Michael Goi, ASC was born and raised in Chicago. He began shooting 8 mm films, when he was only seven or eight years old, and upgraded to a 16 mm Bolex camera during his early teens. Goi organized a cinema society in high school, and studied filmmaking at Columbia College, in Chicago. Goi gained insights into lighting during a brief stint on electrical and as a gaffer. He operated a still photography studio, shooting product and fashion shots for seven to eight years, and also shot documentaries and commercials in Chicago. Goi compiled about a half a dozen low budget film narrative in Chicago, before migrating to Los Angeles during the early 1990s, seeking to broaden his horizons. He has already compiled some 30-plus credits, including independent features and telefilms. Goi still works on documentaries when time permits.

Following are excerpts of a conversation:

ICG: Where are you from? Where were you born and raised?

GOI:   I was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up primarily on the near North Side in Lincoln Park. I subsequently, lived in different parts of the city. I lived on Huron Street and had a photo studio there, and on the South Side when I was working documentaries.

ICG: Can you trace your interest in photography to someone or something? Was it your parents, somebody in the family or a teacher?

GOI: I can trace my interest in making movies to a single event that happened when I was seven years old. I went to a friend’s birthday party, and for entertainment they were showing an 8 mm film digest version of Dracula and Frankenstein. It was projectedon the wall. I had seen a lot of movies before then but I never thought about how they ended up on the screen. I remember looking back and watching the little strip of film with all those little images kind of dancing in the projector. I remember my friend pointing to the wall and saying, ‘no, the movie’s up there.’ And I said, ‘well no, the movie’s over here.’ That was my first exposure to the idea that a bunch of individual images become moving pictures.

ICG: What did you do about that insight?

GOI: I bugged my parents to buy me an 8 mm camera, so I could make movies myself. Then, I corralled all the neighborhood kids and made a lot of movies. When I was 14 years old, I decided that, I needed to get into professional filmmaking. I saved up money I earned by doing odd jobs and bought myself a used Bolex 16 mm camera, which I still own today.

ICG: What kind of movies did you make?

GOI: When I was a kid, I was a big silent movie junkie. I made movies that work purely visually, because I didn’t have the luxury of recording sound or doing sync dialogue or anything like that. A lot of my movies were sort of tributes to Buster Keaton, primarily. I just loved the intricacy of the action, and the way he staged scenes.

ICG: Where did you get the Buster Keaton movies? That had to be before VCRs.

GOI: There was a company called Blackhawk Films that distributed silent films in 8 mm, Super 8 and 16mm. I started collecting them very early. I collected Buster Keaton films. I owned Metropolis and Keystone kops movies by Mack Sennett. I ended up with a rather huge collection of Super 8 and 16mm films.

ICG: Was it an avocation, or did you think you were going to be able to make a career in filmmaking at that early stage in your life?

GOI: I think by the time I started high school I knew that filmmaking was something I wanted to do as a career. I wasn’t sure what area of filmmaking I wanted to be in, because I loved editing as much as I loved cinematography.

ICG: Were you also a fan of contemporary movies?

GOI: I went to movies relentlessly. There was a theater in Chicago, on Clark Street, called the Parkway. It was a grind house when I was a kid. They would run anything that they could buy for $50. They showed four double features a week. They had a lot of eclectic double features. I remember a Phyllis Diller movie being paired with Charlton Heston in Will Penny. I watched whatever they ran. That was my first film education. When I was about 13, I went to an optometrist because my eyes had been getting progressively worse. They told me that I had some form of progressive blindness, and that I would probably completely lose my sight by the time I was 30. That fueled my desire to see as many different kinds of movies as I could. I saw documentaries, Italian neo-realist films and silent films. I wanted to have that storehouse of images in my memory when my sight went away.

ICG: Were there teachers in high school who influenced you?

GOI: We had a cinematography society in Lane Tech High School, which I actually helped start. That was really the only body of people who were involved in making movies. I met a couple of my lifelong friends in that club, but it was primarily a technically oriented school for training draftsmen, future engineers and things like that.

ICG: Did you have a plan?

GOI: My plan was to join the military after high school, because I was in ROTC with all of my friends. I liked the discipline in the military environment. I always figured I would go to military school. But, after graduating from high school, I had a talk with my parents, and they asked me, is this really what you want to do? They really encouraged me to do what I wanted to do. My parents have always been very giving. They were in an internment camps during World War II, even though they are American citizens and were both born in California. They raised me with the idea that there was nothing that I couldn’t do. That’s where I got the idea that I should never have a job just to make money every day.

