QUESTION: Where were you born and raised?

BERNSTEIN: I was born in Buffalo in upstate New York. There was no seminal event that happened to me as a young person that made me want to be a cinematographer. It certainly wasn’t the quality of the light in Buffalo. I remember it was gray; the snow was stained brown from the traffic and the sky dark. But as I say that, I realize the suppressed palette of the place did affect me emotionally. Saturates leaped out against that neutrals, as in a dream or a postindustrial nightmare.

QUESTION: What did your parents do?

BERNSTEIN: My parents were just ordinary folks. I don’t think they were particularly ambitious for me. Their main concern, I think, was that I wasn’t an embarrassment. We moved to the United Kingdom, where I completed my education. My degrees were in English literature and philosophy.

QUESTION: Did you have a career goal at that point in life?

BERNSTEIN: I wanted to be a writer, but like Pooh Bear I thought too much and wrote too little. That is too say I was more a reader then a writer, more academician then poet. I got very interested in semiology and structuralism (the study of how language encodes ideas). Initially I studied how the spoken and written language worked, but then became more interested in how codes worked in other languages, like the language of film. My interest in film language led me in a rather convoluted way to cinematography.

QUESTION: That’s interesting. Can you be a little more specific?

BERNSTEIN: I became very interested in understanding how in altering light, composition, camera angles and camera movement a cinematographer alters an audiences perception of the visual event, and thereby the audience’s emotional response. It is a difficult thing to quantify. I remember specifically thinking back to seeing Lawrence of Arabia when I was a child, and how its images had always remained in my imagination, not only for their pure beauty and sublime scale, but because they affected me emotionally, striking some unconscious but responsive cord. Later I saw Days of Heaven. I had much the same response, but now my understanding was informed by my studies. It would be accurate to say that the cinematographers of these two films, Freddie Young (BSC) and Nestor Almendros (ASC), were those who most influenced my decision to become a cinematographer.

QUESTION: How did you make a connection between words and photography?

BERNSTEIN: In writing essays and articles about film. I realized that film images worked very much the way the spoken/written language works. You want to express certain ideas. There are culturally agreed and understood codas. These shapes, which we call letters, have agreed upon pronunciations. These letters form words. These words have agreed meanings. But it is of course arbitrary. The word “cat” has no innate “catness” about it, but on hearing this word the listener forms an idea in their brain. A cat. We can then add adjectives, and qualifiers, to make it a black cat, or an angry black cat. These words are codes, but not universal codes. They are specific to a culture that shares that language. Photography in some respects is a much more complex language system. The denotative (specific) or connotative (symbolic or implied) meaning of an image can be ambiguous, but also complex. Perhaps the best literary analogy is the Haiku poem. The fewer words have greater potential meaning — the more words that are added in longer literary forms, the more specific the meaning. An image offers both specific and non-specific meanings. It can work on many layers, conscious and not.

I suppose I became more serious about film as a practical rather then theoretical occupation, around 1976, when London, where I was living, had a lot of independent film production companies. There were also structural and thematically radical independents coming out of France, Italy, the Far East, and the States. The American New Wave was at its height, with Scorsese, DePalma and Coppola. There was a building in North London called the Co-op, where you could edit your films for a few pounds, I think they had a couple of Bolex cameras available. I put an ad up offering my services as a cinematographer. I was a bit of a fraud I suppose. I mean I could get an exposure, but I am uncertain what I felt qualified as a cinematographer. But it was a fortuitous choice as everyone else wanted to be a director. I got hired. The first film I did was about the Druids of Stonehenge. They aren’t real druids of course. Just folks who like to get dressed up. But then I wasn’t a real cinematographer, so I guess it was appropriate. I got a little CP16 camera, and we went to Stonehenge early in the morning. We filmed people in sheets, stumbling through some ritual they had created. The sun came up over the heal stone, so through the spectacles, large bellies, and trainers under the Marks and Spencer’s sheets, in some ways undermined the intent, the morning still had a certain mystical quality. It led to other independent projects. About this time a producer named John Roseman had the idea of producing videos for bands. I don’t think MTV existed yet, or if it did it was very much in its infancy. Suddenly everybody wanted to do music videos. And as I was a cinematographer, I began shooting music videos. Eventually, I bought a camera and shot a whole lot of music videos, with smoke and backlight, girls walking across sets in stilettos for no particular reason, more smoke, etc. Some were quite successful. That led to commercials. I later worked with Tony Kaye. We did a commercial for British Solid Fuels that won the Cannes Golden Lion for best commercial of the year, and suddenly I had a lot of offers for commercials as well.

