Masters of Light. Dennis Schaefer
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a dance and an interplay that goes on. Sometimes it might seem that it would be frustrating to have a director say, “I want this kind of shot.” But, in fact, that isn’t what happens. Usually that’s an initial idea and then by talking about it something quite different may evolve. That happens to Schrader and me a lot. It’s something that neither one of us initially imagined but which hopefully becomes something even better. Really exciting directors see actors as elements inside the film, though the most important ones. Everything else is secondary to performance and the screenplay. But even a director like John Schlesinger, who is very actor oriented, is also incredibly visually oriented. He has very specific ideas about how he wants a shot. On Honky Tonk Freeway we had several very big shots which were costly in terms of production. If something happened, if the actors didn’t hit the mark, if they didn’t do it right so we got the composition, if the light hit an actor in a way other than we had already decided, Schlesinger would sometimes call “Cut,” or we would do another take. He was most uncompromising in getting all the elements to come together. Performance of course was paramount but it had to be in concert with composition, camera movement and lighting. A sense of detail about all those elements and being able to juggle them is what makes a director a filmmaker and an artist.
Generally though, you’ve always worked with someone who’s visually oriented. You haven’t made the choice to work with somebody who’s not visually oriented.
Only Redford. I told him the first time we met, I had a need to do that film that was probably as strong as his. I read the novel when it first came out and was obsessed with it. I was an operator at the time. Redford’s then producer, Walter Coblenz, was an old friend of mine. He had been the assistant director on Two Lane Blacktop, on which I was assistant cameraman. Walter and I had stayed in contact during all those intervening years. He subsequently left Redford’s Wildwood Productions to go off on his own but he plugged me in to Redford. I told Redford, “I’ve got to photograph this film.”
What happened there? Thinking of the cameramen Redford had worked with before, he could have asked Roizman, Willis, Hall or any other number of people. But instead he hired you.
I never asked him why. One thing is I don’t think he wanted a cameraman that was a star. He didn’t want someone who would be an element that he would have to deal with that would distract him from the total control he wanted with the actors. Yet he wanted somebody that he felt could deliver. He’s a very, very articulate and intelligent man. He’s specific in what he focuses on. I think he also wanted somebody that he could have that kind of dialogue with who was a little flexible. Also the absolute conviction I had to do the film may have influenced him. He saw the first Karen Arthur film I did, Legacy, which was shot in 16mm and dealt with a woman whose story was very similar to Mary Tyler Moore’s in Ordinary People. Legacy follows her life one day in summer when her husband’s away on business and her kids are at camp. She breaks down and goes crazy at the end of the day. The woman is compulsively ordered, clean and disciplined very much like Beth in Ordinary People. Redford plugged into the feeling that photography somehow enhanced and expressed something about that woman. Legacy was shot in 16mm so it was a square frame; it was very severely designed and it was a cleanly realized film. That was basically the way I saw Ordinary People looking: clean, severe and having very direct imagery. We talked about Legacy quite a bit.
In preproduction, what kind of conversations did you have about the visual style of the film, of how you wanted to mount the film?
Well, we looked at The Conformist.
Again!
Yes, I ask every director I work with to look at The Conformist; even if we decide it’s flamboyant and totally wrong for us, there’s such energy there and it’s such a springboard for discussion, that it’s always fruitful. Redford found that stylistically it was just too rich for him. He was most closely tuned into the character of Beth. In preproduction he understood that character more clearly than any of the others. So we talked a lot about her, about how the house should be perfect and have no flaws in it but yet it should look askew somehow. He was always calling up images about how you would see something on a table. Everything was right about that table but the positioning of some object on that table was just slightly wrong. He felt that finding things in the house that were just slightly out of context or in conflict would help give a sense of tension to what was going on. I think it wasn’t as closely realized as either he or I wanted.
What experience, unrelated to filmmaking, do you feel has helped you in your career as a filmmaker? I notice that you have quite a great interest in art.
I’ve collected Indian art for many years. Art is very important to me and I spend a lot of time looking at it. American Indian art is very abstract. It deals with all the materials of earth. I learned about American Indian art before I learned about European art. I don’t know that it has any direct influence on me; I just love having it around me. I also collect still photography; I’ve been doing that for about six years. I got involved in collecting still photography because I started buying Edward Curtis’s American Indian imagery. And it just seemed that since I was involved in photography, it was natural that I started studying it. When I was in film school, I spent virtually no time at all looking at photography. It’s only in the last five years that I’ve really methodically collected and studied photography. That’s had a very strong influence on my work because most of it has happened since I’ve become a director of photography.
In what way?
Most of the photographs I have are black-and-white. There’s a control still photographers have over the image that cinematographers can’t have. So by virtue of looking at the design elements in the still photography I really admire, I get ideas and try to think of ways I can take some of those elements and apply them in a cinematic context. For instance—and we’re not talking about fine art photography here—in American Gigolo, because Richard Gere’s wardrobe was Armani, I started looking at a lot of the Italian fashion magazines. I noticed a real strong sense of what used to be called Hollywood hard light being used in the fashion ads. This was at a time when our fashion photography was still very soft and pastel. I started seeing a lot of photography that had hard shadows on the wall; the sort of thing that has become very popular in the last two years. I was very intrigued with that as a style for the film. Schrader and I looked at a lot of vintage fashion photography and decided to use hard light in American Gigolo. We used the shadows on the wall as a compositional element; we made them elements in the frame, balancing Gere’s shadow against his image. Scarfiotti, the designer, deliberately gave Gere’s apartment that grey, monotone look so that we could use the walls to create shadows and light forms. Everytime you see the apartment it has a different look in terms of the kind of light that’s being projected on the walls. The wall itself almost becomes a canvas.
The interesting thing visually about American Gigolo is that it doesn’t look like Los Angeles. At least it doesn’t look like the Los Angeles we see in television series or even other movies. It looks interesting and sensual in American Gigolo. You captured a certain quality of time and place that really hasn’t been seen a lot.
We knew that the interiors were going to be very stylized and have a very specific look; we wanted strong compositions and strong lighting. We felt we just couldn’t go out on the streets and make do with what was there. If we did, it would just make the film schizophrenic. So we spent a lot of time scouting locations. We modified some locations. We shot certain things at a specific time of day. We tried to shoot at the magic hour. When we didn’t have any of that going for us, we tried to find disturbing compositions of rather boring places. For example, there’s an establishing shot of Sotheby Parke Bernet which is a very boring building. But I tried to find a composition that was not normally the way you would frame it. In fact, that whole scene inside the building, with the camera moving from one wall to another, was staged in a way so that it was constantly disorienting. The last shot of that sequence is outside in back of the building but we shot it in the magic hour because I knew that the blue light would look very good against the green lawn. The house in Palm Springs was another very deliberate choice. Paul wanted to have a white facade against the mountains; that way we had the dark blue sky, the black outline of the mountains and the white facade of the house. It was strictly a matter