| THE CINEMATIC ART OF VILMOS ZSIGMOND |
A short(ish) extract from an article written by Chris Patmore of an interview with Vilmos at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, where the film screened was “NO SUBTITLES NECESSARY – LASZLO (KOVACS) & VILMOS (ZSIGMOND)” [Thanks to Moviescope magazine. The full article can be found in the current issue – Vol. 3. No. 1] |
“I consider a good cinematographer is a sort of an artist, a sort of a painter, but not using brushes and paint but using the technology that consists of camera, lenses, lighting, camera moves and all those things.” |
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If great cinematography is all about capturing light, does the medium on which you capture it, whether it is film or digital, really matter, or is there something in the organic nature of film that sets it apart? |
In reality, it shouldn’t be any differences in the lighting, whether it is film or digital. The only difference I can see today is that digital cinematography is done on low budget movies – with the Red camera, for example. People use the Red because it is inexpensive, but the cinematographers don’t have the experience that we old-time cinematographers have. I think they should concentrate on making good lighting. Just because the digital camera gives you an image immediately when you turn it on, that doesn’t mean you have got good lighting for that scene. You still have to figure out that each scene has to have a different mood, and it has to be lit. I hope the art of lighting, the art of cinematography, is not going to die because we have digital photography. Because it is actually nothing to do with the camera you use. There is good lighting and there is bad lighting; there is good photography and there is bad photography. I think you can make brilliant movies with digital cameras. Look at the “Slumdog Millionaire”. All the digital sequences have the right lighting for that. It was not pretty lighting but it was the right lighting for the story. The composition was very important, the camera moves – running with the camera, it was exceptionally beautiful photography. |
With all this digital technology in cinema these days, how much of the work is art and how much is now technology? |
It’s totally combined and you can’t really say a percentage because the technology comes first, that’s the base of everything. You have to learn the technique of cinematography, you have to learn how to light, how to compose the picture, how to move the camera. That’s a given. |
| Everyone has to learn all that before you can use it for the sake of art. We have to use the techniques to create something that can be considered as an art. Film is an art form – it exists – not often – about ten per cent of the movies are shot artistically. Most of them are basically exposing the film and telling the story. This works because the majority don’t really care about cinematography. They care about what the actors are saying, the performance of the actors, and the story. That is what most of the people want to see in the movie theatre …… We have to educate audiences to consider film as an integral part of the story and therefore an art form. |
So what are the particular processes you follow when working on a film? What are your basic techniques? |
I drink lots of coffee – it is most important to wake up and start the day in good spirits. What is interesting is that in my career I have had to work with so many different directors who are improvisers. It is very hard to cope with that kind of system because I like to be prepared. |
My basic technique, everyone’s technique is basically the same. My approach is that I don’t try to light something until I see what is happening in front of the camera, so I need a rehearsal from the director. If there is no rehearsal, I want to at least find out what a director thinks will happen in the morning when they get on set. Once I know where the actors are going to move, I have a pretty good idea of how to pre-light the set. Then first thing the next morning, I will tell the director to have a rehearsal with the actors before they go to make-up, because it can sometimes take two hours to make-up some women so we can shoot them, then we have the stand-ins to duplicate the movement of the actors, then I can really perfect the lighting, and that’s the most important thing for me – to get to that stage. |
| Have you used any particular techniques to enhance the films you’ve shot? |
In the old days we didn’t have much choice in the ways we could alter the look of the film because it was all standard developing. We were searching for things with which we could make something look different and one of the techniques was the flashing technique, where we would pre-expose the film before developing in order to make it look different. It was a little bit grainy, especially if you pushed the film and overdeveloped it to make it grainier, which is what we did on McCABE & MRS MILLER. You have that old look, like antique images. Sometimes we also flashed the prints. On HEAVEN’S GATE we flashed the negative and prints also, and not so much overdeveloping. On THE DEER HUNTER we pushed the film two stops to make it look like war footage and to make it blend in with some 16mm newsreel footage we had. We had to do this because we didn’t have the money to recreate what the newsreel footage showed. This was basically the only thing we could do. Later on came the bleach bypass, which a lot of people used until digital came in. This also gave an interesting look. SE7EN was actually shot like that which was beautiful in a way. It’s very difficult to do it right but Khondji did a hell of a job to get that definite look. Today we have digital technology and the digital postproduction when you go to an intermediate. Now we really have a chance to do all kinds of things that we couldn’t do in the past, and we can do it much better because we can shoot the film straight and get all kinds of effects in post. If I take the colours out of a colour film, it makes it a better black-and-white looking film, strangely enough. I made tests and it looks better than shooting on black-and-white. |
| What is your process for doing this? |
The nice thing with the digital intermediate process is I can decide on that day, on the set, what I would like to see later on in that digital intermediate. In order to do that, I take some still photographs of each scene. Then I go home and when everyone else has gone to sleep, I work on the computer for a couple of hours with a stills photographer and we change the look of that still. Then I can determine how much of the black-and-white look I want in it and how much contrast I want. More contrast, less contrast. More colour, less colour. So we can do that in Photoshop. Once we have that, we can email it to the laboratory, by which time the hard drive has been flown over from Los Angeles and the lab is waiting for the stills from me, then they make the dailies on a hard drive and send it back to me. We see the dailies basically in the form that it will probably look like when we do the answer print. It’s very good because the director, and everyone who wants to see, can see what we are aiming for. The wardrobe people can see what happens to the colours. It has a lot of advantages that we never had before. At the moment it is the best of the two worlds – the film world and the digital world – shoot on film and end up on digital. And once you have finished on digital, go back to film projection or to electronic projection, which is very, very good these days. I didn’t believe it ten years ago that the electronic projection could be as good as the film projection, but it is that good and it can’t be destroyed with scratches and all sorts of problems like in film projection. These are the good things to tell, but where we are going I don’t know. Ten years from now there probably won’t be any more film around to shoot on, or it will be very costly because the fewer people who shoot on film, the more expensive it will be, and we will only have digital front projection, front work and digital postproduction. I still think the problem is how to store the film, because digital ‘film’ doesn’t last very long and they predict that every five years they will have to re-preserve it, which will be very costly. When you think about how costly it is going to be to preserve digital they will be wishing to go back to the old days of film where you didn’t have to go through any conservation, because you put it in a good place and it was safe forever – or a hundred years anyway. In the long run it is going to cost more to shoot on digital than on film. |
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