They taught me that I should do what I loved, and somebody would pay me to do it. I ended up looking into different colleges and universities that offered film courses, and chose to enroll at Columbia College (in Chicago), which was very small at the time. The entire film department shared a floor with the photo department. I think there were 150 students in the film department. They’ve grown tremendously. I think they have the biggest enrollment of any film college or university in the world today. What I liked about Columbia was they had a very hands-on approach to moviemaking. The first day I was there, they put a camera into my hands and 100 feet of film, and said go out and shoot something that means something to you.

ICG: Were there other students there who ended up in the industry with you?

GOI: Columbia seems to have a knack for turning out cinematographers. Jeff Jur (ASC) is a friend, who was a student at Columbia while I was there. I was an electrician on a couple of advanced student movies Jeff was shooting at the time I was starting out at Columbia. I’ve never forgotten the freedom that he gave me to contribute ideas and the seriousness with which he treated my passion for cinematography. Later on, Janusz Kaminski (ASC) also came through Columbia College, and Mario Fiore, who worked as Janusz’s gaffer for a number of years before he moved into cinematography.

ICG: What did you do after graduation?

GOI: They invited me to teach. I thought about that for a while but I was anxious to go out into the world and make more movies. I was already making feature documentaries for PBS while I was still in college. There was an instructor there named Jim Martin, who was very interested in the documentary field, and so was Michael Rabiger. They fueled my interest in documentaries. Jim was working on a project on the South Side of Chicago about how the neighborhoods were suffering as a result of the decline of the steel mills. I ended up shooting and editing the entire project. It was a massive project, which took about three years. After that, we collaborated on a documentary about the public housing projects on the South Side of Chicago, and how the residents were fighting for the right to govern their own buildings. So, I had an early interest in documentaries, and an interest in grabbing images that had power and meaning in situations where I couldn’t always control what was going to happen. I got the reputation of being kind of a ballsy cinematographer, because I would sort of stomp all over the news guys. I realized even then, I was only going to get one chance to get it on film. I liked that immediacy of documentaries, but they didn’t pay much money.

ICG: What form of media was used to shoot documentaries in Chicago at that time?

GOI: We shot all the documentaries on 16 mm color negative. I believe it was 7247. It had an exposure index of 100, and I generally used a zoom lens, so I could work fast. I shot a lot of film with an Éclair NPR and with a CP16 camera. I still try to leave space in my life to work on documentaries that interest me. I did a documentary that hasn’t been finished about a man who is dying of AIDS and his relationship with his son. We followed all the way through the time that he died, and then covered the reactions of his family afterwards. I also did a feature-length documentary on the rise and fall of Death Row records, which got released on DVD.

ICG: Let’s re-visit Chicago? What did you do after graduation?

GOI: I shot commercials and documentaries for a number of years, and then I got into still photography, because I wanted to do something on my own. I ended up doing quite a bit of fashion and product photography. I opened a studio with some friends for a period of six to eight years. The problem became that I had to get up every day and do photography in order to pay the overhead. It got to the point where it wasn’t fun anymore. I couldn’t just pick up my camera and shoot for the hell of it. Everything had to be a job. That’s when I made the decision to walk away from it and come to Los Angeles.

ICG: Who were you shooting those still photographs for…was it for magazines?

GOI: I did it for different clients, Quaker Oaks, McDonald’s, Sears, retail stores and also for magazines in Chicago. Metro Magazine gave me a lot of creative freedom to do pictorials. That was a lot of fun, because I had the freedom to express ideas.

ICG: How did you get into the commercial business?

GOI: I kind of fell into commercials in Chicago by default. That was a lot of commercial production in town at that time. I fell in with a couple of producers who were making commercials on a fairly regular basis. They had stable client bases. I started as a camera operator, and then began shooting and directing commercials. I had my own studio after a while, and made a pretty good living doing commercials.

ICG: In retrospect, what did you learn from these different experiences?

GOI: What I learned from stills is the precise nature of photographing faces. I had already done one feature at the time I started the still studio; but until I started freezing people’s faces and seeing expressions and what the light was doing on their faces, I never realized the impact that it could have. That’s the big thing that I took away from still photography.

ICG: How about commercials? What did that early experience teach you?

