A Conversation With Stephen Burum, ASC

By Bob Fisher

Stephen Burum, ASC was born in Visalia and raised in Dinuba, a rural town in central California. He shot his first 8 mm films during his early teens. Burum studied filmmaking in the Theatre Arts Department at UCLA, where he earned a bachelor and master of arts degrees. He began his career shooting 16mm films for a Walt Disney Studios nature film series. After completing a two-year military obligation, Burum worked on the periphery of the industry lensing a few ultra-low budget slasher type films, occasional commercials, documentaries and television specials in both film and video formats.

In 1976, Frances Ford Copolla asked Burum to direct and shoot second unit for Apocalypse Now. He shot his first mainstream feature in 1981, and has subsequently compiled around 30 credits, including such notable films as Rumble Fish, Body Double, Casualties of War, Carlito’s Way, The Shadow, Snake Eyes, Mystery Men, Mission Impossible and Mission to Mars. Burum has earned nominations in the annual American Society of Cinematographers Outstanding Achievement Award competition for The Untouchables and The War of the Roses, and he took top honors for Hoffa, which also earned an Oscar nomination. Life or Something Like It is slated for release in March. Following are excerpts of an interview:

ICG: I understand you are one of those rare native Californians.

BURUM: I’m a third generation Californian from the rural community of Dinuba, which is in the Central Valley near Fresno. My father’s parents were pioneers and my maternal grandparents owned a small newspaper in town. My grandfather wanted me to take it over someday.

ICG: Were you a photo hobbyist while you were growing up?

BURUM: My hobby was building model airplanes. A lot of kids did that. I had a little box Brownie camera and I’d take pictures of the airplanes. After a while, I felt the still pictures weren’t satisfactory. I earned money by watering people’s lawns and things like that. After I saved around $20 my parents helped me buy a little Brownie 8 mm movie camera. Pretty soon I was making 8 mm movies with some of my friends in our backyard. We’d crash a plane, fill the backyard with smoke and film some kids wearing surplus Army uniforms running out of the smoke with catsup on them.

ICG: How old were you?

BURUM: I was 13 or 14. I was very interested in science when I was a kid. I loved chemistry, and I was pretty good in math and geometry. The Russians had launched Sputnik, and every kid in America was encouraged to go to college and become a scientist, chemist or engineer. I wasn’t that great of a student, so when I saw a picture in Life Magazine of a sound stage at UCLA and found out that they had a movie school and since everyone had to go to a college in those days, I could do my hobby in school. What could be better?

ICG: What was UCLA like?

BURUM: The theater arts department was divided into theater, motion picture and radio/television divisions. They also had a program for training people to become theater arts teachers, and they had a puppet theater. During the first two years you had to take all the basic theater classes in acting, directing, lighting, scenery, make-up, sound and theater history. Then, you were required to take a history class in either movies or TV. When you were a junior, you declared what your specialty was going to be. We also took lots of English and literature classes. We were very lucky because the faculty consisted of people who had worked in the industry. But they weren’t very encouraging. They’d tell us that the movie industry was dying—all the studios were dying. They told us not to waste our time and do something else with our lives.

ICG: Who were some of the faculty?

BURUM: I remember Arthur Ripley, who had started out as a writer with Max Sennett. He was also a director, and he was known as a picture doctor—an editor who you brought onto films with problems. I also remember Dorothy Arzner, who was one of the first women directors. There were a lot of women directors in the silent film days and during the early talkies, so that wasn’t unusual. She had started as a film editor, and had cut all of the Valentino pictures. She also cut James Cruz’s Covered Wagon and Ironsides. She directed many pictures, one with Katherine Hepburn, and Nana at Goldwyn that Gregg Toland (ASC) photographed. Charlie Lang (ASC) told a story about how she saved his skin, when she was directing the first picture he shot. There were problems with the negative on the first day. They tried to blame it on him, but she got the lab to admit they had made a mistake. She was a great teacher. There were a lot of other people. Henry King, John Ford and Fritz Lang came over from 20^th Century Fox, and spent some time with us. Charlie Clarke (ASC) taught cinematography, and he’d brought some of his compadres from ASC. They were very small classes. It wasn’t like today. Theatre arts wasn’t a popular subject. I think the biggest class was motion picture history, which had maybe 20 people. Most of the classes had four or five students, so you got very personal attention. If you were really interested in something, you could explore it in depth. I was really interested in being a special effects cameraman. Mr.Clarke told me I ought to talk to Bill Abbott (ASC, head of visual effects for 20^th Century Fox), and he arranged for me to visit him at the studio.

