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 Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication

Prologue

PART I

1
PARADISE

2
A SECOND CHANCE

3
AROUND THE WORLD

4
SAMBA AND LIBERATION

5
INTO THE MUSIC
 6
BIG BROTHER

7
LOVE KILLS

8
AFRICAN STORIES

PART II

9
TWO BROTHERS

10
BADLANDS

11
THE INVERSE SQUARE LAW

12
REDEMPTION

13
TWENTY BELOW

14
THE FOG OF WAR
 15
THINGS CHANGE

16
THE DUDE ABIDES

PART III

17
O, BROTHER

18
THE BARBER

19
MAKING A PLAN

20
“WELCOME TO THE SUCK”

21
THE PREACHER’S SON

22
SIGNS AND WONDERS

23
THE ILLUSION OF LIFE
 24
EMBRACE THE MYSTERY

PART IV

25
PART OF THE ESTABLISHMENT

26
BOND, JAMES BOND

27
WELCOME SHADOWS

28
THE LAND OF WOLVES

29
HAIL, CAESAR!

30
ALL THE BEST MEMORIES

31
TO END ALL WARS

32
EMPIRE OF LIGHT
Epilogue
Roger Deakins Film Credits
Photography Credits
Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Author
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TO JAMES

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 PROLOGUE
Every picture tells a story.
PROVERB

In my career as a cinematographer, spanning almost half a century,

I’ve been lucky to play a part in telling a great many stories, whether
in documentary filmmaking or Hollywood films. Since the first
figurative art made on a cave wall more than fifty thousand years
ago, humans have used images to visualize a story and reflect the
world around them. It was a somewhat more contemporary version
of this same need that drew me to sketch my early surroundings on
a pad of paper, a need that evolved into photography, then finally led
to producing flickering images on a movie screen.
Many people equate the craft of cinematography with creating
beautiful images. In contrast, I believe the cinematographer’s role is
to support the story, to immerse the viewer rather than create
attractive but ultimately uninvolving “eye candy.” As with a cave wall
drawing or an Edvard Munch painting, some images can tell a story
without the need for dialogue. But, unlike a painting, other elements
of a film—the writing, the acting, the production design, the editing,
and so on—are of equal importance to the cinematography in
combining to form a whole.
Believing in and wanting to highlight the collaborative nature of
filmmaking, my wife, James, and I have hosted the Team Deakins
podcast since 2020, where she and I talk to other members of the
film industry, from directors and stars to cinematographers and first
assistant directors to costume designers and sound recordists. We
almost always begin an episode the same way, asking, “How did you
get to where you are today?” It’s a simple question, one that seldom
produces a simple answer but always one that is interesting. As
James and I have learned, there is no single path through life or into
a career in film. Everyone has their own story.

Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form.

JEAN-LUC GODARD

Working in the film business involves not only helping tell stories
but also stumbling across them. Here’s one that, like many others, I
wish I had filmed but remains only as a memory. I was driving back
from shooting one of my first professional jobs, a documentary in a
remote part of southern Ireland. I had followed my map down a
narrow road to a slipway. I could see the same road continue up the
bank on the other side, but between me and it lay a wide body of
water with no sign of a ferry. Gazing at me from his seat on a low
stone wall that bordered a fishing shack, blacked with tar in a vain
attempt to protect it from the weather, was an equally weather-
beaten man and his dog. I walked over and told him I was lost. He
seemed deep in thought as he lit his pipe, so I sat down and
patiently waited for him to speak. What followed was the story of his
life and what a rich life it had been: his wayward youth, his
adventures in the merchant navy, meeting the love of his life in a
strip club in London’s Soho, and so much more. Finally, he emptied
his pipe and gestured toward the fishing shack. “My parents lived
here. I was born here, and I will die here. I can’t help you get where
you are going but I wish you well. Drop by if you are this way again.”
Ironically, the documentary I had been shooting was on storytellers.
As for my own story, it would be easy to say it was my dream to
become a cinematographer from the very first time I went to the
cinema, but the truth is rather different. It was a long and gradual
process that led me to cinematography, one for which there was no
obvious career path. And it was not until I was on a film set, looking
through a camera, that I began to understand cinematography, a
learning process that is still evolving today.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
EDGAR DEGAS

As a schoolboy, I was drawn to the work of a wide variety of

artists, from William Blake to Giorgio de Chirico, Edvard Munch and
Francis Bacon to Toulouse-Lautrec, painters who sought something
more than a beautiful image. I would spend hours studying
photography in once-popular magazines such as Life or Picture
Post, or books from the “art” section of my local library. I was
mesmerized by the imagery of Julia Margaret Cameron, Walker
Evans, BrassaÏ, Bill Brandt, Jacques Henri Lartigue, André Kertész,
and Dorothea Lange. Instead of using a brush and a canvas, these
great photographers interpreted the world through their lens. But my
only experience behind a camera was when my brother, Bill, and I
were capturing ourselves with the fish we had caught, using an
ancient Kodak Box Brownie. The notion of a career with a camera
did not ever enter my mind.
I loved my hometown of Torquay, in the beautiful southwest of
England. In so many ways it was an idyllic paradise but, for all the
happy hours I’d spent wandering the beach at low tide to gather
shrimp and crabs, fishing with my dad in his small boat or simply
catching mackerel off the rocks, it had not always been a happy
place for me. I had watched those around me prepare for familiar
lives in a familiar town, and I knew it wasn’t for me. Like my Irish
acquaintance, I left Torquay with little idea what I was looking for.
Only at the age of thirty-five did I realize I had found it.

Everything you can imagine is real.

PABLO PICASSO

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 1
PARADISE
I found paradise in Devon. It was hiding behind a cloud.
UNKNOWN
My parents met during World War II. My father, William Albert
Deakins, was about to embark for Germany during the last months
of the war, and they decided to get married if and when he returned.
My mother, Josephine, was London born and had driven an
ambulance during the Blitz before serving in the Women’s Auxiliary
Air Force. My father joined up in 1939, at the age of twenty-one and
with little experience of the world beyond rural Devon, and became
an explosives expert with the Royal Engineers, serving in France
before, during, and briefly after the evacuation of Dunkirk. The
Engineers had been tasked with destroying or booby-trapping the
bridges surrounding the perimeter of the Dunkirk evacuation, to slow
down any attack that might come from Rommel and his panzer
divisions. After the evacuation was completed, my father’s small
band of engineers were told that the time had come for them to “fend
for themselves.”
Deciding their best chance was to head south toward the Spanish
border, my father and a mate fled on foot before the advance of the
German army as it took command of the Channel coast. Dodging
waves of German Stuka dive bombers, they were rescued from the
beach at Saint-Valery-sur-Somme so long after the Dunkirk
operation that my grandmother had given her son up for dead.
In 1941 Dad would join the newly formed Special Air Service,
again as an explosives expert. His first assignment took him behind
the German lines in North Africa, where the SAS made nighttime
raids on supply depots, railway lines, and airdromes from their base
inside the supposedly impassable Qattara Depression. Then,
following the Allied victory at El Alamein, he served in Sicily as one of
Major Paddy Mayne’s commandoes, tasked with disabling the clifftop
guns that threatened the Allied invasion fleet, not unlike a real-life
version of Alistair MacLean’s The Guns of Navarone.
My father had an eventful war. He would tell many stories, both of
moments he wished to forget and others that were among the best
experiences of his life.
Though my father returned to his hometown and to his father’s
painting and decorating business, the war years changed many
things for many people. It was no different for my mother. She had
little time to settle into her new life in Devon, far away from her native
city, as, sadly, she developed multiple sclerosis in 1949, the year I
was born. The disease progressed so quickly I struggle to remember
a time before she became paralyzed. I can readily recall my father
carrying her from our car to the beach or across the moors for a
picnic, but I find it impossible to conjure up a picture of her walking.
As her paralysis progressed, my mother was accepted for tests at
Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire, some two hundred
miles and six hours away. My father would drive us there for visits,
and one evening we watched a play put on by the hospital staff. It
was a corny story about a wife waiting for a husband who was away
at war. I remember the lead actress placing a lamp on the window at
sunset so that her character’s husband could find his way home in
the dark, but I have no idea what happened after that. We left, with
my mother in tears. I was maybe five or six at the time. Only later did
I realize it wasn’t the story that overwhelmed her but the picture of
her life as it might have been. In her youth my mother had been a
model with a burgeoning career as an actress on the London stage,
but that was way before I was born. She never talked to me about
her role as an understudy to Anna Neagle, or her brief appearance in
the 1939 film Too Dangerous to Live. In fact, I knew little about her
once-exotic city life until many years after her death.
 When my mother became bedridden, I would sit by her side as
she delicately painted the birds that came to a feeder outside the
window, while I concentrated on drawing my dinosaurs, copying
them from the latest National Geographic magazine. In the last few
years of her life, when she could no longer hold a brush, I saw her
less and less frequently. But I would often hear her. During the night,
when my father tried to comfort her, she would scream, “I wish I were
dead!” My final memory of her is looking down from the top of the
stairs as she was wheeled away for the last time. She died in 1958,
at the age of forty-one.
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 Yet a picture of my mother that dates from before I was born has
followed me throughout my life. It’s an image of her at a funfair in
Southend-on-Sea, taken by the photographer Kurt Hutton in 1938.
Rising from the seat of a ride called the Caterpillar, her dress open to
the wind like Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, she looks
young and carefree, a side of my mother I never had a chance to
experience.
When my father showed me the photo it seemed very familiar, but
I would not have known it was her if he hadn’t told me. First
published in the October 1938 issue of Picture Post, the image has
since taken on a life of its own. My mother seems to keep an eye on
me, as I often see the picture in the most unlikely places. At the
National Film School, it appeared on a poster advertising a London
photo exhibition. In 1994 it appeared in the Santa Monica shopping
mall, her face blown up to cover a full two floors. In 2003 she
appeared on the cover of a book entitled Woman: A Celebration, and
on a day off from shooting 1917 in Glasgow, I spotted the same
photograph in a pub on the east coast of Scotland. There was my
mother, frozen forever in an expression of joy.

Photography can only represent the present. Once

photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Both my older brother, William, and I were more than a little

confused by our mother’s death, a confusion only made worse when
my father almost instantly remarried. My stepmother was, I am told,
my mother’s best friend but, as she lived in London, we had never
met. My grandparents had died, and I am sure my dad was petrified
at the thought of raising his two young sons by himself. I can’t blame
him in the least for looking for a partner. I don’t remember my
stepmother’s name or much else about her, other than she drank
large amounts of whisky during the afternoons while sitting in front of
the television. A lit cigarette rarely left her lips. One day I came home
from school to find the house empty. She had recently replaced our
furniture with her own, and now that too was gone. When my father
came home from work, he appeared as surprised as I was but also, I
sensed, relieved. It had been many years since we had been as
close as we were that evening, sitting on some upturned wooden
crates and watching a film, probably a gangster film with Alan Ladd
and Veronica Lake, on a television that was about all we had left.
In the summer break from school, I would work on one of my
father’s building sites, sometimes helping to fix a leaky roof—which I
remember most clearly, as I have a fear of heights—other times as a
bricklayer’s gofer or as a general odd-jobs apprentice. I loved
working with such a diverse group of characters who took real
pleasure in the jobs they did, but the work itself was not for me. As
his business began to fail, my father worked longer and longer hours
trying to outrun the inevitable. I am sure he felt I would eventually
follow in his footsteps. So, partly for this reason and partly through
loyalty to his employees, he continued to pay four or five specialist
tradesmen year after year without making a profit for himself.

Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded

forever.
ISHMAEL, IN MOBY DICK BY HERMAN MELVILLE

Otherwise, I spent much of my time fishing. In the spring I would

be down on the seashore before school and back again in the
evening. Being by myself, the simple pleasure of watching a sunrise
over the sea informed my childhood: the shadows cast across the
water by passing clouds, the fin of a basking shark idly slicing
through the surface (there were a great many when I was a kid), the
shrill call of an oystercatcher announcing the arrival of spring, or a
ganett diving on its prey.
It was only in my teenage years that I grew to enjoy the company
of a group of like-minded friends, all of whom were older than me
and already working for a living. Peter was a hairdresser, Luke a
signwriter, Phil a shoemaker, Martin a house painter, and Graham a
onetime champion motorbike racer who worked at the local china
clay quarry. In the autumn months I might ride passenger with
Graham through the narrow lanes of Devon to find remote,
untouched fishing spots, or a group of us might spend the night
fishing for conger eels, lighting a fire to cook some mackerel while
watching the skies for Yuri Gagarin and UFOs.
On winter evenings our group might be seen fishing off the harbor
breakwater or holed up in the sea anglers’ clubhouse to keep warm
while sharing a beer or two. Or more. In Devon, recreation revolved
around drinking, and what was true for aimless youth was just as
true for the adults around us. Late one night, while walking around
the harbor on my way home, I came face-to-face with my math
teacher, who was weaving toward me from the opposite direction. I
worried about meeting him at such a late time of night and me
having had an “underage” drink, but I had no need. It was well past
closing time, and he was hardly in a state to recognize me. I was
glad he was a no-show at school the following day, though I did feel
sorry for him when I read the evening paper. Shortly after we
crossed paths, my teacher had fallen in the harbor. It was only by
chance that someone was there, sober enough, to fish him out.
After playing at the Town Hall in 1964, Mick Jagger of the Rolling
Stones described Torquay as “a great town. But I shouldn’t think
there’s much to do in the winter.” He was being polite. The winters
could be grim, but summers in Torquay were alive with tourists and
music. Eric Clapton and the Yardbirds came that same summer,
while The Who followed them to the Town Hall in 1966, only for Pete
Townshend to smash his guitar onstage and start a fire.
At the height of the summer season, the town could also be
rough. I was at a social gathering for visiting foreign students at a
local church hall when the vicar was viciously stabbed, as was the
manager of a club I occasionally drank in after the pubs had closed.
On leaving a concert by the Kinks at Torquay Town Hall with my
brother and a friend, we got into a fight with some sailors from a
naval warship anchored in Torbay. It climaxed with my friend being
thrown through the front window of a shop displaying TV sets. He
ended up sitting among the televisions surrounded by broken glass
but, amazingly, without a scratch on him.
 My brother eventually settled down to work in my dad’s hardware
store, finding religion in a church that seemed to me more akin to a
doomsday cult. Later in life, when I was living in London, I attempted
to deal with my own lingering anger at our mother’s death through
twice-weekly visits to a therapist—until he gave up his practice,
informing me in parting that he just couldn’t take all the sad stories
he was having to listen to every day, mine included. I believe he left
London and joined a commune in the wilds of Scotland, which
seemed like a good idea.
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 There’s a funny little cat / With a tummy nice and fat. / He’s
won picture fame… / Felix is his name.
“FELIX KEPT ON WALKING” BY ED. E. BRYANT (LYRICS) AND HUBERT W.
DAVID (MUSIC)

Images of Felix the Cat (the first animated film star), Mickey
Mouse, and Popeye might well be my earliest memories. My brother
and I would climb up a rickety wooden ladder to the dusty, low-
ceilinged attic where my father readied the projector he had brought
back from Germany at the end of the war. Afraid of heights, I
dreaded the climb, but what I experienced there in the dark helped
me overcome my fear. The machinery would whir, the light would
flicker, and Felix or Popeye would come to life. Reels of cartoons
could be rented from our local post office and came with a film
splicer, which was just as well, as our projector would snap the film
and leave it with more taped-over breaks than clean frames. My
favorites, such as Felix the Cat at the North Pole or Mickey’s debut
film, Steamboat Willie, were from the 1920s, but some things never
get old.
Like many in the UK, my father had bought our first black-and-
white TV set to watch the Queen’s coronation in 1953. Until he
began to spend all his time at work, in the evenings and on
weekends we would watch films together, American noir with such
great titles as The Asphalt Jungle, Kiss of Death, On Dangerous
Ground, They Live by Night, or, my favorite of them all, In a Lonely
Place. But as time went on, my brother and I were left to our own
devices.
 There were then five cinemas within walking distance of Torquay
town center, including the Empire, the Odeon, the Colony Cinema
(the first in town to be equipped with CinemaScope, when it was still
known as the Electric Theatre), and the Tudor (now a family-run
museum filled with antiques). This meant I always had a wide range
of films to choose from. Options on any given weekend could include
the latest Carry On film (in which I had little interest), Anthony
Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire, Peter Sellers in I’m All Right
Jack, Zulu starring Michael Caine, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove
(it’s hard to put into words the effect that film had on me at the time),
and even an occasional import from Italy or France. On our first date,
a girlfriend asked to see The Sound of Music and proceeded to cry
through almost the entire film. The power of film?
Beyond its proper cinemas Torquay was also briefly home to a
film club that showed films on a portable 16 mm projector in the
beautiful Art Deco showrooms of the Gas Board on Torquay’s high
street. The first films I remember seeing there? Jean-Luc Godard’s
dystopian Alphaville, Chris Marker’s post-apocalypse La Jetée, and
Peter Watkins’s The War Game, which staged the effects of a
nuclear explosion over London in horrifying detail. Using grainy
black-and-white images captured by handheld cameras, The War
Game exposed the sheer pointlessness of the British government’s
planning in case of nuclear attack. Two women who were sitting in
the front row of the mock-up cinema fainted when the bomb
exploded over the East End. Reactions such as theirs pressured the
BBC to ban the film for the next twenty-five years.
Harrowing as The War Game was, I considered myself lucky to
have seen it. I had watched Sergei Eisenstein’s agitprop
masterpiece Battleship Potemkin by then, with its famous montage
scene of the massacre of civilians on the Odessa Steps, but found
The War Game even more remarkable in both its content and its
filmmaking. Not every film had to be a fairy tale or beautiful to look
at. It could also be angry; the camera could shake, and the image
could be grainy. In 1967, Watkins’s film won the Academy Award for
best documentary, which always struck me as curious. The whole
film was made with nonactors and staged as if a report on events
that were real, but was it a documentary? Either way, there’s no
other film quite like it today. Perhaps we really have learned how to
love the bomb?
My bleak view of life was not helped by the news that dominated
the ’60s, but despite my occasionally excessive drinking and all the
days and nights spent fishing rather than in study, I did well at
school. I even topped the religious studies class without attending a
single lesson. I asked that we study both Buddhism and Karl Marx
alongside the Bible and was sent to stand in the corridor for my sins.
When it came time to join the outside world, I didn’t have the
slightest clue what I would do. My headmaster and a career
guidance counselor suggested I seek employment in a bank.
Whether I was inspired by my father’s stories of foreign lands or a
need to leave some bitter memories behind, I became desperate to
leave home. I loved film, but film was not a career choice. It was
simply something that other people did.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an

artist once he grows up.
ATTRIBUTED TO PABLO PICASSO

I spent many of my school hours painting pictures of things I had

observed: a lonely woman waiting on a station platform with a child
in her arms, an elderly couple in a park shelter, or simply the waves
crashing on a beach. My art teacher, George Roper, was nicknamed
“Stringer” for the way he would twist a noncompliant pupil’s hair.
(The French teacher was called “Hitler” for similar reasons. French
was the only exam I failed, and I had the bruises to prove it.) Mr.
Roper was not only a brilliant watercolorist but the only person who
impressed on me that life was short, and I should be sure to find
what I wanted to do with it.
More to avoid a job at the bank or return to the building site than
anything else, I decided to apply for a place at a university or an art
college. But by the time I dragged myself away from fishing for long
enough to decide where to apply, it was too late for a university
place. Art college—which, as the name suggests, was entirely
devoted to painting, sculpture, pottery, printmaking, and graphic
design—was my only option. After a rejection from my first-choice
school for, somehow, being “academically too well qualified,” my
father helped me find one that was still open to applications: Bath
Academy of Art. For the first year of study, a prediploma year, I
would have to pay my own way, but I would be able to obtain a grant
if I continued on to the three-year diploma course. The paintings I
had done at school under the guidance of Mr. Roper secured me a
place, and my father agreed to an advance on the wages he would
pay me for future work I would do on one of his building sites. He still
fantasized I would come to my senses, get this “art thing” out of my
system, and straighten out for good.

Let me ask you something, what is not art?

ATTRIBUTED TO EDGAR DEGAS

Bath Academy, then based in Corsham, Wiltshire, was very much

an “art” college. The first winter I experienced there in 1968 was very
cold and it snowed heavily. But that didn’t deter one student in the
fine arts department from arranging his bed on the lawn outside the
administration building and lying down on it naked to become just
another snowdrift. It might have been his form of expression, but
maybe I was in the right department after all. It was in the graphic
design department where I first discovered I had a skill for
composing a photograph and, more important, that this gave me
creative satisfaction. Both things are related. Why would you develop
a skill if you found no satisfaction from exercising that skill? There
were a number of inspirational tutors who found their way to the
college, such as the painter Michael Craig-Martin, the concrete poet
John Furnival, and printmaker Jack Shirreff, but it was through the
photographer Roger Mayne that I discovered my pleasure in taking
pictures.

If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never
 going to get others to feel anything when they look at your
pictures.
DON MCCULLIN

But photography was not a recognized discipline at Bath

Academy of Art—and, of course, I was not Roger Mayne. Most
people would have seen Roger’s historic documentary-style
photography of London’s Southam Street, if nowhere else, on the
cover of a Morrissey single or Colin MacInnes’s novel Absolute
Beginners. But great photographer that he was, even he needed the
income from a teaching position to survive (Roger would say he
couldn’t teach anyone how to take a photograph). It was a fantasy
that I could make a living with the kind of photography that interested
me. I was drawn to photojournalism rather than the world of
advertising and graphic design. I had no interest in helping to sell
vacuum cleaners or dishwashers. Between classes, I stole off with
the darkroom key to have a copy made at the local hardware store. I
wanted to work on my own projects at night, without the distraction
that comes from a room full of students. During the day, I would
hitchhike to Bristol and spend hours photographing the city’s
backstreets, or to Bournemouth, where I’d sleep on the beach to
shoot yesterday’s abandoned deckchairs silhouetted against the
sunrise. I photographed Corsham’s stately buildings and avenues of
trees at night, using lengthy exposures and the multiple flashes of a
borrowed battery-powered flash unit. On nights I was not taking
photos or watching the moon landings on the common-room TV, I
was often working in the darkroom.
The presence of an art college in Corsham inspired the opening
of a small independent cinema, which would show both
contemporary films and some of the major classics by directors such
as Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, and
Francois Truffaut. But it was the more angry and visceral films, such
as Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterpiece Army of Shadows or Sam
Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, that left me in awe of what could be
achieved by a master of the craft. Westerns had begun to change
dramatically in the 1960s, and though I loved Sergio Leone’s The
Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West, it
was The Wild Bunch, set in a violent, rapidly changing American
West before World War I, that felt especially relevant to the world of
Vietnam and the Manson murders. As Peckinpah was to say of John
Huston, he “tried not only to tell a story but to make some kind of
statement.” My father loved Westerns, especially any that starred
either Joel McCrea or Randolph Scott, so Ride the High Country
(also called Guns in the Afternoon) was a favorite of his. I’d also
seen the much-underrated Major Dundee in the cinema. But it wasn’t
until I was at college that I connected these three films to the
singular vision of one director.
As graduation approached, few options for my future presented
themselves. I’d discovered a love for still photography and had
begun to consider pursuing documentary filmmaking as a natural
extension of that work. But that seemed like a daydream. There was
the rumor of an old 16 mm film camera somewhere deep inside the
college vaults, but I had failed in my attempts to even set my eyes on
it. After all, I was at an art school, and neither film nor photography
were art. Which is probably why, to this day, I have a problem with
the word “art.”
My belief in myself was diminished even further when I went in
search of a part-time summer job as an alternative to my father’s
building site. I applied to be a beach photographer on the Torquay
seafront, taking Polaroid pictures for tourists enjoying their summer
holidays. Shortly after I was rejected for that job, an advertisement
for Smirnoff vodka appeared on billboards across the country. It
showed a young man, obviously a film director, beside a movie
camera. He was smoking a cigar and accompanied by a beautiful girl
holding a clipboard. A caption read, “I was a struggling beach
photographer until I discovered Smirnoff.” The picture seemed to say
it all. I was not even that struggling beach photographer.
 Bath Academy’s rather imposing principal, Rosemary Ellis, offered
little hope when we met to discuss my future. I confessed to her that
I had no idea what I would be doing in the real world, but I knew it
would in no way involve a bank or graphic design. She asked me
why I had attended art college in the first place if not to pursue a
career in art and design. I had no answer.

Whoever wants to know something about me… they should

look attentively at my pictures and there seek to recognize
what I am and what I want.
GUSTAV KLIMT

It was only by chance that a fellow student read of an exciting

opportunity. The National Film School, a unique government-
sponsored institution, now known as the National Film and Television
School, was set to open in Beaconsfield, to the north of London. Its
first class would consist of twenty-five students seeking training for
the film industry. It seemed like a pretty good idea, but with only
twenty-five places available I did not have high expectations. In truth,
loving film was probably not the only reason for me to apply to the
NFS, as my fear of a nine-to-five job still haunted me.
What had I to lose?
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 2
A SECOND CHANCE
Filmic: Relating to or characteristic of motion pictures
DICTIONARY.COM DEFINITION
After getting my rejection letter in the summer of 1971, I called
for an appointment with the head of the film school, Colin Young,
and took the train to London to ask him why. I was so nervous. I was
shaking by the time I walked into our meeting. All I remember was
having a strange discussion with Colin as to what makes an image
“filmic.” He pointed to a framed photograph of a dray horse on the
wall behind his desk: “That is filmic!” The image was taken with a
long exposure so the horse and the cart it was pulling were blurred
while the background was sharp. It’s out of focus! How is that filmic?
I expected I had blown my chance but, as I left, I was met by Tony
Gurrin, who would become head of the school’s sound department.
He assured me if I applied again next year, I would be offered a
place. I caught the train back to Corsham with a little more hope
while trying, without success, to decipher what Colin had said. To
this day I cannot define “filmic.”
But what to do for a year?
Again, I was called to the office of Rosemary Ellis, this time not to
receive a reprimand for wasting my place at her college, but to
suggest a job as a photographer. An arts center in North Devon, run
by her friend John Lane, wanted to create a contemporary
photographic record of the area and of a way of life that had
changed little since the end of the war but was now rapidly catching
up with the outside world. Or, more correctly, the outside world had
begun rapidly taking over North Devon in the shape of tourism and
holiday homes.
I remain immensely grateful to Rosemary for guiding me to the
Beaford Arts Centre. I was not the ideal person to take on the
project, which needed someone far more self-confident and outgoing
than me. But I did my best, and in hindsight, my initial rejection by
the National Film School was a blessing in disguise. The year I spent
wandering the country lanes of North Devon offered me the perfect
space in which to gather my thoughts and to find my eye, which is a
pretentious way of saying to record images that reflected the world I
was looking at in the way that I saw it. I discovered how pictures
could tell a story and that it was the stories that drew me to create
pictures.
As Tony Gurrin had assured me, my second application to the
National Film School, which included a script I had written about a
homeless woman in Torquay as well as photographs from North
Devon, was accepted. But the school—a campus built around
Beaconsfield Studios, a place whose glory days were well behind it
by 1972—was hardly what I expected. The studio had been in
operation since the silent era and once served as home to the Crown
Film Unit, which began making government-sponsored
documentaries during World War II. It continued in that role until the
newly elected Conservative government shuttered the unit in 1952.
But, despite the studio’s prestigious history and its newfound
purpose, it was in a dilapidated state when I arrived. I felt lucky not to
have been accepted as one of the National Film School’s first
twenty-five students.
 If I knew how to take a good photograph, I’d do it every
time.
ROBERT DOISNEAU

Though the school hadn’t really been ready to open, its founding
director, Colin Young, had seized the moment, while there was a
Labour government backing the project. Born in Glasgow, Colin had
served as head of UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television
beginning in the mid-’60s, when its students included Francis Ford
Coppola, Paul Schrader, Haskell Wexler, and other future luminaries.
Through the NFS he hoped to provide British filmmakers with similar
educational opportunities.
I doubt even Colin’s most dedicated students at UCLA spent as
much time in the studio as some of my film school classmates and I
did, though this was at first more by necessity than by choice. My
tuition fees were again paid by my local council, and I had a little
spending money left from my year as a photographer. Even though I
decided to live near the studio rather than in London, I still could not
pay Beaconsfield rent. Some fellow students found themselves in a
similar bind. Happily, there were some unused offices on the studio
lot. Why not sleep on their floors?
It was the perfect solution, if an unsanitary one, at least at first.
Within a short time, the school supplied us with beds and bedding
and fixed up the bathroom facilities. The NFS also supplied lunch on
weekdays, so I would need only to account for supper, which usually
consisted of a pint and a pie at the local pub, or a fish-and-chip
takeaway. On weekends, while most every other student left for
London or home, I stuck around.
Despite Beaconsfield Studio’s ramshackle condition, the school
had, by its second year, been supplied with most of the necessities
of filmmaking. There was an array of camera and lighting equipment.
The stages were basic and probably not up to today’s strict safety
codes, but they worked. We were not instructed in how to use all the
equipment, as the course—or what course there was—was not so
technically oriented. We made our first short films using 16 mm
cameras, taking turns at directing, shooting, recording sound, and
other tasks, learning as we went. Colin very much believed in leaving
students to their own devices. Once I became familiar with how the
equipment operated, I grew to like the anarchic nature of the school.
Which isn’t to say we learned everything on our own. One of my
most valuable lessons came from Charles Lagus, though I didn’t fully
realize it at the time. A cameraman who’d worked on the ’60s police
procedural Z Cars, Lagus charged us with lighting a set that
represented a backstage dressing room with multiple makeup
mirrors, each of which was outlined by the familiar pattern of bare
light bulbs. He left after setting the exercise up, asking Charles
Stewart, famous for his work with Ken Loach and on the
documentary series World in Action, to take over during his absence.
I had decided that the lighting was quite fine as it was, but Stewart
suggested that we were not working on a documentary. On a feature
I would have to light the scene.
So, light it I did. I wasn’t unhappy with what I had done, but it all
felt a little unnecessary. Then Lagus returned. “That’s nice, but it
looked pretty good to me with just the natural light coming from the
practical bulbs,” he said, “Just because you can light the shot doesn’t
mean you should, or you must.” It was amusing that the
documentary veteran expected narrative films to have an obviously
artificial look. But Lagus’s advice was probably the most important
lesson I learned while at the National Film School.
Over the length of the course, we were each allowed a large sum
of money—our training was said to cost the same as for a jet pilot—
to invest in our own productions or contribute to the productions of
our fellow students. Most students used the opportunity to make a
film that would gain them employment in the outside world, a
showreel if you like, and because of that they would look for the best
craftspeople to work with them on their projects. As I had no
experience, I could not expect to be one of the chosen few, so I
decided I would make my own.
I shot my first effort, a short documentary about the homeless
veterans who’d gather at the Salvation Army in London’s Waterloo
neighborhood, on Super 8. For the soundtrack, I had my girlfriend at
the time sing the World War I standard “When This Lousy War Is
Over.” My second film was a 16 mm black-and-white short that I
directed with the same girlfriend playing an actress who was
readying herself to go onstage and having a nervous breakdown, an
interesting exercise as she was an actress herself.
 For a third project I returned to the Devon countryside to film a
documentary about the Tiverton Stag Hunt, which I called A Farmer’s
Hunt. Stag hunting, like all hunting with hounds, had become
controversial by the early 1970s. It’s a topic about which I have
mixed feelings. Intellectually, I’m against it. But I’ve also seen the
important role such hunts have played in rural society, uniting the
community in a big event. As with my photographs, I wanted to
document a tradition before it disappeared.

Film is a reflection of the world we live in, not an escape

from it.
SAM PECKINPAH

Still waiting for other students to ask for my “expertise,” I decided

to try my hand at directing my own fictional story. I had often
imagined what all those old people who retire to the seaside would
talk about all day, so I wrote some Pinteresque dialogue for two
women as they sat together on a bench facing the beach. I hired two
well-known London theater actresses to play the parts, and a friend
agreed to record sound. Very early one morning my friend and I
drove to the seaside in a van with the two actresses we had
arranged to meet in the West End. It was soon obvious that my
“cast” felt they were slumming it (as they most certainly were) and
didn’t care too much for the notes from their director. But I
persevered. After a couple of takes in which all I could hear was
“acting,” I suggested they just read the lines. “Imagine you are
reading from the telephone directory.” The result was so deadpan it
was perfect, exactly what I had in mind. It’s also probably why this
was my last directing gig!
With this short drama I had now photographed four very different
films. My camerawork on these led directing students to hire me as
their cinematographer and, by the time I finally left film school in
1976, I’d shot fifteen films. These varied considerably in content and
tone and included everything from a 35 mm comedy short shot in
Switzerland, to a poetic exploration of the work of the painter Paolo
Uccello, to a documentary about the development of a park in the
East End of London. I even shot a gangster film, inspired by Jean-
Pierre Melville’s Le cercle rouge and Le deuxième souffle, though
our film paled in comparison.
I left in 1975 well prepared for a job in the film business. But what
job? And where? One bit of advice I received took me aback. A
governor of the school suggested I seek work as a production
assistant in Plymouth, at the local television station closest to
Torquay. With luck and hard work, he suggested, I might make my
way up to camera operator in seven or eight years. Whether this was
a serious suggestion or a deliberate attempt to rile me up I have no
idea, but within a decade I’d worked as a cinematographer on a film
the governor in question produced. Whether it was intentionally
motivational or not, to this day I am indebted to David Puttnam for
giving me such uninspiring advice. Instead of Plymouth I decided to
try my luck in London.
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OceanofPDF.com
I was and still am not someone comfortable among strangers, but
having no money can be a tremendous source of motivation. During
one of my attempts to scare up work, I stumbled on an opportunity
that was far bigger than I expected. Having knocked on a door
unannounced, I was ushered into the offices of one of the
independent production companies that then peppered Soho,
servicing industrial documentaries and what were once called “pop
promos,” later referred to as “music videos.” Its director, Chris Boger,
agreed to watch a tape of my work at that very moment. This was
unusual. He turned to me after what felt like half an hour of silence. “I
think your work’s great, but I’m not doing any pop promos at the
moment.” I began to wonder if I’d wasted my time. But, at least, I
could reflect on overcoming my nerves to get this far. As I rose to
leave, Chris added, “I’m doing my first feature film.”
“Well, let me shoot that,” I said, seizing the moment. Thanks to
some recent work I’d done on a corporate documentary, I had a
union ticket (much to the despair of the union hierarchy, whose
president had made an agreement with the National Film School—if
you get a job you get a ticket), a necessary requirement to join a
professional production, even a low-budget one such as this. After
taking a moment to consider what I had said, Chris offered me the
job right there and then. I was twenty-seven, and it seemed too good
to be true!
It was only after I’d accepted the job that I learned what the
project was. Cruel Passion was what might be called soft porn,
though its literary source material, Marquis de Sade’s 1791 novel
Justine, set it apart from Confessions of a Window Cleaner or the
Carry On series. I left the meeting elated at the opportunity and
confident in my ability to pull it off but also wondering what I’d gotten
myself into. Luckily for me, the start date was extremely close, giving
me little time to worry, especially once Chris and I began scouting
out locations, assembling a team, and planning what we would shoot
and where. In seemingly no time, I found myself in my car and on my
way to the first day of shooting.
Both then and now, I aim to arrive on set before the general crew
call, to allow myself some quiet time to prepare myself mentally for
the challenges ahead. I see it as disrespectful of the cast and crew
to arrive late and to arrive unprepared. (Later in my career, I worked
with a director who was habitually late to set and often unaware of
the scenes we would be scheduled to shoot. After the film turned out
well, which was a testament to the cast and crew that supported him,
he called me to talk about his next project. Having arranged to meet
for coffee, he arrived more than forty-five minutes late. The first thing
he asked me: Could I work faster?)
For our first day on Cruel Passion, a one-room cottage had been
constructed among the trees on the backlot at Bray Studios, where
many Hammer Film productions had been shot in previous decades.
I had not seen the set before that day, so I was using my early arrival
to consider what I’d need to light it. Two other crew members, many
years older than me, arrived a few moments later. They introduced
themselves to each other as the first assistant director and the
standby set carpenter. Neither took notice of me. Then they began to
talk about the ex–film school student who had been hired by the
director and would obviously be gone within a week. He was not only
lighting the picture but also operating the camera. What was the
industry coming to? If my body hadn’t been frozen in fear I would
have surely gone home.
The first AD turned to me, and only then did he ask who I was. I
blurted out that I was the ex–film school student. Then I turned to the
carpenter to ask that he rig a spreader between the walls of the set
and as close as possible to the ceiling. I required this beam to hold a
maximum of two small open-face lamps, so there was no need for
anything substantial. Turning back to the first AD, I requested he
send a runner to the local pharmacy to get me some aspirin. When
the carpenter and the first AD left, still well before the crew call time,
I looked around for a secluded place in which to throw up.
The rest of the first day went fairly well, although I found I had
good cause to be nervous—just not for the reasons I’d anticipated.
Later in the schedule I almost burnt to a cinder while filming a
graveyard dream sequence. An overzealous effects supervisor
loaded a coffin with plastic bags filled with gasoline which, had they
all ignited, would have blown away anyone standing within fifty feet
of the grave. As it was, my camera crew and I were briefly engulfed
in a dramatic fireball, which, luckily for production, we captured on
film. It was after episodes like that the more hardened, long-time film
workers began to accept me, if not respect me.
I could not have known it at the time, but my experience of
working with few resources at the National Film School prepared me
for some of the other challenges of Cruel Passion. Much of the film
took place in candlelit spaces, so I needed to create the effect of
flickering flames. While there are now many reflective materials
made expressly for film use, they didn’t exist in the 1970s. Instead, I
used thermal blankets, the kind that you use if you’re going on an
expedition. Crinkling them as I bounced light off their reflective
surfaces created a convincing firelight effect. With limited resources,
I had to ask myself, “How can I do this cheaply and with something I
could find at a hardware store or a haberdashery?” Even now,
working with much bigger budgets, I find that’s often still the best
solution.
Released in some parts of the world as The Marquis de Sade’s
Justine or simply Justine, Cruel Passion starred Koo Stark, who
would later become a tabloid fixture thanks to her relationship with
Prince Andrew, and later still a respected photographer. On one
memorable day, an October day and as cold as hell, Koo was
required to fall seminude into a lake as her character attempted an
escape from what were in reality the director’s Doberman pinschers.
Getting the shot required me to film her while sitting alone in a
rowboat. By the time we were done, Koo was all but a block of ice. I
had to fish her out before she was. Like the rest of us, maybe even
more than the rest of us, she experienced the discomforts of low-
budget filmmaking firsthand.
When posters for Cruel Passion began to appear in London, I
found myself hoping my name wasn’t on them. But in truth, I would
have still taken the job. It’s not a film I would do now, but back then, I
really needed a break. Within a few months of leaving the National
Film School, I’d gotten a chance to work as a professional. I had no
idea at the time, however, it would be the last narrative feature I’d
work on for the next six years.

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 3
AROUND THE WORLD
A tourist with a typewriter.
CHARLIE MEADOWS, IN BARTON FINK
Moving into documentaries wasn’t part of any grand design for
my career, but it undoubtedly helped that I had a passion for them.
My passion and that the UK feature film industry in the 1970s (Cruel
Passion notwithstanding) remained something of a closed shop to
anyone who had not worked their way up through the grades.
Documentary filmmaking, on the other hand, was another story.
British documentaries came into their own in the 1960s and ’70s,
thanks to groundbreaking shows such as the investigative news
program World in Action, the globetrotting cultural anthropology
series Disappearing World, and a boom in films about social issues.
What’s more, their producers were more open to working with recent
film school grads with relatively short résumés—and even smaller
salaries.
While my focus had been on still photography, I aspired to
become a photojournalist. Film school didn’t squelch that ambition so
much as transfer it from a still frame to a moving image, thanks in
large part to Colin Young’s emphasis on documentary filmmaking. I
admired the work of filmmakers like Albert and David Maysles and D.
A. Pennebaker, whose use of lighter cameras and synchronized
sound popularized the cinema verité movement in the 1960s. I
especially loved the long observational films of Frederick Wiseman
and those of French director Jean Rouch. His 1961 documentary,
Chronicle of a Summer, opens with a discussion between Rouch,
codirector Edgar Morin (who coined the term “cinema verité”), and
fellow filmmaker and Holocaust survivor Marceline Loridan-Ivens
about whether it was possible for subjects to be themselves on
camera if they knew they were being filmed. I’d think about that
scene a lot during the next few years.
My first job on leaving the film school had been with another film
school veteran, director Ben Lewin, and sound recordist Eddie Tise
(both destined for long film careers) on Welcome to Britain. It was a
look at the British immigration system shot verité style, centering
around the work of Reuben “Mr. Fixit” Davis, who would arrange a
sweatshop job in the garment district of London, as well as a visa
through a fake marriage, for immigrants from Pakistan and
elsewhere.

Seeing is different than being told.

AFRICAN PROVERB

My second assignment would involve covering a different sort of

confrontation. A filmmaker and activist, Antonia Caccia, conceived
Chimurenga—The War in Zimbabwe as a firsthand look at the
Rhodesian Bush War, a years-long struggle for control of the country
now known as Zimbabwe. As with her previous film, Last Grave at
Dimbaza, the first to document apartheid in South Africa, Antonia
received funding from the African National Congress, the chief
opponent of South Africa’s government. That film made her persona
non grata in both Rhodesia and South Africa, but she had a
workaround: pair a two-person film crew with a journalist who would
work under the cover of shooting a wildlife documentary.
It briefly looked like the film would fall apart. Sound recordist
Diana Ruston and I set off to meet with a journalist in the Rhodesian
capital of Salisbury (now Harare) and create a plan together. Nothing
in film school prepared me to be a covert operative but, when our
initial contact was thrown out of the country, Diana and I were left
stranded in the unfamiliar capital city of a country in the grip of a civil
war, with nothing but sketchy credentials as cover.
Enter Bruce Palling. Now a widely respected food writer, Bruce
was familiar with dangerous locales, having spent time covering the
Vietnam War. Somehow, the ANC connected us and we arranged to
meet at a café in the city. We found Bruce, sitting at a table among a
group of war correspondents discussing their work. The Bush War
was winding down. There would be a settlement soon. The story was
getting stale. Where would each of them go for their next front page?
Lebanon seemed the favorite.
Why were we, two wildlife filmmakers, sitting in full view of the
street with this group of cynical war correspondents? Wouldn’t it
appear suspicious? It seemed a crazy way to start but, having met
up with Bruce, we discussed our options. Our permits allowed us to
film in game parks and animal reserves in the north and west of
Rhodesia, but all Bruce’s acquaintances resided elsewhere. It would
have to do.
First, we drove our bright yellow rental car (inconspicuous in its
conspicuousness) to Fort Victoria (now called Masvingo) to film the
Great Zimbabwe National Monument, the ruins of a Bantu city dating
from the eleventh century. Despite its well-documented history, the
ardent white supremacist prime minister Ian Smith had deemed
Great Zimbabwe to have been built by the Arabs rather than by
indigenous Africans. The government’s racism went so deep it
wanted to rewrite history to suit its vision of the world. Next, we
traveled toward the city of Bulawayo, stopping on the way at a small
motel for the night.
We ordered a meal at the bar and got talking with the owner of
the place, who was a longtime resident of the country. He left us as
we sat down to eat and only reappeared as we were about to turn in
for the night. Transformed from a chatty barman to a soldier in
uniform, albeit a rather sloppy one, he placed his high-powered rifle
behind the bar and asked if we wanted a drink, seemingly eager to
tell anyone who might listen what he had been up to. As he
described it, it had been a successful night’s work. He and some
friends had been in the bush hunting Kaffirs, their name for the
ZANU nationalists, as if it were just another day at the office. We
quickly left the next morning for Bulawayo, where our interview
subjects included a girl who could only watch as the security forces
raided her family home; swinging her cat around their heads, they
beat the poor animal to a pulp against the wall.
We headed east, in the opposite direction to the game parks we
were supposed to be filming. The white European settlers typically
traveled in armed convoys, but we felt this would draw attention
toward us. And, besides, wouldn’t a convoy be a more substantial
target for a band of armed guerrillas than a vehicle traveling alone,
however boldly colored? As we drove, Bruce suggested the three of
us had to make some tough choices. Should we drive as fast as
possible in expectation of an armed attack? (Yes!) Should we slow
down on dirt roads that might contain IEDs? (There was no
consensus on this one!) And what about when a dirt road split into
multiple choices? The Vietcong, Bruce told us, would place a stick at
a fork in the road to tell any of their number which direction was safe.
Were Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU or Robert Mugabe’s ZANU freedom
fighters using the same tactics? If we found a stick, would we even
be able to tell which direction it indicated? Or was it simply a stick?
Somehow, close to the border with Mozambique, we reached a
mission station hospital run by a doctor whom Bruce had met in
Vietnam. An elderly farmer was sitting on his sickbed, in the midst of
telling us how he had been abused by government forces, when he
suddenly stood up and gestured toward the window. “You should be
filming them!” he cried. Outside, among the trees, we saw dozens of
Rhodesian soldiers, many wearing ski masks and in camouflage,
marching toward Mozambique both armed and ready for combat. We
then heard planes passing overhead and flying east. We’d arrived on
the day Rhodesian troops engaged in their first major raid on ZANU
training camps on the other side of the border. We were miles from
where we were supposed to be, so to avoid endangering the mission
station staff or their patients had we been discovered, we left as
quietly as we could. We had been lucky up to now, but it wouldn’t
last.
While staying for a night on a farm owned by another of Bruce’s
more liberal friends, but temporarily managed by an Afrikaner, we
woke to the sound of soldiers surrounding the farmhouse. The
manager had decided to inform the local authorities that he
suspected the so-called wildlife photographers staying with him were
not who they claimed to be. We were under arrest for being in a
restricted area and told to follow the army convoy back to its base in
Chipinga, where we faced the guardhouse.
Fortunately, none of the troops joined us in our now-well-traveled
yellow rental car and, fearing the soldiers would impound our footage
and target our interview subjects, we gathered our sound tapes and
film reels, intending to bury them somewhere, anywhere, alongside
the road. When our military escort disappeared behind a sharp bend,
we seized the opportunity. I dumped our material inside a storm
drain and quickly covered it with dried grass before scurrying back to
the car. We hit the accelerator and rounded the bend to fall in line
behind our captors. Thankfully, they seemed none the wiser.
To our surprise, we weren’t jailed but given comfortable
accommodation and invited by the soldiers to join them for drinks at
the bar. They were all young and friendly, and especially so to Diana.
They described the opportunities that had brought each of them to
Rhodesia, in their minds a country and a people that the world
misunderstood and that they were now fighting to protect. It was as if
they were trying to win us over to their side. One young man had
been in Rhodesia for only a matter of months. In Liverpool he’d been
an unemployed laborer on the dole, or “signwriting for the Queen,”
as it was ironically known among those without work. Now he was a
lieutenant in the Rhodesian army, speaking derisively of what he
called “the old country.”
Like the others, he had only unkind words for all that he’d left
behind. England was going down the drain thanks to James
Callaghan, socialism, and too many immigrants. They spewed an all-
too-familiar fantasy, but the beer was cold and welcome, and we did
our best to keep our opinions to ourselves. Maintaining our cover
story, Diana stressed that the nature film we were shooting was a
lucky break—and maybe our only chance of employment in a brutal
industry (a lie that at least had a kernel of truth to it, and Diana was
very convincing). After some questioning the next day, we were
given instructions to report to the home affairs department in
Salisbury.
We didn’t head there directly, however, stopping first to retrieve
our footage and recordings, which were miraculously still hidden in
the storm drain. But we needed to find a way to get them safely out
of the country. As we made our way to the capital, via the much
longer but safer route through Bulawayo, I recalled seeing a
business under Indian ownership on the main shopping street that
specialized in beautiful carpets from Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Suspecting its owners might have little sympathy for Ian Smith and
Rhodesia’s white nationalist government, I delicately approached
them, expressing interest in their wares and buying a small carpet to
boot. Could they send the carpet to the UK, I asked, so I did not
have to hand-carry it, and maybe I could add something more
personal to the package? The two shopkeepers, cautiously friendly,
agreed. Whether they knew the “more personal” item was film
footage I couldn’t tell, but I suspect they did. It was just a simple
cardboard box, but I had forgotten to remove a label on the outside
that read “KODAK.”
Either way, the package arrived safely in London not many days
later. Told to leave the country but not told how to leave, Diana and I
boarded a train for Botswana. Our plan was to meet up with our
director, Antonia Caccia, in the capital city of Gaborone and continue
filming in the refugee camps along the border. In the middle of the
night our train crossed into Botswana, leaving us to watch the
Rhodesian border post recede into the darkness behind us. It was
engulfed in flames.

We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea—

whether it is to sail or to watch it—we are going back from
whence we came.
JOHN F. KENNEDY

Back in London, in the autumn of 1976, I had the good fortune to

meet Chris Menges, a cinematographer then best known for his work
on the early Ken Loach classic, Kes. I was eager for any advice he
could give me but, after I screened some of my work for him, he only
asked how many more there were like me leaving the National Film
School. Chris had worked as a freelance documentary cameraman
for producer Charles Denton at Associated Television, and I suspect
it was on his recommendation that I received a call from Denton
asking me if I could take a meeting about a boating project. At the
time, I assumed it would be a film about Donald Crowhurst, a sailor
who’d apparently taken his own life during the first single-handed
yacht race around the globe, having fabricated logs of a journey to
within sight of the winner’s line that he could not live up to.
Crowhurst, who never ventured out of the Atlantic Ocean, had sailed
his yacht from Teignmouth (hence his boat’s name, Teignmouth
Electron) on October 31, 1968. His ill-fated adventure had been big
news in the South Devon seaside town, and I had followed the story
closely.
However, it was not Crowhurst that Denton wanted to make a
documentary about but John Ridgway, who’d gained fame in 1966
by rowing across the Atlantic with his partner Chay Blyth. Ridgway
had since founded the John Ridgway School of Adventure, which
remains in operation in the Scottish Highlands, and planned to
compete in the second Whitbread Round the World Race, now
known as the Ocean Race. It was Denton’s hope to produce a film
about the stress on people working in extreme conditions by
embedding a two-person film crew with John on his yacht.
Around the World with Ridgway was an opportunity I could not
pass up, even if getting the job required lying about my sailing
expertise. Well, not so much lying as waffling around the producers’
questions. I told them I came from Torquay, had grown up around
boats, and was well qualified for the job. Then I let them draw their
own conclusions. In truth, my sailing experience stretched no further
than time spent on my father’s dinghy (which invariably failed to get
off its mooring or soon capsized when it did). Also, I could not swim.
Nonetheless, they believed me. And why shouldn’t they? I was from
Devon, birthplace of John Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, and Sir Francis
Drake, the first ever Englishman to circumnavigate the globe. When I
joined Ridgway at his school it became obvious how little I knew, but
by then it was too late. I had the job.
To keep it I had to learn the ropes, literally. After some
preparation, I joined John and the rest of his crew on a test sail from
Cape Wrath on Scotland’s northern coast to the north of Ireland and
toward Madeira. Still a work in progress, John’s boat wasn’t
prepared for the hurricane-force winds we encountered. (Not as well
funded as some of the other fourteen captains, John had to change
the name of his boat from English Rose VI to Debenhams, the name
of the now-defunct department store sponsoring him.) After taking
down all but a small staysail to keep the boat from rolling, we went
below to wait out the storm. Everybody was seasick. Everybody. We
began passing around a bucket. Though ill myself, I started filming,
not wanting to let such a moment pass. Despite my obvious
inexperience, “Anybody who can film while being sick,” John told me
as he retched, “is all right by me.”
Noel Smart, a staff cameraman at ATV who had dearly wanted my
role, joined me as a sound recordist after my original partner had to
drop out on doctor’s orders because of his extreme seasickness.
Noel was an experienced yachtsman, which was a good
qualification, but he did have to learn how to work a Nagra tape
recorder. Space was at a premium aboard John’s fifty-seven-foot
ketch, and everyone—other than the skipper and his wife, Marie
Christine, who came along for the ride—had to pull their weight on
watch. For Noel and me, every day of the nine months we spent
preparing for and shooting Around the World with Ridgway required
us to work as both filmmakers and crew members. Both these tasks
could be exhilarating but were also exhausting. Our regimen was
four hours on, four hours off. Sometimes things would happen while
we were on watch that we wanted to film but couldn’t because we
were sailing the boat. Other times, after a hard shift, Noel and I
would have to persuade each other to get out of our bunk beds, put
on our wet-weather gear, and shoot.
 I was filming in the aft cockpit as K1218, Debenhams, left
Portsmouth on August 27, 1977, in a light rain. Over the following
seven weeks we endured a storm in the Bay of Biscay, the intense,
airless heat of the doldrums, days of eerie calm without a breath of
wind, and, probably the most nauseating part of the entire journey,
the constant pounding of the boat as we tacked into the southeast
trade winds of the South Atlantic. Our first stop was Cape Town,
South Africa, which provided welcome relief but a bracing jolt of
political reality. I ended up spending quite a bit of time at the yacht
club next to the marina where we moored Debenhams, and I got to
know one of the barmen quite well. One night, when no one else was
around, I asked if he fancied a game of snooker. “No,” he replied. “I
can’t touch the snooker table.” It was a sickening feeling to, once
again, come face-to-face with the reality of apartheid.
Later, we were invited to a “braai,” an all-day, all-meat barbecue
(and almost always a drunken piss-up) central to white South African
culture. Our crew included two brothers from Scotland who were
turned away. Why? Because their grandmother was from India. We
all walked out. Sure, we met a lot of white people who were very
nice, like the Russian countess who made me strawberry pavlova in
the kitchen of her mansion overlooking the Cape but, as in
Zimbabwe, you could see they were living a lie. As for ourselves, by
simply sailing into Cape Town, we had all become guilty of
condoning apartheid. And, while at the start line for the second leg of
the race, less than nine miles away lay Robben Island, where Nelson
Mandela had been imprisoned for thirteen years in a cell measuring
seven feet by nine.
Momentarily seduced by the Cape Doctors, warm, southeasterly
winds that carried us to the front of the race for the first and last time,
our passage to New Zealand involved surviving some of the
journey’s most dangerous stretches—and its most thrilling. Our
navigator for this leg, Captain Tom Woodfield, who had spent
nineteen years in Antarctic waters on a naval research vessel,
reckoned we could save time by sailing on the Great Circle Route,
which would be shorter and might give us an advantage over a more
northerly trajectory. But this would mean leaving the latitudes of the
Roaring Forties and sailing into the Furious Fifties (whalers would
have it that “at 40 degrees, there is no law, but at 50 degrees, there
is no God”) or even dropping down as far as the Screaming Sixties,
winds that travel, unbroken by any land, around the Southern Ocean.
I have exceptionally good eyesight, an advantage in both
cinematography and sailing. Because of this, I usually stood watch at
the bow to scan the horizon for icebergs. I loved it. Being in that
position, with the yacht behind me and nothing but cresting waves or
the occasional dolphins ahead, it felt like flying. Years later, when I
watched Titanic, I found Leonardo DiCaprio’s “King of the world!”
scene a bit embarrassing, but I also understood how he felt.
Spotting icebergs in a snowstorm usually means they’re not that
far away and, as there is always more ice below the surface than
above, it’s best to give them a wide berth. With a full rig, sailing at
ten or fifteen knots and with sails frozen into sheets of ice that crack
as they come down, it takes quite a lot of effort to make a yacht
change course. On one occasion I was reducing sail with Dick
McCann, the youngest member of our crew, when a wave caught us
and swept Dick over the rail of the foredeck. His safety harness kept
him out of any real danger, and I pulled him back onboard with little
difficulty. But when we finished our work on the foredeck and I went
to unbuckle my own safety harnesses (I always used two), both
safety harnesses were hanging free. For sure, it was my lucky day.
We sailed on until one morning, while on watch, I saw something I
couldn’t understand. I turned to Noel to voice my concern. “We are in
a gale, but the sea is calm. That white line across the horizon. What
is that?” As we got nearer it became obvious: We were sailing into a
bay of ice. This was no longer yacht racing. Tom took a reading of
the sea temperature. At almost 30°F, it was below the freezing
temperature of fresh water. The sea would freeze over at 28.4°F.
Soon growlers, ice chunks the size of cars, began bumping against
our fiberglass hull. Noel and I wanted to film, but the boat was now in
danger.
The ice was here, the ice was there / The ice was all around:
/ It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, / Like
noises in a swound!
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER
 A book of Coleridge’s poems was the only reading matter I carried
with me on the voyage, and by the end I knew The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner by heart.

As we tacked into clearer water, Noel and I left our watch. When I
returned with my camera, Ridgway was taking over the helm. We
backtracked out of the ice, heading north and losing all the
advantage our more southerly route might have given us.
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 The race plan was for all the yachts to spend Christmas in
Auckland and, as we rounded the tip of New Zealand’s North Island,
I could smell cut grass wafting off the coast, a welcome sign we were
near. (Even all these years later, I think of that moment whenever I
pass a freshly mown lawn.) But, as we sighted land, an intense
storm blew up out of nowhere and, by nightfall, we were, again, a
long way from our goal. We finally docked more than thirty-two hours
later, alongside the high-tech racing machines of some of our fellow
competitors. The Auckland before us could have happily fitted into
the 1950s of my Devon childhood, a sleepy English town on the far
side of the world. Though I returned to New Zealand with James in
2003, and experienced how vibrant and multicultural Auckland would
become, in 1977 it felt as if we had stepped out of a time machine.
It was in Auckland that the project almost disintegrated. Neither
producer Richard Creasey nor I wanted Around the World with
Ridgway to be simply about yachting. Nor was that the brief I had
been given by Charles Denton. John, on the other hand, wanted a
flattering film. He spent stretches of the voyage trying to influence
the film’s depiction of him by dictating what we were allowed to film,
even demanding he be present during all interviews with his crew
members. The tension between these two goals escalated, and both
Noel and I came close to walking off the project. Only Richard’s
intervention, and a truce that made it clear I could shoot what I
wanted to shoot, thrashed out during a discussion that John refused
me permission to film, kept us aboard.
The tensions between John and his crew, as well as the crew and
the filmmakers, do play out in some of the film’s more memorable
scenes, but knowing he was being filmed, was John being himself?
Were the crew? To quote Tom’s Yachting World review of John’s
book about the experience, “as skipper his priorities were as
confused as the seas to be met in the Southern Ocean. Caged
afloat, this showman adventurer… tormented by the possible cost of
every sound around him frequently became wretchedly depressed.”
Later in the voyage, John would deliver a speech lashing out at
his crew (ironically, a scene he encouraged Noel and me to film),
criticizing their body odor, and accusing them of being “freeloaders”
for not having “contributed one penny toward the voyage.” He saw
them as in debt to him for the opportunity he’d given them. Later I’d
occasionally hear echoes of his attitude in the directors who thought
of films as “theirs” with little regard for the grips humping the gear to
the top of the mountain.
Beyond Auckland, across the Pacific Ocean, Cape Horn stood
waiting for us. Some 5,000 miles (8,147 kilometers) later we rounded
the Horn without incident, sailing through on a cool breeze in spite of
the Horn’s dangerous reputation.
Albatrosses greeted us as we tacked through the sound that
separates the East and West Falkland Islands, past Fox Bay and
San Carlos—names made infamous by the Falklands War in 1982—
before docking at Rio de Janeiro on the very day Carnival began.

