Masters of Light. Dennis Schaefer

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СКАЧАТЬ over here, you know, and then a little backlighting wherever possible.

      Do you believe that source light is a sacred commandment? Or is it like painting?

      No, it’s like painting. Rembrandt never gave you a source light really. If you look at his work very closely he’s got a lot of stuff coming from different directions and you don’t know why. It’s not important. Jimmy Wong Howe is the one that told me that. He said, “Source lighting is only for the American Society of Cinematographers conventions.” He said, “You do it any way you want to. Do what looks the best.” Source lighting is totally impossible in some situations. For example, a dark bedroom at night with no light on; where’s the light coming from? Certainly not by moonlight. And if you really tried to reproduce the moonlight effect through a window it looks like daylight. So what do we do in movies? We put a blue filter on it and say, “Hey, it’s moonlight.” It should be done to the taste of the cameraman, the way he thinks. There’s no such thing as a rule or a commandment about that.

      

      We understand that Norma Rae was shot 99% hand-held. What sort of lighting problems did you encounter?

      Tougher ones because the camera wandered around everywhere. And being in practical locations, we couldn’t necessarily hang lighting units from up above. In the factory, it was all fluorescent lighting so again, we mounted a light on the camera. I had a very clever gaffer who could adjust the dimmer on it if an actor got too close. In the houses and other places where we had to go hand-held, Marty and I would talk about it and he would give me a corner to work in and I could light from that direction. Or I would light through the windows if it was daylight and just let them burn up. Now when I was shooting an actor directly against a window, I would neutralize or neutral density the window to balance it out. But most of the time, when the actor was away from the window, I’d take the neutral density out and let the light coming through the window be the key light and use white cards to balance it. It presents a lot of problems because with a hand-held camera, you never know where it’s going to be. It’s also tough on the sound man because he doesn’t know where the headroom is all the time with the boom. So the sound man had to use radio microphones all the time just to cover himself.

      If you had to give advice to a young student or cameraman about the lab, what kind of advice would you give?

      I’d say learn everything you can about the lab because laboratories are not unlike a lot of the highly technical people that you meet sometimes in life. They can razzle-dazzle you with technological mumbo-jumbo, you know, especially if they don’t know who you are. And a lot of times it’s done just to impress themselves, but a lot of times it’s done just to sort of get rid of you. “The lab will fix it,” is a common cliché. There’s no such thing. They can, to a degree, help you but any filmmaker, cameraman, director or producer, should really know the goings-on in a laboratory; how it functions and why it works the way it works and what your limitations are. Even if it’s just a simple thing that you know that they have a printer scale of 0-50 lights and the preferential exposure is a 25 light. Then if you just know that much, when the man says you printed at 26, 27, 29, you know what he’s talking about and you should know that those three lights refer to the cyan, magenta and yellow colors. If you know just that much already, the lab can’t bullshit you. You should also know the inner workings of their back-end of the picture, back-end of production. Why they have to make the CRI [color reversal internegative] in a certain way. What’s a CRI? And why can they only give you so many release prints? Because as a cameraman, if you’re going to give them a very delicate negative to work with because that’s what you want, you must tell them; most of the time they say don’t do that because we may not be able to give you a release print. You will be able to come back and say, “Yes, you will. All you have to do is make me the best CRI in the world, make three of them if necessary. I don’t care how many you have to make but protect my original and don’t touch it.” If you didn’t do that they would talk you into shooting the picture differently just to accommodate them. That’s happened to me many times even at this stage of my career now where the MGM lab tried to tell me how to shoot Casey’s Shadow. And I said, “No, you’re wrong. I’ll expose it the way I want to expose it because I know it can be done.” Also on The Cheap Detective it was the same way. The bottom line is the MGM lab lost The Cheap Detective because they couldn’t come through.

      We’ve heard other people say that there is no substitute for a strong director. That the director’s strength filters down to everybody and it makes everyone feel secure.

      Sure. I totally concur. The director is the leader of the thing, supposedly the man in charge. Although the cinematographers are more and more becoming the titular heads of the crew. They are in a sense the right arm of the director. They supply the spit to get the crew to do what the director wants. The director doesn’t have to be strong technically; he doesn’t have to know if he wants a particular 75mm lens here. He can just say, “I want a shot this size here.” Now he relies on your competence and knowledge to know what lens to use for that shot. But he polices the creativity of everybody; unless he does that people are left floundering. You know, all of a sudden you have inconsistencies, from hair dressing to wardrobe. The director really has to be very strong in communicating exactly what he wants and in being faithful to what he has said and not wavering because the minute he wavers everybody sort of feels that lean, and it’s not good. It’s not good when a cameraman suddenly gets a reputation of being the guy who really helped to direct a picture. I’ve heard that about some cameramen. Or the guy who was really in charge was the cameraman and the director sort of followed him around. That’s not the way the system is designed.

      That’s what people have said. People we’ve talked to that have been in situations similar to that have said that invariably their camera work suffered because if they had to pull the director along they didn’t have time to do what they wanted to do and should have been doing in the first place.

      And it’s not fair; it’s not fair to the cameraman. Because you have a situation where you like the project and the director says, “Help me out.” Sometimes they say that, “Help me out, I don’t know what to do here.” Well, your concentration goes now into his realm of creativity and yours has to suffer somewhat. I don’t like to be put into that position. That’s probably why I’m more selective now as to who I would work for. Marty Ritt is my mentor, my hero; if I can get on a Marty Ritt picture every time, I’ll be very happy.

      Talking about Martin Ritt, is there any special spark of creativity when you have worked with a director a few times? Is there some kind of electricity or is it you just work together really well, that allows you to produce such good work?

      Marty is the only experience I can give you as I have worked for him more than anybody else. I’ve done six pictures with him. What happens is, I can’t really describe it. It is a chemistry situation. It’s just something that functions. I have a tremendous love for the man and his talent. He has a tremendous amount of respect for anybody that knows what they’re doing, and that already opens the door for anybody to be creative. And I can’t tell you what it is; all I know is that if he called me to do a picture tomorrow and I have another picture going, I’ll drop the other picture and go with him. Because I know that under his auspices and guidance, I will have total freedom to just go as far as I want to photographically. Plus he also, in his own way, teaches me a great deal about directing, which I want to learn about. He teaches me a great deal about the discipline of filmmaking and I find myself making sure that when I compose a shot it isn’t a self-indulgent thing; it isn’t a cameraman’s shot but it’s something that’s appropriate to the story and he brings that out in you. I think maybe that’s what happens with a lot of other relationships like that. The director and cameraman are almost equal in stature but yet each one knows his position. I don’t know what else to tell you about that. It’s not easy to be articulate about it.

      It’s a tough thing but there’s a lot of people out there who want to break into СКАЧАТЬ