A Conversation with James Chressanthis
by Bob Fisher

James Chressanthis was born and raised in Philadelphia. His father was an engineer and an amateur photographer who documented his business travels with "fantastic photos." Chressanthis got his first 35 mm reflex camera as a gift at the age of 10. He began shooting 8 mm films in college and later invested in a 16 mm camera. Chressanthis planned to follow in his father's footsteps, entering college as an engineering major, but his personal interests were photography, poetry and art. He earned a master's of fine arts degree at Southern Illinois University. Chressanthis began his career as a sculptor and artist who taught at the university level for seven years. He shot a personal diary film during a visit to his grandparents' native village in Greece. After it aired on PBS, Chressanthis took a sabbatical and enrolled at AFI as cinematography major in 1984. He subsequently filmed nearly 100 music videos before breaking into narrative filmmaking with an independent feature called Leather Jackets. His episodic series credits include Nowhere Man, The Cape, High Incident and Martial Law. He has also lensed various independent features, the studio features Hexed and Urban Legend and movies-of-the week, Father and Son, Death Dreams, Majority Rules and The Cape. He won a Cable Ace Award (shared with Bryan England) for Public Enemy # 2.

QUESTION: What is your first memory of taking a photograph?
CHRESSANTHIS: I remember taking a picture out the front window of the house. There was a small lawn and a tree. I was trying to capture the autumn/winter light that was very cold and sad. I also photographed friends in high school. I recently found an album of those Ektachrome slides. There are a couple good ones.
QUESTION: Did you have career plans in high school?
CHRESSANTHIS: I loved photography, painting and art. I was interested in movies, but that was all magic. It didn't occur to me that you could make a living at doing any of those things. I didn't make that leap until after college, when I was in my 20s.
QUESTION: Where did you go to college?
CHRESSANTHIS: I followed a long, circuitous route. I studied engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I took a hiatus from school and traveled around the United States for about six months when I was 19, and ended up in Arizona. I got a bachelor's of fine arts from Arizona State University and later earned a master's of fine arts degree from Southern Illinois University. I was doing still photography and making little films during that time. I was also doing sculpture and mixed media performance art, so I still wasn't dreaming about becoming a Hollywood cinematographer.
QUESTION: What kind of photography and for what purpose?
CHRESSANTHIS: For art. Is there any other kind of photography?
QUESTION: When you got out of college, how did you make a living?
CHRESSANTHIS: I taught sculpture and drawing. I was a college professor in Michigan for seven years. I was tenured and I did a lot travelling during that period.
QUESTION: When did you start shooting films?
CHRESSANTHIS: I made some 8 mm films in college. I borrowed a 16 Bell & Howell camera and later owned a Bolex.
QUESTION: And you were doing it for the love of it?
CHRESSANTHIS: Yes, of course. That's implicit. I made my first serious film in Greece during visits to my maternal grandparents' village. It was meant to be a diary of that journey.
QUESTION: Tell us about that film.
CHRESSANTHIS: It was called Remembrance of a Journey to the Village. It was a personal journey for me, because I met all these relatives and people who hadn't immigrated and they were my long, lost family. The film was my way of creating a diary for myself. I wasn't thinking of it as a start of a career path.
QUESTION: Was that your first visit to Greece?
CHRESSANTHIS: I was there in 1979. That's when I decided to make a film. I went back in 1980 and again in 1982. It took a while to cobble the resources together. I was a college teacher, and I didn't make any money. I got a Michigan Council for the Arts grant and a small Ford Foundation grant, and we had a fabulous fundraiser within the family. My whole family put money into this film. I had about $25,000. It was a great experience. I got into festivals and I started seeing films and meeting people from Hollywood. I was about 27- or 28-years-old when I realized you could make a living doing this work. I was in a festival in Houston and I got a bronze award. The gold and silver winners were National Geographic Society films.
QUESTION: Tell us about that film.
CHRESSANTHIS: It was an ethnographic study of the life of a Greek mountain village. The life of shepherds, goatherds-they really had more goats than sheep. It followed the harvest cycle from the planting of wheat and other crops to the turning of the fields, the end of winter, and the beginning of spring. We shot when it was cold and wet and we ended with the summer wheat harvest. These people harvested wheat by hand with a scythe. They tied the bushels together and put them on the backs of mules, way up on these incredible mountains. Those were my first 14-hour shooting days but it was an incredible experience. There are still things in that film that I have never surpassed, because of the content. That's where I really started to fall in love with film. It was 16 mm color reversal film.
QUESTION: How did you get it on PBS?
CHRESSANTHIS: My local PBS station heard about it. I showed it to them, and they said, 'we want to distribute this film.' This was back about 1982. They distributed my film by satellite. They were very helpful.
QUESTION: What happened next?