ICG: What was that like?

BURUM: I remember sitting in this big, dark office in a big leather chair, and asking him how do you do this or that, and he’d say, ‘Well, kid, I’ll tell you how we do it here.’ There were no books like we have today. In those days, it was all knowledge that was passed down from one generation to the next. You learned at the feet of the masters. It was kind of an apprentice situation. It’s fantastic with all the books that are available today. Some are very good, and others are preposterously dumb. It just depends on who wrote them, and whether they’ve done the work or not.

ICG: Did you come out of school knowing what you wanted to do?

BURUM: There wasn’t much of a demand for people to come out of college and go to work in the studio system, so they were training us to make independent films, documentaries and ethnographic films. In those days, documentaries were very different than today. They were scripted and carefully constructed. Someone like Robert Flaherty would spend a year with people at some remote place, while he figured out what kind of film he wanted to make. He scripted all the scenes. That’s how he did Nanook of the North and other films. He documented what real people did. Today, it’s more of an editorial process, shooting tons of material and looking for a point of view during editing. But, to answer your question, I didn’t know what I was going to do. The way it worked at UCLA was that you had to do everything. You had to write. You had to direct. You had to shoot. You had to edit. You had to do costumes and make-up and production management. I even took a year of animation classes. That was a lot of fun because you learned how images moved and how certain things trick the eye. One lesson was taking a square and turning into a sphere. You had to decide, is it just going to roll or is it going to bounce? Is it going to come down on a point and then is it going to compress? Is it going to spring up? Everybody had to come up with his or her own method of how do you turn a square into a circle. Animation was very valuable, but I liked cinematography best.

ICG: Why was that?

BURUM: The wonderful thing about cinematography is that the discipline encompasses everything else. It encompasses writing because you have to analyze the story. You have to analyze who the characters are and understand how the director is going to stage them. You have to know who is important in the scene and what is not as important. Unless you understand what the story is about, who the characters are and what roles they play, you don’t know how to present characters visually. Should they be obscured? Should they be revealed? Should they be in a prominent position in the frame? Should they be in silhouette? How do they relate to other characters? Are they both in a prominent position and in strong light, or is one person in the dark foreground and the other in light so your eye goes to them?

ICG: Are those things that they taught or something that you learned by yourself?

BURUM: They taught that. In fact, we were in an academic situation where we had to explain or defend every decision. Henry Koster, one of our teachers, would give us a rehearsal scene with two actors from the theater division. We would stage the scene and explain what we were doing. He’d look at us and say that’s very good, but suppose you have an actress who can’t act. Now what are you going to do? You’re 19 years old, so you’d be very intense and say, well, I’d fire her. Then, he’d tell you that the leading lady is the mistress of the head of the studio. Now, what are you going to do? What you learn from that process is that there are 100 ways to do everything, as long as you understand what the result is supposed to be. Mr. Koster told a great story about when he was starting out directing silent pictures in Germany. There was a World War I picture with this guy leaving on a train and a girl is waving goodbye. They laid this dolly track, which was 300 feet alongside the railroad station platform. They were going to do a dolly shot with the actor and show the tears in his eyes. They worked all day setting up the shot. The train left the station, the girl waved and the camera dollied. Mr. Koster said it was the most exciting day of his life, but when he went to dailies the next day, all they saw was this close-up going bouncy, bouncy, bouncy with was no feeling of movement, because they didn’t understand the technique.        

ICG: Were there people who went to school with you who are still in this industry?

BURUM: Sure, Francis Coppola is one. There were only about 80 students, and maybe 20 or 30 teachers. Carroll Ballard was also in our class. Everyone recognized that Francis and Carroll had a lot of talent, so they got a lot of attention. Stanley Kramer taught a producing class for a year, and he was fabulous. People used to ask him how he got the money to do his films and his answer was always, ‘you’ve got to have the dream, and then you have to be willing to sell your grandmother.’ He said, in fact, ‘I’ve sold my grandmother twice.’ The message was that you’ve got to be willing to do what you need to do if you really believe in your project. He said, ‘if you have the dream, you will find a way to do it.’ When you’re a kid that’s not very good advice; but when you get older, you realize that motivation is probably as important as talent. That’s the story of anybody who’s successful—they want to do it so badly that they’re willing to focus all their intellectual and physical energy on that goal. If you do that, and if you’re lucky, then you’re going to be successful. That’s the most important thing for anybody who wants to be in this business. You really have to want to do it, and you need both talent and luck. I was very lucky in a way, because I knew I was interested in cinematography while I was at UCLA. I was given the opportunity to shoot 72 student films. I was the permanent cinematographer in Miss. Arzner’s class. They were little black-and-white pictures, so I was pretty well trained.