QUESTION: How did you make the transition to narrative films?

BERNSTEIN: That happened with the emergence of Channel 4. I began doing independent films for them. I had set up a little company in Soho Square with some friends and acquaintances. It was meant to be a filmmaker’s co-op. The plan was to lend or rent equipment to each other and have a school to train people how to make films that wanted to learn. It was a glorious mess. We did some good things. Some of the courses were good, and some people ended up working in the industry as a result of our efforts, who wouldn’t otherwise have had a chance. But we didn’t, or I didn’t, have much business accruement, and it was chaos. Still I met one of my dearest and longest friends, the hugely talented Gabriel Beristain (ASC, BSC) through the company, and John Mathieson (BSC) the gifted director of photography, worked there for a while as well. I think he came to us just out of college.

QUESTION: Did you have any mentors or were you totally self-taught?

BERNSTEIN: I’ve learned a lot from other DP’s. But it’s mainly from studying their work. Gabriel and I talk a lot, and he’s given me a great deal. But I was self-taught. I studied art extensively, particularly early 20^th century artists, and late 19^th century artists. I learned a lot about light from them. I’ve stolen an idea from every good film I’ve seen, probably. Particularly the work of Freddie Young (BSC), Nestor Almendros (ASC), Raoul Coutard, and Vittorio Storaro (ASC, AIC). The latter’s The Conformist, I have seen probably more then any other film.

QUESTION: Do you think of yourself as an artist, a technician or both?

BERNSTEIN: I think that’s a very important distinction. I don’t want to sound pretentious, but if you consider the nature of art, it is meant to give us new eyes to see the world. I want audiences to respond viscerally to what our intentions are for a film. I think that cinematography works very much like music in that it is difficult for us to measure or quantify why audiences respond to what we do. So it is an art. And its practitioners must therefore be artists.

QUESTION: Tell us more about your analogy of music and cinematography.

BERNSTEIN: I can sit in dailies and I can see the other people watching the film with me respond physically and emotionally to the images; but it is very difficult quantifying what they are responding to. If you watch people listening to music, they may also respond, but you would hard put to quantify why they are responding.

QUESTION: I’ll borrow a phrase from Vittorio Storaro, who said, cinematographers are the authors of the images. But, that isn’t widely recognized.

BERNSTEIN: Part of the problem lies with our collective culture. Films are reviewed as theater rather than as a unique art form. Critics will talk about scripts and performances. They talk about things they understand, but they understand them because their own cultural antecedents are principally in traditional theater, though they may not recognize that. In this context, cinematography and music aren’t understood, except to say they were beautiful, because there is not a particular language developed within criticism for their description. Unfortunately, many reviewers don’t recognize how decisions made by the director, cinematographer and composer made a profound impact on the visceral reactions and intellectual responses of audiences. I’m not saying that cinematographers aren’t recognized. We are, at least within the industry, but not in the consumer press. I don’t think I read a single review that mentioned the significance of Bob Richardson’s (ASC) decision to use Super 8 film and other formats in certain scenes in JFK, yet that made a profound impact. I consider that a significant artistic decision worthy of comment, in fact, essential to an audiences understanding of the film’s artistic treatment.

QUESTION: The collaboration between directors and cinematographers is unique.

BERNSTEIN: An important thing about that collaboration is that cinematographers have to integrate their vision for a film with the director’s vision.

QUESTION: Do the many music videos you shot influence you today?

BERNSTEIN: Not really. None of my films look like music videos, but the great thing about music videos was that we could experiment with different lighting, film stocks, lenses and filters. We would decide to try putting four filters on the lens, force process the film, or put a negative through a reversal film postproduction process to see how it comes out, and then try it again the other way around. It was a great way to learn.

QUESTION: Are there other cinematographers whose work you follow?

BERNSTEIN: I can mention all the obvious names, but the truth is I learn from all cinematographers. I can watch a television program shot by a 29-year-old cinematographer and find something that he or she did that is quite interesting. I’m constantly learning from other people. I still read every magazine and journal about cinematography and photography that I can lay my hands on. I still study art. I collect books of photographers and paintings. But it’s not just the good work that others do that I learn from. I learn from my own mistakes that I have had ample opportunity to make over these last 20 years. When my son Adam was in the seventh grade, he wrote an essay in which he was required to say who his hero was. He said it was me. “My father is my hero because he messes up all the time, and he lets me see it.” So I feel o.k. about messing up. I think that’s a hugely important lesson to learn. It’s o.k. to mess up, and you will sometimes mess up if you’re willing to push the limits of your craft.

