it would be cloudy. So matching shots was really a nightmare. I don’t know if you noticed it but some shots really don’t match at all. It was a very long scene, shot over a whole week, and we could not stop production just because it didn’t match. What we did to get around that was shoot very tight on the action so you don’t see that it’s so cloudy outside: by doing that you can hide the fact that the weather conditions have changed. You get by, although it’s not perfect.
Of course, Nicholson cared more about the performances and the story rather than the lighting in that sequence. Because of that, we didn’t stop shooting; and he probably was right about that for what it was.
What about the experience of working with Terrence Malick?
Days of Heaven was a fantastic experience also. He’s an artist from head to toe. Every little molecule in him is an artist. For a director of photography to work with him, it is the treat of your life. Because he’s very much oriented to photography, more than any other director that I’ve ever met. And he knows more about photography than any other director I’ve named. He could have actually filmed this movie and done it very well. He knows about light and mood. He knows that a light can be almost like an actor; that it will give a scene a feeling that is as strong as a good actor. He gives great importance to it.
We shot a lot of film; we shot under very exceptional lighting conditions. We very often shot in what he called “the magic hour.” We would prepare and wait the whole day, then we would shoot at the time after the sun set. We had about twenty minutes there before it got dark. We would just shoot frantically to make use of this beautiful light.
You would have to open the lens up further and further as the light began to go?
Yes. We started with the normal lenses and we would change to the fast Superpanavision lenses which open up to f1.1. Well, first we went to a f1.4 lens, then there was one lens, a 50mm, that opened up to f1.1, so we would rush to get the 50mm and put it on as the light went; then we would pull the 85 filter off to get another stop and then as a last resort we pushed the film. So we expanded this 20 minutes to 25 minutes of shooting time. Of course, we were quite determined to match everything. And it gave a quality that I don’t think has ever been seen in movies. Because you don’t know where the light comes from; it’s a strange type of light. The quality of the skin tones is very extraordinary. I allow myself to boast about it because I credit that to Terry; I just helped him in achieving what he wanted.
How did Terry Malick communicate to you how he wanted Days of Heaven to look? How did he explain it to you?
He was very clear about it; he talked to me by phone because I was in Europe making a film when he contacted me. And we prepared the film by phone. I read the script and took some notes and we talked a lot by phone about the look of the movie. Then when I got to Los Angeles and later to Alberta, we talked more at length. But he insisted from the very beginning that he wanted to shoot some scenes of the film in this “magic hour.” He wanted to know if the film stock was capable of doing it and I said, “Absolutely, I’ve done it before.” We did some tests in the area (Lethbridge, Alberta) before we started shooting. We did tests that involved pushing the film and shooting after sunset. We found the tests very convincing; it looked good so we went ahead.
But that was his main concern: to use that type of light in color, which hasn’t been done too much. In black and white, of course, Orson Welles used that type of light in the first part of Touch of Evil and there have been other black-and-white movies that utilized it.
We also talked about the colors of the set and the clothes. We didn’t want too many colors; we leaned heavily on browns and period colors, colors that were not bright because historically they were not bright in that time. Patricia Norris got old clothes and old textiles, so that the clothes wouldn’t have that synthetic quality that they now have.
So it sounds like Terry Malick knew very specifically what he wanted?
At the same time, nothing was that rigidly planned. We would find things on location also; there were many things that would just happen. As we were doing the film, we would be finding things. There was lots of improvisation in the shooting, in the acting and all respects.
For instance, there would not be a call sheet that went into great detail as to what we were to shoot that day. Our schedule was dictated by the weather, the conditions and the way we were feeling. This made some people on the crew, which was basically a Hollywood crew, unhappy.
Who determined which sequences were to be shot in the “magic hour” and which ones were not?
Well, it had to do with the logic of it. For instance the scene in which Richard Gere has a fight with a worker who asks him if his sister is keeping him warm; well that scene takes place at lunch time in the fields so obviously it could not be the “magic hour.” So there’s a logic to it. And also we shot at the “magic hour” when actually, in the movie, it was supposed to be dawn or dusk. But that’s a known fact—that farmers wake up very early to do their work. So we shot in the “magic hour” for both sunset and dawn sequences. It made sense, it wasn’t gratuitous. And some scenes, like the scenes by the river with Brooke Adams, they had to be shot at the “magic hour” because it was supposed to be after work. So it was all justified by the logic of the script.
Did you use any filters or put anything in front of the lens?
No, not at all. We didn’t use any filters or any diffusion; we wanted the image to be very sharp and crisp. We didn’t use any fog filters either. We sometimes took out the 85 filter in order to gain one stop in exposure, a supplementary stop. In doing that, of course, the image becomes bluish. In some situations, like when Richard Gere and Linda Manz are roasting a chicken in front of the fire, it worked very well and we left it as it was without color correction. It all became very blue, you remember? And the only thing that has color is the fire and the sparks of fire. But in other scenes, we had the lab correcting the color so it wouldn’t be so blue and so it would match with the rest of the film.
How did you go about shooting those night exteriors, especially the scene where they have the celebration around the campfire?
For that scene, we used a new technique, at least as far as I know. We used propane bottles with burners to simulate the light of the fire. I mean, normally when you shoot a scene that’s supposed to be firelight, you have a spotlight and you wave and shake pieces of clothes or plastic or something in front of it to imitate the flickering of flames. But that always looks very phony and ridiculous. So since my technique has always been realism, I thought why not go to the real thing and use real fire? So we had the bottles of propane with the burners and we put them as close as we could to the faces of the people, but out of range of the camera. We lit it exactly as we would light it with electric light only we used a flame instead. And that light had the real flickering, the real movement and also the color temperature because it’s very warm and has its own kind of reddish quality that you don’t get in electrical light. You know the scene when the fiddler is playing and all the people are dancing? All that is lit with propane.
And of course that made the gaffers, the grips and the prop men unhappy. No one knew whose job it was to handle the propane. The electrician would say, “That’s not electricity so why should I be lighting with that; it doesn’t belong to me.” The prop man would say, “Why should I be handling these bottles? This is lighting.” Nobody wanted to take care of it. It was confusing.
Concerning that night sequence with the grasshoppers and the fire, did you enhance that light? It looked perfectly natural.
The fire was shot actually as it was. It was real fire. No enhancing, no nothing. In fact, if you light fire, you spoil it. Because if you overlight a scene where there is fire, then the fire doesn’t give the proper
