By Bob Fisher

Ellen Kuras, ASC was born and raised in suburban New Jersey. She enrolled at Brown University intending to become an Egyptologist and segued into a general study of social anthropology. Kuras got her first taste of photography when she took an exchange class at the nearby Rhode Island School of Design. After graduation, she worked at a museum in Providence, Rhode Island for a short while and decided to continue her education at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. Kuras subsequently took a class in Super 8 filmmaking in New York City. She began working on documentaries in low-paying or unpaid jobs in roles ranging from production assistant to sound track editor and camera assistant. During the late 1980s, Kuras decided to invest some time in working as an electrician in order to master the mechanics of lighting. She shot her first documentary, Samsara: Death and Rebirth in Cambodia, in 1987. It was the first United States film made in Cambodia in the wake of a tragic civil war that devastated the population. Kuras has subsequently compiled an eclectic mix of TV commercial, documentary and narrative film credits. She won the best cinematography award at Sundance in 1992 for Swoon and again in 1995 for Angela. Her other credits include Geoffrey Beene, 30, 4 Little Girls, and Indie pictures Postcards from America, Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, Unzipped and I Shot Andy Warhol. Kuras has compiled six studio feature film credits during the past three years, including The Mod Squad, Summer of Sam, Bamboozled and Blow.

Following are excerpts of a conversation:

KURAS: I was born in a typical suburban New Jersey town. It was a very strong community with a pretty good school. I grew up in a neighborhood where everybody knew everybody else. There was one movie theatre and the same film usually played for six months. One important aspect of my youth was that I was very active in both athletics and in theater, playing softball, field hockey and basketball. Often being the captain on the team, it really helped me to shape my sense of leadership and sense of working together on a team with a group of people. Sports helped me to be in situations where one learns not to choke and if you do create an error, you move on. You can’t look back. I think that making films is very much the same, because we have to consider and support our crew like team. I’ve realized that collaboration and teamwork is a really important part of being a cinematographer.

KURAS: I actually acted, believe it or not. I was always interested in theater and interested in literature, probably as a way of responding to a certain creative impulse. Another influence, I think was sculpting. Growing up, I wanted to be a sculptor. My father was very adept in using his hands and would often get me to help him make whatever he was inventing. I ended up filling the basement with different kinds of forms and shapes to find some room to create something. Now, I realize hat what I do now —shape light — is akin to what I was trying to do with solid form back then.

KURAS: There is sculpture that just has to do with the form itself, and then there’s sculpture that has to do with form and how light plays on it. For me, when you’re lighting someone, or lighting the space, the ideas revolve in part around sculptural forms. It’s about three-dimensionality. I never really thought about it until recently, when someone had asked what I had wanted to be when I was a kid, and I realized that I had always dreamed of working with my hands, of wanting to shape something textural, luminous.

KURAS: My mother’s side of the family was somewhat artistic. My aunt was a fairly gifted amateur photographer, which I found out by looking through her trove of photographs after she died about five years ago. I realized she had a really good eye for composition and light though. She carried around her Brownie camera, something that she was known for in the family. When she died, my mother gave me her camera. I was unaware that she was paying attention to those elements, however unconsciously. My father’s family was musical, but he’s an avionics engineer who is very mathematically oriented. My father is a brilliant man with a near-genius IQ. He’s an inventor, a philosopher and ethicist. He has always helped me to shape my philosophy and sense of ethics. Through the course of his life, although he’s gone through great ups and great downs, he has taught me a lot in terms of how good and evil works in the world.

KURAS: I didn’t pick up a camera until I was in college.

KURAS: I went to Brown University intending to become an Egyptologist. From the time I was in sixth grade, I developed an interest in ancient civilizations which probably came from my father who was very interested in the part of the ancient world that had to do with how they invented ways of measuring the pyramids; how they built the pyramids; how they developed astronomy; and how they developed simple tools to build the civilization that they did. He had a lot of books around the house that had to with the mummies and ancient Egypt. As a kid, I would look through them and I became fascinated with that whole world and wanted to learn more about language systems, ancient Mesopotamia and the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. I think for me part of the interest was also a sense of the texture of that area; the colors and stones. I think it goes back to the sculpture — the idea of the tactile quality of the Rosetta Stone Hierogy and the way that the letters were raised… it’s a fascination that plays in a child’s mind.