GOI: Commercials taught me patience. Before I started shooting commercials, I never had the patience to wait three hours for a Hershey bar to get fluffed up, or to go through shooting endless takes of gravy dripping down mashed potatoes. You also had to understand why this drip looked better than that drip, which required me to concentrate on a purely aesthetic level, without regard for the time it took.

ICG: And, what did you learn from shooting your early documentaries?

GOI: Documentaries taught me everything else. They taught me how to think on my feet, and they taught me what makes an emotionally affecting image. I also learned how to think like an editor in terms of where the cut points are, and how I could make a film work dramatically while I was shooting it. I also learned how to work with people, because I was frequently getting into situations that were highly emotionally charged. When you step into a crowd of 50 people, who are arguing with their landlords about their building, and about babies falling off the roof and dying because there are no screens on the door, you learn really quickly how to get yourself into the middle of situations and still be invisible, so you have that close perspective. On documentaries, you need to have a distant perspective, and still have a close proximity to what’s going on.

ICG: What was your first narrative film?

GOI: My first narrative feature film was a movie called Moonstalker. I had written and optioned a horror film screenplay to a man who was primarily a writer. His name was Michael O’Rourke. The deal came together and then it fell through. I didn’t hear from Michael for a while, and then he called and said he was going to be directing a movie in Reno, Nevada. It was a horror film that was going to be shot in 16mm with an 18-day schedule; most of it was going to be filmed at night. He said I could have two small kits and one 5K, and a whole bunch of extension cord, and asked if I wanted to shoot it? I think he felt he owed me something because my screenplay deal fell through.

ICG: What was that first experience like?

GOI: Moonstalker was an interesting experience. There was a blizzard the day before we started filming in Reno, and it dumped literally two yards of snow on all of our locations. We had to bulldoze piles of snow out of our locations. The electric crew was constantly getting shocked, because we were running extension cords through the snow; which was the only way we could light up the forest at night. Camera batteries would die after two takes, because of the cold. I loved it. It was different than anything I’d done in commercials or documentaries. I loved the fact that I was photographing actors and telling a story, and that we were able to start with a mindset of how to make it scary. Michael O’Rourke really gave me my first break.

ICG: What did that opportunity lead you to next?

GOI: Moonstalker floundered in distribution for a while, but that same year I ended up starting to shoot a movie that I wrote. It was an action picture called Chains. I wrote it by default, because we had a location, actors, equipment and everything set up, but we didn’t have a filmable script. A week before we’re supposed to start shooting, the director, Roger Barski, asked me if I could write something that worked for the actors and location, since that’s what we had. The money was already committed. I holed myself up for six days and I wrote the screenplay and we started shooting it the next day.

It was sort of like my nod to the Westerns, which I loved when I was a kid. It’s a siege movie. These people from the suburbs run afoul of a street gang in Chicago, and they have to hole up in a factory at night. They have to defend themselves against 1,000 street gang members who are trying to kill them. We ended up shooting it over a five-month period, taking breaks to do other things. I shot another feature in between.

ICG: When did you start writing?

GOI: I started writing in college. Of all the things in moviemaking you can do, writing is the toughest for me. I would never call myself a writer. If I can’t finish a first draft of an idea in two weeks, then I can’t do it, because it will just drag forever. I have to have the entire idea laid out in my head before I start writing.

ICG: When we did this conversation with Vittorio Storaro, he said that cinematography is like a language; only you use images instead of words. Do you see that similarity?

GOI: I do and I don’t. It’s different for every writer. I try to write descriptively with less dialogue because I personally don’t think I’m very good at it, but I can see that connection. There’s a strong connection between cinematography and music for me. A lot of times when I’m talking with directors, especially first-time directors, when they can’t convey what they’re looking for visually, I ask them to tell me what kind of music they hear in this sequence. They’ll say, oh, yeah, it should be like some particular song, or they’ll hum something that suggests it. I can immediately cue me in on how they’re thinking about particular scene.

ICG: Where did you pick that up?

GOI: I don’t know that I picked that up from anybody in particular. I just have a great love of classical music and jazz.

ICG: I remember doing an interview with Wolfgang Treu, where he said music and cinematography are similar because it’s all about contrast. I asked him what he thought he would have been if he had been born before there was motion picture film, and he said that he would probably have been a composer.

GOI: It was my dream for a number of years to be like a guest conductor at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and conduct Mahler’s Sixth Symphony.

ICG: I noticed that a fair share of your early credits had horror film titles?

