BF: (Bob Fisher) John, I thought we’d talk just a little bit in the beginning about why and how you got interested in filmmaking?

JB: (John Bailey) It happened during my junior year in college, when I studied abroad in Europe. I spent a year in Austria, mainly at Innsbruck and Vienna. It was 1962- 63. I had seen a few foreign films, Bergman’s Wild Strawberries and Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, but I didn’t feel that I was part of that culture. Those foreign films were kind of rarified artifacts from a culture that I didn’t relate to. But living in Europe, and struggling to speak German, in an environment where the new wave films were what everyone was seeing, it was different. People were talking about Antonioni, Fellini and Jean-Luc Godard. Obviously, there were American films in the theatres, but they didn’t have the incredible presence, almost the hegemony they have today, where they obliterate indigenous film cultures.

European cinema was in a very exciting state, and people were talking about movies. I got swept into that and saw an enormous number of foreign films. I came back to the United States with a consuming interest in film. During my last year at Loyola University, I started going to a movie theatre called The Riviera Capri. It was where the Beverly Cinema is now.

They would run the most eclectic films. I barely survived my senior year at Loyola, because I was going off every night to see everything I could at that theatre. Fortunately, it was very cheap.

BF: Was there a point where you said, I want to be a cinematographer, or did you differentiate that from filmmaker?

JB: Deciding to be a cinematographer came much later. At that point I was interested in film theory and criticism, not in terms of daily newspapers reviewing, but writing about film. Oddly enough, I’m starting to do that now after all these years.

BF: Where did you go to film school?

JB: I went to USC, because I was interested in film theory. I wasn’t one of these kids who grew up with an 8mm camera glued to my head. During my first year, I took a beginning camera course that Gene Peterson taught. Woody Omens was a teaching assistant who encouraged me. My first project was a still photo shoot. I took photographs of little greasy spoon diners, and the patrons and cooks. I accidentally overexposed everything about three stops because I didn’t know really how to do anything right. When I printed the pictures, they all came back with a very high key, washed-out look—more like Richard Avedon’s fashion photos than gritty pictures of greasy spoon diners.

Woody, in his infinite generosity was very supportive. He gave me the encouragement I needed to think about going ahead. Otherwise, I could have been squashed right then. There were a lot of interesting people studying at USC at that time, Caleb Deschanel, Bob Steadman, George Lucas, John Milius, Randal Kleiser and others. Most students wanted to be directors. Somebody had to shoot their movies, and I ended up starting to do that by default.

BF: What do you mean by default?

JB: Nobody else wanted to do it!

BF: Really?

JB: Yeah! (Laughs)

BF: It’s never that simple. Something inside of you had to say you wanted to shoot and this was your opportunity.

JB: Well, no. Actually it was a very methodical decision. I wanted to be a

writer. I had done a little bit of creative writing and studying. If you want to be a writer you have to learn vocabulary, grammar and style. I said to myself, if you want to be a film writer or critic, you have to learn the language of film. I decided to learn by looking through the eyepiece and shooting film. That’s how I got seduced into an endless fascination with the camera.

BF: How did you get started?

JB: I shot some student films, but at that time, it didn’t mean anything to be in film school. It didn’t provide any entree into the industry and certainly not into the Guild. As a matter of fact, it was a time when the worst thing you could do would be to let anybody know that you had been to film school. There was certainly no courting of students by the industry.

So it was hard getting started. My initial jobs were actually in post production -- synching dailies, cutting negative and reversal film. It was a long time before I started working in production. The first job I had was as a loader on a low budget horror film. We shot black and white short ends – none longer than 150 feet -- with a blimped Arri IIC.

By the end of the first week, my thumbs were all taped and bandaged from loading those old Arri magazines. There was a gear on the bottom that tore up your thumb. I did that for $50 a week.

BF: So, there has never been an easy way to begin your careers?

JB: No. I think the cliché that you pay your dues is true. There’s no way around it. I can think of a few people who came out of the (barrel of the) cannon at full speed. But, I think they were short-changed in a way. I know the temptation is to move as quickly as you can as far as you can. My own theory is that the more underpinnings you have, the more of a support system you have. The more you know about a lot of other things other than your own trajectory, the better off you’re going to be in the long run. There are incredible stories, especially during the last decade of one shot successes. I guess that’s always been true in Hollywood. There also is a long list of filmmakers who have done incredible student films, and maybe even a first feature, who never rise to that level again.

BF: Who were the people at that stage who influenced you?

JB: I got into NABET as an assistant. I worked with a lot of commercial cameramen who really knew their stuff. David Shore was one. I also worked with Gregory Sandor, as an assistant on a lot of very low budget films. He finally got an I.A. film through the director Monte Hellman. He had worked with Monte on a couple of independent features, including The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind. Monte got a studio film called Two Lane Blacktop. He hired Gregory to shoot it. I was in the I.A, by then. I was in Group 2, and supposedly you couldn’t work on features -- but I assisted Gregory on this film. I learned so much from him, because he was trained in the Hungarian tradition of classical composition and very beautifully sculpted light. He set every light according to perfect ratios, even back light. His dailies were incredibly consistent. There were no surprises. I learned the ABC’s of lighting by working with him. He was a very big influence on my career.

