Jamie Anderson was born and raised in New City, New York, some 30 miles from New York City. His grandfather was Maxwell Anderson, an eminent Broadway playwright, whose stage credits included What Price Glory, Lost in the Stars, Key Largo, The Bad Seed and Winterset. He also scripted a number of screenplays, including All Quiet on the Western Front and The Wrong Man. His father was a stage manager and director in the theater and also of early, live television programs, including The Kraft Theatre and directing live Kodak commercials on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Anderson enrolled at Syracuse University with the intention of studying architecture, however his interest shifted to film. He subsequently transferred to New York University (NYU), and majored in film studies. Anderson began his career as a production assistant in New York City, working for Howard Zieff, a TV commercial director/ cinematographer. An NYU classmate took him to Los Angeles to crew with him on a Roger Corman film. Anderson shot a number of films for Corman, and he also assisted various commercial shooters. By the mid-1970s, he was working regularly as an assistant cameraman and then as an operator for such noted cinematographers as Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC, Conrad Hall, ASC, Bruce Surtees, ASC, Tak Fujimoto, ASC, Allen Daviau, ASC and John Alcott. Anderson earned his first narrative feature credit as a cinematographer in 1992 for Unlawful Entry. His subsequent credits include What’s Love Got to Do With It, Grosse Pointe Blank, Small Soldiers, The Gift, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, and such telefilms as The Temptations. The following are excerpts of a conversation with Jamie Anderson:

ICG: Where were you raised?

ANDERSON: I grew up in a town called New City, New York in the Hudson Valley. It’s about five miles from the Hudson River and 30 miles north of George Washington Bridge. It is very much in the sphere of New York City. My grandfather was a playwright working in New York and moved to New City along with a bunch of artists, painters and writers during the 1930s. I grew up in the same house that my dad was raised in. My father was in the theater for a while, and then in television.

ICG: Who was your grandfather?

ANDERSON: Maxwell Anderson. He was a teacher and journalist, who became a successful Broadway playwright (What Price Glory, Key Largo, Winterset, etc.). He also wrote screenplays and adapted plays as film scripts.

ICG: What did your dad do in television?

ANDERSON: He started as a stage manager in the theater, working on my grandfather’s, plays, and then directed live television programs for the Kraft Theater in 1952 or ’53. He also worked on the Ed Sullivan television show, and went into advertising with J. Walter Thompson. He worked on the Kodak account from 1955 until he retired about 20 years ago. He just turned 83.

ICG: Did you spend time on Broadway and TV stages when you were a kid?

ANDERSON: My earliest memory of the theater was probably my grandfather’s play The Day The Money Stopped. My parents took me on the train to Philadelphia to see the try-outs. They used to open shows in Philadelphia or New Haven and then bring them to Broadway. I remember getting room service from the hotel, and everybody was sort of somber because the play was a disaster. My father worked for a long time on The Ed Sullivan Show directing live commercials on the show. I got to visit that stage quite a few times. It was a real theater with a stage and balcony and proscenium and control room. That was pretty exciting, the old television cameras, a big stage crane for the center camera, and all the gear in the control room.

ICG: Did you grow up thinking you were going to be a filmmaker?

ANDERSON: No. My dad was a still photographer as a hobby. He had a darkroom in the downstairs bathroom and taught me how to use it when I was about 12. He gave me a two and a quarter inch Minolta Autocord camera, which I had for a long time. He also taught me how to build things and how to be a carpenter. When I was a kid, I helped an artist across the street build a house. He had done a lot of the remodeling on the house I grew up in, incredible woodwork, I also thought it would be fun to build houses. All through high school I took pictures for the yearbook and for my own enjoyment, and printed them myself, but I dreamed about becoming an architect.

ICG: Did you study architecture?