It is a mild, mild wind, and a mild-looking sky; and the air

smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have
been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the
Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the
new-mown hay.
CAPTAIN AHAB, IN MOBY DICK BY HERMAN MELVILLE

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 4
SAMBA AND LIBERATION
I’m still patient until patience gets tired of me.
ALAMIN ABDULATIF, ERITREAN SINGER
Debenhams was an alcohol-free zone, and we were mostly
living off dried food supplied to us as part of a sponsorship deal
(though an occasional flying fish that landed on deck added some
spice to our menu, and I’d smuggled aboard a bottle of wine and
some leftover Christmas cake to celebrate with as we rounded the
Horn). Now we were in the middle of an ongoing feast. I spent many
nights at Carnival during our stay, sometimes filming and sometimes
just reveling in it. One night, Rio Yacht Club hosted a cocktail party
for all the crew members of the yachts, but they obviously had no
experience of ocean racing crews celebrating. The night ended with
everyone in the swimming pool—including the skipper of ADC
Accutrac, Clare Francis—being gassed by local police in full riot
gear.
A time such as this would never come again, and Noel and I
made the most of it. A wealthy British banker decided to show the
crew of Debenhams the real Rio, which involved a tour of nightclubs
and brothels that beggared the imagination. The banker had a
woman—specifically, a paid companion—for every day of the week.
One, in surprise, asked him, “What are you doing here? It’s not your
night!” There were only a few of us who took the journey with this
guy, and no one had any intention of participating in the brothels’
services. Besides, we couldn’t even afford the cost of the beer! The
banker, however, bought a round in every club. One brothel was
dressed as if from the boudoir of Louis XVI’s wife, Marie Antoinette.
Another was like an immense barn with human-size canary cages
hanging from the ceiling, containing nude dancers of all races, from
which the clientele could make their selections. It was the definition
of decadence, and after one last cold beer we headed back to our
yacht.
At each port of call I would send back the footage we had shot.
From Rio I drove down the coast to the ITV news office in São Paulo
to send off my package. This was quite a trip in itself; São Paulo was
a vast city unlike any I had experienced. I eventually found my way
to the right office, only to discover no one had any idea what I was
talking about. But, regardless, they sent off my exposed film and I
made my way back to Rio.
I anxiously waited to hear from the cutting room. In Auckland I
had been informed that my previous months of work had all looked
very dark. In fact, the images might not even be usable. I had
checked the camera but could find nothing wrong, and I had left
Auckland wondering if I was shooting for no reason. Thankfully,
before we sailed out of Rio, I received word that all was well. It was
not until I was back in London and visited the cutting room that I
found the cause of the problem. I looked at the screen of the flatbed
editing machine and could see that the print was indeed very dark.
But it was dark not just within the frame but across the sprocket area
as well. If the negative was at fault, it would show only in the picture
area of the print, so this was a print defect. The print stock was
fogged, and I had spent four months worrying about nothing.
By the time we returned to the Solent we had circumnavigated the
globe, sailing more than 26,780 nautical miles to do it. During those
161 days, 5 hours, 5 minutes, and 23 seconds aboard Debenhams,
the world could often feel very small. As I was about to go on watch
in the vastness of the Pacific, our navigator informed me we had
reached Point Nemo. Named after a character in Jules Verne’s
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, it’s known as the “oceanic pole of
inaccessibility.” Simply put, it’s the furthest spot from land anywhere
on Earth. Interesting, I thought, as I climbed on deck and looked
down to see a Coke bottle float by. This was January 1978. I wonder
what it looks like now.
Even on this remote patch of blue was a reminder we’d inevitably
be returning to civilization. For all the difficulties of life at sea, the end
of our voyage filled me with mixed emotions. I remember vividly the
Capital Radio jingle blaring out of the speakers in the cabin to
introduce the London traffic news as we sailed into the English
Channel. I thought then of Bernard Moitessier, the French
yachtsman who’d been leading the single-handed Golden Globe
Race when he decided to opt out in the home stretch, choosing
instead to sail to Tahiti after sending an explanation via slingshot to a
passing ship: “because I am happy at sea and perhaps to save my
soul.” At that moment I knew how his soul felt.
Back at home I began to think about what I’d experienced, three
very different countries in very different stages of development as
well as a lot of blue, but also the things I had missed out on during
my time at sea. Somewhere, among the rolling swells and screaming
winds of the Southern Ocean, a friend had sent a message to me
over the ship’s radio. It read, “May the Force be with you!” I had no
idea what she was talking about!

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were

striking thirteen.
THE OPENING LINE OF GEORGE ORWELL’S NOVEL 1984

It was April and my arrival home seemingly confirmed some of my

misgivings about resuming my old life. As often happens in the film
business, I found another toothbrush by the sink, my girlfriend having
moved on in my absence. Perhaps it’s fortunate, then, that I scarcely
had a moment to get used to my life in London before packing my
bags. Richard asked if I’d be interested in working on a documentary
with Sarah Errington about Eritrea, a country locked in a war for
independence with Ethiopia since 1961. He was attempting to start a
series of documentary films that reflected the news in a more
personal way, and I didn’t hesitate to say yes to this first effort. A
reporter who’d stayed in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon (she had
been in the Associated Press darkroom processing film when the
Vietcong arrived in the office), Sarah seemed to me the closest the
era had to Gertrude Bell, the nineteenth-century explorer-writer-
diplomat-historian.
With the addition of sound recordist Eddie Tise, our small team
was complete. Africa lay ahead. But, having flown into Khartoum, we
were asked to shoot a news story in aid of the famine that was again
distressing the western part of the Sudan. In a remote desert
hospital, we filmed the human casualties of the crisis, including a
young boy who had no limbs. His arms and legs had been so
withered by hunger that the medical team removed them as simply
as if they were made of papier mâché. The Italian doctor who was
caring for him told us that no one would adopt such a child, that they
would have to return him to his parents and, as they would have no
use for him or any way to care for him, he would die. When the piece
was set to air in the UK, the union stepped in. As we were a
freelance crew we were only sanctioned to film in Eritrea. What we
had shot outside of that agreement could not be shown. I’m still
speechless.
We essentially had an open brief shooting Eritrea—Behind the
Lines, no agenda beyond filming with the Eritrean People’s
Liberation Front. But first we had to get there. Bureaucracy in
Khartoum was eventually overcome by Sarah, gentle as a kitten but
intimidating when angry, bursting into the Sudanese Minister of the
Interior’s office to demand our travel permits. We were on our way,
first boarding a flight to Port Sudan, before taking a taxi down the
Red Sea coast to Tokar.
From here we would hitch a ride on one of the many Mack trucks
moving supplies across the border into Eritrea. Our truck, like the
rest, traveled the desert and mountain roads by night for fear of
enemy planes. Sarah sat inside the driver’s cabin while Eddie and I
perched atop the stacks of supplies beneath the starry sky, clutching
onto our film gear as the unwieldy vehicle lurched its way toward the
border. We slept under acacia trees during the day and followed the
tracks of previous supply trucks across the desert sand at night.
Once, woken by what I thought was rain, I opened my eyes to see
that it was blood from a lamb our driver was slaughtering for the
cook pot, which was to be the last meat we were to eat for some
weeks.
Later, after we left Eritrea and crossed back into Sudan, we were
served a memorable curry in a dusty border town where camels
roamed the street. Having lived for some weeks on a kind of
fermented pancake called injera, chips, and the occasional boiled
egg, this was more than a special treat, but to this day I’m not sure if
it really was goat curry. Was it made from the puppy we played with
as we ordered our meal? The waitress had disappeared with the
puppy in tow. Apart from a single yelp coming from the kitchen, we
never heard from it or saw it again. Or maybe we did.

When we arrived at the EPLF’s main base we were prevented

from filming, and it took a few days until our hosts determined we
were not CIA spies. Sarah and I had met with the leaders of the
EPLF in Rome, but here in the field things were different. After our
release we were encouraged to document their training camps,
where hundreds of girls with shaved heads made green by an
antilice formula learned to fight using wooden rifles, and the hospital
built deep inside the mountains. All this was interesting, and quite
visual, but we wanted to visit a more traditional Eritrean village, to
capture the EPLF’s attempts to make their case to the people. Which
was how we ended up in Zager, close to the Ethiopian front line and
on hills that overlooked Asmara.
In Zager we filmed daily life in what appeared to be a peaceful
village: Farmers hoed their fields and tended their cows while the
women gathered firewood or drew water from the well. Peaceful, that
is, until children harvesting sorghum in the midday sun were
interrupted by a MiG jet and a phosphorus bomb that exploded in the
air above them.
We followed Teke, the village elder, and some of the EPLF
teachers to their meetings among the eucalyptus groves (held there
to be out of view of enemy planes). Other than a daily visit from the
Ethiopian Air Force, these meetings were the most interesting aspect
of life in the village, as the freedom fighters attempted to persuade a
rural Christian community to support their Marxist ideals. We were
always accompanied by our “translator,” a primary school teacher in
civilian life who now carried a Kalashnikov, and our work was
overseen by another member of the EPLF who had been studying
law at Harvard before being drawn into the fight for his country.
Once the fighters trusted us, we were taken to visit the front line
that overlooked Asmara, though, to our frustration, we were
prevented from filming what we saw. Russian tanks sat out on the
plains below us while their crews shaved in the early-morning
sunlight. As we were warned by our guide, and exactly on time, a
mortar barrage rocked the defense line, and we were ushered
across a field riddled with angry plumes of black smoke to an
underground bunker made of stout tree trunks. After we settled in to
wait out the barrage, Eddie began playing chess with some of the
EPLF soldiers, while every now and again a mortar round would
shake the roof and cover the board with dust. Watching Eddie blow
off the dust and resume the game, I found myself thinking, This is a
long way from Torquay.
 Later, the night sky was lit up by explosions, and the soldiers we
had observed shaving were brought into the action. We did not know
it at the time but the Ethiopian army, spearheaded by a column of
Russian tanks and armor, were in the coming days to take control of
almost every part of Eritrea. Sarah, Eddie, and I discussed our
options. Should we stay and film? Before making that decision, we
found we had no choice. A Land Rover pulled up to our shelter, and
our EPLF minders whisked us off to Sudan and safety. While we had
not completed our work, I appreciated the exit from who knows what.
But, as we sat in the safety of Sudan, enjoying our “goat” curry, I
thought about the villagers who, if they were to remain in place—and
they had little choice but to remain in place—could well suffer
Ethiopian reprisals. And neither we nor the EPLF could do anything
to help them.
Our journey to Khartoum and home was a memorable trip, and
not just for the endless taxi drive across the desert or the midnight
stop for tea in a Bedouin tent deep inside the sand dunes. In the
short time we had been in Eritrea, Khartoum had changed. What had
been a bustling city was now beginning to close in on itself. Less
music echoed in the streets, and the mesmerizing Sufi Whirling
Dervishes no longer whirled. As our flight left for home, I thought of
Ray Bradbury’s short story “A Sound of Thunder,” in which a hunter
travels back in time and, by accident, alters the future into which he
returns. It felt we too had trodden on a butterfly.
To leave the UK we had filled out a carnet, a customs form stating
exactly what equipment we were temporarily taking out of the
country and what we would be returning with. To our customs official
at Heathrow our film had left the UK in a raw state and was returning
having been exposed to light. Did that not change its value? he
asked. I questioned his thinking: “Perhaps. But there is only the
possibility of an image. Its value depends on what we might have
filmed and how good a cameraman I may or may not be. Until the
negative is developed and the film seen by an audience, how can we
know?” Thankfully, with a grunt and a shrug of his shoulder, he let us
through.
 The heart sees before the eye.
SUDANESE PROVERB

It wasn’t long before I traveled back to Sudan, to a country

controlled by an ever more repressive Sunni regime. Directed by
Chris Curling, Worlds Apart: The Southeast Nuba focuses on some
of the tribespeople who make their home at the foot of the Nuba
Mountains. They’d been documented before by Leni Riefenstahl in a
pair of exploitative books in the 1970s, transposing the manipulative
imagery of her Nazi propaganda films to its new setting in Africa’s
Sudan. I don’t believe we ever intentionally crossed any ethical lines,
certainly not the lines Riefenstahl crossed, but our presence itself
was disruptive, and that in turn became part of the film’s story.
Sudan had been ruled by an Islamist government since gaining
independence in 1956 but it was, at first, Islam with a light touch
rather than the strict Sharia law of later years. Religious and social
change were slow to come to the Nuba in the remoteness of
Kordofan province, but we, no doubt, accelerated it. The people we
filmed traditionally wore only body paint, but after our arrival the
government sent in truckloads of clothes and, sometimes with armed
soldiers in support, attempted to force them to cover themselves.
The Nuba were confused by this. Since Riefenstahl had brought
them notoriety, tourists had been drawn to their nakedness. They
had been paid to remain in their state of innocence, but now the
government was insisting they cover themselves. Later, James Faris,
an anthropologist who had been one of the first to study the Nuba
and assisted on the film, expressed regret over his involvement,
though we were pretty sure all those Bermuda shorts and lime-green
skirts the government supplied would wind up in the markets of
Malakal or Melut no matter what the authorities hoped.
On our arrival in the village of Kau, we had been held in a small
compound, able only to listen while the Nuba’s seasonal festival,
made famous by the Magnum photographer George Rodger as well
as Leni, took place in the village beyond its walls. The Sudanese
government didn’t want any more attention brought to the Nuba and
only bowed to pressure from the BBC once their festival had ended. I
suspect they knew full well that, with the hot dry season having
begun in earnest and the temperature rarely falling below 90°F, there
was little activity in the village. Chris once suggested I film a man
sitting under a tree because he was picking his nose. And he was
serious.
It offended Jim that Chris decided to pay the village to stage
another version of the festival we had missed and to film some of the
more secretive rituals on a very long lens. At the same time, our
work was being monitored by agents of the Sudanese security
service, and this government scrutiny became as much a part of the
film as the body painting and the ritualistic, but brutal, bracelet
fighting. It was far from the “man in harmony with nature” style of
ethnographic documentary that Jim had imagined. But, though it was
as exploitative as any outside view of a culture must be, what Chris
Curling edited out of all the footage we shot was a lot truer to the
reality of the Nuba in the early 1980s.
Unlike on previous assignments, I was now working with an
assistant. It takes a certain kind of person to leave home and to live
rough for months at a time, but Barry Ackroyd was both young and
eager. I worked with Barry on several documentaries, including one
made previously for Chris in India, Reflections in a Peacock Crown,
also in the Worlds Apart series, and another that followed Van
Morrison and his band on tour in Ireland. Barry soon began to shoot
documentaries himself before going on to be a very successful
cinematographer, working on The Wind That Shakes the Barley,
United 93, The Hurt Locker, and Captain Phillips, among many
others.
Our journey took us by small plane down the course of the White
Nile and on a long drive; once again I rode on the top of a supply
truck, this time with Barry into South Kordofan. Finally reaching Kao,
Barry and I spread some foam matting on the dirt between three
mud walls that had once held a roof. We cooked on a small propane
stove, and once we managed to rent a Land Rover, we washed in
water we collected in jerry cans from a nearby well.
 One morning we were cleaning our camera equipment and
loading magazines when Barry spotted some tiny clear scorpions
that had hidden under one of our cases. I brushed them aside as if
they were harmless and went to fire up the stove for breakfast. In the
refuse trench next to the stove I encountered a large black scorpion,
one that looked truly dangerous. But no! Jim cautioned, “That’s not a
problem. It could give you a nasty bite, but it’s the small clear
scorpions that are the ones you need to watch out for. They are
deadly.”
The next night, Barry slept in the open, far away from our ruin and
on an Indian charpai, a wood-and-rope bed he had specially made to
raise him off the ground. When, around dawn, the dogs began to
bark, I went to see what was going on. What looked like a tire track
zigzagged its way beneath Barry’s bed and ended at the foot of a
giant Bao Bao tree some fifty yards away. A large python had holed
up in its branches. Dogs barked at it and a group of young men
yelled and threw sticks, while Barry slept peacefully through it all.
Barry was in his element and was willing to help with any task, but
I found it odd he always volunteered to fill our water cans and clean
the vehicle. One day I accompanied him to the well, and the
attraction immediately became apparent. The well was the only
source of water for the entire area, so each morning there would be
a long line of naked young women, clay pots balanced on their
heads, making their way down the same road Barry was driving. On
the return journey to the village Barry, being a gentleman, would fill
the Land Rover with passengers. The girls were all smeared with
sim-sim oil and a rich red ocher, so when they got out of the Land
Rover, having been squashed inside the cabin as well as riding on
the footplate, the imprints of their body parts left the vehicle looking
like a modernist work of art.

Stigma against mental illness is a scourge with many faces,

and the medical community wears a number of those faces.
ELYN R. SAKS, THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD: MY JOURNEY THROUGH
MADNESS

The last documentary I worked on and codirected with Jon

Sanders (a sound recordist I knew well and who would later produce
and direct his own independent feature films) would be Then When
the World Changed. This was a Channel 4–commissioned
expansion of a previous film we had made about patients with
schizophrenia. For the new film, Jon and I followed seven patients
through their treatment in a psychiatric hospital over the course of
many weeks, observing them in the common room, interviewing
each individually in different emotional states, and sitting in with
doctors as they discussed each patient’s diagnosis. We found we
had far more time to talk to them one-on-one than any of the
overtaxed doctors, and we learned many details they’d missed.
We discovered, for instance, that one longtime resident of the
ward had avoided Nazi Germany’s persecution of the Jews by hiding
in a barrel on the deck of a freighter. She had not seen her family
since that day forty-five years ago and had no idea what happened
to them. While Jon and I sat in on another assessment session, a
doctor asked a nurse when the patient in question had last been
seen without medication. She’d been taking eight different drugs,
many of them first prescribed to her more than ten years previously.
The doctors no longer knew who the real person was underneath all
that medication.
One case troubled me even more than the others. Visiting a
recently released patient in her dilapidated fourteenth-floor tower
block flat, Jon and I found her in a terrible state. She was drunk,
vomiting all over herself, and completely alone. Jon began running
the tape recorder, but I couldn’t bring the camera up to my shoulder
to film her. It felt voyeuristic and wrong. So, I cleaned the lady up as
best I could before Jon and I cooked her a meal. Then we
interviewed her and had her describe to us what had just happened,
including her impression of our arrival at her door. It was in no way
as powerful as the visual of when she opened the door, but, maybe,
it showed her more respect.
So many sad faces and so many sad stories. Some made it into
the final film, while others, too personal to use, were left on the
cutting-room floor. It came as no surprise when my therapist closed
his practice and left London for a commune. To become intimately
involved in the lives of people that I knew I would leave behind when
a project ended made me uneasy. I had that same feeling when I left
Eritrea, and now it was much closer to home. Even with the best
intentions, were we not exploiting our subjects? I had no regrets
about my time shooting documentaries, and I have great respect for
many being made today, but for me it was time to move on.
I’d remember this time when working on Barton Fink, in which
John Goodman, playing a psychotic working-class salesman, tells
Fink, “You’re just a tourist with a typewriter. I live here.”
OceanofPDF.com
 5
INTO THE MUSIC
In another time / In another place.
VAN MORRISON, “ASTRAL WEEKS”
During my days of knocking on doors unannounced, I had
made contact in 1976 with a small film service company based in
Soho called Solus Enterprises. The partnership included Jack
Hazan, the cinematographer and director of A Bigger Splash, a film
about David Hockney, and its editor, David Mingay. They were
working on their next project, Rude Boy. It was there that I first met
Dick Pope, who was just making the transition from assistant to
cameraman and would become a good friend. (In fact, our careers
seemed to develop in tandem over the years, a highlight being when
we attended the Academy Awards together in 2015 as fellow best
cinematography nominees, he for Mr. Turner and me for Unbroken.)
On my return from Zimbabwe, I had used the office at Solus as a
base to organize myself for the around-the-world yacht trip; after that
adventure, I returned to see if the company could send any work my
way. I was now the proud owner of an Éclair NPR 16 mm, a backup
camera that I had left packaged in cellophane for the entire voyage
and came as part payment for the job. It no doubt helped my
acceptance to the company that I had my own camera and that I was
willing to add it to Solus’s equipment pool.
Being freelance can be quite depressing when the phone doesn’t
ring. And while few assignments came directly to Solus, rather than
to its individual partners, it was good to have a base in Soho, even if
only for somewhere to sit with a cup of tea when there was no work.
It was Dick who came to my rescue and kept me solvent by hiring
me to operate a second camera on the occasional documentary or a
concert featuring bands such as the Clash or Whitesnake. Around
the World with Ridgway had given me a profile as a cameraman, so
other work gradually began to come my way, including a
documentary about the footballer Jimmy Greaves and his struggle
with alcohol, and another for Michael Radford, the ex–film school
student with whom I’d later work on Another Time, Another Place,
1984, and White Mischief.
Mike’s Van Morrison in Ireland followed the famed singer’s tour of
Belfast and Dublin in February 1979. Although almost entirely a
concert film in its present form, we shot some wonderful footage with
Van and the band, including scenes of the maestro walking up
Cyprus Avenue in Belfast and meeting, for the first time in many
years, the window cleaner with whom he once worked. Here he was,
up a ladder and still cleaning windows.
I especially miss a scene we shot at a dark Italian restaurant one
evening outside Dublin that didn’t make the final cut. We were
having dinner with the band when Mike suggested we start filming.
My first thought was there was not enough light, but my assistant,
the always imaginative Barry Ackroyd, had a solution. Seeing the
dining tables were already lit by candles, he went into the kitchen,
returned with a whole box of them, and proceeded to line them up
along the middle of the table. In lighting we use the term
“footcandle.” The term almost explains itself: A footcandle is the
amount of light that falls on an area one foot from a standard candle,
so this was the perfect place to test the formula. Quite simply, on 100
ASA film stock and shooting with an aperture of 2.8, one hundred
footcandles are required for a “correctly” exposed negative. The
twenty-five candles Barry sourced from the kitchen gave a great light
but burnt down so quickly he had to constantly keep adding more to
keep my exposure steady. Once the dinner was over, the table
looked like something out of a Salvador Dalí painting, with candle
wax frozen in place as it dripped down on its path to the floor.
Back at our hotel, Van decided to stage an impromptu concert in
the lobby and, having uncovered the piano that the manager had
attempted to conceal, proceeded to wake the entire building. Only
some of the guests considered it a great treat to be serenaded by no
less a singer than Van Morrison at one in the morning. It is a pity
nothing from these scenes made it into the final cut, but the concerts
were brilliant. Van was playing in his hometown, Belfast, for the first
time in years, in front of ecstatic crowds, and in Dublin, where we
shot a concert that contained probably the best-ever version of
“Moondance.”
After I returned from Ireland I headed for Great Yarmouth, a faded
resort town on the Norfolk coast once famous for a cold-smoked
herring known as a bloater. With the fish long gone, Yarmouth was
servicing the North Sea oil boom and a rock and roll revival festival.
Curtis Clark’s Blue Suede Shoes, part documentary and part fiction,
features acts with names like the Flying Saucers, Freddie “Fingers”
Lee, Matchbox, and the Rockabilly Rebels, all of whom fed off the
raw and raucous energy of a Norfolk crowd. One act even
culminated with a singer taking an axe to a piano—shades of Pete
Townshend!
 My lighting for the film was simple. Not only what we could afford,
I felt it looked right for the “cheap and cheerful” setting. But it did not
involve any backlight. Curtis’s wife, Penny, who was the producer,
called me into her office after a first day of filming. “Some of your
fellow cameramen are complaining about your lighting. They say you
are not using any backlight,” she informed me. Backlighting was a
standard for concert films at the time—fill the stage with smoke and
punch light through it to silhouette the band. This would not be the
last time I received, and ignored, a complaint about an absence of
backlight. Or smoke.
Around this time, I began shooting pop promos, now more
elegantly called “music videos,” which, thanks to the introduction of
MTV in 1981, began to explode in popularity. I was still concentrating
on documentary work, but I enjoyed shooting the few promos that I
did, including those for Karla DeVito, Tracey Ullman, the Belle Stars,
Lene Lovich, Status Quo, Kirsty MacColl, Genesis, Robert Wyatt,
and Meat Loaf, among others. For the directors Godley and Creme,
recording artists in their own right and famous for their band 10cc, I
shot Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” and Eric Clapton’s “Forever Man.”
And it was a music video that led me to America for the first time
in 1982, though not for long enough to form many lasting
impressions. My memory now of Marvin Gaye’s video of “Sexual
Healing” is of a mad rush of filming during the day and an exploration
of the Sunset Strip at night. Thankfully, Marvin Gaye was not an
early riser, so my assistant and I had plenty of time to recover from
our first night’s escapade. On our last day we decided to drive up the
Pacific Coast Highway and take in Malibu, have lunch sitting by the
blue waters of the Pacific, not thinking how far we were from LAX
and how long it would take us to return our rental car. We made the
flight just as the doors were closing, hoping the film we had shot
made it on the plane with us.
As with “Sexual Healing,” most shoots were fast and cheap
without a lot of prep time, often in challenging situations that varied
from one extreme to another, from running around with a handheld
camera to lighting a stage set with laser beams. They could also go
on all day and all night, the longest I ever worked being something
like thirty hours straight. On that shoot a producer turned up after the
first fifteen hours with a suitcase of cash and convinced us, in truth
easily enough, to keep going even though we were already half
asleep.
I had seen Ray Davies and the Kinks play in Torquay, so it felt
quite odd to find myself working on a film the singer was directing,
Return to Waterloo. We shot as if it were a documentary, jumping on
and off a train to capture elaborate dance routines staged on station
platforms with little chance of being able to return for a second take.
It was kind of crazy, but it was also a good way to discover ways to
shoot fast and work instinctively. And it was fun.
Two of my favorite experiences in the music world came while
working on documentaries about the roots of jazz. One featured
traditional kora players of the Gambia and another the contemporary
music of Jamaica. The latter included filming the producer and
recording artist Lee “Scratch” Perry as he smoked spliffs the size of
cigars in his Jamaican studio and the wonderful ska band the
Skatalites, jamming in their garage on a Sunday morning after I had
almost overdosed on a mix of sinsemilla and a Cuba Libre the night
before. Whether my hangover had any effect on the footage or not,
what I shot that Sunday became a standalone episode within the
series. And it was while filming in Kingston’s Trenchtown that I
accidentally wandered into a turf war between two rival gangs. But
that’s a whole other story.
The Malcolm Mowbray–directed documentary Capital City was a
little less fraught. We shot all around London, but an afternoon
concert at Alexandra Palace was the highlight of both the film and all
my concert experiences (other than sleeping in a field to
“experience” Jimi Hendrix’s penultimate gig at the Isle of Wight
Festival in 1970). I’m a big blues fan, so I was starstruck by a lineup
that included B.B. King, Chuck Berry, and Muddy Waters. I stood
onstage with a handheld camera, a 35 mm Arriflex BL that weighed
around fifty-five pounds with a fully loaded thousand-foot magazine,
as close to each performer as I could manage. In a moment I’ll never
forget, B.B. King turned to me while riffing on his guitar, Lucille, and
said, “That camera’s got to be heavy.” I agreed. After shooting his set
for over half an hour I surely knew it was.

The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it

away from you.
B.B. KING

In 1983 it was time for me to move on. It was shooting a variety of

small documentaries with Mike Radford, including his Van Morrison
in Ireland, that led me to my first feature film since Cruel Passion.
Another Time, Another Place was Mike Radford’s adaptation of a
recently released novel by the Scottish writer Jessie Kesson, set in
rural Scotland during World War II. The film concerned the complex
relationship that develops between three Italian prisoners of war and
the wife of an isolated crofter fifteen years her senior. We chose the
beautiful but bleak Black Isle on the east coast of Scotland, to the
north of Inverness, for our location, a place where the weather can
change from one hour to the next. We had the entire cast, led by
Phyllis Logan, on call for the length of the shoot, and all our locations
were within easy reach and available to us on any day.
In the mornings Mike and I would have an early breakfast
together and confirm, based on the weather outside and the forecast
for the day, which scenes we would shoot. The crew would
rendezvous at a crossroad in the middle of the Black Isle and there
receive directions to what would be the first scene of the day. That
might have been the bothy or a potato field, a cornfield or the barn. If
the weather felt right, we might cover the ground with cotton wool
and pretend it had recently been snowing. One night we waited in
the hotel bar for a local farmer to telephone when his cow was about
to give birth so we could film the event with Phyllis playing the
midwife. Luckily it all happened before we had been in that bar for
too long. I asked myself, “Are all films going to be like this?
Everybody staying in the same place, going to the pub together in
the evening and talking about the movie. Being able to choose what
you shoot in the morning depending on the weather. If this is the way
films are made, maybe this is for me!”
That it’s never happened since would come as a shock to few
people in the film industry. But in 1983 Another Time, Another Place
showed during the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival
and led to yet another experience I could not have even dreamt
about as a boy.
OceanofPDF.com
 6
BIG BROTHER
Who controls the present controls the past.
GEORGE ORWELL, 1984
It’s tempting to say the time was right, but Orwell’s novel is,
unfortunately, always timely, as the years to come would further
confirm.

It was on April 4, 1984, when we shot John Hurt writing in

Winston Smith’s diary the words, “April 4th, 1984—From a dead
man, greetings,” though we didn’t realize our schedule would lead to
this somewhat stunning coincidence.

When Mike offered me the chance to shoot 1984 I was taken

aback. I had shot only one independent feature with him and that
had involved minimal location lighting and no studio sets. The film
had not even been shot on 35 mm as, to save money, we had used
Super 16 mm. My only other on-set experience of a feature film (I
certainly wasn’t going to suggest Mike see Cruel Passion) had been
when I shot some behind-the-scenes footage of Pirates of Penzance
for an arts program with Mike. I hadn’t been encouraged by what I
had seen. Not that I wasn’t impressed by Douglas Slocombe’s high-
key, direct lighting; it was the industrial, almost impersonal, way the
set was run that seemed counterintuitive to the kind of filmmaking I
pictured being part of. Later, Mike told me that a TV series I had
shot, Wolcott, had reassured him that I was up for the challenge of
1984. I didn’t let on that I had no such confidence in myself.
Mike hoped to shoot 1984 in black-and-white, but the realities of
production and finance made that impossible. So, wanting a look that
would convey the grimness of the dystopian Britain Orwell renamed
“Airstrip One,” we worked to figure out the next best thing. Our
friends at Kays Laboratories in London helped us employ a
technique first used by Kazuo Miyagawa for Kon Ichikawa’s 1960
family drama Her Brother. Miyagawa had extensive experience in
film labs and gave Her Brother a desaturated look that he called
“silver tint.” Our main problem: Miyagawa never told anyone how he
achieved his results.
Kays accepted the challenge of cracking it, applying what we now
call “bleach bypass” to our footage’s positive print. Silver crystals,
which act as a catalyst for the development process, were retained
in the print emulsion by skipping the bleach bath that would usually
remove them and keep the colors of the image truer to life. By
remaining in the print, the crystals act as a black-and-white layer in
the emulsion, resulting in an image with more muted colors, a high
contrast ratio, and an intense black. We were thrilled with their work,
which allowed Mike and me to create a visual analogue for a joyless
world defined by fear.
To complement the process, I used very little bounce light, though
this was, and remains, my usual approach. I wanted the harder look
created by a single directional light source falling into deep shadows.
And 1984 is one of the few films for which I severely restricted the
colors of my light sources. Whether shooting night scenes or
interiors, I wanted to keep the color of the light neutral or a little cold
(or bluish). The only color contrast within the film is the warmth of the
Telescreen projections and the bucolic Golden Country.
 With our look established, we set off to find appropriately joyless
locations. Scouting is done either by a production designer, a
specific department, or, as has been my more usual experience, by
the director, accompanied by the production designer and the
cinematographer. Sometimes, I simply venture out on a day off to get
ideas. Which was how, when walking around the East End of London
on my own, I came across Beckton Gasworks. This sprawling
industrial complex had opened in 1870 but for the previous eight
years had been left to rot. Its dilapidated state certainly looked
joyless. After looking at my Polaroids and making a quick scout, Mike
embraced the location. You may recognize Beckton from a more
popular film shot there some time after 1984, Kubrick’s Full Metal
Jacket, in which the gasworks stood in for Vietnam.
 Finding the rats proved to be a greater challenge. When our
animal handler took the cloth off the cage he had brought to the
production office, Mike and I were confronted by a lab rat, a snowy
white animal with luminous pink eyes. We asked him how he thought
a white rat might be appropriate to Orwell’s vision. “We could dye it
black,” he replied. “And the pink eyes?” asked Mike. I expected him
to suggest the lab rats could be fitted with contact lenses, but no, he
agreed to bring us sewer rats, as big and as black as he could find. I
have no idea how he caught them, nor do I want to know, but
knowing it would take time to film the rats, I asked my friend Dick
Pope to help us out. Unknown to Dick, I was asking him to take close
shots of rats. Unknown to me, Dick shared a common fear with the
main character in 1984, Winston Smith. Inside Dick’s personal room
101 were rats.
 Telescreens of various sizes project propaganda masquerading
as news everywhere from private dwellings to crowd-filled public
places, like Victory Square. To find out how we could create them,
we turned to special effects expert Charles Staffell, whose career
stretched from Henry V through Superman. Talking to Charlie was a
little daunting as I could tell he was straining to be patient with two
unknowledgeable but enthusiastic beginners. He had so much
experience in the world of effects, while both Mike and I had, let’s
just say, none!
 We discussed what Charlie could do in terms of back projection
and front projection, what our options were to shoot everything “in
camera” (rather than adding postproduction effects work to the
image we had captured on the set), what restrictions there would be
in terms of the space required for the projection system, and the time
it would take to set up. A technique nearly as old as movies
themselves, back and front projection involves filming actors against
screens with previously filmed images projected onto them, either
from the front or the back. Both have advantages and
disadvantages. Front projection produces the stronger image but, as
its name implies, also requires finding ways to project the image at
an angle that avoids hitting the set and the scene’s actors.
Further complicating matters, our actors would sometimes have
to sync their performance to some specific cues in the playback or to
match precisely what was being shown on a screen behind them as
if the image was being beamed in from cameras observing them in
real time. We’d also need to rewind the footage during the shoot to
accommodate multiple takes. All this was new to both Mike and me,
but once we had some understanding of the complexities involved,
we broke down what we could shoot on location, what needed to be
shot in a studio, and how much time it would all take.
We achieved our playback images in several ways, mostly using
front or back projection but on some sets just regular televisions
housed in a frame of the same style and shape as our larger
Telescreens.
On one occasion, we inserted the image as a glass shot, a once-
popular technique that dates back to the silent era and was used on
All Quiet on the Western Front and Ben-Hur among many others.
The camera was set to photograph a landscape in the East End of
London. On a large piece of glass, held at forty-five degrees to the
lens and in the foreground of the shot, both the framework
supporting the Telescreen and the buildings beyond were painted in
perspective to the existing landscape as it appeared through the
lens. The playback image of Winston Smith confessing was then
projected to fit the screen area as it appeared on the glass—care
being taken that each element of this composite shot was held in
focus—and the shot captured entirely in camera. Five extras walked
through the midground, and a helicopter hovered in the sky, but
much of the image was simply painted on the glass. How differently
such shots can be achieved today.
We filmed the elements that were to be played back well in
advance of principal photography to allow time for the processing
and editing of the footage. As we wanted these images to convey a
distressed texture, we reshot our playback footage off a CRT
television screen. This embedded the scan lines inherent with that
system in our image. Using filtration, we added a warm brown tone
that contrasted with the predominantly cold look of the live-action
footage.
 One location proved especially difficult to figure out. We were to
film a pair of large crowd scenes in the ruins of Alexandra Palace, an
entertainment facility built in the Victorian era and more recently
renovated before a fire virtually destroyed the main structure in the
summer of 1980. (The fire started at night, and I happened to have
been filming Capital Radio’s Jazz Festival there that same
afternoon.) In 1984, it remained literally a shell of its former self, and
so provided an ideal stand-in for the public rallies of Airstrip One’s
Victory Square.
But Victory Square would be dominated by two towering versions
of our Telescreens, and we had not settled on how this would be
achieved. It seemed the one time in the film that we would have to
resort to bluescreen and insert the image in postproduction, but
neither Mike nor I wanted this. So, I took Charlie aside and naively
asked him if there was a way we could simply project the images as
would be done in a cinema. Was there a projector that would give
me enough light? It was hard to gauge Charlie’s reaction sometimes
as he often seemed a little grumpy, but that was just his way. We
made some tests.
To create the forty-five-foot-tall Telescreen images, Charlie used
his carbon arc projectors. But as bright as they are, the carbon arcs
barely moved my meter when projected from the required distance of
seventy-five feet onto a white screen. Instead of being the brightest
element within the frame, the images were in danger of being
completely washed out. Charlie realized that front-projection material
would reflect more efficiently than white, but it would not allow us to
shoot at an angle to it. However, there was a paint used on hazard
signs that might serve our purpose when applied to the screen. It
was a compromise but, sure enough, my meter did now register an
exposure, and the reflective surface gave us some latitude to shoot
at an off angle to the screen. The effect was similar to the experience
of modern 3D or IMAX screens, which also have a silvered surface
and reflect light at varying intensity depending on the angle of the
viewer to the image.
 The lighting in the playback footage of the speaker had to match
what we’d film on the set, which was shot many days later and under
very different conditions. This was just one of many reasons I drew a
schematic of the location lighting well in advance. The irony of
shooting with the playback in camera was that if the camera and the
projector were fully in sync, I would see it only as a very faint image
through the eyepiece, if at all. Both the camera and the projector had
180-degree shutters so, when they were in sync and both fully open,
the maximum amount of light passed from the playback screen onto
the film. But when the camera’s reflex mirror reflected through the
viewfinder what the lens was seeing, the projector’s shutter was
closed, and no playback image was visible through the camera. In
the days of no video assist or a way to play back a take, it felt a bit
like flying blind.

In spite of all his wizardry, Charlie was not entirely happy with the
film because he didn’t approve of, or maybe just didn’t understand,
our aims. After we shot and processed our first playback footage and
Charlie saw what we wanted him to project, he went apoplectic. Why
would we want to use such a trashy-looking image? He had been in
the business for more than forty years, he had so much more
experience than two ex–film school students, and he had no
intention to work on a film that, he felt, had little regard for quality.
But Mike knew what he wanted and was adamant that it was to be
done his way. This was Orwell’s grubby, retro-futuristic version of
1948, rather than the gleaming future of 2001: A Space Odyssey (on
which Charlie had also worked), but Charlie was never convinced.
Other scenes presented different challenges, some of them also
Telescreen related. Since my early exercises at the National Film
School, with Charles Lagus and the makeup mirrors, I have asked
myself one question before addressing a scene: Where is the light
coming from? The answer is not simply an aesthetic choice but
involves the practicalities of a set or a location.
For the office of O’Brien, the Inner Party member played by
Richard Burton who serves as antagonist to John Hurt’s Winston, we
built a set onstage. For both this set and the prison cell, Charlie
required a large area to accommodate his back-projection system.
Not only would each entire set be reflected in the glass in front of the
playback screen, but I needed to limit any direct light from hitting the
image and washing it out. Although I tend to prefer a light source,
such as a window or a practical lamp, that will more easily project
light into an actor’s eyes, for these and similar sets I had to take a
different approach. That approach was to ask the art department to
build a softbox into the ceiling of each set, which would allow me to
project a pool of soft light onto the actors and control what fell onto
the Telescreen behind them.
 If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind
is extinct; we are the inheritors.
O’BRIEN, IN 1984

The torture room (the Ministry of Love) posed a similar challenge

to O’Brien’s office, though it did not involve a Telescreen. The
staging of the scene required shooting in every direction, including a
pivotal moment in front of a mirror. To reach into the actors’ eyes at
that moment would be hard with a source coming from above, and
would be a compromise that I wasn’t willing to make. Again, I asked
the art department (collaboration between the cinematographer and
the production designer during the prep period of any film is so
crucial) to build a light source into the set, this time a high window
that ran almost the entire length of one wall. This would place
Richard Burton, who had most of the dialogue, in a soft frontal light
while leaving John Hurt, lying on the torture bed, in semi-silhouette.
Only at the point Winston Smith is introduced to his own face in the
mirror would it be fully visible in what would become a soft sidelight.
 It was through such simple challenges that I developed my way of
lighting, an approach that was naturalistic but also gave me flexibility
as a camera operator. And it was through these day-to-day
challenges that I developed a way of collaborating with a team. Many
of them had been with me on documentaries and pop promos rather
than having worked their way up through the feature world. My gaffer
John Higgins, nicknamed Biggles, I had met on a Genesis pop
promo, and 1984 was our first, but by no means our last, feature film
together.
Shooting 1984 was complicated and stressful but also, despite
the dark material, a lot of fun. Mike was a joy to work with, largely
because of the passion and integrity he brought to the film. There
were times during Another Time, Another Place when he had serious
doubts about the film. It was not Ermanno Olmi’s film The Tree of
Wooden Clogs, which he always made reference to. Was it even any
good, let alone anywhere close to the film he had dreamt it would
be? By the time a film is cast and starts production, it takes on a life
of its own and becomes a product of all the elements that bring it in
front of the lens. Our process did not change from Another Time,
Another Place to 1984, but we did have more time. Mike focused on
rehearsing with the actors and determining exactly what he wanted
from a scene before we set the camera. Occasionally, rehearsals
would last for hours. Once, Mike locked the stage door to keep the
producer at bay, while we rehearsed all morning and into the lunch
break. By the time we began shooting it was well into the afternoon,
but we still managed to complete the day’s schedule, and without
going into overtime. This showed me the value of having a plan
before you start rolling the camera rather than just shooting your way
into the scene.
We also shot the entire film in camera, shooting images that with
today’s technology are more often given over to visual effects. It’s a
shame because the thrill of doing it for real on the day just can’t be
beat. Not just photographing the set and the lighting but the entire
image in combination with the performances. One of the least
recognized but most important aspects of a cinematographer’s job
(and, by extension, that of the shooting crew) is to help provide an
immersive reality for the film’s actors, a secure and welcoming space
in which they feel free to do their work. Without the characters the
actors create, there is no film.
The experience of shooting 1984 also helped teach me not to
compromise the way I like to work because of what other people
think about my ability. A line producer on the film had a low opinion of
me and—reviving memories of Cruel Passion—was particularly
skeptical that I could cope with a film of such scale as both its
cinematographer and camera operator. Not only did he imagine an
operator would be taking over after a day or two, but he also insisted
we carry a full second unit camera crew for the entire shoot—I
suspected as a backup, as we had no need of them otherwise. One
day, a geared head turned up on set. A geared head is operated
using two revolving handles, wheels that control both the pan and tilt
axis of the camera. Most camera operators used them in the past,
when cameras were far heavier, but, even now, they can be an
effective tool in the right hands. Our line producer assumed an ex–
film school student wouldn’t know what to do with one, and he came
to watch, or should I say gloat.

Feigning my gratitude, I had my camera grip make the swap with

my regular fluid head, also referred to as a friction head, manipulated
using just a single pan bar. We got the shot and I turned to my first
assistant, Andrew Speller, and asked that the geared head be
returned. I didn’t see a need for it again that day. The train we were
shooting had crossed through a static frame, and I had simply locked
off the wheels. While in film school, I’d practiced using a geared
head until I could attach a pen to it and sign my name, something
cinematographer Gerry Turpin (operator of Peeping Tom among
many other films) had told me was the traditional way to prove one’s
competence. I was not carrying one on 1984 to save money and for
no other reason.
1984 earned strong reviews, but that might have not been the
case if we hadn’t avoided a potential disaster before its release.
Because of the additional silver left by the bleach bypass process,
heat could build up in the gate of a projector and cause the print to
burst into flames. Had we not warned projectionists to make sure
their equipment maintained a sufficient gap, we might have had
serious problems. I can’t imagine the image of movie theaters
burning across the UK would have been good for the film, or any of
our careers.
As for my own career, it had taken me a long time to find myself.
Behind the camera, as a film’s cinematographer, I felt a confidence
that had previously eluded me. But it was only while shooting 1984,
while standing on the western edge of Salisbury Plain looking toward
a landscape of gently sloping hills slowly coming to life in the early-
morning sunlight, when I recognized myself as that cinematographer.
Behind me was a parking lot, but it was the view ahead that
mattered, the location that director Michael Radford and I had
chosen to represent the Golden Country, as described by George
Orwell in his masterwork 1984. This was the idealized vision of
England dreamt of by the story’s protagonist, Winston Smith. It fell to
our production designer, Allan Cameron, to build a gloomy corridor
that had no place in such a bucolic landscape. My job, as the film’s
cinematographer, was to shoot it in such a way that it matched the
sets we had built onstage back in London.
The crew arrived early to build the hallway and, at the end of it
and facing to the west, a door to the dreaded Room 101. Later it
would contain Winston Smith’s worst fears, but for now it served as
the entryway to his dream. The work done, we broke for lunch early,
readying ourselves to take full advantage of the afternoon light for
our shoot. Ordinarily this would have been just another meal break—
a boxed lunch, a quiet cigarette, and a few moments of slumber. But
this day was different, for a couple of reasons. We had the location
for only one day, and because we were working with a limited
budget, we had no individual trailers, no catering tent, and only a
single portable toilet. That left our well-known stars, John Hurt and
Richard Burton, to make the best of it along with the rest of us.
They did so without complaint, seated on the grass verge of the
parking lot eating their boxed lunches with the rest of the crew. I’d
first seen and admired John Hurt alongside Derek Jacobi in the TV
series I, Claudius and, more recently, playing John Merrick in David
Lynch’s film The Elephant Man. Richard Burton, on the other hand,
had begun his career in film before I was born! Here was Alexander
the Great from the film of the same name, Jimmy Porter from Look
Back in Anger, Mark Antony from Cleopatra. And here was Alec
Leamas from Martin Ritt’s haunting film version of John le Carré’s
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, one of my all-time favorite
films, just a few feet away, chatting casually with us on a fine spring
day in the English countryside. It was a moment I’ve not forgotten. I
knew then that I had found what I had been looking for.
What exactly we talked about that day disappeared in the
moment, but I remember an earlier event a little more clearly. A few
days after joining our production, Richard Burton sent word he would
like to talk with the entire crew once shooting had wrapped for the
day. It made for an intensely nervy afternoon. Famous actors are
often preceded by their reputations, and Burton certainly had one. As
we all gathered sheepishly outside his trailer, which was no more
than the holiday caravan an elderly couple might take to the English
seaside for a weekend break rather than that more often seen on a
Hollywood shoot, we feared we were in for a bollocking. What were
we doing wrong?
 Richard Burton appeared, stooping to exit through the low door of
his trailer and be confronted by a sea of worried faces. His first
words? “Thank you.” Could he hear our collective sigh of relief?
Then he elaborated, “These last few days have been among the best
experiences of my life. When I came on set and saw so many young
faces looking at me, it terrified me. So, I wanted to take a moment to
thank you all for making me feel so welcome and for being so
supportive. I’m truly happy to be working with you all and especially
so on such a project as this. Again, thank you. I will look forward to
seeing you all tomorrow.”
Even now, I am deeply moved when I think about that moment,
especially remembering Burton passed away before he could see
the finished film. It was a wonderful thing for him to say, and it was
said with such sincerity. It not only made me realize someone of his
stature could be as insecure as the rest of us but why he was. (It
also showed me the power of graceful behavior—something that you
don’t always see on a film set.) Together we were a team, each of us
trying to do our best for a director and a project that we all really
cared about. Not Richard Burton, nor any one of us, wanted to let the
team down.
I was energized by the fear that came with the challenge. I liked
being part of a team, which is an essential part of the process, and I
liked having the responsibility of fulfilling a director’s vision while
running a crew of technicians. But by many, I was still considered an
outsider. I had not worked my way up through the industry ranks,
which was the normal path in the 1970s and early 1980s, much as it
had always been. But how was I to know? It was a happy accident
that had led me to the National Film School, and into an industry I
knew little about.
I had also learned that as soon as you pick up a camera you must
be prepared for compromise. There are many elements involved in
shooting a film. Things that can always be done better. But what is
better?

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 7
LOVE KILLS
I’ll never look like Barbie. Barbie doesn’t have bruises.
NANCY SPUNGEN, IN SID AND NANCY
Although I had seen the Clash in concert when working with
Dick and knew of the Sex Pistols—who could have not been aware
of that notorious Bill Grundy interview and their provocative songs
such as “Anarchy in the UK” and “God Save the Queen”?—I was
deep into filming an around-the-world yacht race by the time punk
rose to prominence. Like Star Wars and a great many other things, I
missed the release of the Pistols’ first album and the band’s
infamous live shows after they added Sid Vicious as bassist. But the
impact of punk could still be felt when we were making Alex Cox’s
dramatization of the fatal romance between Sid and Nancy Spungen
in 1985. It was natural that a kind of “punk chaos” set the tone for the
shoot.
With Gary Oldman cast as our Sid and Chloe Webb as our Nancy,
it soon became quite clear this would be a kind of spontaneous
filmmaking—and quite the opposite of 1984 or the more recent
Defense of the Realm I had shot for executive producer David
Puttnam. We were operating with very little money, working from a
script that was open to variation, and often shooting on locations
without permission. And when we did have permission, it might be
for something quite confined rather than what it expanded into. For
example, at one fancy central London hotel our location manager
had arranged for us to shoot in a suite on the second floor and
nothing more, but the scene soon spread its wings into the main
lobby and, once we had outstayed our welcome there, up to the roof.
To work quickly and to give myself more control over the frame as a
scene “progressed,” both Alex and I agreed I should shoot much of
the film handheld. This, in turn, influenced the way Biggles and I
approached the lighting. Often, we needed to light a scene quickly
and allow for shooting in all directions, so we began to construct
various ring lights and batten strips of household bulbs, both cheap
and easy to rig. To save on gel, and if we had no dimmer system, we
might connect the bulbs in series, thus reducing the voltage to each
and warming the color they would emit. Apart from our concert
scenes, we used very few conventional film lights on Sid and Nancy.
It was a way of working that I was moving toward before this
experience, but this film certainly had a significant effect on how I
developed my approach to lighting.

For one scene we re-created the Sex Pistols’ infamous Silver

Jubilee celebration during which the band performed “God Save the
Queen” aboard a boat, in mockery of Queen Elizabeth II’s own
celebration of her twenty-five years on the throne that was to happen
on the Thames a few days later.
Like the Pistols, we were confronted by the river police, and at
least some of their boats featured in the film were not an intended
part of the scene. Like the 911 call that someone made to the fire
brigade when we were shooting outside a theater in New York City,
the chaos added to the scene’s production value. The shot of Sid
and Nancy leaving the melee was lit using only the fluorescent tubes
underneath the walkway, which Biggles had purposely rigged, and I
shot it handheld simply walking backward with Chloe and Gary,
doing focus myself and panning to County Hall as the couple passed
out of frame. And, because our shoot was being closed down by the
police, we had time for only a couple of takes. Despite the rush, I
love the feeling of the shot, especially when combined with the music
of Pray for Rain.

We also shot our own version of “My Way,” this time in a West
End theater, loosely based on the original video but with a
heightened nod to the romance of the piece and with a foretelling of
its ultimate end. Nancy is shot but the two of them still manage to
walk away as if in a dream. Andrew McAlpine, the film’s production
designer, Biggles, and I chose a simple stairway of fluorescent tubes
for what was one of the few formally staged scenes.
 He’s a fabulous disaster. He’s a symbol, a metaphor, he
embodies the dementia of a nihilistic generation. He’s a
fuckin’ star.
MALCOLM MCLAREN, IN SID AND NANCY

Otherwise, much of the film was made on the fly, literally. We took
a skeleton crew to Paris, flying in at dawn to shoot Sid and Nancy
experiencing the sights of Paris. After dark and before taking a flight
back to London, we shot a scene involving Sid’s agent, played by the
film’s co-producer, at a café across the street from the famous
Moulin Rouge cabaret venue. As on so many other occasions, we
obtained permission to shoot from the proprietor of the café only
when we turned up with our cast and equipment. I was working with
one assistant, David Bryant, and Biggles served as our sole
electrician, carrying a basic lighting kit of four Red Heads, small and
lightweight 650-watt open-face lamps that I was used to using on
documentaries. It was all our small plane could accommodate. Both
Gary and Chloe spent the day in full makeup and in character. In
truth, Gary spent the entire shoot with his hair extensions and in full
punk mode, whether on set or out for a beer in San Francisco. Crazy
and brilliant. It was a world away from shooting 1984.

Soon after our day in Paris we left London for New York’s JFK
airport, disembarked in the late afternoon, and piled into a van to
begin scouting a wide variety of locations I had never seen before in
a city I was experiencing for the first time, places including the
Chelsea Hotel, Times Square, Alphabet City, and a methadone clinic.
Not least, we scouted the Jersey Shore in search of a location for the
film’s dreamlike final scene, in which a spectral Nancy joins Sid at a
pizza parlor in the middle of nowhere with the city skyline in the
background.
At close to midnight, we wearily gathered for a production
meeting to finalize our plans for the seven o’clock call time
scheduled for the next morning. Moments later Dave Bryant burst in.
“I just want to tell you the camera truck is outside, and the driver is
nowhere to be found. The fuel tank is leaking, and the vehicle holds
twenty-eight gallons of diesel fuel. Or it did. Much of that is now
running down the street. We have unloaded all the camera
equipment but it’s sitting on the pavement.” Dave meant the sidewalk
in Brit talk, and the mix-up between the meaning of these two words
would often cause problems for us while shooting in the States.
“Simon,” he continued, referring to our second assistant, “and I have
nowhere else to put it. Oh! And it’s beginning to snow. And you think
we’re shooting at seven tomorrow morning? I don’t think so. But
that’s up to you. For myself, I’m going to bed. Or I will be if you can
tell me where I’m supposed to be sleeping tonight.” It had been a
long day.
The following day, a little later than planned, we began filming a
few scenes at the storied Chelsea Hotel, the site of Nancy’s death. It
was there that I first met Bill O’Leary, then a practical electrician but
now a gaffer, with whom I’ve worked in America whenever possible.
Bill is quiet, focused, easygoing, and especially gifted in embracing
unorthodox ways of lighting. These qualities served him well on Sid
and Nancy, a film on which we used a wide array of unusual
practical bulbs (gag lights), either hidden to augment an existing
source or as a visible addition in the shot. This included, at Billy’s
suggestion, a single red bulb in the back of a shot as if marking an
exit. (Slipping a single red bulb into a shot became something of an
inside joke. You might spot them in Fargo, The Hurricane, and
others.)
 Anywhere, but especially on locations, distractions can slow the
work. Alex had a lot of friends in New York, and the day we shot on
the Chelsea stairwell turned into an unexpected social gathering. I
admit I can get annoyed at these sorts of things when I’m trying to
set the camera and to light. Unable to hide my frustration, I took our
first assistant director, Betsy Magruder, aside and asked, “Can you
get rid of that woman who’s leaning over the balcony there? I mean,
it’s really hard to concentrate when you’ve got all these people
hanging around!” She turned to me and replied, “That woman? That
woman’s Raquel Welch.”
From New York we moved to San Francisco where, among
others, we shot the scene in which Sid talks to the Pistols’ frustrated
road manager Phoebe (played by Debby Bishop) in the back of a
taxi. This was, like much of the film, a spur-of-the-moment decision
that somehow worked out. We filmed the scene over a lunch break
with Alex spontaneously hailing a cab and nonchalantly asking the
driver if he could accommodate an unusual request. We needed to
use the cab for filming, and all he needed to do was hold on while we
made a few adjustments, then simply drive us across the Bay
Bridge. I taped a piece of muslin on the roof of the cab and with my
free hand—my right hand was holding the camera on my shoulder—
aimed a “sun gun,” a handheld portable lamp, at it to get a bit of
reflected light in the actors’ eyes. Alex recorded the sound, and I
can’t remember if he was in the trunk or wedged beneath the actors’
legs. Either place was quite unusual for a director.
One of the most memorable scenes in Sid and Nancy comes late
in the movie. The shot encapsulated the look and tone of the film,
which varied from the dark and realistic to the poetic and surreal. It
figured prominently in the film’s trailer, and a still image from the
scene served as its poster in much of the world, becoming
synonymous with its doomed love story. But was it planned?
On the morning of the shoot, Alex, Abbe Wool (who cowrote the
screenplay with Alex), and I were, as usual, traveling together to the
location. We were scheduled to shoot a scene in which the couple
meet with their drug dealer, played by Xander Berkeley, in an area of
downtown LA that could stand in for New York. With the alleyway
already on our minds, the romantic moment took shape as we drove.
At first it was Alex who suggested he needed a shot of the couple
embracing in the alley. Then it was Abbe who suggested they be
surrounded by trash and that, maybe, it should be falling from the
sky as well. Alex warmed to Abbe’s idea, and I added my own
contribution by suggesting that the moment would be more poetic if
we were to shoot in slow motion. It would be as if, for them, time had
slowed.
 I can’t remember who suggested we put dustbins in the mix, but I
knew then it had to be shot in slow motion. To capture metallic
dustbins falling through the frame in a way that would feel weightless
and poetic, rather than angry and violent, we’d needed to shoot at
least at seventy-five frames per second. The higher the frame rate,
the slower the projected image; 120 fps would be even better. It
seemed a simple idea, but I would never have imagined that renting
a high-speed camera in Hollywood, the center of the world’s movie
industry, would prove so difficult.
Because we didn’t need to shoot sound, a non-sync Arriflex 111,
which could shoot up to 150 fps, would do, but production had to call
every single rental company in LA before finding one. When the
camera finally arrived on set—and who knows where it came from—
David put it through its paces: faster and faster! 50 fps, 75 fps, 100
fps, until an awful crunching sound told us the film was being
shredded by the camera’s mechanical claw. Eventually, David
managed to get the camera to run perhaps twenty feet of film
through the gate at 120 fps, before we heard the same awful sound.
It would have to do.
Without any time to prepare for the shot, the dustbins and the
trash were simply what our prop department had managed to find on
the morning of the shoot. Between each take, everything had to be
gathered up and carried to the roof from which it would be thrown.
We’d run the camera and, when it came up to speed, cue the trash,
but by the time it entered the frame the camera would have jammed.
The first time I worked in LA, shooting the “Sexual Healing” video,
we’d used our own equipment brought over from London. This was
only my second time shooting in LA, and it wasn’t living up to my
expectations. But everyone took a turn to haul those trash bins up
the six flights of stairs. Eventually the camera ran for a full take, and
that is the one you see in the film.
 But luck was sometimes on our side. One shot of Sid calling
Nancy from a pay phone somewhere in the American West takes
place against a skyline at magic hour (the time between sunset and
darkness, or between first light and sunrise), as seen through the
window of a harshly lit diner. For the scenes of the band on the road
we had a tour bus that we drove to El Centro in southern Southern
California, east of San Diego and near the border with Mexico. Alex
and I wandered around the town looking for inspiration. “Well, that
café is great. Let’s try it.” Once again, we simply asked the owner for
permission, gave him some money, and that was that. We needed to
film a few shots inside, but I saved the one through the window for
the moment the sun set below the horizon and was blessed with a
wonderfully surreal pinky sunset. To capture a simple shot like this
for real is a thrill you don’t get on a stage against a backing or an
LED screen.
For the scenes in Sid and Nancy’s room at the Chelsea Hotel we
worked on a set in Los Angeles. This gave us time to rehearse in the
quiet of a stage and have control over the environment, such as
when Sid flicks the cigarette that causes the curtains to catch on fire,
which we shot in slow motion to, again, give it a dreamlike feel. I love
it when Gary lights a second cigarette and throws the lit match into
the flames. It was something he did in the moment and one of the
subtleties that makes his performance so brilliant, a piece that
illustrates the intensity Gary and Chloe brought to their work.
Looking at the film now, I regret the way I lit some parts of it,
particularly this set. Preparing the scene in which Sid and Nancy’s
dealer comes to their room, I got too obsessed with lighting each of
the three characters. I rigged 1K Fresnel lamps on top of the set
walls to make everyone in the scene clearly visible. I rarely work in
that way, setting a lamp where there is no justification for it to be,
and I see now that it would have been better to play one character in
silhouette, or deep in shadow. But when you are under pressure and
in the thick of things, it can be hard to stand back and look at what
you’re doing from the outside.
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 I recognized my tendency to overlight when under pressure quite
early on in my career, and it’s something with which I still struggle.
Thankfully, by the time we got to one of Sid and Nancy’s final scenes
I’d suppressed that urge. The scene of Nancy’s death appears more
naturalistic and motivated, using the cold, green light of the hotel
room’s fluorescent bathroom fixtures, the sharp pattern of an exterior
streetlight, and a flickering television from the apartment window
next door. It’s minimal and raw, and I believe it’s one of the best
scenes I’ve ever shot, one in which the performance and the camera
are fully in sync. I wish I had had the guts, and the clarity of vision, to
take a similar approach throughout Sid and Nancy.
I had learned a lot. There is not always a need to draw a
storyboard or plan out the shots in detail before the day of shooting. I
enjoyed the challenge of a “run and gun” approach, though “chaotic”
might also be a valid description and experiences often seem rosier
in reflection. While it can be fun and exhilarating to shoot this way it
is only so when you have a director, such as Alex, who is always in
the story, rather than searching for something, anything, they have
not thought through. No film is ever perfect, and we made plenty of
compromises on Sid and Nancy. But the film is successful in its
blend of the real and the unreal, especially in its final scenes, where
the ugliness of Nancy’s death gives way to Sid’s fantasy of a reunion
against the Manhattan skyline. The day we filmed, a low cloud hung
over the Twin Towers and the cold grayness of the day provided a
striking contrast with the pink neon sign reading simply PIZZA. On a
sunny day the scene would have been entirely different, and, once
again, we got lucky.
Not counting the whirlwind “Sexual Healing” shoot, Sid and Nancy
was my first real trip to America. I decided to stick around for a bit
and spent five or so weeks exploring California and the American
Southwest. Though America was growing on me, I had no idea
when, or even if, I’d be back.
Instead, it was three films I shot in Kenya during this time that
remain among the most influential in my life.
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 8
AFRICAN STORIES
The eye never forgets what the heart has seen.
AFRICAN PROVERB
Written and directed by Harry Hook, The Kitchen Toto takes
place against the backdrop of the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s
in Kenya. I liked the script because it didn’t attempt to simplify the
story into bad guys and good guys. The film succeeds in conveying
the situation’s historical complexities by concentrating on the
experiences of its few characters and limited settings, but what could
have been a thoroughly pleasant experience was marred by
personality conflicts and, above all, poor planning.
We were shooting in the Kakamega forest area, in the far
northwest of Kenya and not far from the border Kenya shares with
Uganda. Because we were on the equator, the daylight, in theory,
lasted twelve hours. But with the surrounding forest being both
dense and tall, the number of hours we could shoot using natural
light proved to be far more limited. And Kakamega was called the
last tropical rain forest in Kenya for a reason. Every afternoon we
would have intense thunderstorms, some of which would bring hail
that covered parts of the jungle in two or three inches of ice. It often
made filming impossible.
The main location for The Kitchen Toto is a plantation house
where the title character, Mwangi, played by Edwin Mahinda, works
as a houseboy to a white policeman. We’d get a couple of exterior
shots in the morning, be forced to break for lunch when the
thunderstorms came in, and move inside during the afternoon. That
may sound simple enough, but because the storms were so intense,
we’d have no natural light coming through the windows when we
came to shoot our interiors. Not that we could shoot much when it
was pelting down, as the corrugated iron roof made recording sound
impossible.
One storm was so violent that the dining tent began to blow away
as if it were a yacht’s spinnaker. It floated skyward while ten or more
crew members held on to one of the guy ropes. All of them, including
Biggles—who is quite a large man—became momentarily airborne
before a brief lull in the wind sent them crashing back to earth. On
we went, intent to keep on schedule, even though I informed the
production that some footage could not possibly match what we
were shooting in bright sunlight. “That’s because you have no idea
what you are doing. Haven’t you got a sunshine filter?” To our
producer, everything looked fine on our low-quality VHS dailies
tapes. Only when we were back in London did it become obvious to
everyone that some of the footage was, indeed, unusable.
Night work presented a different sort of challenge, particularly as
the thunderstorms always seemed to arrive just as we were rigging
our lighting. One afternoon Biggles was attempting to position a lamp
high in the branches of a large fig tree when lightning began flashing
all around him. We were shouting at him to get down, especially
since he was holding a large metal lamp and running a cable from
the tree to a generator a hundred feet away. What’s wrong with this
picture? Nothing was worth the risk he was taking, but Biggles just
wouldn’t stop until he had finished securing the lamp in place. Today
a safety officer would shut down the entire unit until a dangerous
storm like that had passed by—as happened to us on a number of
occasions when we were shooting Sicario in New Mexico—but there
was no such position in the Kakamega rain forest.
Though we did not have a large crew, accommodation was a
challenge in such a remote spot. But as luck would have it, there
was the Golf Hotel, which, as the name suggests, fronted a golf
course that had been hacked out of the jungle. The drab concrete
block was a work in progress, but with help from our electricians, it
gradually came to life, never more so than on a Saturday night when
the entire cast and crew gathered in the disco. Naturally, the
Samburu warriors who were serving as extras in the film came
along. These nomadic cattle herders, close relations to the Maasai,
wear their hair in long braids which, like their bodies, they color with
a rich red ocher. When we first began shooting, they had all gotten
sick eating from our catering tables. The combination of chips,
avocado, and chocolate pudding upset stomachs used to milk, cows’
blood, and raw meat. From then on, the caterer supplied food better
suited to their specific diet. Whether on or off the set, the Samburu
wore their traditional dress, which was not much, and they always
carried their throwing spears. They are also renowned for their
dancing. Much like a scene from a John Ford Western, they were
asked to put their spears behind the bar before they took to the
dance floor. Once disarmed they began their singular traditional
dance moves, which consisted of jumping up and down, in a frenzy
getting higher and higher, while remaining on the same spot. All to
the sounds of Bananarama or Wham! and under the disco ball
lighting supplied by our electrical department. Which, I have to say,
was some of their best work.