In graduate school, I was the cinematography teaching-assistant. When I got out of college, I immediately went to work for a Disney animal unit. I was 24 years old, and I was shooting films for Disney with 16 mm ARRIFLEX cameras. I even met Walt Disney. He was very nice. He asked what I was doing, and told me to have a good time. The interesting thing was that he had complete control over all of his projects. He looked at dailies for everything. We were at Three Rivers in the Sierras for maybe six months, and he visited us twice. He was very hands-on. We had a scene in the show where a crow comes out of a cage, flies across a room and lands on a set of antlers. We were expected to shoot it exactly as it was scripted. We were having a tough time getting the shot in one take, so the director Hank Schlossdecided to do the scene in three pieces. Once a week, the director had to call and talk to Walt about the dailies. After one call, he said, Walt wants the crow shot all in one piece. It took us a week and it drove the animal trainers crazy. It was a very good beginning work experience because we had to do everything. We did a two-parter called My Family is a Menagerie in Three Rivers near where I was born. It was fun living in the mountains, shooting those films. It was all Ektachrome, 16 ASA. I remember lighting a kitchen with these animals tearing it up at 800 footcandles. We learned to light at these really high light levels, but it didn’t seem so difficult because that’s the way you learned. It would be a lot easier today, because we’ve got better and bigger lights

ICG: In retrospect, what did you learn from that experience?

BURUM: I don’t want to use the word perfection, but I guess that’s the word I have to use. We always did it right, because we had the old man watching over our shoulder. He was never hard, mean or nasty. After the first month, I was given a pay raise because they thought I was doing such a good job. I went from $125 to $150 a week. It made me feel really proud. You had the feeling you were part of an organization that cared and was making good stuff. I did that for about six months, and then I was drafted. I went to Fort Polk, Louisiana, for basic training and the first place I was stationed was the Defense Information School at Fort Slocum, New York. It was a school where they taught officers how to be journalists, photographers and television and radio announcers.

ICG: What did you do?

BURUM: When I first got there they thought that I was supposed to be a radio announcer. I went to radio announcer’s school for about 15 minutes until they heard me read some copy. I ended up teaching other soldiers how to use TV cameras and switching, which I learned at UCLA.

ICG:  Did you spend your entire Army career doing that?

BURUM: No. I decided I should go to the Army Pictorial Center in New York. I requested a transfer, and a school friend, Irv Paik, whowas an officer there was able to help me do that after about three months. I was then assigned to the special effects department. We shot all kinds of training films and openings for The Big Picture, an Army television show. Broadway actors would come in and do these introductions, including Jason Robards and Lee Bowman. I spent two years stationed in New York and got to see live Broadway shows about twice a week with free USO tickets. I got to see great revivals of Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, including Oklahoma and Carousel, and classics, including Greek drama. It was part of my education, and it was very important. When I got out of the Army, I was offered a job on another Disney animal picture. I wanted to get into the union, which was impossible in those days. Another school friend, Ron Dexter, who ended up owning a commercial company, was working for John Urie, a commercial producer. I worked with him as an assistant, and also with other cinematographers on low-budget, motorcycle gang, doper kind of movies that were made in 20 days for about $50,000. Ron got a call from a company which was doing an Ann Margaret special. Ron couldn't do it because he had a lucrative job at Urie shooting commercials. He asked if I wanted to go to Sweden with Ann Margaret.

I talked to David Winters who was the director and Burt Rosen, the producer. I went to Sweden with David and Ann Margaret. I had an ARRIFLEX IIC and shot 35mm film of her wandering around Sweden singing songs. It was aired on NBC as part of a television special. It was successful, so I did another special with Ann Margaret. Then, in 1970, Coca Cola decided to sponsor a Raquel Welch special. We traveled around Europe, Mexico and up and down the California coastline. We shot that one in 16mm. I did 13 or 14 specials like that until the production company went broke. I also did also some non-union, low budget motorcycle, horror and slasher films. One of them was called Scream Bloody Murder. They took it to the Cannes Film Festival, where it got glowing reviews. I had 10 percent but, of course, I never saw any money. Fox offered the producer and the director $750,000 for this picture that we had shot for $55,000. These guys were so crazy about their ego they thought they could do better releasing it themselves. Of course, they lost their shirts.

