Fred Elmes Reflects at the Hawaii International Film Fest
By Bob Fisher

Originally appeared in International Photographer in 1996

Fred Elmes, ASC was chosen to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Hawaii International Film Festival by a jury of film critics impressed by his work on such independent features as Blue Velvet, River’s Edge, A Woman Under The Influence, Eraserhead, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Wild at Heart and Night on Earth.

There was just one small string attached. The festival managers asked Elmes to participate in a seminar labeled Cinematographers and Digital Artists: Friends or Foes? The festival promoted the seminar by citing the infamous 1996 Daily Variety article which claimed “the torch was being passed” from cinematographers to digital artists.

It was an interesting conundrum. On one hand, Elmes was being honored for his artistic accomplishments. On the other hand, he was asked to debate whether cinematographers will play a diminished creative role in the digital age.

“I was a little put off by the title of the seminar,” Elmes admits. “The real issue is how to preserve the artistic rights of cinematographers as authors of the images we help to create. We need to develop forms of communication that result in a more collaborative effort between cinematographers and people who work in digital postproduction.”

Elmes studied photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, intending to pursue a career as a photojournalist. He earned a degree in filmmaking at New York University. Elmes began his career shooting documentaries before deciding to continue his studies at the American Film Institute, where he teamed up with another student, David Lynch, and began a four-year collaboration on the making of Eraserhead.

Most of Elmes’ cinema credits are for art house films. In addition to Lynch, he has worked with John Cassavetes, Jim Jarmusch, Martha Coolidge and Tim Hunter. Most recently, he shot Ice Storm for Ang Lee, which earned critical raves at Cannes. The film will be released by Fox Searchlight Pictures, a division of 20th Century Fox.

Elmes recently shot In the Gloaming, an HBO movie that was the directorial debut of Christopher Reeve. He has numerous TV commercial credits. Following are excerpts of a conversation reflecting on his career and the issues raised in Hawaii about the role of the cinematographer in the digital age:

QUESTION: What was the outcome of the seminar?

ELMES: No one on the panel argued that digital artists will replace cinematographers as a creative force. That’s mostly ignorance about the roles different people play. Yet, we agreed that we can learn a lot from each other. Digital technology is becoming an extension of our work as it allows us to photograph things knowing that the image can be manipulated by replacing a background, or by altering colors and contrast at computer workstations. I got much of my experience with digital postproduction by shooting commercials.

QUESTION: Is that an attraction of commercials?

ELMES: Shooting a feature film takes a lot out of you. It requires a lot of thought and a certain amount of physical endurance. It takes time to recharge. That’s where it helps to shoot commercials. Commercials are short term commitments that enable me to be more selective about features. They are also fun to shoot. It's an opportunity to work with a lot of different directors who have fresh ideas. You can experiment more freely.

QUESTION: Can you give us an example?

ELMES: I shot a Mazda commercial in Europe. A man is driving at night on a lonely dark road. You see only his close-up and his point of view of the road. He’s nodding off. An animal dashes in front of the car. He swerves. He nods off again. The man awakens and swerves to avoid a truck. Is he going to crash? The tension builds. The car rolls to a stop and the front bumper taps against a phone pole. He backs up, drives forward and taps the pole harder. He backs up again, and the third time he rams into the pole. That activates an airbag in the car, which he uses as a pillow while he naps. The tagline is ‘airbags save lives.’ That’s a good example of a one-minute story with a beginning, middle and ending. Commercials like that one are packed with visual information. You can compress the story and the audience will still follow the logic.

QUESTION: Do these techniques carry into features?

ELMES: Eventually, but commercials and (music) videos are much more experimental. Sometimes it takes years for ideas you routinely use in commercials or videos to filter into features. I shot a Guinness Beer commercial in England, with Michael Haussmann, an American director who lives there. We were creating a Salvador Dali world. We shot tests on our pre-lit stage and took them into telecine. We had a couple of hours of play-time to find the look. We tried some really complicated approaches, such as laying off one pass of the negative in black and white and another pass in color, a third with a bit of diffusion, and combining them in different ways. It pays to experiment before you shoot.

QUESTION: What was it like shooting your first film for Ang Lee?

ELMES: Ang Lee is a soft-spoken man who uses words sparingly. He felt that the painting style of the photo-realists was right for The Ice Storm. So, we visited galleries in New York and looked at a lot of books. We found painters whose style we liked from the period (the early 1970s). We selected painters who imitated the fine details and lighting in photographs, and photographers who imitated painters who were imitating photographers. These references gave us a lot to talk about.

QUESTION: What did you talk about?

ELMES: I tried to find clues about what got Ang interested in the story.

QUESTION: What is the story about?