GOI: I seem to go through phases. You know everybody wants to hire you to do what you have just done. I did a horror film, and suddenly got into the horror film cycle. When I did an erotic thriller, I got into the erotic film cycle. I think until you establish yourself, you tend to get pigeonholed that way. I did a Black movie in Chicago called How U Like Me Now, and from that time on, any movie that was being shot in Chicago that had African-American people in it, I would get the call. For a while, I was the African-American cinematographer.

ICG: Did you have an agent then?

GOI: No, I didn’t have an agent when I was in Chicago. I was kind of flying blind. I didn’t actually get my first agent until I moved to Los Angeles.

ICG: Did you move to Los Angeles for a job or on a flyer?

GOI: I moved to Los Angeles because still photography was not as gratifying for me anymore, and I was getting a little burned out on commercials. I had already done about six features before I made the decision to move to Los Angeles. I recognized that that’s where I needed to be in order to make the kind of movies I wanted to make.

ICG: What year was that?

GOI: I moved to Los Angeles in 1990 on a wing and a prayer. I knew a few people there from Columbia College who I hadn’t seen for a while. I wasn’t in the Los Angeles Local, and I came to the city at a time when the country was going into a huge recession.. All the smaller film companies were closing up their shops and more established cinematographers were taking smaller budgeted movies.

ICG: What did you do in that situation?

GOI: There was a movie being shot in Las Vegas called Sword of Honor. A friend was working on it as a grip. He told me that if I really needed a job, I could work on that film as a grip. I also ended up doing some still photographs for them. They found out that I was a cinematographer, and asked me to shoot second unit. That was sort of the turning point for me. The contacts that I made on that low budget action picture led to other low budget action pictures. From there, I started to branch out and shoot more features that were based out of Los Angeles; some with Charlie Carner, who also moved to Los Angeles from Chicago, when he started doing more television movies of the week.

ICG: Is he a writer or a director?

GOI: He’s a writer and director, who now co-produces the movies he directs. When he did Vanishing Point for the Fox network, he asked me to be second unit director of photography for Daryn Okada (ASC).

ICG: Did you ever get discouraged or have any doubts?

GOI: Sure, there were down times. When I first moved to Los Angeles, I lived for six months off the three hot dogs for 99 cents special at the AM/ PM mini-market. That’s how I survived. Moving to Los Angeles was a huge decision for me, but once I made that decision nothing was going to persuade me to give up.

ICG: Do you still occasionally work on documentaries?

GOI: The most recent one that was completed is Welcome to Death Row (2001). I’ve been working on one about a man who has AIDS that is yet to be completed, and another about this woman who is sort of homeless now. Some of my documentaries are with companies and others are more personal projects. It depends on what inspires me and how much time I have. I’m doing some of them on DV, though I prefer 16 mm. When we shoot on digital video, we try to make sure the final product gets transferred to film, because I have no idea what’s going to happen to digital tape formats in the future.

ICG: Who were some of the other people who have influenced you over the years?

GOI: After I joined the Guild, George (Spiro) Dibie fueled my interest in participating in seminars. Charlie Carner has been very supportive. My first anamorphic film was an independent film called Hundred Percent. They had a screening at American Cinematique, and Vilmos Zsigmond (ASC) showed up. I didn’t know at the time that he was such a giving person. I mentioned Vanishing Point. I don’t think anybody told Daryn (Okada) that there was a second unit cameraman who was a friend of the director. Daryn took it in stride, and he gave me a lot of freedom. His generosity was certainly important to me at that point in time. Cinematographers are some of the most giving people. I’ve tried to pay back the people who have helped me by mentoring younger people within the limits of my knowledge. I get a lot of calls from people who say, I’ve been here for two months. How do I find a job?

ICG: How do you answer that question?

GOI: I tell them they’re doing the right thing by picking up the phone and calling people, which is sometimes the hardest thing to do. If you don’t make your presence known, people won’t know that you’re here.

ICG: It sounds like you didn’t get a chance to work as an assistant or an operator?

GOI: In Chicago, I worked as an assistant cameraman for a while. I wouldn’t say that I was very good at it. I ended up being an electrician and a gaffer. I did that quite a bit, because I liked handling the lights, turning them on and seeing what the different units did. That’s sort of the path that led me, eventually, to cinematography. I have always considered myself a sort of low-tech cinematographer, which is probably not true. I think we don’t like to admit how much we actually know, but I’ve never been obsessive about equipment.

