Masters of Light. Dennis Schaefer
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If you would measure the amount of film that I shot in my career, the ones that people know are just the part visible of the iceberg. I shot an enormous quantity of film in Cuba for television and newsreels; also for school television in France. That’s a lot of footage; that keeps you in training.
So it’s your training as a documentary cameraman that gives you that intuition?
Also, every situation that you face in a new movie, you have faced it before. It’s not new to you. And that’s the reason why I could make five feature films last year. Whereas the year that I made La Collectionneuse, that was the only film I made and it left me exhausted. It’s because you learn to work faster and, I hope, better.
What about now that you’re working in Hollywood?
I haven’t worked in Hollywood. Days of Heaven was shot in Canada. Goin’ South was shot in Mexico. Kramer vs. Kramer was in New York. But I know what you mean by Hollywood.
So you shot none of that in a studio?
Well Days of Heaven was totally on location but they built sets on location. On Goin’ South, we used the sets of the western town that John Wayne had built in Durango. It doesn’t make too much difference whether you shoot in a studio or a natural set if the sets are reconstructed. The only difference is that you can go from the outside to the inside on a natural set, which is, by the way, one of the things that Truffaut likes. And you can’t do that in a studio. Truffaut likes to always link the exterior with the interior. You often have people going from the outside into a house in one shot like in The Wild Child. So that people can really see the connection between the interior and exterior. It also makes the people participate in the film. It’s not like the films made in the fifties, where you would have an exterior shot really on location and when people crossed the doorway, suddenly you were on a studio set and it was very obvious.
So you’ve really never made a film in the studio environment?
At times I have, like Madame Rosa. The apartment scenes were shot entirely in a studio in Paris. Now I haven’t shot in a Hollywood studio but I’ve seen films being made in Hollywood and it’s not too different from our way of doing things. Only in Hollywood, you have more hours, more gaffers, more grips, more coffee and more doughnuts.
Do you have a preference for studio over location work?
Yes, I think when we were younger we fought the wrong battle for 16mm as much as we fought the wrong battle for natural sets. I am more eclectic now. There are situations where natural sets are excellent; in other situations they are useless. For instance, in Madame Rosa, about two-thirds of the film took place in that apartment; in Kramer vs. Kramer, two-thirds of the film also took place in an apartment. There’s no doubt that you can control the lighting better by being on a set, especially when you have long scenes. If the scenes are very short, if they are vignettes, like in La Collectionneuse, I agree it’s good to have natural light because it falls very nicely and you just cut to another scene. But when you are shooting a very long scene (with natural light) the light is falling a certain way like it’s falling in this room now; but in an hour from now, the light will be falling differently. So paradoxically, a natural set will sometimes give a non-realistic feeling to the audience because the lighting will change from shot to shot. There will be no continuity. You want to get a smooth continuity and there’s nothing better than a studio for that, especially for those long scenes. My Night at Maude’s was also shot partially in the studio. Maude’s apartment was a set and there’s no doubt that it helped the actors to be relaxed. When the actors have to perform long sequences and a great deal of dialogue, if they are disturbed by traffic in a street or a helicopter passing over and you have to call “cut” every minute because the take is no good for sound, then the performers get in a bad mood; all the stopping and starting is disturbing them. When you are in the studio, you control your work; you are comfortable and the actors perform perfectly.
What film do you use in Europe; do you use Kodak?
We use Kodak Vincennes as opposed to Kodak Rochester; Vincennes is the town in France where they make it.
Is it the same film, the same emulsion?
Kodak says it is but we know it isn’t. It’s a little softer I think. In theory it’s exactly the same but something is slightly different.
I thought possibly you used Agfa or some other European stock.
No, I haven’t used Agfa; I’d like to make some tests with it. I’ve seen the Fuji film. In fact, it’s unfortunate that Kodak practically has a monopoly in this area. Because it’s like a painter had to have only one palette; it would be interesting to use other things. The problem is that the other things might not be as good.
How do the labs differ?
The labs are better here. For one thing, they are cleaner, much cleaner. And that’s very important; what always infuriates me is white spots on the film done in French labs because of all the dust. The air extractors are not good enough; the transportation of the film from one room to another is not carefully done. People in the labs are underpaid, of course, so they don’t work as well. Also the opticals are badly done in Europe. Whenever there is a dissolve, it’s not very good. But in America, they are very well done. When I see the work that was done by the lab on Days of Heaven, it just absolutely amazes me; I can’t believe it. What the MGM lab did was incredible and I’m very pleased with it.
You’ve done a number of documentaries with Barbet Schroeder. What can you say about the shooting of Idi Amin Dada?
I could say we came to a point which is interesting as journalism and cinema. Taking into account that it was journalism, you had to be unobtrusive; the smaller the crew is, the better. We knew that Idi Amin was very temperamental and that he was not going to be bothered. So we just had to be as invisible as we could. We knew what we were shooting was so exciting that there was no place for aesthetics. We had to do photography that was more intelligent than beautiful, more functional than aesthetic. We did very little lighting because we had a very small kit for lighting and we lit everything ourselves without electricians. We hand-held the camera very often. That time, we were using 16mm; I think that’s where it should be used, for that kind of thing and not for fiction. But for that kind of movie, we could have never done the film in 35mm. It would have been impossible.
One scene where you went into the meeting with his aides—I can’t believe he allowed you to film that.
Well, he was actually quite proud of showing that. He told us we could shoot for five minutes only. But then, when the five minutes passed, he didn’t acknowledge it, so we just remained there and he never said anything about it. So we just kept shooting. And he actually got very excited about that sequence and he was probably very proud of it. The only problem I had there, from the point of view of lighting, is that their newsreel people were also shooting and they were throwing their light intermittently all over the place. I had set all my lights in advance and suddenly my light reading would change completely and that was a big problem for me because it suddenly got overexposed or underexposed.
The footage we shot was of course very much longer than the film itself because Idi Amin repeated himself a lot; he said the same things for about three hours. We shot all the ministers in the meeting to use as cutaways. But I wasn’t very well located, so that the one minister who was killed 15 days later was precisely the one I had not gotten a shot of alone. I just got him in a panning shot. Then we learned that 15 days later he was found dead on the banks of the Nile. When Amin was talking to him in the meeting, he was telling this man how he had not done his job well. Little did we know what was to happen later. But Amin wasn’t actually looking at him. He was talking to the air so we had no way to know which man he was admonishing. Well, we found out about this man’s death back in Paris when we were looking at the rushes. So we had the laboratory freeze the frame on this man. Now when the film came out, Amin wasn’t happy. So he tried to exercise censorship by taking hostages. He put the French residents of Uganda in prison. It’s the first time that this kind of censorship has been perpetrated in the history of the cinema. So that by this taking of hostages Barbet was forced to cut the freeze frame and the phrase about his murder from the film.
Goin’