BF: How long was it until you got to shoot?

JB: I started shooting while I was an assistant cameraman. It was mainly student films and a couple of AFI projects. I shot a very low budget film that Alan Rudolph directed. It was a rock ‘n roll horror film that we made for $40,000 in around 1970 or ’71. He doesn’t even list it in his filmography. Before that while I was still a student, I shot a film in 16mm (format), in black and white with anamorphic lenses -- which was quite an experience. There were no anamorphic lenses as such in 16mm at the time, but we had a system that was similar to the original 20^th Century Fox CinemaScope, where you focused two sets of lenses at the same time.

BF: I never heard about that before.

JB: You had to focus both lenses and sometimes the synchronization was very weird. We had a little 16mm Éclair NPR camera, which we were trying to focus by hand. There was no follow focus mechanism. Every once in a while, something would break loose and the anamorphic image would sort of shift sideways.

BF: In retrospect, were those experiences valuable for you later on?

JB: I had a kind of creative freedom that I hardly have ever had since.

BF: Was there a film that you shot at the early stage of your career, where you said to yourself, this is it, I know I can do this?

JB: No. I’ve never felt that way. I still don’t feel that way. Carol and I talk about this a lot. The night before I start production on a new film is very tense for me, because I feel I have to prove myself all over again. You start every picture from ground zero. I don’t think anybody ever really feels secure.

BF: Who is Carol?

JB: Carol Littleton is my wife and a (preeminent) film editor. She is the same way when she’s starting a film. She always says, " I don’t know if I can do this," and I have to assure her that she will be great.

Do we have to continue discussing my history? It’s so boring.

BF: It’s probably encouraging for people who are at the beginnings of their careers to hear that you had to climb that same mountain they are facing. But, let’s move forward now to last Spring, when the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers and the USC School of Cinema and Television asked you to keynote a day-long symposium. The place was USC. The symposium was labeled: The Future Of The Cinema: A Real World Progress Report. What went through your mind when they asked you to do this?

JB: Well, (laughs) I’ve always thought that the SMPTE was a very technical, and scientific organization. I couldn’t imagine why they would want me, a non-technical cinematographer to deliver a keynote address to a scientific organization. I had to be assured that they wanted me to talk about topics that I consider to be important.

I went ahead and wrote about the things which were on my mind at the time. I must say, I had a lot of trepidation speaking to that audience, but I had 30 minutes, and I decided to use all of them, because you never know when you’ll get a captive audience like that again.

I could sense while I was talking that I had touched a kind of chord. The response that I’ve gotten since then has been very reaffirming. You know, no matter what we do, whether we’re a post production supervisor, a daily contact man at the lab, a Kodak rep, a telecine operator, a cinematographer, writer or director, I think we all love movies. We are all concerned about what is happening to movies and worry about the future of movies and where are we headed. I’m not talking about technology.

I’m talking about artistry, creativity, aesthetics, the impact of film on society, and on morality. All of these things overlap. I got a sense that even though most of the audience (at the USC seminar) consisted of highly skilled technicians, they were also film-goers who see movies just like anybody else. I didn’t say anything particularly different or new, but it was interesting in the context of a seminar that was ostensibly about technology, that the initial focus of the day was about content.

BF: One of the things you said was that you feel some responsibility for content – even though, unlike a writer, director or studio mogul, you don’t have much control over content.

JB: As a cinematographer, the principal control I have is whether I decide to work on a certain film or not. I’ve been very careful in selecting scripts - and I’ve been very lucky that I have had the good fortune to work with wonderful directors who were interested and concerned about the content and the human implications of the stories they were telling.

There are certain kinds of films that I’m not interested in doing -- whole genres. When I do something in a certain genre, like an action film, what interests me is not the action, but the moral dialectic. When I first interviewed with Wolfgang Peterson, who directed In the Line of Fire, I think he was kind of surprised, when I told him that what I found absolutely fascinating about the script was not the plot, and the notion of whether the assassin was going to succeed in killing the president. I was intrigued by a series of phone calls that happen between John Malkovich (the assassin) when he’s provoking and taunting Clint Eastwood (secret service agent).

They were talking about the meaning of life. What value does it have? What does it matter whether one person lives or dies? Who cares? Malkovich’s character was totally nihilistic -- and while Eastwood’s character was not intellectually articulate, he had genuine human values. He spent years living in the shadow of the Kennedy assassination, wondering whether he was morally responsible for not protecting the president.

For me, those phone calls constituted the heart of the film. I said to Wolfgang, ‘You know, if you just took these phone call scenes, and strung them together and cut everything else out, and just made a 20 to 30 film, you’d have a very intense drama, a one act moral dialectic.’