You wouldn’t by any chance have a chocolate-covered

lobster?
ALICE DE JANZE, IN WHITE MISCHIEF

White Mischief, which reunited me with Another Time, Another

Place and 1984 director Michael Radford, showed another side of
the colonial misadventure. Set during World War II, the film depicted
a real-life murder case involving the “Happy Valley set,” a group of
aristocrats who took up residence on the shores of Lake Naivasha in
Kenya. While scouting around the lake, Mike and I walked into the
home of an older couple from Scotland, a Tudor-style mansion built
out of Scottish granite and surrounded with a beautiful, well-
manicured rose garden. They’d taken their little bit of Scotland and
transferred it to the shores of Lake Naivasha, where hippos
wandered around instead of sheep. It gave us a glimpse into the
mindset of the affluent and decadent Brits of our story who could
ignore a war that was tearing Europe apart and, with their
amphibious planes and crates of champagne, turn Naivasha into
their personal playground. No matter how much you read about
colonialism, it’s only when you see the lasting effects of its arrogant
history firsthand that it really hits home.
Working with Mike again was a no-brainer after 1984, though
White Mischief required a much different look. The sun-drenched film
depicts a beautiful place forcibly taken over by ugly people incapable
of appreciating it. While looking out over Lake Naivasha, a character
played by Sarah Miles sums up their attitude completely as she
watches another dawn come up over Lake Naivasha: “Oh God. Not
another fucking beautiful day.”
In many respects Mike and I took an approach opposite to 1984,
which relied heavily on the claustrophobic atmosphere created by a
locked-down camera. Instead, we emphasized floating camera
moves that connected characters within the same shot, movement
motivated less by what was happening within the frame than by the
sense of the scene. We wanted the camera movement to appear
light and effortless, but shooting scenes in this way required careful
blocking and actors that would work to specific camera direction.
Many of the shots also involved rigging a crane on which I could ride
and laying tracks for some lengthy moves, which could be
particularly tricky on irregular terrain. One scaffolded platform that
we constructed for a shot that followed a car up a hill and revealed
the Rift Valley began to collapse as soon as I mounted the crane. It
was a miracle we got the shot. Normally we would have used a
much larger crane that would have required less of a build, perhaps
a remotely operated camera head as well, but to have either for a
single shot in Kenya meant having to rent it for the time it would take
to ship it back and forth from the UK. We were no longer in
Shepperton Studios.

Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the

corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing
but food and water.
W. C. FIELDS

White Mischief ends with a sequence in which Greta Scaachi’s

character, Diana, rides through the bush, ending her journey at a
cocktail party taking place among the gravestones of a cemetery
beside the glistening water of Lake Naivasha. Diana leads the
camera to reveal the cemetery and the characters we have got to
know during the film with a movement that is typical of what Mike
wanted throughout the film. But the movement then becomes even
more dreamlike, ending as she sees a vision of her murdered lover
enjoying himself among the other guests, helping to blur the line
between the real and the unreal. It seemed a bookend to both my
experience in Kenya and that of the country that the final image is a
close shot of a servant holding a tray of champagne, played by the
same young actor who had been our Kitchen Toto star, Edwin
Mahinda.
Over the 1980s, I would shoot a variety of films ranging from the
stylized noir of Stormy Monday to the brooding British spy thriller
Defense of the Realm and the period drama Pascali’s Island, set on
a Greek island during the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Some were
good experiences, and some were not so good. It was shortly after
returning from Greece that I left a film with a multitude of problems
that, for me, epitomized the indulgent side of filmmaking, from an
unprepared director to a cast with specific ideas as to how I would
photograph them. One actor suggested he would only be shot on a
50 mm lens, and an actress insisted I use an Obie light (a frontal
light invented for Merle Oberon by her husband, the great
cinematographer Lucien Ballard, to soften the scar tissues left over
from a car accident), cosmetic lighting for which she had no need
and nor did the film.
Since the release of 1984 I had received several approaches from
American directors, but either I had been busy, my visa application
had been turned down, or a studio had vetoed my hiring. I decided it
was time to take a chance. I flew to LA to look for work.
It took some time, but an offer eventually came my way. A
“prestigious family comedy,” as my agent described it. I wandered
along the beach in Santa Monica thinking through my options—being
by the sea always seems to clarify my thoughts. It had the
expectation of an enjoyable shoot with a fine cast of actors. Should I
say yes? No sooner had I turned the offer down than my agent, who
had begun to doubt my sanity since I had left the last project,
received a call from Bob Rafelson. Would I be interested in a film
about Richard Burton (another son of Torquay) and John Hanning
Speke, two Victorian explorers, and their search for the source of the
Nile?
Would I? Bob Rafelson was one of the most influential directors of
the 1970s. Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens are
two of the best American movies of that or any other era. If I had not
been in Los Angeles, if I had not left one film and turned down
another, I would have never been available to meet with Bob, nor
would I have been free to work on his film. A happy accident? Who
knows?

In this wilderness you will find only Allah’s terrible whimsy.

ARAB CHIEF, IN MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON

I often don’t know why I’m approached for a job, and Mountains of
the Moon is no exception. I suspect Bob wanted someone out of the
UK as we were shooting part of the film there. Perhaps a
cameraman who had documentary experience. Chris Curling, who I
had worked for in India and the Sudan, came aboard as an associate
producer and anthropological advisor, but Bob told me he had no
idea we had worked together. Perhaps he had seen 1984 and it was
as simple as that.
Bob was a larger-than-life character. He had a reputation for
having a temper, and everyone had heard stories about him hitting
producers and having other eruptions. Perhaps he had mellowed by
the time we met, as I saw only flashes of Bob’s dark side. I loved
working with him. He told tall tales that were impossible to believe
until we discovered that, yes, he was telling the truth. One time we
were in this small plane flying across a wide expanse of seemingly
empty bush, and he said, “Ah, a friend of mine lives on a ranch down
there. I recognize it. I was walking across Kenya and I met him down
there.” He had never mentioned any of this before. Suddenly, there
was a ranch and we were buzzing around his mate somewhere in
the wilderness to the edge of Mount Kilimanjaro.
Bob loved exploring. We hiked for hours along the border with
Tanzania, between lines of trenches and barbed wire left over from
World War I, before coming across a perfect crater lake that
appeared out of nowhere. On the northeast border, we traveled with
Kenyan soldiers as guards until they refused to go any further.
“Somali bandits” was their reasoning. Bob asked, “Should we press
on?” I replied, “Well, yeah. We’re here, aren’t we?” In another era he
might have been Richard Burton searching for the source of the Nile.
I love exploring too, though the trip did stir my fear of heights.
Scouting the far-flung areas of Kenya by plane reminded me of my
last trip with Chris Curling, following the White Nile from Khartoum
into South Kordofan. Our bush pilot in Sudan told me that most in his
profession don’t live past fifty because of crashes, something you
don’t want to hear when as far as you can see there is only desert.
For a final scout we flew up to Lake Turkana in the northern part
of the country. The area is pretty much a desert where the lake is
surrounded by the cones of multiple volcanoes, though I don’t think
they’re active anymore. We wandered around looking for an
establishing shot we could use for a scene set in a nearby village,
and we happened on a wonderful spot looking down toward the lake
over the straw roofs of some huts. I asked Bob, “This would be good,
wouldn’t it?” before our guide said, “Yes, this was built for Vilmos…
Vilmos…” I finished his thought: “Vilmos Zsigmond?” I asked, not
expecting to hear the famous cinematographer’s name. He said,
“Yeah, that’s it. For a car commercial.” And I thought we were in the
middle of nowhere. Vilmos’s car commercial brought back memories
of that bobbing Coke bottle at Point Nemo.

I asked Dick Pope if he would come on the project and shoot

second unit of the expedition. I knew Dick had experience working in
Kenya with Chris Curling on his Worlds Apart series and that he
would be a perfect fit for this project. I was relieved when he said
yes, and I couldn’t have made a better choice. Dick seemed in his
element. He would disappear into the wild with his own caravan of
extras and return, days later, with two or three beautiful shots. Not
dozens of images but just what you really want from a second unit.
That Mountains of the Moon was a passion project for Bob made
it all the more embarrassing when, after some scenes early in the
shoot, it briefly looked like I didn’t know what I was doing. While we
were still in the UK we filmed a scene in which Burton, played by
Patrick Bergin, attends a dinner party with members of the Royal
Geographical Society, and we needed to light the dinner table as it
would have been in the 1850s, with candles. I couldn’t do what Barry
Ackroyd had done for me in Ireland, so Biggles made up some rigs
with little bare bulbs to boost the candlelight in the most naturalistic
way I could think of, though there still wasn’t a whole lot of light.
When the dailies came back only the candle flame was well exposed
while the characters appeared as green shadows in the inky
blackness surrounding them.
Sitting next to Bob and producer Dan Melnick in the screening
room, I pulled out the lab report. These reports assign a number to
the density of each of a negative’s three color layers (red, green, and
blue) from the intensity of light required to make the print. I was
shooting with an Agfa stock that I rated at 320 ASA and would
usually print at 31 across the average of all three colors. That’s a
little overexposed (27 being considered a midlight), but the heavier
negative allowed me to maintain a good black in the shadows. When
I looked at the sheet I saw a much higher number, 45 or 50. The
image had been printed down from where I had exposed the
negative by as much as two stops. I called the lab, and the timer
came to the phone, “Oh, on the sheet you said ‘candlelight.’ That’s
what I printed for.” I suppose that made sense. Not looking at the
rest of the frame, he’d printed for the flame. I was much happier
when we screened the proper version the next day. And so was Bob.
 It’s sometimes tricky to create a naturalistic look while still lighting
the actors in ways that will do justice to their performances, and
candlelight once made that even more challenging. During one
scene in Mountains of the Moon, Burton passes a single candle over
the naked body of his wife, Isabel, played by Fiona Shaw. There was
no way I could shoot with the candle by itself unless I had one with a
triple wick, but that would have involved dropping hot wax all over
our lead actress.
Biggles came up with a solution—a boom pole with a 60-watt bulb
hanging from the end of it. At 25 percent of its regular voltage, it
matched the color temperature of the flame, and Biggles simply
followed the path of the candle while keeping the bulb just out of
shot. I’m always happy when we can find the simplest solution to a
problem, and this was a trick we’d return to several times in the
future. Cinematography is a wonderful blend of creativity, technical
know-how, and problem-solving. I still think it’s quite a nice-looking
scene, although with modern film stocks and faster lenses, let alone
the capabilities of digital cameras, I would be able to use the single-
wick candle and nothing more.
In spite of the remote locations and complicated logistics, the
shoot in Kenya went smoothly thanks to line producer Terry Clegg,
whose careful planning allowed us to travel to all the places we’d
chosen during our scouting. Filming, on the other hand, wasn’t
always so easy. Our most difficult scene appears early in the film
when Somali waranle (warriors) attack Burton and Speke’s
expedition as they camp on the beach, which we shot on the shore
of Malindi Bay.
I always want to create lighting that has a plausible source and
consider simulating moonlight for night scenes to be something of a
cheat when there is any other possibility, but it’s sometimes
unavoidable. Here we had fires outside and oil lamps inside the
expedition’s tents, not much to light the entire scene, but even so, I
did not want to use moonlight. That the explorers couldn’t see their
attackers until they were feet away was part of what made the
moment so fearful.
 I think Bob had originally hoped to shoot the entire sequence by
firelight but then resigned himself to a more conventional approach.
“Well, where are you going to put the moonlight?” he asked me. “I’m
not going to use moonlight,” I told him. By this point Bob had become
quite trusting but he still wanted to understand what I was going to
do, replying, “So, how are you going to light it?” I explained the
campfire and oil lamps approach. “What about the landscape?” he
asked. We’d chosen the spot in part because of the miles of sand
dunes surrounding it and Bob naturally wanted to see them in the
film. But we had seen them, I reminded him. We’d shot a scene with
Speke arriving back at the camp in the late afternoon, having been
out hunting.
Bob remained skeptical about the darkness I was proposing, but
he went with it. To increase the effect of the natural sources, Biggles
and I created some practical lights using a variety of incandescent
bulbs that came from the hardware store and could be used in
multiples, either mounted on short wooden battens or inside
purpose-made rectangular metal dishes. We buried the dishes in the
sand, so that they were hidden from the lens, and angled them
toward the focus of the shot, which they bathed in a soft but
directional light while still appearing to come from the campfire or the
tents.

It’s not what you light—it’s what you DON’T light.

JOHN ALTON
 When Burton escapes the confusion of the battle and retreats
across the dunes I began to wonder if not creating a moonlight
source had been a mistake. Biggles was the one who suggested we
use Maxi Brutes (lamps that hold twelve or eighteen sealed-beam
1,000-watt PAR 64 bulbs) and dim them down to look like firelight. I
was skeptical at the light being so frontal to the camera but, by
placing the lamps directly on the sand, we found the light would rake
the patterns the wind had made in an interesting way while
separating the characters from the dunes behind them. It was a
technique that I carried with me until using it again on a much larger
scale, and hopefully to better effect, for Jarhead.

Filming Mountains of the Moon stretched from Liverpool’s

Victorian docks to Kenya’s Rift Valley. Scenes involved anything from
a genteel game of croquet to a more concerning encounter with
lions. The lions, supposedly tame, were maneuvered into our frames
by two slightly built young lads banging sticks on rusty sheets of
metal. But I suspect the lions had already been well fed as they were
not remotely interested in us or our film.
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 While shooting on more remote locations the cast and crew were
housed in a tented camp. It was as if we were on safari, sitting
around the campfire in the evening with beers and watching our
dailies from a VHS tape on a small television. But remote as we
were at times, I wished it were more. Bob was in the radio tent for
some time one evening and as he left, he called me over. “The
studio wants a word.” Fearing the worst, I lifted the radio receiver.
“Deakins? Your dailies are too yellow. Too yellow!” I had no idea
what the voice from the studio was talking about. The negative was
being processed in London, and I would have known had there been
a problem. “Where are you?” I asked, as politely as I was able. “How
are you viewing them?” “I’m in my car on the Pacific Coast Highway.
On my TV in the back of my car.” Maybe, I suggested, the TV might
be at fault (it was 1989 after all), or maybe the connection cut out.
Either way I returned to the campfire shaking my head. Bob looked
over as I sat down. “Hollywood,” he said as he returned his gaze into
the fire.
 We shot Speke’s discovery of Lake Victoria on our last day in
Kenya. Only it wasn’t. During our scouting we had found a beautiful
overlook a short drive from Homa Bay on the eastern shore of the
lake, and we had mapped out a single shot that would require a
small crane. As the camera position involved a long hike up the
almost vertical hillside that drew us to the shot in the first place, it
took a while for our reduced shooting unit to get ready. Everyone
mucked in and we made the shot in the midafternoon sunlight,
which, as the sun set into the shot, was always our preferred time of
day.
“OK?” Bob asked, after we made the shot. Of course, there was
no video assist or playback at this time, so a director had to trust the
operator more than today. The shot worked fine, but I was not sure if
the lake was entirely visible as the air was thick with haze. I
suggested that we should wait and see if it cleared. To cut a long
story short, it never cleared. Our small unit stayed in a hotel (a
charitable description) on Homa Bay for several days, carrying the
camera up to the crane every morning, readying the cast with their
props, hoping the sky would clear and the lake be fully visible. Bob
disappeared after that first take. We knew precisely what was
wanted, so he had no reason to stay. Besides, Jack Nicholson was
flying back from London to LA in a private jet. Bob could get a free
ride, so off he went.
That left us to the lake flies—which can be so bad you don’t go
outside after dark, and are known to have killed fishermen by
smothering them in their swarms—and a bar with warm beer. One
day turned into two, two into three. Until one evening our barman
told us, “The farmers in Uganda burn off their fields at this time of
year. That is why it’s so smoggy. It might clear if the wind changes.”
“Do you think it might?” “Not at this time of year, no. It always blows
across the lake from Uganda.” The first take is the one in the film.
Making Mountains of the Moon wasn’t all hard work all the time.
It’s not often that I get a chance to fish on the job, but I take
advantage of opportunities when I can. On a meal break while
shooting at Lake Turkana I hooked a large Nile perch. As I was
playing the fish, Bob was having his regular lunchtime swim. The El
Molo people who lived by the lake were once crocodile hunters, and
the guide who had taken me out on his boat commented that the
rock Bob was swimming toward was called Crocodile Island. We
considered breaking the line to pick up Bob before it was too late,
but that would have meant losing our fresh lunch. Besides, we didn’t
want to disturb Bob’s midday relaxation. We arrived back at camp
and cooked the fish, which was large enough for everyone to enjoy
as a treat before beginning that afternoon’s work—including Bob,
who returned safely.
Later, Bob would call Mountains of the Moon the favorite of his
films. I think Five Easy Pieces is his masterpiece and that elements
of Mountains of the Moon don’t quite come together. But it was an
experience that stays. Shooting three films in Kenya was like
exploring the history of colonialism, traveling back in time from the
Mau Mau rebellion to the hedonism of the Happy Valley set to the
first European exploration of the country, before it even became a
country. It was not until after World War I that the area became
known as the Kenya Colony and two million acres of land were given
over to settlement for those who had been in “imperial service.”
Mountains of the Moon saw part of that history from one narrow,
Eurocentric point of view, but as I learned about Sidi Mubarak
Bombay, the WaYao guide emerged as a more interesting subject for
a film. Enslaved as a boy and raised in India, where he became
fluent in Hindi, it was Bombay, played beautifully by Paul Onsongo in
Mountains of the Moon, who led Burton and Speke to their
discoveries. It was Sidi Bombay who guided Henry Morton Stanley in
his search for David Livingstone. In 1873, Bombay walked across
the continent from coast to coast with Verney Lovett Cameron. He
was given a medal by the Royal Geographical Society but was never
invited to England to receive it. That’s a story.

You go away for a long time and return a different person—

you never come all the way back.
PAUL THEROUX, DARK STAR SAFARI

After Kenya, I did return to America to shoot, but to a very

different part of the country. The Long Walk Home is a fictional story
set during the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, the yearlong protest of
Alabama’s segregated public transportation system set in motion by
Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger. The
film shot in Montgomery using historic locations and even some of
the original buses. It was the sort of film I had always hoped to work
on, one with human characters that took an insightful perspective on
real events, although, like Mountains of the Moon, one that also felt
the need to place undue emphasis on the perspectives of its white
characters. Even then, so many years after the bus boycott took
place, our filming The Long Walk Home stirred up ghosts in that part
of America. While scouting the film we’d approach homeowners and
be told we could use their homes to shoot in—until they found out
what the story was. “Uh-uh. Not in my house.”

I don’t want your children to grow up scared of mine.

ODESSA COTTER, IN THE LONG WALK HOME

My next film was also about America but shot largely in Thailand.
Originally scripted by Richard Rush, Air America began as a satirical
take on the true story of the CIA’s clandestine airline, which operated
inside Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War transporting
guns and drugs. Rush, who had a gift for dark comedy, originally
planned to direct the film himself. When this didn’t work out, the
script ended up in the hands of producer Daniel Melnick and became
a vehicle for Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr. I’d worked with Dan
on Mountains of the Moon—in fact, Bob Rafelson was set to direct
Air America at one point—and we got on very well. I’d also liked
director Roger Spottiswoode’s 1983 film Under Fire, in which Nick
Nolte plays a photojournalist working in Nicaragua. Its tone and
politics felt like a good match for the Air America I imagined we’d be
making. It felt like the right project.

What’s considered psychotic behavior anywhere else is

company policy.
GENE RYACK, IN AIR AMERICA
 The bad omens started in preproduction, when a rare earthquake
threatened to destroy our production office on the twelfth floor of a
hotel in Chiang Mai, and they continued as we scouted the film by
helicopter. Roger, Dan, production designer Allan Cameron, aerial
unit director Marc Wolff, and I were passengers in a Thai Air Force
Huey helicopter, no doubt left behind at the end of the Vietnam War,
flying out of Chiang Mai to scout the mountains to the north and west
of the city. The clouds lay low in the sky and, after a long time seeing
nothing but clouds and the dark shapes of the mountains below, it
seemed to us that we were lost. But, as the Thai pilot spoke little
English, it was hard for us to know for sure. To cut a long story short,
we landed in a Hmong village nestled among the mountains, where
we were greeted by a people who looked to be in full ceremonial
costume, though these were apparently their everyday clothes. Our
pilot proceeded to spread a map and ask one of the elders to point
out where we were. What village was this? I never did hear an
answer, and we took off without seeming to know more than we had
before we landed.
This was at least a colorful life experience, but our return trip was
much less enjoyable. As we flew back toward Chiang Mai in a
direction that seemed at best a guess, Marc gestured to the fuel
gauge. He was concerned that the needle hovered around the full
mark, indicating the Huey had not used any fuel during all the hours
we had been circling the mountains. The copilot tapped the gauge,
the needle dropped to zero, and a red light began to flash. How far
are we from the runway? Should we fly in fast in the hope that, if we
run out of fuel, our inertia will take us in? At least we would be close
to the ground if we crash! On the other hand, if we gain altitude, we
might be able to glide our way to the runway. It was a bizarre
conversation to listen to from the back of the Huey, but we somehow
landed safely.
The scouting trip set the tone for what would be one crazy shoot,
which stretched from October 1989 through February 1990 in
Thailand, the UK, and Los Angeles. Air America involved working
with the largest crew I have come across before or since—or ever
want to come across again. I felt the film could have been shot
handheld using a single camera with long takes that concentrated on
the characters rather than the action, but the director took the
opposite approach.
It’s not that I don’t ever see a place for multiple cameras, as one
scene on a dirt runway illustrates. A giant cargo transport, a DC-130,
flew into Chiang Mai one afternoon having, reportedly, flown directly
from where it was in use in South America. In what use was the
subject of much speculation. The pilot, a real American cowboy,
came to scout the runway in the middle of the jungle where we
expected him to land his “bird.” He took one quick look at its length,
pointed to a spot in the dirt where he would stop the plane, and
disappeared into the nightlife of Chiang Mai.
When the plane circled the field the next morning, we were
waiting with eleven cameras set to where our pilot had made his
mark. We were close but not too close. Maybe. Should we shoot on
longer lenses? No, that would only weaken the shots. The pilot
brought the plane in; it taxied slowly toward us and stopped within a
foot of the mark. Once our assistant director gave the all clear, we
had the shot, and the plane took off on its journey back to whatever it
did in South America. Had we known the pilot had had to be dragged
out of bed that morning, after a night on the town that, for him, had
hardly ended, we might have made a different decision as to where
the cameras would be!
This was a good use of multiple cameras, but I prefer every scene
to have a specific visual perspective rather than showing the
audience a series of random shots that, however beautiful, don’t
further the story. Even when shooting action scenes, I like to remain
focused on what’s needed rather than a series of options that will
never be used. Action can have a point of view: Witness the distinct
identities of both Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear and
William Friedkin’s 1977 remake, Sorcerer. Roger Spottiswoode is an
ex-editor (who worked for the great Sam Peckinpah), and he likes to
have a lot of footage when he gets to the cutting room. He is the
director and that is his prerogative, but I might never have signed on
if I had understood this.
Dan had hired me, and he wanted to make it work, but Roger
clearly did not value my input or like me operating the camera. I
realized just how low his opinion was of me when, some four weeks
into the shoot, we were watching dailies: tedious coverage of a
convoy of trucks wending its way through the jungle, mortar rounds
exploding and troops in camouflage responding, action shot multiple
times, on multiple lenses, and with multiple cameras. It was footage
that I didn’t remember shooting—a cinematographer’s nightmare.
Only then did it dawn on me that the crew was even larger than I had
initially thought. An “action” unit, being directed by a stunt
coordinator, had been shooting for almost as long as our first unit.
While a second unit is not unusual on a film like Air America, it was
odd that the film’s cinematographer—that is, me—had not been
consulted.
The final scene of Air America involved another helicopter, this
time shooting on a Los Angeles freeway using nine cameras. When
the production wrapped, I returned to London harboring grave
doubts about the business and my place in it. Doubts that led me to
move back to Devon. As luck would have it, I found a flat in a
location where I had often imagined I would one day like to live. I
made an offer (OK! I admit it. I did use my Air America earnings, so I
shouldn’t complain too much!), and in little more than a month I was
back in Devon. I got out my paintbrush and attacked the walls of my
new home. Air America could and should have been something very
special, but instead of a satirical black comedy in the vein of
M*A*S*H, it turned into a wacky buddy action comedy. We started
with a good script and the budget to do the story justice. How could
you tell?
And then the phone rang.
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 9
TWO BROTHERS
Look upon me! I’ll show you the life of the mind!
CHARLIE MEADOWS, IN BARTON FINK
It was my agent calling to tell me about a script, though it
probably wasn’t the right project for me. “It doesn’t make much
sense. It’s like two different movies. About halfway through it
changes into something that doesn’t match what it sets up.”
I asked who the director was, then remember hearing the
shuffling of paperwork.
“It’s two brothers. I don’t know them. Joel and Ethan Coen.” I
asked for the script to be sent over right away.
That Joel and Ethan Coen wanted to meet came right out of the
blue. They’d only released two films—Blood Simple and Raising
Arizona, with a third, Miller’s Crossing, soon to follow—but I thought
the two that I had seen were the work of highly imaginative
filmmakers. And Barton Fink was nothing if not imaginative, filled
with references to old Hollywood, American literature, and World War
II–era politics, some of which I got and other parts I didn’t.
The Coens were in London and, my Devon flat still being a work
in progress, I was as well. So, we met up for tea in Notting Hill. The
brothers were not at all how I’d imagined they might be. Just a
couple of young chain smokers with long hair—Joel’s was
particularly long and curly back then—rather quiet and unassuming.
They were also very much in sync about the material and their
approach to it, so much so that one would finish the other’s
sentences. What had been a pleasant conversation wound up after
an hour or so leaving me with little idea what would happen next—
until my agent rang and told me production would start in June. I
would be meeting up with the Coens in Santa Monica for five weeks
of prep.
It was years before I understood why they’d hired me (or that I
wasn’t the only cinematographer they interviewed in London that
day). Barton Fink was to be shot nonunion in a union town, so a
European cinematographer would fit that bill. Joel later told me they
had put in a call to Air America director Roger Spottiswoode to find
out how I worked, and he’d given them a scathingly bad report. He
told Joel and Ethan I liked to operate the camera myself, was not a
fan of second units, that I did not like shooting with multiple cameras
or with zoom lenses, and that I preferred working out the shots in a
scene before the day’s shooting began. Joel laughed when he told
me this; it was exactly what the brothers wanted to hear.
Barton Fink was my introduction to the idea of working from
storyboards (line drawings of each shot). Before that, on 1984, Sid
and Nancy, Pascali’s Island, and Defense of the Realm, I had
worked with the director to figure out how we would cover a scene
during a blocking rehearsal. Almost without exception, this would
take place on the morning of the shoot. The process could take an
hour or more, sometimes, as was the case on 1984, even longer.
During the five weeks of prep I had with the Coen brothers in Los
Angeles, we scouted locations, discussed the look of the film, and
drew storyboards together with their regular storyboard artist, J. Todd
Anderson. On subsequent films with Joel and Ethan, I would not
always be involved in the initial process of creating the storyboards
but, at the very least, we would review them together before
production began in earnest.
The first shot of Barton Fink is also the first shot I worked on for
Joel and Ethan, though what you see is different from what we had
initially conceived. The film opens in a New York theater at the
premiere of Fink’s latest play, Bare Ruined Choirs, a drama set
among working-class New York fishmongers. We used the Orpheum
Theatre in downtown Los Angeles to stand in for a Broadway house
and storyboarded a series of small, close shots to open the film: the
fly counterweights moving, the stagehand reading his paper between
actions, then, finally, a close shot on John Turturro that swings
around to reveal the stage and the play’s cast taking in the
audience’s applause. While scouting the location, I asked if we might
connect these individual shots into one flowing camera move and
was taken by surprise when the brothers agreed to try it. I think they
knew we could easily shoot the individual setups if the move proved
impossible but, not yet having any reason to have confidence in me,
they asked that I prep the shot the day before.
I knew we could pull it off, but we’d need the right equipment, so I
ordered a Louma crane. Invented in the early 1970s but only slowly
coming into common use, the Louma was the first telescopic camera
crane arm to incorporate a remote head with a video assist monitor
from which the camera could be operated. Where traditional crane
arms would generally require a human operator mounted behind the
camera, the Louma made this unnecessary and expanded the sorts
of shots we could create. It was the most maneuverable lightweight
crane I knew, and we rigged it on our location at the same time as
Billy O’Leary set up our simple lighting. Since I met Billy in New York,
we had become good friends. He had worked as my gaffer on The
Long Walk Home and had also joined Biggles and his crew in
Thailand for the Air America experience. It gave me confidence to
have him with me on Barton Fink, as not only was he a good
electrician, but he could also understand my most wayward
sketches.

I arrived at the theater early on the first shoot day, as did much of
our crew. We had the camera up and ready soon after the scheduled
call time. While waiting for the actors to finish with makeup, hair, and
wardrobe, we had plenty of time to rehearse the crane move with
Joel and Ethan. After the actors arrived, we completed the shot in
one or two takes, without Joel or Ethan suggesting we cover the
action with static shots. Leaving the camera on the crane, we shot
the two other angles we needed for the scene, and by late in the
morning we had completed the scheduled work for the day. At one
point Ethan asked me to slow down (something I have yet to be
asked to do by any director but the Coens, before or since) or the
lunch that had been prepared by the film’s caterer would go to
waste. I was relieved. It had been my first day of shooting with the
Coen brothers and I had avoided being physically sick. In truth,
however nervous I might be, I have learned to bury myself in my
work, and my confidence grows from my work.

But every day brought a new challenge, and my next was in the
main ballroom aboard the Queen Mary, the retired British ocean liner
that had been converted into a floating Long Beach hotel. We had
our storyboards, so I knew this location called for a shot that would
track through the ballroom as if it were Barton’s point of view, before
stopping on a static shot of his agent sitting with some dinner guests
and cutting to a close shot of Barton. To accomplish this long,
winding move across what was by no means a smooth floor, I had
arranged for a specialist operator, Mark O’Kane, to be hired along
with his Steadicam rig. I’d used the Steadicam on pop videos and
Mike Figgis’s The House, but it was still a relatively new tool for me.
Invented in the 1970s, it had become overused in the 1980s. But
applied properly, as in Hal Ashby’s Bound for Glory or Elem Klimov’s
Come and See, it could both create a unique and powerful effect and
be useful in challenging locations. But our long moving shot only
added to the difficulty of the lighting.
Using even a minimal rig inside such a sensitive space as the
Queen Mary presented problems. Today I would almost certainly use
one of the many lightweight lighting balloons to project the soft,
central light source I was looking for, but, in 1990, those were still
years in the future. By removing some of the recessed lighting
fixtures, Billy and our key grip, Brian Reynolds, devised fixing points
to suspend a rig over the dance floor, but this would allow only for
the lightest of units. Conventional film lighting was out of the
question and, because I wanted the light source to be both warm
and soft, dimming an array of household bulbs struck me as the
simplest solution. Though it was a technique I had used many times
in the past, here it would be on a much larger scale.
 To avoid the walls becoming as bright as the center of the
ballroom, Billy and I turned to an off-the-shelf hardware-store item,
the R30 mushroom bulb, which is both directional and, at that time at
least, available in a range of wattage. We mounted 150-watt bulbs,
spaced nine inches apart, on thirteen ten-foot-long wooden battens.
To accentuate the central brightness of the dance floor we used two
small wooden rings mounted with 300-watt mushroom bulbs. Each of
the more than two hundred bulbs faced directly down from the
battens, which we rigged to a simple pulley system to be able to
raise and lower them easily. It was quite an affair to assemble, but
once we got it in place, the light it gave off worked well and, thanks
to having each line of bulbs on dimmers, it was totally controllable.
We were told by our minders that in all the time the Queen Mary had
been used as a film location they had never seen anything quite like
it!
We shot the scene at the Queen Mary bar using still more
household bulbs, specifically a row of 100-watt globes rigged above
and between the two characters and softened with a layer of tracing
paper diffusion. I use regular hardware-store items to save money
but also because of the way I think about light. I see practical lights
—a fluorescent tube or a bare bulb—as tools of equal importance to
more specialized film lighting. It’s a practice I embraced long before
Sid and Nancy—even bringing it to documentary work—and one that
I’ve maintained on far bigger-budget films such as Blade Runner
2049.
 When I sometimes (quite often, in truth) have doubts about the
improvised kinds of things I come up with, I am reminded of an
article in American Cinematographer magazine on John Alonzo’s
lighting of Chinatown. Alonzo was brought in by Roman Polanski to
replace Stanley Cortez because Polanski found the great
cinematographer’s methods too predictable and slow. Like myself,
John Alonzo had experience as a documentary cameraman, and
when it came to lighting the sets for Polanski’s film, instead of the
conventional film lights Cortez had been using, he reverted to the
minimalistic style and simple tools with which he was more familiar—
tracing paper and household bulbs. That was in 1974. Nothing is
new.
We repurposed another real-life location for the lobby of the Hotel
Earle, where Barton lives while in Los Angeles. The Wiltern
presented a different set of challenges. The job of transforming the
theater into the lobby of a hotel that had seen better days fell to
production designer Dennis Gassner, but his hard work would be for
nothing if it couldn’t be seen, and the script called for a shaft of
sunlight. We had an early call, but Bill O’Leary and I arrived about an
hour before that to finesse our lighting in the quiet before the rest of
the crew arrived. I’d planned on bouncing two 12K HMI lamps off two
4’ × 4’ mirrors set on opposing sides of a balcony above the
reception desk, but it soon became clear that the short throw of the
lamp did not allow for the clean sharp beam of light we were looking
for. We called the rental company and ordered a Molebeam, a lamp
that produces a sharp parallel beam of light, which turned up in rapid
order. The effect looked good, but it was not sunlight. It produced a
sharp beam, even more so when bounced off a mirror, but it didn’t
have the intensity I was after.
The clock was ticking, and we needed a solution. On Billy’s
suggestion we again called the rental company and asked if they
had any HMI PAR lamps. These were quite new to the market and
neither Billy nor I had used them before—few had—but our rental
house had two, and we took a chance. The lamps arrived as I
watched Joel and Ethan working with the actors on a blocking
rehearsal, and Billy quietly moved them into position. As the actors
left the set for a final makeup and costume check, Billy struck up the
two lamps and aimed them at our mirrors. To this day I don’t think
the Coens or anyone else was aware that all the equipment going up
and down those stairs was to achieve a “simple” sunlight effect, or of
all the stress I felt trying to pull it off. If the PARs had not worked as
well as they did, I would have resorted to one of the other sources.
The result would not have been as I had in my mind, but sometimes
such compromises are unavoidable.
 Much of Barton Fink takes place in Barton’s hotel room and the
corridor outside. For Barton’s room we worked on a stage in Culver
Studios, whereas the corridor was constructed in a Long Beach
warehouse. Ideally, we would have used the same stage for each,
but the sheer scale of the corridor made it beyond the scope of our
Culver Studios stages.
The hotel room scenes take place at various times of day and
differ considerably in tone. Though I briefly considered treating each
quite separately, this began to feel heavy-handed and time-
consuming. (A cinematographer must always be mindful of a film’s
schedule when choosing a lighting plan.) For Barton’s room, playing
the changing daylight in the world outside would be enough to shift
the mood without dramatically altering the lighting within.
We mimicked the effect of skylight percolating into the room with
an array of 10K Fresnel lamps positioned above the backing and
diffused with brush silk. Additionally, we set three 10Ks on either side
of the window to bounce off silver stipple reflectors and bring soft
light in from the sides of the set. I also laid a white sheet on the
stage floor outside the windows to lift the ceiling with the bounce it
provided. This kind of flexible lighting plan allowed me to easily
adjust the quality, intensity, color, and direction of the light without
shifting the rig. The sunlight effect for the opening shot of the room
was simply created using a single direct 10K lamp, rather than the
daylight-balanced, narrow-beam HMI PAR. At the flick of a switch, I
could go from sunlight to night or any step in between, saving both
time and money.
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 Like classic noir, shadows played just as important a role as light
and, to create pools of light rather than an overall wash, the choice
of practical lamps (the desk and floor lamps) was crucial to the look.
There was little space to add additional lights, but by hanging them
from above the set, I could use a 1K or a 650-watt Fresnel lamp to
bounce light off two- and three-foot muslin reflectors and augment
the practical sources for a close shot, while keeping the floor clear of
clutter for the actors and camera to work in.
Some of the camera moves that Joel and Ethan proposed
required some creativity, particularly when one involved tracking into
a bathroom, up to a sink, and down its plughole, as it did during a
sex scene between Barton and Audrey Taylor, played by Judy Davis.
It’s quite an extreme, and wonderful, variation on the train going into
the tunnel. But, as you see from the comparison between the
storyboards and the shot, things change. The storyboards act as a
marker for what is essential to the scene, but they are not set in
stone.

We accomplished this seemingly singular move by marrying two

shots together. For the first we used a small Fisher jib arm and a
Power Pod Classic remote head, an unusual combination at the
time. The Power Pod Classic was the first compact remote head and
as good as there was for working in tight spaces. I’d use it regularly
after Barton Fink, sticking with it even after new devices superseded
it in popularity.
During prep, first assistant cameraman Scott Ressler figured out
how to keep the image sharp during what was for him a particularly
difficult shot, by shortening the focus range of the 40 mm lens we
were using—we had no need for the lens to focus to infinity—and
tying a knotted string below its front element. As the camera moved
down toward the sink, the knots helped him gauge the diminishing
distance between the camera and the plughole.
When the screen goes black the film dissolves into the second
shot that descends the pipe as seen through an Innovision probe.
This is essentially a narrow tube with a fisheye lens at the end of it,
the same piece of specialized equipment we used to photograph the
keys of Barton’s typewriter as they hit the paper. To extend the
apparent length of the pipe, I had a small card painted with
concentric circles, leaving a gap between it and the far end. Beyond
the probe’s circular view of the card, I bounced light to rake the
interior of the actual pipe as if the source were coming from the
distance as represented by the concentric circles on the card. Not
the most elegant solution, but simple.
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 For the film’s most striking sequence, the hotel fire, Dennis built
two matching hallway sets so we could shoot on one as the other
was being set up, and the paper from any burn shot being replaced.
(Incidentally, the length of the set was extended using a photograph
of the built hallway pasted on the end wall in a similar way to the
pipe.) Our effects team rigged the set walls with perforated gas pipes
that zigzagged all the way down the passageway, allowing us to
control the way it burnt via a series of valves. That didn’t mean it
couldn’t be a little dangerous. The actors, my dolly grip, and I had to
coat ourselves in a fire gel, and those of us not on camera wore
asbestos suits. But because the effects team was so good and
rigorously showed all of us how the effect was being done, everyone
felt very comfortable. For the tracking shots, I handheld the camera
on a wheeled rig made of speed rail, essentially lightweight pipe, that
was alternately pushed or pulled by Bruce Hamme, our dolly grip,
with whom I would work on almost every subsequent film until he
retired in 2017. Today, this sequence might be done in VFX, but
would it look as exciting as it was to shoot with real fire?
Barton Fink’s final scene would become one of its most
discussed, so let me just say right away that I don’t know what’s in
the box. (And I don’t think Joel and Ethan know, either.) But I can
shed some light on one element of the last shot. The pelican diving
into the water, just before the film cuts to the credits, is there
because we were lucky to catch a bird (a real bird as opposed to a
digital bird) diving into the water.
Sometimes, it’s as simple as that.
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 Soon after Barton Fink wrapped, I headed to Baltimore to scout
for playwright David Mamet’s third film as a director, Homicide. For
this film we drew storyboards for the major sequences but, as the
locations were chosen late in preproduction, these illustrations bore
little relationship to where we would shoot. Nor did the ambition
behind the storyboards reflect the tight schedule we were up against.
On the other hand, John Sayles made his own simple sketches for
every scene of Passion Fish, depicting the size of a frame or the
movement of the camera. The final film closely reflects the intent
behind John’s drawings even though it is not a mirror of them. Barton
Fink adhered far more closely to the original storyboards, and I was
struck that the finished film contained all but a handful of our shots.
The Coens had achieved this using one hundred thousand feet of
film stock, no doubt a tenth of what we had shot on Air America and
a pure fantasy on most mainstream productions.
Coming from the instantaneous nature of documentary shooting
to working with a preconceived plan might seem restricting, but I
can’t say I have ever felt that. But there is always an exception to
every sweeping statement like that. M. Night Shyamalan and I spent
many weeks storyboarding The Village together and based
everything we drew on the locations and sets we knew we would
shoot on. It was a surprise, and sometimes frustrating for both the
actors and me, that what we shot mirrored exactly what we had
conceived beforehand. That, to me, is a little too restricting.
But before Passion Fish took me into the bayous of Louisiana, my
life took an unexpected turn in the badlands of South Dakota.
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 10
BADLANDS
Hard to believe, huh? It used to be all theirs, clear on up
into Canada. This is what they got left with.
FRANK COUTELLE, IN THUNDERHEART
Directed by Michael Apted, Thunderheart is a mystery set in the
1970s starring Val Kilmer as an FBI agent of Sioux heritage who’s
sent to a South Dakota Native American reservation to investigate a
murder. Kilmer’s character has spent much of his life covering up his
Native American roots and, in some respects, the film felt to me like
a natural follow-up to Homicide, in which Joe Mantegna’s character
takes on a case that forces him to reexamine his Jewish identity.
Mike Apted alternated between narrative films and documentaries
throughout his career, and Thunderheart was a fictionalized version
of a story he explored in Incident at Oglala, which documents a fatal
conflict between the FBI and members of the American Indian
Movement.
Filming took place on the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation, where
the actual events unfolded in the 1970s, with some characters being
played by local members of the Lakota people who remembered the
history well. We’d shoot action that felt a bit too Hollywood, only to
be told the real events were so much worse. It’s a credit to Mike that
none of the Pine Ridge residents raised objections. They felt like he
was making an earnest attempt to tell a truthful story.
Shooting with Val was never less than interesting and often
involved coping with his eccentricities. Once we were filming with
him and Ted Thin Elk, who plays the character of Grandpa, in a vast
and empty landscape with, as far as we could tell, nothing around for
miles. Val had told us, “Nobody can stand in my eyeline.” Fair
enough. Some actors are very particular about where the crew stand
so, to Val’s wishes, everybody had to get behind the camera. I was
operating, with Eric Swanek as my first assistant and Andy Harris
serving as his second, which was the first time Andy and I worked
together. Mike and the rest of the shooting crew were all lined up
behind a large diffusion we erected as a blind.
All Val should have been able to see out of the corner of his eye
was the camera and my head. But we were about to roll when he
pulled away from the frame. “No! No, I can’t. There is still somebody
in my eyeline.” We all looked around. Really? Way, way out toward
the horizon you could just barely see a kid sitting on the back of a
pickup truck, the child of a rancher who was probably out looking for
his cows. Val insisted, “I can’t shoot with that kind of distraction. It’s
all I can see.” So, we sent a production assistant out in a vehicle,
which took some doing since we had cleared the set for Val’s
eyeline, and the nearest transport was far away. As this was all
playing out, Bruce Hamme (our dolly grip, who I had met on Barton
Fink and stayed with me for Homicide) whispers to me, “Does Val
ever act in the theater? Does he have the audience turn their backs
to the stage?”
While scouting, it was obvious that South Dakota’s great
landscapes, the badlands that go off into infinity, would present
problems at night. Without completely losing the naturalism we were
going for, I required a single source rather than an approach that
might make it feel as if there were multiple moons. We’d chosen a
location for Grandpa’s trailer that looked out over a beautiful view of
the badlands and was close to a rise that would serve as a spot from
which Val’s character, Ray Levoi, would keep watch. It was at the top
of this rise that I could position a moonlight source, but what kind of
light could we possibly use?
 We could erect a high scaffold tower and rig individual lights on it,
which would cost a lot of money, eat up a lot of time, and make
daylight filming impossible on any consecutive day. Instead, I
convinced the production to rent a Musco light, a mobile floodlight
usually used to light sports events and stadiums. It was something of
a leap of faith as I’d never used a Musco before, but Billy O’Leary
called to find out the specs on the unit, and we thought we could
make it work. At its full height of one hundred feet and parked on the
top of our hill, we found we could mount a heavy diffusion across the
lower two rows of the Musco’s sixteen individual lamps, flooding
them out to spill a soft light across the landscape below the unit
while spotting in the two upper rows of four lamps to directly light the
badlands in the distant background. We finished one shot, a pan
across the landscape toward our moonlight with the Musco truck
above the frame line, and breathed a sigh of relief. We felt confident
that we’d made the right choice—until it rained.
Dry and chalky, the landscape of the badlands readily reflects
light—except when it rains. What had looked mystical and ghostly
was now invisible. I peered into blackness and suggested to the
assistant director, Chris Soldo, that we take an early meal break.
Sure enough, it had stopped raining when we returned at around
eleven o’clock. We could resume shooting, but the badlands had yet
to dry out. It was then that Billy suggested that the generator would
need refueling. The Musco had been left on during the break and the
genny had run low. All this took time, but I was aware that it was
taking a little more time than was usual. Finally, Billy turned to me
and asked if he should fire up the light. At that point I knew for sure
he had been diplomatically filling time. The landscape had dried out;
we completed the night’s work on time and went on to shoot another
badlands exterior with no further holdup.

On a shoot like Thunderheart you get to know your coworkers

quite well. We’d rented out virtually every motel room in the small
South Dakota town of Kadoka, which we turned into our home base
for the film. I love shoots like this, and I enjoyed using what
downtime I had to explore the landscapes of South Dakota, driving to
the Black Hills as well as to the Devil’s Tower in nearby Wyoming.
Having no distractions ensures that everyone on board the movie
cares about what they’re doing and is willing to sacrifice the comforts
of their home life for the length of the project. It’s a situation in which
everyone works closely together and often shares some free hours
together.
One person I always work particularly closely with is the script
supervisor. Not only the director’s right hand, the script supervisor—
or continuity person, as they are known in the UK—is a key ally
when it comes to deciding on a shot or when reference must be
made to a shot or scene that has been completed days or weeks
previously. Thunderheart’s script supervisor was named James Ellis.
Born in New Jersey, she spent most of her childhood there and
on the island of Ocracoke in North Carolina. At the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she studied classics and began
creating multimedia shows for the university with friends. This
sparked an interest in working in film, which in turn led to a job at
DuArt, a New York–based film lab where she had a chance to learn
from the best but hit a glass ceiling when she asked for a raise. After
DuArt, James worked as a postproduction supervisor before, when
filling in for an absent coworker, she segued into the role of a script
supervisor, which in turn led to feature films and commercials. It was
my luck that a commercial had brought her to Michael Apted and
South Dakota.
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 They broke my TV.
GRANDPA SAM REACHES, IN THUNDERHEART

While on Thunderheart James and I had one date, though we

sometimes can’t decide whether it counts as a date or not. One
Saturday (a rare two-day weekend of no shooting or scouting), we
drove an hour to Rapid City, where we took in a double feature of
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Terminator 2. (I didn’t care for
either, but James liked Terminator 2.) We ate at an Italian restaurant,
which felt luxurious compared to Kadoka’s grocery store. Afterward
we talked all the way back to the motel, not only about the movie we
were working on or those we’d just seen but about all sorts of things
that pass through your mind on a long, late-night drive. Though we
met in the badlands of South Dakota, it was Thunderheart and our
love of film that had drawn us together.
James and I married, in Hong Kong, in December of that same
year. She’s both a professional and creative partner as well as a
personal one. (We use the Team Deakins name for our collaborative
efforts for good reason.) Perhaps because we met as collaborators
on a film set, we have always worked well together. Over the years,
we have built up a method of working that, at this point, is accepted
by production. We come as a team. From the initial reading of the
script through prep, shoot, and post, we work side by side. James
fully understands the technical side of the process, so she will
coordinate with production, VFX, the post supervisor, the AD
department, and our crew to ensure we have what we need and that
there is a clear communication with all the departments. Because
we’ve worked through the script together, she knows exactly what I
am trying to achieve visually. She will view the dailies each morning
and make sure there are no surprises! It’s a bonus that we get to
share the life experiences of the movies we work on together.

Never work with animals or children.

W. C. FIELDS
 Though it was a rarity that we could work on the same project
when James was still scripting, The Secret Garden presented an
early opportunity. Agnieszka Holland was shooting her adaptation of
the classic children’s story in the UK. As it was her first time in the
country, she readily brought on James as her script supervisor. We
enjoyed the experience of being in England together and working
with Agnieszka, though making the film wasn’t without a few speed
bumps.
A key character in the story is the robin who leads the heroine to
the secret garden of the title. For the film, this involved using a
specially trained English member of the species. But when our
American Zoetrope producers viewed some early test footage of the
bird, they were confused. “What is this?” “A robin.” “That’s not a
robin. A robin is bigger than that.” “It’s what we have in England.”
“How will an audience know this is supposed to be a robin?” We
were filming an English classic in England, so we had, quite logically,
been training a European robin, but it transpired that the English
variety is, of course, far smaller than its American namesake. But we
stayed with the original robin because, although they explored the
option, the production couldn’t secure a permit to import the
American bird. If the producers had waited a few short years for
special effects to catch up with their demands, they could have had
any robin they wanted. There would have been no need to spend
weeks training it to land on a garden spade, and the bird could have
talked.
Apart from those I met in Africa, who became fascinated with my
balding head, I’d never had to deal with kids at all. But the younger
members of the cast took easily to James and, by extension, to me,
meaning I often had to shoo them away from the camera when it
was time to shoot. Despite the famous admonition never to work with
children or animals, we found both quite pleasant. The English
summer proved otherwise, but that’s another story.
 11
THE INVERSE SQUARE LAW
That gag’s got whiskers on it!
SMITTY, ARGUS REPORTER, IN THE HUDSUCKER PROXY
From the fairy tale of The Secret Garden I returned to the world
of the Coen brothers. The Hudsucker Proxy takes place in a kind of
stretched reality, a fantasy world built from the familiar elements of
1950s New York. I saw it as a joyful challenge to light, particularly
some of its more elaborate sets. But it was also a hugely ambitious
film and, as we began to prep and shoot before Christmas 1993, I
think we all began to harbor doubts that we would pull it off. Joel and
Ethan were working with their biggest-ever budget. Designed once
again by Dennis Gassner, the full-scale sets were like something out
of a Fritz Lang movie and built to completely fill our stages in
Wilmington, North Carolina. At a scale of 24:1, even the model of the
New York of Hudsucker, beautifully crafted by Mark Stetson and his
team, filled a large stage. Some of the scaled buildings were so tall
that our effects team, using a motion control rig, had to shoot them
lying on their side.
Hudsucker was the most complex technical challenge I had
confronted since 1984. The sets alone seemed daunting enough, let
alone the number of large locations we had to scout and prep; many
of them, like the Merchandise Mart and the Blackstone Hotel, were in
Chicago. Yet when we returned from the Christmas break all the
elements began to click into place, and the shoot took on the more
relaxed and focused atmosphere I’d already begun to associate with
Joel and Ethan’s sets.
One afternoon on the set of Barton Fink the lights had gone out
and I asked Billy O’Leary what was going on. He seemed unusually
evasive. When “God Save the Queen” began to play over the
speakers and a single lamp came on, I knew why. It was my forty-
first birthday! In the darkness Billy provided, production had laid out
a proper British teatime spread, complete with a butler bearing a
silver tea set and cucumber sandwiches. Similar routines happened
on Hudsucker as well. Birthday cakes would arrive to surprise a crew
member and a band might play during our lunch break. You took
your work seriously shooting with the Coen brothers, but there was
always time for a laugh.
 Though the film is set in the 1950s with some dark themes, a noir
look was not what I had in mind for Hudsucker. The film is a parable
and a romance, so to offset the heightened sense of reality that
would come from the exaggerated sets and wide lenses, I felt the
lighting should be more naturalistic and reflect an overcast, wintry
New York. A cool soft light approach felt appropriate to the story; it
would complement Dennis’s wonderful expressionist sets and
minimize any additional lighting I might need on the floor. This was
important, not only to save time but because of the nature of the
sets: the multiple reflective surfaces and the wide, even carpets that
would become a confusion of shadows if lit by any source other than
a window.
The cavernous boardroom from which Hudsucker founder Waring
Hudsucker, played by Charles Durning, takes his fatal leap, is one of
the sets that everyone who’s seen the film remembers. Knowing the
entire set would be in the frame at some point, including being
reflected in the mirror-like surface of the boardroom table, Dennis
and I had built into the ceiling what was essentially a large diffusion
panel with a surrounding soffit. Just as on 1984, I was choosing to
light the space rather than a series of individual shots.

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 A large set is the same as a small set, only bigger. Light works in
the same way on both, and all that changes is the size and number
of the units required and the practicalities of rigging them. Here, the
practicalities took precedence. Spacelights are a staple for film
productions. Often used in multiples of a hundred or more to create a
soft overhead source that emulates daylight, they’re both easy to rig
and cheap to rent. While not the most efficient way to project light
into a set like this, they would provide a soft and easily controllable
source. Besides, we had far more pressing challenges to
concentrate our efforts on and which needed more specialist rigging.
For daylight to reach into the set through the windows of the
boardroom we mounted 10K Fresnel lamps above the ceiling and
bounced them off a purpose-made 28’ × 10’ reflector that was rigged
on chain hoists above the Translite backing (a photographic
backdrop). We used a similar lighting pattern for both Norville’s and
Sidney Mussburger’s offices, though for these we needed larger
reflectors and even more 10Ks.
All this worked quite well for the daylight scenes, but dusk was
another matter. I nearly came unstuck trying to light a scene between
the film’s naive hero, Norville (Tim Robbins), and the scheming
Sidney Mussburger (Paul Newman). I wanted to create a warm pool
of light where Tim was sitting while keeping the walls and far side of
the room dark, so that Paul would appear as a silhouette against the
backing, only walking into the light to confront Norville. I began the
morning rigging 1K Fresnel lamps to bounce off gold reflectors, while
the rest of the electrical crew added blue gel to the Maxis lighting the
Translite outside the window, which was no small task in and of itself.
The more I struggled with the reflectors, the more I hated the result.
By midmorning I realized I was flogging a dead horse. I needed a
change of plan. I approached Joel and Ethan in the production office
and apologized for the delay. I asked if the crew could break early for
lunch, promising everything would be ready when we came back if I
could keep working with a few electricians. I was more than a little
surprised how relaxed they were about the deal. I would be ready
after lunch? That’s fine. Let’s have lunch then.

