Phedon Papamichael, ASC was born in Greece. He made his first trip to the United States at the age of four when his father was the art director on John Cassavetes film Faces. He lived in Munich from the age of six through his studies at an art academy in Germany. During his teens and early 20s, Papamichael experimented with a Super 8 camera, but mainly focused on still photography. Cassavetes saw his still pictures and told him to come to New York “to shoot his next picture.” Papamichael moved to New York when he was about 20. He did freelance still photography for European publications, and shot a series of short films for friends. After a year, he moved to Los Angeles and supported himself by shooting medical films for $100 a week. By 1988, Papamichael was shooting one ultra-low budget film after another for Roger Corman.
           
He worked as a gaffer on one film, and a director on another, and gradually began getting pictures with somewhat bigger budgets. Papamichael became a member of the Guild in 1995 when he shot Unstrung Heroes, a Disney movie directed by Diane Keaton. 
           
Papamichael is still in the dawn of his career, but he has already compiled an impressive and eclectic list of narrative credits ranging from the TV mini-series for Wild Palms to the features Phenomenon, Patch Adams, The Million Dollar Hotel, Moonlight Mile, Sideways, The Weatherman, Walk the Line, and the upcoming Pursuit of Happyness.

The followed are excerpts of the conversation:

QUESTION: So let’s start out in the beginning. You were born in Greece, right?
PAPAMICHAEL: I was born in Greece. We came to the United States in 1966 when my dad was working with John Cassavetes as the art director on Faces. They shot it at John’s house. I don’t remember much of that because I was only four. My dad stayed and continued to work with John for a while. I moved to Munich with my mom when I was six and went to school there. I completed my schooling in Germany.

QUESTION: When and how did you get interested in photography?
PAPAMICHAEL: My dad was a painter, and I started drawing at a really early age. I wanted to be a painter initially, and then I got interested in industrial design. One day I was in a ski cabin and everybody was asleep. There was a Super 8 camera on the table. I remember the moment I decided to pick it up. I was instantly fascinated with the framing. I started walking around the ski cabin at night, sort of framing images. It was like an instant love affair. I asked my dad to buy me a Super 8 camera, and he got me one for my next birthday. I was probably 14. I shot and edited a bunch of movies and tried to sync music to them with a cassette player. I transitioned to still photography when I bought my first 35 mm camera. I took that a little more seriously. I wasn’t a professional still photographer, but I had some pictures published in magazines. I wanted to be a still-photographer for a while, but there still was that love for film.

QUESTION: When did you turn in that direction?
PAPAMICHAEL: The turning point was when I saw a Godard film called Le Mépris. It is called Contempt in English. Raoul Coutard shot it in wide screen Cinemascope in color. The stars were Brigitte Bardot, Jack Palance, and Michel Piccoli. Fritz Lang played himself. I was just fascinated by that film … the way the camera moved and all these wide shots. It was very graphic. It actually resembled my still photography, because I shot these graphic, primary color surfaces with shadows and textures on walls. It had a very similar sort of style. There was symmetry and long, lateral camera moves. It was the first time I wrote down a cinematographer’s name. I was a movie buff in Germany. We watched a lot of Bunuel, Godard, Truffaut, Wenders and other films. Around that time I realized that there is someone who is in charge of telling stories visually. I started watching Bertolucci’s films and was very influenced by Vittorio Storaro’s early work on The Conformist, 1900 and Last Tango in Paris.

QUESTION: Where did you go to school?
PAPAMICHAEL: I went to sort of an art academy in Munich, where I was studying fine arts. I sent about 20 still photographs to my dad, who was in the states working on Love Streams with Cassavetes. I got a letter from John Cassavetes. I remember exactly what it said: “Your photography captures the spirit of a new generation in a classical form.” He told me I should come to the states and shoot his next movie.