ICG: What did you learn though from that experience?

GOI: I learned how powerful it is to put that first light in the right place the first time. I’ve been on sets, where I’ve seen the key light dance around in several positions until they found one that they liked. It taught me to pre-visualize what I wanted the shot to look like, so I could figure out where that first primary light was going to go. After that, everything else falls into place… gaffing taught me where to put the light and what happens when I put diffusion material in front of it, and the effect it has on faces.

ICG: When did you get an agent?

GOI: I got an agent about a year and a half or two years after I moved to Los Angeles. I had done a few small features by then. I sent my reel around to several places. What happened was that my African-American movie opened in a few theaters in 25 cities on a Friday. There was a review in the Los Angeles Times that complimented the cinematography and mentioned my name. By Monday morning, it was apparent that the movie had made zero dollars. After that all of the agents were too busy to see me, except for one guy. That’s how he became my agent.

ICG: You wrote an interesting letter that was published by the Los Angeles Times after their interview with Robert Rodriguez, where he quoted saying that the digital camera pretty much does the cinematography for him. Did you get any response?

GOI: I received some letters and calls. Some people misunderstood, and thought I was against using digital cameras. I was actually commenting on the claim that they are easier to use. For me, shooting in a digital format is much more grip intensive. I can walk onto a location and roll with a film camera with the windows in the background, because I know they are going to kind of glow in a soft, white kind of way. I know its going to be a solarized white light with digital video, so I have to use rolls of ND12 to take down the windows. When I’m lighting for high-def, I end up covering the monitors in the video village or shutting them off while I’m lighting. I have a separate monitor for my digital imaging technician that only he and I look at.

ICG: Why is that?

GOI: Because if the monitors are on, as soon as you turn on a light and point the camera at the scene, somebody is going to make a comment before you’ve actually lit. How do you deal with somebody passing by the monitor and saying, don’t you think it’s a little dark in that corner? It creates the wrong atmosphere. I light the set first, and then turn on the monitors in the video village. I think it’s important to have a digital imaging technician who you trust, and a really good grip crew, if you’re shooting digital video. It’s also a different discipline when you’re actually rolling the camera, because they want you to have 10 to 15 seconds of pre-roll before you record anything. I don’t know why that is, but it happens every time. I find that the directors end up telling me to just let the cameras roll in-between takes, and that freaks out the actors a bit, because they’re used the AD calling out roll and sound. We roll the camera, shoot the slate, they call action, and then everybody performs. When the tape is always rolling, everything turns a little … I don’t know how to describe it. The tension isn’t as tight leading up to the shot, and I think some of the work suffers because of it.

ICG: What are some of your other experiences shooting in digital formats?

GOI: Digital video is certainly convenient when I’m shooting documentaries. I can roll for two hours on an interview, and not have to stop. I’ve used HD on a couple of narrative films. One of them was well suited for it, because it was in situations that we could largely control, and the umbilical cord that goes to the digital imaging center wasn’t obtrusive. HD wasn’t a great choice for the other movie. It had a lot of fast motion and shots that had to be grabbed; and a lot of nighttime requiring quite a bit of lighting.

ICG: What motivated the directors or producers to shoot in HD format?

GOI: Usually a producer has suggested it based on promotional hype that they’ve read or heard that convinces them it will be cheaper. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. On one movie that I ended up not doing, the producer really felt strong about doing it in high-def. I read the script and saw how many nighttime explosions there were, and the number of locations where it would be really difficult to control lighting. I advised her against it. I ended up doing another movie, but not because I objected to the fact that she wanted to do it high-def. She ended up calling me several months later and saying, ‘we’re in post-production hell. We’re having to composite in all these backgrounds that got blown out, and we’re having to color in every explosion that we shot.’

ICG: If you believe what you read in the press, we’re in a time of transition. Are we?

GOI: I don’t know if transition is the right word. I think it’s more accurate to say there are so many options for gathering images today that it is difficult for producers to make informed decisions. I think 35 mm film is great when you can afford it. I shot Red Water, a television movie, in Super 16. You have to be more careful because it’s a little less forgiving than 35 mm film. I find that when I shoot in digital video formats, I have to be much more careful than I am with 16 mm film.

ICG: That’s pretty much the opposite of the most common perceptions by producers, isn’t it?