CHRESSANTHIS: I shot a video documentary. It was more of an experimental performance piece called Necros: An Aftermath. It was about a friend who was a Vietnam era veteran. I used computer-generated imagery crossed with a documentary interview. It was a very unusual mix of media in those days. It was about his confession or revelation of what happened to him in the army. He avoided doing anything that had to do with violence. The Army wasn't putting these people in prison because there were too many of them, so they would give them undesirable duty. He was an orderly in a burn unit at an army hospital. He took care of soldiers who were dying of severe burns. It went on to show at the Kitchen Video Performance Gallery in New York, and WNET in New York broadcast it. It was also part of an international public television festival in 1986.
QUESTION: Is that when you decided to give up teaching and do this work full time?
CHRESSANTHIS: I was full time as a professor for seven years, so I was entitled to a sabbatical. I took a year off, and spent it at the American Film Institute. At the end of that year, I resigned my tenure. I just decided it was time to move on. Life is always about the future and not what you've done in the past. I was at AFI from 1984 to 1986. Howard Schwartz (ASC) was on the faculty and he was very generous and helpful. He also introduced me to Vilmos Zsigmond (ASC) and I got to work as a cinematography intern on The Witches of Eastwick, directed by George Miller. That was a fantastic opportunity. It was an anamorphic film. At the end, Vilmos had me shoot inserts and some little shots.
QUESTION: Sounds like it was a primal experience.
CHRESSANTHIS: First of all, Vilmos is a fantastic teacher and a wonderful human being. He was very generous. By the way, Phil Abraham, who is now the DP on The Sopranos, was on that crew. He was a first assistant but took the job as a second just so he could work with Vilmos. I was on the film for 110 days. At the end of it, Vilmos and George Miller asked me to do these inserts.
QUESTION: What else did you get out of your experience at AFI?
CHRESSANTHIS: I loved AFI. I specialized in cinematography but I think I must have sat in on every class they offered. I'd never worked with crews before. I'd never collaborated. I'd done everything by myself, so it took me several years to get use to the idea.
QUESTION: Were there other people there who influenced you?
CHRESSANTHIS: David Lean spoke with us. David Putnam showed us The Killing Fields but first he made us read journalist Sydney Schanberg's New York Times articles that the movie is based on. We also read the original script and the revisions before we watched the movie. Then we analyzed it for a week on laser disc. We looked at every shot, and he explained all the different things that went into it. A lot of it revolved around Chris Menges' cinematography, which won an Academy Award. Some of the Cambodian scenes were actually shot in England. It was a revelation to me that Chris shot daylight exterior scenes in Yorkshire that we were convinced to be in Cambodia.
QUESTION: How did your career move forward after Witches of Eastwick?
CHRESSANTHIS: I had previously assisted Amir Mokri while I was trying to figure out what to do next. The only movies available for someone like me to shoot were non-union, low-budget independent features. They were mainly exploitation films, and I really wasn't interested. Amir suggested music videos. He said it would give me a chance to shoot a lot without much interference, because videos are always about the images. I had worked on a couple of Stevie Wonder projects and I really like it, so I started shooting music videos. I was fortunate to shoot Bobby McFerrin's first music video. It was called Opportunity. Two weeks later it was on MTV. Right after that, I shot M.C. Hammer's first music videos before he was a star. I shot Dr. Dre, Easy E, and Ice Cube videos at the beginnings of their careers. I shot somewhere between 80 to 100 videos.
QUESTION: How did you get that work?
CHRESSANTHIS: There were a lot of little production companies, but mainly it was making connections with directors. Having that Bobby McFerrin piece gave me a lot of credibility. Most music video budgets were very low. I occasionally worked on a bigger budget shoot, but you really had to be inventive and creative. Usually, you had one or two days to shoot and you were expected to deliver dynamite, commercial-quality imagery, no matter what the budget was. It was fun. I worked with Rupert Wainwright on his first music videos and he's since become a feature director. He did Stigmata recently. I wasn't interested in performance music videos. I wanted to work on videos with storylines. At that time, the record companies weren't very intrusive into the process. They would sort of nod their heads and ask you to stay on the budget and to make sure you get good close-ups when you were shooting the performance. We crafted storylines that were narrative in nature. We did a Hammer video called Turn This Mother Out, which was visually based on The Cotton Club and Once Upon A Time In America. It was a great costume epic set in New York during the 1930s. We shot on a very small budget in a large Los Angeles theater. It received a Grammy nomination and got me my first feature.

QUESTION: How did that happen?
CHRESSANTHIS: I was in my mid-30s. A lot of people thought I was a lot younger and that can be sometimes a disadvantage because they don't want to trust millions of dollars to an inexperienced cameraman. But a British director named Lee Drysdale had a film called Leather Jackets starring Bridget Fonda. He took a chance on me based on my music videos. He saw that I was filming an African-American cast at night and he liked the look and mood. Leather Jackets was a contemporary film noir story.
QUESTION: Was the production format for music vidoes film or video?
CHRESSANTHIS: I've never shot a music video in video format. About half were 16 mm and the rest were 35 mm.