QUESTION: No kidding?
PAPAMICHAEL: John was like that. He would hire a big cameraman, fire him, and then turn to the PA and say, “Okay, you’re shooting tomorrow.” Anyway, that was very exciting news. I didn’t really want to stay in Germany and study architecture or whatever my Mom wanted me to study. As soon as I could, I got on a plane and came to the United States. I was rooming in New York with Liz Gazzara, Ben Gazzara’s daughter while they were cutting Love Streams. She wanted to do a short film, and had seen my stills and asked me to shoot her film. I told her that I had never shot a film but I knew composition and depth of field. She said, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll get John’s camera out of the closet.” It was the Éclair NPR that he had used to shoot Faces. It had been sitting in a closet for a decade. We asked him and he gave it to us. We got about $5,000 together, and cast Nick and Xan Cassavetes and all our friends, and shot a 20-minute film. For me it was a really sort of a learn-by-mistake experience. I remember the first dailies. We were sitting in the screening room, and there were these blue intermittent flashes on the film. Everyone was asking me, what is that? I had no idea. It turned out that the magazines were leaking light. It was a mystery to me. Why would the magazines leak light on a professional film camera? My $500 Nikon camera didn’t leak light. There were a lot of lessons to learn. My sticks would slide away and then I thought somebody should invent something that holds the legs together. Later, I learned they had these things called spreaders. I remember inventing a way to pull focus by putting marks on the floor. Later, I learned that other people had already figured out how to do these things.

QUESTION: Didn’t you also do some photojournalism?
PAPAMICHAEL: I did do a little photojournalism. It was my first income in the states. I photographed celebrities and events for various European magazines.

QUESTION: How did you get shooting films?
PAPAMICHAEL: After Liz’s movie, I shot a bunch of shorts for that group of friends. Of course, I wasn’t getting paid. After a while, we moved to Los Angeles, and I began shooting medical videos once a week UCLA for $100. I was making $400 a month. I paid $225 in rent and lived on the rest. I kept pretty busy. I tried to get into assisting cameramen just to make some money. I interviewed with Robbie Müller for Barfly, Theo van de Sande on Miracle Mile, and also with Mikael Salomon.

QUESTION: When was this?
PAPAMICHAEL: It was in 1985. I wasn’t a first cameraman, so I didn’t get any of those jobs. I would get Dramalogue and call people who needed someone to shoot their shorts. I ended up shooting a UCLA graduate film. Alexander Payne was actually the boom man on one short I shot. That was the first time I met him. I had a reel with a lot of footage, but I hadn’t made any money yet. Then I got my first job with Roger Corman.

QUESTION: How did that happen?
PAPAMICHAEL: A friend who was a graduate of AFI got a second unit job directing on a picture called Deadly Dreams. She asked if I wanted to shoot second unit with her. I was really fast because I was mostly shooting in natural light. They introduced me to director Katt Shea Ruben. We did three movies, almost in a row, Dance of The Damned, Stripped to Kill II and Streets, which had Christina Applegate playing a teenage junkie who was a hooker. The great thing about Corman was that we had to shoot these features in 15 days. You shot for 16 to 18 hours a day with maybe 60 setups. I remember on Stripped to Kill II, I had 66 setups in one day. It was just fantastic training. It was like a mini-studio system. There was a UPM who was concerned about the budget, and Roger Corman would come down sometimes. He had these weird hang-ups, like we weren’t supposed to use dolly tracks. We had a PA in the parking lot waiting for his Mercedes. If he spotted his car, he would run in or radio us, and we would yank the dolly off and hide the track. Corman would visit for half an hour, and then he’d leave and we would put the track back down. The bottom line was he didn’t really care as long as the movie had full frontal nudity and people were getting killed. They were definitely B movies genre films, but at the time he had actual theatrical distribution from MGM. MGM brought me in once, supposedly to interview me for a studio picture. I could tell in the interview what they really wanted to know. They kept asking me how much Roger was making these movies for, because he was actually selling them to the studio for $1 million apiece. Body Chemistry, which I shot, ran for five weeks in a theater in Westwood. We were making those films for about $200,000.