ANDERSON: I went to Syracuse University, and they told me to take a year of liberal arts and see how I felt. During that freshman year, I watched an architecture student who lived a couple rooms down the hall. He was working 24 hours a day. It was unbelievable how hard those guys worked, so I began to reconsider the idea of becoming an architect. That would that have been around 1965 or 1966. During the summer of my freshman year, I took a course from James Card who was the curator at the Eastman House in Rochester. He taught a survey course in the history of film at Syracuse. He lectured twice a week and it was really interesting. He showed a lot of great films, many of the early silent movies like The Great Train Robbery, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. I quickly began to fall in love with the idea of making movies. It just felt like a natural thing to get into cinematography, because I loved photography. I was still doing it in college. It took me a couple of years, but I finally transferred to the NYU film school after my junior year of majoring in English at Syracuse. I lived downtown in the East Village on East 13^th Street and went to NYU. My rent was $83.38 a month. The first week I was there some guy was stabbed in the bar across the street and died on the sidewalk across from my building. I was held up in my own hallway by a kid with a knife who took my money but left my subway fare. It was the same block that you saw in Taxi Driver, where Jody Foster’s character worked the streets as a prostitute.

ICG: Where there other early influences on your decision to become a filmmaker?

ANDERSON: My first real job was building scenery during the summers in the Bronx at a Broadway scenery studio, Feller Scenery. I was thinking the other day about how much I learned by working with those guys. Those were all members of Stagehands Local One, who built scenery during the day and worked the shows at theatres at night. I worked in various places around the shop, during the different summers there, the Drafting room, as a carpenter’s helper, in the Iron shop, or just sweeping up. When I started making movies, it suddenly felt very familiar. I was a teenager when I started working there during the summers. I think I continued until my first summer in college. There were a lot of different personalities, both difficult and wonderful people. I learned how to get along with all of them and liked all of them. At the same time, they were teaching me. The boss was an old Army buddy of my dad’s. He was a taskmaster, but a wonderful guy who could build anything. His shop did most of the big shows at that time. Fiddler on the Roof was built while I was there. The scenery was interesting because it was always different. There were always different construction problems. People were always trying new things.

ICG: How’d you get into film?

ANDERSON: The first summer I was at NYU, just before I started film school, I worked at an advertising agency where I learned a bit about that business. The next summer, a friend of my dad’s got me a job as a P.A. with Howard Zieff. He was a very hot still photographer in the 1960s and ‘70s and became a very hot commercial director. He worked on Benson and Hedges, and Volkswagen ads—that sort of thing, a lot of it was pretty cutting-edge at the time. He became known as a director who had a kind of a movie look. Howard loved doing stuff that mimicked real movies, like the club in Casablanca. He used to recreate scenes like those all the time. He was a good lighter. He built some of the first soft lights in his shop, and he had a really good eye for lighting faces. I was working almost full time, and then it became full time. I started going to film school in the evenings. It was great job, because I did everything. I was a still photographer on the set. I printed production stills in his darkroom. I was a location scout. I was a P.A. on the set. I was a runner. I helped the casting woman, taking Polaroid pictures and videotape of the cast. It was just a great place to learn.

ICG: What was the next step?

ANDERSON: I left film school without a degree, because I was missing some freshman liberal arts requirements. I just decided it was time to start working. I got a job with a guy who did industrial films and documentaries. I was his camera assistant, the location guy and P.A. I took care of the equipment and did some operating when he needed two cameras. That was my first professional experience with motion picture cameras. It was all 16 mm. After about a year, my former roommate at film school—Jonathan Kaplan, who’s now a director-producer on ER—got a call from Roger Corman, who asked if he would like to direct a movie? Jonathan thought it was a joke. He thought a friend was pulling his leg and hung up on him. But, Roger Corman called back.     

ICG: Do you know why Roger Corman called him?

ANDERSON: Martin Scorsese, who was teaching at NYU at that time, had made a film called Boxcar Bertha for Roger, and he recommended Jonathan for Night Call Nurses. Jonathan brought three of us with him to Los Angeles…Jon Davison who’s now a producer, a writer, and me. We made our first feature together for New World Pictures. Roger was a really interesting guy. He was unbelievably tight with money, but that’s how he survived. He was a very pragmatic and a very bright guy. He graduated from Stanford and started directing low budget movies. He was the kind of guy, who would make a movie in five days or six days, and realize he had the set standing all weekend, so he’d make another movie over the weekend instead of letting the set stand. He knew how to make something out of nothing for very little money.

ICG: What was it like working there?

ANDERSON: My first job there was as a second unit cinematographer. I’d never shot 35 mm before. I was making $175 a week, and I thought it was great. You learned how to get the shots somehow. There was a great deal of enthusiasm. The place was full of people my age who were eager to get good experience and have a lot of fun doing it. You saw your film right away. You saw your mistakes and you could learn from them. I worked on about a half a dozen pictures for Roger, and I was also a camera assistant on commercials to make a living.