QUESTION: Were they as experimental as people say or were they scripted?
CHRESSANTHIS: You can script an experimental video but there was a lot of freedom. Even though it's a commercial industry-at the heart of it, is the pure joy of music. There were great expectations for beautiful images. It was a great training ground because we had freedom. I believe it's a little more restrictive today. Vilmos Zsigmond once said that sound/ the dialog in film is like music. I've always taken that to heart. I've noticed great and actors directors are always trying to get rid of excessive dialog. They try to compress dialog to make it as sparse as possible, so that you're looking at the person's performance. You see the words, rather than hear them.
QUESTION: When you were shooting music videos, did you get a chance to get involved in the back-end of the process when it went through telecine transfer and timing?
CHRESSANTHIS: Yes, I was always involved in telecine. That was the other great part of it. That's why, I think I became technically adept, because that was the way to control the look, which is critical. The director and I always supervised telecine. We did all the color corrections in dailies, not at the end of the process. There was a very good reason for that-actually two reasons. In the early music videos, the end product was actually cut on film. But then, we switched to telecine and did the editing in video. That made it important to get the look you wanted out of the transfer because you might run out of money later in post, or the record company may just say, 'We like it the way it is. Don't do that artistic stuff.' So, we tried to get the look down on film and during the transfer.
QUESTION: That's the heart of the great debate about the future role of the cinematographer, isn't it? Does it matter how you light or shoot if everything is going to be fixed later?
CHRESSANTHIS: Yes. It's an engineering mentality driven by people who don't understand the artistic process. That's why cinematographers will fight for film dailies on feature films, because you have to show the editor and director, this is what it should look like. If the dailies are wrong, it creates misunderstandings. I've had the experience of dailies being printed wrong, and the director or the editor will decide that a shot is too bright or too dark, or they have the impression a shot is soft, when it isn't, and suddenly it's not in the movie. It could be a critical shot, and by dropping it, the whole scene is edited in a different way. The same thing is true with the visual style. You want to show the editor and the director what the movie is going to look like during dailies because once you are in postproduction, time gets compressed and compromises are made. Someone from the head office says, 'You're done tomorrow. Forget about color correction. It doesn't matter. The audience doesn't care.' That happens every day in this industry. The only people it doesn't happen to are people like Steven Spielberg and the Coen brothers, who just put O Brother Where Art Thou through a digital intermediate process, where Roger Deakins (BSC) controlled the look of every shot.
QUESTION: How do you deal with that issue - controlling the look?
CHRESSANTHIS: It can get very complicated. I was preparing to shoot a period film about Eartha Kitt's life that begins in the 1930s and goes to the 1970s. I was planning to use a skip bleach process of the original negative for some parts and color reversal film in other parts. The director and I agreed, but the producers wanted to know why we couldn't do this at the end of the production. Our idea was that we wanted to create the look up-front, because it would influence the entire editorial process. There are different ways to get the same results. I guess that's part of what makes this a creative process.
QUESTION: Who was the director?
CHRESSANTHIS: His name is Oley Sassone. He comes from a music video background, and I've worked with him on episodic television on Martial Law. We did four or five shows together. He totally supported the idea of creating as much of the look as possible on the negative rather than in the print process. Janusz Kaminsky (ASC) created a great look in Saving Private Ryan using skip bleach on the prints, but he had Steven Spielberg behind him. Darius Khondji (AFC) created a great look using a lab process for Seven but they didn't make all of the release prints properly, so people who saw the film in Iowa missed a lot. That's why I loath totally rely on creating the look at the end. There is always a chance that someone will decide that there isn't time or money to do it right.
QUESTION: You're touching on a really interesting topic…how the look of a film that you create during original photography affects the perceptions of others in the creative process-the editor, the producers and so on? There are directors who say, 'don't bother, I'm going to fix it later.'
CHRESSANTHIS: You're painting the mood when you are shooting. What I'm photographing is not just the actors saying their lines. That's a very crude definition of cinematography. What you actually should be photographing is the subtext. What is this film about? How can you fix that later?
QUESTION: How do you zero in on that when you start a project?
CHRESSANTHIS: There is a different answer for every project but generally if it's based on reality, I read everything I can find. I look at lots of photographs and the research compiled by the art director and I also study the design arc of the film. I keep all of my notes in my computer database. When we were preparing to shoot the film about Eartha Kitt, there was an important scene that was staged in a 1970s hotel room where two journalists have come to interview her. They've brought government files that document how her career was ruined. It was the first time she was confronted with evidence that people in the government decided to crush her career. They start reading the file and it is filled with innuendoes and smears. She tells them how she grew up as an illegitimate daughter of a sharecropper in South Carolina during the 1930s, living in abject poverty. Her mother abandoned her at age five. How do you photograph that? We looked at a lot of photographs from the period by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lang. There were many pictures available from different sources, including the WPA, a photo project sponsored by the federal government during the 1930s.
QUESTION: Who is we?
