A Conversation with Stephen Lighthill, ASC

By Bob Fisher

Stephen Lighthill, ASC, was born in Massachusetts and raised in Connecticut. He studied journalism, and segued into filmmaking at Boston University. Lighthill traveled to San Francisco with a friend intending to pick up an award for a student film. He found work on local news film and documentary crews and pretty soon, Lighthill was shooting film as freelancer for CBS News and 60 Minutes. He also helped organize a collective, which raised funds for and producedSons and Daughters, a two-hour theatrical documentary about the anti-war movement in the San Francisco Bay area. Much of that footage became the heart and soul of Berkeley in the 60s, a theatrical documentary lensed by Lighthill that earned an Oscar nomination in 1990.

Lighthill earned his first narrative credit in 1975 for Over- Under, Sideways- Down. It was for a public television program that was the forerunner to American Playhouse. By the late 1980s, Lighthill was focusing on narrative filmmaking. HBO gave him his first big break with an anthology series called VietnamWar Story in 1988. His subsequent narrative credits include episodic series Earth 2, Nash Bridges, and The Huntress. His features and telefilms include:  Break Of Dawn, Spirit of 76, Hot Summer Winds, Shimmer, Open Season, Stranger in My House, The Perfect Daughter, Kidnapped In Paradise, and The Crying Child. Lighthill is a member of the National Executive Board of ICG, representing directors of photography.

Following are extracts of a conversation:

ICG: Let’s begin with your background. Where are you from?

LIGHTHILL: I was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. My dad was an actor turned beer wholesaler. Lighthill was actually his stage name. His parents were German of Jewish-Catholic descent. He was in vaudeville in New York City, and some stage manager told him that Lichtenberg was not a great name for an actor. He consulted a numerologist and came up with this name that is supposed to be lucky. I’ve resisted the urge to go back to my roots and adopt my grandparents’ name.

ICG: Were you raised in Massachusetts?

LIGHTHILL: I actually grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. My dad was a salesman for the Joseph Schlitz Brewery before he became a beer wholesaler. My mom worked in the business with him. I spent my summer vacations until I was 18 working in the warehouse moving beer cases around. When I was 18, I was sent out to put up point-of-sale advertising. I hung neon signs and put up point-of-sale displays.

ICG: Were you photography hobbyist?

LIGHTHILL: I kind of picked up photography in college, only because I was a car maniac. I used to detail and clean up and hot-rod old Studebakers. I took up photography so I could take pictures of my Studebakers. In those days, I thought I was a good writer, and I think I was probably okay. I enrolled at the Boston University Graduate School of Journalism after majoring in business education in undergraduate school.

ICG: Where did you go to undergraduate school?

LIGHTHILL: Babson Institute in Wellesley, Mass. I was on a track to take over dad’s wholesale beer business, which if I had done, I’d be a millionaire today because he sold it for a lot of money, but that’s another story.

ICG: Why did you decide on journalism school?

LIGHTHILL: I really liked writing. In my undergraduate days, I wrote for the school newspaper. I got a teaching fellowship in economics at Boston University, and that enabled me to take required courses in journalism. It was very frustrating, because I could only do three courses a semester, so I went across the river to Harvard, which had a very good night school. I took writing courses and figured out that I didn’t care for the solitary experience of being in a room alone with a typewriter. All my good friends at Boston University were filmmakers, and as part of my journalism education, I had to take a still photography course. It was taught by an ex-Marine, combat photographer, who started everybody out with 4x5 Speed Graphic camera. You took one picture at a time, and you processed and printed it. He required you to explain everything you did and everything that was right or wrong about that picture. The Speed Graphic camera was a great tool for teaching. I fell in love with photography and then very quickly fell in love with filmmaking.

ICG: Did you make films at Boston University?

LIGHTHILL: I only made one film. They had a Friday night film series, where they showed interesting documentaries. I remember seeing I Am A Camera. It was a Russian film by Ziga Vertov about a cameraman, and I thought, ‘I can do that.’ I was working at a small newspaper in Connecticut during the summer, and all the reporters seemed to be alcoholics. That made an impression and I didn’t want to work on a small daily newspaper. I had seen Primary, the Richard Leacock documentary about John Kennedy campaigning in West Virginia, I remember thinking that was the type of filmmaking I wanted to do.

ICG: How did you get started?

LIGHTHILL: I had made one short film at Boston University, and it won a prize at a student film festival at San Francisco State. Around that time, I completed a six-month tour in the National Guard, and decided to take a trip around the country. I drove across the country with a friend who was starting a job as an assistant editor with David Wolper. We decided to go to San Francisco, so I could pick up the award I had won for my student film. I was staying with relatives in Mill Valley. I remember driving across the Golden Gate Bridge with the fog underneath the deck of the bridge and thinking this is a beautiful city. I thanked the three judges who had given me that student award and told them I was looking for a job. One was a program manager at KPIX in San Francisco. He gave me a little job.