QUESTION: Did any other mentors influence your thinking?

BERNSTEIN: I was a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Maryland for a short while. That’s where I met Bob Kolker who was a really important mentor. He pointed me down some really interesting avenues as regards film theory. He’s written several books, including Film, Form and Culture, which I think is great.

QUESTION: You wrote a very interesting book yourself called Film Production, which is a best seller on film school campuses. Frankly, I don’t know how you found time to write a book with your growing and amazingly diverse body of work.

BERNSTEIN: I have always loved teaching. I find it the best way to learn something about which you are uncertain. When you have to explain something to others, you come to a real understanding of it yourself. For me writing and teaching makes me a better artist. As for the diversity of my work, it’s true. I’ve done comedies and dramas, small films and big films. This was part by accident and part by design. Early in my career I just needed to work. Later it was decided by others than myself that I was funny, and therefore a natural for comedy. Then with Murder at 1600 and second unit on S.W.A.T., and Blade 3, others decided I had a penchant for action. With Monster, a penchant for small, intense dramas. I love lighting and what the camera does. I have a skill set and a sensibility, but I enjoy what these different types of projects bring. Each one of those projects has specific challenges and a particular pleasure. When I did Waterboy, it was broad farce, but we had some complex football material in it that was a lot of fun, big set pieces, and then there’s Adam Sandler who is simply a delight to work with. I used high key lighting, but I also used a lot of fill to enable the actors to improvise and not feel that they had to land on exact spots. I also used multiple cameras to allow for the spontaneity that breeds good comedy. I have always shot very fast. This is not because I compromise, but rather I plan so that on the shooting day I have already made the decisions I have to make. If actors don’t have to wait and if the director gets more set ups in a day, it makes for a better film. My gaffer Ted Hayash and key grip Vidal Cohen have worked with me so often, and they are themselves so skilled and organized, that we are often ready so fast that we are waiting for other departments. Whatever type of film we work on, this basic principle remains true. But I also feel it is the responsibility of the director of photography as one of the leaders on the set to create an atmosphere. On comedies, I will keep it light and funny, and try to make sure that everyone is laughing. On a drama, I will bring a seriousness that allows the actors to focus on their work completely. Strangely I learned this second principle relatively recently. On Monster I came with low expectations. It had a small budget, and it was with a first-time director. I figured a few weeks work, I would make it interesting, give advise when asked, and then out. But the director, Patty Jenkins, approached the work with an integrity and singularity of vision that I don’t think I have witnessed before in the industry. Everything was about quality, a constant examination of what was right, what would work. On the few occasions when we disagreed, and that was rare, I realized it was because we both cared so much about making each scene perfect. She was a first time director but she taught me about integrity and complete commitment to a project. She made me a better cinematographer. Charlize Theron also became sort of a spirit guide. From the moment she arrived on the set, after hours of make-up, till the time we finished many hours later, it was all about performance. Her commitment and energy—and here was the lesson—her courage in throwing herself completely into what she did, altered me as a person. She won an Academy Award for the film. Now if I have to make a choice, I would rather work less and do better work on worthwhile films.

QUESTION: How do you decide that something is a film you want to do?

BERNSTEIN: Early in my career anything that was offered was a film I wanted to do. Today, two things are likely to affect my decision. One is my first meeting with the director. That relationship is like a marriage only, oddly, much more intense. You have to decide whether you’re going to be able to get along with that person for the long time that you’re going to be together. I think I have gotten along well with over 90 percent of the directors I have worked with, and many have remained friends. The second thing is the photography. I’m always interested in doing new and different things. If the project is very much like what I have done before, and the script is not great, then it is less likely I will be interested. Sometimes a project comes along that is just so interesting it is impossible to resist. I just shot a film in India, where we were had thousands upon thousands of extras in hand made pre-Christian garb, hundreds of camels and elephants, and Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif.

QUESTION: Was that One Night with the King?