CHRESSANTHIS: The director, production designer and myself. We really loved the Walker Evans' black-and-white photos from the WPA files. They captured the very harsh reality of a sharecropper's life in the South. The costume designer was creating worn-out pieces of clothing and I was asking myself, how am I going to get that black-and-white look? They won't let me shoot in black-and-white. Actually, shooting in black-and-white may not be the best solution because it may take you too far out of the film. It may be too objective to suddenly jump from color to black-and-white, and too obvious. So, the skip bleach process was appealing, because by not bleaching the silver out of the negative, it essentially leaves three black-and-white layers. That has the effect of slightly desaturating the film while rendering the contrast much harsher. That harshness was very appealing and the feeling of desaturation was going to be helped by the color of light we used and how we planned to expose and filter the film and of course, our interactions with the costume designer and art director presuming they'd use subdued colors. We picked a ranch to shoot at in the middle of summer. All the greenery was turned to gray or brown because of the heat. I tested all the current Kodak stocks, and it turned out the best one for this project was the old (Eastman EXR 100T) 5248 stock. It had a really vivid effect. As the story progressed into the 1940s, we planned to stop using the bleach by-pass process but we were going to continue using the 5248 stock. I actually got that idea from Bob Richardson's (ASC) work on JFK. The 5248 film has a different tonal quality, softness and unique color saturation. So, I'm saying, that you plan by using all the design elements-light, contrast, color saturation, choice of colors, choice of film stock, and by working with the costume and art directors. We shot tests and showed them to the art director so we could discuss the color palette. But you never do it all in preparation. It's a process of making decisions everyday. You shoot, and then you look at dailies and discover the look… subtle things, a little darker or brighter affect how the audience relates with the characters and the story. This is the core of the filmmaking process. Engineers don't understand this. Your artistic work is dependent on responding to what you're shooting every day and seeing it on a screen. Then, you have to match everything, light, colors and style for continuity.
QUESTION: This relates to what you said before about anti-intellectualism and the people who say anyone can make movies by pointing a video camera and pushing a button because everything can be fixed later with a computer.
CHRESSANTHIS: There's nothing inherently wrong with that if that's the intention of the director, but it's also my prerogative to decide not to shoot for somebody like that. There are plenty of people who they can hire to point the camera and shoot, but let's not call it cinematography.
QUESTION: You said your first movie was Leather Jackets. What did you do after that?
CHRESSANTHIS: I shot some low budget television movies. I came into the ICG in 1993. I was shooting a TV series for CBS called Hearts of the West. We were shooting in Los Angeles, and the company shooting it, tried to do it non-union. I thought was sort of odd because generally most TV series, especially those shooting in Los Angeles, were union. The production manager seemed very nice. He said, 'Don't worry, it's going to become a union show. They're just posturing, and trying to save a little money in pre-production.' So, I said, 'Great, I'm finally getting into the Guild.' I was actually refused membership when I worked on Witches of Eastwick. I shot for more than 30 days, which was the rule at that time, but someone at the Guild was very rude to me and basically told me to take a walk. In fact, I can't repeat what they said to me, but those people are gone and we happily have had more progressive leadership since 1989.
QUESTION: What happened on Hearts of the West?
CHRESSANTHIS: It turned out the producers were extraordinarily greedy and inhumane in terms of how they treated the crew. The conditions were terrible and the pay was low. There were 50 people on the shooting crew and 49 voted to be represented by the I.A. I wasn't a Guild member but I'd been a teacher and walked a picket line. It's unfair for people to make less than minimum wage while an actor is making $50,000 a week. That's actually the thing that got me. My loader came to me during this debacle and said, 'Look at my timecard and look at my paycheck.' They'd reduced the number of hours on his paycheck because if they'd put in the number of hours he worked divided by his flat wage, he would make less than minimum wage. That's a violation of federal law but that's done in our industry on a regular basis, especially in a non-union world. Then, there's lack of freedom of speech. You're not allowed to speak out in favor of the union or you're fired. But that's accepted too. As long as you want to keep working in the business, you've got to go along, get along and keep quiet. Well, in this case, the crew went on strike and the I.A. supported it. The producer told the crew. 'My door's open at any time. If you have any problems, you can always come to me. If you come across the line now, everything will be forgiven.' Of course, this was the same producer who told me he was going to fire the gaffer if he ever tried to talk to him again. That was after the gaffer complained that the electricians were not being paid fairly.
QUESTION: Have you also had experiences with great producers on TV shows?
CHRESSANTHIS: Yes. A great producer is like a great director. He knows how to nurture the talent and bring the elements together. He has a vision. He's a filmmaker and an artist. You feel that you can do your work. A lot of us would do this work for free because we love doing it.
QUESTION: What was the outcome of the strike?
CHRESSANTHIS: We won the strike and they kicked out the scab crew. That was revelatory, too. The producers promised the scab crew, they'd stand by them and they'd always have a job. The producers were embarrassed in the trades when Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams and other people started speaking out, so they canned the scabs and brought the crew back.