BF: Did you ever try that?

JB: I did that once as a student exercise, and also on Ordinary People, I took the scenes between Judd Hirsch and Tim Hutton, and strung them together, and told the story in four or five scenes. You didn’t need anything else to understand the story.

BF: How do you apply that to your work?

JB: I think when you’re reading a script, the really compelling thing you need to do as a cinematographer, is ask yourself, what is the heart of this film? Where are the three or five scenes that constitute the core of this movie? Then, ask yourself, are they good? Was it John Ford who said that if a film has three good scenes, it’s going to work? I think you can tell that at script stage. I have never once been deceived when I’ve read a script and said, "Here’s the heart of it, these scenes are really good," and made the decision to do the picture. Sometimes the film hasn’t always been successful or turned out quite like I thought, but the core, the heart of the film that is in the script has been valid for me.

Conversely, when I’ve decided not to do films because I didn’t feel it had any heart or core, there have been very few exceptions, when I wasn’t glad that I didn’t shoot that movie even though it might have looked beautiful or earned $200 million at the boxoffice.

BF: What’s the pay-off for you?

JB: That I’ve never felt after shooting a film, ‘I’ve just wasted four months of my life, and that it was an empty experience’.

BF: You suggested to the audience at the USC seminar that at the end of the day, they visit the Los Angeles County Art Museum to see a movie.

JB: The LA County Art Museum was doing a retrospective of the films of Robert Bresson, which originated at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Bresson has always been really important to me, because all of his films deal with moral conflicts and issues. His films, even though they may have been secular in subject, always had a strong metaphysical basis. He’s a keystone for me in the same way that Bergman is -- the other thing about Bresson is that he has a very stripped down, sparse visual style. He almost always shoots with a 50 mm lens, and he hardly ever dollies. His composition is always very static. He uses non-actors, so you’re not distracted in a sense by a bravura performance. What you get is a sense of a real person.

I thought this would be something very interesting for the people in this audience to see. I wanted them to see a Bresson film, where there’s no overpowering music or extreme editing techniques -- it’s just bare bones filmmaking with a very committed and powerful vision.

BF: You also suggested that they shouldn’t get seduced by new tools and technology? What was that about?

JB: I think we Americans are gadget oriented. I mean it’s one of the reasons we’re so incredibly successful in the world. We embrace change, and we embrace technology very quickly. The downside of it is that we can be very easily seduced by technology, and become so involved with the mechanics and the techniques that we don’t really think of the creative potential to use these tools in ways that are not so obvious.

I just gave a seminar at the Academy (of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), where I showed a very eclectic selection of excerpts from five films. There wasn’t a single CGI or manipulated effect or process shot. One of the films I showed was Tango, Carlos Saurce was the director, and Vittorio Storaro was the cinematographer. Almost the entire film takes place in a studio rehearsal hall in Buenos Aires. They made magical use of huge scrims and panels saturated with colored light – There were also mirrored panels and you can actually see the reflections of the camera on the panels behind the dancers -- the camera itself is a participant in the dances.

BF: What were the other films?

JB: Maborosi is a Japanese film with very sparse camera movement and very long, static tableau shots. In the entire 10 or 12 minute section I showed, the only camera movement was a slight pan from left to right when the leading actress walks up stairs and goes into an office. It combines a slight pan with a very short dolly move. Every other shot in the clip was locked off.

Then I showed sequences from Run Lola Run -- the action, the movement, and the cutting are very dynamic. It is pure filmmaking energy. There obviously are some Steadicam moves and cranes, but none of the digital manipulation that we have come to think of as essential to contemporary filmmaking.

BF: I also showed a black and white French film called Hate, which had long Steadicam sequences, not in any acrobatic sense. They simply used the Steadicam to execute some very complex shots.

The story follows three characters who live in housing projects outside of Paris. It’s about social unrest. One of them is a Jew. One is a black North African. The other is an Arab. They are in their early 20’s. It’s an unlikely trio of friends. You follow them around during a 24-hour period when they’re waiting to find out whether a friend of theirs who was shot by the police the night before is going to survive. It’s set against this very tense background of demonstrations that happened that night.

The Steadicam is constantly moving with them. It’s almost like a neo-new wave film. It reminds me of the classic Truffaut and Godard and Malle films of the early ‘60s, which took place on the streets of Paris and in the cafes. You never got a sense of anybody living anywhere because they were always living in public places in these films.

Raoul Coutard shot so many of those films with his handheld Eclair CM3 camera, or those famous dolly shots in a wheelchair from Breathless. Well, this was like the next generation of New Wave films in that it is a film shot on the streets with actors constantly moving around followed by a Steadicam. That thrusts the audience into the film because the camera is like a fourth character. It creates an incredible sense of involvement, and it’s not used in a showy way. He used the Steadicam for a dramatic reason -- so, basically the films I showed and talked about demonstrate how the camera was used in different ways dramatically.