ICG: So, you were getting to shoot a lot of film? How did you get into the Guild?

BURUM: Burt Rosen’s secretary told me that a friend was producing a television special in Mexico on tape with a local crew, but they wanted to do double coverage for protection in 16 mm. Carolyn Raskin and George Schlatter from Laugh In were the producers. I went to Mexico with them and lit for both the TV and 16 mm cameras. I told Carolyn my sad story about not being able to get into the Guild, and she told me that the lighting director for Laugh In had partnered with a guy who had a television lighting company called Academy Lighting Consultants. I did some work for them, and they helped me get into the union.

ICG: When was that?

BURUM: It was 1973-74, but I could only get in as what they called a director of photography E, electronic. That’s how George Spiro Dibie (ASC) got into the Guild, and it’s how I met him. I started doing live and tape television shows, including Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, some Donnie and Marie musical variety shows, a Dinah Shore special and Andy Williams Christmas specials. I also worked on an ABC program called The Midnight Special. We produced a series of classic stories on videotape. I also did a lot of blue screen at Paramount for MagiCam, a special effects technique. I worked a lot of commercials and did some work for A Little House on the Prairie, Mork and Mindy, the effects sequences for Carl Sagin’s Cosmos, the Johnny Mann Stand Up and Cheer Show, and some other TV work. Through MagiCam, I met Allen Daviau (ASC). He called me up one day out of a clear blue sky, and said he heard I knew how to light for the Ultimatte system, and asked for some advice. We’ve been friends ever since.

ICG: How did you get back to shooting film?

BURUM: Francis Coppola saved me. He was doing Apocalypse Now in the Philippines. Francis called and said he needed some second unit work on helicopters and those types of shots. He asked if I would do it? I asked, who was going to direct the second unit? He said, ‘you are.’ I said Carroll Ballard should direct and I would shoot. Francis said that he had talked to Carroll and Carroll said that I should direct. I thank them both for my big break.  I went to the Philippines and did a lot of aerial work and all the transitional shots for Apocalypse Now. That’s how I met Vittorio Storaro (AIC, ASC).

ICG: What was the transitional stuff?

BURUM: The boat going up the river and just about everything where you don’t see a principal actor. When I got there, Francis took me into his office and told me we had to do everything perfectly or he was completely doomed. The first thing I did was watch Francis and Vittorio shoot. I knew Francis was trained the way I was trained. Charlie Clark taught us that if you are a cinematographer, you had to be able to shoot anything in anybody else’s style. So, I watched exactly what Vittorio did. We talked a little bit. When I did a scene it was in the spirit of Vittorio and Francis. We had lunch many Sunday afternoons. Francis would make eggplant and pasta with olive oil and we would talk about what he wanted me to do. I still remember Francis talking about the boat going up the river. What does  wake look like when the boat was going fast and what does it look like when it’s going slow? There were a lot of (Slavko) Vorkapich type montage scenes. I also shot a lot in the compound and with the villagers. Francis wanted the film to contrast the old and new. If we had somebody weaving a traditional basket, we’d have a Coca Cola can in the frame.

ICG: Did you have a sense that you were making a film for the ages?

BURUM: Absolutely. The minute I got there I knew that this was going to be a great picture. All of the stories about how difficult it was are true. It was hard both artistically and physically, but you always had this feeling that it was going to be a great picture. That’s one of the things that helped keep us going. Sometimes I would wait on the river for three or four hours for the clouds to be right or for the light to be right. I would only shoot it if it were perfect. It was all very, carefully thought out. I was supposed to be there for 30 days. At the end of 30 days I had finished what I was supposed to do, but Francis said, ‘Steve, there’s just a couple other things I’d like you to do. Its just a couple more days.’ So, I went out and did that next thing, and then he added a couple of other shots. I knew I was there for the duration. I stayed for six or seven months the first time. We all went home for Christmas, and then I went back for two more months. After Marty Sheen had his heart attack, Francis had me shoot tons of Vistavision plates off the boat, from every angle and in every light condition thinking we were going to have to do a lot of process work with Marty, but it was never used.

ICG: Did you see Apocalypse Now Redux?

BURUM: Of course.

ICG: What were your impressions?

BURUM: I think the re-release is much more satisfying. The French plantation was always the political component of the picture. It really explains the picture to you… the whole concept of colonialism. I think it gives the picture the dimension that it should have had in the beginning.