ICG: Doing what?

LIGHTHILL: They had this Sunday morning talk show, which was kind of a half-hearted attempt at providing public affairs content for local television. They wanted a few minutes of film as a lead-in for each program. One producer said, why not take the whole budget and make one film on one subject and produce one Sunday morning show on film? We produced a show on a welfare rights organization in Oakland. The Oakland welfare department was sending welfare recipients out to work in the fields as farm laborersfor a few dollars a day. Our film aired on a Sunday morning, and on Monday morning we were fired.

ICG: So, your first job lasted for one film. What did you do next?

LIGHTHILL: I started freelancing. I worked periodically as a camera assistant, but there weren’t too many people to assist in San Francisco. I worked with Vern Carlson and Ken Allen, and then I started picking up freelance work as a newsfilm editor. Around 1965, I started working on a low-budget feature. That was around the time the war in Vietnam was heating up. We abandoned the feature project and formed a collective to begin working on a film about the anti-war movement in the Bay area. It was called Sons and Daughters. I ended up being the cinematographer and editor. I was also the treasurer of American Documentary Films, the collective that produced the film.

ICG: What did you actually film?

LIGHTHILL: We were shooting 16 mm black and white film of protests in the Bay area. We did a lot of illustrative footage. We shot at Fort Ord while Gis were being trained. We had this extraordinary footage of guys getting their first Army haircut and nametags, and eventually doing bayonet training. We alsofilmed missiles being built. We were able to get into the Oakland Army terminal and film Jeeps and tanks being loaded onto ships. They lifted them up on cranes, and you could see it from the Bay Bridge. We could see that there was a war going on, and nobody was really paying attention. It was all around you. The irony was that there was a lot of footage that military photographers had shot that you could purchase. We had footage of guys in combat operations and wounded civilians and GIs setting huts on fire, and it was all bought from the government.

ICG: What happened after you completed Sons and Daughters?

LIGHTHILL: It was released in 1966. We made a 35 mm blow-up, which ran in a theater in San Francisco for a month. We also won a prize at a film festival in East Germany. I was 27 years old and everything seemed possible, but I was very disenchanted with being on the left and preaching to the converted. Looking back, Sons and Daughters was way more ambitious than it should have been. It ended up being almost a two-hour film.

ICG: How did you follow that act?

LIGHTHILL: I didn’t want to just make films that a minority of people in the country would see. I really wanted to be a working cameraperson. I started freelancing as a newsreel cameraman and doing vacation relief at the local news stations. In 1967, some of my footage from a little riot in the Haight Ashbury was picked up by CBS network news, and John Harris, who ran the Los Angeles bureau called to ask who I was. I told him what I was doing, and he told me to get a camera and he’d keep me going. He was frustrated because a lot of the TV news camermen at the time came out of newsreels. They had these big sound cameras and little Bell & Howells. If you wanted sound on film of a riot, they would rent a room at a hotel near the riot, and shoot out of a window on the second floor. My sound camera was a converted Auricon, which was very common at that time. I had a really wide angle, zooms, 9.5 to 95 mm. Later on, I modified the camera, so I could put it up on my shoulder and use a folding eyepiece. It was a predecessor of the CP16 camera, which became the standard for TV news and documentaries. It had a DC motor and I could use it with a battery belt, so I could run with it and shoot from inside a moving crowd.

ICG: How did it work out with CBS?

LIGHTHILL: I was popular with CBS because I was on the ground rather than shooting through a second story window, and I could go anywhere. I had my wide-angle Angenieux zoom, so I could be right in close to people.

ICG: You were freelance all the time?

LIGHTHILL: Yes, I was always freelancing. I never had a staff job. I worked with TV stations in San Francisco for about a year, or maybe a little more, and then CBS provided all my employment. I became a full-time stringer for them. I probably spent more time on the Berkeley campus shooting film than most students spent studying.

ICG: Didn’t you also shoot film for 60 Minutes?

LIGHTHILL: I did. I was one of the first 60 Minutes freelance cameramen. I shot a lot of the early stuff with Mike Wallace, and I actually shot Candice Bergen’s test as a 60 Minutes correspondent before Lesley Stahl came along. They were looking for a woman correspondent, and they decided to try out Candice. She had no experience. The story we covered was about the Berkeley City Council. She was really out of her element, but she was wonderful and easy to work with. My last big story for CBS was the Patty Hearst kidnapping. That was when they introduced portable electronic cameras. It was one guy with a camera and another with a recorder that was staggeringly heavy. This guy would move a few feet from the truck and just kind of stop. I’d see them get out of the truck, and realize I wasn’t going to want to work with such preposterous video gear. I had spent so much time making my news gear light weight so that I could do cinema verite shooting, that I just had no energy for starting all over again with video. The whole idea of the networks was to get rid of film processing at any cost, including the cost to camera people’s bodies.

