it does present some problems and some advantages. One of the problems is focus, for instance. When the camera is moving all the time, it is quite difficult for the focus puller; he has to keep following and keep the correct distance. Also it presents a problem for the camera operator, which is me, because in Europe I do operate the camera. At every moment in every camera movement, there has to be a composition that looks good. So it’s like making a thousand compositions in a very short period of time. On the other hand, you have an advantage in that you have no problem about matching. When you’re editing and you’re going from one shot to another, you have to make sure that the eyelines are right, that the lighting is the same for every shot of the sequence. When you do a “plan-sequence,” it takes a long time to prepare; you might do one a day, but you save time in the long run too.
The shot may make up several minutes of the finished film.
Well, in the editing of the film, there is less work to do because the whole thing is preedited. So you work the whole day and you only do one shot, but you save all the time in the editing later.
Monte Hellman whom you worked with on Cockfighter said that you were fast; that it was one of the first things that came to his mind about you.
Good, I’m glad he said that. I don’t boast about being good but I boast about being fast.
He said, “Of course he’s good; you’ve seen his films, but the thing you don’t know is that he’s also very, very fast.”
The reason being that I light very little. For a cameraman, most of the time is lost in lighting. Well, very often I go to a place and I realize that it is very nicely lit as it is. So what we do is we choreograph the actors in relationship to the existing situation and it’s easier that way. I think that by spending too much time in lighting, you end up being mannerist. And that’s something I learned from a short experience that I had with Roger Corman. Right after I made La Collectionneuse, we made a film in Europe that was produced and codirected by Corman; Daniel Haller was the other director. It was called The Wild Racers. It was an insignificant movie. But the importance of that experience was we learned to work very fast. It’s a twofold area; we realized that because you are faster, you are not necessarily worse in cinema; and because you take a long time to prepare something, it’s not necessarily going to be better. With every shot you take time somehow; some shots you take longer than with others. But, on the whole, you just have to go ahead and shoot and follow your intuition. Sometimes if you think too much you sort of lose the intuition and the natural flow.
But still you get the wonderful compositions; how do you achieve such quality and still work with such economy? It does seem like a contradiction.
If it is so, I guess it also has to do with the fact that I come from reportage, from newsreels, documentaries, and television and that was my training ground. If you would measure the amount of film that I shot in my career, the ones that people know are just the part visible of the iceberg. I shot an enormous quantity of film in Cuba for television and newsreels; also for school television in France. That’s a lot of footage; that keeps you in training.
So it’s your training as a documentary cameraman that gives you that intuition?
Also, every situation that you face in a new movie, you have faced it before. It’s not new to you. And that’s the reason why I could make five feature films last year. Whereas the year that I made La Collectionneuse, that was the only film I made and it left me exhausted. It’s because you learn to work faster and, I hope, better.
What about now that you’re working in Hollywood?
I haven’t worked in Hollywood. Days of Heaven was shot in Canada. Goin’ South was shot in Mexico. Kramer vs. Kramer was in New York. But I know what you mean by Hollywood.
So you shot none of that in a studio?
Well Days of Heaven was totally on location but they built sets on location. On Goin’ South, we used the sets of the western town that John Wayne had built in Durango. It doesn’t make too much difference whether you shoot in a studio or a natural set if the sets are reconstructed. The only difference is that you can go from the outside to the inside on a natural set, which is, by the way, one of the things that Truffaut likes. And you can’t do that in a studio. Truffaut likes to always link the exterior with the interior. You often have people going from the outside into a house in one shot like in The Wild Child. So that people can really see the connection between the interior and exterior. It also makes the people participate in the film. It’s not like the films made in the fifties, where you would have an exterior shot really on location and when people crossed the doorway, suddenly you were on a studio set and it was very obvious.
So you’ve really never made a film in the studio environment?
At times I have, like Madame Rosa. The apartment scenes were shot entirely in a studio in Paris. Now I haven’t shot in a Hollywood studio but I’ve seen films being made in Hollywood and it’s not too different from our way of doing things. Only in Hollywood, you have more hours, more gaffers, more grips, more coffee and more doughnuts.
Do you have a preference for studio over location work?
Yes, I think when we were younger we fought the wrong battle for 16mm as much as we fought the wrong battle for natural sets. I am more eclectic now. There are situations where natural sets are excellent; in other situations they are useless. For instance, in Madame Rosa, about two-thirds of the film took place in that apartment; in Kramer vs. Kramer, two-thirds of the film also took place in an apartment. There’s no doubt that you can control the lighting better by being on a set, especially when you have long scenes. If the scenes are very short, if they are vignettes, like in La Collectionneuse, I agree it’s good to have natural light because it falls very nicely and you just cut to another scene. But when you are shooting a very long scene (with natural light) the light is falling a certain way like it’s falling in this room now; but in an hour from now, the light will be falling differently. So paradoxically, a natural set will sometimes give a non-realistic feeling to the audience because the lighting will change from shot to shot. There will be no continuity. You want to get a smooth continuity and there’s nothing better than a studio for that, especially for those long scenes. My Night at Maude’s was also shot partially in the studio. Maude’s apartment was a set and there’s no doubt that it helped the actors to be relaxed. When the actors have to perform long sequences and a great deal of dialogue, if they are disturbed by traffic in a street or a helicopter passing over and you have to call “cut” every minute because the take is no good for sound, then the performers get in a bad mood; all the stopping and starting is disturbing them. When you are in the studio, you control your work; you are comfortable and the actors perform perfectly.
What film do you use in Europe; do you use Kodak?
We use Kodak Vincennes as opposed to Kodak Rochester; Vincennes is the town in France where they make it.
Is it the same film, the same emulsion?
Kodak says it is but we know it isn’t. It’s a little softer I think. In theory it’s exactly the same but something is slightly different.
I thought possibly you used Agfa or some other European stock.
No, I haven’t used Agfa; I’d like to make some tests with it. I’ve seen the Fuji film. In fact, it’s unfortunate that Kodak practically has a monopoly in this area. Because it’s like a painter had to have only one palette; it would be interesting to use other things. The problem is that the other things might not be as good.
How do the labs differ?
The