GOI: Some of them still think you just turn on the camera and point it. I mentioned this in my letter to the Times. I was participating in a seminar in Miami where a young guy asked, don’t you think that your job as a cinematographer is obsolete because anybody who picks up a digital camera is now instantly a cinematographer? I asked him, if I gave you an electric guitar would you instantly play it like Eric Clapton? The reality is that the camera is just a tool, and you have to be informed about what each of these tools can do. It’s a continuing educational process with different production companies. Some of them have gotten smart about what works well with high-def and what doesn’t. Some of them still need to be educated.

ICG: I realize that you are very early in your career, so this is a premature question, but I’m going to ask it anyhow. Can you pick out three or four of your own films that you liked?

GOI: Out of the documentaries, Fired Up, a story about public housing in Chicago is a film that I would love to see stand the test of time. Moonstalker, the first feature that I shot, simply because I still think it’s an entertaining movie and it’s out of distribution now. There was also a movie that I did with Jon Voight for Showtime called The Fixer (1998) that in a lot of ways was a big turning point for me. It gave me an opportunity to do visually what I saw in my head and to follow it through to completion almost exactly the way I wanted it. That movie was heavily influenced by works of Gordon Willis (ASC). It’s a story about a guy who works with the underworld figures in Chicago. It had that kind of dark, brooding tone. I was able to push the limits on how dark was dark, and how far I could underexpose the film and still read enough light on faces to tell the story. I got a lot of freedom from Tony Bill and Helen Bartlett, the producers, and Charlie Carner, the director. There was a very supportive atmosphere. That movie got nominated for an ASC (Outstanding Achievement) award in the mini-series and movie of the week category. I would also include Judas, a movie I shot for ABC. It was one of the most gratifying experiences I’ve had with an art department, a first AD, and with a crew that had a single-minded agenda of making a creative, artful, beautiful compelling movie.

ICG: I don’t want to jump to conclusions. What’s the film about?

GOI: Judas is about the relationship between Judas Iscariot and Jesus Christ. It was originally called Judas and Jesus. It was on the shelf for three years .Tom Fontana, who created the series Oz wrote the script and Charlie Carner directed it. You always hope for those experiences that kind of feed your soul. When I take on a project, I have to live or die by it, so I put everything I’ve got into it. A lot of times you don’t get that much back.

ICG: Was it literally true to the Bible, an interpretation or something in between?

GOI: It’s slightly contemporary. All the dialogue is contemporary. It’s based on events that are documented in the relationship between Judas and Jesus. The actors speak in a contemporary language, but we felt like the imagery had to be very classic to balance it out. There are a lot of scenes in interiors that should be dark, because of the period of time, while the outside world is hot and sort of slightly bleached out and white. We worked really hard to get that balance and give it that feeling.

ICG: What did you do?

GOI: I scaled back my lighting, and if something looked inappropriate from one angle, we shot in a different direction that felt right for that scene, rather than bringing in 12Ks and filling it all in. We worked fairly minimally, because we had to work very fast. The whole movie was shot in 23 days all over Morocco. There was a location where we had to climb a half-mile up a mountain just to get one shot. The locations were breathtaking, and the areas we ended up shooting for Jerusalem were incredibly pictorial.

ICG: When you are shooting on this type of schedule, do you get sufficient time in preproduction with the production and costume designers?

GOI: Production design and all the elements that you end up photographing are incredibly important. I went out to Morocco and Rome a couple weeks early just to get the feel of those areas and to see what the light was like. Paolo Biagetti was the production designer. It was a great experience working with him, because he and all of his people were obsessed with being true to the period, but they also understood that it had to work for the camera. A lot of times when you work on lower budgeted projects you feel the pain of the art department because they never have enough money to do what they need or want to do. The director and I scouted one location that was going to be a hut, where Jesus and his followers were living for a while. We were thinking the door would be better on the other side of the hut. We came back to the location the next day, and the art department had ripped the door out in the middle of the night and put a new on the other side, just so we could see what it would look like and feel like from that direction. That kind of enthusiasm is really infectious on a film like this.

ICG: Do you approach shooting a TV movie differently than you would a feature film?

GOI: No. It’s all feature films to me. I don’t make too many concessions in my way of thinking in terms of shooting for the small screen as opposed to the big screen. You might shoot maybe a couple more close-ups, but I like to think that when you concentrate on the subtle details and nuances they will translate on TV as well as on the screen.

ICG: We wanted to ask about Red Water, another television movie you shot last year. Was that the film you shot in HD?