It was sad in a way, because we were just getting some good newsreel filmstocks, and the processing was very quick. Electronic cameras were great for news, because you could see it now. It was logical, but we lost a lot, giving up those great optics and handheld cameras.

ICG: It also seemed to me that news became much less introspective?

LIGHTHILL: Yes, when being fast is everything, there’s always something lost. I’ll never forget the first editor who talked to me about electronic editing. He didn’t miss looking for the out-takes and splicing. He missed rewinding because that was his think time. There was no longer any time to think about what he was doing. He’d put in a time code and the take came up. It was the same thing with shooting news. It was a different culture.

ICG: You got into the Guild relatively early in your career.

LIGHTHILL: I got in as an assistant in 1967 when I was working on local news and documentaries in the public affairs departments of local stations. I remember getting up at a meeting and asking a question, and Herb Aller – who was the business agent – told me to shut up, work and pay my dues. When I got my card as a news cameraman and started shooting for CBS, I was able to hire my own assistants for each job. The CBS contract said you couldn't discriminate based on union membership, so it was an open shop. I could hire whomever I wanted. One of my friends told me about this woman who had been working as an assistant who wanted to get into the union. Her name was Geraldine Kudaka. She was a Japanese-American, who was raised in Hawaii, and a good worker. I knew it would be controversial, because there were no women working on crews, not even in sound. I waited until I got a 10 day job out of town and hired her. Noboby knew anything about it. That got her 10 days, and she needed 30 to be brought in. After that, I got her a day here and a day there doing news assignments until I got a call from somebody in employee relations in CBS who asked me who G. Kudaka was. I told him and he said, great. There was a consent decree by the justice department requiring the studios and networks to do a better job of diversifying. They kept track of who was hired and what race and gender they were. What happened was that the business agent for Local 659, Jerry Smith leaned on CBS, and I was told to stop using Geraldine. I called the union and spoke with Gerald Smith, the business agent who denied that they were leaning on CBS. He said I could hire whomever I wanted. I secretly tape-recorded that conversation. But, despite what he said, the union was still pressuring my contact at CBS, so I had to tell Geraldine I couldn’t hire her anymore. She filed a Fair Employment Practices suit and I became persona non grata after they took my deposition. She won her case very quickly. She got a year's back wages and got into the Guild as an assistant. There was a similar situation with a still photographer in Los Angeles who had worked for NBC. She filed a suit and they found out about Geraldine's case and wanted me to testify to prove there was a patternofdiscrimination behavior. They subpoenaed me. I was in Los Angeles shooting on a news assignment, and I thought I could just slip into the courtroom, do my testimony and get out quietly. I didn't know that the Daniel Ellsberg – the person who leaked the Pentagon papers to the New York Times – trial was going on right down the hall. All of these newscrew guys came in and watched me testify. It was clear that the Guild was doing all it could to keep women and anybody who wasn't a brother, son, cousin, or nephew of a member on the outside. Fortunately, I had that recording of my conversation with the union business agent. After my testimony, I handed the tape to the attorney for this woman still photographer. The case actually went to the Supreme Court.

ICG: What did you do next?

LIGHTHILL: I had always had parallel careers in non-fiction and fiction. I was shooting news, and assisting on features. One of my first narrative film jobs was working on Bullitt on background footage, following what was happening behind-the-scenes. During the early ‘70s, I had joined with several other people, including Rob Neilson, who’s still making films in San Francisco; Judy Irola (ASC) who’s at USC now; and Steve Wax, who nowhas a company Chelsea Pictures, doing commercials. We started a film collective called Cine Manifest in 1971to make interesting, low-budget features. In 1975, I stopped shooting news and I shot my first fiction feature, Over- Under, Sideways- Down. It was for a public television program that was the forerunner to American Playhouse. That experience taught me I didn’t feel ready to the challenge of being a full-fledged fiction DP.

ICG: Can you be more specific?

LIGHTHILL: I realized I wasn’t experienced enough at lighting and understanding what all the crewmembers did. I also felt that I had more work to do in documentaries. I had just done news or 60 Minutes stories. I really wanted to do long-form documentary work, and so for the next 10 years that’s what I did, along with an occasional fiction film. I began working on Berkeley in the ‘60s starting in 1980. That film earned an Academy Award nomination in 1991. Looking back, I did something that’s sort of inconceivable today. I made a decent living, kept a wife and kid afloat, bought a camera package and shot documentaries that were government-funded films. They were either NEA or NEH grants and usually on historical subjects and social issues. I shot a film about the history of the Wobblies. I also shot Seeing Red, the history of the Communist Party during the 1930s. It also received an Oscar nomination. And, shooting those historical documentaries was my real graduate school.

