By Bob Fisher

Allen Daviau, ASC was raised in Los Angeles, where he developed an early interest in photography and lighting. He launched his career during the 1960s shooting an early form of music videos, and segued into commercials, educational and documentary films.

Daviau earned his first mainstream narrative credits in 1979 and 1980 with three movies-of-the-week. That lead to an opportunity to shoot E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which earned the first of five Oscar nominations for Daviau. He later received nominations for The Color Purple, Avalon, The Empire of the Sun and Bugsy. Daviau has also earned ASC Outstanding Achievement Awards for The Empire of the Sun and Bugsy in 1987 and 1991, respectively. His other narrative credits include The Falcon and the Snowman, The Twilight Zone: The Movie (George Miller and Steven Spielberg segments) and Fearless.

Daviau has also compiled hundreds of TV commercial credits.

ICG: What influenced you to think about getting into the film industry?

DAVIAU: I grew up in Los Angeles during the 1950s. There was a neighborhood movie theaters, and I also rode the bus to go see movies in Hollywood. I remember my parents taking me to see films in big movie palaces downtown when I was eight- or nine-years-old. Later I  saw Psycho downtown on opening night. It was also the early days of television. I was six-years-old when my father brought a seven-inch screen black-and-white TV set home. When I was 12-years-old, I saw a demonstration of color television at an appliance store on Western Avenue. It was an NBC opera theater production of Mozart's from Abducction from The Seraglio. I’ll never forget that day. It was absolutely stunning. There was a guy from RCA who tuned the 12-inch screen. I had to find out how it worked.

I went to my grammar school library the next day, and checked out a book on color television. But, it was about the CBS field sequential system, which used a rotating color disks. I think that book was published around 1946, and the industry had subsequently adapted technology developed by RCA. So, I went to the neighborhood library and a woman there helped me find books on television. It was too early for me to find anything about the NTSC system that had been adopted by then. So, I went to a TV repair store where they had an RCA manual on color television maintenance. I started looking through this manual, having no idea of what they were talking about. That motivated to do a little more research.

The Baldwin Hills public librarian was very helpful. She figured out that I needed to read about photography and that led to cinematography. After I exhausted the resources at her library, she sent me to the downtown main library. That was my real introduction to color photography and cinematography. I found copies of American Cinematographer and International Photographer Magazines and a magazine called Radio News that had articles about experimental television during the 1920s and 1930s. The historical aspect totally fascinated me, and I began to understand color separation and how it was related to the Technicolor process. I was really intrigued by the different processes for taking and displaying color pictures on movie and television screens.

Nobody I knew could afford a color TV, but I could go to appliance stores and experiment with turning the knobs that adjusted colors. In high school, I met somebody who knew someone connected with a TV show that was produced out of NBC Studios, in Burbank. This woman could get us in to see a religious show produced in color. I think it was called Faith of our Children. They let me in the control booth and that was phenomenal.

ICG: What do you remember about that?

DAVIAU: It was a live show done with three color cameras. I could see the impact of lighting. That experience started me on a career of gate-crashing at different television studios.

ICG: How did you gate-crash?

DAVIAU: I perfected the fine art of being able to walk into a studio and look like I belonged there. When you're 14-years-old, people assume that you're somebody's son or nephew. The trick was looking like you should be inside when you're still standing outside. I found the ideal thing would be to wear a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a necktie but no jacket. Even though you were outside, it looked like you belonged inside. CBS TV City was a tough place to gate-crash. I’d wait for the coffee truck to pull in after 10:00 a.m.

I’d walk to the back of the truck when the guard got his coffee. Then, I’d slip into a circle of people, and I’d walk in the door with them. Nobody ever said a thing. The problem was not getting lost in the cavernous long hallways. If I gate-crashed on a Thursday morning, Bob Crosby did a color show at noon. Then, I’d go over to two drama shows. Climax was a one-hour live drama, and Playhouse 90 was a 90-minute live drama.

ICG:    Were you conscious of the fact that you were witnessing history being made?

DAVIAU: I now realize how fortunate I was to have observed the end of the era of live television. At NBC, I met a guy named Del Jack who was a lighting director for both The Dinah Shore Show and the Lux Video Theater. Just being able to follow him around and watch what he was doing was a great education.

The people in early television were generally quite open and very nice, especially compared to how I was treated on motion picture sets. I’d find out where films were shooting on the streets of the city, but if I tried to walk up to somebody from the camera crew, they yelled and told me to get away. Their attitude was that if you weren't born into the industry, you weren’t supposed to be in it.

By the time I was 16, I had figured out how to get on movie sets. I got onto a stage at Paramount, where Charlie Lang (ASC) was shooting a Western movie (One Eyed Jacks) with Marlon Brando in his directorial debut. It was shot in VistaVision. There was a huge interior of a hacienda set. Many years later, I got to meet Charles Lang, and I told him how much I learned by watching him those few days. He told me what a great time he had had doing that film.

ICG: What did you learn?

DAVIAU: I had no technical foundation, but I could see that Charles Lang was really in charge of how that set ran, and how much he was enjoying himself. I remember he was making this shot with a big camera move, and any time he'd get a chance, he'd run over and play with a rack of baby spots with all kinds of little snoots and devices on them. He was using these as though the light was coming from a chandelier. He was splashing light on a wall with a very complicated pattern. He would watch the scene through his contrast glass.

I remember thinking this guy's got the best job I've ever seen in my life. He would go up and very quietly talk with Brando about how certain things were working and how they could change certain things in blocking the scene. I remember that sort of put it in my mind that that was the job I wanted even though I really didn't know that much about it.

ICG: Did anyone in your family have anything to do with the film industry?

DAVIAU: I come from a very nice family who had nothing to do with the motion picture business. After I got out of high school, I visited the camera Guild office and asked about becoming a member. They told me to forget it. They wouldn’t give me an application. There was a glass window, which they slid open. There was a guy in a baseball cap leaning against the counter and a woman behind him.

They were both were kind of sneering at me when I asked for an application. In those days, there was very little formal instruction for cinematography even if you went to a film school. You had to get into the union and begin as a loader just to be around cinematographers and watch them work. There was nothing like the seminars we have now. There are books today that give you a lot of the basics and encourage you to experiment.

ICG: What else influenced you at that point in your life?

