I’m often asked by students: What’s the first thing I do when walking onto a set? Thanks to Dennis Schaefer and Larry Salvato’s 1984 collection of interviews with prominent cinematographers, Masters of Light, Conrad Hall, ASC gave a more articulate answer than I’ve ever been capable of.
“The first thing I do is quake in my boots; that’s the first thing I do. I sit down and I get a camera set up and I probably lean my eye against it as a sort of security thing like the character in the “Peanuts” cartoon strip who sucks his thumb and holds the security blanket up to his ear. That’s about what I do with a camera and my eye. I put my eye up against the camera and close the other eye and be totally alone. Or I can blink and see if anybody is watching. And everybody is watching because you have to decide what you’re going to do and you have to communicate that to somebody. After you get rolling, you pretty much have it all well in hand what you want to do. But the first day I come on set, I usually don’t know what I want to do; I feel like I’ve just graduated from USC. I feel inadequate. It really takes me a little while to get rolling and to get my courage and spirit up. Not too long, but it takes a while. Then what you do is, if you haven’t done it the night before, or the week before, you decide how you’re going to light it. In other words, you don’t decide whether it’s going to be rough or slick, real or naturalistic. But you have to decide how to produce that effect that you’ve already agreed upon with the director. And there are a lot of different ways of accomplishing it. So you just go about doing it; there’s no formula.”
My default response to young people is that there are no one-size-fits-all answers to any question about cinematography. My gratitude goes out to Hall for backing me up on that point. I wasn’t close with him during his life, but we did spend time together and I got to know him to some extent. My recollection is that he was a friendly, unpretentiously brilliant man.
Where has his type gone and why aren’t we producing them in the quantities we used to anymore?
An older AD once asked what my primary motivator was on set. My answer was…Fear.
Yes, Russ…it also remains a prime motivator of mine to this day!
FEAR, it is!
Greg – Funny how nobody outside our little world knows that, isn’t it? We always project an air of total competence, but a lot of it is bullshit. It’s even funnier when you project it upon everyone else on set. At least we know what we’re doing! Can you imagine what the rest of them are feeling?