ICG: How did you get into commercials?

ANDERSON: I joined NABET (National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians), because I couldn’t get into the Guild. I was working for Caleb Deschanel (ASC), Allen Daviau (ASC), Woody Omens (ASC), Ron Dexter, John Hora (ASC). They were all in NABET at that time because the IA was not making it easy to get in the local in those days. Finally, Roger gave me a chance to shoot first unit on a film called Hollywood Boulevard (1976). The director was Joe Dante, and Eric Saarinen was the second unit cameraman. It was a take off on low budget movies. We used a lot of clips from Roger’s old movies, so we only had to shoot about an hour of the story. It was a busy 10 days. I think we had a $60,000 budget. I shot a couple of other movies after that, including Piranha with Joe Dante, which had a bit of a bigger budget. It’s a cult favorite now as many of Roger’s old pictures have become.

ICG: How did you finally get into the camera Guild?

ANDERSON: The Guild opened up during the mid-1970s for about a year. If you could document 30 days of work with one company or 90 days with a series of companies, you could apply to get into the Guild. I had experience both in commercials and movies as an assistant, and also as a cinematographer on four low-budget, non-union films. I had much better documentation as an assistant for getting in the union. I was a loader for Mario Tosi on The Stunt Man, and I was an assistant for Allen (Daviau) and Woody (Omens), who got into the union around the same time. I pulled focus for five years until I moved up to operator. Tak Fujimoto (ASC) moved me up on a film directed by Jonathan Kaplan. It was called Heart Like A Wheel.

ICG: Who were some of the others you worked with as an assistant and operator?

ANDERSON: I worked with Vittorio Storaro (ASC, AIC) as an assistant on One From The Heart. I knew some of the production people on the picture. I was brought in for an interview and he hired me. I don’t know why, but I was glad that he did. The operator was Tom Ackerman, who’s a cinematographer now. John Leonetti was one of the other assistants. Vittorio also had some of his regular crew from Italy. It was a wonderful experience. We shot at what used to be called Hollywood General Studios, then Zoetrope Studios, which was operated by Francis Coppola. It’s called something else today. Every single stage on the lot was devoted to this movie. It was a fantastic project to work on. It took place in a totally constructed Las Vegas. The sets by Dean Tavoularis were gorgeous, and the story was very romantic and wonderful. I can’t go on that lot anymore without feeling as though I’m visiting my old college campus, only somebody else has moved in.

ICG: Didn’t Coppola use a makeshift video assist system and direct from a trailer?

ANDERSON: Not really makeshift at all, it was a Jetstream trailer that he called the Silverfish. Still has it. Francis loved the idea of shooting scenes in real time and having people go from one room to another and have another camera start rolling. He had a video camera coupled to each film camera, so he could watch the live images in the trailer. It was a little like live television, and it enabled the actors to walk from one room to another and do entire scenes without cutting. We did that to an extent, but I’m sure it wasn’t as much as he had originally planned. It was a very interesting experience. We did long, long takes sometimes. There would be scenes where gauzy net scrims would divide rooms. The lighting would change, and you’d be able to see through the scrim. The next scene would begin with two other characters. I certainly had never seen anything like it.

ICG: And he was calling the shots from a trailer?

ANDERSON: He was out in the Silverfish, where he had monitors for all the video cameras. He had a P.A. system and a video “spycam” set up and could talk to the actors on the stage from that trailer like this disembodied voice. It was kind of weird. It was always much nicer when he came on the set and talked to people. I think it was especially hard on the actors. Everybody just responded much more to a human being there in a director’s chair—especially him. I mean, he’s such a warm guy, and he’s so communicative. He’s a funny guy, too. There was great energy   on that film when he was out there. When it was just this voice it wasn’t the same thing.

ICG: You also worked with Storaro on Tucker?

ANDERSON: When he came back and did Tucker with Francis (Coppola) up north, Vittorio called me. I was an operator by then. He needed a second camera crew and that was a great opportunity. It was a very visual, stylized movie that took place in the 1940s, and it was anamorphic. It was my first time on a wide-screen show, and it was just great. It was shot in the San Francisco area. We had space in an old Ford plant in Richmond that was deserted. They made part of it into a Tucker assembly line. Parts of it were used for office scenes and parts were just used for set construction. The Tucker house was in Sonoma. It was a beautiful old farmhouse with a porch all the way around it.

