Continuing upon last Friday’s post, here are Arthur Miller, ASC’s thoughts on how a producer can influence a cinematographer’s work.
The quote was cribbed from an article in the April 1942 edition of American Cinematographer…
“There are some whose only idea of photography seems to be to get a crisp, recognizable image, and maybe conceal the leading lady’s wrinkles and the hero’s extra chins. If you try to take even a few minutes longer per scene in the interests of good camerawork, you very quickly learn their opinion of such useless foolishness!
And then there are producers like Darryl Zanuck…he has an instinctive appreciation of good photography and what it means to a picture. He honestly wants his pictures to be the best-photographed in the industry and he backs this up by going far out of his way to give his cinematographers every opportunity to do outstanding work. Let one of those non-photographic directors interfere with even a single day’s work and as soon as the rushes are screened, Mr. Zanuck makes it his business to find out what’s interfering with the camerawork, and correct it. He’s the only producer I know who feels that retakes to improve the photography are as commendable as re-takes to improve direction or acting.
He thinks pictorially to a degree that very few other producers do, or can. Hehas an uncanny ability of viewing the rushes, not just as isolated scenes, but as parts of a coherent whole. For instance, we had some sequences in “How Green Was My Valley” which, if you looked at them alone, were pretty drab and uninspiring examples of photography. Most producers would have thought something was badly wrong with the camerawork: but Zanuck had such a clear image of the story in his mind that he knew just how essentially that unattractive visual mood fitted into the overall pattern Ford and I were trying to create. He even complimented US on it!”
As I stated about director John Ford in my previous post, if only all producers thought like Daryl F. Zanuck…!
Good post, Richie!