I also showed sequences from PI, which was shot in 16mm black and white -- I think probably, a high-speed reversal film. It’s a very strange, bizarre looking film, kind of a Kafkaesque paranoid study about a mathematician – it was made for something like $40,000.

BF: Coming back to the seminar you did at USC, you told the audience then you were going to begin shooting a personal movie.

JB: Via Dolorosa. David Hare is our most productive and prolific English language playwright – and maybe the most important one. During the last couple of seasons, he has had a string of successes on Broadway, including Amy’s View, starring Judy Dench. Earlier in the year he had an adaptation of La Ronde with Nicole Kidman. It’s called The Blue Room. He’s been very present on Broadway this season.

BF: What is Via Dolorosa about?

JB: It’s a dramatic monologue about a series of trips that he (Hare) made to Israel and the Palestinian territories, where he interviewed a lot of people. It was originally supposed to be a play. He was invited to be the English playwright. There were also supposed to be Israeli and Palestinian playwrights as well, and each of them was going to write a play. David was invited because from 1924 until ’48, the English administered the (Palestine territory) under a mandate (from the League of Nations after World War One). One of the people he interviewed was Benni Begin, the son of Mehacham Begin (former Israeli Prime Minister). Begin immediately got upset with him, because (Hare) wanted to talk about the current situation. Begin said, "You are supposed to be here to talk about the British Mandate." David interviewed something like 30 people across the entire spectrum, both Israeli and Palestinians, and he gave voice and life to those individuals in the monologue he wrote. It’s not a political or sociological report. Its focus is on the people. He originally read his play on BBC Radio, and decided to perform it as a monologue at the Royal Court Theatre, in London. It wasn’t static and seated like Spalding Grey’s monologues. It is very dynamic.

BF: Has he done this before?

JB: No! In fact, the very first thing he does when he comes out on the stage is stand there with his hands folded, and he says, "Partly of course, I wanted to see what it was like." (being an actor). Normally I prefer to have Judy Dench do this sort of thing." Of course, there’s a big laugh from the Manhattan audience, because Judy Dench is three blocks North doing a play of his, Amy’s View. But it’s an amazing performance. He doesn’t mimic voices but interprets characters. There is a human dimension which probes the consequences of people living in this seething cauldron of intense emotions.

BF: I’m presuming you saw this as a play before you decided to shoot it?

JB: I was contacted several years ago by the producer Michael Brandman, when Master Class was closing on Broadway. He asked if I would photograph and direct Zoe Caldwell with multiple cameras in the theatre, right after the play closed, but the project fell apart at the last minute. Well, cut to a couple of years later, and the same producer calls and says they’re trying to put together a film project for Via Dolorosa. I’d heard about the play. He sent me the script. I read it, and was absolutely knocked out. It was the most important text I had read in years, and it was written by a great playwright, -- and he’s performing all the roles!

So, even before it was locked down, and they had the money, I used my own American Airlines advantage mileage points and flew (to New York). I stayed there for a week, and saw seven or eight performances. I became absolutely convinced that this project must happen.

BF: Were you already seeing this as a movie in your head?

JB: Not at that point. I didn’t want to put myself into that space, because I didn’t know it was going to happen. When I got back to LA, and it all did come together, I didn’t want to get too emotionally invested, because it still bothered me that Master Class fell apart at the last moment.

BF: What’s the "it" that came together?

JB: The money came together. BBC decided to put up the money and The Lincoln Center Theatre Group also came in. All of the rights issues were cleared. I went (to New York) for about a week of pre-production to put the crew together, and to start planning how I was going to photograph it.

BF: Does BBC have specific plans for airing this film?

JB: BBC is going to air it, we hope in high definition, so we photographed it in Super 16 16:9 format.

BF: Did BBC give you any criteria for photographing the film?

JB: No. I haven’t talked to anybody from the BBC.

BF: So, you were totally on your own to decide how to shoot this?

JB: Nobody told me I had to do anything any particular way. Michael Moyer, my gaffer, and I basically used the lighting from the play -- which was very dramatic -- and we augmented it for film. We used four cameras and shot two performances. Normally in this situation, even if you shot two performances, you’d end up picking one or the other ,because they’d be so different. The actor might respond to the audience differently in each performance, and David, you know, is not a trained actor.

Well, I had seen him do this seven or eight times, and he was -- I don’t mean this in a disparaging way, but in a very flattering way -- he was almost robotic in the way he performed. The entire 90 minute piece was perfectly choreographed. Every move that he made -- pulling out a handkerchief, raising his hands -- on both performances were within a split second of being perfectly matched. The tone, for the most part, was almost perfectly matched. So, we found we were actually able to cut between two performances and actually vary camera positions.

BF: Who else is ‘we’?

JB: The editor, Raul Davalos, is an old friend. He used to be my wife, Carol’s assistant for many years. She suggested that I talk to him. Raul is a very sensitive quiet man. I knew he would respond to the material, and so I asked him to do the editing.

BF: Did he give you any input before you shot?