ICG: Did Storaro talk about his philosophy about the use of colors?

ANDERSON: On One From The Heart, he gave everyone an essay or treatise on the use of colors in the movie. Every color had a symbolic value. It was the same on Tucker and Dick Tracy.

ICG: What did you learn from working with Storaro?

ANDERSON: He is a very open and a free thinker, who was always challenging himself and everybody who was working around him. One of the things you learn from working with him is not to be afraid to stick your neck out and try new things. He has such courage, and an incredible command of the technology. He is a real fighter for what he believes in. He really challenges you to have that same kind of commitment and courage… and of course the man can light beautifully. You hope some of that rubs off on you. One thing I really learned was the notion of having a vision or plan and sticking to it, being committed to your idea.

ICG: You also worked with him on Dick Tracy?

ANDERSON: I started as an operator and got moved up to second unit cameraman. That was a lot of fun and also terrifying at first. I was shooting stuff for this movie on the back lot while he was shooting somewhere else. He was very kind—one of the warmest human beings you’ll ever meet. He is also very supportive and a really good teacher.

ICG: You also worked with Allen Daviau (ASC).

ANDERSON: I initially worked with Allen on commercials during the 1970s when I was still an assistant. He’s a natural born teacher, who is devoted to cinematography and movies in a way that is just unimaginable. He lives and breathes it. Allen loves talking about the craft. He’s not a perfectionist, but he’s tenacious and will stay with something he’s trying to do until he gets it done. He’s also a beautiful lighter, and really a nice guy… one of the warmest people I know. I was lucky to be able to work with him as an assistant, and then when I started operating and he started shooting movies, and I got to work with him a little bit as an operator.

ICG: Which films did you work with him on?

ANDERSON: I worked as an assistant on E.T. (the Extraterrestrial). There was a rotating crew on the B camera. There were three of us and we each stayed about four weeks. I did most of the stuff that takes place in the house. It was all done at Culver City. It was both great fun and everybody’s first nightmarish experience with animatronic rubber creatures.

ICG: Why was it nightmarish?

ANDERSON: It was during the very early days of using cables and servo-motors to control puppets made out of latex and paint. I remember one wonderful woman who did the hands of the puppet, who was kind of a mime-dancer. She had these great expressive hands. There were several people who wore this rubber suit. They were real troopers who would never say they needed a break. One day one of them suddenly passed out from the heat and fell right on his ET face. We pulled the suit off and the guy was just soaking wet. It was the first experience I had photographing that type of scene… trying to make a puppet look real and alive. Allen’s lighting was brilliant. I did it again with Allen on Harry and the Hendersons, only I was an operator on that film. It was a very difficult creature, because the eyes were so deep and it was the real actor’s eyes behind a Rick Baker mask. It was really hard to get light into that face…it was a struggle for Allen. He really worked hard on that film.

ICG: Who else did you work with during that period?

ANDERSON: I had an opportunity to work with Joe Biroc (ASC) on Airplane. Todd Henry and I switched jobs between first and second assistant every week, and that was okay with Joe. I don’t think I have ever worked with anyone who made more use of hard light. He had a gorgeous way of lighting. By then (1980), most cinematographers had picked up soft lighting techniques from commercials, so I learned a lot about cutting and shaping images with light by watching Joe.

ICG: Didn’t you also work with Conrad Hall (ASC)?

ANDERSON: Conrad Hall was always one of my heroes from the moment I got interested in cinematography. I can remember reading about him in American Cinematographer Magazine as a teenager in high school and early college, and I also saw Butch Cassidy and some of his other pictures from that period. He was always doing these very fresh, inventive things. I met his son, who was an assistant when I got into the industry. In fact, he worked as my assistant when I operated for Tak Fujimoto (ASC) on Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. He recommended me to his dad who was preparing to shoot Tequila Sunrise, which Robert Town was directing. The chance of working with Conrad Hall was something I never actually thought I would have an opportunity to do. He is another wonderful guy to work with. He’s full of energy and very funny. He’s a real artist on the set. These ideas come and he starts working on them. It’s like he discovers things by accident, but of course it’s not really an accident. He’s also a hell of a great lighter, and his enthusiasm is contagious. He was so interesting and so much fun to work with that I felt, if I never did anything else again at least I got to work with Connie Hall.