We stripped the gold reflectors out of the way, and in place of

what had become a complex rig we hung three Chinese lanterns and
angled them in such a way that they formed one single source when
viewed from where Tim was seated; we placed the one nearest to
him highest and dropped the other two down toward the window.
Then we covered the sides of the lanterns facing the window with
Blackwrap to avoid any reflection in the glass, before going to lunch
ourselves. The process took less than thirty minutes and taught me a
lesson: When a plan needs so many little fixes to make it work, there
is something fundamentally wrong with the plan. It’s better to cut
your losses. This was the only time I have made such a dramatic
lighting U-turn on a shooting day—and, of course, I was very lucky it
was with Joel and Ethan.

The Hudsucker Building was based on Chicago’s Merchandise

Mart, and the set extended with a central tower and clockface using
a model. Dennis Gassner built the room behind the clockface as a
separate stage set with working machinery and a high tier of
walkways connecting it all together. Until late in the film, we see the
large clock only from the outside. Then the climactic action moves
inside where Moses (Bill Cobbs), the good clock keeper, uses a
broom handle to pause time. This prevents Norville from falling to his
death but also leads to a fight between Moses and the evil janitor
Aloysius (Harry Bugin). You have to see the film to understand!
The clockface is backlit when seen from the front, so I simply
used a festoon of 100-watt household bulbs, controlled by a single
dimmer unit, to justify that look. My first instinct was to use these
same bulbs as the only source for the set, but I would have a hard
time controlling both the falloff of the light and the hot spots around
the bulbs. Besides, the soft, warm glow of the bulbs alone felt
emotionally wrong for a scene that was both surreal and violent, nor
was it the best way to enhance the graphic nature of the machinery
behind the clockface. The scene and the set called for a more
dramatic, almost theatrical approach. So I decided to keep the clock
lights very warm and contrast this with a cold snap of light from
above, a kind of “God” light.

The height of the clock room presented a challenge as, although

there was ample space on the stage to each side of the set, it left
little room to bring in light from above. I asked Dennis to leave just
enough space above the set so that we could create an illusion of a
sharp beam of light from above using mirrors. Specifically, Billy
suggested we bounce four 4K Xenons (though he also rigged a
higher-wattage Xenon)—at the time the sharpest, brightest lamps on
the market—off four 4’ × 6’ mirrors. With 6’ × 4’ mirrors at an angle of
forty-five degrees to the Xenon lamps, their beams would start out at
approximately four feet square, widening out only as dictated by their
distance from the reflector.
As the inverse square law dictates, the further away the lamp, the
more even its light falls over a measured distance. So, by using
mirrors and lengthening the throw of the lamps, we were also
evening out the light between the top and bottom of the set. The
inverse square law is a very useful tool when considering how you
want your set to be lit. If, for instance, you want a person standing at
a window to be that much brighter than another deep inside a room,
you place your source close to the window. Conversely, if you want
both people to be lit to the same intensity, you place your source as
far away as is practical.
The Hudsucker Proxy’s producers included Joel Silver, who was
taking a rare step away from action movies. Joel was incredibly
supportive through the whole process, but when he joined us to
watch dailies in the evening, after his first appearance on the set, I
could feel him growing increasingly uncomfortable in his seat next to
me. Frankly, he made me uncomfortable by just sitting next to me
but, with his eyes still glued to the screen, he said, “Roger, what the
fuck am I looking at?” Without turning to him I replied, “You did read
the script, Joel, didn’t you?” Though it’s since been reappraised and
embraced—rightly, I think—The Hudsucker Proxy baffled most
critics, and audiences stayed away. If this was a test of whether the
Coens’ sensibility could play to a wider audience, they seem to have
failed it.
The last scenes of Hudsucker took place on the backlot in
Wilmington, Carolina—exterior shots with fake snow that froze. It
was that cold. Joel, Ethan, and I sat around a burning brazier while
Tim did his thing in a crane shot I was operating remotely. After a
long, complicated shoot, we were exhausted but sad for it to end.
Like Barton Fink, it had been one of those jobs.
It was still a surprise to find it was on Tim Robbins’s
recommendation—or was it his insistence?—that I came to be
offered my next film. In truth, I wasn’t a huge fan of Stephen King’s
horror stories. I probably wouldn’t even have read the script if James
hadn’t insisted. “It’s not what you think,” she said. James was right.
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 12
REDEMPTION
Nothing left but all the time in the world to think about it.
RED, IN THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION
The Shawshank Redemption, written by Frank Darabont, is one
of the best scripts I have ever read. But even a great script takes a
lot of hard work to bring to the screen.
Shooting began in June 1993 with Frank directing his first high-
profile feature. Shawshank would be a challenge for anyone. We
worked on alternating six-day weeks and often for fourteen-hour
days. A lack of momentum hurts the morale of any crew, most of
whom want to keep busy rather than stand around kicking their
heels, so it’s important to come to set with a plan. Shooting went
slowly, so slowly that rumors began to circulate that the film would be
shut down, and to keep on schedule scenes began to be cut from
the script. But I was the one looking through the camera, seeing for
the first time those remarkable performances as an audience would
see them. From the first few days of the shoot it became obvious
that the film would be special.
Though I knew them to be as frustrated as I was, Tim Robbins
and Morgan Freeman were both true professionals, key in keeping
up the morale of the entire crew. Some actors get engrossed in their
characters and rarely talk with anyone behind the camera, but not
Morgan. He would be telling the most raucous joke right up until
Frank called action. One day, during a scene with the parole board,
he stopped in midflow to give the most moving performance on
camera, then completed the punchline after the camera had cut. I
was amazed. James took over as script supervisor during the latter
part of the shoot, and she found it hard to stay focused on her job
when watching some of Morgan’s performances.
To match the Shawshank State Penitentiary of King’s novella,
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, we needed to film at a
prison in a rural setting with a sizable yard. We found one in
Mansfield, Ohio, the site of the Ohio State Reformatory. Built
between 1866 and 1910, the reformatory had been in use until 1990,
just three years before we began filming, and a number of ex-cons
were still around to tell us of their experiences. It was a grim but
ideal space. It offered almost everything we needed except for the
central bullpen, a cell block with tiered floors that opened onto an
interior courtyard.
 Working from the beautiful designs of Terry Marsh, the production
built a set in a disused factory not far away from the reformatory.
This suited our purpose, but there were a number of serious issues
that needed to be confronted, not the least of which were the
resident pigeons and the building’s walls of glass. Leaving the set
open to the inconsistencies of the daylight would create all sorts of
problems, so the entire factory would have to be blacked out at some
cost to production.
To have any chance of lighting through the three-floor window at
one end of the interior courtyard, I asked that the set be positioned
with the maximum floor space between it and the factory wall. I
suggested the set be offset so that there was space outside the
windows of the cells belonging to the two main characters, Andy and
Red, so that we could build a platform for lighting and make our lives
easier if and when we needed to float the wall. But the one three-
floor window, however large, would provide only a limited source of
light for any shots deep inside the set. I preferred to stay away from
turning on the practical lamps for the daytime scenes, as I wanted a
distinct look to each time of day, so Terry and I discussed building
skylights into the ceiling of the set, leaving enough room between the
set and the roof of the warehouse to accommodate some lighting.
The complexity of the rigging and lighting of the set, along with the
pigeon wrangling, had probably not been factored into the original
budget.
We primarily shot The Shawshank Redemption in script
continuity, meaning we filmed each scene in the order it appeared in
the script. This approach can be advantageous artistically to both the
cast and director, but returning to sets and locations as needed,
rather than filming all the scenes within them at one time, creates
some logistical and technical challenges. It also creates additional
costs. To negotiate these issues with production, and for many other
reasons, I was happy to have Billy O’Leary as my gaffer again.
Hudsucker had included some of the most difficult technical
challenges we had faced on any of our eight films together, so it was
a blessing he was able to travel to Mansfield with his great rigging
gaffer, Richie Ford, and his regular key crew members.
To facilitate shooting in continuity and allow flexibility within the
schedule, Billy and I developed a plan to light the set and leave it
standing, which was another production cost but one with no
cheaper alternative. We had to shoot both day and night scenes on
this set and needed to keep what we did for one unobtrusive in the
other. Daytime scenes required large sources we could project
through the skylights and the cathedral-style window, for which we
used Maxi Brutes. We spaced a series of these lamps to form large
panels the size of each window and skylight. We affixed blue gel to
the barn doors of all the lamps, hung diffusion outside the glass
window, and stretched diffusion panels that would stand in for glass
across the skylights. Fortunately, because we were working in Ohio’s
rust belt, the nearby manufacturing district included a plant that could
provide us with a cloudy polythene product tough enough to
withstand the heat of our lamps, neutral in color, and, most
important, cheap.
For the nighttime interior we worked closely with the set dressers
to come up with a style of practical light that would work for both the
design and lighting of the set. In the main bullpen area, I wanted
overhead practical lights that both shaped the light and, with the right
bulb, I could use as my only source. On the walkways or inside the
cells, I was looking for one that would be visually correct but would
offer me some place to add a “gag” light behind it. The cage lights fit
that bill. For each fixture, we threaded in an additional power supply
so that we could add a double-ended halogen bulb, of either 150 or
250 watts, to the side facing away from camera. To fix these bulbs in
place Billy used green plastic-covered garden wire, stiff enough,
when soldered to each end of the bulb, to hold it in position. I
wouldn’t recommend using this type of wiring, or an open bulb, if the
light is to ever be used at full intensity, but here we kept it dimmed
down as a warm source that blended with the bulb seen on camera.
If you look closely, you can see a slight double shadow, which
always bothers me.

The prison set was rigged and lit to be available to shoot at any
time, but the location offered another logistical challenge. The most
efficient way to light the interiors of the State Reformatory was to use
HMIs, which are both powerful and daylight balanced. But lighting
through the windows from outside—something that seemed obvious
to me—created a problem for our day scenes scheduled to shoot in
the prison yard. And we were shooting in script order: inside one day
and outside the next. Finding a way to accommodate this required a
little scheduling magic from our first AD, John Woodward. It also
required a great deal of overtime for the rigging crew. We were
lighting with around twenty-five lamps, so each time we shot inside
the reformatory we had to re-erect the scaffold and order anew all
the HMIs. These HMIs were not a widely available lamp in the
summer of 1993, so they had to be shipped in from a variety of rental
houses far away from central Ohio. Shooting in continuity came at a
cost.

We shot the day exteriors without additional light unless the

natural daylight changed so much that I was forced to use lighting to
match one shot with another. John had tried to build some flexibility
into the schedule so that we could shoot as many of our exteriors as
possible under cloud cover, but there is never enough. It proved to
be a much different experience to that on Another Time, Another
Place, when Mike Radford and I could shoot any scene on any day.

I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy

living, or get busy dying.
ANDY DUFRESNE, IN THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION

There was one long exterior scene between Tim and Morgan, the
“get busy living” scene, that we had to shoot on a specific day. When
that day came, the weather refused to cooperate. The sky stubbornly
remained blue when we wanted clouds.
After talking this over with Frank, and having no alternative to
shoot, we staged the scene against a wall that remained in shadow
for most of the day. It was preferable to working under a full sun, but
as the sun rose in the sky it illuminated more and more of the prison
yard and dramatically altered the color and intensity of the light
reflected onto the actors. To prevent this, we stood up large baffles
that allowed only the skylight into the area in which the scene was
being played out, which was fine for certain camera angles but not
for everything. Luckily, the middle of the scene played in closer shots
that we could more easily control, and we held a single wide angle
for late in the day, when the opposite wall acted as a flag to put our
characters in shadow while the sun cast a dramatic shadow on the
background.
I was shooting Shawshank utilizing naturalistic lighting, motivated
camera moves, and a minimal range of lenses. Wide shots were
made on a 28 mm or 32 mm and closer shots on a 40 mm or a 50
mm. I think these lenses are closer to natural vision, and I like an
audience to feel present in a scene, not looking at a character as if
on a long lens from far away. If I had shot the closer angles of this
scene on longer lenses, a 65 mm or an 85 mm, it would certainly
have been more forgiving. Less of the background would have
appeared in the shot, and what did could have been put out of focus.
But I never saw shooting this way as an option. You establish a style
and keep to it.
Seemingly simple scenes are often more complex than they
appear, as proved to be the case when we shot the prisoners laying
down pitch on the roof. For one shot we needed a Giraffe crane with
an arm spanning thirty-two feet, while for a final shot we needed the
smaller Aerocrane with a sectional arm of approximately thirteen
feet. Each crane would carry a camera I could operate remotely, so
we did not have to worry about the extra weight it would take for an
operator to ride the Giraffe. But the Giraffe alone weighed 2,821
pounds without accessories, which required us to shore up the roof
from the floor below as it was hardly in shape to support the crew,
much less the weight of the crane.
Once we mapped out a rough scheme of the shooting, we found
that the Giraffe could be hidden from view during the second section
of the scene, so we rented scissor lifts to carry the equipment up to
the roof, and we were set.
The moment when the convicts relax with their beers is an
example of how efficient these tools can be even in the simplest
settings. The scene involves a slow track and panning shot to
establish all the characters in place, followed by a series of static
closer shots, all of which had to be filmed in the same soft, end-of-
day sunlight.

When you work with a remote head on a small jib arm such as the
Aerocrane and a dolly grip as good as Bruce Hamme, you can be
extremely efficient in repositioning the camera from one shot to
another without allowing the momentum of the shoot to slow. A good
dolly grip will notice when an actor is out of position or when a move
is slightly different than in a rehearsal, and this system allows them
to rapidly compensate. All of which has become easier with the
introduction of miniature onboard monitors, but no technological
advance can replace the human touch.
It seems to be common knowledge I don’t care for one of the
most iconic shots in The Shawshank Redemption—but like a lot of
common knowledge this simply isn’t true. As originally planned and
storyboarded, Andy’s prison escape would have been a much longer
sequence, one that included a train passing by the prison walls and
him chasing down a boxcar, another ten or twenty shots. It was more
than the fastest of crews could complete in one night. By the time we
had filmed Tim emerging from the sewer (I had extended the length
of our set pipe by using a trick from Barton Fink, painting concentric
circles on a card) and wading in the stream, we knew we were in
trouble. We needed a shot to end the scene. We already had the
camera on the Giraffe crane, so one of us, I can’t remember who,
suggested taking it to its full height and shooting a top shot of Andy
breathing in fresh air. It would become an iconic moment.
Here’s the only thing that annoys me about it: We had a Lightning
Strikes, essentially a lamp that you can flicker like lightning. Billy was
manning the remote control to the lamp as I operated the camera
when Frank said, “Oh! Let me do that.” Then he took the remote
control, and began pressing it over and over, like a kid with a new
toy. I said, “Frank, it’s just going to be one long flash!” And it almost
was. But who am I to argue with the many who love that shot exactly
as it appears in the movie?
 Lightning strikes in the same places all the time.
BORIS ZAKHARIN

At this point, it might sound as if my career had kicked into high

gear. In some respects, it had. My work, especially on 1984, Sid and
Nancy, Mountains of the Moon, and Barton Fink, had established my
reputation. I’d been welcomed at the American Society of
Cinematographers’ clubhouse, where I’d met Gordon Willis, Owen
Roizman, Haskell Wexler, and others whose work had inspired me.
Conrad Hall had complimented me on Barton Fink, and I doubt he
could have imagined how much that meant to me. I’d even met
Stanley Cortez, cinematographer of The Magnificent Ambersons,
Shock Corridor, and Night of the Hunter, who’d become a fixture at
the clubhouse in his retirement and often scolded me for not wearing
a tie. But esteem doesn’t equate to job security in the film business.
After completing the shooting of The Shawshank Redemption, I was
to be fired from my next two projects. And in between those unhappy
experiences The Hudsucker Proxy was released to a decidedly tepid
response.
A cinematographer can be fired from a project for any number of
reasons. Perhaps the cinematographer had never been the
director’s choice but had been imposed on them by a producer.
When a shoot is behind schedule the cinematographer might be the
first to go, a warning to a director to go faster or a message to the
studio that production is doing something to solve its problems. A
cinematographer may be fired by an actor, more often an actress,
who doesn’t like the way they are being photographed. It may be that
the director and cinematographer just don’t see eye to eye. Not only
had Stanley Cortez been fired from Chinatown by Roman Polanski
but, on Doctor Zhivago, David Lean replaced the great Nicolas Roeg
(cinematographer on Fahrenheit 451 and Far from the Madding
Crowd, and director of Walkabout and The Man Who Fell to Earth)
with Freddie Young. But to know all this did not make it any easier.
My self-doubt returned with a vengeance. But on meeting with
Conrad Hall, he laughed it off. Since being introduced to him at the
ASC clubhouse after the release of Barton Fink we had become
friends. Now, at the same venue, this time for a celebration of the
ASC award nominees for cinematography in a feature film, he told
me, “You’re no one in Hollywood until you’ve been fired at least three
times.”
Not being familiar faces to a majority of members of the ASC,
James and I were privy to some personal opinions about my
cinematography:
“… It’s easy when you can shoot everything in natural light. Yes,
Shawshank looks good and deserves its nomination, but there was
no lighting involved and cinematography is about lighting.”
“… Shawshank was shot like a documentary, not a feature film…”
Being asked who I was once again recalled my experience on
Cruel Passion. Who am I? I am the cinematographer you are talking
about!
I was flattered that so many members of the ASC thought
Shawshank involved little lighting, and perhaps theirs was the
greatest praise. They couldn’t tell that the major interior was a lit set.
That not only was the real prison interior dark at any time of the day,
but just getting an exposure was often impossible without lights.
Besides, we were working long days, and with the actors’
guaranteed turnaround, our start times were forced later and later as
the week progressed. By Friday we could be shooting a day scene
well into the night. Despite the wishes of our production department,
we had no option but to light both the set and the location.
Because The Shawshank Redemption began to “find traction,” as
they say in Hollyweird, we were off to the award shows—or maybe
not!
When I found out I had been honored with the ASC annual award
for a feature film, I was on the roof of a parking structure in
Minnesota, where it was the middle of the night and the temperature
had fallen to twenty degrees below zero.
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 13
TWENTY BELOW
Oh geez…
JERRY LUNDEGAARD, IN FARGO
I can’t remember ever being so cold as we were shooting
Hudsucker in Chicago, but Joel and Ethan’s follow-up would lead
us all into a freezer. When they told me about their next movie, they
weren’t sure I’d be interested. After the commercial disappointment
of The Hudsucker Proxy they decided to return to their roots, not
only with a low-budget film but one that would shoot in their native
Minnesota. In the middle of winter. Why wouldn’t I say yes?
I loved Joel and Ethan’s script for Fargo, but it was only while
scouting the film with them that I fully understood their vision for the
film. The brothers would often look at a location, then pace back and
forth before suggesting to our production designer, Rick Heinrichs,
“It’s a little too interesting.” Spots deemed “too interesting” included
the hallway of a Radisson hotel. “It might work if we took the picture
off the wall,” suggested Joel. “Or removed those two chairs,” Ethan
pitched in before Joel suggested the couch might also go.
 Joel and Ethan talked about shooting in a more observational way
than our previous collaborations. The camera almost becomes a
character in Barton Fink and The Hudsucker Proxy. It rarely stops
moving, whether motivated by the action within the scene or not.
With Fargo they wanted an approach more akin to a Ken Loach film,
where the camera remains planted in a static position, panning only
when the action demands it. Where we used wide lenses on Barton
and Hudsucker, for Fargo we’d rely on longer lenses, in keeping with
the observational approach… or so we said.
 It’s nice having a guiding concept, but rules are made to be
broken. For our very first shot, of Steve Buscemi’s character burying
a case of money in deep snow by a fence, we laid eighty feet of
track. But we did use a 40 mm lens, which was a departure from the
wider lenses of their previous films. This and other choices would
give the film a more naturalistic feel even though the dolly was not
banished to the truck.
We shot Fargo in the first months of 1995, a cold winter but one
stubbornly light on snow. Finding consistently snowy landscapes
forced us to move some locations further and further north, until we
were almost into Canada. We knew we might be shooting elsewhere
when an elusive snowstorm hit the location we’d chosen for the
opening shots, so one weekend we marked off each camera angle
with a wooden stake, writing on them the lens length and camera
height. Sure enough, when snow finally arrived we were locked into
shooting at an interior location, but Robin Brown, my onetime
assistant and now a standby operator (I have always operated
myself but the union demanded I carry a standby), was there to
capture the moment.
 Elsewhere, we had to make our own snow, including for the
overhead shot of the frustrated Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy)
trekking back to his car in the middle of a parking lot. Our effects
team had laid down chipped ice overnight, but the lot was not
originally intended to be so barren as it appears in the film. After we
removed the glass from a window in the office block that overlooked
the lot, I could look down at Jerry’s car as it was being moved into
position and the driver walking away on a predetermined path. All
that remained was a lonely car with a single set of footprints leading
from it. I asked our assistant director, Michelangelo Csaba Bolla, to
hold off bringing in the other cars until Joel and Ethan could see
what I was seeing. Although logically it didn’t make any sense for the
parking lot to be empty on a workday, they agreed the shot was
stronger. Their only concern was what to do with the dozens and
dozens of cars that had been brought in to fill it.
 As is common practice with the Coens, we were working from a
storyboard. Other cinematographers might feel that the amount of
preparation the brothers do leaves them only to “paint by numbers,”
but I don’t find that at all. If anything, you can be more open to what
happens on the set because you already know the essential
elements that will make the scene work in the edit. Prep can free you
to concentrate on the challenges of the day or the happy accidents it
might bring. Not every director works this way, and I also love
working with no safety net, as I might on a documentary. But the
Coen brothers’ films are hardly documentaries, even if Fargo
pretends it might be.
The night shoots presented the most difficult challenge. In
particular, the scenes set on desolate stretches of highway with no
obvious light sources other than those produced by the vehicles. I
considered shooting establishing shots at magic hour, with just
enough light in the sky to see the horizon or, alternatively, using
Musco lights to define the landscape. Each approach had its pros
and cons. But why not embrace the darkness? It would look more
menacing and, while we would see the snowscape only in the
headlights of the cars, the contrast with the bleached white of the
daytime scenes would be quite dramatic.
Joel and Ethan signed off on the plan, and Billy O’Leary and I lit
the driving scenes with lights attached to the front bumper of our
picture vehicle facing the road ahead and a four-foot fluorescent tube
resting on the hood to light the characters. In the static scenes we
hid 650-watt Fresnel lamps beside the vehicles and bounced a little
red light onto our cast. A bonus? The inky background allowed us to
shoot many of the close shots during the daytime without suffering
the cold of the location, in a garage and with simply black drapes
surrounding the car. The pity was that to get breath coming from the
actors’ mouths, heaters were not an option.
 From the storyboards I would do a breakdown of the more
complex scenes and display each shot in an overhead view. From
these diagrams the AD and I would order the night’s work, giving
each shot an allotment of time to complete. Sharing this information
with Billy and Mitch Lillian—possibly the best key grip in the business
and who I was working with for the first time—allowed us to function
as efficiently as possible in quite extreme conditions.

Although the snowscapes and the night driving provide the more
memorable visuals, the film is really about characters and the
settings they inhabit, making our location choices crucial. The bars,
Jerry’s office facing onto a busy highway, the airport parking lot, the
Lundegaards’ home, and others (none of them “too interesting”)
helped establish who these characters were. Lighting the actors and
locations in a simple, naturalistic way seemed right, and using
practical lights and carefully selected window treatments—blinds,
curtains, sheers, and so on—helped achieve this. In other ways it
recalled working on Sid and Nancy, only my lighting techniques had
become even more minimal and reliant on purpose-made gag lights,
such as ring lights or a strip of household bulbs, rather than
traditional film lights. As had been my practice since 1984, I made a
drawing of each location that illustrated all the changes and
additional lighting I required.
Shooting the scene at the wood chipper went well, with the
addition of a large amount of strawberry jam. To reset the chipper
and the “bloodied” snow was time-consuming, but, luckily for our
schedule, the Coen brothers were comfortable with only a single
good take of each setup. The action that followed out on the ice
could have been more difficult. Ethan walked out to make sure it was
safe. I have no idea what would have happened if we’d lost a Coen
brother midshoot.
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 When Peter Stormare ran away from camera and fell down, a
price number appeared prominently marked on the soles of his
boots, which now faced the camera. It was a mistake, but as it made
everyone laugh, the brothers left it there for the closer shot.
 Despite the cold and the film’s low budget (not including the
expensive boots), we’d enjoyed working on Fargo but in no way
could have anticipated it would go on to become such a well-loved
and critical favorite. When shooting a film, it’s hard to foretell what
lies in its future.
 If I do not speak out and resist, I am an accomplice.
SISTER HELEN PREJEAN, IN DEAD MAN WALKING

Tim Robbins and I had gotten along well making The Hudsucker
Proxy and we had shared a mutual frustration on The Shawshank
Redemption. He approached me to work on a film he was directing,
though he wasn’t sure I’d want to do another prison movie, and one
with a minimal budget. In truth, I had turned down a director who’d
asked me to simply re-create what I’d done on Shawshank. But
where Shawshank had the qualities of a fable, Tim wanted to keep
Dead Man Walking stark and realistic. He even said to me that it
might look ugly. Or, at least, mundane. While I liked the script and
Tim’s concept for the film, I also felt like it had a great deal to say
about the morality of the death penalty, depicting both sides of the
argument without preaching to either.
 We shot Dead Man Walking using deliberately anonymous
lighting, and I saw my job to serve the performances, to keep the
focus on the characters rather than on any visual flourishes. That we
were working with a low budget provided another good reason to
keep it simple. I count both Dead Man Walking and the next film I
worked on, Courage Under Fire, among my most satisfying
professional experiences, yet, apart from dealing with weighty topics,
they couldn’t be more different.
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 14
THE FOG OF WAR
Imagine a life without consequences.
SPECIALIST ILARIO, IN COURAGE UNDER FIRE
Set during the then-recent Persian Gulf War and informed by
some real events, Courage Under Fire depicts conflicting accounts
leading to the death of a helicopter pilot, Captain Karen Walden.
Meg Ryan had signed on to play Walden and Denzel Washington to
play Nathaniel Serling, the lieutenant colonel charged with
determining whether Walden deserved a posthumous honorary
medal. Scripted by Patrick Sheane Duncan for director Ed Zwick, it
touched on themes both timeless and timely, since the role women
should play in combat was a much-debated topic at the time.
Production was denied any military cooperation, so all the armory,
such as one of many tanks seen in the photo of Mitch Lillian, me,
and Billy, was provided to the film by private individuals. It’s kind of
scary what’s out there.
The nighttime tank battle was complex, but the film’s extensive
helicopter sequences led to more lengthy preproduction
conversations. We shot-listed the alternating versions of the
Rashomon-influenced story. Then we broke down each camera
angle, deciding on those we could achieve for real by my operating
either inside or hanging outside of a flying helicopter. On Air
America, I had done a lot of hanging outside a helicopter, filming Mel
Gibson in the copilot seat as we flew over the mountains north of
Chiang Mai and Mae Hong Son, and it was one of the few things I
really enjoyed about that film. My fear of heights never kicks in when
I’m shooting like this. As James has suggested, looking through the
lens removes me from reality.
The space inside a Huey was limited, especially with our full cast
of characters, so we needed another option. Production’s initial
concept of shooting on a stage against a bluescreen would have
been expensive, and given the intricate way sunlight plays inside a
flying helicopter, I did not see how it could be made to feel real. I
thought back to a sequence in Air America, one that involved a Huey
crashing into the jungle. Our effects supervisor on that film, George
Gibbs, mounted a helicopter on a gimbal on the flatbed of a truck
and, with Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr. in the cockpit and me
filming from the back or a side seat, we simply drove the rig into the
jungle.
I talked over the same idea with Courage Under Fire’s effects
super, Paul Lombardi, and we pitched it to production. It saved on a
studio rental and on a company move, so they were happy with that
and, luckily, our location department found a raised dirt road from
which, with the additional height of the rig, it would appear in camera
as if the Huey were flying. Shooting on the rig with Andy Harris, who
was now my regular first assistant, and me strapped outside the
copter felt scarier than when we were really flying. But it was good to
shoot every angle in camera and find the two approaches, on the
truck and in the air, blend together seamlessly.
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 PHIL: Remember that story in Life magazine?
The one about Eddie Rickenbacker?
Him and his crew ran out of fuel over the Pacific and were
drifting in a raft for twenty-four days.

LOUIS ZAMPERINI: They made it, right?

PHIL: Yeah. Most of them lost their minds, but they made it.
UNBROKEN

Filming the aerial sequence in Unbroken, some eighteen years

later, presented a similar challenge. Having discovered that there
was no longer a B-24 Liberator that was flying, we looked for an
alternative. Production suggested mounting a fuselage on a gimbal
and shooting it in a parking lot, but that would leave us open to the
weather and the constantly varying angle of the sun. Finally, we
opted to shoot onstage, surrounding the set with a light box of
diffusion, backlit by an array of 160 Spacelights and 147 2K Blondes,
while creating our own sun via a T12 Fresnel lamp on a crane arm.
In those eighteen years since Courage Under Fire, visual effects
had evolved. With a little “persuasion,” our ILM effects team agreed
to forgo the use of a bluescreen and comp in exterior imagery using
the foreground structure of the plane as their matte line. To shoot
toward a bluescreen would have severely restricted the light I could
have projected into the plane from what would be the natural source,
so it was key to keep open to view the entire width of the light box.
Today, both these alternate methods (whether from Courage Under
Fire or Unbroken) of shooting inside a flying machine can be
superseded by an LED video wall, more often called the Volume.
This can certainly take the danger out of the process, but I don’t
think there is yet an alternative to simply driving that helicopter into
the jungle.
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 15
THINGS CHANGE
Just like a dream experience, whatever things I enjoy will
become a memory. Whatever is past will not be seen again.
THE DALAI LAMA, IN KUNDUN
For Courage Under Fire I relied heavily on my documentary
experience, and I suspect, though I’ve never confirmed, that
played a role in Martin Scorsese’s decision to hire me for Kundun.
The film Marty planned to shoot about the Dalai Lama, with a cast of
nonprofessional actors, could not have been more different from one
set during a war and starring Denzel Washington and Meg Ryan. I
happily signed on to the film, and James would join us as script
supervisor. We’d come to treasure our time in Morocco, a truly once-
in-a-lifetime experience.
That’s not to say the location didn’t present difficulties or the
shoot went entirely smoothly. The production was based in the city of
Ouarzazate (“The Door of the Desert”) and operated out of Atlas
Studios. When I first arrived to scout with Marty at the beginning of
June 1996, beyond two signs—one reading ATLAS STUDIOS and the
other OSCAR HOTEL—lay open desert broken only by the stooping
figures of women making bricks out of the bare earth and leaving
them to dry in the sun. I found out later this was being done in
anticipation of our film needing stages, essentially airport hangars
with tin roofs and dirt floors, within which we’d construct the sets.
By the time James and I returned, less than two months later, the
“stages” were up, and production designer Dante Ferretti’s sets were
nearing completion. Though they were wondrous, I occasionally had
to cut an opening to make them visible in camera. For instance,
Dante and his team had painted the ceiling of the assembly room, a
cavernous space with no apparent light source, with the most
beautiful of Buddhist motifs. I hated defacing it but, much as I dislike
top light, I saw no alternative approach to accommodate the wide
tracking shots that our director wanted. Besides, the ceiling would
never be seen by the camera, so I asked my Italian key grip,
Tommaso Mele, to cut some holes in the murals that I could pretend
were skylights.
 Skylights are a traditional feature of Tibetan architecture, and our
sets incorporated many of them. Billy O’Leary and I adopted a
consistent style of lighting for each that used a cutoff pyramid of
diffusion with an open top. The angled sides of this diffusion were lit
using an array of Maxis, in the case of the assembly room, and 2K
Blondes, for the smaller skylights, to mimic the soft ambience of the
sky, while the opening above allowed me to occasionally introduce a
stronger source as if it were direct sunlight. To get a sharp beam, as
in the Amdo farmhouse where the infant Dalai Lama is discovered,
we rigged a mirror above the set—referencing the clock room on
Hudsucker—and hit it with a 6K HMI lamp that we worked off a stand
on the floor.
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 The Tibetan cast came from a wide variety of places. Many were
from Dharamsala, but a Tibetan who played one of the Dalai Lama’s
advisors ran a newsstand in New York City, while another had been
an advertising executive in San Francisco. They were a diverse
group, but they shared a culture and a passion to reflect their
traditional way of life, which had been disrupted when China
annexed the country in 1950. A famously peaceful people, some
became worried about the direction of the film after seeing the
violence in Marty’s previous work. Others were a little shocked at his
quite colorful language when a shot wasn’t working as he wanted. I
suspect Marty didn’t realize how many of his cast could speak
English.
Lobsang Lhalungpa, our technical advisor, left Tibet in 1947 and
since 1989 had lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which he felt was
most like his home world. Similarly, many of the Moroccan locations
reminded our cast of Tibet; some were brought to tears by the sight
of the mud-built farmhouse that we chose to stand in for the real
birthplace of the Dalai Lama in Amdo province. With the High Atlas
Mountains as a backdrop, a fortress, said to have been occupied by
the French Foreign Legion, could easily appear as a Tibetan
monastery.
 Our Tibetan cast never complained. They were there for the sake
of the Dalai Lama. On many days they stood in 110-degree heat,
dressed in heavy Tibetan costumes. Craft service would come
around with bottles of water and some cheese sandwiches for the
crew, but the camera crew and I would send them back, suggesting
that if the Tibetans got nothing, then we would have nothing. More
than food, the Tibetans wanted yak butter tea. When production
arranged for this to be brought, morale improved appreciably.
The Tibetans stayed in a hotel in the center of Ouarzazate that
gave them free rein in the kitchen on Sundays. James and I were
delighted to be invited to join them for Sunday dinners, which
provided a nice break from the bland set catering. Other members of
our crew brought their native cuisine with them as well. During prep,
Billy and I had been anxiously waiting for our lighting package to
arrive as we were keen to start work. The grip and electric trucks
were driving from Rome, and when they finally arrived, our Italian
grip crew began unloading what, to them, were the most important
items on the vehicles: boxes of pasta, cooking utensils, the largest
cheeses I’ve ever seen, and a pizza oven.
We had a seventy-five-day schedule that ballooned to 103 days.
Though Kundun was not on the same scale as other films with
shorter schedules, it involved child actors. Four actors played the
Dalai Lama at various points in his life. As soon as we ran the
camera the youngest did more crying than any child I have ever
encountered or want to encounter. We even tried to shoot him from
inside a blacked-out hide, distracting him by dangling puppets and
cardboard birds in front of his face using a long nylon thread knotted
to the end of a boom pole. Nothing seemed to work unless he was
sleeping. Marty’s long-serving editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, did a
wonderful job with the footage we gave her.

The bulk of our crew came from Italy and the UK. But in addition
to Billy and a few of his New York team, I had with me Bruce Hamme
as dolly grip and Andy Harris as first assistant camera. Andy and I
had first met when he was working as Eric Swanek’s second
assistant on Thunderheart. I later worked with Eric on Shawshank,
but when he had to leave due to a prior commitment, Andy took over.
We have been working together ever since. Andy is a Jersey boy
whom James knew well from her New York days. He had never
traveled outside of the United States before Kundun and was quite
reluctant to do so. Consequently, I had struggled to convince him
that Morocco would prove to be the experience of a lifetime, one he
would regret if he turned me down.
After checking out our relatively modest camera package, Andy
boarded an early flight to Casablanca and disappeared off the map.
Our production office in Ouarzazate was in a panic, having heard
nothing from him through the night and late into the following
morning. The office had assumed the worst, as the route from
Casablanca to Ouarzazate involved crossing the High Atlas
Mountains via a very treacherous road. In truth, Andy had been
picked up by a taxi, arranged by production, at the airport in
Casablanca, but the driver spoke no English and did not know which
hotel he was taking Andy to—though, luckily, he knew the town.
Andy got into the car, and they set off into the pitch-dark night. Had
he been aware then of the sheer drops to each side of the road as it
wound its way across the mountains, Andy might have found the
drive even more “exhilarating.” Arriving in Ouarzazate in the middle
of the night and after being turned away by others, Andy checked
himself into the first hotel that agreed to give him a room. In the
morning the hotel guided him to the production office of a television
series that was also basing itself in Ouarzazate and they in turn sent
him on his way to our production office—after a leisurely breakfast.

Traveling—it gives you a home in a thousand strange

places, then leaves you a stranger in your own land.
IBN BATTUTA (1304–1368)

When he finally arrived, the Italian staff began sobbing, acting as

if he had been lost forever, because they assumed he had been.
From that day on they called him “Andy of the Desert,” and he has
since become an avid traveler. In retrospect, he was quite lucky. One
taxi had dropped an older Tibetan lady in another village altogether,
remote and in the heart of the High Atlas. It was only via gossip a
day or two later that the production office learned where she was
and could send a vehicle to retrieve her.
During preproduction, Marty gave me a copy of Melissa
Mathison’s script on which he had written notes and drawn a bird’s-
eye view of both the camera position and movement he envisioned
for each of the various scenes. In the mornings he would leave it to
me to ready the shot and only come to set when called for by our
AD, Scott Harris. Whether intentionally or not, if what I had set up
deviated at all from what Marty had in his mind’s eye, I was in
trouble.
Marty once told James that he liked editing films more than
shooting them. He seemed uncomfortable in the desert, and talking
about movies appeared to help. James would try to stump him by
thinking of a movie he had never seen, but she never could. When
he would mention a movie James hadn’t seen, he’d say, “Oh, I’ll get
you a VHS!” There wasn’t much to do in Ouarzazate, so we watched
them all, even Shakes the Clown. Only later did James learn from
the production office that every time Marty asked for a movie, the
staff had to find someone in Italy to hand-carry it through Moroccan
customs as, if sent on its own, a VHS tape would never have made
it. Those in the production office were not so fond of the “name a
movie” game that Marty and James played!
The sets that together formed the mazelike Potala Palace had
been built to accommodate a long tracking shot through the corridor
leading to the assembly rooms, but no consideration had been given
to how we could track with a dolly on uneven stone paving slabs.
Early in prep I managed to convince production to hire one of the
best Steadicam operators for the length of the shoot, Peter
Cavaciuti. Peter had been a friend since we had worked together on
the Eric Clapton video “Forever Man,” and this kind of shot was why I
had asked him to be with us.
Peter and I had practiced the camera move before asking for
Marty to come to the set and, as I felt we were ready, we
immediately went into a full rehearsal. I was watching the live feed
with Marty on his monitor and, I guess wondering why I was not
operating, he turned to me and asked how we were accomplishing
the shot. I said it was Pete and his Steadicam. Marty was taken
aback. “Really?” he said. “He’s good! I would not have known.” Later
Peter would work with Stanley Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut and with
Sam Mendes and me on 1917. As I said to Marty, he is one of the
best.

Night scenes set around the Buddha were lit using small halogen
bulbs hidden among the votive candles. But most of the other sets
required much larger rigs, and the throne room is just one example.
Billy and I lit this using an array of twenty-four 10K Fresnel lamps
bounced off gold stipple reflectors. Our rigging crew hung a series of
scaffold tubes as high above the set as possible. As our “stage” was
not load bearing, these were supported by goalposts hidden behind
drapes the art department had supplied to look like authentic
columns. The 10K Fresnels were set to project light both toward and
away from the throne but always parallel to the chamber. Between
them hung a series of 16’ × 4’ gold stipple reflectors set at forty-five
degrees to each row of lamps. The gold stipple focused the bounce
into the central area of the set rather than allowing it to spill out in all
directions, as it would off a matte white reflector, and the light from
multiple lamps blended into one another to create a large, soft
source. In conjunction with dimming the lamps, the gold of the
reflector warmed the light to the same color temperature as the
votive candles on the set. The Maxis referred to in the diagram were
rigged for the daylight scene, between the Tibetans and the Chinese
general, that shot at a later date on the same set.

Every day, residents of Ouarzazate would queue up outside the

studio in the hope of getting a job on the production. I was lining up
one shot of the young Dalai Lama underneath a red cloth when a
production assistant brought in a small boy from the street named
Mohammed to work as a stand-in. I immediately placed the red cloth
over his head and aimed a fully spotted 10K Fresnel toward him.
Though he spoke no English and was quite overwhelmed he soon
became engrossed with everything he was seeing. It’s easy to forget
how exotic filming can appear to someone on the outside.
On Fridays we had “Dollar Day,” when crew members put a dollar
(or dirham) in a hat for a winner-takes-all draw. It was probably
Bruce who wrote Mohammed’s name on a note and put it in the hat.
As luck would have it, his name was drawn. It was difficult to
convince the boy that the prize, $70 or $80, was his to keep as he
had never seen that much money in his life. When it really sank in
that this was his money, he flat-out fainted. Mohammed and his dad,
a local goat herder, went off smiling that evening.
The set usually had security that restricted access to outsiders.
But one day in Casablanca, as we were shooting some of the
montage shots depicting the Dalai Lama’s journey to China, the
system apparently broke down, allowing two or three Chinese
“officials” to confront some of our cast members. Wearing long
trenchcoats and homburg hats, they looked so obviously like spies
that they might have been from central casting. But despite their
comical appearance they were quite serious. “Why are you betraying
the Motherland?” they shouted in the face of one of our cast
members. This actor, who had studied as a monk and had found it
difficult to pretend anger for a scene earlier in the shoot, now took a
swipe at one of the officials, flooring him. He told us later he had
been thinking of all the family members he had lost when the
Chinese invaded Tibet. The Motherland! He was one of the gentlest
people on the set, but even he had a breaking point. He told James,
“I’ve spent years as a monk getting rid of anger. It’s hard to find it.”
But find it he did. The same Chinese “gentlemen” had previously
been to our production office while we were still based in Ouarzazate
but, irony of ironies, we had been at a distant location shooting a
scene depicting the Chinese takeover of Lhasa.
 Late in the film, the adult Dalai Lama (Tenzin Thuthob Tsarong,
the Dalai Lama’s grand-nephew in real life) has a nightmare in which
he stands in the middle of hundreds of corpses, monks he imagines
are to be killed by the Chinese. I had once achieved a similar
camera move to the one Marty envisioned using a massive
construction crane, but that had been a boom down and shot on a
wide lens. For the camera to start on a close shot of the Dalai
Lama’s face before tilting down to the bodies at his feet and slowly
rising to reveal a wide tapestry of death, it required a more delicate
tool set: the seventy-five-foot, Russian-made Akela (at the time the
largest camera crane available and before a drone was an option) in
combination with a Cooke 18–100 mm Varotal zoom lens. Our
production was hesitant to transport such an expensive item as the
Akela, along with its accompanying technicians, from Europe to the
edge of the Sahara for a single shot. But I was not going to be the
one to tell Marty we could not make that shot.
Without the extras we needed, or the Akela getting us as high as
Marty wanted, the final frames had to be extended in post. This was
the first time I had used the Akela, and it was a pure coincidence that
the second time was for our first shot on the next project, The Big
Lebowski—to follow a tumbling tumbleweed down an LA hillside.
Kundun includes a wide variety of imagery and lighting that
ranges from the warmth of the candles to the chill of the night
scenes. I wanted to play with the contrast in color a little more than I
might in another film. Kundun is a dream, a kind of visual poem, so I
felt this gave me license. But I did want to keep it within reality, and I
often obsess over the smallest of details. A single bare light bulb
contrasts the romantic candlelight of the film’s earlier moments with
encroaching modernity.
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 Production finished in Casablanca, which stood in for Peking.
After so many days and weeks in Ouarzazate, where the food
selection was sparse, we immediately sent out to McDonald’s for our
night shoot’s supper. In fact, we ordered from McDonald’s for the
next four nights rather than eat from the catering truck. I don’t think
McDonald’s hamburgers had ever tasted so good—maybe not since
I returned from the yacht race—so good that Tenzin ate three and
went back for more.
Kundun was detested by the Chinese government, and the film
received only limited release elsewhere. Looking back, I remember a
comment widely attributed to Disney CEO Michael Eisner—“The bad
news is that the film was made; the good news is that nobody
watched it.” But another quote seems more heartfelt, this one from
cinematographer Fred Elmes: “Whenever possible, shoot the films
that you care about, because those are the ones where you’ll do the
best work.” Given the chance to work on any Scorsese movie,
Kundun would be my pick. It’s not a traditional narrative story or a
history of Tibet, violent or otherwise, but a melancholy tone poem to
a changing world.
James and I had experienced another country, an eclectic mix of
cultures, and shared the shooting of a film together. The good and
the bad. By the time we left Ouarzazate many of the Moroccan cafés
and carpet stores featured a picture of the Dalai Lama alongside that
of their king. The Tibetans had that effect on people.
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 16
THE DUDE ABIDES
It’s good knowin’ he’s out there. The Dude. Takin’ ’er easy
for all us sinners.
THE STRANGER, IN THE BIG LEBOWSKI
Kundun’s schedule had expanded to 103 days, but we still made
it home by Christmas. Joel and Ethan had waited patiently to finalize
prep and location scouting for their next film, The Big Lebowski,
which was scheduled to shoot before the end of January 1997, so
we hit the ground running. I was happy. For all its challenges, Fargo
had been a fun shoot, and they had become two of my favorite
collaborators. Their new project, not a surprise with the Coens, was
“something completely different,” as Monty Python put it. The script
read like a cross between The Big Sleep and a stoner comedy,
making it hard to picture exactly what sort of movie it would be. That
had been true of Fargo, but with The Big Lebowski’s many moving
parts, plot strands, and red herrings I wasn’t sure what to make of it.
But I knew it would be interesting.
That The Big Lebowski also offered a chance to work with Jeff
Bridges made it even more exciting. In the early 1970s, Bridges
appeared in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, Michael
Cimino’s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, and John Huston’s Fat City, all
of which helped shape my appreciation of film. To my mind, they’re
still three of the greatest American films.
I was in Torquay when I saw Fat City for the first time, having
been rejected as a beach photographer and yet to start on the next
stage in my life at the National Film School. Back then, Torbay
cinemas served as a test market for some films before they went into
wide release, but I’m not sure Fat City—with its gritty depiction of
boxers living in Stockton, California, and Conrad Hall’s shadowy
cinematography—played that well based on the screening I
attended. The cinema was almost empty, save for a few old people
who were most probably there to get out of the incessant rain of an
English summer and have a short nap. I like to think those who
stayed awake were as deeply affected by the film as I was. Now,
twenty-five years later, Jeff Bridges was the Dude.
Sometimes a film’s look comes together at different points in
preproduction. On Barton Fink, the Coens and I had five weeks of
prep together, scouting locations and discussing what worked for
them and what didn’t. It was during these conversations, standing on
real locations, that I started to see how Joel and Ethan pictured the
film. Though decidedly different films, we went through a similar
process on both The Hudsucker Proxy and Fargo, but because I
arrived late to Lebowski I had some catching up to do.
The Big Lebowski provides a fine example of how the most
seemingly simple locations can prove to be surprisingly difficult. A
bowling alley, the gathering place for the Dude and pals Walter (John
Goodman) and Donny (Steve Buscemi), served as a central location.
You might think finding a working LA bowling alley at the beginning
of 1997 for a story set in 1991 would be easy, but no. After several
dead ends, we settled on the Hollywood Star Lanes on Santa
Monica Boulevard. It looked the part and, just as important, was
closed at the time, which allowed us the freedom to prep and to
shoot both interiors and exteriors. But lighting its thirty-two-lane
space would take time and money.
 Billy O’Leary joined me once again, and we knew from the first
time we laid eyes on the place it would need to be rewired. Few of
the existing light fixtures worked. Those that did were caked in years
of accumulated grime, rendering them virtually useless. It would
have been possible to approach each shot separately, by moving
lamps as needed, but it is my practice on most films to light each
scene in a way that requires little relighting when shooting the
coverage. Besides, on Lebowski we had little time for changes. We’d
need to light the alley in its entirety, and we had only a short time to
get it done.
And there was another complication. Because we’d be shooting
some scenes in slow motion, filming at 120 frames per second rather
than the usual twenty-four, we’d need to light for a level almost two
and a half times brighter than normal. And that was not the only
issue. Some fluorescent lights flicker. Changing the speed of the film
going through the camera’s gate offsets the sync between the
shutter and the flicker of the bulb, creating a strobing effect. You can
avoid this by shooting at certain high speeds paired with specific
shutter openings, but we wanted to change speed within the shot.
To do this and maintain an even exposure you can adjust the
shutter opening or the lens aperture. As changing the shutter
opening can also affect the strobing of the image (see Band of
Brothers for an example, which used the strobing for effect), we
rented a speed aperture compensation unit. And we still had to swap
out the alley’s old-style magnetic ballasts for flicker-free electronic
ballasts, while we added more fixtures to increase the light level.
That’s the work you sometimes need to do to make an everyday
location look as if it hasn’t been altered at all. But once we had
everything in place we could shoot quickly, adding little beyond a
handheld reflector to bring out a cast member’s eyes or add a
highlight to a bowling ball. Like so many situations, from Shawshank
to Kundun, production might balk at the initial cost of a piece of
equipment or a lighting rig, but when it saves shooting time, it saves
money.
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 Shooting inside and outside the bowling alley went smoothly, and
only one or two shots proved to be head-scratchers. We wanted to
push behind a ball as it rolled toward the pins, and our little
motorized skateboard had trouble catching up with the ball. What to
do? Bruce Hamme suggested we set the camera on a soft pad, and
he would push it down the lane at the end of a forty-foot pole. And for
the point of view from inside the bowling ball, Mitch Lillian and Bruce
simply mounted the camera on a revolving spit, offset it on the dolly,
and tracked alongside the alley. The black “hole” was added as an
overlay later.

The simplest solution is most often the best!

A POPULAR VERSION OF OCCAM’S RAZOR
 Keep it simple, stupid!
THE U.S. NAVY’S “KISS” DESIGN PRINCIPLE

We worked hard to keep the bowling alley scenes naturalistic, but

The Big Lebowski freely departs reality at several points. We shot
the fantasy sequence—in which the Dude rents shoes from Saddam
Hussein, descends a staircase stretching to infinity, and joins Maude
Lebowski (Julianne Moore) in a bowling-themed, Busby Berkeley–
inspired dance sequence—in a Santa Monica airport hangar.
Because the hangar didn’t have a load-bearing ceiling, as a studio
would, Mitch had a truss built to span the set and hold our lighting
rig. I wanted the sequence to appear as if it were illuminated by a
single soft source but keep the light from spilling beyond the set and
allow the background to fall into darkness. The solution was an array
of 1K Fresnel lamps rigged in an overlapping pattern that imitated a
soft source, just as a ring light or a strip of household bulbs might,
but that would also act as a directional source. This approach was
not dissimilar to lighting the ballroom in the Queen Mary but one with
an even more focused pattern of lamps than the R40 bulbs. I would
return to the same technique many times in the future, including for
the concert scene in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and for Wallace’s
office in Blade Runner 2049.
To isolate the set, we draped the walls with black cloth, but to give
some sense of a night sky beyond we created stars using small
pieces of front-projection material to make them shine. In fact, we
used material I had left over from Shadey, a bizarre British comedy
reviewed as a “cult film looking for a cult,” for which I had attempted
to turn an elevator into a spaceship. As for that film, lighting the
projection material required only a small source placed close to the
camera lens, so dim that it made no difference to the shot otherwise.
And to run the camera down the alley between the legs of the girls
we again fell back on Bruce’s low-tech solution, his soft pad and a
forty-foot pole.

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 That rug really tied the room together.
THE DUDE, IN THE BIG LEBOWSKI

We shot the exteriors of the Dude’s bungalow on location, but, as

the Coens wanted a specific layout, production designer Rick
Heinrichs built its cluttered interior as a set. It also had to look dirty
and uncared for, so Billy and I took steps to emphasize this with our
lighting, for example using a single bare bulb in the bathroom. It’s
always a balancing act when shooting a movie. It needs to look
good, but what does “good” mean when depicting places that aren’t
pretty? I used to have long conversations with Conrad Hall about this
topic. How do you draw an audience in while staying true to what the
scene needs? Just because it may look lovely doesn’t mean it looks
right.
Driving scenes are always time-consuming if they are shot for
real, out on the street. It’s necessary when you are shooting car to
car or the characters interact with their surroundings, but there are
scenes that can be shot onstage and faked, using a technique called
“poor man’s process.” I find this quite fun to do, especially when a
film is not supposed to be completely naturalistic and the scenes
take place at night.
For Lebowski we used rotating lights to mimic the passing
streetlamps. Behind the car a series of dollies tracked back and forth
with small red and white lamps standing in for the taillights and
headlamps of the surrounding traffic. With every lamp on a dimmer,
a simple setup can create quite a complex interactive pattern of light.

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 On the other hand, for the daytime car work in The Man Who
Wasn’t There (a film I will return to later) we used a combination of
live-action points of view and bluescreen work (one of the
advantages of shooting a black-and-white film in color) for which we
had shot background plates in advance. Onstage, Mitch rigged a
rotating arm, much like we had done on Lebowski, but that held a
large leafy branch at its far end rather than a lamp. The gaffer,
Randy Woodside, rigged a lamp, a 5K Fresnel, at the center of the
circle of rotation so that it cast the pattern of sunlight across the car’s
interior. As we could play back our chosen background plates on a
monitor, Mitch and his grip crew could time the shadows cast by the
revolving greenery as if the car were traveling past the trees in the
plate. This technique would not have been an option for a black-and-
white film noir shot in the 1940s and ’50s, hence their use of the
back-projection technique we had embraced for 1984. Bluescreen
became the preferred technique in the late 1950s (one of the first
and most famous uses was for John Sturges’s The Old Man and the
Sea, shot by the great James Wong Howe), and back projection is
rarely, if ever, used today. Things have changed again since we
“faked” our driving shots on Lebowski and The Man Who Wasn’t
There, and today these can be shot entirely in camera, on a virtual
reality stage.
It’s hard to believe it now, but The Big Lebowski debuted to mixed
reviews and tepid box office in March 1998. At the time, this didn’t
come as that much of a surprise. It’s an odd film, a stoner noir that
undoubtedly confused those expecting another Fargo. Though it
found a second life, it wasn’t until James and I were consulting at
Pixar a few years later that I realized what a beloved cult film it had
become. Pixar’s animators had decorated their workstations to
reflect their tastes, with a Star Trek theme or a favorite sports team
as well as a shrine to The Big Lebowski, complete with bowling
paraphernalia and a palm tree.
I felt a sense of whiplash going from a stoner comedy to The
Siege, a mainstream Hollywood movie with Ed Zwick that attempted
to imitate Gillo Pontecorvo’s epic The Battle of Algiers. Courage
Under Fire had found a reasonable balance between a commercial
drama and a film that dealt with a real-world situation. With The
Siege, Ed would attempt the same, but with a story that depicted
what might happen in the event of a terrorist attack on New York.
While I can’t entirely disagree with reviews that criticized the film for
a sense of self-importance or for ultimately trying to be all things to
all viewers, I think it works as a cautionary tale of how democracy
under stress can easily morph into a fascist state. We made the film
a couple of years before 9/11, yet the FBI and CIA ended up making
many of the same mistakes Ed, Lawrence Wright, and Menno
Meyjes’s screenplay anticipated—blowback! The film’s happy ending
might be the most Hollywood thing about it.
I worked for a third time with Denzel Washington, alongside
director Norman Jewison on The Hurricane. Like many directors of
his age and experience, Sidney Lumet being the prime example,
Norman didn’t do many takes once he felt he had what he wanted,
and, for me, the shoot was a pleasure. But the script of The
Hurricane often embellished Rubin Carter’s story. It smoothed over
his marital infidelities and the thornier aspects of his past.
Consequently, the finished film met with controversy when it arrived
in theaters at the end of 1999. As much as I like the film and admire
Denzel’s performance, I think true stories should be just that. A less-
sanitized version of Carter’s life would have been far stronger.
Whatever his faults, Carter deserved the fair trial he never got.
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 17
O, BROTHER
Do not seek the treasure!
PETE HOGWALLOP, IN O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?
By accident, rather than design, I’d become something of an
expert on prison movies. My next film with Joel and Ethan, O
Brother, Where Art Thou?, opens with a different picture of prison
life. A chain gang sings in the opening shot of the Coens’ musical set
in 1930s Mississippi, a film that drew on Preston Sturges comedies,
traditional American music, regional history, and, providing the spine
of the plot, Homer’s The Odyssey, for which the great author would
get a screen credit. It was a typically eccentric mix, and Joel and
Ethan were looking for a distinct look to match the material. The
phrase “hand-tinted postcard” kept coming up, which seemed like
the perfect model. But instead of simple sepia tones they wanted the
skies to remain blue and the skin tones to appear natural while
shifting the greens and other lush colors to create a more parched
landscape. I could picture this. I just didn’t know how we’d achieve it.
Finding a solution involved a lot of dead ends and
experimentation. Andy Harris, James, and I shot test after test with
various types of filtration in front of the lens, attempting to achieve
the look photochemically. In discussions with Beverly Wood, our
contact at the Deluxe film lab and a former chemist, we considered a
bipack process, a technique in which two negatives are exposed on
the same positive, allowing a layer of black-and-white to be exposed
on top of a normal color pass. Ossie Morris had used a similar
technique when he shot Moby Dick for John Huston, using the
Technicolor dye transfer or imbibition printing process (last used in
the United States for the release prints of The Godfather Part II). But
we wanted to change select colors, not the entirety of the image.
Neither Technicolor nor bipack printing, nor any combination of
filtration in front of the lens, could achieve this. Perhaps the only
solution would be to hand-paint a black-and-white negative, as
Georges Méliès had done for his Le voyage dans la lune in 1902.
At some point Joel mentioned we might want to look at a
technique being used on Gary Ross’s upcoming film Pleasantville,
which John Lindley was shooting. Much of Pleasantville takes place
in the idealized, black-and-white American world of a 1950s sitcom
but would make selective use of color to reflect its setting’s shifting
reality. The film achieved this effect for the first time using a digital
intermediate, by which the camera negative is scanned, and the
digital copy of that negative is color-timed (allowing for selective
timing not possible with the photochemical process) before being
recorded back onto film. Though I was averse to using a digital
technique on any film (I am both a purist and hesitant to change), it
did sound like the right tool for the job.
To confirm this, James and I took our test footage to Cinesite, a
branch of Kodak that had begun putting resources into digital
postproduction. The results looked pretty bad. Although the
possibilities were obvious, our efforts looked crude. The technology
wasn’t sensitive enough to achieve what we wanted. Yet. We were
told the process was rapidly evolving. In a year it would be perfect
for what we needed. We all agreed to take a leap of faith.
The Coens have generous postproduction schedules written into
their contracts, which would help, but, in truth, we were still taking a
tremendous risk. O Brother, Where Art Thou? was an expensive film
with big-name actors, including George Clooney. We had no idea
what it would look like when we were done, even if we knew what we
wanted it to look like. While watching dailies in a Jackson,
Mississippi, theater I heard Joel telling George and John Turturro,
while looking at a fully saturated and lushly green landscape, “It’s not
going to look like this.” I kept thinking, I hope it doesn’t look like this.
But what is it going to look like?
In the meantime, we would be suffering through a sweltering
Mississippi summer in which the thermometer rarely registered
below ninety degrees. If the actors in the chain gang appear to be
suffering from the brutal heat, it’s not entirely acting. I think we all
started to feel like we were in Cool Hand Luke. Happily, Joel and
Ethan’s working method takes factors like this into account, building
breaks into the shooting and, in general, looking after the cast and
crew. It has always impressed me that the Coens line up in the lunch
queue like everyone else, rather than heading for their trailers and a
meal fashioned by a personal chef, as is the habit of some directors.
One time I was with Joel in the queue when a crew member asked
him what he did. “Oh, I’m the director,” he replied without any sense
of irony.

