Masters of Light. Dennis Schaefer
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my theory, and really it’s just a theory has to do with the fact that in documentaries you make instant decisions because your subject doesn’t stand still for you. So you make decisions while you’re looking through the finder. What is it you’re going to stay with? And there’s a certain bravura, I suppose, in letting the camera roll on someone and knowing that, if you stay on him, that’s better than to pan over here where something more exciting is going on because out of that you might just end up with nothing. So it’s that kind of training, plus the time limits that you have in documentaries. But when I brought that to features, I think that I unconsciously applied it.
Now, the other part of my theory is what might happen to some cameramen—and I don’t know specifically if it applies to all of them—is that you do get to a certain point where you start working on pictures of great magnitude or some very important film, and people go around patting you on the back and saying, “Jesus, you’re great, this guy is terrific. He is fast.” You might start asking yourself “why?” And that will slow you down, you see. It happens. You reach a point when you say, “Wait a minute, why am I so good, what is it about me?” So, as a cameraman, you get there, you look at a set, you start to think about it, you start chewing on it too much and then, all of a sudden, you’re taking too much time. I think that’s what happens. I went through that to a degree, right after I did Chinatown.
On Vanishing Point, you had a film crew traveling over a lot of space and you’re filming a story that keeps moving, that’s episodic. What are some of the problems that the cameraman has to face when shooting a film like that?
The logistics, of course, were tough: the cameras, the heat and the dust. We’d take some great chances; we did some stunts with one or two cameras and never waited to see if the lab would say it was okay. We just went on to the next location. We were very lucky; we didn’t lose a single frame, never lost any negative. For necessity’s sake it was a very small crew; the entourage for the picture was bigger than the crew. I only had two grips and two electricians and myself and a couple of assistants and that was it.
What sort of problems did you have in the desert with the dust?
The cameras can get thrown into worse positions than they used to. An example would be in Vanishing Point, using the Arriflex so much. And to put it in the front of a car and shock the shit out of it. Well, that camera was designed as the gun camera for the Messerschmidt so that was a pretty secure camera, and we used it constantly, because it was a rugged piece of equipment. We were lucky it was just a straight Arri with no sync pulse at all, just a motor. We did have a sync camera, we shot an Arriflex sync camera. I made damned sure that I personally inspected those cameras within an inch of their lives. I went through all of them and it sounds silly to do that but you should do that. Under those circumstances, if I hadn’t done it, I might have suddenly discovered in the middle of the desert that some strange refraction created a fog and ruined my film.
This is in the way of tests, going through and checking the camera?
That’s one thing that a lot of filmmakers don’t want to do. It’s so boring to do that, but it’s something that should be done.
The preparation and the boring aspects of checking scratches on film, checking the light-tightness of the magazine, and the lenses matching, that the motor’s functioning, letting it run back long periods of time with dummy rolls—it pays off, psychologically it pays off. Maybe the guy that rents you the camera says it’s perfect. Don’t take his word for it, make sure it’s perfect yourself.
On such mobile locations as those in Vanishing Point, is it difficult with lighting? It seems like you’re always on the run; do you use one light more, one type more than another?
The lighting was very, very tough on Vanishing Point because sometimes you had to fight the exposure while he was driving the car. It was f2.8 inside and outside it was f16. When you have someone driving a car and, let’s say for the sake of argument, the exposure reads f2.8 on his face and behind and through the windows, the background reads f16. Well, you’re better off under-exposing him a full stop, maybe two stops to f3.5, f4.5, because when you print it, it looks more natural to have him darker than the car and the background will not look as hot.
Now, if you have the advantage of adding a light to it, and if the exterior is f16, and you can bring his exposure up to f5.6 and light him, then expose it down to f8, another stop, another stop and a half. Again you get a sure sense of reality and you’ll never see the light. You don’t know where the light’s hitting; you only see it in his eyes. Also, when you have reflections on the windshield of a car, never expose it the way the light says to read it on the face, always over-expose it. Because over-exposure cuts through reflection on glass. You over-expose it and then print it down. In other words, if you used a spot-meter, the reflection would literally cover up the actor’s face. Set somebody behind a steering wheel and take different exposures and then try it and see what will happen. It’s the fastest way to learn a lesson that I learned the hard way. But it’s an advantage because again it’s expediency. You don’t have to say, “Oh, I’ve got to pump him up with light.” In the old days they used to. Some cameramen still do; they’ll pump up the driver so much, like in Adam-12, or they’ll cover the whole thing to get rid of reflections, which is not real.
You did Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues, where the majority of the actors are black. Black obviously reflects differently than white; that’s a fact of life. Do you have any special theories or special ways that you went about lighting them?
Well, I had a theory. I found it’s not a matter of how much light you put on black people, it’s how little light you put on white people. In other words, you don’t have to burn up Bill Cosby just to see him. Leave him alone, but don’t put as much light on the white person. Expose for the black person and the white person will not be over-exposed. I just used that rule of thumb. There is an interesting facet of photographing black people as there is photographing a lot of us that have darker pigment in the skin. Diana Ross, for instance, had a sort of chocolate kind of quality to her skin, whereas Cicely Tyson had a slight bluish quality to her skin. So for Cicely I would use a warmer light; instead of a blue, daylight fill light it would be a regular tungsten warm light, and it would give her a little warmth to her skin. With Diana Ross having this little warm quality against Billy Dee Williams, her eye light always was a little colder blue to bring her back within the range of Billy Dee. You find that’s true about all black people in the sense that they reflect a certain cast. And the film being very sensitive to blue, it is the one color that you really don’t want to introduce into their faces. I found that just playing around with the light and accentuating the best features of a person as you would do with a white person, is just really the way to attack the problem of lighting black people. And the other theory is not to put as much light on them as you might think.
Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues were both period pieces. One was an urban period piece and the other a rural period piece. I’m wondering what went into your lighting of both those films to enhance the periodness of them.
Well, Sounder was an exterior picture and I tried to give the interiors a sort of available-light quality. In other words light comes in through a window, that’s what the inside should look like. That’s the way it is. And also with the night interiors, we tried to give them a certain available-light quality and let the bugs float around the lamps and all of that. The only difficult thing about Sounder was the beginning; the coon chase. And I called Jimmy Wong Howe on that. That’s how the picture starts at night, chasing the coon. Where does light come from? And I called Jimmy (he was very sick at the time) and I said, “You know Marty better than I and I’m about to give him an idea but I don’t want it to blow up in my face.” And he said, “What’s your idea?” And I said, “My idea is that we shouldn’t shoot it day-for-night just in order to see. The audiences nowadays are too hip and they know exactly what’s going on. Why not shoot it at night and light it, but instead of lighting it from a high angle, light it from very low angles; just straight shots, light through the trees. Make it graphic, a graphic look, because it is the beginning of the picture and you want to set up a certain pace to it.”
He agreed with me: “Tell Marty I said so and if he gives you any trouble, you tell him that’s the way