ICG: You also worked with John Alcott (ASC). What was he like?

ANDERSON: John Alcott was a very interesting guy. A friend of mine was assisting for him on commercials. He needed an operator to work with him on a movie for Disney called Baby. It was a dinosaur movie with another rubber creature. We were going to shoot in Africa. I met him with him, and we got along pretty well. He was used to working in the British system, where the operator and director work very closely together, and the cinematographer was sort of an overall supervisor and lighting cameraman. The operator worked with the director on set-ups and coverage. It was a great experience. John was very supportive, and let me do whatever I had to do, not to mention working in Africa, which was quite an eye opener. I learned a lot from him about production and preparation. John really understood the whole dynamics of production and how to make that work for the cinematography. I learned a lot about the politics of moviemaking from him.

ICG: You also operated for Bruce Surtees (ASC)?

ANDERSON: Bruce Surtees is another wonderful cinematographer, who is lots of fun to work with. I got hooked up with him on some commercials and then a couple of B camera assignments on some movies with Clint Eastwood. Those were just day calls. Somehow, he knew who I was and called me when he needed an operator for a very peculiar movie called Back to the Beach. Bruce keeps you guessing, and he keeps you on your toes. He’s very inquisitive. He was always trying to do something more interesting than you would normally expect.

ICG: All of this raises a question. A lot of kids are coming out of film schools who have to decide whether they want to be an assistant and operator or just try to go out and shoot?

ANDERSON: I can only speak for myself. Working on other cinematographer’s crews was an invaluable experience. I think the whole apprentice system is extremely important. Had I gone into the Guild as a cinematographer, I would have missed all the experience and things I have learned by watching these people at work. I’ve also worked with Don McAlpine (ASC, ACS) and John Hora (ASC). Sure, there are times when I think, I would have shot a lot more movies by now if I had started as a cinematographer, but I never would have gotten to work with any of these guys, and I learned so much from all of them. It stays with you forever. I can’t tell you how often something I’ve learned from one of the guys who I’ve worked with comes back to me while I’m shooting a film. It’s just there like a presence. It’s like they are there looking over my shoulder. I can’t imagine being able to learn about what it takes to be a cinematographer in school, even though I went to film school. There are certain things you can learn in school, but the most important teachers are the people who you work with early in your career. You can learn so much by working with great cinematographers who have 20 or 30 or more movie credits. There’s so much to learn from what they did and how they did it that I can’t imagine missing that experience. And it’s not just a matter of learning tricks or techniques, but it’s watching different people creatively go about the work, following an idea, solving lighting problems, committing to a particular style, and what that means in the day to day work. It’s learning a bit about how to think, not just how to read a light meter.

ICG: You’re not talking about emulating other people’s techniques, right?

ANDERSON: Right. You’re always doing things you’ve never done before or maybe nobody’s ever done before. The cinematographers I worked with were always trying to come up with new twists and new ways of doing things. You’re always in new situations, trying to hang a light in a new place, or to make light happen in impossible places. The more you watch somebody else solve those problems, the more tools and information you’re going to have to invent solutions of your own when you start shooting. Every time you start a day, you’re calling on some experience you had and adding some new twist to it.

ICG: Who did you shoot your first feature with as a cinematographer?

ANDERSON: Jonathan Kaplan, the director who brought me out here in the first place. The picture was called Unlawful Entry. It was a kind of cop psycho thriller with Kurt Russell, Madeline Stowe and Ray Liotta. Jonathan was very supportive, and I was ready to start shooting again. The film had a lot of atmospheric shots. It had a lot of night scenes and a lot of scary stuff, racing around downtown Los Angeles and night interiors in houses. There was a lot of opportunity to have fun with lighting. It was a dark and spooky thriller.

ICG: Was it a difficult decision moving up and giving up a safe niche as operator?