DAVIAU: In high school, I started doing stage lighting during plays. I learned a tremendous amount from that experience. It involved learning to light drama in real time. You're on that dimmer board and you're making allowances when an actor changes their performance. If something goes longer or shorter, you’re making decisions to hold or cut the light, in part, depending upon the reaction of the audience. You have to be in total sync with the performers and directors. You have to understand the set. You learn how light can affect emotions and draw an audience into a play.

No one knows what you are doing, but you at the climactic moment of a scene when you hit that switch on the dimmer board. You can tell the difference in applause and audience reaction when you miss. It really made me appreciate what actors do. I learned that I had to understand what a performer was trying to achieve and figure out how to help him. I also learned about creating motif lighting for characters.       

ICG: I want to go back to an earlier point. What studios did you gate-crash?

DAVIAU: Paramount was very easy. MGM was harder, but I got lucky there one day and got to watch Busby Berkeley direct Jumbo. I think it was the last film that he directed. I think everyone on that set realized they were seeing something special.

ICG: I take it that you didn’t go to film school?

DAVIAU: I didn't have the grades for UCLA or the money for USC or NYU, so I found jobs in camera stores and film labs. I started taking stills when I was about 14, and did a lot of my own darkroom work. The girl next door was a great subject. I still talk to her on the phone. I remember the adventures of shooting pictures of football games at night with flashbulbs, but usually I did more general work. I enjoyed playing in the darkroom a lot. I remember making color prints from slides using a special type of paper. All those things played a role in shaping my future.

ICG: Do you remember other cinematographers you saw on gate-crashing adventures?

DAVIAU: I got to watch Joe McDonald (ASC) work on a picture called The Matchmaker with Shirley Booth, Shirley Maclaine and Tony Perkins. It was at Paramount. Originally, it was going to be a color film, and all the sets were designed for color; but they decided to shoot it in black and white. I remember a scene where McDonald spent 45-minutes lighting a Shirley Booth close-up. It was still in the era of the heavy lights. There were a lot of electricians walking in the green beds on top of the set. I was also still getting used to the idea that the cinematographer had a camera operator          

ICG: Do you know why you picked cinematography rather than directing?

DAVIAU: I loved photography and also the technology. I could see that cinematography was a way you controlled complex technology in the service of art. That was very exciting. I also liked the fact that cinematography is something that is either there or it isn't there the next morning. There are very few acceptable excuses if something isn't there the way you wanted it to be, or the way the director thought it was going to be.

It was never about exposure. It was about how you blocked and composed a shot and how the focus changed when the camera moved, and how you used color and light. It's a matter of directing the eye of the audience to where you want it to go at a specific moment. Once I had that concept, nothing else was going to interest me as much as cinematography.

ICG: How did you progress from the camera store to a career in Hollywood?

DAVIAU: Right around the time of my 20th birthday, my parents moved to Fresno, California because my dad got a promotion. I was working the graveyard shift at Technicolor's consumer photo lab. After the Easter rush I was laid off . I really wanted to save my money to buy a 16 mm Bolex camera. I asked my parents if I could live with them for a year, so I could save money to buy the camera.

It was like moving to Siberia. Fresno was definitely out of the mainstream. I wound up working in a film processing lab and in a discount department store in a combination and hi fidelity department. In fact, that’s where I got the idea for the department store look in Avalon. I worked a six-and-a-half-day week for very little money, but I got to meet a lot of people who were interested in photography. I also got involved with the Fresno Community Theater and Civic Light Opera as a lighting designer. There was a wonderful director named Gordon Goede, who did a repertoire every year with a number of serious plays and several comedies and one big musical.

There were also two radio stations, KMKE and KINO, involved in a rock 'n' roll battle for audiences. They were doing very aggressive promotions. I called one of these stations and arranged to talk with the general manager. I told him I was interested in the promotional end of the business. I said I could do still and motion picture photography, and I could light stage productions. The genius of the operation was Ron Jacobs, the program director for three stations owned by one group, in Fresno, Hawaii and San Bernardino. I got to talk with Jacobs, and it turned out that he had just bought a Nikon camera. We became good friends. He got me my first job shooting motion picture film.

ICG: How did that happen?

DAVIAU: I spent 11 months in Fresno, and then in the spring of 1965 I went back Los Angeles. I was working in a camera store. Soon afterwards, Ron Jacobs became program director at KHJ, a rock 'n' roll radio station in Los Angeles. It became number one so fast it was absolutely incredible. That convinced RKO General that Ron knew the youth market. They asked him to handle a program on KHJ-TV Saturday from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m. He brought Peter Gardner from New York to produce the show. Luckily for me, Peter got off the plane and asked Ron for a cinematographer. Even though it was a live television show, he was going to use a lot of film pieces.

ICG: Do you remember why he wanted film segments?

DAVIAU: He just wanted the flexibility of getting out of the television station and doing things that could best be done with a 16 mm film camera. By then, I had enough money saved to buy a 16 mm Beaulieu camera, model R16E. I had traded my still photographic equipment in and bought three Angenieux prime lenses.

I was shooting promotional pieces for KHJ radio that ran on Sam Riddle's dance party on the TV station. I was able to show that film to Peter Gardiner, but it wasn't enough to convince him. Luckily that summer I had shot a 16 mm film for Nick Frangakis, who was a student at UCLA. Somehow, he got special permission for me to shoot this film even though I wasn’t a student. It was like a music video, except that it was set to Stravinsky's Symphony of the Psalms the Lau Daute. It was a very emotional piece that wound up running at the New York Film Festival. I showed that to Peter and his associate producer. There were so many splices; I don't know how it even got through the projector. When it was over, Peter told me to tell the camera store I was leaving.

That was my first shot at television. I had to take a pay cut. I was making $150 a week at the camera store, and this job only paid $100 a week, but I was shooting and editing  three three-minute weekly films.

ICG: Did that editing experience help you in your career?

DAVIAU: It's helped me at every stage. It gave me an appreciation for what editors do and what they need from cinematographers. We had an editing room located upstairs from the best 16 mm lab in the city. It was called American Color Lab; I shot film for three- to three-and-a-half minute spots for the 13 week run of the show. It was wonderful experience. I remember shooting the initial promotion for the Monkeys TV show. KHJ ran a promotion with a trainload of kids riding to Del Mar. The Monkeys performed on the train going both ways. We got the KHJ disk jockeys into the film.

ICG: It sounds like music videos.