QUESTION: Who were some of the other people you met at that time?
PAPAMICHAEL: Everybody always assumes that I went to AFI, because everybody I knew and was working with at Corman’s place was either just out of AFI or still going there…Janusz Kaminski, Mauro Fiore, Wally Pfister and others. Janusz ended up gaffing for me on two or three Corman films, and Mauro was my key grip. Janusz shot second unit on Streets actually, and then he got his own Corman movies. It was a lot of fun because we didn’t have any stylistic or visual restrictions. We could do anything we wanted. I remember, we went to see The Last Emperor, and then we went back to work at Corman’s on Monday and tried to make everything look golden. We did a lot of expressionistic photography with colors and smoke. We could shoot in real darkness, and it wasn’t like for a studio, where you would get execs freaking out, saying you are taking too many chances. We could do stylistic work and have a lot of fun. Janusz went on and shot The Rain Killer, his first feature, and Mauro ended up gaffing for me. Wally Pfister was an electrician at the time and he ended up being my operator on probably 10 films. Mauro ended up gaffing for Janusz, and he shot the first movie that Janusz directed. This connection and friendship between us has remained for 15 years.

QUESTION: You never worked through the crew system as an assistant?
PAPAMICHAEL: Somehow I ended up being a gaffer on one very low budget independent film. I knew nothing. I worked with Philip Holahan. At the time, he was a first assistant. He had this super-low budget film. I told him, I don’t really know what a gaffer does. I remember being up the night before looking through the Mole-Richardson catalog and trying to familiarize myself with the terminology. I didn’t know what a butterfly was, or a C stand, Babies, 2Ks … I didn’t know any of those words. I could use the lights if I saw them laid out in front of me but I couldn’t ask anybody for anything. But, he helped me and it worked out okay; so I did one movie as a gaffer. Then, we did Penelope Spheeris’ movie The Boys Next Door. I was the second AC on that. It was a five or six week shoot, and I got $500 a week. I was so happy. That was so much money for me. He took me on knowing I had never been on a camera crew. It was like an intensive boot camp for AC training for five weeks. It was a great experience, because I learned what to expect from and how to work with my crews later on. Philip was an excellent first AC. Every night after wrapping, we’d be on the tailgate and we’d have a one-hour meeting where he went over the day, and what we did wrong. I ended up doing one other film as second AC. The cinematographer and the first AC got fired, so I was moved up. I pulled focus without ever having done it before. Luckily, the whole film was shot at T- 5.6. 
Later I was getting jobs from the directors who I met at Roger Corman’s place. I met Carl Franklin, who later asked me to shoot One False Move. We’ve remained in contact. I think I might have mentioned Katt Shea Ruben, with whom I did three Corman films… She got Poison Ivy for New Line, starring Drew Barrymore, Tom Skerritt and Cheryl Ladd. That was a $4 million dollar movie and an eight-week shoot. That was how I transitioned out of Corman into some slightly higher budgets, and into Studio Pictures.

QUESTION: How did that happen?
PAPAMICHAEL: Janusz had shot Wildflower for Diane Keaton. She got her first feature as a director at Disney. It was called Unstrung Heroes with John Turturro, Andie MacDowell and Michael Richards. It was a really nice script. I guess Janusz recommended me to Diane because he was busy. I had done one other studio picture. It was called Cool Runnings with Jon Turteltaub. I had worked with him at Motion Picture Corporation of America, which was kind of like the graduate school of Corman. A lot of Corman people had moved over there, and they had approached me to do a picture. I didn’t really want to do it because it was a stupid comedy about this East German, but they offered me a deal. If I would shoot Jon’s movie, I would get to direct a picture. I ended up doing the movie, which led to an extended collaboration with Jon Turteltaub.

QUESTION: Did you actually get a chance to direct?
PAPAMICHAEL: I did direct a movie there. It was called Sketch Artist. That was right after Poison Ivy. I cast Drew Barrymore, Sean Young and Jeff Fahey. It was a Showtime original with a 25-day schedule. I asked Wally Pfister to shoot it. That was one of his first features and our first collaboration as cinematographer/director. He got nominated for an ACE award, which is the cable award, for best cinematography.       

QUESTION: When did you get into the Guild?
PAPAMICHAEL: That happened on Diane Keaton’s film Unstrung Heroes in 1995. I asked my key grip, Rafael Sanchez, to be the gaffer on that project. He said that he had to think about it and talk with his wife, because everyone knew him as a key grip. Three days later he called and he said he decided he wanted be the key grip on the film. I told him that that job was no longer available. He took the gaffing job, and has been my gaffer for 18 features. He’s become one of the most sought after gaffers in Hollywood.       