On O Brother, as on all their shoots, everyone mucked in. For

later scenes, as we moved from one wet bayou location to the next,
George would carry a tripod on his back, for instance, and Tim Blake
Nelson would tote a magazine case. Perhaps it’s because George,
Tim, and John had all directed films themselves, or planned to, that
they understood it made a difference when everyone felt equally
involved in the hard work.
Is it because I’m a fisherman that I am always conscious of the
weather wherever I am? Perhaps, but it is also crucial to a
cinematographer. With assistant director Betsy Magruder, whom I’d
first met while making Sid and Nancy and had introduced to Joel and
Ethan, I’d break down each day of shooting into an order that
allowed time for the complexity of each shot while considering the
angle of the sun and other factors. For instance, we had two days to
shoot the sequence where the film’s protagonists make their escape
via train, including plates that would form a background to the few
shots we had to do with the actors against bluescreen. To get the
best from the light on our location we reversed the train overnight to
shoot from the opposite direction on the second day.
I draw out similar breakdowns for any complicated exterior work.
It’s the sort of practical concern that often gets overlooked when
talking about filmmaking. You can spend all day setting up one
perfect shot, then have no time for the next shot or the shot after
that. It’s a cinematographer’s job to create the right image for a film
but also to keep the process rolling. It’s important to try not to
compromise while keeping to a schedule, knowing that it’s inevitable
that some compromises will have to be made. Accomplishing both
can be done only through careful planning and thinking about what
needs to happen after a shot’s been captured—where the camera
goes next, can a camera track be laid in preparation for the next shot
without it affecting the present one, what lights need to be moved,
how the changing sunlight will affect reflectors, and so on.
Some things fall through the cracks. We filmed the baptism scene
at a location called Alligator Lake, though it wasn’t the wildlife that
nearly derailed us. We’d brought in a seventy-five-foot Akela crane to
do an overhead shot, the same crane as we had used in Morocco
and to follow that tumbling tumbleweed. But to achieve the exact
camera move the brothers wanted, the base of the Akela had to be
mounted on a track and moved during the shot. This would require
purpose-made wheels and track to carry more than 5,500 pounds of
weight. To say the least, the ground was quite saturated, as we were
in a steaming Mississippi swamp, so Mitch Lillian, once again our
key grip, decided to bring in some railroad sleepers (“crossties” in
American parlance) on which to construct a firm base for the
purpose-made track. Everything worked until it didn’t. After a few
takes, pushing the heavy crane back and forth, the wheels began to
fold, and the grips began to sink into the mud—and the crawfish—
taking the sleepers with them. But, as luck would have it, we
managed to get the shot before everything came apart.
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 There were crawfish and there were rats. While I was staying in a
small motel in Jackson I was woken up in the middle of the night by
the sound of scratching. For the first two nights I had been so tired I
went back to sleep, but by the third, it went beyond a joke. I traced
the noise to the couch. When I bumped this piece of furniture up and
down, out popped a very large black rat, more suitable to Winston
Smith’s nightmares than my own. Once I had chased the rodent out
of my clothes closet, through the door, and into the night, I returned
to a restless sleep. On my way to work I confronted the manager.
“Yes, they will do that,” he nonchalantly informed me.
 We returned to Los Angeles to finish shooting some of our
exterior scenes, including the town square and entrance to Homer
Stokes’s hoedown. But we shot the hoedown itself, in which the
Soggy Bottom Boys would perform and Homer Stokes would be run
out on a rail, inside the historic Vicksburg Southern Cultural Heritage
Foundation Auditorium, a location that proved challenging. Not only
was it a sensitive space to work in, but its low ceiling gave me few
lighting options, and there would be no time in our schedule to make
changes during the shooting day, no way to light the scene shot by
shot.
I planned to boost the footlights beneath the Soggy Bottom Boys
and hang two rows of lamps between the drapes above the stage to
light the front of the audience. These two sources might have been
sufficient in some situations. But here I was looking for the scene to
take on a warm glow while concentrating the light on the
performances and Homer’s antics among the crowd, rather than
have it flood the whole auditorium. To combine a soft source with a
directional one as I had for Lebowski, I again turned to a large array
of small Fresnel lamps (though none of the 1Ks I had depicted in my
initial plan) instead of household bulbs.
It was a wonder how Mitch managed to tie in a pipe rig against
the ceiling without damaging the location. And it was a wonder how
Billy managed to fit in forty-eight 650-watt Fresnel lamps (or
“Tweenies”) so neatly and compactly that we could shoot wide shots
of the stage and of the audience without one appearing in frame.
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 We had based our Mississippi production office in Canton.
Because the town had been the site of a recent KKK rally, staging
our own there seemed a little inappropriate, to say the least.
Consequently, the scene, one of the most challenging in the film,
would be staged in a field outside Los Angeles that was surrounded
by a wooded hillside. The field was large, as it had to be to
accommodate our full complement of hooded extras, and the scene
would be lit entirely by the light from a flaming cross.
As with the night scene on the beach in Malindi, I dismissed the
idea of a “moonlight” source. And, as in Mountains of the Moon, to
create a flame effect over a wide area I again turned to Biggles’s
original suggestion of a dimmed Maxi Brute—in fact, eight dimmed
and flickering Maxi Brutes rigged on two large Condor booms.
Luckily for me, the field itself was bare but for a single tree that sat
alone near its center. This allowed Billy O’Leary to position our lights
behind and above the tree, while the cross was some thirty feet in
front of it, the tree acting as a cut to the light hitting the ground at the
foot of the cross. Only five years in the future, for Jarhead, I would
be digitally replacing a light source with a flame, but for O Brother
this was not an option. To overcome the effects of the inverse square
law, I needed to project light to the rear of the crowd, where our
protagonists entered the action, while making it appear as if it was
coming from the fiery cross.
As funny as the scene is, with its obvious contempt for racist
buffoons, shooting it had some awkward moments. Not only did the
re-creation of something so hateful get to everyone on the crew, one
night we saw some people who had stopped their car on the road
above our field to watch the “rally.” It would have been hard for them
to see the camera or the lights from where they stood, and I’ve often
wondered if they thought they were witnessing the real thing—in
California.

Damn! We’re in a tight spot!

ULYSSES EVERETT McGILL, IN O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?

Although nine months had passed since our initial tests, the
digital intermediary (DI) process was still in its infancy when we
began to color-time O Brother, Where Art Thou? Not only was it
James’s and my first DI, it was also the first for our brilliant and
extremely patient colorist, Julius Friede. What we were trying to
achieve pushed us to the limit.
We were working with a Spirit DataCine system that output DPX
files that could later be transferred back onto celluloid using a Kodak
Lightning II recorder. One problem: As we made our adjustments to
its color, the original camera negative would need to be run back and
forth through the gate of the DataCine, which scanned it in real time.
This goes against the first thing you learn with film—handle the
negative as little as possible. Subsequent advances have made
digital post routine and less terrifying, but we needed to use extreme
caution or the resulting damage to the negative could have caused
us to lose the entire film. Another problem: Each reel of the negative
had to be fully timed before those twenty minutes of cut footage
could be scanned and laid down on tape. In an echo of the Heathrow
customs official that greeted me on my return from Sudan, nothing
existed until we had laid down each fully color-corrected twenty-
minute reel—as a power cut was to painfully illustrate when we lost
an entire week of work.
 This was the first time digital technology had been used to
complete every frame of a film. After experiencing it once, I vowed to
James that I would never use the process again, a promise that
lasted for all of three films. You can’t stop progress!
Having spent eleven or twelve weeks in the DI suite staring at the
same images, I had a hard time believing anyone would choose to
go down this route. But some of my fellow cinematographers saw
what we achieved on O Brother, Where Art Thou? as the opening of
Pandora’s box. By embracing digital technology, we were cheating.
We had destroyed the photochemical process. I didn’t know what the
future held, and I certainly had no idea that digital tools would take
over so quickly and completely. In some ways I was, and still
consider myself, a purist. I love film. Even now I shy away from
postproduction effects when I believe we can get what we want on
set and in camera. But when a director has a vision in mind and asks
you to help realize it, you employ any process available. It’s the
image that matters, not the tools used to create it.
Incidentally, Joel told me that the ASPCA had made a visit to the
cutting room. They could not believe the cow that is machine-gunned
down by George Nelson and the one on the roof floating with the
flood were not real. They were not. Of less concern for them seemed
to be Sheriff Cooley’s dog, which is seen drowning in the
floodwaters. Perhaps the ASPCA had yet to see Jurassic Park,
which was seven years old at the time O Brother was released. And
Pandora’s box was already open wide.
 After all the state-of-the-art experimentation with digital color
timing, it was a joy to venture into a world in black-and-white. It was
also a rare joy to shoot in LA with James, who, while not on the
payroll, was a partner throughout.
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 18
THE BARBER
Sometimes you look at it, your looking changes it… The
more you look, the less you really know. It’s a fact, a true
fact. In a way, it’s the only fact there is.
FREDDY RIEDENSCHNEIDER, IN THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE
The Barber Movie, as it was originally titled, was inspired by
1950s noir and science fiction. It was typical of the Coens’ work in
two ways: It attracted an extraordinary cast (in this case, Billy Bob
Thornton, Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins, Tony Shalhoub,
Scarlett Johansson, and James Gandolfini), and it was impossible to
classify. My job was to create a look that, to borrow a phrase, tied it
all together. I’ve always loved black-and-white photography and I
saw what would ultimately be known as The Man Who Wasn’t There
as the perfect opportunity to blend the naturalism I consider my
mainstay with the stylization of film noir.
Joel and Ethan referenced Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt
when talking of the film’s Santa Rosa, California, setting. Others
came to mind for me. Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly—described
by critic Tim Dirks as “the definitive, apocalyptic, nihilistic, science-
fiction film noir of all time”—shot by Ernest Laszlo, is among my
favorite films. And I love to revisit the more naturalistic noir of
Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success, shot by James
Wong Howe, and Richard Brooks’s In Cold Blood, shot impeccably
by Conrad Hall. But none became direct photographic references for
The Man Who Wasn’t There.
It’s impossible to know how the films you love or the pictures you
have seen have influenced your own perceptions. When I’m taking
still photographs, I work in black-and-white rather than color. Color
can be a distraction when not used purposefully. I love how color is
used by painters like Edvard Munch, James Whistler, and Toulouse-
Lautrec: sparingly and with extreme deliberation. But I love simplicity,
and maybe that is simply why I love black-and-white.

In color, I am more worried about the light, the clothes, the

setting, etc. It is more complex. In black and white, it’s the
person who is important.
HARRY GRUYAERT (who is only one of the most influential color photographers
on the planet!)
 Though it might seem ironic, after making many tests, Bev Wood,
James, and I discovered that our preferred black-and-white look for
The Man Who Wasn’t There could best be achieved by shooting in
color. We found a low-contrast color stock, Kodak 5277, that, when
printed on a high-contrast title stock, would record a wider tonal
range than any traditional black-and-white film emulsion. Since we
had a limited budget and I was aiming for a deeper-than-usual depth
of field, shooting on 5277, a 320 ASA negative stock, would also be
an advantage.

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 Filmmakers often talk about the “key-to-fill ratio” (the contrast
between highlight and shadow). Some cinematographers establish a
ratio before they begin a project and take a range of meter readings
as they light each setup. Personally, I have little idea of what ratio I
was using on any shot of The Man Who Wasn’t There. I don’t work
like that. I take a meter reading of what I consider to be the primary
focus of a shot and judge my exposure from that point. I arrive at the
contrast by what I see through the camera by eye, sometimes using
my 1970s-era Polaroid camera to confirm my choice.
I used more direct lighting on The Man Who Wasn’t There than
on any film since 1984—my favorite lamps being the 650 and 1K
Fresnel. But there were occasions I used a larger lamp, such as a
6K HMI PAR, to create a shaft of sunlight combined with a small soft
bounce source close to an actor’s face.
Mixing noir, existential philosophy, quantum physics, and science
fiction, The Man Who Wasn’t There stars Billy Bob Thornton as the
barber Ed Crane. To obtain the $10,000 he needs to invest in a dry-
cleaning business, Ed decides to blackmail Big Dave (James
Gandolfini), for whom his wife, Doris (Frances McDormand), works
and with whom she’s having a barely concealed affair.
Having returned from a wedding party with his inebriated wife, Ed
recounts in voice-over the story of their relationship as he watches
her sleep—until he’s interrupted by a call from Big Dave. Ed leaves
Doris to meet Big Dave in the department store he manages. There
is a fight, and Ed kills Big Dave in self-defense. He drives home; for
a moment he watches the shadows of the trees blowing in the wind,
then enters the house and sits back down in the same spot he just
left. As he returns his gaze to the sleeping Doris, Ed completes the
story. From this simple scenario, Joel and Ethan conjure up a
remarkable combination of image, music, performance, and voice-
over. To me this is a brilliant piece of filmmaking, the closest to a
perfect sequence I’ve ever been a part of. Not because of my
cinematography, the lighting, or a particular image; the whole mood,
the melancholy sadness, it’s simply cinema. It makes you feel
something in a way that only cinema can.

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 In shooting this, and all of The Man Who Wasn’t There, I used
specifically chosen practical lamps or direct, hard lights to create the
effect of a streetlamp or other justifiable off-camera source. For Big
Dave’s murder, I needed a lamp that would cast a pool of light on the
desk while allowing me to leave James Gandolfini in a deep shadow
lit only by the bounce light coming off the paperwork in front of him.
As the scene progressed, the lamp, aided by a wire, would fall onto
the floor, from where it justified a wide cone of illumination that I
enhanced using an open-face fixture, in this case a 650-watt Fresnel
without the lens, off camera.

For Doris and Ed’s bedroom I wanted a specific weave for the
sheer curtains that would allow me to cast a pattern of light across
the characters as if from an outside streetlamp. The sheers were
dyed a dark gray so that they did not overexpose. To give the whole
mood of the scene a slightly eerie feeling, we further broke up the
light with the movement of foliage in the wind, a theme that we
maintained outside with Ed sitting in the car and when looking at the
house from outside.
 The Man Who Wasn’t There’s cinematography blended
expressionistic touches with naturalism, much as the film balances
lurid events with Billy Bob’s minimalistic, matter-of-fact performance.
It takes place in a recognizable everyday world filled with deep
pockets of darkness that threatens. Instead of light we used
shadows to limit what the audience could see in the midday
restaurant meeting between Ed and lawyer Freddy Riedenschneider
(Tony Shalhoub). We shot this at Musso & Frank, a popular and
long-lived Los Angeles restaurant that needed little dressing to fit the
period. My goal again was to light the entrance as if it were in
sunlight as a contrast to the dim interior. I didn’t want the audience to
struggle to see Billy Bob or Tony, so creating a contrast with the
doorway and allowing the characters’ lighting to fall off rapidly into
the darkness surrounding them created the feeling of a dimly lit
space without it actually being one.

I found it a rare occasion when Joel and Ethan would mention a

specific light they had in mind for a scene. It was during the last
preproduction meeting for The Hudsucker Proxy that Ethan
suggested we had talked through every aspect of the shoot except
lighting, and I had to tell him that we had been rigging the sets for
three weeks. It was a bit late to have that discussion. But here, for
the scene that takes place in Ed’s cell, and in which Freddy suggests
arguing Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in his defense,
they felt it was the right time for some theatrical lighting.
I took this to our production designer, Dennis Gassner, and asked
for a simple small window at the highest level of the cell wall
opposite the doorway. I knew this would be our major axis of
shooting and that the position of the window would rarely, if ever,
appear in frame. I then had a wooden template made for the bars of
the window, but instead of fixing it in line with the wall I allowed it to
angle down into the set. By positioning the bars at 90 degrees to my
light source, the shadow cast would remain more uniform than if the
lamp were at an angle to them. While experimenting with the PAR
lamp, our rigging gaffer, Chris Napolitano, and I came to the idea
that the light pattern should fit inside a circle rather than the more
naturally square shape of a window, to enforce the idea that Freddy
was performing to an audience.

He told them to look not at the facts, but at the meaning of

the facts. Then he said the facts had no meaning.
ED CRANE, IN THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE
 For a later scene, in which Ed walks down a corridor toward his
execution, we couldn’t afford to build a corridor with any detail, so I
suggested using overhead pendant lights. These would focus the
light on the center of the corridor and define the walls, which were no
more than painted flats, by the shaped pattern they cast. It made for
not only a striking image but a cheap one.
Joel and Ethan always imagined The Man Who Wasn’t There
ending with Ed strapped into an electric chair in an execution
chamber fashioned to resemble a pure, white void akin to the prison
set in George Lucas’s THX 1138 (though this was my reference, not
theirs). The set needed to be shadowless, and the walls blend in
together. The solution was simple: Stretch a heavy diffusion across
the ceiling and evenly light it from above. If the camera caught the
ceiling, either directly or in reflection, the diffusion would appear as a
flat white and blend with the walls. I find the result, as if Ed is
meeting his final moments surrounded by a sea of nothingness, a
striking effect in the midst of the film’s more shadowed noir
atmosphere.

The release of the film underscored the difficulties of exhibiting a

black-and-white movie in an era dominated by color. Show prints
struck for projection at major venues in Los Angeles and New York
were made on a black-and-white title stock, Kodak 5269, which had
the contrast and tonal range we wanted, though this had taken some
developing magic by Beverly Wood. Most of the general-release
prints were struck on a color print stock from a black-and-white
internegative.
We’d made a color print, but only to check the negative and with
no intention of it ever leaving the lab. But leave it did. After a
screening Joel fielded a call from a critic asking why they’d shot
twenty minutes of the film, a single reel, in color. What was the
significance? As usual, Joel and Ethan kept the answer to
themselves, even if they knew it.
We filmed The Man Who Wasn’t There in the late summer of
2000. In October of that year, Joel, Ethan, producer Jeremy Thomas,
and I went to Japan.
We were ostensibly there to promote O Brother, Where Art Thou?
(a film the locals found more than a little odd), but our main purpose
was to scout locations for the Coens’ next film, To the White Sea, an
adaptation of a 1993 novel by the poet and Deliverance author,
James Dickey. Set in Japan toward the end of World War II, it’s the
story of an American airman downed over Tokyo the night before the
firebombing of the city in March 1945. It becomes a journey into hell
as the airman attempts to find his way from Tokyo to Hokkaido and
on to the White Sea, off Japan’s north shore. As Joel will tell you, I
was passionate about this film like few others. It had been a great
scout, and it was good to spend time with Joel and Ethan
experiencing another country, but it was not to be. The film was
going to be beyond the available budget, and on September 10,
2001, Joel called with the bad news. It was a bitter disappointment,
but the following day it was one that paled into insignificance.

I would do what many another wouldn’t, and the best thing

was that I knew I would do it; there wasn’t any doubt.
JAMES DICKEY, TO THE WHITE SEA

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 19
MAKING A PLAN
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
I kept busy during the next few years shooting A Beautiful Mind
with Ron Howard, Levity with Ed Solomon, House of Sand and
Fog with Vadim Perelman, Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers
with Joel and Ethan, as well as The Village with M. Night Shyamalan
—a wide variety of projects that involved both location and stage
work. For the naturalistic House of Sand and Fog, designer Maia
Javan built a house onstage so that we could control the fog of the
title. Similarly, Dennis Gassner built a full-scale bridge onstage for
The Ladykillers, and we employed the same sprinkler system to
create its misty environment.
The village in the film of the same name was constructed on
location so that we could connect all our interiors with the exterior in
one composite set, whereas A Beautiful Mind shot on a variety of
locations, some of them the smallest and most restrictive to work in
that I have ever experienced. A Beautiful Mind shifts from realism to
a more noirish look in depicting John Nash’s developing
schizophrenia. Some moments recalled a scene in Norman
Jewison’s The Hurricane in which Rubin Carter is hallucinating,
referenced in the script as having “visions” of wild animals and so on.
Norman and I reduced the scene to Denzel alone in his cell, with no
wild animals and fantasy elements, simply cutting between opposing
close shots of him talking or boxing with himself. Similarly, Ron and I
decided if we shot Nash’s hallucinations as if they were real, the
audience would be drawn into his world and, through experiencing
these visions as he was, only slowly come to understand he was in
fact quite ill. Consequently, we drew back from using visual effects
and only turned to that more stylized approach when trying to
visualize Nash’s mathematical process.
Although these were a wide variety of projects with directors who
worked in very different ways, my method of drawing diagrams
stayed the same. There is rarely a location or a set for which I don’t
draw a plan.
Though I was wary about working in Hollywood, it did have
advantages. These included the opportunity to spend time talking
film with some of the greats of cinematography, Vilmos Zsigmond,
Owen Roizman, Haskell Wexler, and Conrad Hall, among others.
Despite their stature in Hollywood, each of them could be remarkably
modest about their own accomplishments. Conrad, for instance,
attributed the famous In Cold Blood scene, in which the shadow of
rain on a window forms “tears” on Robert Blake’s face, to chance
rather than design, and the bleached exteriors of Fat City to a
mistake in loading the wrong film stock.
Conrad ended his career shooting two films for Sam Mendes,
American Beauty and Road to Perdition. I’d talked to him about
these collaborations, the first films Sam had directed after breaking
through as a wunderkind of London theater. When Sam approached
me about his third film, I thought I knew what to expect. Conrad had
told me that Sam had a dedication to working from storyboards that
went beyond most other directors he had worked with. It had
frustrated him. He liked to improvise on the day, when the actors
were playing their parts on a set and were not just imaginary figures
within a pencil drawing.
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THE VILLAGE
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A BEAUTIFUL MIND
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 20
“WELCOME TO THE SUCK”
D.I. FITCH: What the fuck are you doing here?
ANTHONY SWOFFORD: Sir, I got lost on my way to college, sir!

JARHEAD
To my surprise, Sam Mendes’s approach to Jarhead would be
altogether different. He planned to make the film with the immediacy
of a documentary, shooting handheld and rehearsing on camera.
But, unlike a documentary, we could analyze what we had shot and
adjust for a take two, take three, or a good many more. We’d, of
course, still need to choose locations and design sets to fit both the
action and the overall look of the film, but the camera would be free
to move wherever the actors would take it as they explored the
scene. The more I thought about it, the more intrigued I became. I
hadn’t shot a primarily handheld film since Sid and Nancy. It had
made sense on that film, and it made sense now.

Sam wanted to capture in spirit Anthony Swofford’s memoir, the

story of one soldier’s experience serving in the Gulf War. Though
trained as a sniper, Swofford would never get a chance to fire his
rifle. For both him and his fellow soldiers, the enemy became their
sense of futility. Important for Sam was that the film reflected that
truth. It’s no accident that Swofford, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, can
be seen reading Albert Camus’s The Stranger.

After a while you could get used to anything.

ALBERT CAMUS, THE STRANGER

We used many references from actual events to set the look of

the film’s world and—with shades of Joel and Ethan stripping down
Fargo’s locations to their basics—leaned away from landscapes with
any dramatic features. Sam wanted it to look as if Jarhead’s
characters were operating in a void, placing them in a surreal empty
expanse where the horizon separating earth and sky became almost
invisible.
This only sounds simple. Sam also suggested a high-contrast
look that allowed viewers to feel the grain of the emulsion as they
watched the film. Consequently, his first instinct was to shoot on
Super 16 mm since it has significantly more grain than 35 mm, and
the smaller cameras would allow for easier handheld shooting.
Shooting on 16 mm would have been something of a throwback for
me, as I’d have been using the same sort of camera as in my
documentary days, one far lighter than the Arriflex 535 35 mm
camera that had become my first choice for features since its
introduction in 1990. Though a major advance on previous 35 mm
cameras, the 535 still weighed twenty-two pounds, twice the weight
of the 16 mm Aaton camera. A significant difference when you are
shooting handheld across a ten- or twelve-hour day.
Still, I was wary of the limitations of 16 mm’s smaller negative,
particularly when shooting at night or working under intense sunlight.
A 35 mm negative not only would be sharper but would retain more
highlight and shadow detail, which led me to consider the 35 mm
Moviecam SL (short for “SuperLight”), which I had often used for
handheld work, or the recently introduced Arricam Lite, which
weighed only eleven pounds. Though I still preferred working with
the heavier Arri 535B for some dialogue scenes and less active
handheld work (the camera’s weight added stability to the shot), for
most of the film the Arricam Lite or the Moviecam SL became our
camera of choice. However, when we had to run at a gallop to follow
the action, times when it became impossible to keep an eye to the
viewfinder, two other cameras, both workhorses introduced decades
earlier, came to our rescue.
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 Our second camera operator, Scott Sakamoto, favored an
Eyemo, a lightweight, non-sync 35 mm camera first sold in 1925 that
had been much used by newsreel cameramen, while I used an Arri
IIIC, an upgrade of the World War II–era Arri IIC. The first spinning-
mirror reflex camera, the IIC had been employed for projects as
diverse as Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story, Sergio Leone’s The
Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and for other shoots that didn’t require
sync sound. Like many Italian directors, Sergio Leone had little
interest in recording live sound.
For our running shots, Scott designed an old-style parallax sight
to help with framing on the Eyemo. When I could not keep my eye to
the eyepiece, I simply used the Arri IIIC as a point-and-shoot camera
and made a best guess at the frame. The camera motor serves as a
pistol grip, which makes it relatively comfortable to hold when
running. I remember asking Sam, on a shooting day that cost the
production upward of a hundred thousand dollars, what he thought
about Scott and me running around with such antiquated cameras.
He told me not to worry—if it was right for the film, that was all that
mattered.
With those cameras lined up we’d solved how we would be
operating, but that was only one problem. Creating Jarhead’s overall
look involved more film and lab-processing tests than I’d performed
for any previous film, including 1984. We needed to settle on a film
stock but also whether to alter the development of the negative,
which would have effects beyond the relative ASA, or speed, of the
film. Both overexposing and underexposing film can alter the grain
structure of the emulsion and, with it, the contrast and saturation.
 We also had the option of using a bleach bypass. The bypass
could now be applied to a film’s negative rather than the release
prints themselves, and as a percentage rather than by fully removing
the bleach bath, as we had done for 1984. Applying the process to
the negative ensured that prints of the film would look the way we
intended. Because only 1984’s print was affected, various full-color
versions of the film that looked nothing like what we intended
circulated for years on VHS and DVD. It was only a recent release
by Criterion that re-created the desaturated look of the original print.
A lot had changed in the nearly twenty years since we’d attempted to
replicate what Kazuo Miyagawa had done before us, and we now
had a number of variants of the process from which to choose.
The process of testing so many combinations on offer can
become utterly confusing. Sitting in the projection theater, James
and I would sift through the many subtle variations: “This was
underdeveloped a stop, but overexposed two stops. So, it’s actually
overexposed one stop… This one was overexposed one stop,
developed normally but with a bleach bypass of 50 percent… And
this is the same but now on the slower emulsion. How does that
compare with the 5218?”
It was hard to discern any difference between many of the test
images while sometimes we (I should say that James and I were
again working with the great Beverly Wood at Deluxe Laboratories)
felt we had pushed the image too far only to find we liked going to
such an extreme. We were looking for an image with a visible grain
structure and high contrast but nothing so severe it would restrict our
latitude in the DI process. Nor could it feel self-conscious, create a
layer between the audience and the story.
After a lot of experimentation, we settled on shooting on 5218, a
500 ASA tungsten-balanced film stock, with a one-rack skip-bleach
process (in essence leaving a controlled amount of silver in the
negative) combined with an overexposure of one and a third stops. It
is usually recommended that the negative be underexposed when
processing it with a skip bleach to allow for the extra silver left in the
emulsion, so we were, in effect, overexposing one and a half stops.
My average light for the red, green, and blue of the printing process
when shooting on 5218 film negative (my midlight) would usually
read as 25-32-27, but on Jarhead all three lights would deliberately
be ten or twelve points higher.

The DI, the digital intermediary, had become a common part of

filmmaking in the years since O Brother, Where Art Thou? At the
time, the studio standard for this was to work in 2K resolution, which
was faster and cheaper than operating in 4K and deemed “good
enough” for most movies. O Brother, Where Art Thou? had been
finished with a resolution of less than 2K, but my Jarhead tests
revealed that scanning at this level did not clearly resolve the fine
details within the emulsion, and the grain, which we had gone
through so much trouble to create, looked blurred. Adding grain
electronically looked exactly like what it was, electronic noise. In
short, using a higher resolution became something of an issue with
the studio until James and I screened a 2K and a 4K test side by
side in a theater. Then the results were impossible to ignore.
Jake gives a brilliant performance as Swofford, which is fortunate
because the film rarely strays from his side. Neither Sam nor I
wanted to leave the protagonist’s perspective and kept the camera
closely focused on the details of his experience. Some shots are
literally from the character’s point of view, such as when we strapped
a gas mask to an Arri IIIC, much as we had a football helmet for one
character’s point of view in the Coens’ film The Ladykillers.
 Even when not shot in first person, most scenes involved
following Swofford wherever he went, on his journey through basic
training to Kuwait.
However unlikely it sounds, given the harshness of the film’s
terrain, some of the trickiest moments came when shooting interiors
—particularly one sequence that takes place in the soldiers’ barracks
at night, which is gradually revealed as Swofford’s dream. I felt I had
the justification to make this scene graphic and disorientating without
stretching it beyond what an audience could believe to be real.

Imagining there were sodium vapor light sources outside the

windows, my gaffer, Chris Napolitano, and I chose to use Alpha 4K
and Arri X lights. These lamps are essentially bare bulbs with hard
reflectors behind them. Consequently, they cast sharp shadows. A
photometric chart shows each lamp produces a wide beam and, at
sixty feet, a light intensity of around thirty to thirty-two footcandles. At
500 ASA, that would translate to a lens aperture of around 4.0. But,
when the daylight blue of the HMI lamps is corrected with an 85 filter
on the camera and the lamp itself is warmed by the addition of a ¼
CTO or a ½ CTO gel (Color Temperature Orange), the result
becomes less than a 2.8 stop on the lens. In the case of Swofford’s
nightmare, I would have wanted the highlights to be a little over a
mid-exposure, so I would have been shooting at around a 2.2, which
is my preferred stop for most night work.
 Now, these figures can only be a rough estimate, as it is not
certain that a lamp will be exactly sixty feet from the subject. What’s
more, the age of a metal halide bulb will affect not only the bulb’s
output but also its color. Where possible, Chris would see to it that
the lamps were supplied by the rental house with new bulbs.

The lighting creates a slightly-off reality that only reveals itself as

a nightmare when Swofford begins vomiting sand, which is a CGI
effect. I asked Jake if he’d consider doing this himself, but he
declined!
 For some night shoots, inside a tent or when the platoon is
building a pyramid out of sandbags in the rain, we used very specific
lighting techniques, varying between a group of R40 bulbs set inside
aluminum cooking foil to 10K Fresnel lamps shooting directly at the
lens through the rain.
The deserts of Arizona and California, as well as the dry lakebed
of Laguna Salada in Mexico’s Sonora Desert, stood in as Kuwait for
our daytime exteriors and gave Chris Napolitano much less to do. I’d
asked him to become my gaffer on House of Sand and Fog, and he
was accustomed to me using large muslin reflectors when shooting
under harsh sunlight. But here we wanted the harshness, we wanted
backgrounds that were this close to looking blown out.
Similarly, Bruce Hamme had fewer tracking shots to work on, but
he proved an invaluable guide when I was operating handheld,
particularly when I had to walk backward or weave around the
soldiers as they trudged across the sand or through the infamous
“Highway of Death.”
As there was no dialogue in these scenes, I would often talk to
the actors during a shot, asking them to slow down or speed up
whether I was panning off them as if to their point of view or back to
them from the background. I’m happy I had someone making sure I
didn’t fall on my face and close at hand to take the camera from me
after a long series of takes.
For daytime shots of the oil fires we filmed outside El Centro,
California. Though the deep background remained in full sunlight,
Pablo Helman, our VFX supervisor from Industrial Light & Magic,
assured us he could deal with this in postproduction. Steve Cremin,
our effects coordinator, manufactured a column of smoke to block
out the sunlight over a wide area, set up jets of gasoline in the
middistance to mimic oil fires, and sprayed black vegetable oil from a
crane to envelop both us and the actors.
 This all proved very effective, as Scott Sakamoto, our assistants,
and I experienced firsthand. We draped ourselves and our cameras
in heavy-duty trash bags, leaving only an opening for what the
camera was seeing and for our focus pullers to reach the lens. But
we still had to contend with an oily mess when we changed
magazines for a second take, or a third, or a fourth—as well as when
we finally reached our hotel rooms.
 We originally planned to shoot night exteriors in the same spot,
but the idea of doing this on location made me uncomfortable.
Jarhead’s night scenes required a particular atmosphere, a sense
the soldiers had bivouacked in a hellhole, surrounded by burning oil
fires and enveloped in thick smoke. Working at night is always
slower and more expensive no matter what the scale of the film, and
smoke is hard to control on location, but not onstage.
CGI was still in its relatively early days, but I knew that Sam
would be working in post to multiply the extras and add aircraft in a
shot or two. So why could we not use a series of lighting rigs to
stand in for the oil fires and replace them later with elements we shot
separately? I needed a tall unit that would project light in 180
degrees, one that would flicker and glow in the smoky atmosphere
as if it were a large column of flame. There was no ready-made unit
that remotely resembled what I had in mind, so I decided it best if we
made our own using regular household R40 mushroom bulbs. I had
plenty of experience using multiples of these bulbs on batten strips
for the Queen Mary’s ballroom in Barton Fink, so I knew it would
work. As the production department was not so sure of the concept
or of moving the work to the studio, we set up a stage and shot some
tests.
For the shoot, Chris constructed a half circle of 6’ × 11’ wooden
battens, each of which held ten 175- or 500-watt R40 mushroom
globes. The bulbs were wired into eighteen separate circuits
connecting to a dimmer board, each of which would flicker in a
different pattern to mimic firelight. We wrapped the whole unit with a
½ CTO gel, keeping it away from the hot bulbs with chicken wire.
Secured together with pipe and mounted on a rolling stand, these
rigs could easily be moved around the stage and adjusted as the
scene evolved.
We shot on two adjoining stages at Universal Studios (the same
ones we had filled with mist for the bridge sequences in The
Ladykillers), and Dennis Gassner imported (literally) tons of sand to
create dunes. Taking care to leave a fire lane between it and the
sand dunes, we mounted a cyclorama directly against the stage wall,
painted as if the landscape continued into the distance. Steve
Cremin filled the stages with smoke, controlled the density with a
monitor, and I walked around with a handheld camera. It was almost
as simple as that.
 We drew visual inspiration for Jarhead from several sources,
including Werner Herzog’s 1992 documentary about the Kuwait oil
fires, Lessons of Darkness, though few sources were as influential
as the work of photographer Steve McCurry, particularly his quietly
devastating shot of a horse covered in oil. There’s an ironic beauty to
his image that only underscores its true horror but, like Jarhead, it
only scratches the surface of what is real.
Our own scene with an oil-covered horse underscored the shoot’s
difficulty. Though the horse had been trained and spent time on the
stage under the lights, we didn’t really know what would happen
once the camera began rolling. It’s a testament to Andy Harris that
he held focus as we shot with no rehearsal and with very little depth
of field on the lens. When I was shooting handheld and improvising,
Andy would always be as close to the lens as possible, just the two
feet of his focus whip away, with me talking him through the shot,
warning him what my next movement might be.
To create the feeling of the advancing dawn, Chris and I designed
a pattern of 164 Spacelights softened with silk skirts. Using solids
(black duvetyn), both underneath each lamp and to the sides of the
skirts, we directed the light toward the center of the stage. From any
point on the stage only the furthest lamps could be seen clearly,
while those directly above appeared as if totally blacked out. We
gelled the two outside rows of lamps with a ½ CTB filter (a blue gel
the opposite of a CTO) and the inner rows with a ¼ CTB to contrast
with the warmth of the light from our fake oil fires.
The nights we did shoot in the desert confirmed the wisdom of
creating these complicated scenes on a stage. Our location scouts
found the perfect spot for the film’s final desert scenes within the
Glamis Dunes, had it not been for the predicted nightmare of moving
our equipment a half mile from the nearest road through deep, soft
sand at night. Scouting one weekend, I found an area that provided
an equivalent look parallel to a road, so I took some photographs to
pitch this alternate option to Sam. It’s always good to have an
alternative when you want to reject a plan that a director is
comfortable with.
 As with the stage interiors, to mimic the light from distant oil fires,
I intended to use multiple lighting units to create a seemingly soft
source but on a much larger scale. Here, it was a pattern of ten or
twelve Maxi Brutes, set to flicker through a dimmer and fronted with
the warmth of a large sheet of ½ CTO. Our always innovative key
grip, Mitch Lillian, suggested we mount our three rigs—each of which
contained a similar array of Maxi Brutes—on flatbed trailers, making
them easy to move from scene to scene using farm tractors.
 As prepared as we were, we couldn’t entirely plan for the forty
mph winds that arrived the first night of the shoot on this location,
whipping up the sand, stinging our eyes, and ripping apart our gel
frames. Mitch and his team persevered, as always, and when we
eventually managed to roll film, our efforts proved to be worth the
trouble. The wind-blown sand gave our establishing shots an eerie
feeling that seemed in unison with the flickering of the lights. It was
another happy accident.
The end-of-conflict celebration involved a different location and a
total of seventy-two 12-Light Maxi Brutes. These were mounted on a
190-foot platform to softly wash the central action taking place some
700 feet away. A separate line of six 12-Light Maxis side-light
Swofford and Troy as they crest the ridge above the celebration and
the light from four quarter Dino lights rakes the far background as if
coming from a distant oil fire. Shades of the KKK rally on a larger
scale.
Making a war film with so little war was always a gamble.
Jarhead, perhaps predictably, puzzled some, though I thought the
characters’ remove from the action was the point of the story. I was
more confused when I talked to fellow cinematographers and
journalists who wanted an answer to the same questions: How long
did we shoot in Kuwait? What was it like working under the oil fires?

As a lifelong admirer of Westerns, particularly the revisionist

Westerns of Sam Peckinpah, I couldn’t believe my luck to have a
chance to shoot a Western myself, particularly one that was in the
spirit of Peckinpah’s work in many aspects.

Killing a man isn’t clean and quick and simple. It’s bloody
and awful. And maybe if enough people come to realize that
shooting somebody isn’t just fun and games, maybe we’ll
get somewhere.
SAM PECKINPAH

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 21
THE PREACHER’S SON
Jesse James is like a Leonard Cohen song.
ANDREW DOMINIK
Every director takes a different approach to prepare a shoot,
but Andrew Dominik’s was detailed in the extreme. For most films
the production designer will create what’s called a “mood board” that
has, among other elements, a color scheme spanning the length of
the film. I find these can be useful, but they don’t always reflect the
lighting I might plan for a scene or the way that might affect the
chosen colors. But when mood boards are made with images rather
than paintings or color swatches, they can give a more accurate
sense of how the movie should feel. For The Assassination of Jesse
James by the Coward Robert Ford, Andrew, production designer
Richard Hoover, and I had created a mood board on steroids. By the
time we began shooting, the entire corridor of our film’s production
office had been lined with film stills, vintage photos, magazine
clippings, and Andrew’s own Polaroids—anything we all felt could
reflect the look and feel of the movie.
One image in particular, a photo Andrew had taken of a tree that
become faded and browned at the edges, proved especially
influential, as did a portrait of the real Jesse James in the morgue. To
accompany the lyrical narration taken from Ron Hansen’s beautiful
novel and narrated by Hugh Ross (an assistant editor who’d
provided a temp track Andrew liked so well he kept it in the film), we
wanted to create similar images that recalled early photography and
appeared naturally antiquated, with edges that looked like they’d
been distorted by the lens rather than created artificially.
 To achieve the vignetting optically, I returned to a technique I’d
tried out on a short film in 1981, Towers of Babel, which required
shots as if through the peephole of an apartment door. My low-tech
solution had been to place an element from a still’s lens in front of
the 50 mm lens of my 35 mm film camera, so I thought to try
something similar for Jesse James. I worked, as usual, with the Otto
Nemenz rental house, who took apart an old wide-angle lens for the
experiment. We shot some tests, and they turned out even better
than I’d imagined. It appeared as if the image was not just going soft
but fracturing around the outside of the frame, producing some lovely
and strange color banding in the process—“lens aberration,” an
effect then impossible to achieve digitally. Otto’s completed three
different focal length lenses, and, despite some studio pushback, the
images shot on these made it into the final film, though both Andrew
and I would later wish we’d used them more (the studio had been
skeptical of the effect and pressured us to drop it). Since Jesse
James, Otto Nemenz has rented out these same three lenses as
“Deakinizers.”
Beyond these lens effects, finding the overall look of the film
required more experimentation. Andrew was looking for a
desaturated but high-contrast image, one in which the shadows
would have a slightly reddish tint. We talked about McCabe & Mrs.
Miller and mulled over the idea of combining a preflash of the
negative with a bleach bypass process. While I felt this look would
suit the film, I remembered what a laborious process it had been for
Steve Blakely, my lab timer at DuArt, to preflash twenty-eight
thousand feet of negative for the opening scenes of A Beautiful Mind
using an optical printer. For that film, we had flashed the negative—
deliberately exposing the emulsion to a low level of light as if fogging
it—using a warm light to color the shadow areas of the picture, which
was exactly what we were looking for on Jesse James. But rather
than DuArt and Steve, we’d be using a Canadian lab I’d never
worked with before, and instead of limiting the preflashing to a single
section of the film, we’d need to flash the entire negative. This felt
like a recipe for disaster. So, James and I did some more tests.
Through a combination of a photochemical bleach bypass and a
subtle digital manipulation of the shadow areas within the image, we
achieved a result that Andrew found acceptable, and, important, fit
within our budget.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
was a rewarding shoot, but also a long and exhausting one that
overlapped with the complicated postproduction of Jarhead. James
had arranged that the production would work only five-day weeks at
the beginning of the schedule, rather than alternating with six, so I
could fly to LA from our Edmonton base and continue work on
Jarhead at the weekends. During the week James would sit with the
timer to ensure what I wanted was applied and helped with the
postproduction process in my absence. This sometimes required her
to fly from LA to Montreal (where timing work on Jarhead’s release
print was being done), to Calgary, or wherever in Canada we were
shooting Jesse James. It was a taxing month and a half for both of
us.
We began shooting in August 2005 to capture a summertime look
for our locations outside of Calgary before traveling to Edmonton for
a variety of interior and exterior scenes shot at Fort Edmonton Park.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’s
most complex sequence, the train robbery, appears early in the film.
Andrew, producer David Valdes, and I spent a long time scouting
various locations in Canada before settling on three major bases of
operation, which seemed to offer us good possibilities for each
sequence in the film. Fort Edmonton Park wasn’t our first choice for
the train robbery, however.
Fort Edmonton has a train track, but one with a narrow gauge. It
also has period coaches, but only a small train to pull them. David
investigated bringing in a larger train from elsewhere, as had been
done on other locations for films such as O Brother, Where Art
Thou?, but the narrow gauge of the track made this unworkable. We
could only use a larger engine at a completely different location,
which would require David and our first assistant director, Scott
Robertson, to create a new schedule and for the studio to place
more money in the budget. Reluctantly, Andrew agreed to the shoot
being in Edmonton with what he called the “toy train” and on the one
short section of the track that had a decent approach set between
tall trees.
 Thankfully, the James Gang performed the Blue Cut robbery at
night, which would help obscure the size of the train as well as the
limits of the location. And when Andrew said he wanted the scene to
feel dark, he really did mean dark. I’ve had the experience of working
with a director who agreed with me that a conversation could take
place in silhouette, then having him, when viewing dailies the next
day, question why the faces of the actors were in shadow. One
director’s dark is, to some cinematographers, overlighting, so it’s
good to establish which is which before you shoot the scene. To
Andrew, black is indeed black.
Lighting the sequence involved only one traditional lamp. The
light that provides the main source for the exterior shots took the
place of a dim, kerosene-fueled headlight that lit the train track from
on top of the boiler. To make Andrew’s “toy train” appear more
substantial I needed this to be the most striking element in the shot,
something that would itself become a presence and take the
viewer’s eye away from our diminutive prop. A single tungsten 5K
PAR was that light. We also attached a series of dimmed 500-watt
bulbs between the front wheels of the train, to enhance the fire from
the boiler that naturally illuminated the area below the engine, and
which would be especially useful when it let off steam, but the 5K
PAR lit the shot.
I had asked our Canadian gaffer, Martin Keough, to provide two
small crane arms with two 5K Fresnel lamps in the bucket of each. I
intended to cross-light the trees directly in front of where Jesse stood
on the railway sleepers to flag down the train, thinking it important
that the audience see some texture in the surroundings. However, on
the night of the shoot the wind dropped off as we readied to film.
That left some atmospheric fog we had spread lightly across the
frame lying in a smooth pattern just above the track and directly in
the path of the 5K PAR as the train headed toward the camera. The
oncoming light was blooming in this haze to reveal the surrounding
trees, the train tracks, the sleepers blocking the line, and, finally,
Jesse James (Brad Pitt). By hooking up the 5K PAR to a dimmer, I
could have the lamp at full intensity as the train first appeared
through the trees, then progressively dim it down, so as not to flare
the lens, as it approached the camera. Lens flare is a pet peeve of
mine. Though I know some cinematographers and directors use it
intentionally for effect, I’ve never been one of them. The Deakinizers
being an exception, I rarely like any effect that draws the viewer’s
attention to the surface of the image rather than immersing them
within it.
Realizing that any texture added to the trees was unnecessary, I
asked Marty to turn off the other lamps. Then, on second thought, I
suggested he pan the lamps away from the shot and toward our
catering tent. If production questioned why we had rented the two
cranes and the lights, we could at least say they were work lights.
 We had five nights to shoot the entire sequence of the Blue Cut
robbery, which felt sufficient given the long scene inside the mail car
could be blacked out and partly shot during daylight hours. There
were two shots that seemed particularly difficult to figure out how to
pull off but, ultimately, required a little less thought.
The first was a shot of the train reaching the camera, which was
then carried along with it as though fixed to the front. We tested
several complicated options, including setting a track on a flat car
with a jib arm, before it turned dark enough to shoot. But, having
confidence in none of them, I suggested we ditch them all and pack
the front of the flat car with polystyrene. I would handhold the
camera on a square of packaging foam. To light the engine, I had
Marty simply handhold a 4’ × 4’ sheet of polystyrene to catch some
bounce from the 5K and light the face of the engine.
We’d solved one potentially tricky situation, but I remained
concerned about some shots we were planning of the gang hiding in
the trees as the train passed by. They couldn’t be lit by their lanterns
because they had doused these as the train approached, and I had
no intention of bringing in a “moonlight” when I had not used it
anywhere else in the sequence. When I noticed how the light from
our train would cast interesting shadows through the trees in front of
it, I decided to use that as the sole source to light the gang. We’d
hard-mounted one 5K PAR lamp to the train, and we would still need
this lamp for future shots, but fortunately Marty was carrying a spare.
He and Rick Schmidt, our key grip, suggested we use the flatbed
and mount our spare on that. This would not only allow us to pan the
lamp more easily than the one on the train, but it would be quicker to
reset between takes. In reality, the light on the front of the train would
never reach so far to the side of the track, but as it sweeps across
the gang’s masked faces the train takes on a mythical presence,
even as it is entirely out of shot. I’ve never heard a viewer question
the authenticity of that effect.
We planned to shoot long Steadicam shots of Frank James (Sam
Shepard) moving down the railway carriages, and there would be no
place to hide any additional lighting. What appeared in frame would
be the only light source. As always, I worked closely with the art
department to choose the lamps affixed to the wall or hung above
the center aisle of the carriage and boxcar. Each of the wicks or gas
mantles within the globes or glass chimneys was swapped out for a
250-watt bulb and wired back to a dimmer board. Inside the shallow
conical shades of the hanging practical lights, we mounted an
additional four 100-watt bulbs that would project a warm, soft light
across the characters below without diluting the shadows to the
sides. All the globes were dimmed to between 25 and 40 percent of
full intensity to warm their color.

Marty and his electric crew used two miles of cable to rig the train
and ensure that both the Steadicam shot that follows Frank down the
aisle of the carriage and the intense sequence inside the boxcar
could be lit entirely by the light from the practical sources that appear
in shot. Other than bringing in a small gold stipple reflector to catch
some of that light and bounce it into a character’s eyes for a close
shot, we used no additional lighting.
Even without the long hours and travel, Jesse James would have
been a complex job. Having completed our work in Edmonton, we
moved back to Calgary, to a remote location we had scouted on
horseback (my first and last time on a horse) and where the art
department had built the Jameses’ “house on the hill,” in which Bob
Ford would shoot the aging outlaw, as well as a substantial part of
the town of St. Joseph sitting in the valley below.
 For all the interior scenes, in the kitchen, the bedrooms, and the
front room in which Jesse is shot, we worked around the existing
daylight. Sometimes we made use of sunlight to create the shot of
Jesse in the rocking chair or of Bob lying on Jesse’s bed, while at
other times we added soft light from outside by bouncing 12K HMIs
off 12’ × 12’ muslin reflectors. Occasionally, we added a light
diffusion to a window to “blow out” the exterior when the daylight had
faded and we needed to continue shooting. One morning we added
a Hampshire Frost filter to a window to hide the fact that it had
snowed overnight, but luckily, the snow melted quickly, and it was
necessary for only one or two shots.
As with most of the film, the key images were imagined in prep,
but we discovered many others as we rehearsed and shot. The
montage of Bob pretending he is Jesse was created on the day with
Casey Affleck finding things his character might do and taking
advantage of the natural daylight. But the death of Jesse James was
laid out in detail beforehand. Andrew intended the scene to be like a
performance in which each character knows his preordained role.
Specific shots were chosen to enhance this effect: Jesse
deliberately tracing the words in the newspaper with his finger,
looking at his daughter playing outside and the single shoe that she
lost earlier, his face distorted by the window glass, setting his guns
down on the couch in the sunlight, and finally placing the chair to
stand on as if he were about to hang himself. When Jesse reaches
up to dust the picture, he sees Bob Ford raise his gun in the
reflection. The intimate point of view of Bob was a shot found on the
day and chosen because it reinforces the idea that Jesse is complicit
in his own death. But when he falls from the chair, the lens distortion
removes the viewer from the scene so that it becomes as if Jesse’s
death is taking place on a stage, as if we are viewing it from the
audience’s point of view.
As we had initially intended for all our built sets, the interior of the
“house on the hill” combined with the exterior to create a composite
set. Harbison Farm proved to be an exception as we had chosen a
location that was perfect as an exterior; but because of the
marshland around it and its distance from our production base in
Calgary, it proved impractical for the interior scenes. Besides, having
to visit the location on different occasions for the looks of summer
and winter, and to shoot both exteriors and interiors on the same set
with all the equipment and lighting involved, would limit our flexibility.
Our compromise, though not really a compromise at all, was to shoot
the interiors on a set built inside a warehouse, which would not only
be more accessible but give us some sorely needed weather cover.
This decision would prove fortuitous when many days of heavy rain
made the location inaccessible.
Windows and reflections figure prominently in Jesse James, and
in prep we made a key decision to use handmade period glass. Its
wavy imperfections lend a poetic quality to some images, like a
poignant shot of Casey as Robert Ford peering at Jesse. But as
interested as I was in shooting through the glass, the night work also
drew me to it. Projecting light through handmade glass creates a
ripple effect that becomes more pronounced the sharper the light
source and the further away it is.
For night interiors I used 1K Fresnel lamps without a lens, which
in essence become bare bulbs against a hard reflector. In Jesse
James, there are two lamps, both cooled with a half-blue gel, playing
in any one shot: one to create the pattern on the background wall
and another for the character light (with a third lamp used
occasionally to give a little brighter edge to the characters in wide
shots). When lighting with direct sources like this I sometimes use a
2’ × 2’ polystyrene or loose muslin bounce to bring a little soft light
into a face. On a wider shot, when the reflection off the white board
is insufficient, I might use one covered in silver stipple or,
alternatively, add a small lamp such as a 100-watt Fresnel we call an
“Inky.” But I try as much as possible to limit myself to the existing
light.
 In late October we traveled to Winnipeg, which would stand in for
our Kansas City exteriors, St. Joseph, a Baltimore street, and the
Manhattan Theatre in which Bob and his brother, Charley, reenact
the killing of Jesse James for a New York audience. Finally, we
returned to Calgary to shoot our locations in the snow.
If the schedule had not already been a challenge for our producer,
David Valdes, the final winter sequences were. He had overseen the
art department construction of a town in the Rockies, which stood in
for the Colorado mining town of Creed where Bob met his death, on
a site fifty miles outside Calgary via a winding mountain road.
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 During the shoot Andrew was under a good deal of pressure from
the studio to shorten what was a long script, but although he was
forced by our schedule to cut a few small scenes before we shot
them, there were a great many we completed but that are not in the
final cut of the film. Perhaps the most difficult for everyone involved
were those shot in the town built in the Rockies. But any
compromise, such as shooting an interior onstage instead of on
location or the “toy train,” only seemed to further Andrew’s belief that
the production was not on his side.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. During our final
days in Canada, David and the art department arranged that the set
of Ed Miller’s shack be brought into a warehouse overnight when the
location it was built on became snowed in. We shot against an
exterior made of painted backings, which were still wet as the
camera rolled, but we salvaged the scene. And when we couldn’t
shoot Ed Miller’s death in Canada, as that location was also snowed
in, David arranged to transfer what was one of the most difficult night
scenes to the hills north of LA. There were many compromises, but
was the audience aware of them?
We completed shooting The Assassination of Jesse James by the
Coward Robert Ford in December 2005, but it would not receive a
release until September 2007, a year after originally scheduled.
James and I saw a first cut of the film with Andrew, and we both
loved it. But by this time there was plenty of animosity between
Andrew and the studio. His cut, which was initially some three and a
half hours long, was deemed unacceptable. It was only Brad Pitt’s
support that allowed Andrew to complete the film with a much shorter
cut. James and I feel the longer version, which included many more
scenes after Ford kills James, was better. But we are a little biased.
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 22
SIGNS AND WONDERS
Chigurh shot him in the face. Everything that Wells had
ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the
wall behind him.
CORMAC McCARTHY, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
Joel and Ethan Coen signed on to adapt Cormac McCarthy’s
2005 novel, No Country for Old Men, not long after its publication,
seemingly with no real intent to direct the film themselves. I wouldn’t
for a moment say I’m responsible for them changing their minds, but
I’d loved the book and was passionate in encouraging them to take it
on themselves. I knew they could capture the novel’s melancholy,
metaphysical elements and make it their own.
We all understood No Country for Old Men would be less stylized
than the Coens’ previous work when preparing to shoot the film,
even if we never talked about it explicitly. Where the camera had
been almost a character in films like Barton Fink and The Hudsucker
Proxy, or more observational on Fargo, on No Country for Old Men it
would be more classical. Though neither Joel nor Ethan referenced
Robert Bresson or Jean-Pierre Melville, it was the matter-of-fact
minimalism of those two masters that came to my mind.
“Understated” probably best describes our approach. The Texas
landscape is part of the story, and the characters are part of that
landscape, their actions shaped by it. But the bulk of the story takes
place in a succession of motels and gas stations, a border crossing
and a bus depot, a diner and a trailer park, all evocatively described
in Cormac’s book. We created the look of the film through the choice
of all these individual locations, putting them and the film together,
piece by piece.
None of those pieces would prove trickier than the scene in which
Moss (Josh Brolin) returns at night to the desolate Texas basin
where he previously discovered the aftermath of the aborted drug
deal. We chose the location for the daytime view it offered from the
bluff and the terrain of the basin below. In that terrain, Joel and
Ethan wanted a small hill on which Moss could park his truck above
a broad, sloping plain where the main action could take place. The
script called for this to lead down to a river, flowing fast enough to
sweep away a grown man, but as no single location offered
everything in the same place, we filmed the river scenes separately.
The one location fulfilled three wishes out of four, and my task was to
figure out how to light such a large space at night.
I couldn’t get away with lighting only the characters and letting the
background fall into complete blackness. What’s more, the scene
would unfold as dawn broke, and the light would need to reflect this
as the action progressed. As there was no other source, it was a
given that there would have to be a “moonlight,” but creating it would
be a challenge. The bluff from which Moss first overlooks the trucks
in the basin below offered the best option for a light source, and I
made detailed measurements of the distances involved.
 Chris Napolitano and I initially considered using multiple 12K HMI
lamps, supported by a tiered scaffold rig, but this would be time-
consuming to erect and ultimately more expensive than our chosen
alternative. I turned again to Musco lamps, the stadium lighting I’d
first used to illuminate an expansive area in Thunderheart and, more
recently, a tank battle in Courage Under Fire, though neither location
was on this scale. We’d need three. (Like I said, it took a lot of power
to create the illusion of faint moonlight, especially over such a wide
area.) It wouldn’t be cheap—though I had wanted three we could
afford only two—and the summer nights were short.
It would also require some math and another look at the
photometric chart for the Musco light. Working from the formula that
on 100 ASA stock and with 100 footcandles the lens opening would
be 2.8, I knew that at 500 ASA I would require a minimum of 9 fc to
shoot in any direction with a shooting stop of plus or minus 2.0. Of
course, this kind of calculation is hardly necessary with a digital
camera that can be rated at 5,000 ASA or more, but we shot No
Country on film in 2006.
Luckily for me, at the end of 2005 Arri released their first set of
Master Prime lenses. As always with new equipment, James and I
tested the Master Primes in the most challenging situation we could
imagine: looking directly at the beam of a flashlight in a black space.
The best lens will flare in that kind of situation, but the Master Primes
were as clean as any lens I had seen. This would be a considerable
advantage when shooting toward a headlight or a bright practical as I
like to do. And with an aperture of 1.3 they had arrived just in time.
Many lenses are marketed as being fast, but when put to the test,
they reveal this as only wishful thinking. However, the Master Primes
were a true 1.3. Only a few sets of these lenses in a few focal
lengths had been made available when we shot No Country for Old
Men, but I was able to obtain one. The difference between the lens
openings may not seem significant on paper, but 1.3 is a full stop
faster than a 2.0. At a lens aperture of 1.3, double the light reaches
the emulsion and dramatically alters what the camera can or cannot
capture—especially when your light source is more than 1,700 feet
away from your subject!
 My Gossen Lunasix light meter can record in both a reflected and
an incident mode, meaning it’s good for measuring both ambient
light and specific surfaces. The meter has an extremely accurate
readout in low light, so it was especially useful in this situation,
working at the edge of what the film emulsion could record. Though
to see the needle hardly move on my prelight night did not fill me
with confidence. Having been able to afford only two units, Chris and
I ditched the idea of diffusing the Muscos’ lower lamps, as Billy and I
had done so successfully on Thunderheart, and we concentrated on
working an even spread across the width of the basin, leaving the
hillsides to the left and right of the action to fall off into blackness. It
was lucky we had a prelight a few days in advance of our shoot as it
left time for our rigging crew to bring in two 12K HMIs and two 6K
HMI PAR lamps to lift the areas the two Muscos couldn’t reach. I
sorely missed that third Musco light.
As I do when scouting any location, I noted the path of the sun
and the direction in which dawn would break. When Moss looks back
toward his truck and sees he has company, I felt it would be more
threatening to play his point of view in silhouette, and I asked that
this be considered as we laid out the scene on the location.
Naturally, we would not have time to shoot all our shots during the
first glimmers of dawn, so I would have to come up with an artificial
equivalent. We would need a large lighting setup to create what
appears as a very dim effect. I had suggested to Chris that we
bounce three or four 12K HMIs behind the hill, but without adding
smoke or dust into the air, little light registered. It’s always time-
consuming to work with smoke and difficult to control it in an open,
windy location, so we turned to a direct source. Behind the ridge
Chris lined up seven 12K HMIs and pointed them directly at the sky
above the camera. Using a long strip of black duvetyn to cut the light
off the ridge, we simply illuminated particles of dust that were
naturally floating in the air, silhouetting the rise and Moss’s pickup
truck without the need to add more dust or smoke into the
atmosphere.
 The scene’s sunrise is a cheat in more ways than the lighting. By
establishing a false dawn with our array of 12Ks, I could shoot the
sequence that follows, the chase to the river and the confrontation
with the dog, in the natural light of magic hour. As best we could, we
shot toward the dawn or cheated the light by shooting Josh running
at dusk. This worked well, but as luck would have it, for the one
angle shooting toward my artificial source, as the first glimmers of
the true dawn appeared, the sky was overcast. Those seven 12Ks
illuminated the air, but the effect could be seen in front of the clouds!
Another compromise, though I seem to be the only one concerned
by the problem.
As Moss is chased by the dog down the river, we (and by “we,” I
am including our second unit cinematographer, Paul Elliott) shot
during both dawn and dusk, shooting only one or two setups at the
beginning or end of night work or before another day. I scouted each
point on the river, marking down the best time to shoot, always trying
to look toward the light, whether that be the true dawn or dusk.
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 For the film’s opening images of the West Texas countryside,
Andy Harris and I traveled to Marfa during preproduction to film
landscapes at sunrise and sunset. Joel and Ethan told me what they
wanted, specifically the feel of the landscape coming alive with the
rise of the sun, and I returned with just one or two shots more than
those that made it into the final film. The brothers would rarely shoot
a shot that was not going to make it into the final cut, so I was not
going to behave any differently.
The sequence ends with a shot of a windmill set against an empty
landscape of hard caliche, as described so vividly in Cormac
McCarthy’s novel. This montage would be the only time the film
would reflect the landscape in a light that was anything other than
brutal. From Marfa to the end of the film, we deliberately shot under
a high overhead sun, in light that might usually be called ugly.
Even more than usual when working with Joel and Ethan, location
scouts proved important. In Texas we scouted San Antonio and
Eagle Pass looking for our streets and border crossing but settled on
shooting the bulk of production in New Mexico. As Denis Villeneuve
and I were to be reminded while shooting Sicario, it was impossible
to shoot a border crossing in the real location. The action was just
too complex and would take too much time. So, when production
designer Jess Gonchor suggested constructing a border post on a
freeway overpass, the city of Las Vegas, New Mexico, became our
version of Eagle Pass.
We used the historic Plaza Hotel for some interiors and its
exterior, as well as four square blocks of the downtown, which we lit
to shoot dozens of shots on a short schedule. As intricate as this
was, Joel, Ethan, and I had walked the course together, so I knew
every angle and could be very specific with how I would light each
one. The nighttime streets of Las Vegas offered little in the way of
existing lighting, so I made detailed plans for rigging our own lamps
on rooftops, cherry pickers, and building facades, and above the few
existing streetlights. I did this well in advance of our shooting
schedule so that the location department could obtain permits from
the city and allow Chris and his crew eight days to put everything in
place.
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 On shoot days we did not use a central dimmer board to control
each lamp remotely, as you might these days, but relied on individual
hand dimmers dropped to the ground from each lighting position. We
used tungsten-balanced lamps and gelled them with a mixture of ½
CTO and 013 straw filters to give the street lighting a warm, sodium
tint. Most carried a brushed-silk diffusion on the barn doors as well
as the gel. Normally the heat from a Fresnel lamp might burn out a
gel pack such as this, but we kept the lamps dimmed down and the
nights were quite cold, so this never became a problem. Though
Chris did have the rigging crew change the gels every day just in
case the color had shifted due to the heat.
The lighting for the Las Vegas streets, the border crossing Jess
constructed on the overpass, the trailer park, and the cheap motels
would be in stark contrast with the unforgiving sunlight of the daytime
scenes. We would light with a wide variety of brightly colored
fluorescent tubes, ultrawarm practical bulbs, or streetlights of a
mercury cyan or a sodium orange.