DAVIAU: We called them rock 'n' roll promos, but they were the same language as the music videos that came along years later. I'd make two Kodachrome prints. One would be the copy that we edited on the Moviola with tape splices, and the second copy had hot splices, because the projector at Channel 9 couldn’t take the tape. The exposure had to be perfect, because you couldn’t do any corrections with the station’s film chain. They didn't want to change any of their knobs because they were set for the commercials. I learned to shoot film, work with a lab, edit, get a work print, and then I’d try to convince the engineer at the TV station to “a little bit less blue than last week.”

ICG: Did it only last one season?

DAVIAU: What happened was the TV station people and the radio station people got into a battle over control of the show, and we ended up on the street. But, Peter formed a little company called Charlatan Productions, and we shot rock 'n' roll promo films for record companies.

I really enjoy hearing people at MTV talk about how they invented the music video, but we can’t claim that distinction, because the form was really invented by Richard Lester in a little film called Hard Day's Night and another called Help. He came up with the idea of taking the music and lyrics and interpreting them visually. That’s what we were doing for record companies. We worked with The Animals and Jimmy Hendrix and many others for about $3,000 each. I had my Beaulieu camera and one battery, which I kept on trickle charge, because I couldn't afford a second battery.

We were shooting with Ektachrome film rated for an exposure of 25 in tungsten light and 16 in daylight with the 85 filter on the lens. We also had an Ektachrome newsfilm rated for 125 in tungsten. We didn’t use it very often, because it was more expensive. We found a lab that would do post-flashing and pre-flashing that gave the newsfilm a softer image that we could intercut with Ektachrome ECO film.

ICG: Did you keep on editing?

DAVIAU: Charlatan Productions had a great editor, rest his soul, he was fabulous, but sometimes I wanted to edit a particular film because I had a concept I wanted to try. We did a lot of multi-roll editing with fast cuts, super-imposures and dissolves. We'd make the answer print on Kodachrome. Then, we’d make dupe negatives, usually on the original camera film, and we’d use that to make maybe 40 prints, or whatever the record company ordered. We had one person who would bicycle these prints to different TV stations, usually in conjunction with a tour by the group.

A lot of local stations used these promos to do half-hour shows leading into Dick Clark’s Dance Party. They loved these films because it gave them something to put on the screen besides the same group of kids dancing. Sometimes stations would steal the films and not return them. After a while, we began doing shoots in different cities. Once I made three trips to New York in eight days.

ICG: This was still with the Beaulieu camera?

DAVIAU: Mainly, although sometimes we got better budgets and I rented an Éclair NPR camera. Around 1967, I started I started shooting some commercials. I remember shooting for Iron City Beer out of Pittsburgh. The production office was in some apartment on Hollywood Boulevard, and two women were soaking the labels off of bottles of some other beer and putting on Iron City labels. That was because the Iron City beer bottles didn’t photograph well. This would be illegal today but we got away with it. I was still shooting the music videos.

I was also working with a group of teenage filmmakers, who wanted to do a film and I had a camera. We never made that film, but I met Ralph Burris, who’s a production manager today, and his partner, a young man named Steven Spielberg. They were looking for a cinematographer to shoot a 35 mm film. They visited me in our little editing room, and I showed them my rock 'n' roll films. Steven asked a lot of questions. He had a great idea for a film that was about a European-style bicycle racing league in Los Angeles. He sold these bikers on the idea and we got their cooperation. We shot on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Tony Bill was one of the stars.

ICG: Did you shoot that film?

DAVIAU: I told Steven that I had only shot 35 mm once and didn’t really know the equipment. Steven had a deal with Universal Studios, where they gave him short ends. Anything that was less than a hundred feet went to this film. It was called Slipstream. I introduced Steven to a French cameraman, Serge Haginere, who had a lot of 35 mm experience and I got myself on as B camera operator. It was one of the smartest things I ever did, because I got to shoot a lot of great film. We shot every weekend for about six weeks, until Steven ran out of money. I had an old, beat-up ARRI camera with a 1000 mm lens.

We’d start shooting as the sun was rising. We’d be yelling at each other through these walkietalkies which never worked. They decided to shoot the beginning and end of the film in Santa Monica, where the race starts and finishes. They bet the farm on this one weekend when they rented a Mitchell camera and got a Chapman crane. That’s when Steven’s luck ran out. It didn't just rain. It was like a monsoon that entire weekend. It was just devastating.

ICG: When did you shoot your first film with Spielberg?

DAVIAU: In 1968, I was still shooting music promos. Dennis Hoffman, who was a partner in a special effects house called Cinefx, wanted to produce a short film in 16 mm format because Cinefx had just bought a 16 mm to 35 mm optical printer with a liquid gate. They wanted to show how good it was. He put the word out that he wanted to meet young filmmakers. Steven told him a story off the top of his head, making up it up as he went along. He basically convinced Dennis to shoot in 35. He felt no one would take him seriously until he filled the screen with a 35 mm wide-screen image.

I think he was absolutely right. We promised to be very careful not to shoot too many takes. We almost blew it the first weekend. We started shooting on the Fourth of July, 1968 on a little stage at Cinefx. We shot the majority of that short in the desert.

That film was called Amblin. It’s a little idyllic story about a boy and a girl who meet hitchhiking in the desert. It's 25-minutes with no dialogue and no sync sound; just music and some audio effects. We shot 10 straight days, and it was about 105 degrees every day in the desert with no breeze. We started at sunrise and finished at sunset every day, because Steven always believed there would be a better sunrise or sunset. Then, we drove back to Los Angeles to see dailies at Technicolor. We be out in the desert the next morning shooting the sunrise.

ICG: Wasn’t that his breakthrough film that got him a directing job at Universal?

DAVIAU: Yes, and he tried to bring me with him, but the problem was that I still wasn’t in the camera Guild. That was in 1969, and it took another 10 years to get into the Guild.

ICG: What did you do?

DAVIAU: I started ringing doorbells at the commercial production companies. John Ury said couldn’t hire me because he already had three cameramen on staff, but he advised me to join NABET. After that, I got my first national commercial for Goodyear tires. I shot the live-action at the end of an animatic spot made with still cameras. That led to a Chrysler commercial.

ICG: Did you try to do narrative films? 