ANDERSON: Not really. I loved operating. It's a great job. I love looking through the finder and following somebody across a room or just composing shots and moving a camera, but at the same time it wasn’t at all hard to give it up because I really wanted to concentrate on lighting and deciding where to put the camera and how or when to move it. It felt very comfortable right from the get-go, and I had a very good crew. Once you get good people around you who understand what you’re after, you’re not giving anything away (when you stop operating). You are just getting people to help you do what you do. When I first started shooting, I felt I had to solve a lot of little problems about a shot, work out the details and then start lighting. As I got more experienced, I became more focused on lighting.

ICG: Let’s talk about commercials for a while.

ANDERSON: I started in commercials and my dad did commercials, so that was my first experience. When I came to Los Angeles and joined NABET I met Allen Daviau, John Hora, Woody Omens, Ron Dexter and Caleb Deschanel while I was working on commercials. It was great experience, because I was always working with different people in different situations. In those days, they had decent budgets so you had a lot of resources. You had time to make something unusual and make something a little more visual or a little more attention getting.

ICG: Is it relevant to your narrative work?

ANDERSON: Any experience is going to apply to your next job. Commercials are a different way of thinking, but you’re still telling a story on film. You’re still lighting. You are still moving the camera. You are still composing, and you are still dealing with colors. Commercials are also a good place to experiment. You can’t help but benefit from that variety of experience. Commercials are where I learned about telecine, which is now becoming important in features as it become more practical to color time and manipulate film images in digital suites.

ICG: How do you think digital technology will affect cinematographers?

ANDERSON: Obviously, some things are going to change completely, but other things are going to stay the same. Whether you’re shooting a scene with a digital or film camera, you still need to light, and you still need to use composition, movement and colors to create images. Digital technology gives you a lot of flexibility in what you’re able to do in manipulating those images after they’re recorded. That’s inherent in the technology. You just can’t reconstruct every little pixel with film the way you can with a digital record. I think what we need next are advances in digital memory storage and ways to shorten the time it takes to work at film resolution, so you can more freely transfer from film to digital for image manipulation and back again. Unfortunately, there are influential people who are pushing for settling for less. But, whether it’s film or digital technology, movies are still going to be about storytelling. How many movies have we seen with fantastic digital effects, and nobody goes to see them because there’s no story and no life in them? You still have to tell a story that teaches us something about the human condition and that isn’t going to change. I think the cinematographer is still going to be the one who translates stories into images.

ICG: Does it matter to you whether it’s a film or digital camera?

ANDERSON: I hope people continue shooting on film for a long time, because I think there is such a fundamental difference between digital images and this magic lantern where you shine light through something, and get this organic, chemical reaction. I’d really hate to lose that, so I hope the original recording gets done on film for a long time. Film has a warmth and smoothness. It has a much more human image, a more organic quality. Digital images are amazing and startling, and getting better all the time, but there’s a kind of—it’s not a coldness—it’s like a record as opposed to an impression. There’s tremendous pressure to go digital because producers and the studios have this false impression it’s going to save a lot of money. The worst thing we can do is do what they did with television in the early days, which was to rush into a format and a system too soon and get stuck with something that would hamstring the quality of images for years or decades. Especially with technology changing so fast, it would be a mistake to commit to something that’s going to haunt us later.

ICG: Let’s talk about some of the other films you have shot?

ANDERSON: Gross Pointe Blank was one of my favorites. John Cusack was very committed to that project. He just knew that character, the story and the genre. I sometimes ask myself why it worked out that the look was so right for that story, and I’m honestly not sure. I think it’s just sort of an accident of the story, the locations and the kinds of scenes we were doing. In the end it’s alchemy -- sort of an accident of combinations of things you can’t construct. They just happen.

ICG: Was it a designed look or did the look evolve while you were shooting?

ANDERSON: We wanted it to be very stylized, kind of a film noir look, but also kind of modern and quirky with a zing to it. What the hell does that mean? I don’t know, but it worked. We talked about it, using those kinds of words. It just worked between the designer, Stephen Altman and the director; George Armitage, everybody was on the same page and it just kind of fell together.

ICG: Cinematographers have to collaborate with a lot of people…

ANDERSON: That’s true. Everybody on the set has to work well with other people, but a cinematographer’s work is affected by practically every department, props, sets, costumes, makeup, hair, extras and casting. Every once in a while people give you this look like, ‘What the hell does he care about that for?’ You know, it goes back to those days when I worked at the scenery studio where I learned to work and get along with many different kinds of people. You’ve got to be able to communicate with the director who is usually a lucid kind of educated, talented, creative person. You’ve also got to be able to communicate with somebody who is just there to drive a truck, because nothing can be worse than a truck in the wrong place, and sometimes a truck or car parked in the right place can save your ass!