QUESTION: Did participating in that strike influence your career negatively in any way?
CHRESSANTHIS: Yes, I was blacklisted. I couldn't get a non-union MOW or feature after that for several months. My reel would go in, the director would pick me, we'd hit it off and nothing would happen. This happened several times. My wife was pregnant. We were having our first child. I had an offer to go back to teaching with full health insurance. I started thinking, maybe I'll have to go back to teaching and make documentaries on the side. I love making films in Hollywood but it was pretty grim.
QUESTION: How did you get through that period?
CHRESSANTHIS: Jonathan Kaplan was directing a little Showtime movie called Reform School Girl. It was part the "Rebel Highway" series of two-hour movies. I think there were 10 or 12 of them. Jonathan was a friend of a friend, and I always had a really high regard for him as a director. I went through interviews and the producer seemed happy with my work and the fact that I could work fast. Nothing happened. Much later, Jonathan was shooting, I think, the 10th or 11th show or maybe the last show in the series, and he insisted on hiring me. When we were prepping-actually, my contract wasn't signed-he started asking me about Hearts of the West. I was thinking, 'I'm going to lose this job.' I just told him the story of what happened. He said, 'that's very interesting because my father was blacklisted, and he lost his career in Hollywood. He was a writer.' It turned out one of the actors in Hearts of the West named Jonathan Kaplan's father, Saul Kaplan. He remembered moving from Hollywood to New York, watching his father's career destroyed. Perhaps that's why he's such a good director. I only experienced it for a few months, but it reinforced my feelings about standing up to any kind of discrimination.
QUESTION: So, you did that show and then what happened?
CHRESSANTHIS: My daughter was born and I remember doing a little low-budget movie called Kingdom of the Blind. I brought my daughter to the wrap party when she was a few weeks old, and an actor said, 'she's going to bring you good luck. It was basically true. After that, I just kept working, going from one project to another. But, having the confidence of Jonathan Kaplan during that critical period made it all possible because otherwise I might have gone back to teaching. I've shot a number of pilots and a few TV series, including Nowhere Man, which Disney produced. It was kind of a cross between The Fugitive and a political thriller.
QUESTION: I liked that show a lot. It had terrific scripts, and it told visual stories.
CHRESSANTHIS: We shot it in the Pacific Northwest. It was very dark through the winter there and that became an advantage. It rained all the time and we always shot in the rain. It was misty and foggy. Very atmospheric. It was tough on the crew but great for the photography. I had a great time shooting it. I really had carte blanche to shoot. I shot another series, The Cape, about the space shuttle. Then I shot High Incident for Dreamworks and the features Judas Kiss and Urban Legend.
QUESTION: What happened to the Eartha Kitt film?
CHRESSANTHIS: They ran into a funding problem, so the picture is on hold. I also shot a pilot that I really liked during this period. It is called American Family. It was directed by Gregory Nava (El Norte) and features Edward James Olmos and Raquel Welch. It's a great story about an extended Latino family in Los Angeles. We did a lot of interesting camerawork, using super 8 film, digital video and mainly 35 mm film for different looks. CBS didn't pick it up but other networks are interested. Those are the things that break your heart.
QUESTION: Who were some of your role models early in your career?
CHRESSANTHIS: I learned a lot from watching the film noir cinematographers. I looked at a lot of John Alton's B pictures that were produced in the 1940s with very short schedules and they had very cheap sets. While I was studying at AFI, we looked at Farewell My Lovely and Crossfire. That's when I first began thinking about using shadows or negative light to conceal things you don't want the audience to see. Years later, I shot a documentary for PBS, the pilot for the American Cinema series, Night for Night: Film Noir. The opening sequence was fascinating. We copied the opening shots from Crossfire, which was filmed in 1945. There's a murder scene that takes place in a darkened apartment. Two men start struggling. There's one lamp lighting the scene and in the struggle they knock it over. The lamp goes to the floor. It doesn't break, but all you see is the legs of the men. There's a slash of light from the window but you can't see the struggle. Whoosh, something happens, a body goes to the floor, and then you see a doorway open into a hallway and a man runs out. You don't see who it is. We cut to the lamp. That's how our documentary started. The lamp is picked up by John Bailey (ASC), the cinematographer and he says, 'Okay, that's a cut, bring the lights up.' Instead of bringing the lights up, we brought the flags on the set up and we showed the audience how the set was lit. I learned from those film noirs that it's about broad strokes-about what's the most important light in a scene? That's true of any scene. What motivates the scene? What's the mood of the scene? What kind of light should be in the scene? Is it soft? Is it hard? Is it cut? Does it come from the top? What direction does it come from? What's the motivation? Does it change? What color is it? You always have to ask those questions. Sometimes you just need one light on a scene. If I'm shooting a contemporary piece, I tend to light the architecture and the environment first, because you know the actors are going to move through it and that's more life-like. However, I've also been known to use every light on the truck. You can't have one style. If I'm shooting a 1930s period piece, I'm more likely to use classic hard light. That's all part of the repertoire of lighting. But most times, I choose to light very simply to afford the actors a bit more space to work in a more natural environment.