JB: No, unfortunately, I wanted him to come to New York, but there wasn’t any money in the budget. I talked to him about the show, and he listened to a CD that is a shortened version. It’s 77 minutes long, which is all they could put on the CD of a 93-minute show.

In fact, we had to cut five minutes out of the show, because we have to deliver a film no longer than 90 minutes, and I wanted a title sequence and a little epilogue. The epilogue is not actually part of the show seen on Broadway. We wrote and shot that for the film audience.

BF: You said it was going to be seen in HDTV format in England?

JB: I don’t know anything about how much broadcasting they’re doing in HDTV, or whether they’ll air the initial broadcast in HDTV, but they wanted that delivery, I think because they feel this is an historically significant film that will be seen in the future.

BF: Did you do any personal research into shooting film for HDTV?

JB: None.

BF: You trusted your instincts?

JB: Leon Silverman, at Laser Pacific (Media), was one of the people involved in asking me to do the SMPTE keynote. I talked to him about Via Dolorosa. We originally planned to transfer our Super 16 negative right to hi-def. We used the Aaton time-code system. However, the HD telecine system wasn’t up yet and running, so we did a more traditional transfer, I think in digi-Beta format – and after it was digitized, we cut it on an Avid.

I can’t say right now for certain that it will ever be answer-printed on film. We’re hoping that it will -- I have a firm conviction that the piece is so emotionally compelling that we will find the money for a 35mm blow-up, and we want to take it to Sundance.

BF: Did that affect your thinking about how you framed or composed images? Did you think of it as a movie, an HDTV program or both?

JB: It may never be seen on anything other than TV, but I am a filmmaker even when I’m shooting for television. The last thing I did for television, year before last, was an HBO movie with Michael Apted. It had been 18 years since I’d done a film for television. My goal was to make the most compelling film we could. I think that regardless of how you release it, you have to think of it as a film, and that’s what I tried to do on Via Dolorosa. I framed it for 16: 9, which is close to 1.85:1 and we have just laid down a 3:4 version for regular TV with no problems.

I’m convinced Via Dolorosa will have a theatrical release, which is important to me, because that’s where people become moved and remember something. The experience of going into a theatre, buying a ticket, surrendering yourself to the darkened room, and being there from beginning to end -- you make a commitment that shapes the nature of the experience. I think this is such a compelling story it will work on the big screen, even though it’s basically full figure, medium shots and close-ups of a man talking. I still think it’s incredibly compelling emotionally and visually because of what he’s’ talking about -- the richness of expression and attitude on his face.

BF: Did you include the audience, or did you shoot just the performer?

JB: We had two invited audiences. It was not a paid audience. The show had closed, so we invited people who were interested, because David very much wanted to do the filming with an audience present. We never see the audience until they exit the Booth Theatre after the show.

BF: That raises an off-the-wall question. Did Dave Hare want to replicate the reality of the play by performing in front of an audience. There’s a lot of talk today about shooting movies in virtual environments in front of green screens with digitally enhanced characters. What’s your reaction to that?

JB: I think certain directors will be very happy when they can digitize actors from scanned images and move them around the same way they can digitize airplanes or automobiles. But, talk to any actor who has tried to deliver any kind of a performance in front of a green screen, and they’ll tell you it is unrewarding. I’ve read articles about directors who are alluding to altering actors expressions with digital manipulation. If you start altering the way an actor controls his face, eyes, mouth and everything, much less slipping other words into their mouths with dialog replacement, I think that that would be profoundly disturbing to them. I think if you asked any actor, you would get a very strong consensus. It is the same thing shooting in artificial environments. (Note: Bailey addresses this issue in his USC speech.)

BF: Did you shoot the film exactly the way he did the stage performance?

JB: No, he altered it, though not significantly. David is a very sophisticated man, and he was aware that the kind of large playing-to-the-mezzanine gestures that he was doing on stage would not work as well for the camera. It would seem too grandiose. There are moments in the play that are incredibly flamboyant when he’s very animated with his hands and his body language, and other times when he becomes very still and quiet.

BF: How did you stage the film?

JB: I used the lined script to plan where I wanted the four cameras to be at certain times. I had headset connections with the operators, and I called the shots while we were filming. I didn’t always follow it (the plan) literally, but there were certain things that were important to me. In terms of image size, I wanted to be able to push in on a zoom, or where I wanted

something to play in a sustained move – We planned things like that.

David wasn’t particularly aware of exactly what I was doing, but in an odd way he had a sixth sense. After the first performance, he said, "I hope I didn’t look into any of the cameras too much. I felt compelled to do it."

He was initially worried about the cameras distracting him, because he had spent three months totally fixated on the audience. But, suddenly the cameras were there, and they became such a seductive presence that he embraced and incorporated them as part of the audience. Sometimes, we had to decide, do we play his eyeline off significantly -- almost in a profile shot -- when he’s playing to one camera on one side of the house?