KURAS: I’ve always been interested in different people, culture and language systems around the world. I was laughing with someone last week because I remembered that a long time ago, I wanted to be a missionary. Yikes!

KURAS: When I was studying ancient Egypt and the classical world, I realized that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in a library. For some reason, I don’t know to this day why, I decided to take a class in photography instead of sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design. They had an exchange program with Brown where you could take two classes for credit.

Once I took this class in photography, it was quite evident to me that I found a different reality. It was like looking through a viewfinder into another world. The teaching assistant helped me to foster that interest because I think she saw something in the way I was taking pictures that showed some promise. She helped me to believe in what I was doing and to discover something new. If I hadn’t had that kind of encouragement, I don’t know whether I would have gone on with it. It was about discovery. What struck me was how light falls, and sometime is transmitted through certain objects. I remember there were glass jars sitting on my windowsill and a shade drawn over the window. I noticed the light transmitted through the shade and the play of light on the jars created shadows that made a three-dimensional object seem two-dimensional. So, I started by taking pictures by putting light through different types of paper to see how the light worked.

At the end of my sophomore year in 1979, I went to a program at the University of Paris in France. I spent a whole year in France studying semiotics, study of structuralism, post-modernism, language, and psychoanalysis as related to the study of film. It was a very, very rigorous seminar-based course. We got to study with different writers from Cahiers du Cinema and I audited classes with Claude Levy-Strauss. I was interested in studying the idea of how color and composition affects perception. For example, this study really changed the way that I thought about photography. At that point, I was very much involved with photography on another level because I was working at a gallery in Paris. I got a chance to see so many different photographs that came through there. It was a learning experience. When I got back to Brown, I decided to double major in semiotics and social anthropology with a concentration in the American Indian and small-scale societies.

KURAS: An interesting question, because I wanted to be a photographer, but at that point I was also being exposed to documentary films. I remember going to the Margaret Meade Film Festival when I was a senior and at that time, there were only 10 people in the audience!

KURAS: I worked as an intern at the Roger Williams Park Museum in Providence under Marianne Cucchini, who would write grants for public programs, from concerts in the park to film series. I put together a series of exhibitions drawn from the community. I also became involved with and began photographing the Southeast Asians who had recently moved into Providence; because we were neighbors, I could see them walking down the street in their traditional costumes carrying chickens, et al. After graduation, I just kept on working in the museum where I was able to call the poets whom I had admired at Harvard, and say, ‘Look, I got a small stipend for you to come down to this museum and give a poetry reading. Can you do it?’ I got a chance to showcase many of the people whose work I had admired, but I still had that nagging feeling that I wanted to do my own work. I asked myself, ‘what’s my work? What am I good at?" And my father, having just dropped a bundle on an Ivy League education, was asking when I would finally get a real job? Art photography was not a ‘real’ job.

KURAS: I was just taking photographs on my own.

KURAS: The community. I took photographs of people who lived in my neighborhood. I lived in a very bad neighborhood in South Providence, which was near the museum. Providence is probably one of the most ethnically diverse communities I’ve ever lived in. People came from everywhere — especially the refugees. I could witness the juxtaposition of these people who had very recently lived in tribal settings in their traditional countries and who were now living in America. I was trying to figure out how these people were able to mentally cope with their surroundings.

KURAS: Yes. For me, I think for me documentaries can say something about the human condition or human psychology; they can tell a real story in a way that is emotionally effective yet informative. To me, that’s much more interesting than just documenting something.