QUESTION: You raise an interesting point-how lighting affects the performance of the actors.
CHRESSANTHIS: Most of the time, no one appreciates the role of the cinematographer more than the actors. Sure, they want us to make them look good but they also appreciate it when we create an environment with light that's right for the mood and the situation. They also appreciate it when we give them some room to work with so they don't have to be totally conscious of their marks.
QUESTION: In the old days when cinematographers were under studio contract, they worked year-in, year-out with the same actors on the same stages with the same crews.
CHRESSANTHIS: It's a lot different today. Chances are that you are going to meet an actor for the first time on every new project. So, you have to find out what they like and what they don't like; what works and what doesn't work; and how it all fits in with the story.
QUESTION: Would you rather work on a stage or location?
CHRESSANTHIS: It depends on the story and the situation, but I tend to light stages and locations the same way. You just have more flexibility and control on a stage.
QUESTION: Do you think differently whether you're shooting a TV movie, episodic series or feature?
CHRESSANTHIS: No, you can't think differently. If you're thinking, 'it's just TV', you're bound to fail. It doesn't matter if I'm doing a one-hour episodic or a big feature. I light the same way, except on a big feature I have more time and a bigger budget. But, I don't adjust my thinking or even the way I work. I like working quickly. I like the pace. The difference on a feature is that you have the time to keep refining your thinking. You can do more takes, and you can say in-between takes, 'Let's change this. Let's make this pool of light a little smaller. I think we don't need it to be that big.' So, we'll take five minutes and make a little change. I think that's the difference.
QUESTION: When you get a script, what is it that makes you say, 'this is something I really want to do?' Is it the director, the story or the medium?
CHRESSANTHIS: It's always the story, the director and the actors. Who's going to be in it? That's important too, obviously. I hope the movie I've been preparing about Eartha Kitt gets made because it's a period film about a brave woman. I consider her the female equivalent to Mohammed Ali. Eartha Kitt stood up at a White House luncheon and said that we shouldn't be talking about beautifying America. We should be talking about ending the Vietnam War. She pointed out something I didn't know, being a kind of middle-class white kid in the '1960s. A lot of black young men got themselves arrested and put in jail so they could avoid the draft. White kids were jumping off ladders to make their feet flat. They were faking diseases and psychoses. Black kids were breaking windows and getting arrested. Eartha was recently asked, 'what was the reaction to her protest?' She said that two hours later she was unemployed and the government undermined her career. There's a difference between a costume epic and a period film that tells a story. I think about all of those things when I read a script.
QUESTION: Clearly, Jim, you think of film as more than commerce and entertainment?
CHRESSANTHIS: If movies weren't also a form of artistic expression, I don't think people would be that interested in them. Sure, they want to be entertained, and the studios are a business, but it's art that gives this industry its spark. Certainly the system creates a lot of sausage. But, that's true of books, paintings and all other forms of artistic expression. I figure you only have so many years to work, so I don't want to spend a year working on a film that I'm not interested in or that I wouldn't pay to see.
QUESTION: Do you still shoot documentaries?
CHRESSANTHIS: I haven't done it recently, because I've been pretty much working non-stop for the past five years. But, I like shooting docs. They'll always be part of my life.
QUESTION: Do you think the role of the cinematographer is changing?
CHRESSANTHIS: I've read the stories claiming that all we need to do today is record the images and someone else will fix everything in post. I think whether it's a documentary or a narrative story, someone has to compose and light the images and make decisions about the shot sequence at the moment of performance. That takes collaboration between the cinematographer and the director. You're not a technician pushing a button, although that's a common perception that hurts cinematographers because it's not what we do. We photograph the subtext of the story. It is true that there have been great advances in the digital realm, especially in postproduction. I work on the computer all the time making prints, and using PhotoShop with image editing tools for my own personal artwork. I think all cinematographers should learn PhotoShop. We should all have a working knowledge of image editing tools-not only the cinematographer but also the camera operator, first assistant and second assistant as well. I think in the future, hybrid digital film technology is probably the most creative and flexible way to create the best imagery.
QUESTION: What about photography? Is digital imaging catching up with film?
CHRESSANTHIS: I think film is the best image acquisition tool because you can paint with film. It has the highest resolution and the most subtlety in color and tones. Despite all of the hype, the digital cameras and the HD camcorders do not, in any way, approach the resolution capabilities or the contrast range of film or the rendering of colors. There's a lot of hype that says it's as good as film or even better, but it's not true. If you were shooting Lawrence of Arabia tomorrow, you would shoot film automatically. Then, the question becomes are there stories where HD video is good enough? The truth is that I'm always disappointed when I see a new HD camera. I go in with high expectations and end up being disappointed.
