Masters of Light - Dennis Schaefer

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      Where it doesn’t become deliberate is when a cameraman and a director decide to slap on a zoom lens and then shoot ninety percent of a picture with it. What you tend to do is that wherever the camera roughly happens to be, you leave it right there, zooming in or out for your frame. So by not considering the focal length of the lens, you don’t consider whether the camera should be three inches further left or right or six inches higher or lower. I find that by using fixed focal length lenses I’m forced to deal much more methodically with every element of selection.

      How have you found working with Paul Schrader, the nominal leader of New Wave Hollywood, if there is such a thing?

      By directing, Paul has had to confront some of his demons. Paul is an introverted person and directing is not an introverted experience. So I’ve seen a tremendous evolution in Paul from American Gigolo to Cat People. Paul has been growing outward and facing the world around him a lot more. That might be one of the reasons he decided to direct. Writing is a very solitary experience obviously. I have a good relationship with Paul; we get along terrifically. We love the same filmmakers: Bresson, Franju, Renoir. Paul’s grasp of film history and film aesthetics is more profound than anybody I’ve ever worked with. It’s nice for me to be able to deal with that directly and not have to worry whether or not I should mention to this director that this scene is similar to a sequence in Beauty and the Beast or A Man Escaped. Paul and I can talk about that. As a matter of fact, we look at a lot of films before we start production. Preparing for a film with Schrader is almost like going to film school.

      Do you yourself have any aspirations to direct?

      I’ve got myself committed slightly in that direction. A year ago I denied it even while I was trying to work to make it happen. I’ve optioned a novella. It’s not something that I’m just entertaining; I’m actively working on it.

      What is attracting you to directing as opposed to what you’re doing now? What more is there for you in it?

      It’s the total experience of making a film, of making a statement. It’s dealing with my own perception of the world and the way we live in it. And finally, a cameraman can’t make any direct comment about that. I mean, he can through his choice of images but you really make your statements through characterization. It’s not that I have an overwhelming urge to make the jump just for the sake of doing it. It’s that there are very specific stories I want to deal with. I love photography and I don’t expect to ever give it up. If I’m fortunate enough to direct a film, I might find it a totally disillusioning experience. But I want to try it once. And if I’m successful, I would still want to continue shooting. I can imagine that there are a tremendous number of films I would be attracted to as a cinematographer but that I would never want to direct. For instance, I would love to do another picture that had the scope of Honky Tonk Freeway; but as a director I don’t think I would want to do something with that scale. I’m very interested in more intimate relationships. So it’s the ability to have the best of both. Also by virtue of having a craft, I can go out, get a job and work. It’s not just a question of supporting yourself but rather the satisfaction you have of working day by day. A cameraman goes out every day and does his job. A director today has become a writer, producer, editor and everything else. So much of his energy is taken with putting all the elements together and getting ready to shoot that the actual shooting of the film is only a small part of it. For a director to take a project from infancy to maturation may require several years. I don’t know if I can take that because I like production. I don’t know if I have the temperament to deal with all the other things you have to deal with to get the project done. I know directors who would love to be able to do two pictures a year but instead are able to do one picture every two or three years.

      Could you give me a thumbnail, one-paragraph sketch of your artistic and aesthetic approach to each one of your films? What were you trying to do photographically?

      Boulevard Nights for me was primarily an exercise in nighttime street photography. Most of the film takes place along and around Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles. Those cars have a very magical feel; I wanted them to kind of dance, to come alive and sparkle. The scenes with the gangs I wanted to have a much funkier look. So within the element of nighttime street photography, I wanted to deal with the textural difference between the gangs, who were the have-nots, and the car club people, who were the haves. And that’s exactly the dichotomy manifested in the relationship of the two brothers. Chuco was a gang kid and he walked most places while his brother Raymond, who used to be a gang kid, had this incredibly manicured car. It was part of the dramatic chasm between them, part of what kept them from really being able to communicate and understand each other.

      American Gigolo was basically an exercise in high-tech chic. Not high tech in the sense of architecture but high tech in its lifestyle and totally urban in its sensibilities. There’s no sense of nature in the film at all; what little is there is incredibly manicured. Unlike Boulevard Nights which had a very realistic street look, I wanted the nighttime look in American Gigolo to look very manipulated. I wanted the light to look as though everything was artificial. There’s a lot of arbitrary use of light and a lot of arbitrary compositions and camera moves in the film. It’s a study in artifice finally. Richard Gere’s lifestyle is a style of artifice, of packaging and presentation. Paul and I tried for a visual style that reinforced the superficialness of what you see is what there is.

      Ordinary People was an exercise in restraint. It’s a film of very intense, almost hermetic, human drama. It has a boiling test-tube quality to it. Test-tube in the sense too that there’s a scientific, kind of detached point of observation. The camerawork and the lighting are self-conscious enough and remote enough so that you kind of sit back from the cauldron you see in front of you. Some of the most powerful moments with the actors have a detached feel photographically. Or, at least if not detached, then certainly a feel of not being obtrusive. It’s the feeling that you’re privileged to sit there and watch it but you’re not thrown and pulled into it in a way that makes you feel viscerally distraught. It’s an observed film; it has a certain coolness to it. I tried to color balance the film in a very cool way except for the opening montage which has an autumnal feel to it.

      Honky Tonk Freeway was restrained chaos in the sense that it could have been a mishmash of. unrelated incidents. But Schlesinger had a strong sense of how it should all weave together and how the sequences should dance. There’s a lot of camera movement in the film, even more than American Gigolo, but it’s camera movement that is buried and tries to be seamless. It’s restrained chaos in the sense that I tried every way I could to keep things pulled together and unified and still be faithful to the very strong eye that both Scarfiotti and Schlesinger had, looking at the American landscape as two foreigners would look at the more visually bizarre qualities in American life on the road. I tried to enhance that as much as I could. It’s so easy, in films of that scope, to be visually all over the place. But Honky Tonk Freeway is a very disciplined film in a funny sort of way. The characters are so out of control that you couldn’t afford to have a film style that was out of control because that would just create confusion for the audience.

      The approach to Continental Divide is what the title connotes: geographic segregation. The whole point is that here are two characters that are just about as different as they could be. You have a very urban being who is totally involved in the world of newspapers and who would probably pass out the first time he breathed fresh air. On the other hand, you have a woman who has very pointedly escaped all that and has become a recluse high in the mountains. So you have the contrast of the open expanse of the Colorado Rockies and the very closed, claustrophobic world of the Chicago Loop. I tried to juggle those two different visual styles. I tried for a very strong sense of street energy around the newspaper office. We did a tremendous amount of dollying. Michael Apted loves to move the camera and the streets of Chicago are perfect for that. In the mountains, even though the characters are hiking around a lot, the camera is hardly moving. The camera is much smaller than the landscape. When you’re looking at impressive mountains, the only way you want to look at them is just stand back and look.

      Cat People is a myth and a dream. Paul and I worked toward a style of photography that on the surface seemed to be real, almost kind of quotidian in its matter of fact aspect. But it had an overtone, an evocation of a dream-like state.

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