KURAS: Having set up and overseen the programs in the museum, I burnt out after a year. I received a fellowship to study in the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. Coming from a socially conscious job in the museum, it was a huge shock when I arrived, because unlike RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology), which is a very technically based school, the Visual Studies Workshop was an art school. I was particularly moved by one student’s study of soiled baby diapers. Obviously, everybody was doing more formal studies of light and composition. I couldn’t relate to it at first, being in kind of a culture shock. Then, I began to work in the darkroom, pretty much around the clock, especially at night when I could do my best thinking. They had a great 8x10 enlarger that allowed me to start doing the kind of layering and projections that I had wanted to do in photography. Then, I got a Fullbright grant to go to the film school in Poland, but martial law was declared, so I decided to go to Romania instead. I wanted to put together an exhibition about the germination of socialism using photographs, which were in archives spread around Romania. I did a lot of research when I was in Rochester at the end of my fellowship, packed up my things and went home to New Jersey. I expected my visa to come through within a week, but it didn’t happen when the United States pulled most-favored trade status, and the Romanians closed the door on any cultural exchange.

KURAS: I was waiting for something to change. I built a darkroom in my parents’ basement. One day, after a month-and-a-half, I decided I had to do something. Ironically, that very day my father asked me what was I going to do? I ended up taking a class in Super 8 filmmaking in a loft in Tribeca. We were a small group of beginning filmmakers whom I’ve remained in contact with over the years.

KURAS: A few of them have left filmmaking, but one of them, Paula Heredia, has become a very accomplished editor in New York. Another one has gone through theater and stayed in acting actually, as opposed to making films. At that point I didn’t really know I wanted to shoot. I thought of myself as more of a filmmaker. Soon after that class, the teacher (Fred Taylor) recommended me to help finish editing a documentary. I really didn’t know that much about editing, so I worked as an associate producer on a film, and then started to work as a production assistant on other films. I started working in whatever capacity I could on documentaries in order to get experience.

KURAS: One thing I learned on my first job — if you could call it a ‘job’ (the crew people will all appreciate this one…) I started working as an associate producer on the mentioned documentary film. The director/producer promised to pay me $100 a week. I had expenses, however, like taking the bus into the city, and paying for the subway. I worked like a dog for her for about eight weeks because she needed to get her film done for a certain festival. I worked like a dog. I worked on Christmas Eve. I worked on New Year’s Eve. I worked on New Year’s Day. The agreement was that it would be $100 a week deferred until she finished the film. After eight weeks I finished the film and I went off to seek other employment. To this day she never paid me and I’ll never forget that. I waited for about a month and then I called her. She claimed she didn’t have the money but I knew she did. It taught me a lesson that has stayed with me ever since. I always have remembered how important it is for me to protect my crew; and how important it is for people be upfront and honest about money and to stick to your word. I’m very protective of the crew, because it is my responsibility. They’re my family and I’m responsible for them.

KURAS: I decided I wanted to learn cinematography, so I audited a couple of classes at NYU, and decided I had to actually go out and do it. I convinced someone to take me on as a camera assistant on a small shoot that was being conducted by Yvonne Rainer, a filmmaker who makes art films. I was a great admirer of her work, and I still am. The cameraman, Burleigh Wartes, who was a friend, taught me how to load the camera and how to thread film. That’s how I started as an assistant. People were very willing and very giving. From that point on I worked as a camera assistant on documentaries. After doing that for a number of years, I realized I wanted to learn how to light. I started working as an electrician, because I figured that in order to learn how to light, you had to do it. New York was developing a number of independent films at the time and gave me opportunities to work non-union in order to gain some experience.

KURAS: A cinematographer who was shooting Indie films, Frank Prinzi, was very helpful and very open to being somewhat of a teacher. I began on his crew as a fourth electrician. I actually started shooting in 1987. I shot a documentary video in El Salvador in the middle of the war. Fortunately, I knew how to use a video camera because I had assisted on a few video shoots yet I had to follow my instincts about what I thought was visually important to the story. There was a war going on and there were a number of places where we got shot at and had run-ins with the army because the producer was quite bold. I felt a lot of empathy for the people who lived there, which fueled my passion and sensibility to try and make the film good… to make it say something.

