Eduardo Serra: Softlight & Contrast

From American Cinematographer, Dream Weavers by Ron Magid (November 1998)

"I do want modeling and contrast in the image, so my main goal is always to reconcile these two things that people might think are contradictory: softlight and contrast. That's my obsession."

- Eduardo Serra, AFC

Conrad Hall: Tech. Names & Approach to Set Lighting

From American Cinematographer, Leader of the Pack interview by Caleb Deschanel, ASC & edited by David E. Williams (September 1998)

Deschanel: Having watched you work a number of times, I know you have a tendency to ignore certain technical aspects of the craft. I’ve heard you say, ’Oh, bring me a light that’s about this big.’ [Both laugh.] Now, I know you’re talking about a 10K, but do you deliberately just want to free your mind of all of those details?

Hall: Should I know all the names of all the lights? There’s just so much new equipment coming out all the time. In terms of lights, I basically work with big lights and tiny lights. I simplify. I’m loathe to take walls out to shoot a scene. A production designer I recently worked with said to me, ’Conrad, when you shoot, you have a circle around your subject and you work within that circle. When Piotr Sobocinski shoots, he peels the circle back, leaving just a wall here behind his subject. When Emmanuel Lubezki [ASC, AMC] shoots, he does the same thing, but then he kicks a hole in the wall to make space for a backlight.’ Well, I like the reality of shooting in a room with set dimensions. I’m not used to tearing out a wall and pushing back 40 feet so I can use long lenses. I’ve just never thought about working that way. I like to live in this kind of formal reality, in the same way that a painter lives with a canvas of a certain size. That sets up certain rules and suggests an approach without creating the possibility of the viewer being somewhere he or she cannot be.

Ward Russell: Directors & Blocking

From American Cinematographer, Elusive Truth by Christopher Probst (July 1998)

"I'm used to working with directors who are very visually oriented, so I was quite happy to discover that Rob has a very strong visual sense. I find that my work gets that much better when I have a director who has an idea of what he wants and understands what my contribution is. Before going onto each set, we had a lot of discussions concerning the lighting. He's very conscious of light and understands how its direction and mood works; when we went into a scene, we were able to talk about the light source, and we almost always agreed on the best angles from which to show the set. Some directors don't even think about the set; all they consider is the actors, the words and how they go together. That method is the most difficult way to work in terms of lighting because once the director has staged the scene, you then have to figure out how to light the given set to the way he's staged the action. It's much easier — and usually more visually interesting — if the director understands the set and the angles that will be the most visual, and then encourages the actors to work within that environment."

- Ward Russell

"The fundamental language I refer to in staging is: where are the triangles in the shot, and where are the three planes of depth the foreground, middleground and background? Then I have to consider the look I want to achieve, the time I have, and the actors' blocking in relation to those [other] factors. I look for where my light source is coming from which I may want to be cross- or backlight and ask, 'How can I say something about the character or scene with simple staging and the right camera move without that becoming the star of the scene?' I've done projects in the past where an image we've created becomes more about how it looks than what's happening on a story or character level. Ultimately, in those cases, you fall short in a narrative sense, because you've aimed for the wrong goal."

- Rob Bowman, Director The X-Files Movie

"[Blocking a scene for the best visual angles] really is the best way of working. Once we get to a set, give it to me for an hour so that I can rough in some source lighting and then bring the actors in and stage the scene. If they don't naturally gravitate toward the light we want, then the director can encourage them to do that. That way, you don't have to fight to create a good look. Every set usually has its own look to start with, so if you utilize what you already have, it's then just a matter of adding a few final touches before you're ready to shoot. I've found that if you're shooting a certain scene and nothing is working right, it's usually because the camera is in the wrong spot. If you get the camera in the right spot in relation to the actors and the set, it all just falls into place."

- Ward Russell

Tom Del Ruth: On Film

From Kodak's On Film Series by Tom Del Ruth, ASC. (1999)

"Even small compromises can make a big impact on a film. If the texture isn't filmatic, people start thinking about making other compromises and you are left with a film that lacks emotional appeal. Cinematography requires perception and experience to recognize and make the right aesthetic decisions within the boundaries of finite budgets and schedules. That's part of the challenge. You can change the emotional flow of a movie with a single light and you can heighten or reduce tension by choosing the right lens and composition. With all the advances in digital post, one things hasn't changed. The cinematographer is still the author of the images in the collaborative process of filmmaking. It's a serious responsibility, because film is a primary cultural force that has changed the way we see the world."

- Tom Del Ruth, ASC

Peter Menzies Jr: Night Exteriors Approach

From American Cinematographer, A Few Bad Men by Jay Holben (July 1999)

Due to the film's considerable number of night scenes, a major consideration was how to define the night look. Both Menzies and West chose to forsake "Blue" moonlight for a more practical approach.

"I wanted every scene to have that oppressive feeling of muggy Southern heat and I thought that any cool colored light would kill the feeling. As a result, we worked in warm tones. We chose locations that we would paint in darker colors like reds, ambers and oranges, and we stuck to Peter's main night plan, in which moonlight never came down from above. All of the night sequences were lit as if the illumination being generated purely by practical sources on the ground."

