Masters of Light. Dennis Schaefer
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really like to use either of them because I feel they soften the image in a way that’s not a controlled softness. Filtering is sort of a compromise. In terms of color filters for interiors, I prefer to do it on the set lights because you can be more selective. In other words, if you put a coral filter in front of the lens, the whole frame is going to have that degree of saturation. If you do it on specific lights and you leave one or two lights with a clean, white reference, it makes the part of the frame that’s colored more dramatic. When you’re dealing with exteriors of course, and you want an overall color look but you can’t shoot it at the time of day you want or under the light conditions you want, then you’ve got to use something. That’s about the only time I really use color filters.
I use nets a lot; I have a series of them. I shoot a sharp negative and when I want softness I try to build it into the lighting. I don’t use diffusion filters because they tend to break up that sharpness. It makes the image muddy. But very light nets, especially for close-ups, can soften an actress’s or actor’s face. It’s not to flatter them so much but rather it’s so that you aren’t distracted by certain physical problems that make-up can’t cover. Also if you use diffusion with one of the actors in the scene, you have to do it with all of them, maybe varying the degree. In Ordinary People, whenever I used a net on Mary Tyler Moore, I used one on Donald Sutherland too. In fact, most of Ordinary People was shot with a net, even the exteriors. I normally don’t use nets on exteriors because when you stop the lens down as far as you do outside you tend to see them, especially on a panning shot against the sky. But we were shooting under very diffused light and I was shooting exteriors sometimes at the same stop as the interiors. The nets were helpful because it gave the film a very uniform look.
Is there a different approach to lighting a black person as opposed to a white person? I’m thinking of Bill Duke in American Gigolo.
There’s a scene where Duke and Gere are on the steps at the back of the nightclub and it’s lit with blue light. I probably had two and a half times the amount of light on Bill Duke that I had on Richard. Some black people happen to take a lot more light, some don’t. Duke did. It was difficult doing two-shots. I find that’s a case where meters go out the window. On Cat People, I worked with Annette O’Toole, who has red hair and is very fair-skinned. She sometimes took half the light that I expected. I’d get her lit at what I considered key and she jumped out from everybody else. So you have somebody like Duke at one extreme and O’Toole at another. Finally you just have to look through the finder and evaluate it by eye.
Have faster film, faster lenses and other technological advances changed the way you do things? It has for some of the veteran cameramen, but you’re much younger than they are.
Probably not for me so much. Already when I did Boulevard Nights, Panavision had their Ultraspeed lenses and I shot a lot of things on the streets of East Los Angeles where the key lights were practical lights such as store front windows and neons. I used fill light that essentially balanced that. A good deal of that film was shot wide open with Ultraspeed lenses. Now I use the Ultraspeeds and stop down to where I might with more normal lenses. I shot a lot of Boulevard Nights at f1.4, f1.6; never more than f2 for the night exteriors. Consequently it has a very real look. When you’re out on the street at night like that and you’ve got five or six different light sources coming in, you can use them and get an incredibly rich look. But as soon as you turn on one theatrical light, you overpower it all. Then you’re back to lighting for movies again.
Do you prefer working on a sound stage or a location?
I like both.
Is one more difficult or challenging to you than the other? Are there any distinctions to be made there?
No. Some practical locations can be enormously painful, others are easy. It seems most of the recent films I’ve done have had significantly more stage than location work. Cat People was almost all stage because it’s very surreal. It’s a designed film and you only get that kind of control on the stage. Except for two days, Boulevard Nights was all on practical locations. Honky Tonk Freeway was a mixture of both. I think films are coming back to the sound stage more and more, for example, One from the Heart and Pennies from Heaven. They’re almost prophetic of how films are going to go back to a very designed, controlled look with a sense of filmic reality rather than naturalistic reality. Just out of sheer perversity at this point, I think I’d like to do my next film totally on the streets.
How do you maintain consistency from set-up to set-up?
If you’re on a sound stage, it’s very easy. I try to work at the same f-stop all the way through a scene. It’s easier for communication. The gaffer knows, unless I tell him otherwise, that he’s working key to a certain level. And we set everything else by eye. The balance is determined by the amount of fill light. That gets to be a subjective rather than a mathematical thing. When I first started I would set fill light by the light meter but the dailies that came back wouldn’t always look consistent. So I began to realize that there are a number of factors that affect the apparent consistency of the fill light such as where the actors move in the room, what’s behind them and how much of the key light is actually hitting them. There are just a number of factors like that you have to evaluate as the shot moves. So I found that I very quickly got rid of the mathematical aspect of it and I tried to train my eye. It was more difficult in the beginning but now I find that most of the time I come pretty close. It’s something that’s very hard to hit right on because there are so many variables from day to day.
Your films are real consistent. You are able to maintain a certain look from beginning to end.
I have the assistant keep a shot-to-shot log book which gives the f-stop, the filtration, whether there were any nets, the focal length of the lens, etc. A lot of times you can’t complete a sequence on a given day. Maybe you have to come back and finish it three weeks later but you want everything to match. The only way to really remember that clearly is to keep a log book. Also you may have shot and wrapped the picture and then three months later the director decides he wants to pick up some extra shots or an additional sequence. If you don’t have those notes, it’s very hard to match.
With the majority of the cameramen using the same film, the same equipment and the same printing stock, do you think that leads to more of a homogenized look? Isn’t it getting harder and harder to make something look “different?"
There are parallels in painting or still photography. You have Cartier-Bresson, André Kertesz and Gary Winogrand—three very different kind of still photographers, all of whom use basically the same kind of camera, an old non-reflex Leica. It really has very little to do with the equipment. Unless you’re in a situation where the kind of camera you’re using only allows you to use two or three lenses. That can make a difference. But ninety-nine percent of the films are shot with Panavision equipment and you can have any range of lens you want. So it really has nothing to do with the equipment. Cameramen don’t necessarily determine the look of a picture as much as the cameraman and the director together. It’s a dialogue. For me, the most successful experiences are with a director who already has some kind of vision.
The younger cameramen have not been locked into the old apprenticeship/journeyman system where you learn to do something this way and you repeat it because that’s the way it’s been done for thirty years. So many of the younger cameramen, under forty-five or so, have come in from other areas as opposed to that system. They each have a unique way of looking at things. If anything, I think it’s easier for cameramen to shoot in different styles. Back in the old days and even up until the middle sixties, sometimes it was very hard to tell who the cameraman was that shot the picture. The films of many of the cameramen were almost interchangeable. It’s not just the cameramen either because the directors all tended to work in the same way too. As idiosyncratic as cameramen are becoming in their styles now, the directors have also developed very personal styles.
What kind of relationship do you have with your crew? What should a cameraman do to nurture a good relationship with his crew?
I think respect is really the key. I try to hire the best people I can find, not just technically but in terms of personality and cooperation. So much of the job has to do with administration,