KURAS: A producer, originally from Spain, found out about the documentary from one of the people in that original Super 8 class, who recommended me for the job. I remember sitting at a kitchen table in Silverlake (near Los Angeles) with the producer/director. He basically said to me, you haven’t really shot anything. I said, yes that’s true, but I know this camera, these are my photographs, and I really want to do this. Somehow, I managed to convince him to take a chance on me. It was a very harrowing experience, but that naturally led to the next project, which I was going to do with a friend who shared my interest in Southeast Asia. Ellen Bruno was considering doing a thesis film there. She had long-term experience in Southeast Asia as a relief worker and as a social worker. I said to her, why don’t you go to Cambodia? If anybody can get into that country, you can. Now this was in 1987, and at that point no film crews, and very few people, had been admitted into that country. She got permission, and asked if I could recommend someone to shoot it. Well, then circumstances happened and the guy I recommended ended up not being able to go, so I told Ellen I wanted to shoot her film.

KURAS: She said, ‘but you’ve never shot a whole documentary on film’. I said, I know, but I really know these people and I know the sensibility of the place. I’d really like to try it. I know I’m right for the job. She said, ‘you don’t have a camera,’ which was true. I didn’t have a camera at the time. The next day I called up everybody I knew to try to find a used Aaton or ARRI camera. A few days later I happened to meet an equipment broker, who had a brand new ARRI SR2. The third magazine had never even been opened. So I called my parents and everybody I knew, and borrowed money to buy this camera. Two weeks later there I was, landing in Cambodia on a prop plane piloted by some Soviet guy with crooked aviator glasses. I walked into the little cinder block building at the airport with much tradition with much trepidation. After all, I hardly understood how to read a light meter, having had little formal technical training. I just hoped I didn’t screw up, because the material we were shooting was so important and that’s what I really focused on — the material we needed to get. I really learned a lot from of the mistakes I made, such as when I could handheld on a long lens and when I couldn’t.

KURAS: The film Samsara: Death and Rebirth in Cambodia didn’t emerge until three years later. It was a half-hour film that people describe as visually very poetic. After we came back from Cambodia, I basically continued looking for projects to shoot. I shot a lot of videos with subjects like infant mortality, children at work and similar topics. Shooting three-quarter (3/4) inch video was the norm for documentaries at that point. I had a number of really wonderful producers and directors, who believed in me and who gave me the chance to shoot. One of those people was Pat Mitchell, who is now an exec at PBS. She was very influential in helping me to develop my skills as a cinematographer, because we would go out and shoot for hours and hours and a lot of it would be handheld. I was forced to learn how to think on my feet. I had to learn how to think about different ways of lighting without having a lot of time.

KURAS: One of the things I was able to rely upon was some of the experience I had with lighting on dramatic pieces, especially with Frank Prinzi. I learned a lot about ways to light and tricks in lighting, which carried over into the documentary world. I used Japanese lanterns from the start because it was a great way to get great soft quick lighting. You just spring clamp it to the ceiling and you can shoot. That’s basically what the name of the game was. You walked into a room and assessed what the essence of the scene was. I didn’t have to sit there and ruminate about it. What’s the point of the scene and how can we light it the most efficient and best way? Because, as we all know, we had to make our days, and that was the biggest challenge. How do you make all the pages in a day and make it look the way you want it to look?

KURAS: It won about 25 international awards, including the Kodak Focus Award and the Student Academy Award. It was recognized all over the world.

KURAS: No. Back in 1992, cable wasn’t as prevalent as it is today, and people didn’t look at documentaries in the same way they do now. My huge break came in 1992 when Swoon showed at Sundance. It was originally supposed to be a 40-minute art film based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case. Tom Kalin, the director, had written a very oblique script. We basically only had 10 days to shoot a 40-minute piece with about one-and-a-half weeks of prep time. We ended up making the film in 16 mm black and white format, with my ARRI SR2 camera with two zoom lenses. I had Cook 9:50 mm and Zeiss 10:100 mm zooms. We didn’t even have enough money for a regular dolly. We had a doorway dolly with boogie wheels. We couldn’t boom at all. After we shot for 10 days on practically no money, the director started editing. That’s when he realized that it was a movie. He got an NEA grant and, so we got some money to shoot for another four days. Shooting a dramatic film was a completely new experience.

KURAS: It was important for me to go through the script scene by scene with the director, so I could see what was in his mind. I wanted to know what he thought each scene said, who the most important character or characters were, and how he wanted them to move through the scene. We looked at photographs and spoke about movies. I decided to mainly shoot with Tri-X film and experimented with red and yellow filters to get kind of a stark look. My relationship with Tom and the material propelled me forward to try to realize what was there on the page, in his head and in my own imagination. When Swoon was shown at the Sundance Film Festival, I hadn’t even the chance to time the film. It was a big shock when Swoon won.