ICG: What are some of the other things you learned?

LIGHTHILL: We started shooting color negative, and I learned how to light faces. I kept fussing around with lighting equipment and trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t. During interviews, I spent a lot of time looking at my mistakes, and learning what not to do the next time. Someone would move this way or that and the lighting suddenly looked horrible. Today, you just go buy a Chimera and put it next to the camera, but we were inventing our own lighting things in 1975. We experimented with umbrella lights. I picked that up from Haskell Wexler (ASC).

ICG: How did that happen?

LIGHTHILL: I was a camera assistant in 1969 on George Lucas’s first major feature film, THX 1138, which Francis Ford Coppola produced. I was the focus puller. They had hired two local cameramen, Al Kihn and Dave Myers, but Lucas alsobrought Haskell in as a consultant, which he did on American Graffiit, as well. That is how I got to meet and talk to him.

ICG: What are some of your other memories from that period?

LIGHTHILL: I was one of the cameramen on Gimme Me Shelter. That was about 30 years ago. I was on the stage with the Rolling Stones the whole time while Albert and David Maysles were shooting out in the crowd. I basically had my news camera. Everybody else had an Éclair NPR. I was using my converted Auricon with a small brace that rested on my stomach. It was an amazing experience. I remember a shot I made of Mick Jagger on the stage singing. I had him out of focus, because right over his shoulder there was a guy facing the camera, freaking out on acid, and making these enormous grimaces. His hands were curled up like claws. He was there for about a minute until finally somebody grabbed him and threw him off the stage. For me, that shot summarized the whole event.

ICG: Didn’t you also work on Running Fence?

LIGHTHILL: I filmed the whole lead up to that event for the Maysles, including the hearings where he got permission to build the fence across two counties, and also hearings with the California Coastal Commission. I spent more than a year doing that on and off, maybe once every month, and, after the hearings we shot the building of the 18-mile white fence in cinema verite style,aswell. I just aboutwore a camera for over 20 years, everything was handheld. I got my education looking through the lens, and that’s been a big influence. I remember a day when I was shooting a demonstration when my light meter got smashed. I calculated my exposure for the rest of the day by how the ground glass looked. That’s how I learned I didn’t need my light meter. I think there was one shot out of the entire day where the producer said, ‘This is a little dark, but it’s useable.’

That flying by the seat of your pants experience is invaluable, and you get a sense of how the real world looks. Everybody grows up with lights. There are lights in your house and lights where you work and lights at school. It’s kind of burned into you, how light works in most situations and it is sort of like playing billiards. You know if you hit the ball here, it’s going to go over there. Lighting works like that. The thing about learning lighting and film making from a documentary perspective is that you know what the world looks like, because you’ve been in offices and homes all over the world, and that’s invaluable when you are recreating reality for a fiction film, and even when you decide to deviate from reality. One of my pet peeves is that we don’t have an institution in this country that educates directors and cinematographers the way the BBC does. You come through the BBC as a director or cinematographer, and you’ve done everything, soap operas, documentaries, and teleplays. You’re ready for anything.

ICG: Did you work on other documentaries that influenced you?

LIGHTHILL: In the summer of 1980, right after I did Taking Back Detroit, I worked on Occupied Palestine.” It was with an independent producer who’s not in the business anymore. He had an idea for a story about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We were there for about a month. It was pretty quiet, but we were getting guns pointed at us by settlers and police, who were doing things like putting their hands in front of the lens. There was a little bit of rock throwing. We were doing interviews and so on. The film was produced and was ostensibly headed for public television, but it was very partisan and was never aired. In 1980, nobody even used the word Palestine. It was the West Bank. The film basically said, these people used to live in these villages and they were thrown out, and now Isralis live thereand that’s why there’s a conflict. Nobody wanted to hear that. There was a lot of controversy, and more heat that light. That was a disappointment too, but it was a good, honest film.

ICG: How did you get to do Berkeley in the ‘60s?