DAVIAU: I shot a low-budget feature in 1969 that was never seen outside of drive-ins in the Midwest and South. I think we had a $265,000 budget and some very good actors, who you see in TV movies, and a wonderful production manager. The director was an actor who was a studio contract player in the 1940s and '50s. We shot it in Salt Lake City and half of the roles were people from the local community theater. We shot the whole picture in 18 days. I think that virtually everyone on the crew was under 30. A lot of these people who acted in the film gave their houses over for scenes. I won't claim a lot of glory for it, but it was a great experience.

ICG: How come you didn’t follow that path?

DAVIAU: I shot another non-union film two years later for a different group of people and the same director. It was a horrible experience, to put it mildly. I found out one thing about working as a non-union director of photography. You spend one third of your energy as director of photography and two-thirds as the negotiator for all of the people on the crew, and you're never going to see any justice done. That got me very much against shooting non-union films.

ICG: What kind of work did you do at that point?     

DAVIAU: Anything that let me shoot film. I shot commercials, industrial films, and a lot of educational movies for the Franciscan Center in Los Angeles. I did it because I got a lot of experience. What I say to young people today is anything that lets you put film past your eyeballs is terrific. I was fortunate because it was all done on film, whereas today the majority of educational and industrial films are probably shot with video cameras. I’m sorry, but it’s not the same opportunity to learn. That experience was very good for a lot of us who came through that period. The commercials were also appealing because you were working in 35 mm with professional crews, and you were well paid. Some concepts were actually pretty good.

ICG: When and how did you finally get into the Guild?

DAVIAU: I was mainly shooting commercials. During the 1960s and 70s NABET was representing NBC and ABC technicians. They founded a film division because so many of us weren’t able to get into the camera Guild. They made it easy to join. You had to bring a reel, show footage, and be interviewed by a group of cinematographers. I basically was working with NABET companies and non-union companies.

What happened with me was that Andy Davis, who is now better known as a director, was a really fine cameraman who shot a lot of interesting Gene and Roger Corman films in the early '70s. He had a union card in San Francisco, but couldn't work on any roster picture that came out of Hollywood. He found a labor attorney who was willing to question this Catch 22 situation—you couldn’t join the union as a cameraman until you were on the industry experience roster as maintained by contract services. But, you couldn’t get on the industry experience roster until you'd worked 30 or more days for a union company. He said, don't just sue the union. Sue the producers through contract services as well.

That was in 1975. I remember a group of us were on at the press club. There were three guys with 16 mm cameras from the TV stations, and all of them were in the camera Guild. I wondered what they were thinking after we made our statements. Afterwards, they came up and congratulated us. We didn’t know how lucky our timing was, because that same week this guy named George Spiro Dibie, (ASC) filed a lawsuit from inside the Guild. He was shooting a video series called Barney Miller and was categorized as an E card holder for electronic camera. The Guild was restraining him from shooting a movie. They said he could only shoot video TV programs.

George got all the E-card operators and cameramen together. We thought it would take two years to resolve this issue. I think because of the two suits, the Guild declared an open season. Anybody who worked 30 or more days for one company or 90 or more for a group of companies, union or non-union, between November 1975 and November '76 was suddenly able to join the Guild. The burden of proof was on you. I had to find all of the paperwork stored in dusty cardboard boxes, like timecards and paycheck stubs. I remember it was the end of 1978 when I finally got on the roster. That’s when I started working on commercials with Guild signatories.

ICG: Was that when you began using a camera operator?       

DAVIAU: Actually, the first time I used a camera operator was during the early 1970s, when I was doing a dramatic educational film for the Franciscan Fathers. They paid me so little money it didn't matter. I got Bob Seaman, who's become an excellent cinematographer, to operate the camera. I made the deal myself. He was superb, and it was a good experience.

ICG: How did you start doing narrative films under studio contracts?

DAVIAU: During the spring of 1979, my friend Jerry Freedman had a TV movie. Another cameraman was booked to do it, but he got a feature and Jerry let him off the hook. Jerry took me in to Mary Tyler Moore Enterprises, bless his heart, and said ‘you've never heard of this guy. He’s just got a bunch of commercials to show. But, he’s going to do a great job and he's going to do it on time or I'll kill him.’

The production guy who interviewed me was Abby Singer. He asked if I had an agent and I told him no. He said I should have one, but he gave me a fair deal. The truth is that it wasn’t a lot of money, but I would have paid him. It was a TV movie called The Boy Who Drank Too Much. It was a good TV movie with a great cast. The producer had taught at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and he knew there a small-scale hockey stadium there that would be great as a location.

Jerry fell in love with Madison. We shot more than half the movie there and it made the biggest difference in the world. We used local high school kids who played very good hockey. Where are you going to find kids in Los Angeles who play hockey at that level? We brought all the additional camera operators from Chicago. Then, we came back to LA and shot the rest on a stage at Studio City. That gave me an opportunity to get another TV movie with the same director. I also did another television film with Joanne Woodward called Streets of LA

ICG: Who was your first Guild camera operator?

DAVIAU: My first operator came with the director. Jerry Freedman said, ‘I've got a great guy. His name is John Toll (ASC). You're going to love him.’

ICG: In retrospect, are you glad that you began your career shooting, or are you sorry you didn’t work your way up through the crew system with mentors?

DAVIAU: There is no one right answer to that question. I look at people like John Toll, who went through the whole system beginning as a loader. None of us who worked with him were a bit surprised when he became a great cinematographer. His storytelling ability is incredible, and he was probably the greatest handheld camera operator who ever danced through Hollywood. We had handheld master shots in the Boy Who Drank Too Much that go for almost an entire magazine. He’d throw the 1000-foot magazine over his shoulder. He wouldn't use the smaller ones.

I've been really lucky. I’ve worked with some very fine operators who became excellent cinematographers. But, I’ve also seen people come straight out of schools and start shooting right away. It just depends. The truth of the matter is that I might have been such a disaster as an assistant that I never would have had an opportunity to become an operator or cinematographer. Moving up the ladder is also a very tough decision, when you know you are very good at something and you are in demand…

ICG: Thinking back, did having a good operator allow you to concentrate more on lighting?

DAVIAU: Absolutely and another thing a great operator can do is suggest moves. Maybe its just a two or three foot difference, but that extra pair of eyes can really help. One of the things you have to do is allow other people on your crew to make contributions and accept them happily. Another nice thing about having an operator is that he's working with the grip and the dolly on the moves. He's working with the set decorator to move props around or things like that. In the meantime, I can concentrate on lighting. I know people who prefer to operate themselves but usually that’s because it's the only way they’ve done it.