We introduced the same threatening sodium orange of the street

into the set for the hotel room in which Moss is found hiding out,
combining it with the yellow of a shaded practical lamp. And for the
exterior of the El Paso motel, in which Moss meets his end, we used
a wash of cold blue-green light to contrast with warm household
bulbs and the red of the police warning lights.

As with Fargo and other Coen brothers movies, some striking

shots arose by chance. The black scuff marks that pattern the floor
of the deputy’s office as he is strangled by Anton Chigurh (Javier
Bardem) were a product of the actor’s rubber footwear and the
number of takes that we had to shoot. We completed our tighter
coverage first and, to maintain continuity, intended to wipe off the
floor for the overhead shots. That was until we saw just how clearly
the black scuff marks expressed the brutality of the fight.
 Later in the story, the script describes Chigurh looking at his own
ghostly reflection in the gray of a TV screen in Moss’s trailer, and we
added the corresponding image of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee
Jones) in his cowboy hat doing the same. This shot hadn’t originally
been planned, but the two characters sitting in the same place,
drinking from the same glass of milk, and staring into their own
abstractions united them in some strange metaphysical way.
 After we filmed the scene in which Sheriff Tom Bell meets the
sheriff of El Paso (Rodger Boyce) at a diner, we went outside to
shoot them exchanging some final words before going their separate
ways. We had an early call the next day and, on top of that, there
was the added time pressure of an approaching thunderstorm. To
simplify what had been storyboarded as five separate shots, I
suggested we play the exchange in silhouette against the rear wall of
the restaurant. Joel and Ethan agreed that the scene could work that
way, provided we also finish with a close-up of Tommy Lee once he
is inside the car. In jest, Joel insisted I be the one to describe the
lack of coverage to Tommy Lee and that he would only be seen in
silhouette. (He was fine with it.)

From the coffee shop Ed Tom returns to the motel and the scene
of Moss’s death. This is one of my favorite moments, the only time in
the film when Ed Tom and Chigurh are in the same scene. But are
they? The sheriff can sense Chigurh is in the room, and we see him
illuminated by the light kicking off the brass of the empty door lock.
But is he really there? Not when Ed Tom enters. I had two lucky
breaks shooting this scene. First, for the effect of the light bouncing
off the brass, Chris and I found that by offsetting the lens of a 150-
watt Dedo, its light formed an arcing beam with refracted colors
along its edge. Secondly, our storyboard showed Ed Tom standing in
the doorway with his shadow cast on the wall by the headlight of his
truck. I set a small Fresnel lamp to create a defined shadow, but
something bothered me. Though striking, the shot felt more like one
from The Searchers than No Country, and it was only when I placed
a second lamp alongside the first—a vehicle has two headlights, of
course—that I saw the strength of something I usually go to great
lengths to avoid: a double shadow.

No Country for Old Men is remembered as a violence-filled film.

That’s true to some extent, but the most disturbing violence occurs
off-screen. When Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) returns home from
her husband’s funeral, she notices the wind blowing the sheers of an
open window and knows then she will find Chigurh. Once again, fate
and a coin toss become intertwined. To emphasize that key action
and to contrast with where Javier is sitting in the shadows, I
projected a fully spotted 12K onto the foreground using the window
frame as the cut. Otherwise, the scene is played in simple wide
shots in undramatic light. We leave the scene before knowing its
outcome. Only when Chigurh appears on the porch outside to
nonchalantly look down at the soles of his shoes do we know for
certain that Carla Jean is dead. It shows the mastery Joel and Ethan
have over the medium that this played in a wide shot of a house that
could be anyone’s home on anyone’s street. The scene is all the
more chilling because of the violence we have seen and are about to
see. Here it takes place in private.

No Country for Old Men offered plenty of challenging locations to

light and wonderful landscapes to point the camera at, but my
favorite scene is between two aging men in a dusty cat-filled cabin
set out on that hard caliche. Yes, it took a lot of effort for Jess
Gonchor to build the cabin in the middle of nowhere—all that existed
was a windmill and plenty of dirt, and it took multiple HMI lamps and
large bounce sources to balance the interior with the extreme
brightness of the exterior. But the scene is pure magic. When you
have actors as good as Tommy Lee Jones and Barry Corbin, it is
sometimes hard to remember that you are on a set and shooting a
performance, an actor saying lines. Did the setting help those
incredible performances? Would it have been the same had the set
been on a stage and the exterior nothing but a video projection?
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 The script called for visuals to accompany Tommy Lee’s final
monologue in the film, images of his character, Ed Tom Bell, as a
younger man on a horse accompanying his father, who’s holding a
flame, as they ride through a snowy night. We talked about staging
the scene as if it took place in a kind of limbo, but we were struggling
to find a location in which to do it, or for the money to shoot it.
Meanwhile, we visited dozens of rural homesteads looking for our
image of Ed Tom’s kitchen until we found a perfect match. (I often
wonder what the property owner makes of us when we leave
shaking our heads. Do they take it personally?) We walked into one
ranch house that we warmed to immediately, despite its distance
from our production base. The two wizened trees outside the kitchen
window seemed to reflect the character of Sheriff Ed Tom perfectly.
Tommy Lee’s performance, the expression on his face, the sense of
finality conveyed by his words, made illustrating the story he told feel
unnecessary, maybe even detrimental. I can’t remember if it was
Joel or Ethan, or both of them together who, after Tommy’s first take,
said, “OK. Well, that’s the end of the film, isn’t it?”
As a documentary filmmaker you intrude in other people’s lives
and sometimes their misery. You take away your trophies in the form
of your images and return to your own, probably more comfortable,
life. There is an element of voyeurism to this kind of filmmaking that I
failed to come to terms with. Similarly, violence in a drama can be
just as voyeuristic. But without No Country for Old Men’s violent
depiction of evil, that final scene, in which Ed Tom bemoans that God
has not entered his life, would not have the same emotional
resonance. That juxtaposition of ideas, encapsulated in the Coens’
storytelling technique, is why I love films and why I love to help build
the illusion of life.

You can’t stop what’s coming. It ain’t all waiting on you.

That’s vanity.
ELLIS, IN NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

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 23
THE ILLUSION OF LIFE
Animation is about creating the illusion of life. And you
can’t create it if you don’t have one.
BRAD BIRD
I served as cinematographer for three films in 2008: Doubt,
Revolutionary Road, and The Reader, sharing credit with Chris
Menges on the lattermost. But it’s work on a fourth film released that
year that opened another career avenue I’ve subsequently enjoyed,
one that brought me back to watching Mickey and Felix on my dad’s
projector in the attic. But how things had changed. Shortly after
joining the staff of Pixar, after a long tenure working at Industrial
Light & Magic, producer Jim Morris reached out to James. “Will you
guys come in and do a little seminar?” he asked. I’d conducted
lighting workshops from time to time, and this seemed like a pleasant
opportunity to do something outside the norm. We agreed, not
realizing this seminar would double as an audition.
It was a simple event. Pixar had a small set, a lot of lights, a few
electricians, and an Alexa camera with a feed that displayed what
the lens was seeing to monitors arranged among the audience. We
gave a couple of stand-ins some action, set up a simple two-shot,
and began to demonstrate the basics of movie lighting, using a
traditional blend of key lights, fill lights, kickers, and backlights with
multiple flags to shape the light and create patterns of light and
shade on the walls. The audience seemed to be taking it all very
seriously but, after about twenty-five minutes, I started to wonder if
I’d taken the exercise too far. With so many lamps and stands it was
becoming harder and harder to move around the set! I apologized.
“I’m sorry. This is how you might think a cinematographer lights, and
I purposefully gave you what you expected,” I told them, “But it’s
really a long way from what I do.”
I panned the camera around to compose a shot of one of the
electricians. He was leaning against a work light, basically a large
bare bulb on a stand, and I loved the way the light was catching his
face. “This,” I said, “is what I do. And, even better, the shot is already
lit.” Thankfully, the audience laughed. “Lighting, to me, begins with
the choice of a light source, building from there to create a sense of
naturalism. There is no formula you might find in a textbook.” I took
down all the flags and cutters and continued with the demonstration,
only this time lighting the scene as I normally would—with practical
lamps and a soft bounce source coming through a window.
It must have gone well, because Jim soon asked us to visit Pixar
again. Andrew Stanton, a longtime Pixar creator who’d made his
directorial debut with Finding Nemo, was working on a new film
called WALL•E. Andrew and the rest of the team wanted to approach
the look of their film (a sci-fi epic as if shot on film in the 1970s)
informed by the mechanics and aesthetics of live-action
cinematography. How does a camera dolly move? What is the
difference between a zoom and a dolly move? What is the difference
between a wide-angle lens and a telephoto? How will the look of a
camera move change from a wide lens to a long lens? Animation can
move the camera without worrying about dollies, walls, or any sorts
of real-world constrictions. And it can shoot with any length of lens. A
61.2 mm or a 23.75 mm, anyone? This might seem liberating, but
there is a well-established film language based on perception, not
simply on a random series of choices. An audience may not be able
to describe why they’re taken out of a scene when the camera
makes some physically impossible move, but they feel the effects of
that choice.
We began traveling to Pixar and spending a few days at a time
working with their layout and lighting teams, a divided structure
common in animation. The former places the characters in relation to
the camera and sets any move while the latter lights whatever is
presented to them, neither one consulting the other. Our greatest
contribution might have been suggesting these two teams work more
closely together! We put them in the same room and raised
questions like “OK, what do you need to see in this scene? What
mood are you looking for? Is there a need for close-ups or can the
scene play in a wide shot? What focal length lens should we use? If
this area is in darkness, how does it affect the composition of the
shot? And how about depth of field?” As we explored the language of
cinematography with the animators, we also received a crash course
in how animation worked.
Most of our work on WALL•E concerned the early stages of
production, discussing the overall concept for the film as well as
creating reference images for the film’s opening sequences set on a
trash-covered Earth. Putting the sun in the back of the shot and
adding atmosphere to the environment, for instance, allowed the
piles of trash to hover over our shots like ghosts. I think we helped
shape the look of the film, though I can’t help but wish we could have
spent more time on it and developed its look further.

Got some bad news. Um… Operation Cleanup has, well, uh,
failed. Wouldn’t you know, rising toxicity levels have made
life unsustainable on Earth.
SHELBY FORTHRIGHT, IN WALL•E

By contrast, James and I were involved with Gore Verbinski’s

Rango from beginning to end. An oddball take on the spaghetti
Western starring a pet chameleon, Rango is filled with cinematic
references, including the title’s homage to Django, directed by Sergio
Corbucci. Gore felt that to have a cinematographer overseeing the
film would take it away from the more conventional look of
contemporary animated films being made in Hollywood, and he
turned to the prestigious visual effects house ILM, rather than an
experienced animation studio, to do the animating.
We began working with Tim Alexander at ILM’s studio in San
Francisco, as we had on WALL•E, by making a series of reference
images for situations that would occur multiple times throughout the
film—bright desert exteriors, moonlight, a day interior, or a street
scene at night. But the film was about more than its environments,
and key to it working was testing the rendering of each different
character. How, for instance, would Rango’s scaly skin look at high
noon versus under moonlight? How would a mouse’s fur or an
eagle’s feathers react in those same situations, in the warmth of
firelight or in the dim light of an interior? As these are animated
characters, it’s impossible to determine how their surface textures
will react until you light them, especially as the light you are using is
only the product of pixels responding to a computer program.
Sometimes you get some unexpected results.
 As the set pieces of his live-action films suggest, Gore is a genius
at designing shots. It was with the lighting that he needed help. As
we discovered, what was tricky in live action could also be tricky in
animation. Gore wanted the standoff in a dark saloon to recall similar
scenes that had been staged in countless live-action Westerns, so
we decided to light it with shards of sunlight, as if seeping through
holes in the roof. But creating this look in a computer is not the same
as working with a physical lamp.
When Rango walks through the desert, we wanted the horizon to
blend into the sky, as it does in Once Upon a Time in the West. To do
this, the atmosphere had to be added using layers in depth so that
the foreground would remain clean but the background would be
progressively diffused. And it would have been oh so much easier to
use moonlight for the scene where Rango crosses the highway at
night, but why do that when using the whites of the headlights and
the red of the taillights of passing vehicles offered a far more
compelling option?
Working in a virtual environment allowed the lighting department
to do something impossible in a live-action world: set a sun that
would stay in place for an entire scene. On actual locations the order
of a day’s shooting is chosen with the angle of the light in mind. For
example, a scene might have a series of shots backlit against the
sun, but to shoot them requires careful planning around the sun’s
location at each moment during the day. A shoot will follow the sun.
(Robin and Marian, photographed by David Watkin, has moments
like this throughout the film.) Similarly, onstage the key light might be
deliberately shifted from one camera angle to another if it better
serves the look of a shot and the flow of the scene. Yes, continuity is
important and all the shots in a scene should appear to have been
taken at the same time and in the same light, but the key words are
“appear to.” Those shafts of light in the Rango saloon could come
from anywhere if it helped with the mood of a shot.
No man can walk out of his own story.
SPIRIT OF THE WEST, IN RANGO
 I’ve decided I don’t want to fight dragons.
HICCUP, IN HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON

After Rango, we began a long association with DreamWorks

Animation, starting with Chris Sanders’s and Dean DeBlois’s 2010
film How to Train Your Dragon. James and I spent considerably more
time working in person at DreamWorks on the three-part Dragon
series than we had on any previous animated projects, following
each film from the first conceptual illustrations, through the story reel
process, to animation, layout, and lighting. Sometimes we’d spend
the morning moving from one cubicle to the next to discuss lighting
with each digital artist, then check on their progress while doing
another pass in the afternoon. From the beginning we emphasized,
“We don’t want to impose our ideas on anything. We’re just here to
offer advice, give our point of view, and discuss different approaches
that might work.”
Once again, we felt better coordination between the layout and
lighting teams would allow for more possibilities and help create
images that were more dynamic. The first scene we lit for the film
uses only candles for a conversation between the young hero,
Hiccup, and his father, for instance. But where to put the candles?
Placed to one side of the scene a candle might rim a character’s
face and leave the camera side in shadow. And, if the image were to
be naturalistic, the light needed to drop off following the inverse
square law, even if this left much of the background in darkness.
Animators had worked hard on rendering all the detail in those
backgrounds, but, as with the opening sequences in WALL•E,
maybe seeing it all wasn’t the best option for the scene. Getting
everyone on board with this approach took a while. We screened
some initial shots of this candlelit scene, and it was Jeffrey
Katzenberg who dismissively commented, “Oh, it’s all too dark.” But
only a few weeks later we screened something similar, and he said,
“This might be a bit light.” We knew then we’d made a breakthrough.
 Still, lighting was often a far more complex process in animation
than live action. On a set it’s simple enough to project a light onto a
white card, or any other surface, and reflect bounced light into a
face, but it takes a lot of computer power to achieve the same look in
animation (or it used to). So, an important aspect of James’s and my
work at DreamWorks was talking to programmers about how to bring
the real-world physics of light into animation. As the technology grew
more sophisticated this became easier. We could soon project light
on a surface and have it bounce off without using a separate
program to mimic the effect, though for it to bounce a second time
remained wishful. But, with time, technology began to drive the
lighting.
How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, the final film in the
series, includes a scene in a forest. To light it, the team made a 360-
degree capture of the light in a wooded area near the studio. When
they incorporated this directly into the scene, it didn’t look right at all.
Had they imposed too much reality on the film’s stylized world,
created that “uncanny valley,” or was their technology just not ready
to do what they intended? Either way it didn’t look right. But the
exercise did give me a chance to explain an idea central to how I
approach lighting. Naturalism isn’t the same as realism. The goal
isn’t to mimic how light works in the real world but to use natural-
looking light as a form of expression. And what works in live action
can work just as well in animation.
As well as the three How to Train Your Dragon films, James and I
also consulted on The Croods and Rise of the Guardians during our
time at DreamWorks Animation. Each had a different style of
animation and different challenges, whether it was the texture of a
cloud, the rendition of a volcano, or the color scheme of a dragon.
Over the years in their making, we witnessed the constant evolution
of technology, though nothing James and I were involved with had
yet incorporated artificial intelligence (as far as we knew). After our
time at DreamWorks, we became involved with a project at Sony
entitled Vivo, a colorful animated musical. Production designer
Carlos Zaragoza created wonderful color palettes for the various
sections of the film. After so much work in telling the story in this
vivid chromatic world, it was very disappointing that the film went
straight to streaming and was never shown in a theater.
I was able to venture into animation while also shooting live-
action films because of the seamless working structure James had
created by this point. With the producers of each animated project,
James set up virtual network connections that allowed us to be a
part of the film’s development whatever the location we were
currently working on. She was in constant communication with each
of the layout and lighting departments to keep apprised of any new
material that might be available for us to work on in the evening or
over a weekend. As luck would have it, we were working on True
Grit, a live-action Western with the Coen brothers, while putting the
finishing touches with Gore on Rango, an animated one.
But before True Grit the Coens returned to their roots for “the kind
of picture you get to make after you’ve won an Oscar,” as Variety’s
Todd McCarthy described Joel and Ethan’s 2009 film A Serious Man.
And, unfortunately, he’s not wrong. It’s a sad indictment of the film
industry if that is what it takes. McCarthy’s review, like those of most
other critics, praised the film while also referring to it as “a
particularly personal project” before noting its limited commercial
prospects. Drawn from Joel and Ethan’s upbringing in the 1960s
Minnesota suburbs, it surely is the most personal of their films. But it
also uses the specific time and place in which it’s set to ask more
eternal questions about faith and uncertainty. Why do bad things
happen to good people?
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 24
EMBRACE THE MYSTERY
Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.
RASHI, AS QUOTED IN A SERIOUS MAN
Luckily, A Serious Man was not set in the depths of winter and
had no need for snow. What we did need was a period-correct
suburban street that we could make our own, and Joel and Ethan
had a very specific look in mind. Also, the main characters’ houses
had to be opposite each other, and one required a rooftop panorama
that could pass for the 1960s without resorting to special effects.
(Apart from the wide shot of the shtetl in the opening and the tornado
in the final scene, the film has no CGI.) The script also called for
interiors that would work with exteriors. Even if the same house
didn’t work for both, to maximize our shooting time we did need them
to be on the same street. After a lot of scouting, we found what we
were looking for in Bloomington, a suburb less than ten miles south
of Minneapolis that’s also home to the Mall of America. We used the
roof of one house and the interior of another on the opposite side of
the street, to create a composite of the home of beleaguered physics
professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg). Not only did the interior
of one work better than the other, but this also allowed me to leave
the lighting in place without fear of it being seen in any of our exterior
shots.

I’d worked with Joel and Ethan on almost every film they’d made
since Barton Fink, and I’d never seen such simple and direct
storyboards as those created for A Serious Man. Apart from Larry’s
dreams and a couple of scenes shot from the perspective of stoned
characters, our goal was either to let scenes play out in a single shot
or cut between angles that closed in as the scene progressed, either
by using a slow track or, more often, a closer static shot. A Serious
Man is their most restrained and naturalistic film.
Instead of bounce light, Billy O’Leary and I used mostly lamps
projected through large diffusion frames to create a soft daylight
source. This served both the mood of each scene and the
practicalities of each location, but it was also in sync with the film’s
relatively low budget. The approach worked well for the scenes set
at Larry’s house, but for his office I used reflectors, both as bounce
sources to light through the windows and, at the same time, as flags
to control the natural sunlight.

A few locations, such as the opening scene in the shtetl—which

was a set but not shot in the Czech Republic as has been quoted—
required a very different approach, as did the synagogue.
The synagogue we chose had a stained-glass window that we
couldn’t use as a source of light, and the few practical fixtures were
both dim and randomly set. We had limited time to shoot two lengthy
scenes requiring many setups that looked in every direction, so we
needed a setup that would work for every camera angle. Further
complicating matters: The synagogue did not want us to place
lighting stands and other equipment on the floor or touch the walls
and decorations. Fortunately, the building’s interior had some
wooden crossbeams that we were allowed to access, so long as
whatever we attached did no damage. I initially considered hanging
a tiered set of ring lights, but Mitch Lillian, serving again as key grip,
pointed out that they’d be hard to construct and heavy. On the other
hand, a hexagon could be made using straight sections of
lightweight aluminum joined together with hinges. Other than
mounting a porcelain socket every six inches, the hexagons would
be simple to make and, being constructed in folding sections, easy to
transport and install.

The largest of our five hexagons was sixteen feet across and the
smallest about three feet. We filled the center of the light with 100-
watt bulbs, the outside with 75-watt bulbs, and separately wired each
hexagon to a dimmer. When dimmed in sequence, the overall effect
was of a soft, warm light with a brighter and whiter center. We
contained the light from our “chandelier” by surrounding it with a
larger hexagon of Ultrabounce material, with its white side facing in,
and suspended the entire rig using a simple pulley system, which
gave us the ability to raise or lower it at any time. Other than
covering the window with a ½ CTO, to shift the color of the daylight
toward tungsten, this one light served as the only source for the
scene. Not only did this rig allow us to shoot quickly, with no lighting
change between setups, but it was also a cheap and simple solution
to a problem.
 When Larry’s son, Danny, is high we chose another relatively
simple device I had used on Jesse James: a swing-and-tilt lens.
These have elements separated by a bellows so the front glass can
be shifted in relation to the film plane. The focal plane is usually
parallel to the film plane, and focus drops off with distance. Tilting the
front element of a lens at an angle to the film plane allows an object
in the distance to appear as sharp as one in the foreground or only a
small part of the image on the same plane to be in focus. This
unexpected pattern of focus registers as a kind of swimming reality,
which seemed appropriate for both Danny at his bar mitzvah and
Larry as he shares a smoke with Mrs. Samsky.
Danny’s still feeling the effects of the joint he smoked when,
toward the end of the film, he meets with the head rabbi, a meeting
Larry has tried, and failed, to secure for himself almost from the first
scene. Filled with lamps, religious paraphernalia, plastic models of
teeth, paintings, and many other items, the cluttered study would be
disorienting even without cannabis. The only light illuminating the
space comes from two small windows to one side of the rabbi’s
desk. Again, shooting on a real, if heavily dressed, location, we
enhanced the daylight by directing 4K HMI lights through the
windows, softening them with a grid cloth diffusion. Projecting two or
three smaller lamps through a window rather than a single large
lamp allowed me to control the angle and softness of the light more
easily. The lamps could be crossed from positions far apart to project
light to either side of a window, set close together as a harder
horizontal beam, or stacked, one above the other, to create a hard or
soft vertical source depending on their separation.
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 Though we couldn’t summon a tornado (this was a CG addition),
we did get lucky with the film’s final scene, thanks to a well-timed
storm. We emphasized the unease of the moment using a handheld
camera. When the credits start to roll to the sound of Jefferson
Airplane’s “Somebody to Love,” the audience has been left with a lot
of unanswered questions, appropriate for a film so concerned with
the unanswerable. As with the box at the end of Barton Fink and
other moments in the Coens’ filmography, it’s probably best to take a
cue from one of A Serious Man’s most memorable lines and
“embrace the mystery.”
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25
PART OF THE ESTABLISHMENT
The ground’s too hard. If they wanted a decent funeral, they
should have got themselves killed in summer.
ROOSTER COGBURN, IN TRUE GRIT
Watching Guns in the Afternoon or Bad Day at Black Rock with
my father, I could never have imagined working on a Western, let
alone being the cinematographer. Yet, if you count the more
contemporary No Country for Old Men (which I do), True Grit was to
be my third. Henry Hathaway’s 1969 film True Grit, starring John
Wayne, would be on many short lists of the most famous Westerns
ever made. I was a little surprised that Joel and Ethan wanted to
remake it. But when I read Charles Portis’s original novel, which is
more nuanced and darker in tone than Hathaway’s film, their interest
started to make more sense. When their script arrived, I knew they
had a much different sort of film in mind.
The film would reunite the Coens and me with Jeff Bridges, this
time casting him as a disparate larger-than-life character, the hard-
drinking Marshal “Rooster” Cogburn. Hailee Steinfeld had joined as
Mattie Ross, the fourteen-year-old girl who hires Rooster to track
down her father’s murderer, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), and Matt
Damon would costar as LaBoeuf, a Texas Ranger also searching for
Chaney. Filming True Grit turned out to be, as expected, an
adventure.
The night shoots for No Country for Old Men had been a
challenge, but those for True Grit were at another level. The location
for Greaser Bob’s cabin, site of Rooster and Mattie’s tense
encounter with a band of outlaws, proved hard to find. The Coens
wanted a long, deep valley that could snuggle the cabin at one end.
The sides of the valley needed to be steep but allow for a trail from
which Rooster and Mattie could arrive to see the cabin from above.
Furthermore, the valley floor had to have an open end suitable for
the bad guys’ approach.
 After we settled on some barren land on a ranch outside Santa
Fe, gaffer Chris Napolitano and I spent hours hiking around the area
to consider what our alternatives might be. Besides the sheer scale
of the location and the cost of lighting it, an added consideration was
that the axis of the camera would swap between scenes. In the first,
Rooster and Mattie approach the cabin to the right, so I intended the
light to come from the left. For the shootout that follows, Rooster and
Mattie are on the reverse side of the hill looking down at the cabin.
Light from one side of the valley would act as a backlight for one
scene but become a front light for the other. I needed to light from
both angles. After walking through our shots with Joel and Ethan on
the location, I constructed the most precise and efficient lighting plan
I could think of.
As it was practically impossible to say how much of each scene
we would shoot on any one of the six nights we had to complete the
work, we needed to be able to move from one lighting setup to the
next with minimal loss to our shooting time. Moving lights around the
rough hillside in the middle of the night would eat up time and money
we didn’t have, so my goal was to adjust our lighting with a flick of a
switch. This would require more lights, all of which would have to be
rigged in advance, but renting more equipment would be far cheaper
than losing time on a night shoot.
We returned to the location many times during prep to mark out
exactly where each array of lamps would start and end, hopefully
making everything clear to our rigging crew, who would be preparing
the location later in our schedule, when we would be fully occupied
shooting elsewhere. Once rigging began we’d have no time to
change the plan, so we needed to get it right.
There was yet another complication! For the shootout we needed
to run the camera at high speed and use a long lens to depict
Mattie’s point of view of the action, both necessitating an increase to
the light level required. And that meant more lamps, which meant
more cables, which meant more electricians, which meant more
generators. Cabling became a major issue as there was no access
for our generators other than to the rear of the hillside, resulting in a
power loss from the length of the cable runs involved. My plan also
required mounting lamps on an unstable rocky terrain during
seasonably unpredictable weather and operating them in the dark.
Sensibly, Chris Napolitano and Mitch Lillian decided it would be both
safer and more efficient to secure platforms to the hillside, thereby
mounting each row of lamps on a solid surface. It was a lot of work
to be able to shoot at 50 fps on a lens that only opens to 2.8 but, if it
was easy…
Why so many lights instead of the Muscos I had used for the night
work on No Country for Old Men and elsewhere? On first look a
large location or set can appear daunting, and it’s easy to fall back
on what you know. Two factors ruled out the kind of point source
lighting the Musco would provide: First, the location offered no
access for such a cumbersome piece of machinery. Second, and
more important, the script called for snow to arrive at the end of the
night. On No Country for Old Men, I liked the clean shadows a hard
“moonlight” source produced, but here I wanted a softer look, as if
the moon was behind a cloud.
Chris, Mitch, and I had a prelight on the weekend before the
shoot and, after setting all the lamps, we added double wire “scrims”
to the outermost lamps in each row and single wires to those toward
the center of the line. This reduced the light level coming from the
ends of the rows of lamps and gave the source a softer edge. I did
not add any correction to the HMI lamps as I wanted to contrast the
cool blue of the night light (I was shooting on a tungsten-balanced
stock) with the warm firelight of the cabin. This set up the illusion of a
cozy refuge from the wilderness, though we shot the interiors of the
cabin on a stage using 500-watt quartz bulbs to boost the light
coming from the fireplace.
 We shot the scene that takes place the next morning, as Rooster,
Mattie, and LaBoeuf leave Greaser Bob’s cabin, on the first day of
production, though this was never our plan. Filming was based out of
Santa Fe, but because the first day of our shooting schedule was on
a distant location, a ranch to the northeast of Las Vegas, New
Mexico, the crew were staying at a nearby motel. That night it
snowed, and heavily. After a long drive and having grabbed a burrito
each for breakfast, Joel, Ethan, Jess Gonchor (our production
designer), and I were standing in the middle of a broad plain up to
our knees in snow and wondering what to do—an inauspicious start
to the shoot.
 We did need snow, but only for an entirely different scene and
location, the one set outside Greaser Bob’s cabin. The problem: Our
Greaser Bob’s location was eighty or more miles away, south of
Santa Fe and down a road we were told was almost impassable. But
only almost! Again, a great crew makes all the difference. Mitch
managed to free a stake bed truck from a snowdrift, and we stripped
down what we needed to the essentials, loaded up, and we were off.
We managed to shoot the three shots on our storyboards in the
fading light at the end of the day, and what had started as a disaster
turned into a success. And we could check off our one snow-
dependent scene, a welcome development since the weather had
begun to warm up, while freeing the location for the rigging crew. A
lucky break indeed.
 We filmed most of our interiors on location. Of these the
courtroom proved particularly challenging as it was on the second
floor of the Old Courthouse in Blanco, Texas. Joel had given me a
brief to hold Rooster, then on the witness stand, in shadow until
Mattie moves closer to the front of the spectators to get a better view
of him. I decided to create the effect of hard sunlight streaming
through the windows behind Rooster, allowing for bounce light to
wrap around his face from Mattie’s more forward position.
Complicating matters, the windows faced south. Ideally, I would need
three eighty-foot lifts to raise the lamps and three more to carry 12’ ×
12’ solids to cut the natural sunlight, but to cut down the cost of the
rig, I reduced this to a total of four. I worked with Nancy Haigh, the
Coens’ longtime set dresser, to find the right style, color, and density
of material for the window treatment. The warmth of the yellow cloth
we chose enhanced the feeling of the sunlight, and when it was
furnished as a roller blind I could restrict the openings through which
I was punching the 18K PAR lamps to create the shafts of sunlight
(the original plan is a little misdrawn).
OceanofPDF.com
OceanofPDF.com
 Greaser Bob’s and the courtroom were two particularly
challenging sets to light, but there were so many others. How do you
shoot a young girl swimming a horse across a river or galloping
through the dark of night on a horse that is called Blackie?

In the end, what we achieved together as a crew worked. For me,

The Man Who Wasn’t There and True Grit are the most visually
unified films I have worked on. That’s not to say that they are the
best films, or my best work, just that the images complement the
story, set a tone, and flow without distraction. Shooting a film does
not just involve perfecting a series of individual shots; each one
connects to another, whether it be the one that follows or the one
that ends the film.
True Grit enjoyed great popular success without losing the Coens’
personal touch or the haunting romance of Portis’s book. Joel later
mentioned to me that Dick Cheney had announced True Grit to be
his favorite film of the year. I laughed. I reminded him that he had
worried about becoming part of the “establishment” when No
Country for Old Men won for best picture at the Academy Awards.
“What do you have to say now?” I asked.
It was True Grit that brought a second letter from Oswald Morris,
cinematographer of Moby Dick, Lolita, The Hill, and The Spy Who
Came In from the Cold. We had met briefly while I was at the
National Film School, and he had later written to me to say that he
thought I might become a good cinematographer if only I would hire
a camera operator (something I have yet to do). Having seen True
Grit, he wrote to compliment me on, in his opinion, the best-
photographed film he had seen in some time and that he now
understood why an “A” camera operator was not part of my crew.
I don’t always use the same team for every film. Geography and
scheduling make this impossible. But I do have collaborators I like to
turn to again and again, reliable professionals like Andy Harris,
Bruce Hamme, Mitch Lillian, Billy O’Leary, Chris Napolitano, or John
Higgins, whenever possible. You can read their names in the credits,
but credits don’t always tell the whole story. James’s name also
shows up occasionally, usually as “Digital Workflow Consultant,” but
she has played an integral role on every job since we met, effectively
allowing me to be in more than one place at a time.

On The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert

Ford, for instance, she worked closely with Bev Wood at Deluxe
(who’d been with us every step of the way as digital processing
became the norm), the effects companies, and the postproduction
team. She’d talk to the lab, get a first look at dailies, set up dailies
screenings, and oversee every other job that her past film
experience and sharp organizational skills make her better suited to
do than anyone else. On digital projects, she’s the one who makes
sure everything runs as it should and the film looks the way she
knows I want it to. On True Grit, we had digital dailies, which James
arranged and oversaw. She supervised the DI process in post and
coordinated our Rango work with ILM.
Digital tools had become key to our postproduction work while, on
the set, I worked in film. The division was clear. Then the sky fell!
“Cinematographer Roger Deakins Switching from Film to Digital
Camera,” read the headline of a 2011 article in the Hollywood
Reporter.
OceanofPDF.com
 26
BOND, JAMES BOND
The technology you use impresses no one. The experience
you create with it is everything.
SEAN GERETY
When I made the decision to shoot a movie digitally, I didn’t
necessarily expect it to turn into a news story. The digital-vs.-film
debate had been raging for more than a decade, with proponents
dug in on each side. Even as digital filmmaking advanced and
became more common, some directors and cinematographers
expressed a commitment to shooting on film no matter how good
digital cameras became. I was never one to rule out digital capture,
but only when I felt there was a reason to embrace it did I make the
change. My concern has always been for the image rather than the
technology used to create it.

There are Russian spies here now. And if we’re lucky,

they’ll steal some of our secrets and they’ll be two years
behind.
MORT SAHL

We were in Santa Fe, working on True Grit, when, somewhat to

my surprise, Sam Mendes called. Anticipating my reaction, the first
thing Sam said was, “Don’t put the phone down when I tell you what
I am doing next.” He knew I was not a big fan of action movies and
guessed, correctly, I wouldn’t respond enthusiastically to the idea of
working on a James Bond movie. Though I’d been the right age to
be swept up in the popularity of the series, Bond had never really
appealed to me. “I’ll be in Santa Monica when you finish in Santa
Fe,” Sam said. “Let’s go for a walk on the beach and we’ll talk.”
When we met, Sam laid out his vision for a Bond film unlike any
made before. He wanted to use the franchise to explore what the
iconic character meant in the twenty-first century. What if James
Bond might be too old to be a spy in a changing world? The film
would be messier, brutal, and more morally ambiguous than the
typical Bond film, as much a character study as a spy caper. Yes,
there would be action and we would need to work with multiple
cameras and a second unit, but, Sam insisted, it would be, for the
most part, a single-camera shoot. We would work in the same way
as we had on Jarhead and Revolutionary Road.
I joined Sam after he had already begun looking for locations,
seemingly all over the world. He had narrowed his focus to shooting
in India and China. In a sign of things to come, we’d end up using
neither.
In Goa we scouted a railway bridge, high in the mountains, that
passes over a waterfall. It looked promising in photos, but as we
drove there, we became stuck in a seemingly endless line of trucks
—some five thousand, I was told—ferrying bauxite from a Chinese
aluminum mine to the dockside. This alone was sure to make
shooting impossible, while the bridge, when we finally found it,
proved surprisingly disappointing. Moving on to Mumbai, we scouted
a large, congested roundabout that bordered the city’s main market
district, a location that had previously caught Sam’s eye. When he
asked the policeman acting as our guide if, and for how long, we
would be able to shut down the streets, the officer replied, “What
would the London police say if you asked to shut down Oxford
Street?” Fair comment, I thought.
Despite such frustrations, I find scouting the most enjoyable part
of the film process, not just because you stay in a nice hotel and
don’t have the immediate stress of the shoot, but because it offers
precious time that can be spent with a director. Even when a location
doesn’t pan out, the discussions about what might or might not work
for the film are all part of the process. We moved on from India to
Turkey and had better luck with an alternative set of locations.
Istanbul offered us Eminonu Square, situated by the Bosphorus and
beneath the famed Hagia Sophia, as well as a maze of streets we
could control for the time needed for our shoot. The eastern city of
Adana had a rail line suitable for our opening sequence and, within
driving distance, the 332-foot-high, World War I–era Varda Viaduct,
in the Taurus Mountains. The coastal resort of Fethiye would replace
Goa to become Bond’s beachfront hideout and the docking place for
the yacht trip to the villain’s island.

Cinematography, a military art. Prepare a film like a battle.

 ROBERT BRESSON

Robert Bresson talked of filmmaking as “a grand puzzle.”

Shooting a Bond film proved no exception to that statement.
Shanghai was my next stop. In fact, I flew there three times as it was
a firm location until close to our shoot date. Yet, in the end, only our
second unit actually shot there, and then only establishing shots and
plates to use as backgrounds for our work onstage. Other than our
weeks spent shooting in Turkey at the end of the schedule, we’d
barely leave Britain to create a story that takes Bond around the
globe. Javier Bardem, who played the villain, Silva, jokingly
commented that he had taken the film expecting to see the world,
only for the London Underground to be the furthest he got from
Pinewood Studios.
Sam seemed intrigued at my suggestion to shoot Skyfall digitally,
particularly since the film would feature several action scenes shot at
night or in low-light conditions. But he remained unpersuaded, so
James, Andy, and I shot some tests that were processed by our
digital lab, EFILM. James was now full-time on Skyfall. She would
arrange for the processing of the camera’s higher-resolution digital
RAW file and the creation of our LUT (lookup table), and oversee our
dailies timing during the production, leaving me free to deal with
immediate on-set issues. Digital technology was new to production,
but James was, and is, comfortable learning anything that’s new and
using it creatively. The Arri Alexa camera again proved impressive
shooting under minimal light (we had first used the Alexa on Andrew
Niccol’s sci-fi film In Time), but it was finally some close-up shots
that sold Sam on going digital. When he viewed a side-by-side test, it
was the clarity of an actor’s eyes that convinced him the digital
image could stand up to one shot on film, if not surpass it. We put
this to the test with Skyfall’s opening shot, in which Daniel Craig’s
Bond slowly approaches the camera down a long hotel corridor.

Like all the sets, the hotel room and corridor had been designed
around the scene. We had made a rough shot list (not a storyboard)
of the entire film during prep, but we chose the final camera
placement during a blocking rehearsal with Daniel. To achieve the
lighting effect seen in the opening shot, we designed a door with a
small glass peephole. It was only on the day of the shoot that I
proposed to Sam that we keep the focus on the end point of the
shot, pinpointing Bond’s eyes, rather than starting on his iconic
silhouette.
This first scene established the look of our main character, and it
was essential we shoot it before our second unit began work in
Turkey on the action sequence that followed. We built the hallway
and the room to which it led—where Bond would find a dying MI6
agent he’ll be ordered to abandon against his instincts—onstage at
Pinewood Studios well in advance of our shooting schedule. This
allowed it to serve as weather cover for the first stretch of the shoot.
 It was a simple set, but had the weather been uncooperative, it
could have been the first scene I would shoot on a Bond movie! To
connect the set to the bright light of Istanbul, I wanted to be sure the
design would allow for a hard contrast between the exterior and the
dark interior, so the size of the windows and their treatments would
be crucial. Initially Dennis Gassner (once again our production
designer) and I considered using a painted backing outside the
window, but settled on revealing the exterior only once Bond exits
the building into our Istanbul location. The wooden shutters would
allow for shafts of sunlight, via a T12 Fresnel, to light the set while
limiting the view outside.
Sam and I had made an animated previsualization (pre-vis) of the
opening action sequence that incorporated all of our chosen
locations with camera angles and lens choices programmed in. I had
never been involved in such detailed animation work on any other
live-action production, but it proved essential given the complexity of
the sequence and because much of the stunt work would be shot by
a second unit being directed by Alexander Witt. Mostly they would
shoot using a double, not only for safety reasons but because the
stunt team needed time to work out the intricacies of the action.
Though it made sense to shoot the sequence all at once, there were
few occasions when Daniel was not busy on first unit, so we were
scheduled to work alongside Alex and his crew in Istanbul and
Adana before we wrapped production in Turkey. By the time we
showed up, both the stunts and effects had been so well rehearsed
that we shot more angles with Daniel than we had originally thought
possible, leaving fewer effects shots to be picked up in Pinewood at
the end of the schedule. These on-location shots only added to the
impact of the sequence.
 In London, Bond’s boss, M (Judi Dench), follows the action in
Turkey from the MI6 headquarters. Surprisingly, we were given
permission to use the exterior of the real building on the south bank
of the Thames. To have an authentic background onstage, we were
even allowed to photograph the view from inside the building. And for
a night shot we were able to light it, although it was only MI6 staff
who were allowed to set our lamps. Later in our schedule, on a
Sunday morning, we shut down all of Whitehall, so I guess James
Bond has many fans! Though it might have been different had we
asked for a week on Oxford Street.
When MI6 is bombed by the cyberterrorist, revealed later as the
former agent Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem), the organization is forced
to move to its backup headquarters, an underground bunker we’re
told was used by Winston Churchill during the war. Dennis created
this complex using a combination of locations and sets. For the
largest set we used the massive 007 stage at Pinewood, originally
built in 1976 for The Spy Who Loved Me. The set included a
passageway into the main underground space, though the tunnel
into which Bond is driven and the unassuming entrance door that
leads to the bunker were shot on location in South London. The
tunnel was quite short, so we used multiple passes and multiple
camera angles to create the sensation of the SUV traveling a much
longer distance than reality allowed. The fluorescent fixtures we
hung overhead are the same as appear in the main set to imply they
were all newly installed.

After entering the tunnel, Bond walks under bulkhead lamps that
could be left over from the Victorian era, into which we installed 100-
watt tungsten bulbs dimmed down to make them photograph warm
and to contrast this space with the cool fluorescent fixtures that
Biggles and I had decided to use for the main bunker. (I had last
worked with John “Biggles” Higgins on The Secret Garden, so it was
good to team up with him again.) For this, Chris Lowe, our
supervising art director, helped design twin four-foot light fixtures that
looked high-tech but were simple to manufacture. At Biggles’s
suggestion we installed narrow T8 (which are one inch in diameter)
fluorescent tubes rather than the traditional T12, because it would
make the fixture look even more high-tech but, in multiples, still
produce a soft source. The lighting had to fit within Dennis’s overall
concept for the set, but it also needed to light the scenes. To fulfill
both of those requirements Biggles and I worked closely with the art
department to come up with a combination of straight rows of fixtures
within the larger open spaces and square-shaped fixtures in the
smaller confined spaces, such as the interview room.

Because of the large number of bulbs we would need—well into

triple figures by the time we finished—we chose a cheaper off-the-
shelf brand for all of the location and stage work set within the
bunker (even Bond movies need to save money where they can).
After testing multiple brands, we settled on a 4,000K tube that we
found we could dim to 50 percent of intensity without flicker, and
which gave us a cooler look with only a minimal green tint. LED
tubes, both expensive and not yet widely available in 2011, don’t
have any of these problems!
 The chase sequence that takes place beneath the city of London
was split between locations and sets. Dennis built a curved tunnel for
the underground train that Bond only manages to escape at the last
second, but we also shot on an actual train and on a disused station
platform. Despite all that, Sam felt the sequence lacked one
spectacular piece of action, and it was our effect supervisor, Chris
Corbould, who suggested that we crash a train through the roof.
Chris also said we could shoot it for real—that is, with no model work
or CGI. And he was as good as his word. He suspended two sixty-
foot carriages beneath a steel beam. He then attached these
carriages via a cable system to a truck, which controlled their
combined weight of fifteen tons as they were sent to crash through
the roof of Dennis’s Victorian set and stop as if on a dime in front of
one of our eleven cameras, each of which shot footage that was
used in the final cut of the sequence. And all in one take.
The London locations came together well, but our plan to shoot in
Shanghai kept hitting snags. A sequence involving a power boat race
through a complex of canals we had scouted on the outskirts of the
city was cut from the script. And a standing set in a Shanghai studio,
where we’d planned to shoot the complex Macao casino sequence,
was destroyed by a typhoon. So little was left that we decided to
create everything in London.
Apart from an exterior shot of the real location, the Kempton Park
Racecourse became Shanghai’s airport. The scenes of Bond driving
through Shanghai’s streets were created using a combination of
“poor man’s process,” background plates shot on location, and
second unit shots.
 And the location we had chosen in Shanghai as the exterior of the
office tower in which Bond finally confronts Patrice became a
building close to Liverpool Street station in London. To disguise an
area so familiar to citygoers, Biggles lit the back of Liverpool Street
station in a vivid green, just part of a color palette more in keeping
with Shanghai than London.
After Bond rides an elevator by hanging beneath it—a moment
created on set with the help of one of the very few greenscreens we
used in the entire film—he walks down a blue-lit corridor into a wide
area of glass-walled offices. The production had initially considered
shooting this entire scene on location in China, but after I had looked
at the scout photographs and voiced some concern, Sam suggested
I go there by myself and take a look. There were several options, but
none looked out toward Shanghai’s famous lit signage, which mostly
faces across the Huangpu River toward the Bund.
Sam wanted separate office spaces rather than one open bullpen
area. But, enclosed by solid walls, how would the location be lit if not
from the city outside? If the lights were on inside the building,
wouldn’t Bond be in full view of an assassin and, worse still, the
assassin in full view of his target? It would be expensive to
manufacture an outside source on the forty-seventh floor, and
besides that, staring out at nothing but a dark building didn’t make
much sense to me. As I looked out toward the Huangpu River from
the bar of my immaculate Shanghai hotel, I noticed how it and so
much of the city around me seemed to be built of glass. Glass filled
with reflections!
Before I talked with Sam I met with Dennis. He was our
production designer, and I wanted to hear how practical he thought it
was to build the set, as a composite of exterior and interior, on the
007 stage at Pinewood. The 007 stage was already being paid for
because the MI6 bunker was on part of it. What’s more, we could
shoot this night scene during the day and in the UK. By building the
set, Sam could have total control over the space in which the action
was to take place, I could control the lighting, and, even more
important to me, we could incorporate large amounts of glass.
Once Dennis and his art director, Chris Lowe, had researched the
cost and structural issues involved with the design of such a set,
Sam embraced the idea, but he suggested we build a scale model
before we finally signed off on the plan. He was rightly concerned
that it might make no sense if Bond was chasing an assassin with
nothing between them but glass. With a model and some roughed-in
lighting, we could study how the backgrounds would react in
reflection and if there was space on the stage to separate the office
from the hotel room in which the assassin’s victim is shot. Though
models are not always built for a set, one as complicated as this
needed detailed exploration before money was spent. We were freed
of the restrictions of the locations, but now we had to create our own
version of Shanghai at night. We decided on two large LED playback
screens to emulate the copious amount of advertising seen on the
city’s buildings: one that would silhouette the main action and a
second to both side-light the set and add complexity to the
reflections. To see how these sources would interact with the glass
of our set we used two small iPads, the primary one of which played
back a wonderfully incongruous image of jellyfish that the art
department had found online. After the design of the set was
completed and we settled on the overall stage layout, Dennis turned
to Sam and me to ask what we would like on the main LED screen. I
remember well we looked at each other and laughed. We had both
grown to love those jellyfish!
Meanwhile, Biggles and I studied what LED screens were
available and whether they would be bright enough to light the set as
we hoped. After shooting some tests with the Alexa to check for
unwanted moiré patterns (a product of the two sets of pixels
overlapping) as well as light output, we found the one screen that
fulfilled both our requirements. We were testing in the late summer of
2011, and it’s surprising, looking back not so many years later, there
were then so few options available to us. A sectional screen used for
rock concerts, our one option, was in high demand and an expensive
hire. But it did light the set, so it was more than a prop. The second
screen was always going to be seen in reflection or through multiple
layers of glass, so this could be a far more industrial type of modular
unit and cheaper to hire. Besides, it was on the same plane as the
hotel room, so, being that much closer than the “jellyfish,” it made
sense that we would see more of a pattern and texture in its
projections.
 An office building, built to appear further away, frames the jellyfish
of the larger LED screen. The fluorescent fixtures that light these
elements are 2’ × T8 tubes, small enough that they help with the
false perspective. In the background we placed three nighttime
Translite backings; two of them were midground office buildings and
the third was the Shanghai Tower. All three were designed in false
perspective to give greater depth to the cityscape. The main set
stood on a twelve-foot platform so that we could approach the edge
without revealing the stage floor. We shot almost everything in
camera; only the lower parts of some facing buildings and the
moving traffic in the street below were added in post. The glass
shattering behind Bond and Patrice is also a CG addition as it was
dangerous to do otherwise, but not the glass in the hotel room
window shattered by the assassin’s bullet. Other than two rows of
seven 4’ × 4’ blue fluorescent fixtures that light the approach to the
main bullpen area, the lighting comes entirely from what appears in
frame.
We shot the sequence with a lens aperture of between 1.4 and
2.0, rating the camera at 800 ASA. Because the glass was tempered
and quite thick, each successive layer took away some exposure.
Consequently, the earlier shots in the sequence were more open on
the lens than those at the end. Black was the required dress code on
set because of the reflective surfaces, and it became even more
confusing when the LED screens were running. We moved around
with our hands held out before us, searching among reflections that
appeared and disappeared on the otherwise invisible glass in front of
us, exactly as we wanted the scene to feel.
 The fight was staged to take place within a single shot, closing in
on the silhouetted figures fighting in front of the floating jellyfish
before tilting down as Patrice falls over the edge. Sam’s choice was
formal and controlled, diametrically opposed to the fast cutting of
most stunt work (and anathema to our stunt coordinator). In the
casino we broke similar action into very specific shots. In contrast to
these two scenes, we shot in the burning Skyfall Lodge with a
handheld camera and in a very spontaneous way. Sam wanted each
action scene within Skyfall to have an individual style, or its own
point of view.
It wasn’t just Shanghai that found an English stand-in. For the
exteriors of Macao’s casino, we used Pinewood’s exterior Paddock
Tank, where Dennis created a bridge and island temple based on
ones we had scouted in China. While we no longer had to travel, this
did mean we had to simulate a warm evening in Macao on a cold
March night in England. By 10 p.m. the ground froze over but not,
luckily, the tank itself. Moreover, the water never started steaming,
another potential disaster that almost tripped me up on Blade
Runner 2049.
We rigged our camera on a 100-foot Technocrane arm raised on
a 10-foot-high scaffold platform to the rear of the set. Sam and I had
specific shots in mind. Working with our key grip, Gary Hymns, we
figured that with a crane of this length we could shoot a majority of
our scene with its fulcrum remaining in one position. This was the
first time anyone had used the 100-foot Technocrane in the UK, so it
became quite a popular shoot that night, with plenty of extra grips
“visiting” our set and helping out despite the cold.
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 Bond arrives at the casino surrounded by a spectacle of different
lights. The floating lanterns held 250-watt quartz bulbs dimmed down
and flickering slowly to look like flames in a wax lantern. The
dragons were built to be translucent, their interiors rigged with an
array of regular 100- and 150-watt household bulbs. We hung two
lanterns to either end of the boat on which Bond stands to open up
Daniel’s face. Otherwise, I worked with the art department to outline
the roof of the casino using a pattern of low-wattage golf-ball bulbs, a
majority of the set being only a flat cutout. The casino and its lighting
were then extended in post, as was the sky, the lake beyond, and
the silhouette of the far hills. But we captured the bridge, the
dragons, the front of the casino, and the large body of water
surrounding it in camera, along with many of the fireworks.
Sam decided we would introduce the casino in one continuous
shot, following Bond through the main body of the space and to the
cashiers’ counter. To finesse the camera move and lighting, I
rehearsed on a weekend with our Steadicam operator, Peter
Cavaciuti. Although we supplemented it, using a 12-foot ring of a
dozen dimmed-down 2K open-face Blondes suspended above the
gaming floor to give it an overall glow, the main source of light for all
our shots came from the practical lamps that appear in frame. The
lights that hang above the gaming tables were fitted with 2K quartz
bulbs, and the inside of the shades were wrapped with a gold stipple
reflective material. Other hanging lights were rigged with 1K bulbs,
as were the square walkway lights specially manufactured for this
set. We hung a row of paper lanterns to light Moneypenny (Naomie
Harris) at the point where she first appears in the shot and rigged a
strip of warm fluorescent light above the cashiers’ counter. On the
tables we placed a variety of glass candleholders that enclosed 250-
watt bulbs, and we hid the wires by drilling through the tabletops. On
the back walls we rigged small red lanterns to define but not light the
walls, which were no more than red drapes hung in place.
The casino bar proved the one exception to the sole use of
practical sources elsewhere. Although designed for the set, the
lanterns did not, by themselves, light the conversation between
Sévérine, played by Bérénice Marlohe, and Bond in an acceptable
way—though “acceptable” is a subjective term. To shoot the actors
as if lit by these lanterns, we ganged up a series of 2’ × 2’ gold
stipple reflectors to form a U-shaped cove, then bounced 5 ×
Tweenies (650-watt Fresnel lamps) off them to create a soft but
directional wrap of golden light. Once again, the warmth came from a
combination of dimming the lamps, the bounce off the gold stipple
reflector, and the addition of a light CTO gel to the front of each
lamp.
Above the bridge that serves as the entrance of the casino,
spanning a pit that’s home to an irritable Komodo dragon, we
designed a square of bulbs to fit into the ceiling of the set. These
would light the final piece of action on the bridge, but the pit
concerned me as it had no obvious light source. None, that is, until
Dennis suggested he could add a small shrine, and I realized an
array of double-wick votive candles might provide a solution. I would
not have liked to be the one to light the candles had the dragon been
real, but it was only a dummy, a “stuffie,” which helped VFX replicate
the lighting on their fully animated digital version.
 Several scenes justified our choice to shoot Skyfall with a digital
camera, none more than the casino and the glass offices that looked
out on the jellyfish. I know I could have shot these on film, but as the
Alexa recorded so much more detail in low light, it allowed me to rely
far more on practical sources than I had on any previous film. But
definition is only one element of image capture. I might have
achieved a similar image quality by shooting in anamorphic or in 65
mm, but both camera systems would have been bigger, heavier, and
less easily maneuverable than our digital camera.
 We shot Skyfall in London and Scotland over ninety-seven days
and in Turkey for another twenty. The schedule was only three
weeks longer than that for Kundun, for example, though it included
more travel and complicated action sequences on both stage and
location. As James and I soon found out, a Bond film is a roller-
coaster ride, and once you start, you just hang on. The hope is that
the scene you are shooting one day will seamlessly connect to the
one that follows, even though they may shoot weeks apart from one
another and, perhaps, in different countries.
The film climaxes at Bond’s ancestral home, Scotland’s Skyfall
Lodge. We used the Highlands for footage of their journey but a
moorland area twenty-seven miles west of London for the exterior of
the Lodge itself. We had scouted a castle on the west coast of
Scotland, but a combination of budgetary limitations, the need to
house a large crew on a remote location, and the practical
considerations of burning down both a historic castle and the forest
that surrounded it led us to look for an alternative solution!
As our alternative we chose an army training area. Like our
Salisbury Plain locations for 1917 a few years later, the site provided
us with a broad, unspoiled landscape covered at that time of year
with browned heather and dried grasses. This matched Scotland
well, and a nearby hill bordered by forestry overlooking a flat
expanse of moorland worked perfectly for the scripted action. VFX
could add the distant mountains and the lake beyond the Lodge
later.
Though Dennis built the exterior of Skyfall Lodge on location, the
complexity of the action demanded that its interior be a set onstage.
The downside: We would have no landscape outside the windows.
The upside: We could control the light as the action moved from late
afternoon through dusk and into night. Matching the look of our
location work with that of our interior set, which was to include action
with a helicopter at dusk, would be a challenge. But, by having
control of an equivalent lamp, I could more easily time the movement
of the beam of its spotlight to the action within the scene.
We first shot the buildup to the action sequence on location,
luckily under perfectly overcast skies, before we moved to our stage
work. As darkness descends, the view outside becomes less
important than what happens inside, so I added some smoke and let
the exterior blow out a little. For most of the scene, the windows are
seen side on or out of focus in the background, so the slight
“blooming” of the light in the smoke felt natural, while the interior felt
a little darker in contrast to the brightness of the outside. On a few
occasions, where the windows are in focus and you would expect to
see a view, VFX helped by compositing in a background. We never
used a blue- or greenscreen for this, primarily because it would have
destroyed the way the lighting worked on set, but there was little
need as the window frames formed a clear matte line for
postproduction work.

