Masters of Light. Dennis Schaefer
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about taking on that role again?
He’s a total director. He was very excited, not nervous but very excited and very pleased and happy to have the chance to direct. He really enjoys directing as much as acting. He enjoys acting a lot too; you can tell, he’s got such fantastic energy and enthusiasm and he communicates this to the whole crew. Everybody follows him as a real leader.
Did he depend heavily on you for the visual look and style of the film?
He doesn’t depend on anybody; he has his own ideas. But he relied on me a lot; he listened to me a lot and he was happy to have my viewpoint on things and it really worked wonderfully well. It was a fantastic experience.
Was the mine shaft sequence in Goin’ South lit totally with those lanterns?
Yes, basically. There was a little help with some soft light. But just a little because I wanted to give the impression that those lights were actually petrol lanterns and that the mine was very dark. So you had to guess more than see, which also made some of the crew unhappy because they built that mine set and they were questioning whey they should build such a good set if it was not going to be seen.
But I was lucky enough that Jack Nicholson agreed with me; that it was not necessary to see it; that you could show a beam here and a little stone there and guess about the rest. And that would be much more realistic than knowing exactly how the mine was laid out.
And, in that scene, Nicholson was wonderful because he was carrying the lantern and he understood very quickly how the lantern had to be at eye level so that the faces would be seen. Also by waving and shaking the lantern, you would see patterns of light. So he actually did it, he was lighting for me. He was acting but, at the same time, he was a gaffer. It was wonderful. And I asked him if he would mind doing that, explaining to him how it would look better. I asked him if it hampered or handicapped his acting and he said, “Quite the opposite, it helps me due to the fact that I’m thinking of something else so I can act better.” It’s really an ideal thing for a director of photography to have an actor like that.
Some of the scenes were very dark, at least by American standards; I’m thinking of an early sequence in the jail where all the faces are very dark. Was that intentional?
Yes, definitely. I like arc lights very much and we used arc lights there to imitate sunlight coming into the jail. Now I don’t like arc lights outside to compensate, you know, when they use it on exteriors. That I hate; I never do that. But I wanted to use arcs in that scene and Nicholson like the idea of the jail being very sordid and very dark. And then the faces sort of emerge from the darkness and come into this stream of light. He staged the action for that as you could see. So, in that scene, Nicholson himself was almost backlit, almost invisible and only those who came to visit him in jail would be seen. It was an exciting scene to do actually. In fact you’ve mentioned the two scenes that I prefer in the movie, from my point of view and the point of view of my work: the mine and the prison.
What was your aesthetic approach to the timing of Goin’ South?
I did the timing but unfortunately I did not do the final timing because I had to start another movie. I’m not that happy about the final release print of Goin’ South.
On that film, we agreed that we would like the photography to have a very warm feeling. So instead of having the 85 filter on the camera, which is the normal one, we used an 85B filter, which is slightly warmer. The location in Durango didn’t really look like as much of a desert as we wanted it to be, so by using the 85B we made it look more dry. So the plants, instead of being totally green, looked slightly more yellowish and orangish. The first print that the lab did on its own appalled both Nicholson and me because they had color-corrected and subtracted that. We had to tell them to put the warm colors back in.
About those scenes in the desert, did you use any fill light or white cards?
No, the desert is also very easy to shoot because the light bounces off things naturally. It’s only when you have lots of green, the green of nature, that it becomes difficult because green absorbs the light and then there is no bounce or fill light.
Another scene I had great trouble with was the sequence with the gallows because we were having some very stormy days. Sometimes it would be sunny and five minutes later it would be cloudy. So matching shots was really a nightmare. I don’t know if you noticed it but some shots really don’t match at all. It was a very long scene, shot over a whole week, and we could not stop production just because it didn’t match. What we did to get around that was shoot very tight on the action so you don’t see that it’s so cloudy outside: by doing that you can hide the fact that the weather conditions have changed. You get by, although it’s not perfect.
Of course, Nicholson cared more about the performances and the story rather than the lighting in that sequence. Because of that, we didn’t stop shooting; and he probably was right about that for what it was.
What about the experience of working with Terrence Malick?
Days of Heaven was a fantastic experience also. He’s an artist from head to toe. Every little molecule in him is an artist. For a director of photography to work with him, it is the treat of your life. Because he’s very much oriented to photography, more than any other director that I’ve ever met. And he knows more about photography than any other director I’ve named. He could have actually filmed this movie and done it very well. He knows about light and mood. He knows that a light can be almost like an actor; that it will give a scene a feeling that is as strong as a good actor. He gives great importance to it.
We shot a lot of film; we shot under very exceptional lighting conditions. We very often shot in what he called “the magic hour.” We would prepare and wait the whole day, then we would shoot at the time after the sun set. We had about twenty minutes there before it got dark. We would just shoot frantically to make use of this beautiful light.
You would have to open the lens up further and further as the light began to go?
Yes. We started with the normal lenses and we would change to the fast Superpanavision lenses which open up to f1.1. Well, first we went to a f1.4 lens, then there was one lens, a 50mm, that opened up to f1.1, so we would rush to get the 50mm and put it on as the light went; then we would pull the 85 filter off to get another stop and then as a last resort we pushed the film. So we expanded this 20 minutes to 25 minutes of shooting time. Of course, we were quite determined to match everything. And it gave a quality that I don’t think has ever been seen in movies. Because you don’t know where the light comes from; it’s a strange type of light. The quality of the skin tones is very extraordinary. I allow myself to boast about it because I credit that to Terry; I just helped him in achieving what he wanted.
How did Terry Malick communicate to you how he wanted Days of Heaven to look? How did he explain it to you?
He was very clear about it; he talked to me by phone because I was in Europe making a film when he contacted me. And we prepared the film by phone. I read the script and took some notes and we talked a lot by phone about the look of the movie. Then when I got to Los Angeles and later to Alberta, we talked more at length. But he insisted from the very beginning that he wanted to shoot some scenes of the film in this “magic hour.” He wanted to know if the film stock was capable of doing it and I said, “Absolutely, I’ve done it before.” We did some tests in the area (Lethbridge, Alberta) before we started shooting. We did tests that involved pushing the film and shooting after sunset. We found the tests very convincing; it looked good so we went ahead.
But that was his main concern: to use that type of light in color, which hasn’t been done too much. In black and white, of course, Orson Welles used that type of light in the first part of Touch of Evil and there have been other black-and-white movies that utilized it.
We also talked about the colors of the set and the clothes. We didn’t want too many colors; we leaned heavily on browns and period colors, colors that were not bright because historically they were not bright in that time. Patricia Norris got old clothes and old textiles, so that the clothes wouldn’t have that synthetic