Masters of Light. Dennis Schaefer

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СКАЧАТЬ gotten in differently. For me, it was a matter of being there at the right time and being tenacious about it. That should apply to everybody who wants to get into the industry. There’s no such thing as just flipping right into becoming a cameraman. And this really sounds boring, like an old cameraman talking, but if someone had told me in 1969, “You got to shoot Black Sunday,” I would not have been prepared. I would not have known how to do that. So that somehow God gave me the thing to do at the right time. Bloody Mama showed me I could do that kind of picture and Vanishing Point was still within the realm of reality for me. By the time I went to Get to Know Your Rabbit, I had two pictures under my belt; enough to control people, enough to know how to work stage lighting. Sounder was very tough. Lady Sings the Blues was tougher, and so that by the time I got to Black Sunday my control of the technology was totally secure.

      I was in the union retroactive to 1964, but actually did not become a union Group 1 until 1966. And in three years time, by 1969, I was shooting a picture, and that’s very fast. And I’ve not been out of work since. But a lot of that has to do with the quality of what I can do, and a lot of it has to do with being tenacious enough to study and to learn. Because I didn’t go to school, but I don’t say that you shouldn’t go to school. If you go to school, you get a lot of that out of your way. But if you want to get in, go to work, if you can, for a documentary house or go to work for a commercial house, public television but whatever you do, don’t stop shooting. Keep shooting and teaching yourself, go out and do it even if it’s just a still camera you’re using, develop your own stuff, look at it. That taught me a lot. I learned a lot. Get books like, hopefully, this one. It will provoke questions. I give a lot of cinematographers’ manuals to people, not because they’re necessarily the Bible but they will provoke questions. Why use a neutral density filter? Why? Why an 85B as opposed to 85 A or 85C? The book doesn’t tell you, but if you look at it and you see this guy is using a 23A and a 20 something 5 red and blue filters to shoot day for night in black and white—why? And it gets the, saliva going and gets all of these fundamentals into a nice secure place so you can say, “I know it.” Now someone says I want to shoot this kind of picture and you’ve got the technology out of the way and you can get into the artistic realm.

      That goes back to what you were saying about being able to look at a situation and make decisions. You’re secure because you’ve been there. And therefore you know what you’re doing and you do it. So, like you said, I guess that takes time.

      I think that’s what kids nowadays can do; shoot film, borrow cameras, do whatever they can but keep shooting. If you can get a fairly decent film together, there are enough people in this town who will look at it and that’s a way to get into it. Then if you have the fortitude to stay in a loading room, if you have to be in a loading room—be in a loading room. Whatever way you can get in because there is a tremendous need for new cameramen in the industry. The old ones are not being accepted by the new directors, you know. The new guys, the kids coming out of UCLA and USC that are directors, they don’t want to hear from an old cameraman. They want a Zsigmond, they want a Kovacs, and if there’s a better one coming up, they want him. They want Michael Chapman or they want one of these new guys who are coming up. Fujimoto, they want him now, because he’s done something. Also because he relates closer to them; maybe they are on the same level intellectually. I intimidate certain new directors, you know, and so does Gordon Willis and people like that. You get a new guy who calls you up and says, “Do you mind shooting this for me?” Well you can hear in their voices; they automatically assume that I’ll say, “No” or “Here’s the way you do it, kid.” I don’t do that. I have worked with first-time directors and I don’t think a single one will tell you that I have ever ramrodded him in any way whatsoever. I may have coaxed them to do better, but that’s the reason they would go for newer people and there’s a need for those people.

      You can go to work for commercial houses that have a union/non-union situation. You go to work for their non-union situation. You must make a pest of yourself. Otherwise you ain’t going to get anywhere, they aren’t going to come to you, and that’s always the advice I give. The union is not that difficult. First of all, it’s not a hiring hall. They don’t get you the job, so don’t make them a bad guy right off the bat. Use them.

      What about documentary work? What did that, in a nutshell, basically teach you that would come in really handy later on in features?

      What I learned primarily from documentaries was coverage. In documentaries, a lot of times, you are forced to cut the material yourself, but when you have a situation, an event happening and you are documenting it, obviously you can’t be at both places at once with one camera, so you must make the decision of how to cover it kind of like a master shot. When the event is over with, somehow find some other element that is the cutaway from when you were out of focus or whatever and if you learn that, it applies to features, even better. If you really know that, you can make a feature run much faster. You can say to the director, “Here’s a place you can cut.” The most important thing you learn is how to think on your feet. Which is really the basis of what a good cameraman is: to be able to think on your feet. The one thing it does not teach you, because you’re by yourself and you don’t have a director, is how to handle people. But that you can evolve in projects when you work with other people doing your own films. You can learn how that cameraderie has to be established by going on sets. The egos in this industry are so horrendous that you really should study how not to behave, you know what I mean?

      

      On your first feature, Bloody Mama, how did it feel that first day and you were finally the DP, you were to run the crew. How did you prepare for it?

      I didn’t know anybody in the crew. Roger Corman was a major producer and he was directing. I got my crew just from the recommendations of the American International people. And so when somebody would say to me, “Well how many 10Ks do you want?” I really didn’t know. So I kept my cool as much as possible and tried to visualize from what I had seen at Fox, the behavior of the cameramen, and what I had done in documentaries; out of that came a behavior where I made, thank God, the right decisions. So I talked to Roger; he said, “I want a very raw, cold look. I don’t want anything glamorous.” And also I went to the lab. At that time the lab had nothing to do with me because I was nobody and they said, “Well, do some tests and we’ll develop them for you.” Well, I didn’t have the facility to shoot tests and I didn’t get a chance to test anything. So I really went very unprepared, and the crew I got was not the world’s greatest. They were the ones who wouldn’t cross the line; the electricians wouldn’t help the grips, etc. But because I came from documentaries I was physically doing work myself and that was against the rules too. But Roger kind of liked that. He liked the fact that I climbed up a ladder and set a light and did this and that. Eventually I charmed the crew into kind of joining me a little bit and they liked the idea. So maybe what I was doing was whistling when I was afraid, you know what I mean. Because there’s no such thing as not being able to do it, unless you’re totally ignorant about it. I can’t tell you that I was cocky and confident. You know I was scared that I would make a mistake and waste people’s money. But the nice thing about Roger was that he didn’t focus on it. He saw the dailies. I expected something like, “This is not right and that is not right,” and all that. He looked at them and said, “Okay, John. Very good. Thank you.” So I said, “Okay, if that’s the attitude, I’ll just keep on doing what I’m doing.”

      I suppose if you had a more insecure director, it could be very easy to blame things on you.

      Or a new director who needed a lot of help. I would not have been able to give him as much help, at that point. It was a good experience for me. As I say, it was something that I could handle, at that time. The technology that I knew was just enough to handle that picture. Of course, you had damn good actors who were in control. And I did a lot of hand-held in it because I was an expert and was very secure at that. Roger loved it. He never really worked with anybody who did a good hand-held job; so I did it, again violating the rules of the union because the operator that I had couldn’t do it as well as I could do СКАЧАТЬ