He liked putting the camera very close to the performers, right on top of them. Now that’s an intimidating thing to any actress who is so beautiful. Well, it added to her performance, I really believe, it made her nervous. Because here is this camera; here I am on top of her with a camera. So my task was to angle the camera in such a position where I got the least amount of distortion. And Roman never questioned me on that. I would try to line up the camera dead center to her eyes so at least her close-ups did not distort. We even shot some with the 40mm lens which is really dangerous.

      And you tried to put the camera where?

      At an angle. In other words, where the film plane is parallel to the plane of the face. If you move the camera one way, you distort the chin; if you move it another way, you may distort the forehead or the nose. So you have to find just the right height and watch it very closely.

      In Repulsion he used that to great effect especially toward the end of the film.

      There was reason in everything that Roman did. I, of course, had a ball with it, because it was giving me a chance to do a certain kind of lighting. We put ceilings on all the sets. We sprayed them, we put lights through them. We used black-and-white drops outside instead of color drops. So it looked like the city was washed out; there was no color outside through the windows. And Roman showed me about perspective again. He said, “That backing back there is out of whack. Tip it this way so when we look through the lens it’ll straighten up or tip it this way to back it up.” I mean, the man’s brilliant as far as his technology is concerned. So I learned a great deal from him and I taught him a great deal about composition within that aspect ratio of 2.35 to 1. You don’t have to fill the edges of the screen. You do it with lighting if you want to fill the edges, or let the edges go. And then it looks more like an old-fashioned view camera when you look through the viewfinder. The edges are dark but there’s the center. It’s a D. W. Griffith kind of bright center and dark toward the edges. So he liked that, it appealed to him. Another thing to consider for a cameraman is that there is something to be said when you use symmetry, composition. A close-up of you, for instance, using a 40mm lens and with the window moldings back there; if you’re shooting slightly down, those window moldings will climb a little bit this way. If you’re slightly up, they will do something else. So it’s always best to try to shoot straight on; keep that symmetry going wherever possible. And if you notice, a lot of artists, when they paint something, will sometimes bend a tree so that it’s parallel to the frame that they paint it to. And I used that unconsciously in Harold and Maude and in almost all those pictures because I’ve studied art. Since you have a “hard matte” to work with on the screen, if there’s a wall or building to the edge of the screen, I make sure that the gap is not like this or like that, but it’s perfectly parallel. In other words, the edges of your information are parallel to the edges of the screen. It’s a subconscious thing, and I think that people will like it. They won’t know why; but wherever possible you do that and try to straighten it out.

      There are certain directors that always shoot at eye level. Bresson’s films are always right at eye level.

      It’s effective. Also just because one person is standing and one person is sitting, you don’t have to shoot the person sitting down from the point of view of the person standing up. It’s quite legitimate to drop down here and let that person look at the top of the screen. It’s legitimate to be parallel up here and let that person look down the screen. It works. Only when you want to do a Kubrickesque type of situation where you want that distortion. I did a lot of that in The Cheap Detective. I copied all the great old films and copied shots and so on. But that’s an important thing studying composition for the 2.35 to 1 format; for the spherical format it’s a little more square, it’s a little different. And there you’re locked into using the wider angle lenses. Farewell My Lovely was shot with the wider angle lenses and in spherical as opposed to anamorphic.

      It seemed from reading your American Cinematographer article that you like to use a lot of lights; you don’t have any problem with lights, using as many lights as you need or want. With some other cameramen, it seems their attitude from the beginning is the least amount of lights as possible. Would you say that’s true?

      Not really, in reality I like to use very few lights. I mean, that’s one of the problem things. On Chinatown they had a 40-foot van full of lights that I never used; I just got rid of it. The budget savings were enormous. They had lights strung up all along the catwalks and I got rid of them; I don’t need them. In the morgue scene with Jack Nicholson, all I had was one chicken coop coming straight down and a light on the camera, so that wherever he went you would never see the shadow. That, to me, is no light at all.

      A “chicken coop?” What is that?

      A “chicken coop” is a very old type of lighting fixture. It’s a giant sort of box with these great big bulbs that are painted silver on the bottom. The wattages of the bulbs are enormous and they’re screwed up into the coop which is painted white so it reflects and gives you a soft top light. Then there is a piece of chicken wire across the bottom to protect the actors from the danger of breaking glass. It’s a device that’s been around for years. So we used a chicken coop and we put a black skirt around it so it just became a soft pool of light from the top. And the only front light I used was a light mounted on the camera itself. The shadow from that light went directly behind the actor and you’d never see it.

      But I don’t like to use a lot of light, depending on the picture. On The Fortune, we used a tremendous amount of different lighting. I was using a great deal of light in the background as opposed to on the actors themselves. I was sort of painting with light, really changing the aspects of the little bungalows and so on. I used a lot more individual, small units and so the amount of light was greater. I don’t like to use a lot of light because it has an effect on the actors when they have a tremendous amount of light on them. You lose a certain amount of reality. You’d be amazed at the difference in a performance when an actor has to go to a regular lamp and one lamp lights the whole scene. They get the feeling that they’re really where they’re supposed to be. It’s psychological plus it also has a very interesting look. Gordon Willis proved that.

      But it’s wrong to think that because you’ve got a lot of paint you’re going to get a good painting. You can have a wonderful painting with just one color. I mean, children can show you that in a child’s drawing. They’ll stick to particular colors and it looks wonderful. Picasso loved to do that. On Lady Sings the Blues I had a lot more lighting. On Black Sunday, for the effects that I had to have on the sound stages because of the front-screen and rear-screen projection, I had a tremendous amount of lighting. But that was to bring up a key. And I totally disagree with the philosophy of the old cameramen that you take a giant 10K and then put a Christmas tree in front of it. What do СКАЧАТЬ