Masters of Light. Dennis Schaefer

it so it just became a soft pool of light from the top. And the only front light I used was a light mounted on the camera itself. The shadow from that light went directly behind the actor and you’d never see it.

      But I don’t like to use a lot of light, depending on the picture. On The Fortune, we used a tremendous amount of different lighting. I was using a great deal of light in the background as opposed to on the actors themselves. I was sort of painting with light, really changing the aspects of the little bungalows and so on. I used a lot more individual, small units and so the amount of light was greater. I don’t like to use a lot of light because it has an effect on the actors when they have a tremendous amount of light on them. You lose a certain amount of reality. You’d be amazed at the difference in a performance when an actor has to go to a regular lamp and one lamp lights the whole scene. They get the feeling that they’re really where they’re supposed to be. It’s psychological plus it also has a very interesting look. Gordon Willis proved that.

      But it’s wrong to think that because you’ve got a lot of paint you’re going to get a good painting. You can have a wonderful painting with just one color. I mean, children can show you that in a child’s drawing. They’ll stick to particular colors and it looks wonderful. Picasso loved to do that. On Lady Sings the Blues I had a lot more lighting. On Black Sunday, for the effects that I had to have on the sound stages because of the front-screen and rear-screen projection, I had a tremendous amount of lighting. But that was to bring up a key. And I totally disagree with the philosophy of the old cameramen that you take a giant 10K and then put a Christmas tree in front of it. What do you prove? Just that you’re very clever at using one light to do the job of five or six other lights? I’d rather just key the person with one light there, put another light over here, you know, and then a little backlighting wherever possible.

      Do you believe that source light is a sacred commandment? Or is it like painting?

      No, it’s like painting. Rembrandt never gave you a source light really. If you look at his work very closely he’s got a lot of stuff coming from different directions and you don’t know why. It’s not important. Jimmy Wong Howe is the one that told me that. He said, “Source lighting is only for the American Society of Cinematographers conventions.” He said, “You do it any way you want to. Do what looks the best.” Source lighting is totally impossible in some situations. For example, a dark bedroom at night with no light on; where’s the light coming from? Certainly not by moonlight. And if you really tried to reproduce the moonlight effect through a window it looks like daylight. So what do we do in movies? We put a blue filter on it and say, “Hey, it’s moonlight.” It should be done to the taste of the cameraman, the way he thinks. There’s no such thing as a rule or a commandment about that.

      

      We understand that Norma Rae was shot 99% hand-held. What sort of lighting problems did you encounter?

      Tougher ones because the camera wandered around everywhere. And being in practical locations, we couldn’t necessarily hang lighting units from up above. In the factory, it was all fluorescent lighting so again, we mounted a light on the camera. I had a very clever gaffer who could adjust the dimmer on it if an actor got too close. In the houses and other places where we had to go hand-held, Marty and I would talk about it and he would give me a corner to work in and I could light from that direction. Or I would light through the windows if it was daylight and just let them burn up. Now when I was shooting an actor directly against a window, I would neutralize or neutral density the window to balance it out. But most of the time, when the actor was away from the window, I’d take the neutral density out and let the light coming through the window be the key light and use white cards to balance it. It presents a lot of problems because with a hand-held camera, you never know where it’s going to be. It’s also tough on the sound man because he doesn’t know where the headroom is all the time with the boom. So the sound man had to use radio microphones all the time just to cover himself.

      If you had to give advice to a young student or cameraman about the lab, what kind of advice would you give?

      I’d say learn everything you can about the lab because laboratories are not unlike a lot of the highly technical people that you meet sometimes in life. They can razzle-dazzle you with technological mumbo-jumbo, you know, especially if they don’t know who you are. And a lot of times it’s done just to impress themselves, but a lot of times it’s done just to sort of get rid of you. “The lab will fix it,” is a common cliché. There’s no such thing. They can, to a degree, help you but any filmmaker, cameraman, director or producer, should really know the goings-on in a laboratory; how it functions and why it works the way it works and what your limitations are. Even if it’s just a simple thing that you know that they have a printer scale of 0-50 lights and the preferential exposure is a 25 light. Then if you just know that much, when the man says you printed at 26, 27, 29, you know what he’s talking about and you should know that those three lights refer to the cyan, magenta and yellow colors. If you know just that much already, the lab can’t bullshit you. You should also know the inner workings of their back-end of the picture, back-end of production. Why they have to make the CRI [color reversal internegative] in a certain way. What’s a CRI? And why can they only give you so many release prints? Because as a cameraman, if you’re going to give them a very delicate negative to work with because that’s what you want, you must tell them; most of the time they say don’t do that because we may not be able to give you a release print. You will be able to come back and say, “Yes, you will. All you have to do is make me the best CRI in the world, make three of them if necessary. I don’t care how many you have to make but protect my original and don’t touch it.” If you didn’t do that they would talk you into shooting the picture differently just to accommodate them. That’s happened to me many times even at this stage of my career now where the MGM lab tried to tell me how to shoot Casey’s Shadow. And I said, “No, you’re wrong. I’ll expose it the way I want to expose it because I know it can be done.” Also on The Cheap Detective it was the same way. The bottom line is the MGM lab lost The Cheap Detective because they couldn’t come through.

      We’ve heard other people say that there is no substitute for a strong director. That the director’s strength filters down to everybody and it makes everyone feel secure.

      Sure. I totally concur. The director is the leader of the thing, supposedly the man in charge. Although the cinematographers are more and more becoming the titular heads of the crew. They are in a sense the right arm of the director. They supply the spit to get the crew to do what the director wants. The director doesn’t have to be strong technically; he doesn’t have to know if he wants a particular 75mm lens here. He can just say, “I want a shot this size here.” Now he relies on your competence and knowledge to know what lens to use for that shot. But he polices the creativity of everybody; unless he does that people are left floundering. You know, all of a sudden you have inconsistencies, from hair dressing to wardrobe. The director really has to be very strong in communicating exactly what he wants and in being faithful to what he has said and not wavering because the minute he wavers everybody sort of feels that lean, and it’s not good. It’s not good when a cameraman suddenly gets a reputation of being the guy who really helped to direct a picture. I’ve heard that about some cameramen. Or the guy who was really in charge was the cameraman and the director sort of followed him around. That’s not the way the system is designed.

      That’s what people have said. People we’ve talked to that have been in situations similar to that have said that invariably their camera work suffered because if they had to pull the director along they didn’t have time to do what they wanted to do and should have been doing in the first place.

      And it’s not fair; it’s not fair to the cameraman. Because you have a situation where you like the project and the director says, “Help me out.” Sometimes they say that, “Help me out, I don’t know what to do here.” Well, your concentration goes now into his realm of creativity and yours has to suffer somewhat. I don’t like to be put into that position. That’s probably why I’m more selective now as to who I would work for. Marty Ritt is my mentor, my hero; if I can get on a Marty Ritt picture every time, I’ll be very happy.

      Talking about Martin Ritt, is there any special spark of creativity when you