QUESTION: Why do so many journalists quote people saying HD is as good as film today?
CHRESSANTHIS: I don't think that most journalists understand what we do. They think we are taking pictures like a hobbyist would. We are telling stories by writing with light. No one would say that Michelangelo's paintings and sculptures are better or worse art than Shakespeare's writings. They're different mediums; both powerful forms of expression in their own ways. It's the same with film and video. You can't compare them. They are different mediums.
QUESTION: Do you think moviemaking is becoming more or less of a collaborative process?
CHRESSANTHIS: I can only speak from my own experience and the truth is that with all this hype, my day-to-day work has not changed a great degree. Maybe it's because I have the ego, energy and brass to insert myself in the postproduction process. I'm not afraid to say to the producer, 'you're making that too bright. Are you trying to ruin your work? Do you want to put your name on that?'
QUESTION: What kind of reactions do you get?
CHRESSANTHIS: Most producers listen. It takes chutzpah. Every once in a while, someone is going to say, let's get rid of this guy. But they're hiring me as an artist, so I'm not going to roll over and say, 'Okay, I'll do whatever you want.' I think most producers I want to work with appreciate that.
QUESTION: What about all of the hype about Mike Figgis putting a digital camera on his shoulder and shooting Time Code. CCN did a 15-minute report, and said it was the end of "old-fashioned filmmaking." They stressed how easy it was to make an inexpensive movie with digital technology.
CHRESSANTHIS: I know they always show you the picture of Mike Figgis with a camera on his shoulder but a lot of other people were also shooting. What struck me about Time Code was the great work done by all of the camera operators. Remember, they shot 90-minute takes. But, I think the actors had more fun performing Time Code than we had watching it because for actors it's a terrific bit of freedom. Ninety minutes with no cuts. No cinematographer is stepping in and saying, 'you missed your light.' It's just pure performance. That's the beauty of it. It's not really a film in the classic sense. It's a performance art piece. The other side of the coin is how Time Code was exploited in the media. I think it's fine that people are producing movies with digital video (DV) camcorders. There are documentaries I may want to shoot on DV just because it's great to have a 90-minute load, but it's an irrevocable choice once you decide. You have to make the decision based on the questions, what am I getting and what am I giving up? I love the feeling of sitting in the theater and seeing my work on a 60-foot screen, 30-feet high. I choose 35 mm, if I can, to get the most subtle details, the most control of exposure and contrast, and the most beautiful rendering of my actors and my sets.
QUESTION: How much experience do you have with video or DV camcorders?
CHRESSANTHIS: I was a consultant for Sony for 10 years. I taught lighting workshops for the Sony Video Institute in Hollywood on the AFI campus. Sony sent me all over the country doing lighting workshops. I showed videographers how to light like film. Good lighting will improve any photographic medium. I've shot a lot of video, so they can't call me a Luddite. I shot high-definition in 1989. I went and looked at the Panavision/ Sony camera, and what I saw looks a lot like what I'd shot in 1989 only a little sharper. The film output is okay, but it's not like 35 mm film.
My camera crew came with me, and my assistant, Linda Morgenstern, said, 'Let's turn the monitor around so we can see it better.' We were lining up a shot, and the Panavision guy said, 'Don't move the monitor.' I asked why not? One of the primary advantages of having HD on the set is that you can see the sharp brilliant images of the finished product. It turns out; you can't move that monitor around because it goes out of color balance. The monitors are extraordinarily delicate. In post houses, they're changing monitors every month because they're not stable and they don't render color properly.
QUESTION: I've heard that there is a lot of flexibility in being able to slide in chips that allow you to get different looks, maybe emulating different film stocks.
CHRESSANTHIS: With any modern video camera, you can have a set-up chip that establishes contrast, which is a nice feature for videographers. They love it. There's another feature that allows you to adjust details between the edges of areas with different tonalities. You can adjust the detail on a chip camera in the skin tone area to make it softer, for instance, and more film-like. There are things you can do to adjust the black and white levels and mid-tones. That's 10-year-old news. But what remains is the video recording system still has limited contrast and it has limited resolution. The new Panavision/ Sony camcorder uses the same two-thirds of an inch chip they've been using for years. I suppose there are reasons, such as the technological problems and costs associated with a need to process richer imagery. They've designed and put the sharpest most expensive cinema lenses ever made on that camera. They're approximately twice the resolution and sharpness of the existing Primo lenses, which we use on film cameras They're trying to compensate for the two-thirds-of-an-inch digital chip.
QUESTION: What do you do tell students who are looking forward to shooting for the next 40 years? What should they concentrate on?
CHRESSANTHIS: It's not that different than what I use to tell my art students. You learn everything. You learn about digital cameras and you also learn how to light and expose film. You learn how to look at and really see light. You also study art. You spend time in the digital suite, and you learn what happens when you transfer film to video. Kodak is doing some interesting things with digital intermediate technology on a picture that Roger Deakins shot (O Brother, Where Art Thou), where the cinematographer can manipulate colors in parts of images without affecting the rest of the frame.