- Simon West

"In keeping with Simon's warm look, I went with a more sodium-vapor approach for all of the night sequences. We colored all of our lights to have that yellowish sodium feel. [Given the widescreen frame] a lot of the lights on the ground were going to end up in the frame. Obviously, they were not real streetlights, but film lights placed off in the distance and simply gelled to look sodium colored. Simon loved that idea, and once we defocused them, they became these wonderful background elements that resembled anything-- other buildings, streetlights. They created fantastic visual expanse without us having to light everything with Condors. Speed was the other added benefit. By keeping everything out of the air, and not minding that lamps were in the shot, we were able to move much more quickly and cover a lot more ground in a short period of time."

- Peter Menzies Jr, ASC

Peter Suschitzky: Lighting Approach

From American Cinematographer, Flesh for Fantasy by Eric Rudolph (May 1999)

"I don't have a game plan for lighting, and I don't believe in drawing lighting diagrams. If my work is any good at all, I think it is because I work instinctively. If I end up with a forest of flags and bars, it is something that evolves as we're setting up the shot, and it's part of an instinctive need to introduce some shadows and shape into the light. My lighting is simple in that I try to limit the use of multiple sources and fill, but I like shadows. Without shadows, one doesn't appreciate the light."

- Peter Suschitzky, BSC

Jack Cardiff: Lighting & Simplicity

"There are several aspects of lighting. There's a broad sweep that's sort of impressionistic and reasonably realistic, but some of our British cameramen, and the French cameramen, too, were sort of 'itty-bitty'. George Perinal was considered one of the best cinematographers at the time, but he used dozens of lights-- a little bit here, a little bit there-- and it didn't look natural. A big director who had been a cameraman came over from America to do a screen test, and when this director came on set, he said: 'Are you ready, Peri? Peri said, 'Yes.' Then the director said to the gaffer, 'Kill that one, kill that one...' and he killed about 10 lights. Watching that was a lesson to me: Simplicity."

-Jack Cardiff, BSC

Stephen Goldblatt: Working Style

From American Cinematographer, Of Loss and Hope by Zade Rosenthal (March 1999)

"I love to be able to pre-rig, and be as prepared as I can be, but I'm always ready to throw it all away. I'm a very intuitive worker, and I like to think fast on my feet; I really want the rehearsal to drive what we're doing. My guys have gotten used to me calling for something I've said I'd never need, but I'm never in a panic. I like a really good, comfortable atmosphere. I don't think people can work well, or happily, under some kind of gun-- whether it be psychological or physical. I don't like to do it to other people. In a comfortable atmosphere, people are happy. They get up in the morning and they're happy to go to work. That's what this film was like, but unfortunately, it's not something that happens all the time. It could be, however; it just requires desire and people who are really there to work and not just throw their weight around. If everything is driven by the project, everyone can get together in a collaboration."

-Stephen Goldblatt, ASC

Conrad Hall: "Highly Pointillistic" Approach

Over the past few years, Hall has been developing what he calls a "Highly Pointillistic" style of lighting, culminating with his work on Searching for Bobby Fischer, in which he employed this technique to its greatest degree. He again utilized this approach for A Civil Action. -AC Mag

"Early in my career, I started to use spotted-down Fresnel lamps for scenes in hallways where it was hard to hide lights. I would put a light 'on the pin'-- which means fully spotted-in-- and then raise it up behind the camera, shooting it over the heads of the characters down the corridor. I'd then just tip it down so that the hot spot wasn't really hitting anything except the far end of the hallway. The light was at a great distance, so it wasn't very bright at the end of the hallway, but I could then bring just the edge of the light down to subtly illuminate the heads of the people walking. Since that light was from the camera, the shadows wouldn't be apparent and I'd get this nice falloff on their bodies.

From there, I started to develop this sort of pointillistic sense of using light by focusing it rather then cutting it. If you hit a wall with a light and then start gradating it by cutting light off certain parts of the wall, you end up with a lot of flags. A light spotted in on the pin is like working with a finer brush, painting a certain area the way you want it to appear with the contrast you want it to have. I can't recall which film this idea started with, but I began using all of my lamps at full focus. Obviously, to create a soft light you don't focus a lamp on a 12' by 12' or 20' by 20' muslin-- you fill the muslin completely and then cut the light from there. But if you're using the raw light at full focus, it doesn't create shadows that are so sharp. If the character happens to run into the light, it creates sort of blurred shadows on the wall. The edge of the light falls off softly, but there's a hot spot in the center. I love to have people walk through too bright an area, for instance. I don't want them to stand there [in the hot spot] and deliver a page and a half of dialogue, but if they pass through something very bright for a moment it creates a good feeling of movement."

-Conrad Hall, ASC

Conrad Hall: Approach to Lighting

"I'm not like a lighting cameraman, who can light without looking through the camera. I cannot light if I can't see the movie that I'm dealing with. I've always imagined that cinematography is like a writer with a blank, white paper in front of him. Cinematographers have a blank screen that has to be filled with the story. I don't necessarily have one mental checklist of how I approach the lighting on a film, but I do have a frame. And in that frame, you have a subject to deal with that's involved with a story. You have to create visualizations that suit the theme and utilize all of the techniques at your fingertips to enhance the right mood. Being a visualist , I often absorb the environment around me and make mental notes. I don't even do it consciously, but I'm always noting how someone looks in a certain scenario. That impression gets stored away in my mental computer. When you're working on a film, all of your past comes with you, with all of the observations you've stored away; you bring forth the observations that apply to the particular story at hand."

-Conrad Hall, ASC