QUESTION: Were you ever tempted to concentrate on directing?
PAPAMICHAEL: I don’t think of myself as a cinematographer or director. I think of myself as a filmmaker. When you’re working on a studio picture, you are an element of this big machine with a function that is much more defined. There are places in Europe where cinematographers are considered the country’s greatest filmmakers, more so than directors. They are considered the true artists. But usually it’s a collaborative effort. I feel like I have a job as the cinematographer, but I’ll still direct if it’s a film I’m interested in. I’ve also written two scripts that are in development that will probably happen over the next couple of years. But, that doesn’t compete with what I do as a cinematographer. They are little stories I want to tell, but nothing will replace what I do as a cinematographer. As a director, you have to be a politician. You have to be able to deal with movie stars, the producers and the studio. We’re very fortunate as cinematographers, because everybody thinks they can write; everybody thinks they can direct; everybody thinks they can edit; but nobody assumes that they can do what we do, which is tell the story visually with light and motion. It’s a mystery to them. We still have this mystique about what we do. The producers don’t tell you what to do… which they do with the director and writers. We have been in a unique and fortunate position.        

QUESTION: When did you start getting into commercials?
PAPAMICHAEL: I transitioned into commercials really late. I had done probably 15 features, but I couldn’t get commercials because I didn’t have a reel. What happened was that feature directors began hiring me to shoot their commercials. Before I did Million Dollar Hotel with Wim Wenders, I had done a whole bunch of commercials with him. That was sort of our introduction. We discovered that we had very similar aesthetics.

QUESTION: How did you start doing commercials with him?
PAPAMICHAEL: A friend who produces independent films introduced us. Deepak Nayar is his name. He produced a lot of David Lynch films, and he had worked with Wim on The End of Violence. We met for dinner. I had done White Dwarf with Deepak. About a week later, Wim called and said, “We’re doing a Renault commercial in Buenos Aires in two weeks. Do you want to do it?” I did that commercial, a Cadillac spot, and a commercial for the German railroad in Munich. That was our testing ground, and then we did Million Dollar Hotel.

QUESTION: In 1998, you shot Patch Adams, a totally different type of film. Will you tell us about that?
PAPAMICHAEL: I try to mix it up. That film and America’s Sweethearts achieved exactly what they were supposed to do… they were pure entertainment, and I’m not putting that down. They were sort of a turning point for me in terms of doing commercial Hollywood studio pictures. I had a string of lower budget movies, Cool Runnings, Unstrung Heroes and While You Were Sleeping, were all low budget pictures that made a lot of money. Before I really realized it, I was sort of this mainstream Hollywood studio guy, which was not where I wanted to go. I was making good money, and I was working all the time, but creatively, it wasn’t satisfying. Unstrung Heroes helped turn me in a different direction, and then I did the Wim Wenders picture. It didn’t play that well in America, but it got me a lot of international attention.

QUESTION: What role do commercials play in your career?
PAPAMICHAEL: Sometimes it’s a director who I have a relationship and like a lot. I know we’re going to have a good time doing them. Sometimes I’ll string some commercials together, because it enables me to wait for a director or a project I really to do. I have this rule where I don’t want to do a feature film unless I would personally pay $10 to see in a movie theater. I’ve been lucky, because I work on movies that I like and I’m in a position to wait for projects that I like.

QUESTION: How do you pick movies that you would like to shoot?
PAPAMICHAEL: The two main factors are the script and director, but it’s never that simple. Sometimes I will get a good script but it’s not a director who I want to work with at least on that project. Sometimes I will get a script that’s not that great, but there is a director who I think can do something with that material, or it is an interesting director who I want to work with. Ideally, you are happy with the script and the director, and those are the only deciding factors. I will work on a lower budget films if I like the script and the director. It doesn’t have to be a famous director or a well-known, established director. I will usually look up their work and try to look at some of their movies. If I think they are interesting, I’ll try to work with them.