QUESTION: With the advances being made in DTV and maybe HDTV will a day come when the cinema is an endangered species? Will the ability to see high-quality movies at home cut into or eliminate people's tastes for seeing movies in a darkened theater?
CHRESSANTHIS: They said that about television and about VCRs, but movies are thriving because people want the communal experience. We have television and we have the Internet, but people still pay to go to a theater, either a live production or a movie. There is also a ritual of seeing movies in a theatre that is part of the experience.
QUESTION: What about your own children? Would they rather watch a favorite TV show or go to a movie with the family?
CHRESSANTHIS: It's no contest. The movie theatre wins every time. It's because it's a movie and because of the experience. There's something about that social experience that speaks to the center of our souls. We are social animals. We're not especially reclusive.
QUESTION: Remember Alvin Toffler's predictions in Future Shock about the electronic cottage? He predicted 30-years-ago that we would become the wired society connected to the outside world by boxes in our homes, TV sets and computers. Isn't that coming true?
CHRESSANTHIS: To a certain extent it is, but I think our television sets as we know them today will disappear. I think it will be more interactive. With digital television you're going to have banner ads in the Internet model. You get on any website and you've got to be careful not to bump some button because you'll hit an ad and you're going to be questioned about your shopping preferences. I think people don't really want to be questioned about their shopping preferences. They want to be moved and have catharsis and be entertained. They want to laugh and they want to cry. They want to listen to good music. They want to see beautiful faces. They want to be inspired. They want to be frightened out of their wits. That's not going to change. It's pretty hard to be frightened out of your wits sitting at a computer screen. Frankly, I actually don't know how the quick-time movies will succeed. The experience of sitting at your computer, watching a movie you can start, and stop with little ads are plummeting through isn't the same as a theatrical experience. I think movie theaters are with us for a long time to come. That's not to say the trailers in the movie won't be different. I'm sure we're going to have digital trailers and all kinds of other stuff before a movie starts, but the reason you go there is to see the movie. It's a refuge also. My mother told me that when she was growing up poor, she sought refuge in a movie theater a lot. She was trying to escape life. I think the escapism of movies is something you cannot underestimate. That's why they are building movie theaters around the world. Movies were supposed to have died back forty years ago, replaced by television. Well, it hasn't happened. In fact, the Internet is replacing television. That's the big change in our future.
QUESTION: Jim, as a filmmaker, are you looking forward to the future?
CHRESSANTHIS: A lot of people are afraid of the future. They shouldn't be. You will need production designers to design films. You will need cinematographers to compose, frame and light. Maybe George Lucas can create performances in post but most directors want to relate with the actors at the time of the performance. They want the actor to respond to the moment. That's what a cinematographer does with the lighting. You tell the dolly grip, 'be a little quick here, slow this down, and then don't come to a complete stop. Feather and then, when she turns from that table, you pick up and go. And you've got to beat her to this mark because the operator needs to be on her face.' You're making that movie on the set and that's what the damn journalists don't understand. We're creating the moment there. That's what people pay to see. The moment of creation, spontaneous and unfiltered. Usually, that's collaboration between the cinematographer and the director. There are exceptions, like Stanley Kubrick, who not only was a great director, but probably one of the great cinematographers. He really knew the camera.
QUESTION: Before we close, I want to come back to the notion of Mike Figgis putting a digital camera on his shoulder and shooting Time Code. Do you object to that in principal?
CHRESSANTHIS: No, of course not. That was an artistic decision he made, and like I said, he created an interesting performance art piece. But, you can't compare that to Stanley Kubrick putting a camera on his shoulder and making a movie. There's a big difference. I objected to the way it was marketed. No one said anything about the other camera operators. They made it sound like he did it alone and that it was the way of the future.
QUESTION: Would you shoot in DV format?
CHRESSANTHIS: Of course, I think shooting on DV can be very interesting, especially if there's an artistic reason. If I was shooting a documentary about the London club scene and the kids on ecstasy, I could see doing interviews with little, inconspicuous DV cameras. You blow it up to 35 mm film, and it has a graphic quality that's fascinating and right for the story. In my own performance artwork, I shot on one-inch video and I loved the fact that it fell apart when you blew it up. It decayed and looked bad. That was part of the story I was trying to tell. But for someone to come along and say, 'this is how you must shoot now and in the future, because it costs less', or 'it takes fewer people', is sort of artistic Nazism. Oh, and by the way, they forget to tell you it has to be transferred every few years so it doesn't go out of existence because the medium you're shooting on will be obsolete sooner or later.
QUESTION: What are your final words of advice?
CHRESSANTHIS: If there are students following this conversation, it's important for them to study film history and look at how the great movies moved audiences. Figure out how filmmakers used their medium, consider the importance of their content and why they made the films they did.