ICG: How have music videos and commercials influenced narrative films? 

DAVIAU: I have to quote a director who said, the great thing about music videos is even when you're wrong, you're right. You can really try extraordinary things. You're allowed to take chances and do absolutely crazy things. The most interesting music video I've done was about four years ago with Michael Bay. It was with Meatloaf and the song was “Objects in the Rear View Mirror.” We had a good budget and four straight days of shooting on the outskirts of Dallas and in a lot of little towns. We really had a good time and we caught some great light. Michael wants to try everything there is to try. It was a real joy because I'd never done a video with that kind of budget.

ICG: How has your music video and commercial experience influenced your thinking?

DAVIAU: Its not only learning the craft…with music videos, you’re always looking for a type of movement in the image that goes with the music. There is also a discipline you learn when you know you only have 600 feet of film. I’ve been through different eras of commercials. I’ve worked on commercials where you can buy anything you need, and others that have no budget for anything. Sometimes directors have a very clear cut idea. Other times, they'll have a certain image they want and they'll figure it out as they go. I always say that the look of a film—any film—is a combination of design and discovery. Certain parts of it you design.

ICG: Can you give me an example?

DAVIAU: When I was shooting The Falcon and the Snowman with John Schlesinger, he said at the very beginning, ‘I don't want the color red in this film. If a traffic light is red, we won't shoot it until it turns green.’ That was by design, and while nobody notices it per se, it affected the whole color scale of the film. Sometimes you get to a location and start working with the actors, and discover something there is something getting in the way of how they perform, and you decide to emphasize that something. Maybe you do it with a lighting motif or a certain type of angle that emphasizes the direction you're taking that character.

ICG: How about your first feature after you got into the Guild?

DAVIAU: I shot a TV movie called Rage with (director) Billy Graham. After that he had a small picture in 1980 called Harry Tracy. It starred Bruce Dern, Helen Shaver and Gordon Lightfoot. The script, unfortunately, was not completed when we started shooting. It was a Canadian Film Development Corporation picture that the producer had to complete before the end of the year. I still wish we had a more complete script, because some of the best stuff I've ever shot is in that picture. We shot for eight weeks in Canada. Unfortunately, we completed shooting exactly three days before Heaven's Gate opened in New York and that was the end of Westerns for quite a few years.

ICG: How did you get back together with Spielberg?

DAVIAU: Earlier that year in 1980, Steven ran into Jerry Freedman who told him I was in the union and I was shooting TV movies. Steven called and said he was shooting a sequence for the new edition of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It was in the desert, just like we had done Amblin in the desert. It was supposed to be the Gobi Desert, but he was going to shoot it in Baker, California. He promised Columbia Pictures that he could do it in two days.

We got up at 4:00 a.m. and shot at sunrise. It was just like Amblin. Right afterwards, he went to England to do Raiders of the Lost Ark. He already had a film in development at Columbia that was going to be called Night Skies. The concept came from the same guy who did his UFO research that resulted in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It was a story about a farm family out in Oklahoma or Kansas.

One day this object came out of the sky, landed, and these strange creatures climbed out of a spaceship. The creatures cut the phone and power lines and went around slaughtering farm animals and carrying them onto the spaceship. No one dared to leave their house. There was one scene where a little boy is looking out a window and an extraterrestrial comes up to it and communicates telepathically. He says, ‘Don’t worry, I won't let them hurt you.’ That was the part of the story I liked the best.

While he was shooting Raiders, Steven did a lot of talking about the concept for Night Skies and it gradually turned into an idea for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Kathy Kennedy was Steven's assistant at that time, and he basically threw her into deep end of the pool as producer. They took the idea to Columbia Pictures, and the reaction was that, no one over the age of 12 would go to see the film. They passed on it, so Steven took it to Universal, and they asked how much is this going to cost? He said $10 million. They agreed to back him and give him the complete freedom he wanted.

He wanted a cinematographer who was fast and cheap. Luckily for me, after my first TV movie, I acquired an agent by the name of Randy Herron who was with the Herb Tobias Agency. They called Randy because they wanted to see the work of another cinematographer. He sent it over, but suggested that Steven see the TV movies that I had shot. I was in Phoenix, Arizona, shooting a Lawnboy lawnmower commercial. I checked my answering machine at noon and Randy had left a message asking me to call. He asked, ‘If you could show Steven Spielberg any film you've done, what film would it be?’

I wanted to show him Harry Tracy, but was being edited, so I said show him The Boy I Drank Too Much because it's got a lot of moody lighting and it's about kids, so he'll watch it. I remember using that phrase. I went back to shooting lawnmowers. That night I had to fly to San Francisco because I took over a United Airlines commercial for Terry Clairmont, who'd been weathered out for days and days and now had something else to shoot. I shot on that all day Saturday. In the meantime, Randy had called Mary Tyler Moore Productions. The 35 mm print was in New York and they couldn't find the cassette.

Randy knew time was of the essence because Steven was looking at other people's work that weekend. He called a woman he knew at CBS who owed him a favor. He said he needed the air print of The Boy Who Drank Too Much. She moaned and cried but she pulled it out of the vault, met Randy in the parking lot of TV City and gave it to him. He called Kathy Kennedy but by then it was Sunday afternoon.

She said Steven was going to look at films Sunday evening. She gave him the address, and he drove it over and delivered it into her hands as though he was a delivery boy. I got back from San Francisco and a little before seven o'clock the phone rang. It was Steven, who said he was on reel three of The Boy Who Drank Too Much. He asked if I would like to do his next film if we could make a deal. He said he couldn’t let the script out, but asked if I could come by Warner Bros.’ the next morning and read it there.

I went over there and Steven handed me the script.  I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, how are we going to do this?’ No one knew what E.T. was at that time. Steven knew he wanted E.T. to be a combination of an old person and a baby. But, I didn't know if it was a mechanical creature or it's an optical or what. I knew it had to interact with the kids. I read the script again while Steven was in DR with Harrison Ford doing the cobra scene. When he finally came into the room, he said, it's going to be like an animatronic puppet, but really well evolved.          

ICG: The key had to be making E.T. believable and empathetic.

