Masters of Light. Dennis Schaefer
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know what you’re talking about. Try it, see how it turns out.” Chasing and following the lantern very close through the forest, through the trees was very interesting. Instead of really trying to track through the forest with that thing, I sat on a Lazy Susan with a hand-held Arri following the thing very close and asked Paul Winfield and the little boy to run around me; and every once in a while to go around one tree, come back around the tree and back and forth like that, changing sides. And I did a 360° spin and they ran around 360°. Well, when you cut that shot in you can’t tell it’s going around; it looks like it’s going right straight through the forest. And that was it. Also I had lights hidden behind trunks shooting right at them and sometimes right at the lens, but you wouldn’t see the source of the light, you’d just see a flare of lighting. And it added a certain excitement to the whole thing. All those shadows, if you notice, are going straight across, they’re not down. The purist would say, “Well, that’s not source light, that’s the cameraman’s light.” But you must think in terms of the material that applies.
Day interiors were done as naturally as possible. I did use reflectors way out in the distance and shot them through windows so that they would burn up as they went through. But, if you notice, it was really real. I made sure that you were never really aware of a key light on an actor in Sounder. Even if it was outdoors and you had to use an arc for some reason or other, I would use it but the lens had to be stopped down so much that it really had very little effect except in the eyes. So you didn’t have a lit quality, if that’s possible.
So essentially what you did was just try to light it as naturally as possible and any period quality would be picked up from the sets?
From the subject, right? From the behavior and the artwork. See, it’s a good point for all cameramen to take in. It really applies not just to period pictures, it can apply to everything. I’ve seen Gordon Willis do it very well, I’ve seen Owen Roizman do it. What happens is that they take a situation in a room and they look at it the way it really looks and all they do is intensify up to exposure, and then stop it down a little bit more so that intensification doesn’t show. And that’s the best trick I could advise anybody about doing the naturalistic type of photography. It’s like Rembrandt lighting.
I can remember scenes in The Godfather where Willis did that.
Even the silhouette scenes, he had lights on those people. Because of the chemistry and the mathematics of the negative, you must have some light, otherwise it’s kind of greyish mud. He had light on them but he still stopped it down so you didn’t see the light on them and they still were silhouettes. That’s the best rule to follow, if you want the so-called available-light, natural look.
Now, compared to Sounder, Lady Sings the Blues was much different. I guess that gave you more room to . . .
That was more show-biz and you could do more lighting effects. And I went in for color there, a lot of color. Some of the nightclubs had canvas ceilings so instead of lighting the ceilings from underneath, I shot lights through the canvas and put dots of light on the canvas. I tried to create an atmosphere that even the camera may not have seen, but it was an atmosphere for Diana Ross. For example we’d have a window on the set which the camera never saw. But I would put little twinkly lights out there and traffic lights going through so when she looked out the window she could see something. And a lot of times it’s good for a cameraman to do that, and to help the director in that respect. Because sometimes you have actors that really must function in an atmosphere that is not a movie set. Which is another reason I very seldom take walls out in the set—I feel that if I keep the walls in, it keeps the actors in. It makes them think that they’re really in the atmosphere where they belong. And Lady Sings the Blues gave me an excuse to be more bizarre; I threw light in whether there was a reason for it or not, if I liked it. In other words, I never had an excuse. You saw a very cold, dry look when she was shooting herself up in the white bathroom; a tricky exposure. That applies again for shooting a black object in a white room, a dark object in a white room. Again, you don’t take the walls into consideration. Expose for that face of the black person and then you can always print it up or print it down. And also soft light in a white room is much better than hard light. Hard light will bounce the white right back at you. We had smoke effects on that film which I hadn’t done before, and colored smoke wherever possible. For the period cars and exteriors I had a light fog filter to give it a little periodness. In the beginning of the picture I used too much fog, I think.
You fogged the cars to make it not look like they just rolled off the assembly line.
That’s right. I also used nets. When I shot her face I used nets, like hair nets, to put in front of the lens for that purpose. To just take it out of the realm of reality and more into the period piece. When she was very, very young I had fog filters and nets to give it a kind of way-back-when quality. And the colors were simple; it was not overly colorful. It didn’t get colorful really until she walked into the nightclub. Then she saw her new world, which was the nightclub she wanted to sing in.
It seems that you’re one of the few cameramen who give credit to the set designer and the art director and the wardrobe people.
You have the set decorator, the wardrobe designer and also the wardrobe person. They break down scripts just like I break down scripts to shoot. Theirs is probably more complicated in the initial stages. And then they’re at the mercy of the camerman. They really are. And I hate it. I respect fellow artists and I hate it when you don’t utilize what they’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to do. In Harold and Maude the art director gave Maude’s place a boxcar full of detail. They knew that the camera sometimes would never pick up some of the stuff but they were creating an atmosphere, and I was always conscious and aware of that. But when you work with people like Harry Horner, Richard Sylbert and Dean Tavalouris, they had that attitude to begin with. They always figured that they couldn’t go to a cameraman and say, “Get your ass over here and look at what I’m doing.” It really is incumbent upon the cameraman to approach the production designer, and not the other way around, because he is going to be the responsible party for putting that image up there. A very good thing to talk about would be Dean Tavalouris and I on Farewell, My Lovely. Dean had just finished doing the Godfathers. I had just finished doing Chinatown. And here we are doing a period picture again, very similar to what we’d been doing. So we had the task of avoiding copying ourselves, and we also had to work very closely together because I was trying very hard not to make it look like Chinatown and it was very near to the same period; and he was going to try not to art direct it similar to the Godfathers that he’d done. So we were very trepidacious about that. I attacked it first of all by shooting with Fuji film. And that was different. I used a net for the whole thing which I hadn’t done before. I used more color than we had done in Chinatown, with far more reds, blue lights and green lights. And he had a wonderful, wonderful idea of the sheen and polish on the wood that he hadn’t really done as much on the Godfathers. And the sort of abstract way that he furnished rooms was great.
You have previously said that Chinatown was your masterpiece. This is the film where all the elements came together, where everything coalesced. Up to that point in my career, yes, it was the culmination of a lot of experience put to use and it did offer the opportunity to try things I had never tried to photograph.
Could you elaborate on that? What things were involved there that didn’ t come together on pictures before?
I think I said this before; it particularly had to do with Polanski and the way he handled the whole thing. He brought everybody up to a level of competence: the prop man, the production designer, the wardrobe designer, all the heads of departments involved in the movie. He sort of psyched us up to such a degree that we were all putting out top, top efficiency. It gave him a great deal of security to know that when I was going to walk on the set it was going to be perfect. It was a concept that we all had in mind. In other words, none of the little irritations were there like “I forgot to do this or I forgot to do that; there wasn’t enough money to do this.” It was immaculately produced. To everybody involved, that gave us a sense of freedom to really go into the aesthetics or into that realm of trying to create something better in compositions, lighting, and camera moves. We did them with absolute security that everybody else’s job had been finished and was complete and we could be brave and try different