ICG: What happened after Apocalypse Now?

BURUM: Roy Disney was very passionate about sailboat racing. He asked me to shoot a documentary about the Newport to Ensenada race. I’d always been interested in sailboats. I always thought when I was a kid that the greatest thing in the world to be would be to live in Playa del Rey, be an assistant cameraman at MGM, and have my own sailboat... so this was wonderful. I got a first class introduction to sailing and had a really good time making that picture. It was called Pacific High. We shot it in 16 mm and it was blown up to 35. Then I did some TV movies and sit-com pilots with Columbia, and some Father Knows Best reunion specials. I always shot a smattering of commercials. Then, Francis came to my aid again. They were going to shoot Black Stallion with Caleb Deschanel (ASC) photographing it and Carroll Ballard directing. I had shot little documentaries with Carroll. They had me direct and photograph the second unit. After that picture, Caleb directed The Escape Artist and he asked me to shoot it.

ICG: What was it like shooting The Escape Artist with a great cinematographer directing?

BURUM: It was a wonderful experience. Caleb didn’t hide behind the camera. He was right there with the actors. He did his part and I did my part. The great thing was that I would light something or set something up, and sometimes he would say, ‘you know, that’s not exactly the way I’d do it, but if you want to do it that way, we’ll do it.’ If he really had something he wanted, he would say, ‘It should really look like…’ and I’d say, that’s not the way I would do it, but if you want to do it that way, that’s the way we’ll do it. There is so much of both of us in that picture. Caleb and I are still really good friends. I would love to do another picture with him, because he has never gotten the recognition that I think that he should have as a director. He’s a brilliant cinematographer, but he’s also a very good director. He just didn’t get the right breaks. You have got to be lucky and be in the right place.

ICG: How did you get hooked up with Brian De Palma?

BURUM: After The Escape Artist, I shot a number of other films, including Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Entity, The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. The last two were both with Francis directing. We did The Outsiders after Francis finished One From The Heart, which had cost a lot of money and taken a lot of time. Francis wanted to make this picture as quickly as he could with only one or two takes a shot. We did The Outsiders in less than 40 days. He was very careful about rehearsing the kids. He got some money from Universal in the middle of production for another picture. He had this other book, Rumble Fish, so we started preparing that at the same time. Francis asked me what I wanted to do, and I said I wanted to do it in black-and-white. He agreed. We both felt this might be the only chance we were ever going to get to do a black and white film.

ICG: Why was Rumble Fish produced in black and white?

BURUM: The truth is that I just wanted to do a black-and-white picture, because I think its much more interesting than color. You can’t control color as well as black and white. If you have a value in black and white, it is there, you can really control it and get your intentions on film.

ICG: What was your first film with De Palma?

BURUM: Our first film was Body Double. Ida Random was the production designer. There were a lot of films being done with orange-ish overtones. I told her I wanted to do a blue and pink picture, and she agreed. I remembered that we had a mauve-looking back wall with a wonderful Chinese red lamp that had a special shade in Melanie’s (Griffith) room. The trouble with mauve is that it’s very hard to reproduce. We did a lot of paint tests, and finally got the colors exactly the way we liked it. The first two days the dailies were perfect. The next two days the wall turned robin’s egg blue. When I was timing the picture I couldn’t get the mauve back into the wall without turning Melanie magenta. The problem was the lab’s inconsistency. So the wall ended up being robin’s egg blue in the picture. That’s the problem with color. If you do a red, green wall or a blue wall, you’re going to get it but there’s no subtlety or layering. That’s why black and white film is much more satisfying for me.

ICG: I recently saw a digital/film projector comparison test by an SMPTE study group, where they said the most obvious difference showed up on a clip from Rumble Fish. The digital images had a different look and feeling.

BURUM: I think it comes down to a basic difference in resolution, which is more apparent in black and white. Digital projection may look fabulous on a 27-inch monitor, but when you blow it up on a 50-foot screen, you can see limits with resolution, with contrast and with color space. When they can afford to bring digital projection up to film quality, it’s going to be wonderful. Right now, it’s just about marketing. The manufacturers want to sell equipment to theaters, but, so far, no one has come up with a system that has better resolution or color space than film—and there are problems with archiving that nobody is talking about. It’s the same with cameras. I’m waiting for a digital camera with better than film resolution that’s the size of a pack of cigarettes so you can just float it around. But, that’s what everybody wants. The HD digital cameras we’ve seen, so far, are humongous, clunky things with cables coming out of them. But, that’s not the way they’re being sold. They’re being sold as something that frees you to be more creative, and not something that adds another layer of mechanical problems. These problems are harder to handle and more expensive than the film system.