DAVIAU: Steven was very concerned that the idea was too easy to steal and crank out as a TV movie about a kid who has an extra-terrestrial in his closet. Everybody who worked on that film had to sign a secrecy agreement. E.T. kept getting pushed back. The first production designer left because he had another commitment and Jim Bissel was brought in. We had scouted stages, including one that was still packed with all the sets from Palmerstown, U.S.A., which Jim won an Emmy for.

I was lucky I was shooting commercials. I could keep working and also be available the instant Steven said, ‘I need you to shoot a test’ or to take a look at the setting. We looked at all kinds of places. The original script was more elaborate. It involved E.T. and Elliot being taken to a hospital. We spent a lot of time looking at hospitals without finding one that would work. Eventually, he changed the script so that they quarantined E.T. and Elliot inside the house.

That made it simpler for everybody. We had a lot of time to think about how it was going to be prepped, and what was going to be on stage versus on location. I knew that Jim Bissel and the production manager were looking from high on a hill down into a neighborhood in Northridge (California). But Steven wanted a house for Elliot and his family that was in a cul-de-sac and up against a hill, so the creature could come down from that big redwood forest that's not really above Northridge and enter through the back yard. Bissel and the production manager found the builder of the homes they scouted in Northridge, and found he had a similar setting in Sunland/Tujunga (on the outskirts of LA). They drove up and down every street until they found the house they wanted at the end of a cul-de-sac.

ICG: Did Spielberg storyboard and pre-plan most of E.T.?

DAVIAU: Steven just storyboarded concepts that became special effects shots. One of the original storyboards depicted a big skylight storyboarded in Elliot's bedroom. There was going to be a scene where Elliot and E.T. sit there looking at a storybook. The sun sets, and a beam of light comes through the skylight. It hits the storybook and puts colors on their faces. Steven didn’t want us to reveal too much of E.T. to the audience. He wanted them to barely know he’s there. I tried backlighting E.T., and that became the visual concept. E.T. was backlit with a little glow in his eye     

Jim Bissel came up with this concept of shooting all night exteriors of the rear of the house onstage and all exteriors of the front of the house at the location. I made the commitment that we would not use backings outside of the windows on the sets. I was going to burn out the outside with maybe just the branches of a tree just blowing outside in the wind.

It was much simpler and more realistic looking. We played it as a low-key interior even in the daytime, so we could keep E.T. in the dark. We had Venetian blinds in Elliot's room that allowed him to make the room dark for E.T. even in the daytime. The rest of the night exterior scenes were shot at the very end of the schedule near the Oregon border in Crescent City, California. It was a nice location for redwoods, but it was so windy that we had to wear hard hats because you never knew when one of those branches were going to snap off a tree. 

ICG: Did you know you were making like an instant classic?

DAVIAU: The second you read the script you knew how good it could be. When you saw the animatronic creature working you knew he seemed real. There were several E.T.s. One model had arms attached. I think it's only in one scene at the end of the movie where he's reaching up with his arms and letting out that cry. The rest of the time, the arms were provided by a gal named Caprice Roth, who was a mime. She was amazing.

Every time you see E.T. at a table, she's lying on the ground underneath it, kind of propped up it with her arms in the air. She had a video monitor, so she could see E.T. and she moved her hands accordingly. There’s a scene where Gertie and Michael are in Elliot’s room, and E.T. is sitting at a table showing them the globe and the atlas and maps. He’s got a bowl of fruit and is eating a piece of watermelon. He’s gets a little piece on his lip and she reached up and flicked it off. That gesture did more to make E.T. seem real than anything you could ever imagine.

She was so believable, we forgot she was there, and we’d step on her. The main E.T. was mechanical. It seems so old-fashioned compared to what you'd do today. There were 11 people simultaneously operating E.T. We had video cameras and TV monitors everywhere, so everyone could see him. They had to work in incredible unison to make the ripples around the mouth and the eyebrows go up and to turn the eyes the right way.

The more successful they were, the more ideas Steven got to do more difficult things. I cannot tell you the number of times that we would wrap with the kids at 5:30, and then we'd have to work with just E.T. and/or the mother until 7:30 to 8:00. Steven would still be there telling the effects guys, ‘Tomorrow, I want the eyebrows to go higher, there's got to be more movement in the cheeks,’ etc.

ICG: In the original magazine story, you spoke about lighting in the closet.

DAVIAU: So much of the film took place in the closet. Before E.T., Steven had never directed a film in anything but anamorphic format. Movies were anamorphic to him. And I'm saying, Steven, you've got so much of this film taking place in a closet, do you really want to have that anomorphic lenses? You're not going to be able to focus as close and we'll be able to work at a lower light level (with spherical lenses), which was really very important in this film.

We shot with spherical lenses in 1.85:1 format. I remember saying to Jim Bissel and to Steven, I've got a closet at home that has a window in it. We've got so much time in this closet, can't this closet have a window? I always thought it was Bissel who said, why not a stained glass window? That was a great idea. That's how we got a window with orange, yellow and white shapes in it. The other kids rooms were on the same stage, so we could shoot all of those places in continuity. We had wild walls and that worked so well, because E.T. had cables connected beneath him for the puppeteers. We had to be on an elevated stage with room for those cables underneath.

Our key grip, Gene Kearney, had built floater track that was kind of a platform that allowed us to extend the room about three feet. It was the same color as the dark brown carpets, so if we got a real low angle, we could blend that track board with the carpet, and it just made life a lot simpler. I think I told you, everything was backlit, so every scene was based on one question: where is E.T.? If it was the mechanical E.T., it meant that that we had this mass of cables that had to go under the set to where eleven people and all of their controls would be. That determined where the light source was going to be.

One of my favorite scenes is one where E.T. comes out of the closet and Elliot's got the shades drawn. He’s showing him around the room, and E.T. is discovering this whole other world. If you listen, Elliot is trying to explain things, and, of course, he's not explaining anything well, so E.T. is allowed to look puzzled. I was able to throw light on the fish tank and got a glow reflected from that into E.T.'s eye when he's looking at it.

That set the pattern for motivating with the least amount of light you could put on him. E.T. was tricky (to light) because he was a dark brown, and if you didn't get enough in there, especially in the eyes, he was gone. You had to be very careful, but Steven's mandate was, ‘Allen, I will be twice as mad at you if you blow a scene by being too safe than if you blow it by being too daring.’ We had to take chances all the time. I knew certain things would work.