These are the kinds of considerations that you don’t normally make when you’re shooting a film version of a play, but this was a one character monologue. It was very interesting for me, particularly in cutting. When do we cut to an angle on a turn when he unexpectedly looks right at the lens and he plays that line. It has such power when he does that.

BF: Where were the cameras? Were they on the stage?

JB: No, they were off the stage on four by eight-foot plywood platforms that we built up above the level of the seats, pretty much at his eye level.

BF: Were the cameras static or moving?

JB: There isn’t a single dolly shot. There are really slow zooms in and out, and I would reposition the cameras and change sizes after completing a zoom when I wanted to get back to a wider shot or something else.

In addition to the two performances, we had four hours of pick-up shots.

There were times when I wanted to be on the stage closer to him. Maybe I could have reached in with a long zoom, but I wanted a wider angle perspective. I wanted to be more intimate with him. We shot some of that during the pick-up shots. We also used a Super-Technocrane for the second performance and for the pick-ups.

BF: What was the epilogue?

JB: After Hare left Israel, he’s arrived at Gatwick (Airport), and describes his trip home in a taxi in the middle of the night. He’s hearing the echoes of all these voices of the people that he has interviewed. I felt we needed to play it very differently from the stage performance. I wanted the TV audience to feel very close to him. I didn’t want it to seem too theatrical. I made the decision to do pick up shots of the entire three minute epilogue. We had an A and B camera on the stage with a medium close-up and an extreme close-up, side by side. It was very intimate, and occasionally he played directly to the camera.

BF: How did it work?

JB: We are still cutting, but if it works, it will catapult the film into a different dimension, from being an occasionally very intimate and emotionally involving recording of a performance, to forcing an intimate contact between the performer and the viewer. It’s as if he’s really talking to you.

It works because it’s incredibly introspective and reflective. He’s not playing to the audience. You don’t hear them anymore. There are no laughs, but it doesn’t matter because it’s so intense and dramatic, when you listen to what he’s talking about.

BF: At what stage in the process did you decide to film his epilogue that way?

JB: The first time I saw him perform, I thought there’s a qualitative break. He steps back, literally upstage. The light focussed down to a very tight spot. He’s only illuminated from his waist up. It’s like he’s a torch singer in dramatic light. It becomes a different dimension.

BF: What was David Hare’s initial reaction to that suggestion?

JB: He was very receptive, though he didn’t know whether it would work. It transforms the experience. It’s suddenly your experience. It’s not like you’re a voyeur sitting in a theatre for an hour and a half watching something objectively. Suddenly, the audience drops away completely, and he is talking to you individually. It’s surprising and incredibly moving.

BF: What was the set like?

JB: It was a very stark and simple set. The Royal Court Theatre, in London, is very small. The back wall is made of exposed brick with an exit door. They recreated the back wall at the Booth Theater in New York. David actually enters through that door, and he walks out onto a very narrow catwalk. They removed the stage floor, so there’s a pit that goes down about 15 feet under the catwalk, so it is literally a bridge that goes across an abyss that symbolically separates Israel and Palestine.

The bridge leads to a square wooden, slightly elevated platform from which he performs most of the play. At one point in the monologue, he suddenly realizes that he, as a European Christian, is actually involved, because Jerusalem is shared by three major religions. He says, "I realize I have to walk the Via Dolorosa," which is the supposed journey that Christ made from his condemnation and trial to the site of the crucifixion -- the 14 Stations of the Cross. Over time, they have become the sites of pilgrimages with tremendous symbolic significance.

BF: Are there background paintings or transparencies anywhere on the set?

JB: No, it’s just the back wall with exposed pipes, the bridge, the abyss and the platform where he performs. It’s very stark. It feels like a deconstructed theatre. In fact, they tore out part of the proscenium arch, and made it (the stage) look very distressed, like it was falling apart. It is almost like a burned out husk of a theatre.

BF: How about lighting. Is that true to the stage play?

JB: Our lighting matched the spirit of the stage play, because I thought it was so beautifully designed, but we had to alter it for film. David, with his sensitivity to the audience, was very concerned about that. I told him, "This is another reality. The audience won’t care about the lighting or the cameras. Forget about them."

Sometimes, we lit the back wall, but mostly it was bounce from where the key lights hit the stage. Michael Moyer (his gaffer) rigged a bank of 2K soft lights -- I think there were 10 or 12 of them. He controlled them from a dimmer board, so we were able to cue the level and angle of light very precisely. Sometimes, we wanted it dark, and other times we wanted the audience to see more. We also beefed up some of the stage lights. At one point, a 4K HMI comes on in a focussed spot which we augmented.

BF: What about the epilogue?

JB: We used cross spots from stage left and right, and focal lengths on lenses that bring the audience in close. David is good-looking man, but he is 50 years old, and without a little fill light anyone is going to look a little grotesque in that situation. We used opal and Hampshire frost diffusion panels very close in, so they cut the light down and made it a lot more flattering. I also added a front light and a little fill light and eye light when we did the pick-up shots to make him look more appealing.