As the day turned to dusk, we changed the white backing that

hung from the rail to a mid-gray while adding some quarter- or half-
blue gel to the barn doors of the bounce lights. As we were using
multiple lamps to light the backings, we could, by focusing an
individual lamp on a small area of the bounce, control the angle from
which the light entered each window. The camera would see the
backing as a mid-gray but a lamp, spotted in and panned to the side
of the camera’s field of view, provides the source lighting for the
shot. This was similar to the way I would later light Sapper Morton’s
farm in Blade Runner 2049. The camera sees an area that is not
burnt-out while the characters are lit from a hot spot to one side.
 As night falls and the bad guys enter the building, Biggles and I
began adding extra blue gel to the HMI lamps bouncing off the now-
gray backing. The shutters on the windows served a central role to
both the action and the set design. But, as there was no valid reason
for there to be any other source of light inside the building, I didn’t
want them to cut out all the daylight from the outside. To solve this,
we used roughly made wooden shutters and widened some of the
slits between the boards of their construction.
The shot of Silva exiting the helicopter and those that follow him
were made on our second visit to our exterior set. To create the
effect of the helicopter circling Skyfall Lodge onstage, we used a
motorized track that carried an HMI 6K PAR lamp, set inside the rail
used to hang our bounce material. We mounted the lamp using an
underslung Power Pod remote head so that the beam could be
panned toward a window and hold on it, as if it were the helicopter’s
spotlight searching for Bond. I left the camera setting at 4,000K
throughout, and changed the blue saturation by using gels on the
lamps, so that the color of the helicopter spotlight and the warmth of
the firelight remained a constant as the twilight became more
saturated.

The cold light of the PAR matched the light on the real helicopter
and contrasted with the effects firelight that soon became an integral
part of the scene. The explosions and the fires were specifically
placed with reference to the overall action we had mapped out in
advance. When I needed off-camera firelight, I generally used a
flame bar rather than a lamp, as this was quick and easy to add into
the mix.

On our exterior location, we filmed several passes with the

Chinook helicopter in the very last light of day, shooting handheld as
it was impossible to know what the helicopter was going to do or how
Javier would react. The wind from the helicopter’s rotor was so
strong that it once blew out Javier’s false teeth—those he wore for
the role, I should add! While some of the close coverage of Silva was
lit by the actual helicopter, we used a purpose-built lighting rig for
other shots. Biggles had a crane constructed inside the shell of the
Skyfall exterior able to rotate 360 degrees, while the lamp could be
lowered or retracted on a pulley system that suspended it from the
boom. The silhouette of the helicopter was later inserted by VFX
against the fading light in the sky, and the boom of the crane painted
out.
 Chris Corbould manufactured a fully controllable fire rig that he
had built into the construction of the set, much like the gas lines in
the walls of Barton Fink’s burning corridor, though on a much larger
scale. With this we could shoot all the action on location, including
Bond exiting the tunnel with the burning set in the background. Once
we had finished shooting with the actors, a second unit and a model
unit completed the sequence, as the helicopter destroys Bond’s
Aston Martin DB5 and meets its own end in a fiery crash.
It always seemed that the sequence that follows Bond across the
moor to his final encounter with Silva should be lit by a single light
representing the burning Lodge. Talking with Sam, I suggested we
could shoot the scene as we had the oil fires in Jarhead, and for the
same reasons—more control and cheaper. But, with most of the
studios in the UK at full capacity, our only viable option was to use a
stage space 350 feet long but only about 100 feet wide. Ideally it
would have been twice that, but it was the best option, being the only
option.
Our characters would be running in a direct line away from the
burning Skyfall, and the action was going to take place over some
distance. As the inverse square law dictates, to maintain an even
falloff between the beginning and end of the action, I needed my
source to be as far away as possible. Given the size of the stage, I
could afford only sixty feet between my source and the starting point,
and the same distance between where it ended and the far stage
wall. This left about 230 feet of set in which to stage the scene.
Given that we could double back for some shots, this seemed
manageable, but I would have to adjust the intensity of the light as
the action moved down the “corridor” of our set.
Biggles and I selected twenty-four-bulb Maxi Brutes, Dinos, as
our lamps. Arranging these in a pyramid shape allowed us to use the
lower section of the rig to light the action at the beginning of the run
while adding more intensity, using medium flood and spot bulbs, to
the upper tiers of lamps as the action moved further away. We built a
large frame of gel to cover the entire pyramid of thirty lamps and, to
save a meltdown, secured it eight feet to its front. We cut the gel in
vertical sections of ¼, ½, and ¾ CTO in an effort to break up the
color and create a variation between the center and the outside.
 As we had for Jarhead, we filled the stage with smoke but
restricted it as much as possible to the area around our light source.
By using some atmosphere close to the lamps, I could mitigate any
flare they might produce in the lens and soften the overall effect of
the light. Besides, without the smoke there would have been no
silhouette when shooting directly toward the lamps, only bright
squares against a black hole.
Peter Cavaciuti was shooting the slower parts of the action on his
Steadicam, so to get a little warm light into a character’s face, I or an
electrician walked backward with him carrying a ring light. This was a
three-foot-six ring of half-inch plywood with a crosspiece attached to
act as a handle. On the face of the ring, we mounted 40-watt bulbs
at six-inch spacing, dimming them down to match the color of the
firelight source. A hand-squeeze dimmer allowed us to randomly vary
the intensity of the light as if the flicker of the fire.
To shoot some of the running shots we mounted the camera on a
programmable wire rig supplied by Gavin Weatherall. This enabled
the remotely operated camera to move at the same speed as the
action while floating above the uneven ground of our set, a system
that would again come in handy when we came to shoot 1917.
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 The same night we shot the burning Skyfall on location we filmed
the exterior of the church and graveyard. Only a two-wall set, the
church stood across the valley from the Lodge at a distance that
roughly represented the reality of the script but too far away for the
fire to act as a light source (though with today’s faster digital
cameras that would not be the case). Instead, we rigged a 60-foot
line of 12 × 12 Light Maxi Brutes only 250 feet from the church to
serve as a stand-in for the burning set. It was a hell of a cheat, but
what do you do?
The church interior was a stage set for which we built six 8’ × 8’
gold stipple reflectors and rigged them parallel to the church
windows on the side of the set facing the Lodge. We evenly spaced
a row of twelve 2K Blondes beneath the windows and pointed them
up toward the reflectors, which were angled at 45 degrees to the set
wall. Though the light this created was far too soft to be coming from
the burning Skyfall Lodge, which at this distance would have
appeared as if a point source, it felt right. I wanted the light to have a
romantic quality that would contrast with the violence of the scene,
though its deeper red—we had purposely dimmed the lamps for this
effect—seemed to be appropriate to that violence. Perhaps I was
looking to service two opposing thoughts!
Even now, we occasionally find ourselves talking to someone who
can’t believe we didn’t shoot Skyfall on film. In the beginning, Sam
and I discussed adding grain in post to make the image look more
“filmic.” For the same reason, Andrew Niccol and I had planned to
add grain while making In Time but, on both occasions, we
abandoned the plan. But what does “filmic” mean? Even decades
after first being asked that question when applying to film school I
still don’t know the answer.

People think far too much about techniques and not

enough about seeing.
HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON
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 27
WELCOME SHADOWS
There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are
stronger in the contrast.
CHARLES DICKENS
In 2011, I was asked to introduce the Quebecois director of the
Oscar-nominated foreign film Incendies, Denis Villeneuve, to an
evening gathering of Academy members. Neither James nor I had
met Denis, but we’d loved Incendies and his previous films,
particularly Maelström, which is narrated by a fish lying on a
fishmonger’s slab. We quickly discovered that Denis is passionate
about film, highly imaginative, but also thoughtful and calm. He
seemed like someone we would enjoy working with, so I asked my
agent to put my name in the mix if the chance ever arose.
As luck would have it, Denis planned to make his debut in the
United States with Prisoners, a dark psychological thriller about the
kidnapping of two young girls and the passions stirred in its
aftermath. When James and I read the script, we felt the film could
be either an over-the-top gothic horror film or an edgy psychological
thriller but, based on Denis’s earlier work, we had every reason to
think it would be the latter. Luck plays such a large part in one’s
career path, and it was only by chance that Denis was making this
film at this moment and had yet to hire a cinematographer. I am
always insecure when starting work on any film and especially so
when I don’t know its director. But sometimes it just seems to fit, and
Prisoners would become one of my best experiences. I think I could
say the same for James, Andy, Bruce Hamme, and gaffer Chris
Napolitano, with whom I would be working for a ninth time. It was a
bonus that Denis immediately understood the way James and I
collaborate on a film.
We would be shooting the film in winter, but on our first scouting
trip we found the region bathed in a beautiful, low sunlight. The
dappled beams through the trees, the puffy white clouds against an
azure sky—it was all quite lovely and exactly what we didn’t want.
But the scout taught us well. We’d be filming around the weather and
our schedule needed to reflect that. Fortunately, the main cast was
with us for the entirety of the shoot, which allowed us to have some
flexibility. It wasn’t quite the same experience as Another Time,
Another Place, but for a Hollywood production, it came close.
 There were other similarities between Mike Radford’s and Denis’s
ways of working. Like Mike, Denis enjoyed the prep period. He was
intensely focused on finding the right locations and would set aside
time for Canadian production designer Patrice Vermette and me to
talk through the script with him and to work on storyboards. Denis
and I spent many hours walking through each sequence on location,
accompanied by Patrice and our AD, Don Sparks. By the time we
started shooting I had a rough sketch of the way Denis imagined
staging each scene, and for some scenes we had fully drawn
storyboards.
Whatever preparation you might do you can’t change the weather,
but by finding a small neighborhood on the outskirts of Atlanta that
would provide the main settings for the film, we gave ourselves
options. On sunny days we headed inside to shoot interiors, which
included everything from the homes of the Dovers and Birches—the
families of the kidnapped girls—to an abandoned apartment building
where suspected kidnapper Alex Jones (Paul Dano) is held captive
and tortured.
Each set had its own particular needs. Played by Viola Davis and
Terrence Howard, the Birches live in a small house with low ceilings,
so my lighting had to come from practical lights or from bounced
daylight sources outside the windows. The only interior light I used,
other than those seen within the frame, was a twin socket with two
60-watt globes hidden behind the ceiling light in the front room. To
remain free to shoot regardless of the weather, I asked the art
department to provide sheer curtains that would allow me to diffuse
the windows and light through them to replicate daylight.
For the Dovers, played by Hugh Jackman and Maria Bello, we
shot inside a different house than the one we used for exteriors. The
split made shooting easier as we could light the one set for interior
work and hold it in place while we shot exteriors. This would not only
provide weather cover but, as it had on A Serious Man, allow us to
move from exterior to interior without waiting for the set to be lit.
From all our discussions, I made a map of each location denoting
the basic angles from which the camera would see the set and my
proposed lighting. These were especially useful when Chris and I
worked on the extended chase through the backyards of our
neighborhood, through the forest and to the freeway. Given my
distaste for simulating “moonlight” when there are alternative options
and imagining much of the neighborhood bathed in darkness, Chris
and I arranged practical lights as if triggered by motion sensors to
reveal an intruder on a back porch or a barking dog.
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 Sometimes you’d never dream of using the interiors of a location
no matter how perfect the exterior. We did find the perfect
abandoned apartment building next to our chosen liquor store’s
parking lot, but the inside was unsafe for us to scout in, let alone for
a crew to work in. The alternative? A standing set that could be lit
and ready to shoot, one built inside a warehouse that not only
allowed Denis and Patrice to control its layout, but that also served
as one more weather cover option.
Although I had not worked with Denis before, I soon realized that
he welcomed shadows. He was also willing for a character in the
foreground to be in focus as a dark shape or to keep a character out
of focus entirely, as can be seen in Keller Dover’s dream.
Denis would let a dramatic scene, as when Keller breaks the sink
with a hammer, play out in one observational wide shot, giving the
audience no escape from the emotion of the moment. Too often a
director will use multiple angles in a similar scene, the tension falling
away with every edit. Death by a thousand cuts!
 Or he might suggest a shot that confounds everyone. While
shooting the exterior of the Birch house, and struggling to complete
the day’s schedule, Denis suggested one last shot—a slow track
toward a tree trunk! Despite some protests from production at the
lateness of the hour, we completed the shot in the fading light of the
day and Denis’s idea, which seemed so arbitrary at the time, led to
one of the most tense and effective shots of all.
One pivotal location, the gas station where Detective Loki (Jake
Gyllenhaal) arrests Alex, presented more of a challenge. The script
called for a highway rest stop rather than a brightly lit gas station but,
recalling a roadside scene in Revolutionary Road, this gave me
pause. For the earlier film I had our art department provide three
fluorescent-style streetlamps that both appeared in shot and justified
the light source. I could do something similar but felt Prisoners
needed something more graphic, a pool of light surrounded by
darkness, with the suspect’s RV being parked to one side in the
shadows. Searching online, I found an image of a small
Hopperesque gas station that seemed an interesting alternative and
showed it to Denis. He warmed to the idea but was concerned that
the RV be in the shadows close to a wooded area, as scripted.
Finding such a gas station with a wooded parking lot, on a road that
we could control at night and with space for the cranes we would
need for a rain effect, would be a tall ask for our location scouts.
But find it they did. The spot was a little larger than the ideal
Denis and I imagined, but with a parking lot bordered by woodland.
That the location was virtually lit was a bonus, too. Though Chris did
change out some of the mercury vapor lamps above the pumps,
which were old and had become discolored, add some fluorescent
strips to outline the side of the store, and position a few small HMIs
to pick out a billboard, we could save rigging time here and use it
elsewhere.
 The scenes at the Jones house, where Alex lives with his mother,
Holly (Melissa Leo), gave me the most trouble, but it was the sort of
trouble that keeps the job interesting. For me, a scene doesn’t have
to involve spectacular action or a dramatically visual location to offer
a challenge. It’s the drama within a scene that inspires me, the
interplay of the characters with the camera and the light. The street
outside had no existing light sources, which can be a blessing or a
curse. I added some simple practical sources to the outside of the
house and asked the art department to provide a few streetlights to
position along the road. I used these only to justify the sickly sodium-
colored light I would use to pick out the characters as the isolation of
the house was a key element of the story, and the threat implied by
the surrounding darkness helped to emphasize that isolation.
The interior of the Joneses’ house is a mix of colors, a range of
fluorescent lights and old tungsten fixtures, some of which came with
the location; others, such as the bare fluorescent tube in the kitchen,
we rigged ourselves. To the rear of the house, we used the glassed-
in conservatory that faces the abandoned car as the main light
source, mounting a double row of cool green fluorescent tubes on
the ceiling inside. By using a set of matching tubes, set on stands
along the roof line, we were able to “cheat” this source to project a
greenish wash of light over the characters at the car that’s parked
above the pit in which Dover becomes trapped. Other than lighting
some trees to create depth, I allowed the backgrounds to go
completely dark in contrast to the bright practical sources.
And sometimes just a key fob was enough to light a scene.
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 For the film’s final scene, as the forensic team is finishing and
Detective Loki drives up, Patrice and I felt we could justify two banks
of work lights. I specifically wanted mercury vapor lights as they
would also give a cool, harsh light. As they turn off, Loki is left in
silence, with the conservatory now serving as the sole light source.
From out of the shadows, Loki finally hears the whistle. At the
request of the production company, Alcon Entertainment, we shot
two potential endings. In the unused ending Loki joins Keller in the
hole. This was not Denis’s preferred version as it eliminated any
ambiguity, whether Loki would rescue Keller or not. But Alcon, known
for the founders Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson’s strong
support of the filmmaker, promised to use whichever ending tested
higher. And they stuck to their word!
With our next film, Unbroken, James would take on an even
bigger role, evolving to deal with the complexities of the digital era.
Present every day, she plays many roles and interacts with members
of the production at every level, yet it was not until Sicario that a
producer, who had worked with us previously and knew her role,
insisted on adding her to the crew list. With a film negative there are
limited ways to print the image, but with a digital file the options are
seemingly endless. I had always overseen every step of the
photochemical process, but in the world of pixels James oversees
what is a far more complex chain of events: first making sure the
camera settings and DIT (digital imaging tech) monitors are correctly
calibrated, that the digital file is transferred with the correct color
space, that the image is timed to reflect what we are capturing on
set, and then following that image all the way through post into the
DI suite.

We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just

passing through.
AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL SAYING

Unbroken would take James and me Down Under for five months,
to film an epic that was scripted by Joel and Ethan but to be directed
by Angelina Jolie, who had likened it to The Bridge on the River
Kwai. It was a challenging project, not least because Australia’s box
jellyfish can be deadly, and we were attempting to shoot extended
sequences in and on the water. Those ended up in a tank
surrounded by bluescreen. Our B-24 bomber was purpose-built in
Mexico and never left the ground. We staged the Berlin 1936
Olympics in a Sydney sports park and Naoetsu, the notorious
Japanese prison camp, on Cockatoo Island, within sight of the Opera
House and constantly surrounded by pleasure yachts and
sightseeing vessels. Strange things can happen when making a film.
James and I hoped to work with Angelina for a second time on
Africa, the story of Richard Leakey and the famous
paleoanthropologist’s crusade to save the wildlife of Kenya. I would
have loved to return to Africa with James, to show her some of the
continent where I’d worked extensively early in my career, but the
familiar “creative differences,” this time between Angie and the
studio, got in the way. My last visit to the continent, to South Africa
and Mozambique with Danny Glover, had been in search of locations
for a film about the eighteenth-century Haitian revolution led by
Toussaint Louverture. The fortified town and slave port on the Island
of Mozambique, once the capital of Portuguese East Africa, proved a
perfect fit for our needs, but the project would go no further. Why a
film does or doesn’t get made is a mystery. As it turned out, James
and I were on our way to the Mexican border.
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 28
THE LAND OF WOLVES
You’re asking me how a watch works. For now we’ll just
keep an eye on the time.
ALEJANDRO, IN SICARIO
As with Prisoners, we felt our second film with Denis could
have gone the wrong way, had it been another director. Written by
Taylor Sheridan, Sicario explores the influence of the Mexican drug
cartels and the escalating violence on both sides of the border
between the United States and Mexico. It’s a brutal story that in
other hands might have felt exploitative or reactionary rather than
becoming the complex, challenging film James and I knew Denis
would make.
One of the benefits of working with a director for a second time is
that you have a better understanding of his or her process. Denis
and I had such a good experience during prep for Prisoners that he
wanted to repeat the way we had explored the script together on
Sicario, only this time he might lock his production office door when
he didn’t want us to be interrupted. Denis loves to think in images,
and our discussion would sometimes lead to a scene being dropped,
dialogue being cut, or a change of location. Films change from the
script, through budgeting, scouting, storyboarding, and rehearsals,
and on set when the actors and the day bring their own inspiration.
But it’s not until the final edit that the film becomes what it is.
Sicario was an unusual film in that it was a story told from the
point of view of two characters, Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), an FBI
agent still clinging to her ideals as she’s drawn into a situation
defined by moral compromise, and the enigmatic Alejandro (Benicio
Del Toro). Denis was concerned with how the film would transition
between one and the other. One scene we shot, for instance, on the
beach in Veracruz, establishing Alejandro’s identity and his
relationship with the CIA operative Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), came
too early in the story and was cut. I tell Denis that he cut my favorite
scene, but I am joking. It was a great scene, but the film is so much
stronger without it.
Denis enjoys location scouting (not all directors do), which, for
him, becomes the source of many new ideas. We visited El Paso
hoping to shoot on the Bridge of the Americas but, as with No
Country for Old Men, we needed an alternative for our border
crossing. From our storyboards, Patrice Vermette could see that we
needed customs booths and a road leading into the United States.
He realized the wide shots could be made from a helicopter on the
real location while, with minimal CG work in post, he could turn a
parking lot, usually used by hot-air balloonists, into a border
crossing. In doing so he gave us total control over the scene. Going
to Mexico was another problem. But after discussing all the
alternatives with the producers, passionately referencing the colorful
developing country described in the script and our detailed action
storyboards, we were granted shooting time in Mexico City, rather
than trying to simulate Ciudad Juarez on the streets of Albuquerque
or Fort Lauderdale, as had been suggested. The bodies hanging
from the overpass were, however, digital additions and referenced
on our shoot with sandbags. The reality of the scene was too vivid a
memory for the people living there.
 The ordinary-looking suburban neighborhood that now appears in
the film’s opening scene was a challenge to find. We were based in
Albuquerque, one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States,
but we needed a specific sort of house, one part of a neighborhood
surrounded by the desert but, given the events that are about to be
revealed to have taken place inside, also partially removed from its
neighbors. We had hoped to find a house that could work for both
exteriors and interiors, but our preferred exterior would have involved
compromising Denis’s idea for the layout of the interior. Also, to
shoot inside the location would have involved destroying someone’s
actual home to make room for all the prop corpses!
As always when shooting onstage, a balance must be drawn
between the budget of the film and the desire to see the exterior
landscape from inside a set. For Sicario this would be particularly
important as we were staging action that directly connected the
interior with the exterior. Patrice and I decided the best and most
straightforward approach would be to use a landscape backing
combined with a false perspective version of the backyard that
existed on location. The existence of the concrete wall surrounding
the yard was a piece of luck as it allowed us to hide the “join”
between our three-dimensional onstage set piece and the
photorealistic backing depicting the hillside and sky beyond.
It’s usually an advantage to have as much space outside a set
window as possible, but there is a trade-off between the extent of
that space and what the camera will see at the top of frame. Given
the height of the stage and what our widest shots would see, we
reduced the size of the backyard onstage by half, placing a scaled-
down wall twenty-five feet from the house and the backing another
five feet beyond that. This was the best compromise we could find
between our need to look out from inside the set and the action to be
staged outside the windows.

We used an overhead array of Spacelites to light both the exterior

yard and the backing. A front-lit backing, such as we used here on
Sicario, is best lit softly, and here it required no specific lighting.
Chris took six T12 Fresnel lamps to create beams of direct sunlight
entering through the tract house windows and hallway skylights.
Each lamp had to be separated from the others to avoid double
shadows, which was done using extended barn doors rather than
flags. We did it this way so that the angle of the lamps could be
easily adjusted, as if the sunlight had shifted direction from one
scene to another. The windows to the back of the house, which we
never saw out of, were surrounded by light grid diffusion frames,
covered with a secondary layer of light frost and backlit using an
array of 2K Blondes.
Chris Napolitano and I had scouted the exterior location and
mapped the sun’s path during the day. Having worked with Denis on
the storyboards, I could plan our shots so that the angle of the sun
would match from the interior to the exterior. For instance, onstage
we pan with Emily as she is about to exit into the yard. As she goes
through the door the shed explodes and she is blown backward into
the set. We shot the explosion at the exterior location. Onstage, we
erected a small bluescreen to fill the background, which becomes
visible only when the camera looks along the length of the exterior,
and we used a charge as well as air blowers to stand in for the effect
of the explosion on Emily.
Both before and after the explosion, the scene cuts between
inside and out, so it was important that the sunlight on the set was
coming from a similar direction as on location.
 The film follows Kate’s journey to places she’d never otherwise
see, including a warehouse used as a nighttime holding pen for
undocumented immigrants who’ve been caught crossing the border.
When we scouted this location, the building was being used to store
fertilizer so, although it had a great look, cleaning it up seemed
impractical. But, after much searching, it proved to be our best
option. The existing lighting consisted of a few low-wattage mercury
vapor lights, nothing I could use to represent a high-security
government building.
As always, I wanted to light the space with fixtures that would not
only light the scene but appear natural when on camera, defining the
space rather than spilling light across the walls and the ceiling. I
asked Patrice if we could manufacture some simple aluminum
reflectors inside which I could mount a 2K open-face lamp. Using
them in multiples, I could create a large soft source that would also
be confined to the central area of the location. My concern was the
height of the roof and the exposure I could achieve using a minimal
number of fixtures. I considered suspending lamps on chains but
dismissed the idea. Although it might have looked natural and would
certainly have given me a more manageable exposure, I didn’t want
the lights to distract from the very aspects of the location that Denis
and I liked, particularly its openness.
 Photometric charts come in handy. Looking at the specs for a 2K
Blonde, I could see that a single lamp at full flood from a distance of
fifty feet would give me a stop of around 2.0 on the Alexa at 800
ASA. This gave me little room to play with and left me with some real
concerns given the size of the space. Our schedule was tight, so
Patrice and his art department went ahead with finding a
manufacturer to make scoops to house the 2Ks while Chris and I
worked on a plan.
The original idea consisted of thirty-four scoop lights, each with a
diameter of 20 inches, but following a prelight Chris and I did one
night after work, a little more than a week before the scheduled
shooting date for this set, we added a few more.
The light from the twenty-four lamps the rigging crew had put in
place for our prelight appeared soft, and the multiple shadows from
so many single sources were hardly noticeable. But it did surprise
me how small the fixtures looked. I had been right to be concerned
about the size of the space. I was getting a stop of only 1.4, which
would have been fine had I not wanted to add some light diffusion to
the face of the scoops and dim them. Our original order expanded to
fifty-four lights, giving us a shooting stop of 1.8, which was adequate
given we were working with the Master Prime lenses and could rate
the Alexa at 1,200 rather than its standard 800 ASA. Adding the
diffusion to the face of the scoops not only softened the edge of the
beam but allowed the camera to look directly toward the fixtures
without any lens flare. And, again, I am not a fan of lens flare!
 We never burnt the 2K Blondes at 100 percent, setting the central
lamps at around 90 percent and dimming those to the sides to about
70 percent. This filled the space with a warm glow that became both
brighter and a little whiter closer to the center. Other than a few small
sodium lights we added to the wall outside, the entire scene was
shot under this one light source with little additional floor lighting. As
with the “chandelier” for the synagogue in A Serious Man, this
proved to be both a practical and, as it allowed us to shoot the scene
quickly, a cheap solution.
Not all our locations needed so much thought. The interrogation
room was part of an abandoned military complex, the inside of which
was lit by four-foot, stained, yellow fluorescent fixtures. They looked
perfect to me (though I’m not sure what the studio executive who
called me in Kenya from the Pacific Coast Highway would have
made of them). Chris added one more fixture to the ceiling in the
interrogation room and, using old diffusers and yellow gel, made
sure all the others in the corridor matched the same sickly look.
Some of the most suspenseful scenes in Sicario involve a
nighttime raid through an underground tunnel used by the cartel to
smuggle drugs across the border.
 For the opening of the sequence, which sees the team ready
themselves for their reconnaissance of the cross-border tunnel, we
chose a location facing west, less than a mile from our Albuquerque
studio base. This not only allowed us to shoot at the end of a full day
of shooting onstage, but also to jump to it when we had the right
weather.
When Denis and I discussed the film, and the night work in
particular, it became obvious that the audience should not be
allowed to see more than the characters, as they were wearing night
vision goggles for a reason. To approach the scene as a regular
night shoot, with an artificial “moonlight,” made no sense. Denis
agreed that the sequence could play out as a series of POVs, as if
seen through the night vision goggles that all the team members
were to wear. His one qualification was to have Alejandro’s point of
view look different from the others, so that the audience could
recognize his specific POV.
The regular image intensifiers that give the grainy green cast
familiar to any soldier or hunter, as I’d used on Courage Under Fire,
were a given.
 And, when thinking about Alejandro’s POV, I recalled the great
Soviet film I Am Cuba and the wonderful sequence set on a sugar
plantation shot on infrared film stock. Of course, there are plenty of
digital infrared cameras on the market that can be used to find a leak
or an overheating electrical circuit, all of which produce an array of
images in glorious psychedelic colors. But none would give me the
resolution I was after, and both Denis and I liked the stark look of
black-and-white. To cut a long story short, James did a little research
and came across a company called FLIR that had the perfect
camera and were willing to go all out to support us.
 For the last section of the sequence, which plays almost entirely
from Alejandro’s perspective, our standby prop heated a pair of
boots with a blowtorch before each take. When the lead character
walked down the stairs and into the tunnel, his footprints left a heat
signal on the ground, which was easily picked up by our infrared
camera.
To light for the green night vision, I bounced a 1K Fresnel off a 12’
× 12’ reflector that was rigged on a fifty-foot crane over one hundred
feet from the action. Without some lighting the image was a little too
flat and very noisy, so I lit the scene with the most minimal lighting I
have ever used at night. Of course, this lighting made no difference
to the heat-sensitive infrared camera and hardly helped the actors as
their goggles were only props. They were performing in true
darkness and doing their best not to trip on the rugged terrain while
doing so.
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 As the Coens and I had done on Fargo, we split Sicario’s night-
driving scenes into those we could shoot onstage and those we
really did have to shoot on the road at night. I lit both versions very
simply, using a four-foot fluorescent tube sitting on the hood of each
vehicle to mimic light from the headlamps bouncing off the road
ahead. To get the feeling of movement when shooting Silvio’s
(Maximiliano Hernandez) police car onstage, we mounted a few
lights on dollies and tracked them across the background. The
lamps, 150-watt Peppers or 100-watt Inkys (“Inky” being from
“dinky,” meaning small), were both dimmed and reduced in size to
look like point sources far away, although they were only about
twenty feet from the car.

Having kidnapped Diaz, Alejandro has him drive to the luxurious

villa of his cartel boss, Fausto Alarcón (Julio César Cedillo). For this
section of the driving, we used the same technique but with a cool
four-foot tube on the hood of his car to differentiate Diaz’s vehicle
from Silvio’s.
 For Fausto’s hacienda we were lucky to find a newly constructed
building set on a suburban estate that had to be approached via a
semiprivate, tree-lined road. This suited our sequence as all we had
to do was avoid the surrounding houses to make the road appear as
if it belonged to a single property. We would be seeing the driveway
and house from a distance as well as from multiple closer angles, so
it was obvious that any lighting would appear in picture and would
need to be designed into the architecture. It also felt important that
the house look a little over-the-top wealthy. Denis had rejected the
location at first because it didn’t look that expansive and fancy, so,
as with Andrew Dominik’s “toy train,” the lighting would have to help.
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 Sometimes you get lucky. When scouting the space with Denis
and Patrice we initially dismissed the idea of an open exterior, but all
three of us were drawn back to the same space. In the dark and in
its own pool of light, it could appear to be a private, sacrosanct family
space. I think it was the image of Alejandro stepping out through the
screen doors of the main house and walking directly across the lawn
toward the family at their dinner that ultimately convinced Denis to
use it, even to the point of agreeing with production to reduce the
number of our shooting days for the sequence (we would have to
shoot at night). Denis felt confident in cutting our shoot time as the
scene had been shortened considerably during our storyboarding
process. A long conversation was cut from the scene and, instead of
Alejandro letting Fausto’s children leave the dinner table before he
shoots his wife, the scene now plays out a little differently.
 To help the shooting go even faster, I had a piece of luck in the
form of the temporary lighting the owner of the location had strung
up on the ceiling of this “dining room”: a simple strand of golf-ball
bulbs from Home Depot. It seemed perfect, so we bought another
string that matched, and the scene was lit!
The final sequence of Sicario is one of my favorites of any film I
have worked on. Denis rehearsed at length with Emily and Benicio,
both before the day of the shoot and on that same morning, to
ensure that the final confrontation between Alejandro and Kate felt
right for the moment and in character for each actor. As we had
several scenes inside the apartment, and because the interior of our
chosen location had a floor plan that wasn’t appropriate for the
scripted action, Patrice built a set. For scheduling reasons, the
location shots of Emily on the balcony were made more than a week
before the interior scenes onstage. But by the time we came to shoot
these exteriors we had a clear idea of the angles we wanted and,
thankfully, we had a night shoot on the same location. This enabled
us to take a late call and shoot our day work in the more dramatic
afternoon light typical of New Mexico during, what was by then,
midsummer.

The shot from inside the apartment looking out implies someone
is watching Kate as she lights her cigarette. Kate turns to the
window, sensing something is wrong, but she cannot see inside and
just stares at her own reflection. The camera pushes in a little to
enhance the moment before it cuts to Kate in close-up, continuing
the same slight push in.
Patrice and I discussed using a backing onstage, but as the
camera is seeing Kate in a full shot I was not too concerned with the
exterior view. Besides, I liked the clear silhouette of the figure
against the pattern of the curtains we had specifically chosen for the
shot. Perhaps, ideally, I would have liked a vague sense of the trees
outside, but there were more important things to spend our budget
on, not the least of which was our wish to shoot Mexico for Mexico.
This set could be done simply.
 When we began to block the crucial scene in the kitchen, what
started as complex became quite simple. Instead of standing to
confront Emily, perhaps continually moving around her as if studying
his prey, Benicio felt his character would appear more threatening if
he were relaxed and seated as Kate comes in. Then, to increase the
threat, he suggested just the one movement from a stool at the
counter to a chair placed opposite Emily at the kitchen table. At the
same time, I suggested some adjustments to the positions of the
stool and table that I felt would work best for our coverage and for
the way the light would fall on each character. I liked that Kate could
be sitting with her back to the wall and in a frontal light. She
appeared more vulnerable that way and a little trapped. Alejandro
would appear more sinister, shadowed and never in full light.
This simple blocking not only focused the camera on the
expressions of the characters, it also allowed us to make a slow
push in on Kate, which we felt would increase the tension within the
scene. We began with a matching move toward Benicio, but Denis
felt that, in contrast with Kate, we should remain locked with his
character. To do a matching move on both characters, in such a way
as allows for fluid cutting between similar-size shots, the timing of
the move on one angle needs to match the timing on the other, and
to do this the dolly grip has to be almost as familiar with the dialogue
as the actors. Bruce had done similar moves a great many times
since The Shawshank Redemption, but here it became unnecessary,
as Alejandro, through his movements, is growing ever closer to Emily
and to the camera.

The shot of Silvio’s son standing by his father’s bed is a

deliberate reprise of the earlier scene with his father. We shot on
location and, as there was little room between the window and the
wall of the next building, I used a mirror to get a longer throw from a
6K HMI PAR and mimic the sunlight that I felt would enhance the
sadness of the moment. Later, in the shadow of the border wall (or a
CGI rendition of the wall) we see the boy playing football with his
friends. While their mothers look on, gunfire rings out and, for a
moment, the crowd looks toward the sound. But the violence is just
part of life here and nothing has changed with the killing of Fausto. It
is, for me, a shot that says everything in a perfectly simple way.

You are not a wolf. And this is the land of wolves now.
ALEJANDRO, IN SICARIO

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 29
HAIL, CAESAR!
History! Sociology! Politics! Morality! Everything! It’s all in
a book called Capital—with a K.
BAIRD WHITLOCK, IN HAIL, CAESAR!
I sometimes take time to consider signing on to a project, but I
didn’t hesitate with Hail, Caesar! Set in Hollywood in the 1950s,
the comedy would feature homages to a variety of films from the
golden age of the studio system: singing cowboy Westerns, high-
society comedies of manners, Esther Williams spectacles, Gene
Kelly musicals, and biblical epics, all tied together by the real-life
studio Mr. Fixit, Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin).
Given the period nature of the project, Joel and Ethan wanted to
shoot on film, but that didn’t help us re-create the different looks of
the 1950s. We couldn’t, for instance, shoot the elaborate dockside
bar dance sequence, featuring Channing Tatum as the secretly
communist musical star Burt Gurney, using three-strip Technicolor
because the process had not been used in decades. Creating its
saturated colors would have to be done in camera, by way of the
sets and costumes. For all the movies within the movie, the look
would have to be created through the use of traditional styles of
lighting I usually eschewed. It was a unique and fun challenge, one
that I enjoyed all the more because of the cast and crew that the
Coen brothers gathered around them. Nancy Haigh, the Coens’
longtime set decorator, Chris Napolitano, and I went to all the
Hollywood prop suppliers to pull lamps, stands, dollies, and old
pieces of camera equipment out of storage, some that I had never
seen and that hadn’t been used for years. We even uncovered a
backing from Ben-Hur to use in a scene depicting the making of the
biblical epic that gives the film its title!
 The musical dance routine was a classic of the 1950s, and Hail,
Caesar! had to have its own. For this Jess Gonchor, our production
designer, built a set with a retractable floor and other elements of the
traditional way of shooting such a scene. During rehearsals, which
were extensive, we broke down the scene into sections and
individual shots. From this Chris and I could make our own
schematics (there were nine drawings representing each section of
the choreography) that laid out the way the lighting would vary
alongside the action and camera shots. In this case the lights that
appear in camera are only there as props, and the scene is lit using
an array of 650 Fresnel lamps (Tweenies), all of which are
individually controlled by a programmed dimmer board.
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 The biblical epic, the military-industrial complex, and the Red
Scare: Hail, Caesar! touches on them all. But the scene in which
Burt defects to the Soviets by submarine is one of my favorites. The
commie’s escape is part of reality in the story but, like many of the
scenes in Hail Caesar!, reality starts looking like a movie. Chris and I
had a lot of fun working that one out. We shot this on the same 90’ ×
100’ indoor tank as our Esther Williams–inspired swimming routine,
on Stage 30 at Sony Studios, the very stage used by Esther in the
1930s. Although none of our rig appears as part of the scene, this
being reality, Chris and I decided to use direct sources from an
overhead green bed (a lighting platform surrounding the stage), as
would have been the practice in the 1950s. Unlike cinematographers
of that period, we had the advantage of shooting on a 500 ASA film
stock, faster than what would have been available to them, and also
with faster lenses. But 500 ASA or not, it still took a lot of lamps to
reach a stop of 2.0 on the lens.
We hung three painted backings for the sky behind Jess
Gonchor’s wooden submarine but not one overlapped another, nor
did they make a seamless connection with the water. So, even
though we could hide one join behind the conning tower, every shot
needed some help from our VFX team. And they did “paint” in the
moon (though not exactly in line with my “moonlight” reflection) for
the Coens’ homage to Leutze’s famous painting of George
Washington crossing the Delaware!
 For both practical and financial reasons, the Malibu house was
shot onstage against a greenscreen, and the views outside were
inserted in post.
The nighttime exterior plates were shot as “day for night” at the
end of our schedule, on the same day as the daytime plates and the
introductory dusk shots to the Malibu house. We had scouted the
locations beforehand, so I knew the optimal angle of the sunlight that
I needed to match on the interior. I wanted the daytime scenes to be
lit by a soft sky bounce combined with a hard shaft of sunlight. To
create this effect, something that would have been hard to control
during the lengthy dialogue scenes had we been shooting on
location, Chris and I used T12 Fresnel lamps as bounce sources and
20K Fresnel lamps for the sunlight effect. The T12s were rigged
above the set and aimed at white bounce material that hung above
the greenscreen backing, while the direct 20Ks were hung on chain
motors in front of the greenscreen. As we were dealing with a large
glass frontage, the greenscreen was required to separate reflections
of the interior as well as the detail in an actor’s hair. This was
especially true as we were shooting on film.
 But, like many of the techniques we used on Hail, Caesar!, to
surround a set with greenscreen seems like old technology just a few
years later. A volume, or virtual reality, stage provides real animated
backgrounds that can not only service driving shots but also a set
like our Malibu house. Gone is the need for the compositing of a
background using a greenscreen, or the array of lamps I used to
mimic the natural daylight entering the set and lighting the shot. Of
course, you need to shoot background plates in advance, and
renting a volume stage is expensive, so there may be a place for a
greenscreen, or even a Translite backing, for a few more years.
Maybe.
Hail, Caesar! was a fun, sometimes hilarious, reunion with old
friends on a film that explored the old-fashioned way (really, several
old-fashioned ways) of filmmaking. My next job, however, would find
me looking to more cutting-edge technology to help create a vision of
a dark future.
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 30
ALL THE BEST MEMORIES
To be born is to have a soul, I guess.
K, IN BLADE RUNNER 2049
I’d heard rumors of a Blade Runner sequel for years, though
they never seemed to come to anything. At one point it looked like
Ridley Scott, Blade Runner’s original director, would take on the
challenge, but that changed when he opted to serve as producer
instead. So, who would direct? I learned the answer while working
on Sicario: Denis Villeneuve.
Though not successful in its time, Blade Runner has emerged as
a classic in the decades since. It’s at heart a relatively
straightforward detective story set in a noir-inspired science-fiction
universe, but Denis didn’t especially want to revisit what had gone
before. Denis planned to make his own film, albeit one that had
some connections to the original’s story (and the Philip K. Dick novel
that inspired it) and set in a similar dystopian universe. His universe
would be a twisted version of our world today, reflecting the
unpredictable effects of climate change.
I love science fiction. Even if I’ve worked on only two other sci-fi
films, 1984 and In Time (and I’m not sure 1984 even counts as sci-fi
anymore, but as Philip K. Dick said, the best sci-fi is metaphysics).
It’s a genre that allows the imagination to run wild but, like any
genre, can be used to tell a human story, even if it seldom is.
Expanding on our process for Sicario, but starting before we had
a production office to interrupt us or a door to lock, Denis wanted to
use the months before full-time prep began to visualize the film.
James and I joined Denis to work on Blade Runner 2049 while he
was editing Arrival in Montreal, working through concepts and visual
ideas with his regular storyboard artist, Sam Hudecki. Denis would
usually join us at midday for lunch, and through the afternoon we
would go over sketches that James and I had worked on with Sam,
or we would just sit and bounce ideas around. We were free to put
any idea on the table. It was an unusual but highly rewarding
process, one Denis referred to as “our chance to dream” before the
realities of a budget and a schedule forced compromise.
While looking for studio space in Europe, Denis and I scouted
brutalist architecture in London, Hungary, and Slovakia and took the
inspiration from our trip back to the drawing board. This went on for
weeks until our production designer, Dennis Gassner, could join us
and we began to focus more deeply on the sets. After finding only
one London stage available to us, and then only for little more than a
week, we took Ridley’s advice and based the shoot in Budapest.
Budapest offered good facilities and, unlike with the overbooked
stages of London and Atlanta, we could essentially take over an
entire studio while shooting the film.
A cinematographer’s challenge with any film is to sustain an
aesthetic with consistency from beginning to end. To create the
many different looks within Blade Runner 2049, while still
maintaining a sense that everything was happening in the same
world, would prove especially challenging. We had to work within a
ninety-one-day schedule, certainly not one of the longest shoots of
my career and ambitious for everything we wanted to achieve. To do
so would require a great crew. My assistant, Andy Harris, was there
right away, as were Bruce Hamme and Steadicam–second camera
operator Peter Cavaciuti. Mitch Lillian wondered what he would do
by himself with an all-local crew but, thankfully, he was persuaded
and brought his best boy, Paul Candrilli, with him. I had not worked
with Billy O’Leary since The Company Men, but I knew from past
experience he would be a perfect fit for the project and with the
Hungarian crew. Besides, I wanted to team up with him again.
Luckily, he was keen to come on board, as was Josh Gollish, who
had been our digital imaging technician since In Time. Our line
producer was expecting Denis and me to shoot with multiple
cameras. That is what you do on major action films, after all. I’m sure
it was a shock that we planned to shoot with only one, but it left room
in the budget to bring in the people I really needed. Finally, while I
had been scouting Budapest with Denis, I met with some Hungarian
crew members, and I was confident in my choice of Krisztián Paluch
as gaffer and Attila Szûcs as key grip.
As for the look of the film, Jordan Cronenweth’s work on Blade
Runner is remarkable. It’s also not how I light. I’d have a hard time
replicating what he did even if I wanted to. Denis did, however, want
to draw on some noir influences for Blade Runner 2049, but as much
as I love noir, I had to find my own way to create a similar mood for
what I saw as a naturalistic film. For instance, early in the film, K
(Ryan Gosling), the film’s replicant blade runner protagonist, visits
the farm of rogue replicant Sapper Morton (Dave Bautista), whom
he’s intent on “retiring.” In my opinion, this is the most successful
sequence in the entire film, as far as my contributions go.
 We wanted to shoot our exteriors on the backlot under cloudy
skies, so the interior of Sapper’s farm was built on a stage to act as
weather cover. The set originally had only two small windows, but I
asked for a few more to be placed in strategic spots that would allow
me to play the characters in silhouette and lend the interior a more
dramatic look, both dark and threatening. It made no sense that
there were any interior lights on, other than the one small,
illuminated terrarium, so the windows were my sole source. I’d
create a noirish feel not by breaking from naturalism but by
embracing it. The scene’s tension comes from its shadows, wide
shots, and long takes. Not every director would have given me the
latitude to use so much darkness, but Denis and I had developed a
trust over the course of two films together, and it would have been
hard to get through such a demanding project without it.
We imagined the film’s opening sequence during our “dream
time,” scouring the internet for contemporary images that would fit
into the world of 2049: the black sand beaches of Iceland, the storm
clouds over the endless panorama of Mexico City, the greenhouses
of Almería, and the solar arrays of the Mojave Desert. Apart from
these landscapes, filmed by aerial cinematographer Dylan Goss,
whose work had so impressed us on Sicario, we filmed Blade
Runner 2049 entirely in Budapest and, for the most part, onstage.
Given that, it may sound surprising that we used CG as sparingly as
possible. Naturally, sparingly would still be far more CG work than for
any other film James and I have worked on, as the scale of Denis’s
vision would have been prohibitively expensive, if not impossible, to
achieve practically. But, whenever possible, we turned to
postproduction solutions only when we had no other choice. Take,
for instance, the scene where K meets with Joi (Ana de Armas), his
virtual girlfriend, on the roof of his apartment in the rain. We had
studied images of Beijing in the smog during prep and were struck
by the huge, illuminated billboards that glowed in the atmosphere of
that city, and these became key references for Denis’s LA. During
prep we shot a lot of playback material, some of which can be seen
on the large LED screen that looks down on the rooftop; for the fog,
we used a mister system created by Gerd Nefzer, our on-set effects
supervisor. Although I was very familiar with the system, having used
misters on The Ladykillers and House of Sand and Fog, production
was, quite rightly, skeptical. But Gerd relished the challenge, and
after testing the approach we used it not only for this one scene on
the roof but for four larger sets.
 The stage we used for K’s rooftop was quite small, and Dennis
Gassner built to its edges. As the roof had to take up much of the
space, Dennis constructed the buildings beyond in false perspective.
It made little sense for the light to be coming from above and, with
limited workspace below the set, our solution was to rest multiple
small units on the stage floor, facing them directly up to create a soft
glow as if coming from the street below. We mounted small
fluorescent tubes inside the set pieces, panned Big Boy spotlights
across the scene as if they were light from passing spinners, and
fixed patterns of practical bulbs to the stage wall to resemble more
distant lights glowing in the fog. We also rigged two 170-foot spans
of Color Force LED battens and programmed in a chase so a beam
of colored light tracked across the set. But no stage is ever big
enough!
Maintaining the look of our world on location was another
challenge. A city block close to the center of Budapest stood in for
K’s apartment building, and Gerd not only filled this neighborhood
with smoke (and, no doubt, most of the city of Budapest) he also
used a large crane to add falling snow. Yes, the look of both the set
and location work was augmented in VFX, but shooting the main
elements in camera made a difference. You can feel the light
interacting with the atmosphere, and that is hard to replicate without
a base reference.
 Rain, gloom, and artificial light define Denis’s Los Angeles, a city
of have-nots. But what would Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), a man
with infinite wealth, want to set himself apart from the dark, hostile
environment surrounding him? Sunlight! That he was blind made the
idea seem even more ironic. He could only “feel” the sunlight.
For the office of Wallace’s replicant employee Luv (Sylvia Hoeks),
Dennis Gassner designed a water tank to fit into the ceiling of the set
and connected it with the larger, water-filled environment in which we
are introduced to Wallace. To light the office, we simply projected a
10K Skypan and two 2K Blondes through the water to create
“caustics,” the refraction patterns caused by light interacting with the
moving surface of the water. To get the perfect effect, the water had
to be agitated at a consistent speed. Too strong, and the pattern
would become confused; too slow, it would disappear. To find the
sweet spot, one of Gerd’s effects team created an electric-powered
floating agitator, but in the end, he found he had more control with a
small stick and by manipulating it by hand.
Beyond the shimmer created by the water, I wanted the entire
Wallace Corporation interior to be a place where sunlight constantly
played in motion. For the records library, I drew on an image I’d seen
of sunlight coming through a small window, lighting a room as it
bounced off the wall. I wanted to take this idea a little further,
creating a moving patch of sunlight to illuminate a much larger
space. I imagined the light as if triggered by the motion of our
characters. To keep it moving during the conversation in the library
might have been distracting and would have required more
resources than we had. So, the light stopped when the characters
stopped.
 The establishing shot of the records room is a composite of a
four-by-four-foot maquette and a shot of the two figures, K and the
file clerk (Tómas Lemarquis), walking down what looks like a vast
corridor between acres of library cabinets. For sheer scale we could
only fill their immediate surround.
 We lit the maquette simply, with a 1K Fresnel on a wind-up stand,
raising the lamp so the square pattern of light would creep slowly
down the left-hand wall and allow the “sunlight” to illuminate the
interior. The filing cabinets that fill the space in the final image were
added by VFX using the light that swept across the floor of the
maquette as a reference as well as the cabinets we had included
with the figures. The texture of the maquette was also adjusted to
resemble concrete but, in essence, VFX supplemented an in-camera
element.

The set seen after the library, the replicant stairway, was one of
the last to be designed. Originally a simple museum space
displaying replicant designs from previous ages, Denis wanted it to
also imply his characters were descending toward the basement of
the building. He and Dennis came up with the idea of an Egyptian-
style temple with replicants displayed to the sides of what was a
larger opening in a narrow flight of stairs. Continuing with the same
concept used for the library, I envisioned a single-point source of
sunlight passing overhead as if it were following K and Luv as they
descended the stairs. A simple concept but not so easy to execute!
Billy had been overseeing the prelighting while Krisztián stayed
with me on the floor, and because of the complexity of the sets and
rigging, production had allowed for two extra rigging gaffers to join
us. One from New York, Richie Ford, I had known since The
Shawshank Redemption, and the other, Patrick Bramucci, who came
in from Rome, had worked with us on Kundun. Together they figured
out a low-tech solution to the challenge. For the sunlight to follow our
characters the bulbs had to travel in the opposite direction so, to cut
a very long story short, Billy and his team rigged a series of bulbs,
10K and 20K tungsten globes, on separate skateboard dollies
underslung on a rail so that each could be pulled, by hand, across
the individual openings that we had asked to be designed into the
ceiling. The trick was to synchronize the movement so when one
lamp disappeared behind a cut the next would emerge and take over
as one fluid move.

For the next section of K and Luv’s journey, I drew on one of my

favorite movies, Orson Welles’s 1962 adaptation of Franz Kafka’s
The Trial. (I think it’s his best film, even including Citizen Kane.) In
The Trial, Welles shoots Anthony Perkins’s Josef K. (another
protagonist named “K,” interestingly) running through a passageway
that is defined by slatted shafts of hard light, and the corridor outside
Wallace’s Memory Vault seemed to offer the perfect chance to steal
this idea. Working with art director Paul Inglis, I arranged for one
side wall of the corridor to be designed in a series of slats so that two
bare 24K bulbs would send a sharp pattern of light across the floor
and up the wall when they were lowered on a block and tackle. I
wish it had been as simple as that but, in essence, that is what we
did.
 We knew we had to make the film’s introduction of Wallace a
special moment. Denis had conceptualized Wallace’s office as a
platform surrounded by water (an idea that I think came to him while
he was in a Japanese restaurant with a similar layout), and we had
talked about Luv entering as if up some stairs from her office below.
The stairway was a separate set, and we lit it quite simply by
panning a 10K Skypan, on a thirty-two-foot crane arm, over a water
tank that our art department had built into the ceiling.
 Wallace’s office was a far more complex challenge.
I wanted to continue the concept I had used on the maquette of a
square pattern, or patterns, of light moving across the walls and
allow that to be the sole light source. Denis imagined Jared
appearing out of the shadows. If we could sync the light with the
action, he liked the concept. My first thought was to rig a single lamp
on a rail and track it across an opening that stood in for a skylight,
but that proved impractical. There was just no space nor any
available technology. So our solution was to rig a circle of 27 × T12
Fresnel lamps and build in a chase, with three or four lamps dimming
on and off at any one time, so that it appeared as if a single light was
revolving around the circle. To shape the light from the chase, our
“skylight” had to be dropped below the lamps and set at an angle to
the wall.
 For the second scene on the same set, when Deckard (Harrison
Ford) is presented with a replicant of Rachael, Denis had suggested
a pattern of moving spotlights across the characters. Rather than a
random selection of individual spotlights, which might distract from
the performances, I felt a more languid movement of a single source
would better suit the scene. To reassure Denis and myself that it
might just work, we did some tests with a pulse of light revolving
around a complete circle of 650-watt Fresnel lamps. Denis liked the
test, and Billy and I now had to expand the concept to fit the far
larger set. Finally, we settled on two rings of 300-watt Fresnel lamps,
“Betweenies,” the larger being thirty-five feet in diameter and the
smaller twenty feet. Much as we had done with the T12s, the 300-
watt lamps were butted together to form an even circle comprising
some 283 lamps in total. The pulse of light we programmed to
revolve around the circle consisted of ten to fifteen lamps that slowly
faded on or off at any one time, with only the central two or three at
full intensity. The result was a soft but directional sliver of light that
grew in length and width as the scene built toward the introduction of
the replicant Rachael. For the caustic effect on the walls, we
bounced 10K Fresnels (not Bad Boy spotlights as it appears in the
diagram) off the water and, once again, our effects expert agitated
the pond—but now using Gerd’s electronic gadget.
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 On the wide shot, Denis noted it would be simple enough to paint
out the entire rig digitally, but I asked him to consider keeping it. “It’s
going to be weird to have a floating light, isn’t it?” he said. But that’s
why I wanted him to keep it—the moving light source, that is, not the
entire rig.
Denis and I had positioned the scene between Deckard and
Wallace so the actors’ faces would go in and out of darkness as the
light revolved around the truss. I had marked the furniture during a
rehearsal and was a little freaked when Harrison moved his chair on
the day of the shoot. When he was in conversation with Denis, I
moved it back on its mark and, luckily for me, he never noticed. Or
maybe he did and knew exactly why. A lot could have gone wrong,
not the least because Jared, ever the Method actor, was playing the
scene with an opaque set of contact lenses. But, like Wallace,
perhaps he could feel the light. Only once did he have to be saved
from taking a swim.
 The haboobs of North Africa, and a similar dust storm that painted
the Sydney Opera House red in 2009, inspired the look of the
landscape through which K walks toward the ruins of Las Vegas.
Denis had pictured a futuristic city, the Luxor Hotel on steroids, now
emptied of people, but he still wanted to retain some of its old-world
eroticism. In Budapest, the city has banished all its Soviet statuary to
its suburban Memento Park, and our idea was that Las Vegas might
have done something similar, but with a different sort of artwork.

The stage was small, but by hanging a gray drape on the walls
and filling it with smoke, similarly to what we had done on Jarhead,
we could create a world that felt as if it went on forever. The lighting
rig was a simple pattern of Spacelites, and I used a purpose-made
filter on the camera to achieve the otherworldly shade of red. A set of
Maxi Brutes, gelled with a light green, backlit the smoke to create a
yellowish (the green of the gel plus the red of the filter) hue in the
sky, as if somewhere up there is a sun. For me, it began as a
homage to Percy Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias”: “on the sand, / Half
sunk, a shattered visage lies… / Round the decay / Of that colossal
wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far
away.”
 From a small stage we moved to a large semi-abandoned city
building for our casino interior. To maintain the reddish color, Billy
and Krisztián surrounded the building with large HMIs and we gelled
the windows to match the color of the stage work, the higher
windows being more yellow and less amber than those on the
ground floor. We changed our approach because shooting with a red
filter on the lens, as I had onstage, could have created internal
reflection problems. When shooting toward a bright light source with
a dark surround, light can bounce between the lens and a filter to
create a mirror reflection, in this case of a window, on the image.
Either approach required adding gel and diffusion to the windows, so
shooting with a filter on the lens would not save us the time and
money it had onstage. Besides, by gelling the windows, everyone on
set would see the color as it would appear in the film.
The Vegas sequence also involved one of the film’s most
elaborate lighting designs. When K walks into an abandoned casino
show floor, he’s surrounded by holograms, including an image of
Elvis Presley performing “Suspicious Minds” as the sound of the
song cuts in and out. The idea was that malfunctioning display
machines had created overlapping shows while the stage lighting
moved in unpredictable patterns. It was lighting chaos! I worked with
a previsualization team—which I’d done before but never for lighting
—at Light Design Kft., a Budapest-based lighting design company, to
create a pattern of concert-style lighting that could be programmed
to play back in time with the soundtrack and also be easily
adjustable if the scene called for it.
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 The set itself was a lot simpler than the lighting. By that point in
the shoot, other sets had soaked up much of the budget and, during
a lunchtime production meeting, I explained how I thought we could
deal with the problem: Surround the stage with black drapes, and the
lighting could do the rest. All that was needed was a door for
Deckard and K to walk through, a stage, and some furniture. It was
all about the light!