ICG: I’m going to come back to that, but first let’s talk about some of your experiences with Brian De Palma. I’ve heard that you two had an almost instantaneous simpatico?

BURUM: I understood him immediately. I understood what he wanted, his point of view, sensibilities, and how he wanted to do it. I don’t know how that happens…you just understand what someone else sees in their minds.

ICG: Are people born with a talent for cinematography, or can anyone learn the skills?

BURUM: I don’t know if you’re born to do a particular job, but I think cinematographers are people who are predisposed to be interested in telling stories and who have a visual sense about things. The common thread for all artists is they are interested in telling stories about the human condition, including the wonders and the sleazy sides of life. Film is just a way of seeing the world through another set of eyes. It clarifies things for people. I think there has to be something inside which drives you to learn the craft and to persevere during times when your paycheck is very irregular. You have to love what you do so much that you’re willing to put up with all the trepidation that comes with the job.

ICG: You and De Palma have done eight films together. Does that affect the way you work

together?

BURUM: You get used to each other and you know what the other person can do. He is so good with actors, and he’s so good at staging. There’s a comfort level, but I also know that I can depend on him to surprise me and make my work better. It’s like any other relationship. We think the same way in a lot of ways. We both like playing scenes in one take rather than cutting them up into pieces. You’ll notice that in his pictures everything is really well balanced. It isn’t all close-ups or all moving shots. There is a flow, a rhythm and an interesting point of view. What some people don’t understand about him is that he has a very strong moral point of view. In his more personal pictures there is always somebody who gets himself or herself into a situation that causes something terrible to happen to somebody else. The person who caused the problem has to redeem himself or herself. There is always a character who points out the flaws to the person who caused the problem. There’s a scene in Body Double where the policeman accuses Craig Wasson’s character of being a voyeur. If he had seen this guy coming and called the police the girl wouldn’t be dead. So, the character, in order to literally save his soul, has to solve the crime. Brian is interested in this kind of moral dilemma. You can’t just look at the surface. His pictures are so powerful that you get the underlying message by osmosis.

ICG: How does he communicate with you?

BURUM: It’s usually done in a very short, clipped way. There are no long explanations. It’s very simple. He always wants his women to look fantastic. He has an operatic sense, so he likes everything really kind of big. On The Untouchables … he asked what style should we do? The first words out of my mouth were that we should do this picture in black and white. I showed him all these Edward Steichen photographs, and a lot of ‘30s pictures by Margaret Burke-White from Life Magazine. Brian looked at me, and he said you know they’re not going to let us do that. Come up with another idea. I said, in the 1930s they used a lot of repetitive, industrial graphic style images, like shiny Ford cars that were identical all lined up on a street. He liked that idea.

ICG: Can you explain your thinking?

BURUM: It evokes the period; not because they’re old cars, but because they are like the images you see in old magazines and photographs taken at that time that were clean and graphic. It’s a Bauhaus kind of expressionistic feeling that was going on in art during the 1930s… kind of a manufactured, repetitive form of art. There’s a scene with Sean Connery and Kevin Costner walking across the street with three guys behind them. They are dressed in black coats with little homburgs, and they all have goatees. They are just walking in the background. Another thing we did is thin out the background because there weren’t as many people with cars or the congestion that you see today.

ICG: It sounds like you give the audience a lot of credit for being visually literate?

BURUM: I think that’s how people first learn. When you’re a baby, you’re always trying to make sense out of something you see. Then, you want to touch it and see what it feels like. You have these sensual experiences long before you can communicate with words. Images are also your strongest memories. If you can trip those switches, people will get the message from visual presentations instead of just talking about things. It’s one thing to hear someone saying, “I hate Sam because he beats his wife,” and its something else to show images of Sam walking down the street with his wife a half a step behind him, all disheveled, and with the body language of somebody who’s been beaten. It tells you everything about Sam beating his wife that makes a much deeper impression than the words.

ICG: About two years ago, E.L. Doctrow, a Pulitzer prize-winning novelist, wrote an essay in the New York Times about how images in movies and television have changed the way fiction writers tell their stories because the public is so attuned to visual descriptions. It sounds like you are validating that.