GOI: No. We couldn’t have done that in HD format, because of the harshness of some of the locations. If a camera went down while we were out in the desert somewhere, we would have been toast. The producers had raised the idea of shooting high-def, but the director and I decided it would be better to shoot Super 16 film, because of the mobility of the cameras. We were working a lot on water and underwater, and we had to move fast. Kodak had just come out with the (Kodak Vision2) 7218 500 ASA stock. We ended up shooting half the movie with that. There was one instance where that stock literally saved an entire day. We were shooting a sequence where people are leaving this village at dawn. We had planned to shoot it at magic hour, after we’d shot on the boat all day. We ran late during the day, and by the time we got to the village, it was almost totally night. When we started shooting, the film was three stops underexposed; and it was four stops underexposed by the time we finished the sequence. I pushed the stock one stop and hoped for the best, and all that footage came out perfectly. It's one of my favorite scenes in the film, and I couldn't have gotten it on Hi-Def under those conditions. Red Water was broadcast about three-and-a half months after we finished shooting it. It was a very quick turnaround, and it ended up being the number one highest rated cable TV movie of the year.

ICG: I’m writing an article about low budget movies that are being shot in Super 16 format that have gone through a digital intermediate process with film output. Based on Red Water, do you think we’ll be seeing more Super 16 production in the future?

GOI: I think it’s probably a trend, but I haven’t actually gone through a digital intermediate experience yet. Red Water actually went to print through a traditional optical process, and then it was transferred to high-def straight from the film. They had a fixed airdate, so we had to finish the video master first. I timed the movie for the video master, and then went back and re-timed it for a film print; and then we did it again for home video, DVDs and Europe. I essentially timed the movie three times. I think digital intermediate technology will solve that problem in the future. You can time the movie once, and output to the different formats. I would like to see 4K resolution become the standard.

ICG: Can you explain why?

GOI: There are subtle difference between what you shoot on film and what you get on the final product with 2K resolution. There is a slight softness or smearing of details. There’s certainly a lot of control that you have over color tinting and toning adjustments in a digital intermediate process. I would just like to see just the quality of the image slightly better. I’ve seen 4K scans, and they look great.

ICG: This is a rhetorical question, but I’ve got to ask it for the record, because of the way it has been dealt with at seminars and in the press. Do the nuances in image really matter? Does the audience see a difference, or is it just cinematographers who care?

GOI: I think the general public cares. While they may not be able to put their finger on what the specific differences are, it affects their experience. I remember in the early days of television, the public categorized video shows as soap operas and film as movies. TV audiences have much more sophisticated viewing environments today. They have better monitors with bigger screens, and DVD players are in millions of households. People know the difference between watching a film on DVD and VHS. I think people are aware of more nuances in images than we give them credit for.

ICG: Knowing what you know today, if you starting your career all over again, what would you do differently?

GOI: I might have moved to Los Angeles sooner, but other than that, I don’t think I would have changed very much. I love cinematography. I love movies. I still have that sense of wonder when I watch a movie, and every now and then I’ll turn around and look at the projection booth to see the light flickering on the glass. I think it’s a throwback to that time when I first looked at that strip of film going through the projector. Even now, when I finish color-timing a print, I’ll go back to the projection booth and I’ll ask the projectionist if I can rewind the last reel so I can feel the film in my hands.

ICG: Do you think the role of cinematographers is going to change? Besides the perception about how anyone can be a cinematographer with digital cameras, there is the reality that anyone can now alter images during the digital intermediate process. Is that going to affect the role of the cinematographer?

GOI: I think the role of the cinematographer is actually expanding, if you have an intelligent, well-informed producer who understands the value that having a cinematographer in the color-timing room or the digital intermediate suite. I was supervising the transfer of a movie that I had shot several years ago. The distribution company didn’t want me there, because they feared it would take more time and cost more money. Within the first 10 minutes, there was something wrong in the framing. The machinery wasn’t rendering the images correctly, and I was able to catch and rectify that problem. If they had caught it later, it would have been a hugely expensive fix. After that, the producer said he never wanted to do another transfer without the cinematographer present.

ICG: What do you think needs to be done to educate other producers on this issue?