ELMES: It’s an interesting and relevant story about a dysfunctional family, the Hoods, during the early 1970s. They should be happy. They seem to have everything. They have all the trappings of the ideal American life, but they lead very empty, valueless lives. It’s about human relationships and how we deal with a crisis caused by nature. The actors include Joan Allen, Kevin Kline, Tobey Maguire and Christina Ricci. Sigourney Weaver and Elijah Wood also play key roles. Nature plays a big part in this film.

QUESTION: How did you create an ice storm environment?

ELMES: With great difficulty. The story takes place at Thanksgiving, but we shot the film in April and May, when the leaves on trees were sprouting. We went to the location in February and shot winter-establishing scenes for the ice storm. We spent several nights creating an ice storm that looked quite beautiful. It was five to 10 degrees (Fahrenheit), and we were spraying water on the trees to create ice. We tried to maintain that look when we worked with the actors in the spring.

QUESTION: How did you accomplish that?

ELMES: We arranged to shoot all day exteriors first while the trees were still bare. Production designer Mark Friedberg helped by draining the color out of everything, including props and wardrobe. The subtle colors felt winter-like. There were also contrasting looks. One of the family’s home was a more comfortable family setting. The other house was cooler and stark with big walls of windows and a forest of bare trees outside. There are contrasting scenes where we used a combination of sunlight and color gel to make it feel a little warmer, then others we left neutral, very gray feeling.

QUESTION: How much of that was pre-planned versus instinctual?

ELMES: When I prep a film, I make a timeline of the entire story on a very large piece of paper. I hang it on a wall where I see it every day and note all the scenes and start accumulating location pictures. I paste these up along with wallpaper and colors from the sets. This reminds me where each scene is set. I can stand back and look at the whole movie in one place. I guess the answer is that I work from a pre-conceived plan, and then make adjustments when we shoot.

QUESTION: What was In the Gloaming about?

ELMES: It’s a relationship story about a mother dealing with her son who is dying of AIDS. We had a great cast: Glenn Close, Bridget Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg, Robert Sean Leonard and David Strathairn. Christopher Reeve has an enormous spirit and a natural talent for directing both the actors and the camera.

QUESTION: What was the main creative challenge?

ELMES: Our biggest challenge was probably making the gloaming (the magic hour) last all day. We shot the film in Westchester County, New York, in one house. There are six or seven multi-page dialog scenes that play outside the house on a patio during magic hour. When we scouted the location I sat in that patio a full day and watched the light and where the sun moved. Finally, we built a big silk tent, 40 x 65 feet, and flew it over the patio. It extended magic hour from about 1:00 p.m. to 7:30 at night. This gave us the production time we needed. It affected the whole flow of the film. There is very sensitive dialog between the mother and son shot on that patio. I feel we gave Chris and the actors the time and the mood they needed for their performances.

QUESTION: What was it like working with Christopher Reeve?

ELMES: Great. He couldn’t always be next to the camera, so Camera Service Center put an ARRI viewfinder on a color video tap. I showed Chris close-ups of the actors, over the shoulder shots, walking around dolly moves, while he was in another room.

QUESTION: How did you keep a dialog film like this visually engaging?

ELMES: It was difficult because the boy moves very little. Chris did not want anything tricky with the camera. We found ways to make the coverage more interesting both with camera movement and by moving the other actors around him. We also found ways to keep the light alive.

QUESTION: What does ‘keep the light alive mean?’

ELMES: For me it means using the environment to your advantage. When we were on the patio, we shot some scenes on clear days, and other times we used rain or clouds as story elements. We changed twilight by manipulating colors. We were shooting when the foliage was turning colors. By the last sequence, there are no leaves on the trees. That helped establish a feeling of continuity and the passage of time. They’re just subtle things you can use.

QUESTION: It's a TV movie, which means you didn’t see film dailies. Isn’t that an artistic constraint for cinematographers?

ELMES: The problem I have with dailies is the lack of a common reference point. We used Kodak stocks, (Eastman EXR) 5248, 5293 and the new Vision 500T color negative film, and our tests gave me confidence in the look we could achieve. However, it’s still difficult. The film was processed by DuArt, in New York, and they made Betacam SP video dailies which are slightly better quality but it was still frustrating not seeing film dailies, because we were dealing with subtle colors in sunsets and twilight, and moody interiors. I was trying to explain to the colorist, ‘Make it a little warmer with a little pink, and it's darker than you've been making it.’ But often, words fail to describe the visual look. I was fortunate that this was an HBO film, because while the off-line editing is done on the Avid, they conform the negative, make an answer print and finish on film. I enjoy being involved in answer printing and telecine. Producers sometimes feel it takes longer if the cinematographer is involved in postproduction. I believe, however, if I can steer them in the right direction they’ll save time. I make certain they know I want to be involved.

QUESTION: What do you do for an encore after a life achievement award?

ELMES: You work on getting that next job. I would love to shoot an Imax film, or a 65 mm film, and there are hundreds of directors I want to work with and new stories I want to tell.