ICG: What other films did you like?

ANDERSON: I liked What’s Love Got To Do With It. It wasfun, because I grew up with rock ‘n’ roll and that picture went through the periods of my own youth. It was great fun researching Ike and Tina Turner. She was a really interesting person. Their music was wonderful, and her music was wonderful after she left him. I liked the human interactions and the music. I loved doing the musical numbers and the theater stage lighting. We did different lighting for each period. I hired a theatrical lighting designer who was old enough to know how they lit rock ‘n’ roll all the way from the beginning, and we tried to be pretty true to each period we were in. The cast on that picture was incredible. Laurence Fishburne and Angela Bassett were both really devoted and committed to that project, and they brought those two characters to life. It wasn’t a big budget. We had home movie scenes that we shot on 16mm black-and-white reversal film. I bought a couple of Bell and Howell 16 cameras at the pawn shop— no, that’s too romantic. One of them was from Lloyd’s Camera. We shot home movies of Ike and Tina around the pool and their Mexican wedding and other scenes like that, including early 1950’s television, American Bandstand and that kind of stuff, all the way through to the early Rolling Stones and the London rock ‘n’ roll look in the mid-‘60s.

ICG: That remind me of a recent DGA technology report to members that says image quality doesn’t matter, because the audience doesn’t have the taste or intelligence to care about nuances. What do you make of that?

ANDERSON: That isn’t true. People may not come out of the theater talking about the beautiful way the cinematographer dealt with the period, but those things have an affect on the audience and how they respond to the story. It’s not as though everybody is a critic who can analyze what it was that elicited a particular response from the audience. But, we know that the audience responds to darkness and light and they also respond to different colors, composition and movement. An audience will respond differently depending on how you shoot. It’s interesting because no one would deny that the audience responds differently to a very loud sound and one that’s soft, but they seem to be denying that the audience responds to those subtleties in images. I think human beings have an infinite range of ways they respond to light and colors.

ICG: Do you want to pick another movie that you liked?

ANDERSON: I loved The Gift, which I did pretty recently. I also loved Small Soldiers, which was very misunderstood and, unfortunately, it came out at a time when people were very ultra-sensitive about violence in the media. It was taken much too seriously. We had beautiful sets and Joe Dante is a fabulous director. He’s a real film buff …one of those guys who spent his high school years in movie theaters and knows every movie ever made. He has a wonderful eye and a great editing sense. I would have fun doing any movie with him.

ICG: What was it like working with him on Small Soldiers?

ANDERSON: Every day was a treat because he just would approach each scene and situation with such a fresh eye and a quirky sense of humor. He’s very self-deprecating and is not pompous about anything. He’s a great filmmaker who knows where to put the camera. He knows what coverage he’s going to use and he’s very good with kids and young people. He knows how to get performances out of them. Joe has also done a lot of effects films, so he was comfortable with working with both animatronics and digital soldiers. I did an early film with him with Roger Corman. It was called Piranha. We used a lot of rubber fish. He’s been doing effects movies his whole career so it’s pretty hard to get into trouble when he’s at the helm.

ICG: You did The Gift with Sam Raimi. What was that like?

ANDERSON: He has a very dry and wonderfully strange sense of humor. It was an interesting project. Billy Bob Thornton wrote the script which is a story was about a psychic who lives in a small town. She’s a widow whose husband was killed in an industrial accident. She’s got two kids, and she becomes involved in a murder case because of her ability to see things that aren’t there. The whole cast was amazing. We shot in Georgia on a very low budget with just a 44-day schedule. Sam is great at creating a visual tension that results in scary scenes. Even seeing dailies scared me sometimes.

ICG: You have to explain what that means.

ANDERSON: When you are making a movie, you’re so involved in the process, you don’t respond the same way on the set as you would when its edited and sound is added. But, there’s a scene where Annie’s in a hallway and suddenly sees the victim of a murder standing there, half-decomposed and all blue. Just shooting that scene was startling, and then seeing it in dailies. I actually jumped. I’m not kidding. Sam just knows the rhythm and how to reveal things to the audience. He’s really good at understanding what’s creepy and what’s unnerving.