Remember, this was all shot on (Kodak) 5247, a 100 ASA film. There were no high-speed films. The very first samples of the 5293 (a 250-speed film from Kodak) came out a few weeks before we finished shooting. I told Kodak, don't mention this film to anyone. I do not want to be testing this new film on the end of this picture. As it turned out, I probably would have been delighted to have it in the forest. Right at the beginning, I had decided that conceptually I was not going to push, flash or do anything exotic with the film. I wanted continuity in the look. I only broke that rule one time, and that was a shot of E.T. holding up his lit finger. Steven kept asking, is there any way to make it any brighter? The props people said, if we made it brighter, his finger would melt, so I pushed that one shot to get more exposure.

ICG: Was it nerve-wracking having a film like E.T. as your first major feature?

DAVIAU: It was actually very straightforward. Michael Crane at Deluxe Labs got me through that picture as much as anybody, because I'd see him every morning at 6:30 when we looked at dailies. He was very encouraging. In fact, he was one of the first people to say, ‘Everybody in the world's is going to be talking about E.T.’ We all knew we were working on something really good and that it was very special.

What I really wish was available for a documentary is Steven's voice on the sound track talking to the people operating E.T. while the camera is rolling because there's no real sound. I don't know if it's been thrown away. It was remarkable because you'd sit there in dailies and you'd hear him. It was like he was conducting an orchestra. He was talking to every single person who's doing something with the creature.

ICG: But, it wasn’t all fun and games?

DAVIAU: It was hellishly difficult, because Steven was under tremendous pressure. He had to do it for $10 million within a certain time period. We shot it in 61 days. Later, we shot Empire of the Sun in just 73 days and that was on three continents. The guy can make decisions. Having worked with a lot of different directors, I can say something I look for in a director is somebody who will make tough decisions. Steven always leaves himself room for options, but he will make decisions.

ICG: You next shot two episodes of the Twilight Zone: The Movie.

DAVIAU: There were four parts to the film. I shot two of them. The other two parts were filmed by John Hora (ASC) and Stephan Larner so I felt like I was in pretty good company. I shot one segment with Steven (Spielberg) and the other with George Miller. That was a particular joy because of all George’s movies had been made out in the most remotes parts of Australia’s Outback hanging off the back of camera cars, and here he was in a movie that was taking place on one set.

ICG: This was where an airplane passenger sees something on a wing of the plane?

DAVIAU: John Lithgow is a very nervous passenger looking out the airplane window. He sees a creature on the wing and tells the stewardess. Eventually he sees the creature again with his face pressed against the window. It was an opportunity to do a really scary thing. George storyboarded the entire film. He knew how he was going to cover and cut this picture. It was taking place on an airplane that was supposed to be in trouble, so we developed a theme with a lot of bouncing and jouncing. I think there were only eight shots done from a dolly and everything else was Garret Brown, the inventor of the Steadicam or John Toll holding the Panaflex. I had the best of both of all worlds. I think it was the first time I used Kodak’s first high-speed film.

ICG: What were your other most memorable films?

DAVIAU: One is Empire of the Sun. It was just after China was open and before Tiannemen Square. The Chinese were really happy to have Steven Spielberg doing a movie there. We actually were in China for only three weeks. A year later, Shanghai was full of high-rise buildings. We had a few that we had to block with columns of smoke, but mostly Shanghai looked just like it did in 1940. An art director converted all the signs from the modern abbreviated script to the old-fashioned, pre-communist Chinese script. Old people stopped in those streets staring at them in amazement. It was a period film seen through the eyes of a boy who knew nothing but living in China. 

ICG: What other films are memorable?

DAVIAU: After Empire of the Sun, it took two years for me to find another film that I really wanted to do. Mark Johnson, who was the producer, was the first to talk to me about Avalon. I met Mark and Barry Levinson on the set of The Color Purple when they visited Steven (Spielberg). This was one of Barry’s Baltimore pictures, and it was definitely a family story felt very deeply about. He wanted to shoot with two cameras whenever possible. There are so many kids in Avalon that he didn’t want to repeat, coverage unnecessarily.

We also shot at real locations except for one small stage. There was a tremendous amount of night exteriors. We were one of the first productions to use the new Kodak 5296 (500 speed film), and it was in short supply. We were worried about that. I loved the script. It had a period inside of a period. The vast majority of the modern day story was from 1948 to say 1952. Then, we had all those flashbacks to young Sam's coming to America in 1914, and other scenes in 1917, 1923, and I think one segment in the 1930s.

I remember saying, we've got to give each period a visual motif to separate them. Most of the flashbacks occurred in what we would call silent film time. In 1980, I shot a commercial for a bank on some little Western town set, and I suggested shooting it at silent film speed, 16 frames per second and printing every other frame twice to get 24 images per second. The director loved the idea, but the agency was concerned. An optical house talked them out of it.

But, I remembered that idea. When I read the script, I thought its time to take that idea off the shelf and dust it off. I was able to shoot one test and some color filtration tests. I shot both ways at 24 and 16 (frames per second). We were scouting locations in Baltimore, and we looked at these tests in a local theater. We looked at them both ways, switching them back and forth. I remember telling Barry, I bought it would be great for the flashbacks. He bought it right away.

ICG: So, there are different ways to create period looks?

DAVIAU: To quote one of my colleagues, John Hora, he said that the closest thing we have to a time machine is a period film. I’ve always found period films to be a challenge, especially the distant past, say 50 years. You have to visually underline and reinforce the period. A lot of it comes from art direction, costume design and props. Everything has to be accurate, but it goes beyond that.

You are trying to put people inside the mood of a period, and surround them with that feeling so they travel to that time. Lighting and colors give you a lot of great control over that feeling. But to me, the beauty of working on a film that offers you a period within a period is summed up in a great, great line that Barry wrote. It’s at the end of the film, where the elder Sam is sitting in the old folks' home. He said, ‘If I knew things would have changed so fast, I would have remembered better.’

ICG: So, what else have you concluded about period films?

DAVIAU: I think you have to resist easy ways out. Gordon Willis said it perfectly. He said he saw the brownish yellow he created for The Godfather in so many period films that he never wanted to use it again. I've always felt that you should feel free in the way you impose a visual motif that responds to the story, the director and what's going on with the actors. You can have a great concept visually and change your mind entirely when you hear the actors and see them move around in the space.