LIGHTHILL: In 1980, I was working on a film that I actually produced and directed. It was called Taking Back Detroit. I had a grant from public television. I had a Steenbeck in my garage and I was editing away on this film. It was the first time in my life I knew what I was going to be doing for a year, though I took a few freelance jobs along the way. I was in the middle of editing when this guy called and said his name was Mark Kitchell. He had heard that I had a lot of footage from Berkeley in the 1960s, because of the film Sons and Daughters. I told him I was in the middle of making a film, and asked him to come back in a year. I had the Berkley film archived in my garage. Mark offered to look at my film and catalogue it. He was just starting out and hadn’t even written a proposal yet. We agreed. Every week, some of my footage came back in a can with a number on it and a description on a piece of paper. He got some funding finally and was able to start on and off production.  It took Mark 10 years to finish Berkeley in the ‘60s. It contains film of mine from three periods. There is anti-war footage I shot in the mid-1960s; footage that I shot for CBS News that Mark bought from their archive, and the interviews we did 25-years-later which were shot in a bizarre, low-budget, front-projection set-up that I never want to do again. Mark wanted to shoot everybody in his or her kitchens or living rooms. I came up with the idea of shooting in a studio using photomurals of important events in the ‘60s as backgrounds. The photomurals were going to be too expensive, so Mark got someone who made this front projection rig that was adjustable. We projected transparencies onto a ScotchGuard screen behind the person being interviewed.

ICG: The film certainly got a lot of attention.

LIGHTHILL: It won the audience award at Sundance and an Academy Award nomination. I think A&E has the TV rights, and they still show it every year or two.

ICG: Did the Oscar nomination change your life or your career?

LIGHTHILL: Not really. The film that changed my life was a low-budget feature called Break of Dawn, directed by Isaac Artenstein.  We shot in San Diego and it ended up on American Playhouse. It was about the first Spanish-speaking radio personality in Los Angeles. His name was Pedro Gonzalez, and the story was set in the 1930s. It was shown at Sundance. An executive from HBO saw it and as she was walking out of the theater shebumped into a line producer who knew me. That led to me shooting Vietnam War Story for HBO. There were 12 episodes. I ended up shooting nine of them. It was an anthology series. Each show was a half an hour, and it was shot on location. Each had a different screenwriter, cast and story director. It got me an agent in Los Angeles and a cable ACE nomination.

ICG: Did that experience put you firmly on the narrative film track?

LIGHTHILL: I was already headed in that direction. I had done a couple of other low-budget features, including Break of Dawn, and lots short films. I was pretty frustrated with the documentary world. I was shooting documentaries for 20 years, and I was still working with entry-level directors and producers who typically took five years to finish their projects. I was ready to move on, though I didn’t want to admit it because I still loved documentaries. We used to say, find a documentary filmmaker and you’ll find a trust fund, because there’s no other means of support. There used to be NBC White Paper and CBS Reports, but the networks don’t seem interested in that quality of work anymore, and that’s a tragedy. Actually, it’s way beyond it. It’s an atrocity. Lots of great people came out of CBS Reports and those organizations. Documentaries are not being supported, not even by CNN.

ICG: So, you decided to focus on narrative film?

LIGHTHILL: I moved to Los Angeles, and took a job at USC teaching in the fall of ’93. Three weeks later I was shooting the feature Open Seasonin Toronto. It was a satire about television. In ’94, I finally completed the spring semester at USC teaching, and I got a call from a producer who was preparing to shoot Earth II, a sci-fi TV series. It was a staggeringly difficult experience. We shot each episode in seven days, and in the middle of the week, I would be talking to the next director about his script. I had to get used to the idea that my keys had to do my scouting. I was living in L.A., but we were shooting in Santa Fe. We would work late Friday night. I would get up at 3 or 4 on Saturday morning, drive to Albuquerque, get on a plane and fly to L.A. I would get there for in time for a nine o’clock start for a color correction session. I’d work as fast as I could, go home, have Saturday dinner and Sunday breakfast with my wife and thenget back on a plane arrive in Santa Fe in the evening in time to see the show aired, go to sleep and start all over again on Monday.

ICG: How did you deal with it?

LIGHTHILL: I developed some shortcuts. Once we got the color-correction going, I set up a Beta deck on the cameratruck, and started reviewing tapes rather than going to L.A. I started recording mini-cassettes during the day with instructions for color correction. I learned that you really need great communication with the person doing the color correction of your dailies. The first seven episodes were mainly shot in the wilderness. We had no sets except for little pup tents. If it was raining, we’d put the pup tents inside the mess tent. We were outside day and night, and the winter was coming. It was snowing when the carpenters started working around the clock building interior sets.

ICG: The show had kind of an un-earthly look.

LIGHTHILL: We were shooting in New Mexico and Kodak had just introduced a lower contrast film similar to 5277, I think it was called 5287. It was a medium speed film with very low contrast. I basically underexposed it a little without correcting for daylight very much. The alien world had a kind of slightly blue, very grainy, flat look.

ICG: Weren’t there a lot of visual effects on that show?

LIGHTHILL: There was a fair amount of effects, but those were the days when CGI was just getting started, so we did most of them in the camera with lighting, and they used CGI to clean up any little problems. It was a tremendous amount of fun.

ICG: Your next TV series, Nash Bridges, was a polar opposite.