ICG: What about working with Kevin Smith?

ANDERSON: He’s a guy from Jersey who financed himself through film school and made his first movie on credit cards. He’s a hell of a writer who knows how to create great characters. He also has just a great attitude about the work. For somebody as young as he is—Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back—was his fifth picture, he’s very savvy about what’s worth fighting for and what isn’t. He put together a great team, and it was a very interesting, cartoon-y film.

ICG: What does cartoon-y mean?

ANDERSON: The colors were very saturated. It was bigger than life, and not quite real.

ICG: When you are shooting a film like this, do you think back to working with Storaro on Dick Tracy and draw on those experiences?

ANDERSON: Certainly there are scenes in Jay and Silent Bob where we use those kinds of ultra-saturated colors. I remembered that one of the things Vittorio fought for in Dick Tracy was the use of simple, primary colors like you’d see in the comic section of a newspaper. He wanted a sort of two-dimensional, cartoon-y look, and he fought very hard for it. He is the reason the picture looked that way. A room would be all red and one character’s costume be green and the street would be blue, like the funny papers except a lot more so. I’ve realized the times I’ve worked with colors how important it is to keep it simple, because you can easily have too much color or too many colors. If everything is the same color, after a couple minutes, the audience doesn’t see it anymore. You’ve got to bounce off or contrast it with another color to keep it clear in the audience’s mind.

ICG: So, you are saying two things here, if I understand you correctly. One is that you drew on your experience to create the look Kevin Smith wanted, and two that is an interpretive process, which means every one might take a different approach to telling the same story.

ANDERSON: Yes, and that’s why I don’t think any new technology is going to make cinematography so simple that anyone can do it. There’s a lot of talk about the advantage of being able to see images on a HD monitor, but that’s just a tool. The real challenge is inventing a visual way to tell a new story by interpreting feelings, moods and characters. You can’t automate that. It has to come from a human heart otherwise no one is going to give a damn about it.

ICG: One of the things that you alluded to before is that with digital postproduction technology, anybody can change anything the cinematographer does.

ANDERSON: That’s a real problem. Digital technology is making images more accessible. Anyone can manipulate the cinematographer’s images after the fact. It’s a really difficult political/ moral sort of problem that you’re not going to solve by denying the technology. You can’t stop it from happening. But you can educate people about the importance of stories being a vision of an individual and not something that comes from a committee. Truthfully, this isn’t a new issue. From the time the first movie was made, I’m sure there were people meddling with other people’s vision. Sometimes it’s been disastrous and sometimes you might get a good result, but it isn’t the way the creative process has worked in films. I just don’t think audiences are going to respond to over-manipulated films. The really good ideas come from one person at a time.

ICG: How about the TV movies you’ve shot?

ANDERSON: You’ve got to be prepared, because chances are you are going to be shooting six or eight pages a day, so everything has to go like clockwork. Sometimes there is something wonderful about having to work faster, thinking on your feet and coming up with solutions to problems that are suddenly in your face. Allan Arkush, who is another NYU guy, directed most of the TV movies I’ve shot. One of the things we worked on was The Temptations, a miniseries. He’s very organized and a good photographer himself. He understands where to spend his time and which battles to fight. I’ve learned a lot by working with him.

ICG: What advice would you offer to today’s film students?

ANDERSON: Go to school to get an education and also learn about life. You’ve got to learn about art, music, poetry and writing. You’ve got to learn about history, too. You have to experience life, and understand how people expressed themselves before you came along, because there have been thousands of years of writing and art and history and human experience.      

ICG: What do you think are the most important inventions or breakthroughs in technology that have affected the art of filmmaking?

ANDERSON: When someone asked Mel Brooks as the 2000 Year Old Man that question, he said the greatest invention known to man was Saran Wrap. It’s not the machine we use to record and display images that’s important. What’s important is how we use the tools to tell the story. It seems that there’s no end to the tricks and toys that people can invent. It’s amazing that people are still finding new and exciting ways to move cameras around. Just look at the Doggiecam. It’s a simple and elegant invention that provides a totally different point of view. Who anticipated that would come along after 100 years of filmmaking? It is amazing what people can do.