BF: How did you assemble a crew for this project?

JB: I had a lot of really good people working for scale because they wanted to do this project. Monty Rowan is an operator I just worked with on For the Love of Game. He really loves the theatre, and wanted to do this film. He was negotiating for a documentary in New York, and they paid his transportation as part of pre-production. Phil Abraham used to be my assistant, and he operated for me for a short time. He’s shooting The Sopranos, but he loves theatre and operated for me as a favor.

BF: Does a great project attract great people?

JB: Absolutely.

BF: Tell me about your lens selection on this project, because lenses are the windows which record the actors onto film.

JB: We used Aaton XRT cameras and Canon zoom lenses. Honestly, I don’t remember the zoom range, but we tested all the lenses and matched colors because I was very concerned about it being 16mm.

I chose the Aaton camera because we were able to use 800 foot magazines with them. Instead of 11 minutes of running time, we got almost 22 minutes at 24 frames per second. That meant fewer reloads, and less downtime. We staggered the start times, so we always had three cameras running. During the second performance, two of the cameras jammed within a couple of minutes of each other, so I only had two cameras running and one was close to running out. No matter how carefully you prepare, there are always surprises. We had a video tap on each camera, so I was looking at four monitors, and I was communicating with the operators on a headset.

My assistant director was basically video trained. She was used to calling the shots. I guess that’s what A.D.s do for the director on live, multi-camera video productions. They use open mikes, so all the operators can hear. I told her, I can’t work that way. I needed to see the images and be in communication with the operators individually. We got a console with A, B, C and D buttons. When I pushed one button, only that operator heard me. There was slight bleed but not much. When an operator heard my voice, he knew I was talking to him, so he could concentrate completely on the creative flow of what we were doing. Maybe it’s a subtle thing, but if everyone is getting the same feed, they feel like they’re cogs in a wheel.

BF: Were you using colors in any kind of symbolic way?

JB: No. It was almost completely pure white light except for just a bit of mixing amber gels. That was consistent with the way the play was lit. The biggest difference was in light levels. We boosted some levels and compressed others to stay within a stop and a half of the latitude range of the film, because I didn’t want anything to burn out and I didn’t want it to get too dark. I wanted the audience to sense that the light was changing from shot to shot and scene to scene. That is consistent with what they expect from film. If I lit it exactly like the play, we would have gone from him talking in almost complete blackness to being three to four stops over-exposed.

BF: You said you used a medium speed film. What drove that decision?

JB: I decided to use the (Kodak Vision) 7277 film. It’s a 320-speed film that has a very soft contrast range. That was important, because so much of the background, the back wall, and the environment that he’s in are virtually black or very, very dark. I knew this film would hold tonal details.

BF: Did you consider using a faster – 500 or 800-speed – film?

JB: I didn’t want to shoot with the zoom lenses wide open, but I was able to stop them down about two stops and still use this medium speed film.

It didn’t matter for television, because there’s so much control on the telecine. My orientation was that someday audiences will see a 35 mm print in a theatre, so I was thinking about the quality of the blow-up from a Super 16 original. There is no diffusion or filtration for the same reason.

BF: How much of this story is told in close-ups?

JB: We had two cameras side by side right in the center. Most of the time, one was in close-up and the other was in a medium close-up.

BF: What’s a close-up to you?

JB: A close-up includes the shoulders, as opposed to an extreme close-up, which is somewhere in the neck without cutting the chin. I’m very judicious about the use of extreme close-ups. I think they’re over-used, especially by directors who come out of commercials and television. For theatrical films, if you over-use close-ups, they don’t have any impact. Everything becomes the same.

BF: Since you also directed this film, you were able to make choices form the available footage in postproduction. What did you learn from that process?

JB: There is no one right way to make these decisions. Our producer does a lot of television. When he looked at the first pass Raul and I had made, he wanted a lot more of it in close-up. He has very good visceral instincts, but his first editing pass seemed claustrophobic to me.

However, it did focus a lot of the intense, dramatic energy, and I’ve incorporated some of those ideas, because I think they had a lot of merit -- but, I still want variety in image size. For the second performance, we had a Technocrane which allowed me to get some high angles and do some slow crane pans. We are judiciously incorporating some of those moments into the performance without it being distracting.

BF: During the USC seminar, you spoke very eloquently about the art of close-ups. How did that apply to this film?

JB: It’s a very interesting topic. One of the films I showed at the Academy lecture I mentioned earlier, was Maborosi, a Japanese film with very few close-ups. In fact, there are very emotional scenes when the female lead, the heroine, has been informed that her husband has been killed by a train while he was walking on the tracks. She goes to the police station.

We follow her up these stairs, in one pan shot. The scene ends with an over her shoulder shot with the policeman in the room. She’s standing at the doorway, and he’s talking in a long shot. They hold on the shot for the longest time. In an American film, you probably would have seen a quick cut to a close-up of her face, so we get a sense of her grief.