The interior of Deckard’s penthouse apartment, built onstage,

included a painted backing which, although digitally augmented in
post, allowed the whole environment to be photographed in camera.
Using an LED screen was not an option, and I did not want to use
greenscreen because of all the glass and reflections. As the view
would also contribute to the quality of the light inside the apartment,
by far the simplest solution, albeit one that felt quite old-fashioned,
was for the art department to paint a canvas backing. I had this done
in a range of grays, rather than full color, as we were adding gel to
the lamps to create the color.
We lit the backing with 2K Blondes, an inexpensive lamp to hire
and that in a multiple of seventy-five we could use to create a wide,
soft source. The sun that appears through the red haze is simply a
20K Fresnel spotted onto the canvas. For the light penetrating the
windows, we mounted thirty-two T12 Fresnel lamps on the roof of
the set, which we had specifically asked construction to reinforce,
and bounced them off white reflectors that were hung above the
backing, to the very limit of where the camera would see. There was
a lot of light on this set as I was intending for a deep focus in this
scene, but by the time we added gel to the lamps I was still only
shooting at around 2.5/2.8. So it goes!
We used the same set as if it were two different levels of the
building, the uppermost being Deckard’s apartment and the second
an empty floor below. We shot the later scenes later in the schedule
so the apartment could be redressed, and Gerd Nefzer had time to
rig the gimbal on which he would track Luv’s spinner into the room
and land. The mechanics were removed and the path of the spinner
digitally extended by VFX in post. Both Denis and I felt that shooting
as much of the action of the spinner in camera as possible would
give it a reality that would have been difficult to achieve on a
computer. Perhaps it would be different now.
 We shot both the interior of K’s flying vehicle (his spinner) and the
transport vehicle he is pursuing as we had on Unbroken, mounted on
a gimbal onstage. To create the effect of passing flying machines,
Billy rigged a wire across the set and propelled a bulb along it using
a strip of elastic.
In the original script the transport vehicle, with Luv and Deckard
inside, would crash into the sea, forcing K to jump into the water to
effect a rescue. This seemed a very familiar scene. We had a sea
wall. Why not use that? So, we designed a wall with a shelf that part
of the fight could take place on. Adding to the danger, the transport
vehicle could be dragged into the waves and the action continue as it
sank. To shoot the scene we considered using a purpose-ready
facility in Malta, but it proved to be both cheaper and a better use of
our time to build the set in Budapest. And the 150-foot square tank to
put it in. This not only removed days that would be lost through
travel, but it also gave the art department, the effects department,
and my rigging team the time they needed to prepare the set for
shooting.
 It was quite a number, featuring an array of wave makers, dump
tanks, misters, and smoke machines, plus the two platforms for our
camera cranes and various underwater housings for our Arri Alexa
XTs. We didn’t need it all, however. Our purpose-made heated pool
created a natural fog as the night became cooler and, although we
wanted atmosphere, this wasn’t part of the original plan. Production
had installed water heaters and told no one that they were set to
keep the water at a steady seventy-five degrees. I was shocked as
night fell, the air temperature dropped, and an intense mist began to
form over the water. And Gert was not responsible. It was nice, but
not when you couldn’t see the camera, let alone the camera see the
set. But Gert set up a bank of fans, and it worked in our favor as
there is no substitute for the way light interacts with water droplets.
 We used minimal lighting for the exterior, illuminating it with the
LED lights we had built into the two downed vehicles and a few small
panning spotlights to represent passing spinners. We wanted
darkness to do a lot of the work. When we looked at the set during
the day, it seemed to be dominated by the mechanics of the process,
but when night fell, and the mist started to form, it was surprising
how quickly all that fell away to leave just these pools of light.
 On Blade Runner 2049, as she had on other location movies,
James oversaw the creation and running of a “lab” for the dailies, an
area where the dailies could be processed and the deliverables
made. Most important was a screening room that allowed her to view
our dailies every morning, checking that the complex shots had
indeed worked and there were no unexpected technical issues. It
also allowed us to see some early tests of the visual effects work.
In terms of size and complexity Blade Runner 2049 rivaled
Skyfall. But I love shooting and it’s not so often you get a chance to
delve into so many new possibilities. There is such a buzz on set
when things go to plan or when one of those revolving lighting rigs
actually works. At times like that, it is not just me that gets a buzz
from what I do but also Billy, Mitch, Andy, Bruce, James, and the
entire shooting crew. How often does anyone get a chance to work
on a film of such scale, with such an inspirational director and such a
great team?

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it

again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think
of it all your life.
DONNA TARTT, THE GOLDFINCH

While we were shooting The Goldfinch, directed by John Crowley

—one of the best I have had the pleasure to work with—I learned
 31
TO END ALL WARS
Two armies that fight each other is like one large army that
commits suicide.
HENRI BARBUSSE
It’s not always easy for me to talk about what films, and which
cinematographers, have influenced my work. I can point to many
movies I love and cinematographers whose work I admire, even
revere. But I’m rarely able to draw a direct line between the images
of a particular film and one on which I’ve worked. For instance, I
consider Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris an influence on Blade Runner
2049, but my work on that film doesn’t, at first glance, resemble
Vadim Yusov’s contributions to Solaris. Just as often, inspiration
comes from unexpected sources. Blade Runner 2049’s birth scene,
for instance, owes a debt to an Italian fashion show for which models
were suspended in midair wrapped in plastic. Sometimes it’s a single
image. When researching 1917 I found myself returning to a
photograph of a soldier looking toward the camera with a sad,
confused expression.
We’d be shooting the film in color with a dramatically different
aspect ratio, but I kept this photo in mind, holding it as symbolic of
what we were trying to achieve. I liked the feel of the lens and the
relationship of the subject to the camera. But it’s the emotions on the
soldier’s face that I found so haunting. What was his story?
Sam Mendes had contacted us out of the blue to ask if we could
meet. We had not spoken since I had turned down the opportunity to
shoot his second Bond movie, Spectre. He thought I was misguided
to choose an “art film,” Joel and Ethan’s Hail, Caesar!, over a huge
franchise film like a Bond. What could I say? We left it at that. So it
was a little more than a surprise when he called. James and I were
planning to be in London and agreed to join him for lunch near the
theater where he was in rehearsal for a new play. There, he told us
about his next project, a World War I movie inspired by stories he’d
been told by his grandfather, who served as a runner in the British
Army on the Western Front, carrying messages back and forth
between the front lines.
It was only when we received the screenplay that we saw, written
on the front page below the film’s title, that Sam planned to shoot the
film in a single shot. One-shot movies—or movies that appeared to
have been created in a single shot—had come into vogue thanks to
the success of Birdman. We were a bit worried this approach could
seem like a gimmick. However, upon reading the script it seemed
appropriate to what was a simple story taking place in real time and
involving only two main characters. Beyond that, it seemed like a
step in the dark.
In our initial meeting, Sam was adamant that we avoid talking
about the technical challenge that the one-shot concept would
present. We’d treat the film as any other and figure out the rest later.
When that “later” came, Sam said, “I know you’ll figure it out,” but for
now, we asked the usual questions. What do we want the audience
to see? Should the camera remain locked on our character’s
perspective, or do we want it to observe? Is it too claustrophobic to
simply pull the characters down a long trench? Is that claustrophobia
a good thing? Does the audience see anything more than our
characters can see?
Our references included the great 1985 Soviet antiwar film Come
and See, directed by Elem Klimov, which depicts real events through
the eyes of a young boy, Flyora. Only once or twice does the film
leave his singular point of view to show us a horror that he only
imagines. We also discussed László Nemes’s Son of Saul, a 2015
drama set at Auschwitz that stays close to its protagonist as he
navigates a horrific environment. Although incredibly effective,
Nemes deliberately keeps the surrounding action out of focus and
somewhat obscure, whereas we didn’t want to put that kind of
distance between the characters and their environment. Son of Saul
had been shot handheld, and, briefly, Sam thought we might
approach 1917 as we had Jarhead. But as we developed our “shot,”
the viewpoint shifted between one that was subjective, and close to
our characters, to another that was more objective, viewing them
from a distance but with the camera always advancing very
deliberately forward. This led us to look for a more considered and
stable approach to the movement of the camera. Although Sam and I
were working without considering the technical challenge posed by
our ideas, James and I immediately began to research the
equipment we might need.
 The long tracking shots of John Huston’s classic 1951 film, The
Red Badge of Courage, were innovative in their time, but it was
Garrett Brown’s Steadicam system that took the operator off the
dolly. In the mid-1970s, Rocky and Bound for Glory opened an
alternative way for the filmmaker to follow action, best described as a
cross between a dolly shot and handheld. A Steadicam was a good
tool for us, but it was too bulky to fit into our trenches or control at
high speed. Now, over thirty years on from Rocky, handheld
stabilizers seemed to be everywhere.
Most were consumer-based products, but the Stabileye, the
brainchild of Dave Freeth and Paul Legall, weighed less than eight
pounds, was purpose-built for filmmaking, and could be carried by
hand. This became our primary tool. Not only could it be carried by
hand, as it was by Gary Hymns and his grip team on the opening, it
could be suspended from Gavin Weatherall’s wire rig, rigged on a
Technocrane, or handed off from one to another to achieve one long
continuous move. And, as Peter Cavaciuti (my longtime friend and
Steadicam operator) discovered, it could be adapted to fit on a
Steadicam arm. With this he could run in front of the actors while
shooting back over his shoulder and, given space to accommodate
the transition, he could turn around to run behind them in one
smooth move. An advantage for Pete was that he did not have to
watch the frame line as he would with a Steadicam. The
disadvantage for me was that I would have to operate it. The
Stabileye was remotely operated off a monitor using a set of wheels
and, with Pete running and turning at speed, the movement was far
more irregular and abrupt than any I had encountered before. I felt
glad to have spent so many lonely hours at the National Film School
writing my name with that geared head!
We added one last key piece of equipment to our list.
The Trinity rig is similar in concept to the Steadicam but with a
pivoting arm that allows the camera to jib up and down. We knew
this would be an invaluable tool if we could find a proficient operator.
While we were testing other equipment at Arri rental in London, we
were given a demonstration by Charlie Rizek. Although Charlie was
only showing off what was a new tool for the camera company, and
he had yet to work on a feature film, James and I immediately asked
him to come aboard. He was that good.
There could be no discussion regarding whether we shoot on film
or digitally, as the movements required of the camera negated the
former. The best capture system available was Arri’s Large Format
camera, which offered not only higher resolution but less distortion
and a shallower depth of field, compared to a standard 35 mm
format. The look would seem to fit perfectly with that photograph of
the young soldier I couldn’t get out of my mind. The problem was
that the standard version of the LF was too big and too heavy.
As chance would have it, James and I were in Munich leading a
seminar at the university, so we took the opportunity to tour the
Arriflex factory with CEO Franz Kraus. We had known Franz for
many years, and we asked him if, and when, they could provide us
with a mini version of the LF. The request obviously took him by
surprise and he laughed, until he realized we were serious. By the
time we had returned to London, Arri had agreed to provide a
camera for our test period and, after a little more friendly persuasion,
another two bodies by our shoot date.
Our tests were lengthy and detailed, not only with various camera
support systems but to determine the appropriate depth of field of
the image. We chose Arri Signature Prime lenses, which were
purpose-made to cover the large format. They were fast and sharp,
and there was no “breathing” (image shift) when changing focus.
Just as important for our style of shooting, they were very light. But
what would best reflect the image of that haunted face but not
compromise the movement of the camera? Maybe, a 47 mm at F/4?
A 40 mm at 3.2? How about a wider lens at a more open stop, a 35
mm at F/2? We settled on a 40 mm, other than for the sequence in
the German bunker, which we shot on a 35 mm to emphasize the
space. We also attempted to maintain a stop of between a 3.2 and a
4.0 for our day exteriors, though with such long takes and the shifting
cloud cover, that was only our aim.
As we normally do, we had set up a mobile lab to time and view
our dailies. I always shoot with the idea of not having to do anything
major in post, and I treat the DI process as being just about
balancing the images. A cut can be quite forgiving, but for a one-shot
film it was even more important that there was no visual bump
between takes. As she had done many times before, James would
view our 1917 footage every morning with timer James Slattery,
nicknamed “Eagle Eyes,” being especially cautious as our prototype
camera had never been “field-tested.” That it was a prototype
created other issues, particularly because of the various software
programs involved in the workflow that wouldn’t recognize a camera
that, to them, didn’t even exist. This time James was asking vendors
to update existing digital software so that it recognized “Camera X,”
as we called our top-secret Mini LF.
One more serious problem! How to connect the camera and its
systems to the operating console and its monitor, the DIT monitor,
the aperture control, and Andy’s monitor and focus control when
there was a quarter mile or more between them, and the camera
deep inside a trench? James dealt with this as well, finding an expert
in Los Angeles (“Noodles”) who she had production fly in to address
the issue. There were so many elements to coordinate that to have
another interruption of connectivity on some of our complex and
lengthy shots would have been a disaster. How would we have felt if,
after eight minutes, a shot fell apart because a single control system
failed?
When we were finally confident in our transmission systems,
James introduced a direct line of communication with the grips,
Charlie or Pete, or whoever was carrying or operating the camera.
While I was on the remote wheels by the monitor, James was on
headsets guiding them through the shot and alerting them to their
position if it veered slightly off. She knew where I wanted the
camera, and by communicating in this way she allowed me to focus
entirely on operating, which took every bit of my concentration. We
found this system useful for every rig, including one where we
mounted the camera on a motorbike.
Once Sam and I had talked through the “shot,” it should have
been the time to start defining the locations and sets but, on this
project, first we needed to rehearse. More than in any film since I
was shooting documentaries, the camera movement in 1917 was a
dance, a symbiotic relationship between the camera and the actors.
We had an idea of what we wanted the audience to see but, until we
rehearsed, it was only drawings on a page.
We were lucky that Sam cast George MacKay and Dean-Charles
Chapman as the film’s two young leads, Will Schofield and Tom
Blake respectively, as both made themselves available when we
needed them. By rehearsing with the two of them we could work out
the exact timing of the action before Dennis Gassner and his art
department began to build a set or dig a trench. We marked out the
trench lines in a field and adapted them as the scenes coalesced.
When Sam was happy with the blocking, I recorded the rehearsal
with a digital camera (one adapted to our format), taking what we
had drawn on paper and marrying it with what I saw in front of me.
From my recording I could print out a clear visual reference to the
shot and the framing from moment to moment. By the time we came
to shoot, we knew the abilities of each system and where each
would serve us best, and I had overcome most, though not all, of my
fear of operating the Stabileye.
The shoot itself was one of the simplest James and I have been
on, and if every day had been overcast, I might have also considered
it the least stressful. But the weather did present our biggest
problem.
The film takes place over the course of a single twenty-four-hour
span. To make the join between one shot and another work, the light
had to feel consistent. For aesthetic and practical reasons, we
wanted to shoot under clouds, and usually England and Scotland
can be counted on for gloom. But on the first day of production, we
didn’t film a frame. There was not a cloud in the sky. I had asked in a
production meeting what we would do if, as had been the case the
previous year, the UK experienced another warm and cloudless
spring. That was not the right question to ask! The second day of the
shoot was cloudy, and we managed to do both that day’s work and
the previous day’s as well. We were back on schedule. On some
days we’d wait five or six hours for clouds, and at such times Sam
would tell me not to stress about it. It wasn’t my responsibility. Then
why did everyone look to me expectantly until it clouded over?
 The opening of the film proved to be one of the most challenging
to figure out. Sam and I were trying to design a move that would take
our two main characters on a journey from the tree against which
they were resting through the “city” that would, by 1917, have grown
up behind the front lines. Perhaps we were trying too hard to show a
set rather than imply it. What, I suggested, if we simply tracked
back? A straight-line pull-back with Schofield and Blake as they
returned to the trenches, starting on a field that could be in England
(maybe Orwell’s and Schofield’s Golden Country) to slowly reveal a
wall of dirt and sandbags closing in, higher and higher, on either
side. I think that one simple move expresses more than the most
elaborate set could have done. The idea proved a template for the
rest of the film. Occam’s razor.
The first question most people ask about 1917 is how we hid the
cuts. A couple are obvious, as when Schofield is knocked out.
Others, I hope, are not. But none of our methods are particularly
high-tech. We’d shoot matching frames for the end of one take and
the beginning of the next, cut on a pan or when the camera passes
through a crowd, or use the edge of an object as a matte line, many
techniques I had become familiar with when working with Joel and
Ethan. Sam would have to choose a preferred take on set rather
than in the cutting room, as it was crucial for everyone to know the
exact frame we were matching to, as well as the speed and angle of
the camera, before we moved on. We shot most of the film in
sequence, and the opening ten or twenty minutes of footage was set
in the trenches. We all had some concern as to whether the
uninterrupted “shot” would work, but when it was cut together for a
crew screening during the early weeks of the shoot, even without
using digital help with the blends, the sequence felt good.
Having our lead actors available during prep proved invaluable to
us, but it also helped them prepare for the unusual experience of
shooting the film. George told us that because he’d done so many
rehearsals with the camera, by the time we came to shooting he was
able to forget about it. He was able to repeat his actions precisely
and in multiple takes without thinking about it.
 The underground bunker in which Schofield and Blake are given
their orders was a set built inside a barn and acted as weather cover.
Biggles and I used electrified oil lanterns supplied by the art
department to light the shot, dimmed to mimic the color of a flame.
We had done something similar on many previous occasions, dating
back to Mountains of the Moon, but here we had two bulbs in each
lantern in line with the camera angle, each on a dimmer so that it
could be raised or lowered in intensity as the shot reversed direction.
The bulb nearest the camera would be dimmed, so as not to flare the
lens, while the bulb to the rear would be the one primarily lighting the
shot. The camera (and the Stabileye) was mounted on a
Technocrane for the main body of the shot, but Gary took it in his
hands to make the switch in direction as Schofield and Blake are
sent on their way.
For the initial crossing into no-man’s-land, Charlie worked with his
Trinity, but as the sequence progressed, we would again turn to a
Technocrane, a Stabileye in a handheld mode, and a wire rig.
As with Erinmore’s bunker, it’s not always the big things that
present a challenge. Biggles and our practical electrician, Joe
McGee, spent weeks finding just the right combination of LED bulb,
reflector, and battery for the flashlight that Schofield and Blake enter
with in the German bunker. The flashlight had to be period correct,
therefore of a certain shape and size, it had to cast a beam of warm
light (most bright LEDs at the time were cold) intense enough to light
the sequence, and it had to be remotely controlled. The task was a
lot harder than it appeared.
 As with every location, we mapped out the shot as a reference for
our collaborators in the camera and grip team.
Sam and I scouted locations in France to get a feel of the
authentic landscape of the Western Front. But while the art
department carved the front line trenches and the shell holes of no-
man’s-land out of a muddy field to the north of London, we shot
much of the film on England’s Salisbury Plain, a military training
base I’d drive by every time I made the journey from Torquay to
London. We had visited a preserved World War I trench system on
the Somme battlefield that had been dug in chalk and was snow
white, so Sam embraced the same white chalk of Salisbury Plain for
the final sequence, though not the live grenades that we had come
across in France. We were told that French farmers still get killed to
this day from WWI munitions left on the battlefields.
 We had searched high and wide for a location in which to shoot
the broken canal bridge, at one time even considering digging a
canal on the studio backlot, but we eventually settled on Glasgow’s
historic Govan Graving Docks. As we would have little prep time on-
site, we made a full-scale mock-up of the broken bridge, which
Dennis Gassner designed for the location, on the backlot at
Shepperton Studios. Here Gavin Weatherall could place the four
cranes he required for his wire rig in the exact same relationship as
he would have room for in Glasgow, while Gary, his grip crew, and I
could practice taking the camera on and off the wire to extend the
shot before and after the action on the bridge.
The entire action of Schofield crossing the bridge and running to
the canal lockhouse was covered in one shot. With the weather in
Glasgow a perfect overcast, we finished well ahead of our expected
wrap time.
None of this required any lighting, but Biggles soon had his work
cut out for him. For Schofield’s transit through the French village at
night we used every inch of the backlot at Shepperton Studios. This
too required rehearsal before we could begin constructing the set.
We worked with George to find out the length of his run and at which
point we wanted flares to illuminate him. The flares would provide
the sole source of light between the lockhouse and the burning
cathedral in the town square, so it was important where they fell and
just how long they stayed alight. We started laying out the shot on a
six-foot model of the entire town (I say “we,” but in reality, it was art
director Rod McLean), which allowed us, using tiny LED lights as a
stand-in, to determine where best to place the flares relative to the
action. Effects supervisor Dominic Tuohy came through, finding
flares that would be bright enough to shoot by and would burn in the
air for the twenty-six seconds we needed, then rigged each on a
computer-controlled system of wires to travel in a preprogrammed
arc.

As the camera moves through the lockhouse window it reveals a

hallucinatory landscape, the look of which we based on aerial
footage taken from a balloon of the Belgian city of Ypres in the winter
of 1918, just weeks after the war. At the moment when Schofield falls
down the stairs and blacks out, there is, hopefully, the only obvious
cut in the film. Sam and I felt this moment gave us the license to
leave Schofield’s perspective, for the camera to take a more
objective point of view and enter into what might be his hallucination.
The town was built from our model and the key elements were
positioned where they worked best for both the action and the light.
Based on the shadows cast by a 60-watt bulb, our burning cathedral,
we adjusted the architecture on the model to create structures, such
as the colonnade and the arch over the main street. Unlike the
Lodge in Skyfall, we could not burn its equivalent, the cathedral, on
the backlot. Besides, a real fire would not light the set in a controlled
way, so I drew on the experience of shooting both Jarhead and
Skyfall to envision a source that could be a replacement for the 60-
watt bulb of our model. The result was a rig with five tiers of lights
arranged in a circle, each ten feet in height. At fifty feet and
comprising something in the order of 2,000 1K bulbs, it was the
biggest light I had ever asked for.
Although I was using the entire rig as if it were a single source, it
allowed me to control the level of light in any direction. When, for
instance, Schofield heads for the basement, I was able to focus a
little more light on George as he made his descent, or I could
enhance the light coming through the windows of the ruined
schoolhouse in a selective way. My only regret is that the rig could
not be built to what would have been the full height of the cathedral,
as we were limited by Shepperton’s proximity to Heathrow and the
M3 motorway.
I have included two examples of the schematics I drew for the
lighting rig. One is an overview of row two of the tower and the
relationship between the Dino lights, the 12-Light Maxis, and the 6-
Light Maxis. The other is a front-on view of the pattern of lights on
the tower as if seen from the fountain in the town square. I
positioned the largest sources to project onto specific areas, while
the lights around them just soften the overall effect. All the lamps
were on dimmers and rarely burnt at more than 30 percent of full
intensity. Mathie (Stephen Mathie, our dimmer board operator who
had proved so invaluable on Skyfall and BR 2049) controlled all this
from his iPad, which was a technique that blew me away when I first
saw him do it on Skyfall. I thought he was texting a friend!
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 Peter Cavaciuti shot Schofield’s encounter with the German
soldier in the cathedral square using his Steadicam. It was a difficult
piece of timing for Pete. He had to make the transition from walking
forward to backward without preempting George’s turn away from
the enemy soldier, while still having time to find the back platform of
the tracking vehicle that he had to step onto. And that tracking
vehicle was having to begin moving in order to keep ahead as
George burst into his run. We had rehearsed the same kind of
moves numerous times during prep, but the pressure is different
when it comes to the moment to shoot.
We also had to perform extensive tests to determine the right
size, shape, and brightness of the boiler in the basement where
Schofield hides with the French mother (Claire Duburcq) and her
baby. There was only justification for this one light source, and I felt it
important that the light feel romantic and soft. We made a cardboard
mock-up of the boiler to study how much of a curve we required to its
hearth to reach into the shadows where Claire would be standing
and how wide it needed to be to light the scene softly. Mathie and
Biggles stood in as we tested the pattern of bulbs we would use
within the boiler to stand in for the flames of a fire (twelve double-
ended 500-watt halogen bulbs). As with the cathedral, our lights
would be replaced by VFX in post. Though a much smaller set, as
well as a simple scene in terms of movement, this proved the most
difficult section of the film, both to light and to shoot.
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 Other sequences that looked hard were hard, as when Schofield
is pulled down a river after escaping the destroyed village of Ecoust.
For this we used a whitewater rafting facility in North Yorkshire,
which allowed us to change the intensity of the rapids and use
rubber rocks (background elements would be added in post). That
was a good find, but how could we get the shot? Sam originally
wanted to film from a raft, but I was reminded of how difficult it had
been to shoot on a yacht, let alone in a raft. After another crew shot
a comprehensive series of tests, we both concluded shooting from
the water would be impossible without resorting to multiple cuts.
Even if we could have made it work, we would have had to shoot it
handheld, which would have been at odds with the rest of the movie.
Besides, I still can’t swim!
I talked with Gary, and we hit upon the idea of using the
telescopic properties of the Technocrane. We put this to the test by
mounting it on a tracking vehicle to follow someone walking at a
brisk pace, zigzagging back and forth to mimic the motion of a body
in a river. It worked and all we’d need to do was build a road, which
we did after Sam signed off on the idea. On the day, the camera car
driver maintained his position relative to George as he made his way
down the rapids, Gary Hymns and his best boy, Gary “Gizza” Smith,
held the arm, while Malcolm McGilchrist operated the pickle (a unit
that controls the telescopic length of the arm), and I operated
remotely while James gave directions to the grips via her radio link.
Everyone enjoyed the challenge.
 To take Schofield out of the river and through the forest, we used
a combination of the Stabileye and the Trinity; as the soldiers are
called to the front line, we used just the Stabileye. Charlie and Peter
carried the Stabileye to a Technocrane, which then tracked it above
the trench line, before Gary removed it from the crane and finished
the movement handheld.
We used the same system to shoot Schofield’s run from the
trench to his encounter with Colonel Mackenzie (Benedict
Cumberbatch), only this time the camera was mounted on a Mini
Libra head as the motion of our tracking vehicle on rough terrain was
too violent for the Stabileye. Gary had to lift the head and camera off
a fifty-foot Technocrane arm that had followed George down the
trench, carry the camera up and out of the trench, then secure it at
the end of a second Technocrane arm, this one twenty-two feet in
length, that was rigged on the back of a tracking vehicle. Gary had to
be dressed in a soldier’s costume (with a 1917 haircut) so he could
be lost in the crowd of soldiers running away from the camera after
he had played his part in the behind-the-lens action. And his part
was merely the start of the shot before the tracking vehicle took over.
The shot fully deserved the celebratory high five that everyone joined
in once Sam said, “OK, we got that.”
Although worked out on paper and rehearsed with George during
preproduction, the film’s final shot was yet another “happy accident.”
But maybe you make your own “happy accidents.”
The image boards that James and I had made from my rehearsal
videos gave every member of our grip and camera crew a clear idea
of how we planned to cover the final section of the film. Having
practiced the move, Charlie, who was operating the Trinity, needed
only a single rehearsal on the day of the shoot, which was just as
well as we didn’t want to destroy the pristine look of the grass. But
the sun was out. The light wouldn’t match the previous take, and we
waited. And we waited.
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 The forecast was for a warm front to come in from the west and,
sure enough, late in the afternoon, one small cloud seemed on its
way to block out the sun. I suspected the overcast light wouldn’t last
long—maybe only long enough for a single take—so I asked our
assistant director, Michael Lerman, to get everyone ready. But what
if the sun were to come out in shot? The setup involved a lengthy
scene before George would walk to the tree, so judging if and when
the sun might come back out was pure guesswork. But ending the
film in sunlight felt like a good idea! The sun went in and the light
began to match our previous shot. After a brief pause, I nodded to
Sam and he called “action.” We had waited at least five hours for this
moment. If I blew my part, controlling the tilt or the lens iris, the entire
shot would be for naught. There was far more pressure on Charlie,
who was on the camera, and Andy, pulling focus from a van next to
us, over a hundred yards from the scene. But they had been through
the same routine for many weeks by this time and had accomplished
far more difficult shots than this.
As George settled down against the tree, the sun duly came out.
And as Charlie held on what had been storyboarded as the final
frame of the film, the photograph in Schofield’s hands, I could feel
George begin to lean back against the tree. James, who was on our
radio connection, whispered to Charlie, “Roger’s going to tilt up, so
could you move up with him?” As I tilted up, Charlie lifted the camera
and George closed his eyes, taking in the warmth of the sun on his
face.
What you see in the film is the first take. Though we did several
others, the weather front came in and the sun never appeared again
that afternoon. A film is about story and character, not lighting or
fancy camerawork, and Sam and Lee (Lee Smith, our editor) cut
1917 to performance above all. But Lee felt the first take was the
best, the performances felt fresh, and it was the take that captured
the emotion of the scene. The sun came out, and that’s where the
movie ends.
If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on
where you stop your story.
ORSON WELLES

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 32
EMPIRE OF LIGHT
And nothing happens without light.
NORMAN, IN EMPIRE OF LIGHT
1917 won the award for best cinematography at the BAFTA
Awards and at the Oscars. My life might have led me to the stage
at the Academy Awards, but that had never been my goal. Neither do
I judge my work by the acclaim of others. I know what my
contribution might have added to a story. I know where I have failed.
Besides, film is a collaborative endeavor. It is hard to say, I did that,
or That was the production designer, That was the dolly grip’s idea,
or It was the costume designer’s idea. Of course, I was happy. As I
was happy for my longtime friends in the UK, for Biggles and
everyone I had known and worked with since my days on 1984. An
award is a recognition that belongs to an entire team.
But then the world changed. COVID-19 had been a small-item
news story when 1917 premiered, but by the awards season it began
to look like a worldwide problem, and for how long no one knew.
Sam sent us his new script in 2021, and we all thought the pandemic
would have passed by the time it came to shoot in the following year.
How wrong we were.
The town of Margate in Kent, where we filmed Empire of Light in
2022, is located five or six hours by car from Torquay, and about two
hours from Brighton, where Sam spent much of his childhood.
Memories of the cinema unite all three towns. Once Sam had
embraced its stark Art Deco style and the more run-down look of
Margate, Dreamland, itself a closed cinema from a bygone age,
became our stand-in for all such movie palaces. Like 1917, this was
a personal project for Sam. Hilary (Olivia Colman), the film’s central
character, struggles with schizophrenia, as did Sam’s mother. Her
affair with Stephen (Micheal Ward), a Black coworker, becomes a
focal point for the political turmoil of the Thatcher years of the early
1980s, when Sam came of age.
Having spent weeks searching the country for a cinema on a
seafront promenade, Dreamland seemed just too good to be true.
Though its appearance was in opposition to the elegant Georgian
frontage of the Empire of the script, it had much to offer. The exterior
was beautiful in its own way, while upstairs were the remains of a
neglected Art Deco ballroom that looked out toward the sea and a
rooftop that was the perfect place for our main character to enjoy the
new-year fireworks. The lobby, however, which would be the focus of
our work, was much too small, with a low ceiling, not at all the
luxurious space of Sam’s imagination.
When scouting in Brighton, we had considered using the exterior
of what was the cinema of Sam’s youth, and now a casino, but
building an interior on a nearby parking lot with almost the same sea
view. It was our luck to find a vacant lot only a few doors away from
Dreamland that offered the same opportunity in Margate. A stage set
would have required a company move to a major studio and
restricted Sam’s ability to shoot the film in story order. To be able to
walk between Dreamland and one of our most important sets gave
us a remarkable advantage.
 The entire glass frontage of the lobby opened onto Margate’s
ever-changing weather, so I needed to build in lighting that I could
control, in terms of both intensity and color. Dimming a tungsten
halogen bulb warms the color of light it emits, an effect I’ve
frequently used, whether augmenting candlelight or mimicking a
burning cathedral. Consequently, to maintain an exposure balance
with the approach of dusk, its color moves in the opposite direction
to the daylight, which is itself becoming increasingly blue. By
dimming tungsten lights, you increase the color disparity. Adding
neutral-density filters and CTO gel to the glass doors was an option
but a time-consuming one. A recipe for disaster on a film like this.
Besides, the doors open in shot. Once again, technology became
available when I needed it. LED lighting has been slowly replacing
tungsten sources on film production, but Empire of Light proved to
be the first time that I used the technology almost exclusively.
The lobby was the work of our production designer, Mark
Tildesley, in collaboration with our set decorator, Kamlan Man.
Specific light sources were either built into the set ceilings or added
as practical elements to the walls and stairway. By using bicolor LED
strips or Astera LED tubes and globes for every fixture, we could
adjust the balance between our set and the daylight without recourse
to gels, scrims, or any other traditional tool. Our console programmer
and operator, Galo Dominguez, was able to adjust all the interior
light as the daylight shifted, and by separating our lighting into
distinct units, he had the ability to balance our sources relative to the
camera angle.

The central chandelier, an important visual feature as well as a

key lighting element, proved to be a challenge. A period rental, not
only did it need to be rewired, but we also needed glass diffusers
less opaque than those that came with the fixture and large enough
to contain the taller-than-standard Astera bulbs. To light through the
false skylight centered above the main staircase as if it were open to
the daylight, we used LED panel units. As with all our other LEDs,
we were able to balance these to the color temperature of the
daylight coming through the doors facing the promenade. The
process of filmmaking is always evolving, and I’ve constantly
changed my approach to incorporate new technology, whether
involving the camera or in post. This set would have proved even
more difficult to shoot in had I been restricted to conventional
tungsten or HMI film lighting.
 I remembered the promenade lights in my hometown and was
struck that those stretching along Margate’s seafront had been
removed, so when Hilary walks toward her apartment at the opening
of the film, there was no source to light her by. Given my aversion to
combining “moonlight” with practical lighting, I asked Biggles what he
could come up with. Could we line the promenade with a festoon a
half mile long? Again, LEDs came to our rescue; festoons came
ready-made and far less expensive to power than conventional 60-
watt bulbs. With Biggles, his crew, and location manager Emma Pill
we pressed the issue, and the lights were ready literally a half hour
before the first scene for which we’d need them. Biggles thought it
best to leave them on each night and the locals came to love them,
but I’m not sure they survived, as they were a cheap overseas brand
and began to spark even as we shot the film.
The interior of the main theater proved to be another challenging
location. We had scouted in London and elsewhere for a suitable
space but, again for practical as well as aesthetic reasons (and
Sam’s desire to shoot the film in continuity), settled on turning what
was now Dreamland’s faded bingo hall into a sparkling Art Deco
cinema. The problem was that before it became a bingo hall, the
upper balcony of the original 1930s theater had been converted into
a separate screening room, leaving no space for a projection booth
and little space to light. After much negotiation and effort, Biggles
managed to install a series of ring lights containing three hundred
high-tech Astera bulbs, both a high- and low-tech solution that
created a soft source controlled from an iPad. Other than the rings,
we rigged four 650-watt Fresnel lamps to highlight the doors and
statues, lines of LED strips to outline the walls, and a few front lights
for the stage. It was a complex set for everyone but worth the effort,
saving travel time, saving the cost of hiring another location, and
allowing Sam to shoot in continuity.
 The abandoned ballroom was a real bonus. Mark added the
booths, some chandeliers, and panels of yellow gel to alternate
windows. For the most part lighting was minimal, just molding the
natural daylight using flags and reflectors. We shot the dusk scene
over two consecutive evenings, making use of all the advantages of
a real location.
 The rooftop of Dreamland looked down on the promenade and
out toward the pier and its more modern Turner museum. The
festoon would define the bay, and the riggers outlined the pier using
a variety of small sources. We lit the imposing tower block that
overlooks the roof with large LED panel lights and fluorescent strips,
and we detailed a few of Margate’s Georgian buildings with open-
face 2K Blondes, the cheapest lamps we could get hold of. On the
roof, I wanted to play Hilary and Stephen in silhouette as they leaned
on the parapet to watch the fireworks. Here, I could light them from
below, as if it were the yellow of the cinema’s exterior neon, but what
to do for their initial conversation in the middle of the roof? And
Sam’s suggestion that we might see in every direction in one
continuous shot posed a real problem. How could you not see any
lighting? A false skylight proved the answer. This set piece would
emit soft light in all directions from its side windows, via a ring of
small LED spot bulbs rigged under the circular roof and bounced off
a white reflector on the floor. By positioning it close to where Hilary
would set down the champagne bottle, I could light the entire scene
using the one element. The fireworks, by the way, were real.

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 Empire of Light opens with a series of still images of the Empire
lobby before Hilary enters from the promenade to prepare the
cinema for the day to come. These scenes take place mostly on a
set of our creation and with paper pellets standing in for the falling
snow. They were shot on a digital camera of the sort unimagined in
the film’s 1980s and illuminated by newly introduced lighting
controlled by a tablet’s touchscreen. The exterior is an old movie
palace we’d redressed to suit our needs. The interior is an illusion
we created. Movies have changed profoundly since their invention,
and some of the most dramatic changes have occurred within the
half century of my career. But they’ve always succeeded through a
trick of the light.
OceanofPDF.com
 EPILOGUE
The end of a picture is always an end of a life.
SAM PECKINPAH

It’s over fifty years since I took my first steps into the industry. Along
the way the lad from Torquay has been honored with a CBE and a
knighthood. It’s hard not to become reflective about what my job
means and why I do it.
At first my camera was an excuse, my way of avoiding a normal
life. But my job behind the camera has also been my education.
Perhaps the only things of lasting importance to me are the people I
have met and the places I have seen. I have had many experiences,
have listened to many stories, and have had a part in telling many
more—far more than I have time to recount. It is amazing that I have
had the opportunities I have had, given my early life and thoughts.
Film? That’s for other people, not me.
Neither am I the most likely individual to be working in this
industry. I have turned down many projects. Sometimes I have not
connected with the script. Other times I have not connected with a
director. Like oil and water, some people just don’t mix. I always ask
myself, “What is the reason for making this film, other than taking
people’s money?” To spend three or five months on a film—
sometimes longer—I want a script to have more meaning for me
than simply offering another paycheck, however welcome that might
be.

I want a script to affect me in some way. I am usually drawn

to character studies, scripts about real people and the
world we live in, not some fantasy.
ROGER DEAKINS
 Every director I’ve worked with has had different demands. Some
are knowledgeable about every aspect of the process while others
concentrate on the script and performance, leaving the choice of
shot to their cinematographer. I don’t expect a director to know any
of the technical aspects of filmmaking, and I’ve worked with a couple
of highly experienced directors who had little understanding of the
focal length of a lens or depth of field, for instance.
As a cinematographer, I must be aware of all the equipment that
will help me do my job. Then the trick becomes not letting the
technology distract from your instinctive reaction to what happens on
set. I don’t see my role as simply recording what is in front of me. I
wouldn’t want to be on a film where I could make no suggestions and
would only be pushing a button. It’s not that I always want to have
my suggestions followed. (Most of them are probably best forgotten!)
But I’d like them to be acknowledged and for me to be part of the
process. Listening to suggestions and making choices with
collaborators is the way I light with a gaffer and key grip, and how I
work with a camera crew.

People confuse “pretty” with good cinematography.

ROGER DEAKINS

If my work has a signature, the word I would use to describe it

would be “simplicity.” There is always a temptation to create dramatic
visuals because there is so much technology to help you do just that.
But why? If you have a good script, you may only be distracting the
audience from it by employing an audacious camera move or
extravagant lighting. It’s easy to be seduced by the beauty of a
composition or the light, letting one suffer while drawing attention to
the other. A beautiful composition must not be there for its own sake,
preferred above one that, while it may appear mundane, contributes
more to guiding the audience through the story. Lighting is about
framing, and framing is about lighting. I have never been comfortable
dividing the two, which is why I have always operated the camera
(despite what the union-dictated credits might read). Whether taking
a still photograph or operating the camera on a film set, composition
is about a feeling, a feeling that you hope will translate to the viewer.
There is no formula.

Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.

DAVID ALAN HARVEY

Camera movement (or the lack thereof), the choice of when to cut
between shots or when to cover a scene in a single wide
composition, can create or relieve tension, depending on the
moment within the story, the shots that have come before and those
that will follow.

Film entertains with different angles, quick moves, like a

commercial. But filmmakers like [Wim] Wenders allow
themselves to observe a subject for a long time without
changing an angle, and allow you to do that along with
them.
ANDREY ZVYAGINTSEV

A wide, static image, such as a view over an empty ocean, can

suggest tranquility. A fast track toward the same horizon, for
example, can shift the mood. With a voice-over cataloging the
destructive capabilities of a cruise missile, as it was in one unusual
arms manufacturer’s commercial I remember seeing, the tranquil
view can be transformed into something quite terrifying.
While shooting Hail, Caesar! I worked with lighting that was little
different than the Fresnel lamps and Brute arcs used by James
Wong Howe, Stanley Cortez, or Kazuo Miyagawa in the 1950s. Not
only was the style of lighting part of the period look of the film, but
the lighting instruments themselves served as part of the set. Not
long after shooting Hail, Caesar!, I got to experience the other
extreme. For Empire of Light, Biggles and I explored state-of-the-art
LED fixtures, making minimal use of what are still referred to as
conventional light sources. To shoot the two films using such
different technology emphasized to me why it doesn’t matter what
you use, you choose the tools for the job. The one-shot concept for
1917 demanded we use cutting-edge camera-stabilizing systems—
though the cutting edge has moved on since 2019—and even invent
some of our own. Again, the technology served the storytelling. The
story was not created to show off the technology.
For a scene in Skyfall, production originally intended for a small
unit to go to Japan’s remote Hashima Island with the lead actors and
shoot two or three shots. These would serve as an introduction to
the lair of Raoul Silva, the bad guy played by Javier Bardem, but the
bulk of the sequence would then be shot on set at Pinewood
Studios. These two or three shots would be extremely expensive. I
knew there were cuts being made in other areas, particularly to my
lighting demands, so I had a chat with Steve Begg, our VFX
supervisor, to see what could be done. To cut the story short, Steve
translated still photographs, taken by our location scout, into a series
of 3D images. These were regular photographs taken on a standard
still camera, just location pictures for reference, but the compositions
looked great and could be combined with live-action elements of the
actors that we shot at Pinewood. Doing this saved production a great
deal of money and allowed for more time and energy to be spent on
other scenes.
On Skyfall, I lit the actors to match Steve’s background plates, but
today, neural radiance fields derive 3D models from 2D photos in
such a way to allow the lighting of objects independently, free from
any restriction as to how they appeared when photographed. The
object remains photographic in appearance and the result has all the
attributes of being lit by “real” light. Rather than a live skill set,
lighting can be transformed into a computational technique. Virtual
production tools, technology similar to the camera capture systems
with which James and I became familiar when working on Rango at
ILM and with DreamWorks Animation, have broken the remaining
barriers between animation and live-action filmmaking. And who
knows where AI will lead us? Is already leading us?

People worry that computers will get too smart and take
over the world, but the real problem is that they’re too
stupid and they’ve already taken over the world.
PEDRO DOMINGOS

And what of cinematography in this brave new world? Will there

be a cinematographer, a single “eye” overseeing the “photographing”
of a film? In many ways the cinematographer’s role is constantly
being changed by advances in technology. When once a director
would trust a cinematographer to light and expose film emulsion in
such a way as fit the story, and the camera operator to capture the
performance of the actors with elegant compositions and camera
movement, they now view all this in real time on a calibrated monitor.
Often a director is not even on the set—in fact, they can be far away
from it, so much so that he or she must communicate with an actor
via a radio or through the assistant director (though many just shout
very loudly).
And what of color timing? I have heard some timers maintain they
create the look of a film in their DI suite. Really? I view the visual
identity of a film as created when it is shot and not one imagined in
the DI suite. But have I only myself to blame?
I was one of the first cinematographers to embrace a digital finish,
and one of the first to begin shooting feature films with a digital
camera. And, yes, digital cameras have democratized filmmaking.
Perhaps AI will as well. But as Jim Faris, our anthropologist in
Sudan, discovered, time only moves forward. And in the words of the
teacher to a young Dalai Lama, “Things change, Kundun.”
Obviously, the role of a cinematographer did not exist before the
invention of the movie camera, just as there were no still
photographers before the development (pun intended) of a light-
sensitive plate. When I was at art college photography was
considered, by all my tutors other than Roger Mayne, a recording
medium and nothing more. But the photographs taken by Roger
Mayne, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Josef Koudelka, Larry Burrows, Marc
Riboud, Alex Webb, Harry Gruyaert, Gueorgui Pinkhassov, James
Nachtwey, and so many more are not simply recordings of reality but
images that transmit to the viewer a deeper understanding of it.
Cartier-Bresson called it the “decisive moment,” life encapsulated by
the triggering of the shutter. Now AI can create photorealistic images
in many ways indistinguishable from those that are real, but without
the human eye are they emotionally sterile?
Whether told in a single frame or through the projection of
multiple filmic images, the story remains paramount. Its telling should
not be driven by the technology of the day. As I’ve said, at its best,
filmmaking is a collaborative experience. A director can start with a
vision but find its full potential by embracing the thoughts and
suggestions of their creative team through all the stages of
production, until a film evolves that can be so much more than the
sum of its parts. Likewise, both James and I are stronger as a team.
The sum of our personalities. To form a collaborative working
relationship of equals with the person who is closest to you is very
special. Since she and I met on Thunderheart, I have been able to
achieve far more than I could have ever imagined doing alone.

In all my films, it seemed important to me to remind the

audience to the fact that they are not alone, lost in an empty
universe, but that they are connected by innumerable
threads with their past and present, that through certain
 mystical ways, every human being realizes the rapport with
the world and the life of humanity.
ANDREI TARKOVSKY

I left Torquay at eighteen, but I never really left. I kept a small

open boat in the harbor for much of my life, just a modest vessel
powered by an outboard motor but with a front cuddy to use as a
shelter in bad weather. I still have the same boat, although it’s no
longer in Torquay. There are too many Jet Skis there now, so I have
moved on.
One summer a few years ago, I motored out to fish for bass in the
tidal flow between Lyme Bay and Torbay. Luke, a friend I had known
since I was a kid, was out tending to his crab and lobster pots in the
early-dawn light. Luke had been a signwriter, hand-painting the
lettering on a shop front, a garden gate, or a billboard until being
replaced by stencils and molded plastic. I think he once painted the
elegant sign above my father’s shop front. When Luke’s business
began to fail, he transitioned into a full-time fisherman, working his
small boat, one hardly larger than my own, around the coast each
day no matter what the time of year, the weather, or sea state.
On this particular morning the sea’s surface was like glass,
broken only by some gulls and the occasional gannet diving on a
shoal of brit. Seeing me out on the water for the first time in a while
and having just baited one of his crab pots and returned it to the
deep, Luke drew up alongside. We chatted about the weather and
the scarcity of the mackerel shoals that summer. He said he would
often read about me in the local paper, which would rarely fail to
mention a film I had worked on or an award that I had been up for,
that kind of thing. “It must be an interesting life, Hollywood. But I
don’t envy you. Why would I want for more than I have here?” he
said as he looked out across the bay. “The fishing is not like it used
to be, certainly not as good as when we were teenagers, but I still
earn enough for a pint in the pub on my way home. That’s enough
for me.” He started up his outboard. “You take care of yourself,” he
called out as he went off to check on the rest of his traps.
I have thought about that brief encounter quite often. A film set
can be a crazy place. On one difficult night shoot, work was held up
for over an hour because two lead actors couldn’t agree whose
trailer would park closest to the set. What complicated matters was
that one of them had two trailers, the second containing a personal
gym. Once all the egos had been satisfied the equipment trucks
could finally park up and unload, naturally, the furthest from the set.
On another film and on another set, an actor insisted on shooting a
love scene between himself and his costar—for other than creative
reasons. And the director acquiesced! At such times, or when a
director arrogantly calls me and my idea stupid in front of the whole
crew, only to make it their own a few minutes later, my mind wanders
back to Torquay. Luke may not ever envy me, but I do find myself
envying him.
As a would-be rebellious teenager, I fantasized I was that other
Luke, Lucas “Luke” Jackson, so memorably brought to life by Paul
Newman in Stuart Rosenberg’s Cool Hand Luke—although I never
did cut down a parking meter. But it was an earlier film, one that
starred Paul Newman as a pool player, I thought about whenever a
friend and I would challenge tourists in the pub, not at pool but at
darts, letting them win a game or two before playing for a round of
drinks. Like Newman’s Fast Eddie Felson in Robert Rossen’s 1961
film The Hustler, we just had to show them how good we really were.
And we were good. I might have given Eric Bristow or Phil Taylor a
run for their money had I not discovered film!
Now there might seem a world of difference between playing
pool, signwriting, cinematography, and bricklaying, but there’s not if
it’s a craft you have a passion for, maybe your art, something that
gives you pleasure. This one exchange in The Hustler has stayed
with me since my father first allowed me to see the film. Having
played the best pool of his match with Minnesota Fats, before getting
drunk and blowing it, Fast Eddie says to his girlfriend, “Just hadda
show those creeps and those punks what the game is like when it’s
great, when it’s really great. You know, like anything can be great,
anything can be great. I don’t care, bricklaying can be great, if a guy
knows. If he knows what he is doing and why and if he can make it
come off.”
 Another day, another summer, I was in Teignmouth waiting in line
by the beach huts to buy some bait for a day’s fishing. Up until
recently it was possible to buy live sand eels from the seine net
fishermen who caught them at high water in the mouth of the River
Teign. But, like many traditional practices, that is now part of history.
There were seven or eight anglers standing in line when, from
behind me, I heard a man with a thick Devon accent announce, “You
were robbed.” I turned around, as it seemed to have been directed to
me. “Sorry?” “You were robbed. The Oscars. Jesse James. It was
ridiculous.” I chuckled and thanked him. “So, where are you off to?”
he asked. “Orestone,” I replied. “Any good out there?” “There’s a few
bass, nothing great.” “It’s not like it used to be, that’s for sure.
There’s not even that many mackerel around this year,” he lamented,
an annual refrain.
The seine boats had arrived back at the shore and a fisherman
was filling each of the anglers’ buckets with a scoop of twenty or
thirty eels in exchange for a five-pound note. “Well, good luck.
Perhaps I’ll see you out there if that easterly doesn’t blow up too
hard. Should be all right until the tide turns,” he suggested as he
walked away with his rod and bucket of eels. It was a simple
exchange, maybe to some inconsequential, but one that says so
much to me.
I was never naive enough to believe that film could change the
world, but I always felt that stories mattered, that they could
entertain, enlighten, inform, challenge, maybe inspire, just one or all
of those things. How could I have ever imagined where my path
would lead me and what my part in filmmaking would be? It’s not
about the awards or the acclaim, but just the one guy who has seen
something I have worked on and turns to me, a stranger, and tells
me I was robbed. No, I was not robbed. But thanks. Thanks anyway.
As Sarah, played by Piper Laurie in The Hustler, says to Eddie,
“You’re not a loser, Eddie, you’re a winner. Some men never get to
feel that way about anything.”
OceanofPDF.com
OceanofPDF.com
 ROGER DEAKINS FILM CREDITS

Welcome to Britain—1975
The Marquis de Sade’s Justine
(aka Cruel Passion)—1977
Chimurenga,The War in Zimbabwe—1977
Around the World with Ridgway—1978
Eritrea: Behind the Lines—1980
Van Morrison in Ireland—1980
The Southeast Nuba—1980
Blue Suede Shoes—1980
Raj Gonds: Reflection in a
Peacock Crown—1981
Wolcott—1981
Then When the World Changed—1983
Another Time, Another Place—1983
The House—1984
1984—1984
Return to Waterloo—1984
The Innocent—1985
Shadey—1985
Defense of the Realm—1985
Sid and Nancy—1986
Personal Services—1987
The Kitchen Toto—1987
White Mischief—1987
Stormy Monday—1988
Pascali’s Island—1988
Mountains of the Moon—1990
Air America—1990
The Long Walk Home—1990
Barton Fink—1991
Homicide—1991
Thunderheart—1992
Passion Fish—1992
The Secret Garden—1993
The Hudsucker Proxy—1994
The Shawshank Redemption—1994
Dead Man Walking—1995
Fargo—1996
Courage Under Fire—1996
Kundun—1997
The Big Lebowski—1998
The Siege—1998
Anywhere but Here—1999
The Hurricane—1999
O Brother, Where Art Thou?—2000
The Man Who Wasn’t There—2001
Dinner with Friends—2001
A Beautiful Mind—2001
Levity—2003
Intolerable Cruelty—2003
House of Sand and Fog—2003
The Ladykillers—2004
The Village—2004
Jarhead—2005
No Country for Old Men—2007
In the Valley of Elah—2007
The Assassination of Jesse James
by the Coward Robert Ford—2007
Revolutionary Road—2008
The Reader—2008
Doubt—2008
WALL•E (animation consultant)—2008
A Serious Man—2009
The Company Men—2010
True Grit—2010
How to Train Your Dragon
(animation consultant)—2010
Rango (animation consultant)—2011
In Time—2011
Skyfall—2012
Rise of the Guardians
(animation consultant)—2012
Prisoners—2013
The Croods (animation consultant)—2013
Unbroken—2014
How to Train Your Dragon 2
(animation consultant)—2014
Sicario—2015
Hail, Caesar!—2016
Blade Runner 2049—2017
The Goldfinch—2019
How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
(animation consultant)—2019
1917—2019
Vivo (animation consultant)—2021
Empire of Light—2022
OceanofPDF.com
 PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS

The photographs and diagrams in this book are from the personal
archive of Roger Deakins unless otherwise stated.
Photo 1 by Kurt Hutton/Picture Post via Getty images
Photo 1 by Chris Coles
Photos 1 and 2 by Sarah Errington
Photo 1 by Barry Ackroyd

Felix the Cat:

Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC © 1959 Classic Media,
LLC. Felix, its logos, names and related indicia are trademarks of
and copyrighted by Classic Media, LLC. All rights reserved.
1

1984:
Courtesy of MGM Media Licensing
1984 © 1984 Orion Pictures Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

Sid and Nancy:

Courtesy of MGM Media Licensing
SID & NANCY © 1986 Zenith Productions, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
&
Used with the permission of StudioCanal S.A.S.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
BTS shot by Simon Mein
1

Mountains of the Moon:

Used with the permission of StudioCanal S.A.S.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

Barton Fink:
Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC © 1991 Polygram
Filmed Entertainment
&
‘BARTON FINK’ ©1991 20th Century Studios, Inc. All rights
reserved.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
Storyboard drawings 1 and 2 by J. Todd Anderson

Thunderheart:
THUNDERHEART
© 1992 TriStar Pictures, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
Courtesy of TriStar Pictures
1, 2, 3
BTS shot by Elliot Marks
1

The Secret Garden:

Licensed By: Warner Bros. Discovery. All Rights Reserved.
1
BTS shot by Bob Penn
1

The Hudsucker Proxy:

Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC © 1994 Warner Bros.
&
Licensed By: Warner Bros. Discovery. All Rights Reserved.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

The Shawshank Redemption:

Licensed By: Warner Bros. Discovery. All Rights Reserved.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
BTS shot by Michael P. Weinstein
1

Fargo:
Courtesy of MGM Media Licensing
FARGO © 1996 Orion Pictures Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Storyboard by J. Todd Anderson
1

Courage Under Fire:

‘COURAGE UNDER FIRE’ © 1996 20th Century Studios, Inc. All
rights reserved.
1, 2, 3
BTS shot by Merie Weismiller Wallace
1

Air America:
Used with the permission of StudioCanal S.A.S.
1
BTS shot by Frank Connor
1

Unbroken:
Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC © 2014 Universal City
Studios, LLC
1, 2, 3

Kundun:
© 1997 Disney
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
BTS shot by Bruce Hamme
1
Illustrations 1 by Roger Deakins, 2025

The Big Lebowski:

Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC © 1998 Polygram
Filmed Entertainment, Inc.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

O Brother, Where Art Thou?:

Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC © 2000 Universal
Pictures and Touchstone Pictures
&
© 2000 Disney
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Illustrations 1 by Roger Deakins, 2025

The Man Who Wasn’t There:

Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC © 2001 Gramercy
Films LLC
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17

The Ladykillers:
© 1997 Disney
1, 2

Jarhead:
Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC © 2005 Universal
Pictures
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18
BTS shot by Francois Duhamel
1

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford:

Licensed By: Warner Bros. Discovery. All Rights Reserved.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

No Country for Old Men:

© Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20

Rango:
© Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
1, 2

How to Train Your Dragon:

Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC © 2010 How To Train
Your Dragon DreamWorks Animation LLC
1

A Serious Man:
Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC © 2009 Focus Features
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

True Grit:
© Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
BTS shot by Wilson Webb
1

Skyfall:
Courtesy of MGM Media Licensing
SKYFALL (2012)
Courtesy of Eon Productions and Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios
SKYFALL © 2012 Danjaq, LLC and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios
Inc.
SKYFALL, 007 Gun Logo and related James Bond Trademarks, M
Danjaq. All Rights Reserved.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21,
 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31
BTS shot by Francois Duhamel
1

Prisoners:
Licensed By: Warner Bros. Discovery. All Rights Reserved.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
BTS shot by Wilson Webb
1

Sicario:
Sicario courtesy of Lions Gate Films Inc.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21,
22
BTS shot by Richard Foreman Jr.
1

Hail, Caesar!
Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC © 2016 Universal
Pictures
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Blade Runner 2049:

BLADE RUNNER 2049
© 2017 Alcon Entertainment, LLC
© 1992 TriStar Pictures, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
Courtesy of TriStar Pictures
&
Licensed By: Warner Bros. Discovery. All Rights Reserved.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21,
22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34

The Goldfinch:
Licensed By: Warner Bros. Discovery. All Rights Reserved.
1
BTS shot by Macall Polay

1917:
1917 courtesy of Content Partners LLC
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19
BTS shot by Francois Duhamel
1
Photos 1, 2 by the author, Optical Support and Francois Duhamel

Empire of Light:
‘EMPIRE OF LIGHT’ © 2022 20th Century Studios, Inc. All rights
reserved.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
OceanofPDF.com
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It’s been an experience to look back on my life and career and

somehow put it on paper. Thankfully, I have not been alone in this
task.
I should stress that it was never my intent to write a book. My
world has been one of images and not words. Only the enthusiasm
of Amar Deol, my editor, convinced James and me that it might be a
worthwhile endeavor and of interest to any lover of film. It was his
belief in the book that made it possible and his unwavering support
that has brough it to fruition. If there is any blame to go round, it is for
Amar!
I’d like to give a big shout out to Keith Phipps, who helped take
my scattered memories, put them on paper, and give me a firm
foundation to move forward. How does one choose one moment
from a life while dismissing another? What might be of interest to the
reader rather than simply a “favorite shot”? In all this, Keith was my
guide.
Thanks are also due to my longtime and longsuffering agent,
Peter Franciosa. He truly is a force of nature and has supported us
every step of the way. We could not have asked anything more of his
commitment to the project.
I am also indebted to Abraham Zeiger, who has worked tirelessly
through the many drafts and kept an eye on the details. From the
start he has been an invaluable collaborator.
Many thanks to Shubhani Sarkar and Nyamekye Waliyaya for
their creative design and contributions to this work. They brought this
book to another level with their ideas and hard work.
Thanks to Byrd Leavell and Albert Lee for their advice and
patience, and to Eli Idunate for his organization and invaluable
contribution.
 In many ways I am my own worst enemy and chief critic. I fail to
live up to the expectations I have for myself or for my work, rarely
feeling satisfaction after a day of shooting or the completion of a film.
My support has been in the friendship and collaboration I have
experienced with my fellow crew members. Whether someone I have
worked with for many years or on a single film, I have been blessed.
Collaborating with a team—with a camera crew, electricians and
grips, with riggers and standby carpenters, and the many
craftspeople on a film—has made it a pleasure to go to work every
day—whatever the hour. I trust their work is reflected in this book as
much as mine.
And last, but certainly not least, I come to my creative companion
and wife, James. We met as strangers on a film crew and have
shared our lives and our work ever since. The creation of this book
was no exception. She was there from start to finish, both to bounce
ideas with and to organize the material, and she was there to deal
with the insane number of discussions and phone calls it takes for a
book like this to see the light of day. I’m more than grateful to have
such a partner in life.
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 SIR ROGER A. DEAKINS, CBE

Roger A. Deakins, a renowned cinematographer and member of

both the American Society of Cinematographers and the British
Society of Cinematographers, was born and raised in Devon. He
studied graphic design at Bath Academy of Art and, before
continuing his education at the National Film School, he spent time
shooting still photographs of North Devon, with the intent of
capturing the disappearing rural life.
After graduating from the National Film School, he shot a number
of documentaries, pop promos (more commonly referred to today as
music videos), and dramas before he moved into feature films.
Roger has been nominated 16 times for an Academy Award and
won twice for the movies Blade Runner 2049 and 1917. He has been
nominated 11 times for the BAFTA award and won on 5 occasions,
nominated 17 times for the top award of the American Society of
Cinematographers and won on 5 occasions—the first time for The
Shawshank Redemption—and has won the British Society of
Cinematographers’ award 7 times.
He has been awarded Lifetime Achievement Awards from the
American Society of Cinematographers, the British Society of
Cinematographers, and the National Board of Review.
He is also the sole cinematographer to have been honored with a
CBE, in 2013, and a knighthood, in 2021.
He is also an avid photographer. In 2021, Damiani Books
published Byways, a monograph of Roger’s black-and-white stills
taken over the many years since his first introduction to a camera.
Byways continues to be phenomenally successful and is Damiani’s
best-selling book to date. Hopefully, there is more to come.
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