BERNSTEIN: It was. A film with enormous scope shot in northern India in very difficult conditions. Artistically, it is probably some of my best work because it was such a grand scale. The film is the story of Esther, from the Old Testament. Esther was a poor Jewish girl, who was selected by a Persian king to be his wife, though he did not know her origin. She kept her religion a secret and married him. The Empire then embarks on a plan to kill its Jews. Esther must decide if she should sacrifice herself for the greater good or protect her position as the king’s wife. There is a quote in the Old Testament from the story, paraphrased it is, “I will do what is right. If I perish I perish.” I think that should be emblematic for all of our lives. We must choose to do what we believe to be right. Consequence is the natural result of decision. If we were less frightened of consequence we would lead better lives. As I said we had a terrific cast, Peter O’Toole plays the prophet Samuel, Omar Sharif plays one of the king’s senior ministers, John Rhys-Davies is Mordecai, and there are many other fine actors.

QUESTION: That must have been quite an interesting experience for you.

BERNSTEIN: It was a defining moment for me, because Lawrence of Arabia was always so important to me. Suddenly, I found myself working with Peter O’Toole who WAS Lawrence of Arabia. The other thing was that I had a free creative hand. The filmmakers simply said, make it the most beautiful and evocative film that you can. Stephan Blinn, who wrote the screenplay was also one of the producers, and Michael Sajbel was the director.

QUESTION: What was it like working in India?

BERNSTEIN: There is an important scene early in the film with a caravan where this woman is wandering in the desert. They asked how many elephants we wanted. I said I’d love to have 150, but would settle for two or three. The next day we had 50 elephants and 100 camels outfitted for the period. There were battle sequences when they asked how many extras I wanted. I said we 7,000 would be great, but that we could always enhance and multiply a smaller group digitally. The next day we had 7,000 extras show up. In a night scene, I wanted to light a huge fortress entirely with torchlight. The art department hand made 3,000 torches accurate to the period. The only thing I altered was the torches burned kerosene. Ted Hayash added the smallest amount of fill, for some shadow areas, and we were ready. Our night exteriors and all interiors were motivated by torchlight; we used a minimum amount of artificial light. We built “flame projectors” which Ted, Vidal and I designed, which were hand made reflective parabolas, in which we would put kerosene torches. Local craftsman made them from steel from old car parts. We showed them a design for what I wanted. They took a mallet and pounded on the metal to make the reflector. The look from these lights was like from a natural flame. Because it was from a natural flame.

QUESTION: It kind of sounds like old Hollywood.

BERNSTEIN: I think that’s exactly what India had become. I saw a documentary where they described what the crafts were like in the old Hollywood, and it sounds exactly like what the film industry in India is like today. We built a palace thrown room interior, which was 500 feet long and 150 feet wide. I wanted a polished floor with 30 columns that were 60 feet high. The producers and director said they wanted a lion behind the thrown, hence a 50-foot high, gilded lion was designed. And though we were really in the hinterlands, 200 to 300 crafts people and laborers showed up and, working with hand drills and non-powered saws, built this magnificent set in three weeks from scratch. When it was time to polish the floor, another 100 guys came in with Windex and rags. There were no electric buffers. And they use Windex exclusively and for everything. Cleaning, polishing any surface. Windex. Stone, wood, or a camera. Windex.

QUESTION: How did you happen to come on to this project?

BERNSTEIN: Mike Ferris, the legendary camera operator, whom I have worked with for years, invited me to visit a set in North Hollywood where a director was shooting tests for the role of Esther. I went to visit Mike. I chatted to the director, who knew my work. His name was Michael Sajbel. About a week later, he called and asked me to shoot the film. I was able to take Mike Ferris and most of my usual crew with me to India.

QUESTION: How did you prepare to shoot this epic film?

BERNSTEIN: I think with every film I go through the same process, which begins with paintings and still photography. The great thing about a painting is you can put it up and you can show it to a director and work out whether you have a commonality of language. You can say in this painting Renoir uses soft light bouncing off the pavement and coming from below. The background is out of focus, as if it was composed through a long lens. Then, we might look at a Rembrandt using a single source of soft lighting, dropping off into darkness. Once I have that shorthand down with the director, it tells me whether we have a common vision.

QUESTION: Can you be a little more explicit?

BERNSTEIN: It’s a way of making sure you and the director share the same vision, and giving you a common language. Cinematography is both an intellectual and an intuitive process based on your life experience, intellect, emotional responses and memories of other images that you are drawing on unconsciously at that specific moment in time. Robert Browning was once giving a lecture to a women’s club in Victorian England. The story goes that someone asked why he wrote something in a particular way, and his reply was that he had no memory whatsoever of why he did that. Nor did he any longer know what he meant by it. And he hoped that was a help.

