For one thing, they are cleaner, much cleaner. And that’s very important; what always infuriates me is white spots on the film done in French labs because of all the dust. The air extractors are not good enough; the transportation of the film from one room to another is not carefully done. People in the labs are underpaid, of course, so they don’t work as well. Also the opticals are badly done in Europe. Whenever there is a dissolve, it’s not very good. But in America, they are very well done. When I see the work that was done by the lab on Days of Heaven, it just absolutely amazes me; I can’t believe it. What the MGM lab did was incredible and I’m very pleased with it.
You’ve done a number of documentaries with Barbet Schroeder. What can you say about the shooting of Idi Amin Dada?
I could say we came to a point which is interesting as journalism and cinema. Taking into account that it was journalism, you had to be unobtrusive; the smaller the crew is, the better. We knew that Idi Amin was very temperamental and that he was not going to be bothered. So we just had to be as invisible as we could. We knew what we were shooting was so exciting that there was no place for aesthetics. We had to do photography that was more intelligent than beautiful, more functional than aesthetic. We did very little lighting because we had a very small kit for lighting and we lit everything ourselves without electricians. We hand-held the camera very often. That time, we were using 16mm; I think that’s where it should be used, for that kind of thing and not for fiction. But for that kind of movie, we could have never done the film in 35mm. It would have been impossible.
One scene where you went into the meeting with his aides—I can’t believe he allowed you to film that.
Well, he was actually quite proud of showing that. He told us we could shoot for five minutes only. But then, when the five minutes passed, he didn’t acknowledge it, so we just remained there and he never said anything about it. So we just kept shooting. And he actually got very excited about that sequence and he was probably very proud of it. The only problem I had there, from the point of view of lighting, is that their newsreel people were also shooting and they were throwing their light intermittently all over the place. I had set all my lights in advance and suddenly my light reading would change completely and that was a big problem for me because it suddenly got overexposed or underexposed.
The footage we shot was of course very much longer than the film itself because Idi Amin repeated himself a lot; he said the same things for about three hours. We shot all the ministers in the meeting to use as cutaways. But I wasn’t very well located, so that the one minister who was killed 15 days later was precisely the one I had not gotten a shot of alone. I just got him in a panning shot. Then we learned that 15 days later he was found dead on the banks of the Nile. When Amin was talking to him in the meeting, he was telling this man how he had not done his job well. Little did we know what was to happen later. But Amin wasn’t actually looking at him. He was talking to the air so we had no way to know which man he was admonishing. Well, we found out about this man’s death back in Paris when we were looking at the rushes. So we had the laboratory freeze the frame on this man. Now when the film came out, Amin wasn’t happy. So he tried to exercise censorship by taking hostages. He put the French residents of Uganda in prison. It’s the first time that this kind of censorship has been perpetrated in the history of the cinema. So that by this taking of hostages Barbet was forced to cut the freeze frame and the phrase about his murder from the film.
Goin’ South was only Jack Nicholson’s second film as a director. Was he anxious about taking on that role again?
He’s a total director. He was very excited, not nervous but very excited and very pleased and happy to have the chance to direct. He really enjoys directing as much as acting. He enjoys acting a lot too; you can tell, he’s got such fantastic energy and enthusiasm and he communicates this to the whole crew. Everybody follows him as a real leader.
Did he depend heavily on you for the visual look and style of the film?
He doesn’t depend on anybody; he has his own ideas. But he relied on me a lot; he listened to me a lot and he was happy to have my viewpoint on things and it really worked wonderfully well. It was a fantastic experience.
Was the mine shaft sequence in Goin’ South lit totally with those lanterns?
Yes, basically. There was a little help with some soft light. But just a little because I wanted to give the impression that those lights were actually petrol lanterns and that the mine was very dark. So you had to guess more than see, which also made some of the crew unhappy because they built that mine set and they were questioning whey they should build such a good set if it was not going to be seen.
But I was lucky enough that Jack Nicholson agreed with me; that it was not necessary to see it; that you could show a beam here and a little stone there and guess about the rest. And that would be much more realistic than knowing exactly how the mine was laid out.
And, in that scene, Nicholson was wonderful because he was carrying the lantern and he understood very quickly how the lantern had to be at eye level so that the faces would be seen. Also by waving and shaking the lantern, you would see patterns of light. So he actually did it, he was lighting for me. He was acting but, at the same time, he was a gaffer. It was wonderful. And I asked him if he would mind doing that, explaining to him how it would look better. I asked him if it hampered or handicapped his acting and he said, “Quite the opposite, it helps me due to the fact that I’m thinking of something else so I can act better.” It’s really an ideal thing for a director of photography to have an actor like that.
Some of the scenes were very dark, at least by American standards; I’m thinking of an early sequence in the jail where all the faces are very dark. Was that intentional?
Yes, definitely. I like arc lights very much and we used arc lights there to imitate sunlight coming into the jail. Now I don’t like arc lights outside to compensate, you know, when they use it on exteriors. That I hate; I never do that. But I wanted to use arcs in that scene and Nicholson like the idea of the jail being very sordid and very dark. And then the faces sort of emerge from the darkness and come into this stream of light. He staged the action for that as you could see. So, in that scene, Nicholson himself was almost backlit, almost invisible and only those who came to visit him in jail would be seen. It was an exciting scene to do actually. In fact you’ve mentioned the two scenes that I prefer in the movie, from my point of view and the point of view of my work: the mine and the prison.
What was your aesthetic approach to the timing of Goin’ South?
I did the timing but unfortunately I did not do the final timing because I had to start another movie. I’m not that happy about the final release print of Goin’ South.
On that film, we agreed that we would like the photography to have a very warm feeling. So instead of having the 85 filter on the camera, which is the normal one, we used an 85B filter, which is slightly warmer. The location in Durango didn’t really look like as much of a desert as we wanted it to be, so by using the 85B we made it look more dry. So the plants, instead of being totally green, looked slightly more yellowish and orangish. The first print that the lab did on its own appalled both Nicholson and me because they had color-corrected and subtracted that. We had to tell them to put the warm colors back in.
About those scenes in the desert, did you use any fill light or white cards?
No, the desert is also very easy to shoot because the light bounces off things naturally. It’s only when you have lots of green, the green of nature, that it becomes difficult because green absorbs the light and then there is no bounce or fill light.
Another scene I had great trouble with was the sequence with the gallows