When they finally come around so you can see her reaction to what the policeman says, it’s from his point of view, and she’s almost in a full figure shot. It’s not a close-up. In the very next scene, she’s in her apartment, and her mother is bathing her baby. The woman is sitting on the floor with her back up against the wall near a window. She’s in profile. We never see a cut to a close-up of her. I don’t know how to describe the impact. On one hand, I talk about close-ups as being so powerful. But this film relied on the emotional power of the images and the restraint of the director and cinematographer. Partially, this is because people in Japan are publicly not as likely to express their feelings, so you tend to see fewer close-ups.

BF: Can you give us an example of how you used image sizes in Via Dolorosa to amplify the words?

JB: There is one shot where I cut back from a medium close-up to a shot that is slightly wider than David’s knees as he starts this one revelation. We did a slow, push into a tight close-up for this entire speech that he gives. It’s near the end of the play. He has visited the Museum of the Holocaust in Jerusalem and he is talking about different objects on display. The most shocking thing was a note that Heinrich Himmler had written to his troops about the necessity of staying brave in the face of having to exterminate the Jews. I get goosebumps just thinking about it

David’s reading starts kind of unemotionally. There is a slow, slow push in until we are in a close-up just as he reaches the emotional climax of what he’s saying. It’s not the kind of experience you could have sitting from a fixed perspective in the theatre. That’s why even though it’s a man talking, and he’s just standing there, the movement of the shot and the changing image size are a purely cinematic experience. When he starts talking we are in kind of a loose shot that is somewhere between his knees and about his ankles. He says:

We’re moving in and at this point, we are on a waist shot and we’re moving into what becomes an extremely tight close-up.

JB: At that point, we’re in this extreme close-up, and he’s standing there with this incredibly frozen look on his face. We hold and hold it, and then we cut back to a wider shot and start to move away from him.

BF: Is that the way you planned the shot, or did it just happen that way while you were calling shots during production?

JB: I had it down as something I wanted to do, but when I was calling the shot and watching, I think it was Phil Abraham’s camera that was doing it -- the operators were doing their own zooms, which I felt was really important because it had to feel organic. I was watching this thing happen, and I realized I was momentarily transported inside the experience.

When he finished that speech, I had one of the most powerful moments, that I have ever been involved in on film -- and it couldn’t have been simpler. He’s wearing a white shirt and dark trousers in a neutral environment. His body language is telling the story. He is standing almost like a soldier with his chest thrust out slightly askew. His hands are at his sides, and he is talking. The only thing that is really moving is his mouth. He looks rigid as we start the shot. As he gets to the end, his eyes and face fill the frame.

BF: Do you recall what was in your mind at that moment?

JB: I was trying to find a way to stop the forward movement of the play, because it was an extraordinary moment and it leads us toward the internal reflection of the epilogue. He has been talking as an objective reporter, hearing all these voices of Palestinians and Israelis. Now he is involved, a part of the historical tragedy. Earlier in the monologue he has realized that as a European Christian, he has to walk the Via Dolorosa. Initially, it isn’t a religious insight. It is more of a literary understanding. He says:

At this moment, I wanted to stop everything and do something with the image sizes. We looked through all the footage (in post), particularly the Technocrane shots moving around him. We had a wide shot when he gets to the end of the speech and he talks about Melville. Then, we cut to a wide shot that surrounds him in darkness as he says:

And on that image about Melville, we cut to a high angle wide shot that was done from the balcony. During the first performance I had one camera operating from different positions -- in aisles, at low angles from where the audience was sitting, on a balcony at the side of the stage, and in the center. I had film from the camera on the balcony shooting down. We could see the entire set with David kind of small in the frame. It is a slight aerial perspective with David surrounded by blackness.

In a way, we wanted to be in close-up, but the power of him saying that the air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers, while we are literally in the air looking down -- and you sense this darkness around him – it is almost a metaphysical darkness. It’s the darkness of prayers and dreams.

I didn’t think about the significance of the way the images would play when we were shooting that scene. It happened while we were cutting. I was in a close-up and I said to Raul, "You know this is very powerful, but let’s look at the other cameras." That’s when I found this high, wide angle footage, and suddenly Raul was saying, "Wow!"

Those are the kinds of things that happened in the editing room.

BF: How much of this was shot exactly the way you planned, and what part of it was instinctive at the moment of photography?

JB: I couldn’t begin to tell you. We planned where we wanted the different cameras to be, and I called for different shots during the performances. I was looking at what was happening in the frame, and following the creative flow. I don’t know how close we stuck to the original plan.

BF: Do you have a closing thought?

JB: I mentioned that my wife, Carol, is an editor. She is also a musician who used to play concert oboe. When she hears a Mahler symphony, she isn’t listening for the oboe (laughs), because that would diminish her experience. I think it’s the same – hopefully -- for us as filmmakers. You don’t want the audience to be aware of the cinematography. We are part of a concert which tells stories with images, sound and actors’ performances. That is the way our work should be judged.