QUESTION: What about your relationship with the production designer?

BERNSTEIN: The production designer was a remarkable woman. Her name is Aradhana Seth. It was one of the closest collaborations I’ve ever had with a production designer, though I have never had a bad relationship. I find them inevitably like-minded in their concerns about images.

QUESTION: Was there a discussion about format for this film?

BERNSTEIN: We knew straight away that this is a film about big ideas, so we wanted to do something on a grand scale. We decided to compose in 2.4:1 aspect ratio in Super 35 format. We felt it was most appropriate for both the visceral emotions expressed in the story and the scope of endless horizons in all directions in the desert.

QUESTION: Why Super 35 rather than anamorphic format?

BERNSTEIN: I always advocate anamorphic, even though the lenses are inferior to spherical lenses, because you have one less generation in postproduction. But, now with the improvements in digital intermediate, that’s really no longer a concern.

QUESTION: It sounds like you are a DI advocate?

BERNSTEIN: Yes and no. I’m concerned about the compromises some people are making. You want to do a digital intermediate at 4,000 lines of resolution and someone claims that 2,000 lines is good enough. They say you won’t be able to tell the difference, or that you can’t tell the difference between Super 16 and 35 mm film, or between film and digital cinematography. The moment we make that compromise, we are on a downward spiral. It’s our obligation to produce the best imagery that we possibly can. I recently saw a remastered print of Lawrence of Arabia in 70 mm format. It was spectacular! That should be our goal.

QUESTION: How much preparation time did you have in preproduction?

BERNSTEIN: Around seven weeks, partially because we were going abroad. We had two weeks in Los Angeles and the rest was in India, which included filling out the crew, finding equipment, and building the sets. The producers wanted to use as few visual effects as possible and shoot at real locations. I love digital effects, but when you see this fort that we shot at in the North of India, where battles were fought hundreds of years ago, you’ll see what I mean. There is a patina that you get from something that is genuinely old and has a flavor of its own that you can’t copy with CG images. Though the production company, Generation, has a great CG team and they are doing incredible work.

QUESTION: Was it all filmed at practical locations rather than stages?

BERNSTEIN: There were no stages. Our sets were built at locations. We had sets in a palace that a local Raja owned. We shot about half of the film there, about a quarter at exterior locations and another in and around that ancient fort I mentioned. We had an Indian location manager who was a great guy and the most aggressive cricket player I’ve ever seen. We played cricket every weekend.

QUESTION: Did the knowledge that you were doing a DI affect how you shot?

BERNSTEIN: Absolutely, especially on wide exterior shots. I’d typically expose for the northern sky holding details in the clouds knowing I could fix the sky in post. Some interiors were lit with torches, because I knew we could add fill. The great thing about (Kodak Vision2) 5218 (film) is that sometimes I was (T-)3.5 to four stops underexposed. I had a rather brilliant assistant, named Claire Carre, who took digital still photographs and would treat them on Photoshop. We would use them as a reference, figuring out if we had enough information on the negative that I could produce details in the shadow areas. We also planned to desaturate some colors and tonal qualities. At an earlier time, I would have thought about preflashing or using a skip bleach process on the negative. The production and costume designers reduced the color palette, but I also knew I could crank it down on the DI. Claire, Ted, Vidal and I would come up with ideas for looks on the computer, and the great thing about DI is we knew that we would be able to achieve them.

QUESTION: Why did you want a desaturated palette for the period or mood?

BERNSTEIN: I think less color can be more emotive. It has something to do with the unconscious, psychological response of audiences. There have been studies, but I also trust my own eyes, sensibilities and intuition.

QUESTION: How much influence do you think film has on our lives?

BERNSTEIN: I think it’s more profound than poetry and literature. I grew up with Steve McQueen movies, and I admit there are moments when I’m wearing my leather jacket with my light meter dangling from my waist, and the light is playing on my face when I see myself as Steve McQueen running that motorcycle over that wire fence in The Great Escape. In fact I am just an unattractive guy holding a light meter. But our secret paradigms affect our behavior more then we might realize, and I think film shapes those secret paradigms.

QUESTION: What do you tell students and other young filmmakers when they ask you to share the secret of success? Do you tell them the truth about the odds?

BERNSTEIN: I think you have to be patient, and not let yourself believe that things are going to happen quickly. You need integrity and honesty about who you want to become. That way, even if you fail, you can fail with some dignity. If you compromise and fail, what do you have left?