BURUM: One of the things you can’t do well in movies is tell the audience what someone is thinking or how they secretly feel about something. You have to show it, and the actors have to show it with their body language. You also can show it with costume design and make-up and the way you light and stage shots. Have you ever seen a picture that Phil Lathrop (ASC) did called Lonely Are The Brave? It has one of the best openings I’ve ever seen. You see this cowboy riding. He comes to a fence and looks one way and then the other way. Kirk Douglas is playing that role. He looks up and sees a jet airplane. He cuts the fence because he doesn’t want to ride around it, and he rides down the hill. You know immediately this is a guy who is completely out of touch with modern society. You know he’s a rebel, and you know that this is going to cause problems for him. It tells you everything about Kirk Douglas’ character in a totally visual way.

ICG: Can you give us an example from a personal experience?

BURUM: When we were doing The Outsiders, Francis had all the kids look at silent movies. The movie he loved to show them was The Last Laugh, the Murnau picture with Emil Jannings, who plays an old guy who is a concierge at a very fancy hotel. He has a very fancy uniform and he’s very strong and robust. You know that because he’s lifting big giant cases and carrying them into the hotel for people. He’s very well respected in the community. His whole identity is wrapped up in his job. There is a great scene with him walking home proudly wearing his uniform. The hotel’s not doing so good, and new management takes over. They think the guy is too old and fire him. He is so embarrassed that he steals his uniform and walks home because he doesn’t want people to know he was fired. But instead of walking home proud, he’s slumped over. The whole idea of using that kind of visual metaphor for what the character is feeling is really important. That’s why a good rehearsal is so important. Maybe I planned to be a little tighter, but the character is doing something wonderful with their hands or they’re reaching down to grab their ankle because it hurts. That shows the audience what’s in the character’s mind it in an organic way. You really have to pay attention to what’s going on when you choose the size you want to shoot. There are a lot of directors who feel that the only way you can understand dialogue is if you shoot a close-up, if you don’t see the person saying their lines, somehow the audience isn’t going to understand what they’re doing. I think that’s baloney. You look at any good movie and usually the best scenes are the two shots where you get to see the actors playing back and forth with each other with their body language and timing defining their relationship for the audience. If you want to point up something that’s very important, then you use the close-up. If you do it too often, you dissipate the effect of the close-up, and then you have no accent.

ICG: What’s the ideal relationship between a cinematographer and director? 

BURUM: It varies according to who the people are, but ideally you have a free flow of ideas between two people who believe two minds are better than one. The director’s basic responsibility is the story and getting the actors to portray the characters the way he or she wants to tell the story. It’s the cinematographer’s job to come up with a series of images that reinforces those ideas. Some directors are very strong at staging. Others are very good at getting emotions out of actors, but are less interested in staging scenes. Then it’s your job to help them arrange the actors in a way that is most powerful for the scene, and that serves the story. Often there is such a free flow of ideas that you don’t know when it’s all done who did what, because the only thing that’s really important is how well you tell the story.

ICG: Where does the production designer fit into that relationship?

BURUM: The production designer is right in the middle of it. They provide the environment by designing sets that function artistically and mechanically to get the message across. You need them on your side. They were right at UCLA when they required us to take production design, art appreciation, painting and drawing. Its important for cinematographers to understand what the production designer’s job is if you want their respect and assistance.

ICG: It sounds like you have to be a bit of a diplomat?

BURUM: Yes, you do have to be a diplomat, but it’s not about being diplomatic… it’s about doing the right thing for the picture. Everybody wants that, but sometimes people become so immersed in their own problems that they don’t see the big picture. You have to work and play well with others, because it makes for a much better picture.

ICG: Do you have favorite films, so far, in your body of work?

BURUM: No. The best picture is always the one you’re finishing or the next one you’re going to make. You always look back later at things you wish you had done better.

ICG: Let’s talk about some of your other films. What do you remember about Casualties of War?

BURUM: We took a Titan crane to Thailand. We were among the first to use it. We had very large Thai crews, which allowed us to work very quickly. We could put up a 300-square foot silk in an hour. We had 80 people on a scaffolding crew. I had everyone dressed in different colored T-shirts depending on their jobs. The greens people all had green T-shirts. The electricians all had yellow T-shirts. The grips all had red T-shirts. We were shooting at an old rubber plantation. There was a botanist from New Zealand who was a specialist in tropical plants. He had a little greenhouse, which was five or six acres, where he grew all these plants. We would layout a shot and dress it with his plants. We were able to use this one area, and quickly turn it into many sets without taking the time to trek through the jungle. We had a sprinkler system over the top, so we could make it rain. We used some rain, but mostly we used the sprinkler to keep everything watered. I used these big sail cloths in 20 by 30 foot sections that we put over the jungle set. It was overcast most of the time, and so when the sun did come out, we were ready to quickly keep the lighting consistent.