LIGHTHILL: The wonderful thing was that Nash Bridges was shot in San Francisco. I knew everybody in town. When the mayor showed up on set, he said hello to me before he said hello to Don Johnson. I had worked on Willy Brown’s campaign when he was running for the Assembly in the ‘60s. I have tripod marks in just about every corner of that city. In our first meeting, I told Don Johnson that I was never going to blow out a window on interiors, so the audience could always see the city.

ICG: A cinematographer has to be different things to different people.

LIGHTHILL: It’s not all that different than other people’s lives. When I was shooting documentary films, I remember saying to myself, here I am, and I’ve got a hand truck and a Ford van with a lot of cases in it. I’m just like my father delivering beer. I’m half teamster and half a cinematographer. When my dad was a beer wholesaler, he had to sell his ideas to the brewers. It’s the same with a cinematographer. You have to sell your ideas and bring a lot of people to your vision, most importantly, the line producer, who’s going to pay. He’s got to believe you really need an 18K, so you have to earn his trust by being honest and careful about how you spend his money. Cinematography is not just about ordering equipment and knowing what a 12K does versus an 18K, or knowing when and how to use a Jib arm. You have to know something about everybody’s job, because all of your decisions are influenced by other people’s decisions. You have to know everyone and everything justlike the manager of a small business.

ICG: The students who follow these chats are going to want to know if you think it is better for them to come out of school shooting or to spend time on camera crews?

LIGHTHILL: I was sort of a hybrid, because when I was shooting news in San Francisco, I did a certain amount of assisting. In some ways, things haven’t changed. All my assistants on  The Huntress, a series I shot during the past two years, made a film this year — everyone of them. If you are working as a second assistant, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be a cinematographer on the weekend for your friends or your peers. One of the good things about the crew system is finding mentors. That’s something I never had.

ICG: Are there people whose work you’ve followed?

LIGHTHILL: Sure, Haskell Wexler probably foremost, because he came out of smaller films the way I did. I was shooting naturalistically lit interviews, and he was shooting naturalistically lit features. I was following the kind of lighting he was doing.

ICG: Who else?

LIGHTHILL: Gordon Willis (ASC). I just love the way his films look; I love the simplicity of his lighting, especially the Godfather films, and his concentration on composition that is appropriate for the story… he’s been so influential.

ICG: How do you keep pace with advances in technology?

LIGHTHILL: I read and study just likes my students, I attend seminars and demonstrations of equipment at the ICG or the ASC.I’m learning PhotoShop, and I’m shooting digital still pictures. As always,I don’t go anywhere without a still camera. My  AFI class in intermediate/ beginning cinematography this year, starts off with still cameras. I believe that learning the fundamentals of photography is crucial for understanding all kinds of image making. If you are talking about digital cameras, I’ve been shooting video since the 1970s. I shot my first video documentary in 1972 in three-quarter inch format. I’ve shot a lot of stuff for Apple that has taught me about technology. I did a series about how computers are used in education and how they can be used to aid the handicapped. It’s astounding how computers can liberate people. I also shot the commercials that were for the rollout of the PowerBook in Europe.

ICG: What is the “stuff” you’ve done for Apple?

LIGHTHILL: They are corporate-sponsored educational films used to teach people in the school market. I love occasionally making these small films, because it gets me out in the real world where I see what’s happening.

ICG: What about the Mike Figgis claim that anybody can now make movies just by putting the camera on your shoulder, pointing and shooting. In that infamous ad he called cinematographers “technos” who get in his way with their lighting.

LIGHTHILL: That’s so boring and stupid. When Kodak introduced the Instamatic cameras, they were basically fixed focus. You just slammed this little cassette of film into the camera, shut the door, and stared shooting. Some people predicted that was the end of professional photography, because everybody is now a photographer. I’m sorry, but a digital camera is not going to turn a director into a cinematographer. It’s an art and it still requires skill no matter how easy or hard the tools are to use. There was an infamous scene at Sundance several years ago that John Bailey (ASC) witnessed, where director said that digital cameras were going to free him from the tyranny of the cinematographer and the caterer. That’s just the opinion of a few people. There have always been a few directors who also shoot, and a few cinematographers who direct, especially commercials. Some do both jobs well. Some don’t. I think this is a non-issue. The career path for directors is through writing and producing. Often the directors I work with are writers who want my help. They have no idea where to put the camera or why or what to do with different lenses, and they understand that we light for the same reason they chose words.

ICG: Is there is a perception that digital cinematography is easier?

LIGHTHILL: I think experienced and successful producers understand what cinematographers bring to a project. We bring a visual style or taste, plus the knowledge of how to deal with the different people on the set so the movie gets made on time and budget. They understand that there are photographic issues, and I’m not talking about how you get an image on celluloid. For example, the digital image at the present time is relatively plastic looking. It’s going to take cinematographers who know how to deal with lighting, filters and make-up to make adjustments so the actors don’t have that plastic look.

