Masters of Light. Dennis Schaefer
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frame is black anyway so you don’t notice the grain. But I rate 5247 at 200 ASA and most of the time that’s enough for me. In any place where I have a controlled light situation, I don’t need any faster film than that. I don’t like to stop down very deeply anyway because I use nets and if I stop down beyond f3.2 or f4, the pattern of the net starts to show with the wider lenses. So I have very little reason to stop down to f5.6 or f6.3, which I would be forced to do if I were using a faster film.
Is there a noticeable difference between scenes shot on 5247 and 5293?
Yes, especially in The Big Chill. If you started looking at the answer print with a critical eye, you’d be able to tell right away which scenes were 5247 and which were 5293. It’s very apparent, especially when one comes right after the other and they are both interior scenes. But there’s such a lag period involved here. You shoot with a new stock and you don’t have a chance to really confront the end result until you answer-print it a year later. By then you’ve shot another couple of films.
Have you had any experience with lightflex?
No, I haven’t used it because it basically does something to the film that I normally don’t want to do. Essentially, it flashes the film. A very primitive type of light flashing system that flashed white or colored lights on a piece of glass in front of the lens was used by Freddie Young on a picture called The Deadly Affair in the mid-sixties. Then an English cameraman later perfected the system and initially used it to introduce an overall color haze in certain scenes of Young Winston. According to the color of light you flashed through the gels, you could change the color from scene to scene.
Is this a process that is going to replace flashing?
I think flashing has lost some of its mystique, partly because it requires extra handling of the negative in lab and that’s dangerous. Most of the time people use flashing in a situation which they could control if they just used a little more fill light. For example, sometimes on a night exterior, I’ll get a big 12 foot by 12 foot silk and put a 10K through it maybe 75-100 feet behind the camera. Now that’s introducing real light into the scene and it’s not affecting the black sky. But when you flash, you affect everything on your negative including all your blacks. I don’t like that. I like blacks to be very rich. There is one situation where I might use it and that would be one where I had extensive day exteriors with hard sunlight and I wanted them to be less contrasty but I couldn’t use any fill light. For instance, if I were doing a scene in a jungle where I had to go in with a very small equipment package and I couldn’t fill the scene, I would probably use something like lightflex.
What about the Panacam? Have you used it?
Only in demonstrations. I think it’s marvelous. What I like about it is that it’s designed for cinematographers; it was made for people who don’t have a highly technical electronic background and who approach their work as photographers. It’s very much like a Panaflex. It takes Panavision film lenses, filters and matte box. You essentially have the feel of using a motion picture camera not an electronic camera as such.
It brings the two worlds together?
I think it does. It’s a major breakthrough in terms of breaking down the rather artificial barriers between film and video because the two areas are going to get closer and closer as technology improves.
The feeling is that the quality of video will increase as more film cameramen become involved in video because they will bring more of a film look, in lighting, to a video production.
That’s definitely happening. You look at English video and they’re lit, photographed and framed with almost a film sense because they’ve had film technicians working in both areas. Here, it’s only recently that video has been exposed to film technicians and artists. I think a lot of cinematographers are interested in working in videotape.
Have you heard anything about the Skycam, a new piece of equipment invented by Garrett Brown, who previously perfected the Steadicam?
I’ve seen a demonstration tape. The Skycam is a camera that hangs down on a rod from a series of pulleys or rollers and these run along wires. The wires are supported at three or four different points. Through a remote controlled system of these wires, this camera moves in all the axes that you can think of. Hovering above the ground, it can go up and down. It can move along any north-south, east-west axis or anything in between. It can pan and tilt. It’s essentially free hanging. It’s operated through a video monitor where you control the focus and the iris. This thing can go from ground level to however high you have the wires; so it can do anything a helicopter can without rotor wash. It can start right on a close-up of somebody, pull back up in the air, move around them, drop down behind them, etc. It’s really extraordinary and I think it’s going to be used a lot.
Is it any more trouble than, say, laying dolly tracks?
I think initially it might be because these poles and wires have to be rigged. But it gives you total freedom of movement with the camera; you can make moves that have never been done before.
How closely do you monitor what the lab does?
Very, very closely. Whenever I’m in town, I usually go in to the lab in the morning before the shooting call and see a high-speed projection of the dailies. I do that almost every day. When on location, I have daily phone conversations with the lab. I like working with Technicolor lab because so far my contact with them has been very, very good. The labs are technically pretty much the same; it’s then a question of the feedback and service. When on location, you’re very vulnerable. You phone in and ask about the dailies. If you’ve got somebody that’s halfway intelligent at the other end who knows what you want, you know where you stand.
What kind of advice would you give to a student in dealing with the lab?
I think the most important thing is to get a tour of a lab to understand what happens mechanically to the film and how different the parameters of control are from a custom still lab. You have to realize that the responsibility is in your hands not in the lab’s. What the lab delivers is a standard-issue item. In terms of daily one-light prints, anything that you want to have on the film, you have to build into it. Any effect you want, you’ve got to do at the time you’re shooting. It’s a very simple realization but it’s one that doesn’t happen until quite late in the game with a lot of cinematographers. You’ve really got to be responsible for controlling the elements that you put in there. The more you understand how a lab works, the better off you’re going to be. It’s like any business; if you talk to people by their first name, you’re going to get better service than if you’re arrogant.
A lot of times when a film is being answer-printed, the cinematographer is on another film. I’ve been very insistent about answer-printing every film I’ve shot. It’s very important. If your dailies don’t have pretty much the look that you want the finished film to have, it’s very hard to get it in the answer-printing, even if you are there. By then the director and the editor have become used to what it looks like and they become very resistant to changing it.
Gordon Willis’s philosophy, at one time, was give the lab something in a narrow range so the lab will have less opportunity to screw it up.
I try not to work on the edge and give them a thin negative that they can’t print up. I try to work with very strong printing lights so that there’s good density in the negative. If I want it to be dark, it’s dark not because I haven’t got any negative left but because I’m printing on a printer light high enough to dig into it. If I do run into any problems I’ll be able to print it up. So you have to play it both ways. I try to give a director as balanced a look as I can in the dailies because I think it’s important that he be able to evaluate whether the film is working or not. If you’re trying to study a sequence from a dramatic standpoint and you’ve got one shot that’s a stop hotter than the shot after it or one shot is green and the next is blue, then it’s very hard to concentrate on the dramatic values.
How much do you use filtration?
Very little—basically if I’ve got a lighting condition that I can’t control the way I want to. If I want a softer look on an exterior and it’s a very hard