KURAS: I did not expect it at all. In fact, I wasn’t able to get a ticket to go to the awards ceremony, yet we managed to sneak in. I was sitting in the back with Tom and the rest of the Swoon gang when they called my name. Later, at the awards party, agents deluged me. My first encounter with agents. Everyone wanted to represent me yet I didn’t really understand how to navigate in that world at all. During the next two years, much to the frustration of my agent, I kept doing movies that I believed in, which often didn’t have any money.

KURAS: I wanted to work with people who had interesting ideas and who were trying different things with film. I’ve always stuck to the belief that if I got involved with films I believed in, it would be a good experience. I put my heart and soul into my films. It’s kind of like going into the abyss. I forget everything else, and it becomes all about the work and your relationship with the director and the rest of the crew. It’s six months of your life and then you emerge on the other side and you have to suddenly deal with the consequences of being oblivious to everything around you but the movie. That’s why this industry is so difficult on our personal lives.

KURAS: I joined the Guild when I was doing a commercial campaign with Richard Avedon for Calvin Klein about five years ago. At that time, I was mainly shooting independent films in New York. They were very low budget, under $3 million. I was really interested in being a member because for so many years I had supported and protected my crew. It was getting to the point where I needed some help because at that point I was having the crew deals written into my contract before I would sign any sort of deal. I would try to protect them as much as possible, and I was constantly fighting for better rates for them. I wanted to make sure that the overtime deals and any sort of deferred payment deal would be honored. In the non-union independent world it’s very, very difficult for people to defend themselves because they don’t have a body of people to look after them. It’s a catch 22 however, because people have to have experience to join the guild, so where do they get it? Non-union independent projects. I felt I was responsible as a leader, as a DP, because if I didn’t fight for them nobody would, and it was very hard for them to fight for themselves. Joining the Guild was a way of providing some protection for my crew.

KURAS: It was also about five years ago. I knew the director through other projects; art film projects basically. He asked if I would do a Chevy spot for him. I didn’t have a commercial reel, but he had so much clout with the agency that the client said okay. After that, he got me on a Pepsi spot, which was a big breakthrough for me.

KURAS: Commercials are a way for me to experiment in short form and be able to test new equipment and camera moves… how to tell a story in 15 seconds or 30 seconds. I also like it because it enables me to work with a lot of different people in a short amount of time. I usually try to work on commercials that I find creatively interesting and challenging.

KURAS: I got a call from a young director about shooting The Mod Squad for MGM. It was a difficult picture because the studio was very concerned about the story and how it was going to be filmed, considering the fact that it was based on a former TV show that everybody knew about. I wanted to bring a more modern look to it, because it wasn’t supposed to be a period film. It was supposed to be a ‘90s version of The Mod Squad. I used a lot of different techniques from commercials and independent films. There were a couple of situations where I wanted to use bleach bypass, and to their credit the studio execs overseeing the film agreed. But when we were doing certain scenes, where I was overexposing the key light by five stops and allowing the background to go three stops under … making it look more like a commercial… they couldn’t understand why we were doing it that way.

KURAS: It can be very difficult. There’s a lot more constraints about what you can do creatively on studio pictures. Usually, you have to try to find some sort of middle ground, and sometimes that can be really difficult, because they have an idea about how they want to market their movie. If your idea doesn’t fit into their marketing plans, it’s really difficult to make it happen the way you want it to happen. You hear stories from filmmakers who made films in formerly communist Eastern Europe where they would sometimes wait two weeks for the perfect light for the perfect shot. That is not a reality here.

KURAS: I met Spike through my former agent. She had been talking to Spike about me for a while. I shot a short with him for HBO’s Subway Stories. We did a couple commercials and then we did 4 Little Girls, a documentary about the church bombing in Birmingham during the 1960s. It was a switch for me to go back to doing a long-form documentary because I hadn’t really shot one for a while. It was one of those situations where I thought, okay, this is a privilege for me to be able to work on this film, because at the time there were a lot of church burnings going on in the South… which I just thought was unbelievable in the late ‘90s. When Spike brought up the idea of doing the 4 Little Girls, I thought it would be a way that I could visually say something and bring some sort of emotional quality to the images to move people to know about the situation and how wrong it was.