QUESTION: Are there directors who you want to work with?
PAPAMICHAEL: There are four or five directors who I’ve worked with in the past who I’d like to work with again. The schedules are usually more reliable on Hollywood films. Those movies usually get made on schedule. In Europe, you never know. I did a movie in the Republic of Georgia with Nana Dzhordzhadze. It was called 27 Missing Kisses. She’s been trying to schedule her next movie for literally four years. It keeps getting delayed. It’s the same with Wim Wenders. I would have liked to work on Don’t Come Knocking. It was on and off for three years. I was sort of waiting for it, but when financing finally came together, I was on Walk the Line. I feel sorry for the cameramen and filmmakers in general in Europe. Wim Wenders is a guy who has won Cannes, the Palm d’Or, the Golden Bear, and Golden Lion in Venice, and he can’t get a movie financed. They can wait two or three years, and their project it just goes away completely. People can criticize the Hollywood studio system, but it’s not as random.         

QUESTION: What are some of your films that you feel particularly good about?
PAPAMICHAEL: Unstrung Heroes is one. It was directed by Diane Keaton. Unfortunately it wasn’t seen by a lot of people, but I’m still very happy with it. I recently screened it at AFI. They asked me what movie I wanted to screen for their students, and they found a really nice print. I thought it held up really well. Million Dollar Hotel didn’t really find an audience in this country, but I think visually it’s one of my favored movies. It’s interesting when I travel to film festivals around the world, to see how different cultures respond to different films. In Poland, Million Dollar Hotel is considered one of the greatest films of the last decade. I was at the CamerImage festival and people told me that they’ve seen that film eight or nine times, and it’s not just the younger generation. They also liked it in Italy and in Japan, but the French and the Germans hated it. It just goes to show how film is such a unique language that can work around the world. I also feel very good about Walk the Line.

QUESTION: What is it that makes Walk the Line so special?
PAPAMICHAEL: Usually the first time I see a finished film, I think maybe I could have handled this or that differently, because it’s not working. In my first viewing of that film, I was just immediately drawn into the story. I thought the performances were captivating and the dramatic moments were there. The picture flowed. I was just completely drawn in and involved.

QUESTION: Did you know anything about Johnny Cash before then?
PAPAMICHAEL: Very little. I probably had a couple CDs, but I’d worked with Jim Mangold before on Identity, and Cash had come by the set. They were working on the screenplay together. He introduced himself to all of the crew, walked around and said, ‘Hi, I’m Johnny Cash.’ That film was Jim’s dream project. It took another two years until the movie actually happened, because most studios rejected that project. Nobody could imagine Joaquin being able to pull it off, but Jim had confidence in him. Reese Witherspoon is a move star established in romantic comedies, so this was a different genre for her. It was a fantastic achievement for her.

QUESTION: How was the decision made to use their voices?
PAPAMICHAEL: Well, I think Mangold always intended it that way and the decision was in place when they cast. Jim just didn’t want anything artificial about the performances—that’s not what Cash was about. The story that Reese tells is that she had committed to playing June Carter, and after they made the deal she was informed that she had to sing. She asked Joaquin if he knew and asked if he was going to do it. They both decided to give it a shot. They were terrified. It’s one thing to act, but to sing on stage in front of all these extras is something else. It was pre-recorded, of course, but it was their voices that we did playbacks for most of the concert scenes.

QUESTION: Why was it important to shoot that movie at the actual locations?
PAPAMICHAEL: It gives it an authenticity by shooting at the actual venues. There’s not a single set piece that was designed, other than his childhood home. That was reconstructed identical to the actual house. I love shooting on locations.

QUESTION: Do you think the actors respond to the location?
PAPAMICHAEL: Definitely. I think like you are influenced by all kinds of factors when you are on set. The more you can sort of pretend that it’s real … Joaquin truly pretended that everything was real. He wanted us to call him JR and not Joaquin. He was Cash during the making of the picture, and anything that reminded him we were making a movie he blocked out and denied in his mind that it existed. When Joaquin got on stage and did the Folsom Prison piece, the extras got so caught up, that they also truly believed they were prisoners for that moment.

QUESTION: That was an absolutely believable and moving scene.
PAPAMICHAEL: There was a real interaction between Joaquin and them. He was getting their feedback like a stage performer would get from an audience. He thrived on that intensity… it affected everybody… You want to grab that camera and go in handheld and get that face with sweat running down a forehead. It was a very inspiring experience, and that’s how filmmaking should be.