ICG: Do you have a sense of why you get that plastic look?

LIGHTHILL: One of the causes of the plastic look is that the digital cameras at this point have a lot of depth of field, so they don’t help you separate the subject matter from the background. They make images that can give equal value to everything, so everything and everyone seems equally important. The plastic look is inthe nature of digital video. The sensor is an imaging device that sits in the aperture of the camera and never moves. It consists of a grid of light receptors in the same place every frame, this gives the images an electronic, plastic look.  In contrast, every frame of film is a little bit different: there is an interaction between the silver halide crystals and the chemistry that gives you a more fluid look with film. Creating good looking portraits, managing the look of actor’s skin tone is easier in film because there is a more naturalistic look with film.

ICG: What are the perceptions your students bringing to school?

LIGHTHILL: They all want to work in film, and they are frustrated because they are doing student projects with video; especially with mini-DV, which is the bottom of the barrel, in terms of dynamic range and resolution.

ICG: Who decides?

LIGHTHILL: It's different everywhere. At AFI, most first year projects are produced on video. On the final thesis project, if the student can afford to shoot film or organize the resources they can do it on film. It’s their choice. It was the same at USC, but both schools offer classes where film is shot.

ICG: There are some surprising people who don’t agree. There was a DGA technology committee report that stated, ‘The majority of motion pictures and television shows are aimed for a demographic audience that is younger than we are and have different tastes than we do. This audience is also not as demanding for the quality of the projected image that we are… This desired demographic audience knows what they want to see, and if the desired product is delivered to them, they will flock to the theaters irrespective of the image quality. One only has to sit through a screening of a small portion of the box office phenomenon Blair Witch to prove the axiom that nobody has ever gone broke underestimating the intelligence or taste of the American movie-going public.’

LIGHTHILL: I don’t believe that represents the opinion of good directors. There are so many fallacies in that thinking, it’s appalling. For example, most of Blair Witch was shot in 16 mm, and it had a definite aesthetic…a kind of energy and an excitement that worked. I saw Dancer in the Dark, which was shot with multiple video cameras by a great cinematographer, Robby Muller. I don’t particularly love the movie, but it has a great look. It’s proof that you can do interesting work on video; but he was incredibly thoughtful about it. It was lit by a master who used multiple cameras so the production didn’t need multiple takes of elaborate dance sequences and burn out the singer’s voice. I watched it with a young person who really loved the way it looked. The next week that same person and I watched The Bicycle Thief, a black-and-white, Italian neo-Realistic film. Both of us enjoyed that film as much as we enjoyed Dancer in the Dark. It is as fresh today as it was 40 years ago. One hopes the right format that works for the story gets picked for each particular project, and, I hope that we’ll all settle down and have a reasonable dialogue about the merits of all formats for original capture of the image. There are tradeoffs in all decisions in film making, but pushing a format like mini DV as an equal substitute to film formats is silly.  Obviously, I love verite shooting, have done it my whole professional life (my first film company was called Available Light) but I also love great images and working with the dynamic range and resolution of film and none of the available forms of video are substitutes for film, at this point, and usually aren’t cost effective either.

ICG: Do you still work on documentaries?

LIGHTHILL: I recently filled in for Buddy Squires and shot a couple of interviews for the Ken Burns jazz documentary. I never turn down a documentary.

ICG: Can you talk about your role as a cinematographer in defining a look?

LIGHTHILL: Look is a word to define what cinematographers do, and it also describes the work of the wardrobe designer, the production designer and others. Some of us recently made a list of what cinematographers do and it filled two and a half pages with single spaced, short sentences. One of the things that struck me was how much coordination a cinematographer does with other departments. A lot of times the director defers to the cinematographer for various reasons — sometimes just because they are too busy dealing changes in locations, the cast and script. It's so hard for many peopleto understand that a director of photography doesn't only create lighting and take pictures; we are also coordinating a lot of people’s contributions, and all of this work adds up to the “look” of a project.

ICG: When was the first time you had a camera operator?

LIGHTHILL: It became an issue on my first series, which was the Vietnam War Story that I did for HBO. I was doing some of my own operating, and it became a workload issue. I really wasn't doing both jobs well, and then it became an issue of them really wanting the option of having a second camera, so I found an operator who had moved up to DP and moved back down and that worked out.

ICG: Was it hard to let go of operating?

LIGHTHILL: Yes. I love operating. I absolutely love it, and I still feel there are some things you can’t do unless your eye is in the viewfinder, especially close-ups on actors …sometimes I feel you really have to see that through the lens until you’re satisfied everything is working, the lighting and filtration, especially with older actors. But by the time I got to Nash Bridges, we had two and three cameras on almost every shot, so any issue about me operating was gone from my mind.