GOI: I think first we need to educate ourselves. Cinematographers need to be aware of how the business is changing, so we can have control over our future. If there’s a question about how something is shot, or if a problem is fixable, the first person they’re going to turn to is the cinematographer. If we have the answer, we immediately become the most valuable person in the digital suite. If we aren’t there, or we don’t have the answer, they will delegate it to a button pusher, who may not have the right aesthetic inclinations. We need the time to follow projects through to completion. I think the days of shooting a movie and then going off and shooting another movie are gone. If you give up the influence you have on post-production and how the images are printed and/or color-timed in digital intermediate, then you have lost your control as a cinematographer.

ICG: One of the big questions seems to be who’s going to pay for the cinematographer’s time? Do you have high hopes that problem will be solved?

GOI: Anytime there is a discussion about paying somebody, there is going to be resistance. I believe there is going to be a gradual awakening within the industry that it benefits the projects and ultimately the bottom line to have the cinematographer involved, because they are the only ones who know the objectives for the visuals. As talented, and as visually-oriented, as many directors are, I still have not worked with one who feels totally comfortable sitting by themselves in a color-timing room, making decisions about what that movie is going to look like. We create the images.

ICG: If you were standing in front of a film class at AFI or USC class, what’s your best advice for them? Remember, you are speaking to aspiring writers, directors and producers as well as cinematographers.

GOI: I think young directors and writers need to be open to learning about what cinematographers can do for their projects, and how important mutual trust is. I have tended to work with first-time directors, so chances are that I have experience that can help them if they are open to it. A great idea is a great idea, no matter who has it. On my part, I’ll try to find some way to make it work within the schedule that I have. My advice is choosing your cinematographer carefully, because he or she is going to be the closest collaborator you are going to have. That’s true for writers as well as directors, because the cinematographer is the person who’s going to translate your words into images.

ICG: How do they choose the right cinematographer?

GOI: I think viewing reels is helpful, but face-to-face conversations will give you insights into what their personality is like. That’s vital, because when you’re on the set shooting 12 to 14 hours a day, you want somebody you are going to get along with who feels as passionate about your project as you do. Without that passion, you kind of feel like you’re set adrift on the ocean without a paddle.

ICG: What advice would you offer aspiring cinematographers?

GOI: If you want to be a cinematographer, get as much experience as you can shooting whatever you can. I know that digital video is more accessible when you are a student, but I think it’s important for you to shoot film, also. Film is a different discipline, which in some ways will show you more clearly where you’re succeeding and where you’re failing. In that sense, you’re going to learn more than when you are shooting digital video. It’s important to go out and shoot as much as you can and to shoot with people who inspire you. When I was in college and just out, I shot over 150 student films. That was my learning ground. Every time I messed up was a learning experience that taught me where I went wrong and why. If you’re a cinematographer, and you are just starting out, you need to make friends with as many directors as you can, because we don’t do what we do in a vacuum. We don’t do it by ourselves.

ICG: If you could magically gather around this table, filmmakers from the past to talk to or work with on a movie, who would it be?

GOI: I would loved to have met Robert Surtees (ASC). I thought he was an amazing cinematographer. This was the man who shot both Ben Hur and The Graduate. I would love to have met some of the cameramen who were very prominent in the silent movie days like Billy Bitzer and Karl Freund, who was also quite a good director; and he pioneered the three-camera system on I Love Lucy, which we still use today. There are so many people; it’s hard to know where to stop. I would have loved to work with John Frankenheimer, and with Sidney Lumet, who is still directing.

ICG: What if you could choose your own dream project from the past?

GOI: I think we all want to work on films that stand the test of time. I’m such a huge movie fanatic and have such a big collection of movies. There are classic films that constantly inspire me. I would love to work on films like Days of Heaven, Citizen Kane, Godfather and Sunrise. Just the thought of that is overwhelming. I’m always pushing myself, no matter what I shoot, to think, what if this movie is seen 30, 40 or 50 years from now? It’s a torturous position to put yourself in but I would hate to think that nothing I shoot will survive or have any value in the future. I think when I finally retire from shooting, I’d love to be the Indiana Jones of film preservation, and just go around the world finding lost movies.

ICG: We have covered a lot of ground. Is there anything I haven’t asked that you wanted to discuss today?

GOI: I’m sure I’ll think of a million things once we walk out the door. I talked a little bit about the things that have influenced me, including music. I think cinematographers are motivated and inspired by so many things around them. I used to have season tickets to the American Ballet Theater. I’d go all the time because I just loved watching the movement and the technique that was involved. I think if you have it in you to be a cinematographer, chances are you are also obsessed with other forms of entertainment and art, and you feed on that, perhaps without drawing a direct correlation.