ICG: How about a different type of picture, He Said, She Said.

BURUM: That was the first time I had worked on a picture with co-directors. They were a husband and wife team, and they were very respectful of each other. Marisa Silver basically directed the She Said crew and Ken Kwapis directed the He Said crew, but they were always there on the set with each other. If Ken was directing a scene with Kevin Bacon, and Marisa had a question, they would go in the corner and talk, but Ken would handle the situation or vise versa.

ICG: How about Hoffa?

BURUM: Hoffa was probably physically the hardest picture I’ve worked on, because of all the nights we shot in the wintertime…but it really was very rewarding. I’ve worked with three Italian directors, Francis Coppola, Brian De Palma and Danny DeVito. All of them are very passionate, emotional and operatic in how they tell stories; but each of them has a different way of working. Danny directed Hoffa and War of the Roses. He likes preproduction meetings. You’d go into a room with him 12 hours a day and he has these big blackboards. We’d talk about every shot, and he asked for suggestions. He wrote them down in longhand and we’d draw sketches. That picture was filled with all kinds of tricky kind of in-camera, simple dissolve transitions, because it’s basically a memory picture. Danny wanted one image to key the memory for the character of the next image.

ICG: So, the morale is that there isn’t one kind of director?

BURUM: No, there isn’t one kind of director. Everybody does it differently. I shot The Entity with Sidney Furie and he never rehearsed his actors before he’d start shooting. He used to say, ‘you’re going to get more rehearsal doing a lot of takes than you’ll ever get on a Broadway show.’ He was the kind of guy who would do a scene in the morning and a scene in the afternoon. It didn’t make any difference whether the scene was a half a page or seven pages. You did a scene in the morning, and you did a scene in the afternoon. We always saw dailies first thing in the morning. If there’s anything that he felt he needed to pick up or re-do, we would do that before we would start the new work.

ICG: How about The Shadow?

BURUM: I wanted to use hard light, and I had a very young electrical crew who had never done a hard light picture. They were terrified, but actually you can light with hard light a lot faster than you can with soft light because you don’t have the control problems. Once the electrical crew got used to it, they thought it was great.

ICG: What about Mission Impossible?

BURUM: Mission Impossible was probably the most difficult film in terms of keeping things going because there were so many elements. We were shooting in Prague and London. And we had sets being built on one stage, while we were shooting on another stage. I had to come in early every day and look at the new construction with (production designer) Norman Reynolds and figure out the lighting rigs. There were a lot of script changes. Stuff would get half built and then we wouldn’t use it, so we had to kind of revamp all the time. Even though we had about a 12 week prep schedule, it wasn’t enough because the script was so fluid. The art department had a very difficult time. Norman Reynolds and his construction guys were heroes beyond speaking. They were just unbelievably great. I was terrified that we were going to catch up with him, but Norman and his people were always ready.

ICG: How are digital effects affecting the role of cinematographer?

BURUM: There is always some new technology that temporarily becomes the center of things. When sound came in, the soundman became the big deal for a while until he was integrated into the system. Then there was a color consultant on all Technicolor pictures. They became a big deal for a while. It’s the same thing with digital. We are still doing the same things we did with optical effects. You still need to have an idea, and you still need to understand how lenses and perspectives affect the emotions of a shot. No computer program will replace that. I think the digital people are getting integrated into the process and are becoming a valued resource for the cinematographer and director. New technology isn’t always digital. On Mission Impossible, we used a new type of helium balloon to light big interiors.On Mission to Mars, we did use digital technology to replace the sky on almost every exterior on the surface of the planet.

ICG: What’s your advice for students and other young filmmakers tuned in to the chat?

BURUM: I think it’s important for anybody who’s an artist to commit to a point of view. You just can’t randomly cover scenes from every angle and hope the editor will make something out of it. It has to begin with an idea.     When I was a student, Stanley Kramer told us that it begins with the dream. That’s still the best advice you can give anyone. He also warned us that you’ve got to love this work more than anything else. No machine is going to make you more talented or replace experience. My advice is study art, architecture and literature, pay attention to what’s going on around the world in your life, learn your craft and stick with your dreams. There are these hardware hucksters out there who will try to convince you that their equipment will solve all of your artistic and craft problems if you just buy it and use it. What they fail to mention is that a violin doesn’t play itself.