ICG: Has your documentary experience affected your narrative work?

LIGHTHILL: One of the great things about being a documentary cinematographer is that it can teach you how the world works and what it looks like. I’ve been in factories, on aircraft carriers, and in mines. I've been on the presidential campaign trail with George McGovern. But, despite that I tend to discourage students from coming up that way, because an important part of the crew system is the companionship and the mentoring. It’s also a much more competitive world today. When I came out of graduate school in journalism I had made one film and I got a job as an editor almost instantly because I knew how to splice film and use rewinds. I knew the physical job of being an editor, but I had no experience. That would never happen today.

ICG: What are some of the alternatives today?

LIGHTHILL: One of the things I suggest is finding an opportunity in an equipment rental house, where you can meet crews and also learn about all the equipment. I also advise young people to have parallel careers. Work in a rental house and learn about the equipment; get into the Guild as a loader or assistant and work your way up slowly. On the weekends, shoot for your contemporaries and build a reel. You really need to be working as a cinematographer whenever you get a chance, and there are lots of chances. They just don't pay, so you also need a paying job.

ICG: Do you think the role of the cinematographer is going to change?

LIGHTHILL: Absolutely and I think there's a bright and a dark side to that. We are already seeing a convergence of preproduction, production and postproduction. I think on the bright side, cinematographers who learn how to work in the telecine suite with color correction and digital mastering are going to be fine. You can prepare and get a sense of the rudimentary skills with PhotoShop. The dark side is that is that everybody who is sitting around a monitor has got an opinion. The danger is that inexperienced producers and directors are going to micro-manage your work.

ICG: Are you running into that problem yourself?

LIGHTHILL: I haven’t had that experience. I think you have to be prepared to explain the importance of continuity in a non-confrontational way if someone tries to jump into the process in the middle of a scene. You have to deal with it. I tell my students that when they get into arguments on their films. Some of them have knock down, drag out fights that are everything but physical. I tell them that if you think those things are a distraction, they are, in fact, part of your learning process. You are learning how to communicate and lead and that’s all part of being a cinematographer. You had better learn how to be really good at your human relations skills because it's part of the job.

ICG: Is that something they teach routinely at film schools?

LIGHTHILL: Actually, I think more and more of the working cinematographers who spend time in classrooms are teaching it, but I make a big point of it. The ability to communicate affects every single aspect of cinematography. When you're ordering your lighting package, you're going to be dealing with budgetary issues, and you have to be a great communicator to know how to go to the production manager and line producer, and say, this is why we need this, because this is what I'm trying to do. You can't just shove through a big lighting order and hope nobody notices. Production managers can be your best friends, because like the cinematographer, they need to know everybody's job.

ICG: What about runaway production. Is there a solution?

LIGHTHILL: We’ve always had some runaway production. There was a time when it was considered runaway if you went to Dallas. What’s new is the volume of work that's going out of the country and the fact that foreign governments are making it policy to subsidize this work. That’s a big challenge for all the guilds and also for our local, state and federal governments.

I think everybody is going to have to realize that we have a lot more competition and we're going to have to be more competitive. Globalization is a fact and it is not just affecting our industry. I think that we need government help. There has to be a national policy that recognizes that this is one of our biggest exports, and if we want to keep it we have to protect it.

ICG: You shot The Huntress for the USA Network. Aren’t all of the new cable television channels that didn't exist 10 years ago creating new opportunities?

LIGHTHILL: You keep asking these good news, bad news questions. The good news is there are all of these new channels creating more opportunities. The bad news is it's fragmenting the audience by spreading the same viewers over more channels. One of the problems with this fragmentation is that the standards for quality could slip. That affects all of us, because if the quality of images doesn’t matter, it also doesn’t matter who the cinematographer is or what they do.

ICG: What are the options?

LIGHTHILL: It is important us to become involved in postproduction, so we have more influence over the final look that is aired. There are also roles for the Guild and ASC as educators within the industry and with the public, so they are more aware of what we do and why it should matter to them.

ICG: Have you directed any narrative films?

LIGHTHILL: I directed one episode of The Huntress, and I really enjoyed that experience. I’d like to do more of that, but what I really want is good scripts like my old American Playhouse features.

ICG: Is this work more than entertainment and a job?

LIGHTHILL: I’ve never felt this is just a job. We all want to feel proud of what we do, but we are also all different. Some of us like fantasy films. Some of us don't. Some people like dramas; others like comedy. I happen to love science fiction. I think it's a great genre. If I could make a wish, it would be shooting a great sci-fi film. But, basically, I am like everyone else. I want the chance to work on good stories.