A Conversation with Robert Primes, ASC
by Bob Fisher

Bob Primes, ASC was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. His early interests included mathematics, still photography, music and poetry. Primes majored in math and studied philosophy at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he also learned to play the piano. He dropped out after two and a half years, and traveled around Europe, taking thousands of still pictures. After about three months, Primes returned home and enrolled at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Primes “flunked out” after about a year and a half, and got a job in a San Francisco camera store. He took extension classes in filmmaking, and soon focused on cinematography. From 1964-‘75, Primes pursued a career as a freelance filmmaker and cinematographer in San Francisco, mainly working on industrial films, documentaries and commercials. He moved to Los Angeles in 1975, where he was initially employed as a TV commercial director-cinematographer. His eclectic body of work includes music videos, commercials, documentaries, feature films (e.g. Bird on a Wire, A Murder of Crows, etc.) telefilms (Reasonable Doubts, My Antoniaand Harrison: Cry of the City, etc.) and episodic series (e.g., thirtysomething, Quantum Leap, Felicity, etc.).

Primes earned Emmy Awards for Felicity and My Antonio, and a third nomination for Harrison: Cry of the City. He has just received the ASC award for the series MDs, the first digital show so honored and has had ASC nominations for Felicity and the Reasonable Doubts pilot. He has served on the board of directors of the International Cinematographers Guild and as vice president and treasurer of the American Society of Cinematographers. Primes is on the Advisory Board of the National Film Preservation Board. He has championed the authoring rights of cinematographers at conferences in Tokyo and Madrid and at government hearings in Washington, D.C. Primes has lectured and conducted seminars at various schools, and at the Rockport, Maine international film workshop. Following are excerpts of a conversation exploring his memories of the past, observations about the present and ideas for the future:

ICG: Let’s start by talking about your roots. Where were you born and raised?

PRIMES: I was born and raised in San Francisco until the age of six when my parents moved to Millbrae, California, about 15 miles south of San Francisco. I was a San Franciscan at heart. As soon as I got a learner’s permit for driving and got a car, I spent every weekend in San Francisco exploring the city and trying to write poetry about what I saw.

ICG: What did your parents do?

PRIMES: My mother was a mother. My father sold life insurance for Prudential Life Insurance Company.

ICG: Let’s get back to your early interest in poetry.

PRIMES: I had a class where you were supposed to keep a weekly journal. I would explore San Francisco, observe people and write my impressions in my journal. I had a very romantic vision of the city. I also did a lot of photography in high school. From the time I was 10 or 11, I would go through Life magazine every week. I knew who shot what by their style…maybe not all of them but a lot of them. The pictures and storytelling were incredible. The Family of Man came out, what in 1953 or something like that? That book was like an epiphany for me. Every picture to me was a great masterpiece, which told me something about life. I started hanging out around the local camera shop, and got a Kodak 35 mm camera. I think it cost 35 bucks. I did all sorts of menial jobs to get the money to buy camera equipment. When I was in high school, I mowed lawns and spent summers at American Can Company working on an assembly line. I also worked as a busboy at a restaurant. I bought a Linhof 4x5 view camera. I would shoot 4x5 stills at Big Sur, Yosemite and other places. Sometimes my dad would accompany me. I also bought a Leica M3 camera and an Omega enlarger. My 35 mm photography was a solitary experience. If you really want to get an emotion out of a sunset or a mountainscape or of people watching or dwelling, you do it alone, so you can concentrate and process the emotions you feel and what conclusions you can draw about life by being an observer. I believe there are things you must do in a solitary way in order to concentrate.

ICG: So, you had your own darkroom?

PRIMES: Yes. I built a darkroom for black and white printing. I spent a lot of hours doing that and basically teaching myself. I had boxes and boxes of prints.

ICG: How did you get interested in movies?

PRIMES: Margaret Bourke White had shot this incredible sequence of stills of Gandhi at a spinning wheel. It was in Life Magazine. I had a weird dream about Gandhi at a spinning wheel, but it was animated. The stills were like a slide show with dissolves. The camera moved. A very weird thing happened in my subconscious between movies and photography.

ICG: What sparked your interest in music?

PRIMES: My dad introduced me to Chopin and Liszt. In 1953, he took me to Horowitz’s last concert at the opera house. It had a huge effect on me. I also discovered that when you’re in the presence of art, real art, this kinetic thing is working. You go into another plane where you don’t know whether you want to cry or laugh but you feel a profundity without being able to logically explain it. It’s a sweep of emotions that puts you into a state of intense listening.

ICG: Were photography and music your main interest at that stage?

PRIMES: I was loved math and science, especially physics. Math, to me, was a perfectly abstract sphere. It was self-contained within its own world. It was just a thing within itself that really suited my penchant for abstraction. I found mathematics and music to be extremely similar in levels of abstraction.  

