Masters of Light. Dennis Schaefer
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non-people kind of things are second-unit. Any time you’re dealing with one of the principal characters, even if they’re not speaking, I consider to be first-unit work.
Do you have any control over how the second unit turns out its footage?
Absolutely. I try to have the second-unit people see dailies with me as much as possible so that they understand where their footage fits in and what style I’m going with. I have a close dialogue with them regarding lenses, filtration and angles. If it involves lighting, a lot of times I will send the best boy or one of the prinicipal electricians from the first unit to supervise the lighting of the second unit.
Harsh sunlight dominates the scenes in Honky Tonk Freeway. You were really going for that look.
That was the whole point. There was a sequence where all the vehicles crossed the bridge into Florida; it was a series of helicopter shots where they all come together. We wanted a very sharp-edged light, almost etched. The bridge that we picked was essentially an unfinished bridge. There were no side railings, no lines painted, no detailing of it at all. It was just this band of concrete over the water. It was the white concrete, the dark water and this tremendous pure blue sky; it was a very primary look that we were going for. It contrasted with the other locations.
You probably shot most of the scenes during the heat of the day, between ten and two?
We sure did. A lot of times, cameramen will want early morning and late afternoon light. I wanted midday light. I wanted it straight down, hard and hot.
Did you have any problem with harsh shadows? That kind of light tends to look ugly if you don’t know how to deal with it.
We had tremendous problems. I used a tremendous amount of fill light. I used arcs like I’ve never used arcs before. I like to go very soft with arcs, like through tracing paper. But there were times that I had to put them right behind the camera, pump them in and burn the actors up. I hated to do it.
But there’s no other way.
There’s no other way. If the background isn’t important, you can open up and expose for the highlight a little bit and burn out the background. But John and I wanted a very clean, dense background. John understood what it took to accomplish that. A lesser director would have given me a lot of problems with that. But John knew how it had to be. I’m always very apologetic to the actors when I do that because some of them have very sensitive eyes. It’s not like the old days when if you wanted to be an actor, you learned to put up with it or otherwise your career was shelved. Today, actors tend to be very intolerant of the technical problems sometimes. But I find that if you explain the problem to them in advance, most of them are more cooperative.
How do you choose your projects now? You’re in between films and you’re reading a lot of scripts. What are the determinants?
First of all, it’s the script. The more experience I get the more I see that a problematic or mediocre script in the hands of a brilliant director is still going to have problems. A brilliant script in the hands of an okay director can still be a very good film. I’m coming to have more and more respect for what that script is and whether it can be successfully wrought or not. And if it isn’t, what chances it has of being pulled together before you start shooting. Sometimes I’ll read a script that I’m very attracted to but it seems to have problems so I have to take a calculated guess whether those problems will be straightened out before we start shooting. Because the other thing I’m absolutely convinced of is that a script that is not whipped into shape by the time you start shooting is never going to be right. The problems of shooting are so overwhelming and so all-consuming that script problems never get worked out while you’re making the movie. So ideally, I try to find a script that is already all there; a script that works. Then if the director is somebody that I feel also understands the material and is someone who I can respect and get along with, it’s a very easy decision to make. It’s also very easy to dismiss bad scripts that are going to be done by bad directors or directors that I consider to be problematic.
What makes a cameraman worth what he’s paid?
Well, a cameraman takes a lot of heat. The cameraman is really the focus of most of what happens when you’re on the set shooting. The director can insulate himself with the actors; in fact a lot of times, the director is expected to be above it all and somewhat aloof. There are a lot of directors who insulate themselves from the technical problems of filmmaking. But the cameraman is there on the set. He’s got to keep his crew happy. He’s got to effectively coordinate all the shot-to-shot elements of getting the work done with every department. He’s got to be in touch with the production elements—the assistant director, the production manager—in terms of what’s happening tomorrow and the day after. He’s got a tremendous responsibility to the producer and the studio to make the film consistent on a day-to-day basis and deliver it with the kind of professional gloss that’s expected. Today there’re so many first-time directors coming from all different areas and they really don’t understand the elements of filmmaking. Finally, it’s the director of photography who is expected to carry the ball.
So what you’re saying is that the director of photography really has an incredible responsibility all the way around.
Absolutely. I think it’s important to detail why the cameramen get the kind of money they do. If things are not working, he’s the first guy to get axed. In other words, if the picture is in trouble, they’re going to fire the cameraman before they fire the director. You know, the way to scare the shit out of a director is to fire the cameraman. It serves as a warning to the director. That happens a lot.
There’s the other side of the coin too. You have the director who has a very strong sense of how he wants the film to look. Maybe it’s a fantasy that he’s somehow got into his head and isn’t based on any real technical expertise on how film is exposed. However, the director has this notion and the director of photography may or may not be able to deliver that. It’s a tremendous responsibility. There’s a real kind of amorphousness to it. A lot of times the director will say, “I kind of want it to look like this.” What does that mean? But still you have to deliver it. All the departments, from set decoration to wardrobe, come to dailies to see if their stuff is photographed in a way that’s satisfactory to them. So it all focuses back down on the cameraman. He’s the guy that gets the praise or the heat.
You operated for several years. Do you feel that there’s a lot of unconscious material expressed in the photographing of a picture? For example, you may not logically be able to explain why you choose to shoot a scene at a certain angle, but you just instinctively feel it’s right.
Yes, in a way. But because I spent those years as an operator where I had to study the frame so much of the time and consider the fifteen different ways any given shot could be framed, I became very deliberate and very analytical about making those choices. When I was an assistant cameraman, I was very analytical about where the focus should be and when it should jump from one place to another. That all accumulated as baggage when I became a director of photography. So I don’t find a very high level of unconsciousness for me. Now it may be very intuitive for a lot of other people. But in so far as I have the time to reflect, I do try to consider as many options and elements as I can. I feel that I’m very deliberate; I don’t arbitrarily put a 35 mm lens on the camera. To me there’s a big difference between a 29mm, a 35mm and a 40mm lens. There’s a very strong difference in what they can do. Especially when you stop to consider that if you have the room in a set, the difference between using a 29mm and 35mm lens is just the difference between moving forward or backward two steps. You get the same field size. If you’re on a dolly, where you can easily move the camera up and down, you can spend a couple of minutes deciding exactly how high or how low you want to put the camera. There are just all these variables. I have an unconscious checklist I go through; that part of it, in a sense, is unconscious and intuitive. I run through a ritual almost of elements I consider every time I do a shot. I do it much more so in setting the camera position and choosing the lens rather than the lighting. Once you have established what the source of the light is, you basically spend the rest of the shots in that sequence making it consistent. So you follow almost a predetermined guide that you’ve established at the beginning. You’re filling in the