ICG: How about one more memorable film?

DAVIAU: I’d put Fearless on that list because Peter Weir is a remarkable artist and gentleman. It was a great experience and a labor of love for everyone. What a cast. When Peter Weir makes a film, actors line up around the world and when you're on the set, you see why. He hangs up his coat in the trailer in the morning and the rest of the time, Peter is there on the set with the actors talking about the story. He'll talk to them about the depth of their character and their backgrounds. The actors adore him for this. Another thing I noticed, even though we had video assist Peter stood right by the camera. When he said cut, they immediately looked at his face to see how he reacted to the performances. He talks with you about the look of the picture and what he wants to do. Every day was an adventure in an indescribable way.

ICG: Is it more difficult or easier to make a picture like Fearless in confined spaces with less ways to motivate light than say Empire of the Sun?

DAVIAU: I hear versions of that question from a lot of students. Usually, they want to know if it is more difficult big scenes on studio sets than at more confined locations. I think it’s the same as a small scene, only there's more of it. The scariest thing is handling a large night exterior for the first time. I always say you have to be scared every day you go to work. There's got to be something that's daunting to you that you haven't eliminated all doubts about. There is always something that should keep you awake at night. The most difficult set ups in Fearless, were a lot of scenes that we shot different times of day in a relatively small bedroom. But I find that every movie brings its own challenges.

ICG: I was surprised that you didn’t talk more about The Color Purple.

DAVIAU: It was a joy, because of the people who were involved in that film. It was Whoopi Goldberg's first film performance, and it was Oprah Winfrey's first film performance. The film had to be scheduled around the birth of Matt Spielberg, Steven's first child. We shot the interiors at Universal Studios first and went back to North Carolina and shot exteriors and interiors that were done actually at locations. The cast was almost entirely black, and I asked Michael Riva, the production designer to make the walls as dark as he dared. We used arc lamps outside and drove tremendous amounts of light through plastic diffusers on the windows.

ICG: How do you balance between movies and commercials?

DAVIAU: I think commercials are in many ways the best friend of the cinematographer. They allow you to keep your crew together, which is very important to me. When I finish a film, I like to head right into commercials before I even take a break and re-establish contact. It's a different medium. It doesn’t give you the same satisfaction as following the arc of a wonderful script where you have to use every area of your brain. But, there are so many things I've learned by shooting commercials. You get to work with a lot of different directors who want you to do something challenging and different. Commercials are like anything else. You can work on mediocre movies or mediocre television commercials.

Luckily, I find a good percentage of what I do in commercials is challenging. Many times I’ve learned something shooting a commercial that I’ve later used in a film. I’ve shot a lot of commercials where we used speed ramp changes and the shutter or the lens iris tracked the exposure automatically. I used that technique in Avalon and Fearless. We did that with Jeff Bridges in Fearless. We changed speeds while we were tracking with him, go to slow motion in the middle of the take and then come back to normal motion in time for a sync sound line. It was so subtle no one noticed, but I’m sure they can feel what's going on.

ICG: The bottom line is…?

DAVIAU: Commercials are a source of income, experimentation and a chance to skip pictures you don’t feel good about.

ICG: What question do students and other younger members ask the most?

DAVIAU: What would you rather do, shoot in a real location or on stage? The right answer is whichever I'm doing, I'd rather be doing the other. Haskell Wexler (ASC) gave us all a beautiful piece of advice that is ‘when you've been shooting on location and suddenly you walk in and you're shooting on a stage, its critical not to use lighting on the set that you couldn’t have used at the real location

ICG: What do you think about all of the digital versus film talk?

DAVIAU: Commercials were the first medium to take advantage of film-to-tape conversion technology. I remember wandering around the NAB in Houston, Texas, in 1974 and asking about the Rank-Cintel telecine, because I saw one in London that was used to make a direct transfer from the negative to video tape. I remember the joy of getting great film images from the negative. There's still so much room for improvement with both. I believe each medium will offer advantages for many years. I've had digital effects people tell me how much information there is a single frame of negative.

I don’t believe you will achieve those layers of information with a digital camera for some time to come. I’ve actually been trying to get people in advertising to finish more commercials in high-definition. They are running hi-def programs like the Tonight Show with standard definition commercials which have been up-converted. Wouldn't you rather run a high-definition commercial about a Lexus in that period? You've got a demographic audience isolated there that's quite extraordinary.

ICG: What about the claims that the digital video cameras are so fast, you don’t have to light? You just push the gain control button.

DAVIAU: Look, whether it is film or television, the medium is about putting light on the screen. That inherently involves lighting whether you are recording it on film, tape or something else. The light is there for dramatic effect. I think people are deluding themselves. Just because you can get an exposure without additional lighting doesn’t mean you don't need to light. Even in the best available light you are usually looking for a way to take light off of something and create a pocket of shadows that is emphasized with darkness rather than light.

ICG: What advice do you have for people who are just getting started as a cinematographers?

DAVIAU: Learn from the photographic process, because there is nothing like exposing film to a certain density of light and processing it. The beauty of learning to use a photographic process is that you are previsualizing what's going to happen to a series of photochemical events before they happen.

ICG: What about the so-called digital revolution?

DAVIAU: I believe we’ll see more of an evolution than a revolution. They’ll be people like Mike Figgis who will take the unique qualities of shooting in high-def video and do something wonderful with it. But, if I had to decide to shoot a film or commercial in either high def video or film formats, I’d prefer originating on film. Producers like to have a real of negative. If the only thing you have in the vault is a reel of tape, at some point you’ve got a problem, because you're going to want an archival medium.

ICG: If you could wave a wand and invent something, what would it be?

DAVIAU: I’ve told Kodak, someday before I’m shooting a movie, I want to do some tests at a digital facility and come back with parameters for a custom film that Kodak builds for me just for that movie. In other words, instead of digitally altering a film after you shoot and convert it, how about using digital technology to custom design films with specialized imaging characteristics, such the degree of color saturation or contrast

ICG : Knowing what you know now, if you were starting all over again as a 20-year-old, what would you do differently?

DAVIAU: I'd do lots of things differently but they wouldn’t have to do with the art and science of filmmaking. In terms of being a cinematographer, I’m very grateful that I got to work with the traditional photographic processes, and I’m also thrilled to see the transition to better and faster films and lenses and digital post. I think there will probably be a digital adjunct to film rather than a replacement.