Masters of Light. Dennis Schaefer
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a fashion so that it carried a visual look that was even throughout the whole piece.
Polanski didn’t want any diffusion and I guess that caused some problems. Will you talk about that?
Well, the first cameraman hired was Stanley Cortez. And Roman hired Stanley because he had shot The Magnificent Ambersons. They had a big artistic difference, the two of them. Cortez did not want to photograph Faye Dunaway without diffusion and without the proper lighting, and Roman didn’t want that. He wanted to put on film a sort of natural but somber kind of look. And Dick Sylbert had his act together; those sets were brilliant. He had them all designed perfectly. And he had indulged the cameraman, given him places to put giant lights and all of that. It was just a big difference of opinion and so they fired Cortez. And I was called in immediately, like overnight. I read the script on Thursday night; I met with Bob Evans and the producers and I met Roman Polanski on the set on Friday morning to shoot one scene: the barbershop scene. And we had a little dialogue and shot that little scene and quit. Then we went to Bob Evans’s house to look at all of Roman Polanski’s films. The three of us sat there and looked at films; I asked him questions, he asked me questions, and he wanted to make sure that my head was going to be where his was. And I said, “I have no objections to shooting it without diffusion.” I said, I do have a theory and I tried to point it out to him and he went along with it. I said, “In the anamorphic aspect ratio, there’s a workhorse lens called the 40mm lens. The reason I like that lens for shooting and the reason I like to shoot Panavision anamorphic (the anamorphic ratio is 2.35 to 1) is because it is probably the best representation of true human perception.” You and I see—you can check me out on this—we see a great deal with peripheral vision, but our brain can really only compute about 15-20° this way and about 40° this way. No matter what distance you’re at, the angle remains the same. That’s what the brain can really conceive. And also, our brain can see that perspective. That perspective is this room is this size.
The best way for a cameraman to check that 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