QUESTION: On that movie, did you pay homage to the period?
PAPAMICHAEL: I looked at footage of Cash. There’s this one documentary that really an accumulation of shots. In one scene, Johnny Cash is just walking through the forest with a shotgun. He shoots a crow and injures it… he picks it up and starts talking to it… He wants to take it home. In another scene, he was driving in his motor home and taking June Carter back to his childhood home in Arkansas. For the performances I tried to recreate the lighting I observed in these documentaries and stills. I wanted it to be authentic, and not any more beautiful or flattering than it was in reality. It was very simple lighting with just one hard follow spotlight hitting him. There was no great lighting design back in those days, and no color was used. It was just one white spotlight. The rigging gaffer that we had in Memphis had actually worked on some Cash shows. I asked him, did Johnny Cash ever use any color? He said that later in his career, there was maybe a red backlight, but it was very simple… so we did that. But most of the period look comes from the wardrobe, hair and makeup changes.

QUESTION: How important is good production design?
PAPAMICHAEL: Vilmos Zsigmond and I were members on a festival jury recently, and we were talking about that. He thought that 50-percent of good cinematography is good production design, wardrobe and all the other elements. I said it was more like 80 percent. You know it when you’re lighting a great set with a great wardrobe. When you find yourself struggling with the lighting it’s because something feels wrong…maybe it’s the colors on a wall or a sweater someone is wearing. The better the elements are in the frame the less work we have to do. Simpler is always better. I typically use as few lights and as little equipment as I can.

QUESTION: Were there what Conrad Hall used to call happy accidents… things that weren’t planned that ended up enhancing the movie?
PAPAMICHAEL: There were a lot of happy accidents. When you send two cameras handheld on stage, and give the operators the freedom to do what they instinctively want to do, you are going to get some great moments that you could never storyboard, shot list or design. Some of the takes were over five minutes, so it was really tough work, but they got great pieces, including shots that weren’t designed.

QUESTION: Can you think of specific one?
PAPAMICHAEL: We were really trying to fish for flares that had lives of their own. We got older lenses that we found in the backroom at Panavision which weren’t as sophisticated in terms of their coatings. We were intentionally looking to get flares.

QUESTION: Will you tell me about the DI?
PAPAMICHAEL: Joe Finley at Modern was great. We went through the whole picture from the beginning to end, and I picked like a reference frame of each scene and timed that. He timed the first pass using those references. I would go in and corrected what he had done. We did it in only nine days total. We have to make the studios understand that a DI is not this huge monster that is out of control. That’s a misperception that comes from a couple years back when the machines weren’t really tweaked and calibrated as well and so it took much longer. They would have to spend a lot of time, because when they went to film out, it didn’t translate exactly the way they saw it on their monitor. I did have to go to (Kodak) Premier print stock to get my true blacks and the contrast. My overall adjustment on the print was one point of yellow, one point of red and one point of density, and then it matched the digital projection of the DI.

QUESTION: Has DI changed the way you work on the set?
PAPAMICHAEL: Yes, I approach my work on set differently because of this experience. I just did this movie called Pursuit of Happyness that was shot like a documentary with three cameras. The director would ask me, “Can I put a camera this way, this way and this way?” I said yes because I know that I can do a lot to it in post. It’s really an extension of what we do—an extension of our creative work. I’m not saying we can get sloppy now. We just to find practical applications for it. In Walk the Line, there is a Thanksgiving scene by a lake that we shot in June. All the leaves were green. We decided that was one of the compromises we’d have to make. When I went into the DI, I remember saying, “Let’s makes those green leaves yellow, and suddenly everything looked like fall. The director was just blown away. He was so happy. You can use it to create or enhance a stylized look, but you can also do very practical things with. There is an issue there about getting paid for our time in DI. Everyone else is paid for time in post, the editor, postproduction supervisor, the colorist and director.

QUESTION: Why do you think that is?
PAPAMICHAEL: I think it’s a fear that the cinematographer will create an out of control beast, by changing things and messing with the colorist. It’s very important that we are responsible and eliminate this fear.