KURAS: They take an enormous amount of time and energy, so I think I will only do certain documentaries. I’ve shot six feature films in the past three years, and I’ve done commercials consistently in-between all of those movies. It’s interesting that people still remember me from my documentary days.

KURAS: Spike really wanted to shoot with the mini-DV format, because he wanted the flexibility of shooting handheld and the kind of compactness that mini-DV affords. He also liked the idea that you could use many cameras and get a lot of coverage in one or two set-ups, which of course makes lighting extremely difficult for the cinematographer. It was my first video movie, and I must admit I wasn’t really thrilled when I heard that Spike was considering shooting on tape. But he is the kind of person who is very interested in new technology. He is always trying different film stocks and ways of shooting. He’s very interested in the medium as a territory to explore. When he was trying to get Bamboozled off the ground, because it got pushed a couple of months, one night he called me up and he said, ‘so, how do you feel about shooting on tape?’ I said that I don’t want to shoot on tape. Remember, for me, shooting on film was a huge step forward in my career. When I was able to just shoot on film, I felt like I had arrived. And now, here I was being confronted with shooting tape again. I wasn’t really wild about that. But I was aware of what’s happening in the world of technology, and I was aware that video is enabling us to do new things with imagery. At the time, I hadn’t done a lot of research into the mini-DV format. I knew about HD and I knew they were developing a 24P camera, but I didn’t really know anything about mini-DV; and I really wasn’t interested in it. I basically had about one week to educate myself about every mini-DV camera that was made and to try and figure out what I needed because we had very little prep time. We decided on the VX1000 simply because it felt a little bit more textural than video-like. I felt like it was a little bit more akin to Super 8; but it didn’t come without its problems, including focusing and resolution. I mean the lenses fall apart on wider angles, and unfortunately so, because Spike really likes wide-angle shots. When you blow those wide-angle shots up onto the screen, the resolution is not there. So, there were a lot of things that I was not happy about in using the mini-DV medium. There were many times when I hardly could light at all, and that was very difficult.

KURAS: No. I was still very much the cinematographer on the set. When you have a lot of different cameras rolling at the same time, you have to keep track of all the different shots, whether they’re lockoffs and sometimes in the middle of a lockoff shot, you see something that goes awry and you can’t change it because you can’t get to the camera. I think that mini-DV affords a democracy of filmmaking so to speak, because it allows people who wouldn’t normally make films the possibility of trying it out; but I think people who are filmmakers will distinguish themselves in how they tell their stories and how they put them together. For a lot of cinematographers, young and old, it’s a very insecure world right now in the sense that we don’t know what the next generation is going to bring. We have to keep up with the technology in order to be competitive.

KURAS: I think cinematography will have a better future than most people expect. When you think about what makes the magic happen in movies, a lot of it has to do with the look of the film. I think anybody who is just pointing and shooting will find it hard to create that magic. It takes experience and understanding and knowledge to think about things that don’t have anything to do with pointing and shooting…like blocking and moving the camera so that the image says something more than just documenting the action. Making a film requires a lot more than just following a certain storyline, the words on the page and how the actors say their lines. A lot of it has to do with the visual nuances and the environment that’s created in the film. I’d tell the students they need the desire to try new things knowing that mistakes are going to happen. Sometimes a mistake will be the best part of a film. You can’t be afraid to try different things.

KURAS: Friends who aren’t in the industry say, ‘You work all the time,’ but they don’t understand that for me, to shoot is a part of my psyche and the people are part of my family.

KURAS: I consider myself a cinematographer who is a filmmaker. A cinematographer has to take all elements of the story into consideration when you create images. It’s about making a composite picture in the service of the story, so you have to constantly think about how you are going to help tell the story with images.

KURAS: The audience is changing because we are in an age, where a large part of them grew up with MTV and VH1. They have a new way of looking at images.