Masters of Light. Dennis Schaefer
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to find new ways of lighting scenes all the time; ways that you might not have initially chosen but which can turn out to be very interesting. I respond to that a lot and consequently I like working with production designers who think of their stage sets as practical locations. I know designers like very much to build sets that have hard ceilings; I like the feeling of a hard-ceiling set too. We had a lot of them in American Gigolo. The designer, Nando Scarfiotti, builds a lot of his sets that way. It creates certain problems for me but it also makes me more responsive. It’s challenging. Nando was the designer on Cat People too and we had a lot of hard-ceiling sets again. A lot of the sets were two-story so the bottom floor has to have a hard ceiling and even the second floor of some of the sets had hard ceilings. We shot a lot of low angles with wide lenses so we saw ceilings a lot.
But back to the question about other cameramen, I like Vilmos Zsigmond’s work very much. I like Nestor Almendros’s work obviously. Of the French, I like Pierre Lhome a lot. I love the pictures of Jean Boffety who’s done most of Claude Sautet’s films and a lot of Robert Enrico’s films during the sixties. I’m a big fan of Geoffrey Unsworth. There’s an Italian cameraman, Luigi Kuweiller, who did Elio Petri’s films. I think that probably more European cameramen than American cameramen have influenced me. When I was looking at the Nouvelle Vague films in the early sixties that was the kind of photography that made an impression on me. It was photography that was either in the streets or on real locations and it had a very natural look. When the European cinematographers started using color, they were using a very soft color that was unknown in the Hollywood mainstream at the time. I think the English and French cinematographers in the middle to late sixties had a tremendous effect on what happened to color photography in Hollywood in the seventies. When most productions started going to color, most of the cinematographers who were shooting them were the old guard who were black-and-white cameramen or else they were the high-key color musical type. When color prevailed, they continued to light in the same way: with hard light, a lot of heavy hair light, no top light and real strong fill light on exteriors. I didn’t like that look at the time. I liked the Godard look that Raoul Coutard was doing. Also Henri Decae and the early Truffaut films. I was quite young then and I thought that was real. I thought the glossy, slick Hollywood look wasn’t real at all. I’ve sort of come around now; I look at that type of classic Hollywood film now with a great deal of admiration and respect. But it’s still not really my style although I’ve begun to integrate some of it. The cameramen who were the younger ones at that time when the European look really started to penetrate here—people like Laszlo Kovacs, Vilmos Zsigmond and John Alonzo—were very much in sympathy and accord with what the European cameramen were doing.
How would you define your function as a cinematographer? What is it that you do?
I work for the director. That’s my primary line of communication and my primary responsibility. That’s something I feel I learned from Nestor Almendros. He is, for me, a paragon of the cinematographer who is totally committed to understanding, sharing and evolving a sense of style with the director. He’s not there to uniquely bring the film in on schedule and satisfy the studio. I think preproduction time is extremely important and I just won’t walk into a film two weeks before the start of shooting and have a couple of vague meetings with the director. I like to see a lot of films with the director and talk about style, to go through the script sequence by sequence and, in the case of Schrader, shot by shot, essentially story-boarding what we want to do. It may all change once we get on the set and we see that the scene lays out quite differently.
But you like to lay the foundation beforehand?
I like working on that basis; I like that kind of preparation with the director. The director is really the key to whether the film works or not and if the director’s vision isn’t realized somehow, the film really doesn’t have any chance at all. So that’s where my responsibility is.
So you’re basically implementing the director’s vision?
Yes. Again, I’ve been fortunate enough to work with directors that I think have a vision. I don’t know how I would deal with a director that I didn’t think had one. My one experience with a director that you would not immediately consider a visual filmmaker was Robert Redford. Up until that time he’d been considered only an actor even though he had a tremendous amount of influence and control over all the films that his company did. He really is a filmmaker although most people didn’t recognize it. When I was doing Ordinary People, I would get asked, “You’re working with an actor; what kind of vision does he have?” Well, he had an incredible vision about what he thought Ordinary People should be, not necessarily specifically in terms of shots, but in terms of the tones and textures of the film. He had very clear ideas; he’d spent a lot of time evolving and considering it. He’d bought the book when it was in galleys and had labored over the screenplay with Alvin Sargent for several years. So he had lived with it.
Generally, how much creative freedom do you have in setting the visual look and style of a film?
I think probably quite a bit. I consider it a dialogue with the director. I think a director would be interested in hiring me not because he wanted a specific look. Most of the films I’ve done have had very different looks. American Gigolo was very different from Ordinary People and I shot them back to back. So if I get a call from a director to do a film, it’s because he may have a certain stylistic approach he wants but usually he’s very open to developing that with me. Sometimes I haven’t any strong notion of what I want to do until late into preproduction. On Cat People, Schrader and I didn’t really know what kind of style we wanted except we wanted it to be different from American Gigolo. So we started looking at films. As it turned out, a lot of the films we looked at were twenties German expressionist films. They had a stylized sense of irreality. Even the exteriors tended to look like interiors. We started to focus in on that. We also looked at Cocteau and Franju for a sense of film poetry. The German cinema of the twenties had a very hard edge to it. Cocteau and Franju have certain stylistic tangents with the Germans but by virtue of that poetic French sensibility, there’s a softness there. We tried to integrate the two, to take elements of both. I find that looking at films with the director is the thing that I key off of.
It’s really a good reference point for you?
Yes. For instance, one of the key films for me is The Conformist. Oh, we were talking about cinematographers and I didn’t mention Storaro. Gordon Willis and Vittorio Storaro are really the two that are my idols. I’ve seen The Conformist probably twenty-five times. Schrader and I saw it five or six times while we were preparing American Gigolo. For me, it’s a real treasure chest; it’s almost a textbook on filmmaking. So American Gigolo very deliberately had a lot of stylistic characteristics of The Conformist. We were also looking at Welles. We looked at The Trial several times since it was wide angle and forced perspective. The film that we looked at a lot when we were preparing American Gigolo was Touch of Evil. And one afternoon I watched The Conformist and Touch of Evil back to back. I realized that Bertolucci’s sense of movement, that particular kind of crane movement that he has that totally surprises you and takes your breath away, comes from Welles. There’s an awful lot of Welles in Bertolucci and it’s not immediately apparent because, other than that, they are very different in tone and texture. The poetry of their filmmaking is almost antithetical. Yet the way they move the camera is very similar. If I recall correctly, in Bertolucci’s Before The Revolution, he quite literally stole a lot from Welles. Filmmakers do watch films a lot.
Do you generally like to work with a director who goes off with the actors, leaving the technical details to you or would you rather work with a director who wants some input and interplay back and forth?
I know there are several cinematographers who like that sense of total control; the director works with the actors and he tells the cinematographer the basic kind of coverage he wants and the cinematographer sets it up. I could do that; it’s intriguing in a way. But the irony is that even though you have total freedom, you really don’t have any freedom at all because the only freedom you have is within the context of what the director is going to do with the actors. A director who only works with the actors is not going to come up with very inspired blocking. The blocking is what you key off of for your sense of camera movement and the kind of visual dynamics you have inside of a scene. I’m much more intrigued