QUESTION: What is Pursuit of Happyness about?
PAPAMICHAEL: The director is Gabriele Muccino. It was his first picture in America. He did Remember Me, My Love and The Last Kiss, two very successful movies in Italy. Will Smith stars and is also a producer. He basically chose Gabriele to direct this picture. It’s based on the true story of this man, Chris Gardner, who sells medical equipment door to door, very unsuccessfully. He decides to change his life and become a broker. It’s a story about how through sheer determination and persistence you can accomplish anything you want. It’s really about the human spirit and how when you set out to do something you can succeed. Will Smith was incredible, and his real son played his son in the movie. We shot that in a very non-Hollywood way. Gabriele had European sensitivities that brought a lot of energy to the film. We ended up shooting it almost like a documentary with two or three cameras, sometimes handheld or with long lenses capturing a lot of running footage. We created the feel of a race against time. He is always trying to get some place on time. He’s on the streets running through the crowds, trying to get to an appointment or pick up his kid, and trying not to be late. The real Chris Gardner went on to own his own brokerage firm and become incredibly successful.

QUESTION: What format did you shoot the film in?         
PAPAMICHAEL: We shot Super 35. I used to insist on shooting anamorphic all the time. I just loved it, having the large negative. But, now having the DI and the new Kodak Vision 2 stocks, I’m much less concerned. The film stocks, in general, have improved immensely and with the DI process, I’m not worried about the optical blowups anymore. Walk the Line would have been really tough to shoot with anamorphic lenses, because of the weight of the zooms in handheld shots. That would have meant to stop and change lenses during a performance.

QUESTION: Talking about technology, there was a two-page story in the London Financial Times recently quoting a couple of self-professed digital filmmakers who predicted that in the future all movies were going to be made on stage with green screen backgrounds, and you don’t need a cinematographer because you can see it all on the monitor and fix anything later on, in post production. Are you hearing this?
PAPAMICHAEL: No. Like I said earlier, you still have to tell a story. You still have to know where to put a camera, what size lens to use, how dramatic you want to light, and if it should be naturalistic or dramatic? All of that contributes to the storytelling, and that doesn’t change just because you have a camera that’s supposed to be easy to use. The technical aspect of our job was never the challenge for me. I don’t consider myself a technical person. In fact, I barely know where the on/off switch is on the camera. I don’t know anything about gamma curves. I’m just not interested in that. I see what I see and I judge it. I know my tools well enough to achieve the results I need to, and if there is something I don’t know, and I need to know it, I learn it specifically for that picture. When I did Mousehunt, I had never used Snorkel lens or Frazier lenses, but I tested and learned how. I don’t look at anybody else’s tests. If there’s a new stock, I shoot my own test. That’s the only way you are going to know. I never judge any test unless I can do an A/B or a split screen projection, because there are so many factors. The technical part has never been what we’re about. We’re filmmakers and storytellers. It makes a big difference if you put a camera here or you put a camera there and it’s a little lower and shooting up on somebody with a top light. It’s a different effect that it tells a different story. Those decisions will still have to be made. How many people are coming around with a digital still camera right now? You can give anybody a paintbrush and some oil paint…it doesn’t mean they are all going to be another Van Gogh.

QUESTION: Will you tell us about your feelings on collaboration?
PAPAMICHAEL: I’d say that 50 percent to 60 percent of our job is the actual cinematography, and the rest is our ability to communicate. You have to be able to communicate with the director, your crew and the producers. Your personality is a big factor in getting people to want to work with you and for them to achieve their best results. Of course, your actual work is the most important thing, but sometimes in order to be able to achieve that there are a lot factors involved. You have to be able to take a director and inspire them to do things that they wouldn’t usually do… and give them confidence that that’s the right way to tell the story. You’ve got to know how, and that’s where experience comes in.       

QUESTION: For the second assistants, who are reading this on the Internet, or the film school students, are you confident about the future role of cinematographers?
PAPAMICHAEL: Yes. I think movies will continue to be made. The budgets will probably come down, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I think the studios are realizing that you can make really good films for $10 or $20 million and less. There’s a lot of product out there and there are only so many theaters, but I think film has become the most dominant communication art form. People want to watch movies, even if they end up watching them at home. Their systems at home are going to be much improved, and, in fact, some people have better viewing options at home than at some multiplex theaters. I don’t even care if they end up watching it at home on a great high def screen as long as the movie is letterboxed and formatted right. People want that kind of entertainment. It’s part of our culture. I don’t think it’s going to go away.