ICG: Can you tell us more about your still photography?

PRIMES: I was a yearbook photographer in high school, and I also did a lot of the sports photography, especially football games I also shot posed portraits and just about anything with my Leica. If there was something I liked, I’d play the angles and take 36 shots. I carried my Leica with me all the time with Tri-X film and no exposure meter. I’d be on a subway and I’d like someone’s face, so I’d just kind of move until I was close enough. I was about 17 years old. I would shoot before someone could change their expression, and then a tenth of a second later, the camera would be wandering as though I was looking at something else over there, so I wouldn’t get caught doing it. I developed stealth techniques. The 4x5 was a different mentality. It was a very studied, exact thing. I shot abstract images of leaf veins and vegetation and things like that.

ICG: Where did you go to college?

PRIMES: I originally went to Reed College in Portland, Oregon. I majored in math and also took philosophy classes. I flunked out after I think it was after two and a half years. I kind of floated by without any real discipline or good study habits. The problem was that everybody was bright at Reed, and I missed a lot of classes. I’ll give you an example. We were assigned to read Stendahl’s Rouge et le Noir, an 800-page novel. I couldn’t get past the first page. My mind just wouldn’t focus on it, so I failed that part of the course. Four months later, I couldn’t sleep one night, I picked up Rouge et le Noir and found it so fascinating I read the whole thing and then slept through my morning classes. So go figure.

ICG: Did you have an idea about what you wanted to with your life?

PRIMES: I was always high-mindedly ambitious. I always wanted to do something of great significance. I had great fantasies. In fact, I was probably living too much in fantasies. I wanted to do something really glorious; more oriented to the arts, although my fantasies were also political.

ICG: What did you do after your experience at Reed?

PRIMES: I had started taking piano lessons at Reed. I mastered Chopin’s Military Polonaise, but didn’t apply myself to learning more. I decided to go to New York and study music, because that’s where it all seemed to be. In retrospect, maybe I just wanted an adventure. I also had some relatives in New York. I got a job in a camera store, where I met a Life magazine photographer who got me access to their darkroom. After about six months, I went to Europe, where I bummed around from country to country, using a EuroPass, sleeping on trains and staying at hostels. I shot thousands of pictures with my Leica. It was a wonderful, grubby, unwashed, hippy-like experience. I went to the Casals Music Festival in Switzerland at the base of the Matterhorn. At the Casals festival, I decided that I was going to choose music as my life’s work. I called and made arrangements to audition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. I flew back and arrived unexpectedly at my parents’ door with three months of beard. My mother practically fainted. I auditioned at the Conservatory and was admitted based on my ability to play Chopin’s Military Polonaise. That’s where I met Theodora Carras, my future wife, who was everything I wasn’t. She was organized and committed to her art as a concert pianist. We were married about two years later in July 1964. I studied at the Conservatory for about a year and half until it became obvious music wasn’t my future. I was really worried that I would become a bum.

ICG: I can hardly wait to hear what you did after the Conservatory?

PRIMES: I sold cameras at a store on Market Street in San Francisco. I was going to print my pictures from Europe and try to set up a salon. By then, I was seeing a lot of movies. I came to the conclusion that I loved photography, but I needed to work with time. Still photography is more of a two-dimensional art form without the dimension of time. I was a romantic, and sometimes a corny sentimental movie would touch me. I wanted to find a way to reach out and touch people the way that Beethoven and Chopin and Edward Steichen and Cartier-Bresson and Ansel Adams touched me. I decided that I would focus on movies.

ICG: What did you do after you came to that conclusion?

PRIMES: I enrolled in some courses at University of California Extension. One was a course taught by Roy Nolan, and as a result of that class five of us formed a little company called Cosmopolitan Film Associates. We would meet in alternate people’s living rooms. We eventually made an industrial film for the American Can Company. Roy was the director and I bought a Bolex and was the cameraman. The company lasted about a year and a half. I quit my job at the camera store and we made a few low-budget industrial films. In 1965. I made business cards and proclaimed myself—Robert Primes, Filmmaker—but during that period, Theo and I mainly lived on her income as a schoolteacher. I did get to make a lot of little films, including one for the San Francisco Library. I did that type of work until 1975. It was all 16 mm Ektachrome in the beginning until eventually I got into shooting negative. I bought an Éclair camera fairly early and a NAGRA recorder and some lights. I also built two motorized editing benches, and was set up for interlocked projection. It was a big investment. We moved to a three-story Victorian house. I was shooting documentaries, industrial films, some art films and some commercials.

ICG: Give me an example of an art film that you shot.

PRIMES: In 1971, I shot a film called Jump Rope. I had been invited to speak at a film seminar in Seattle by one of my old buddies from the camera store. We arranged for Computer Image Corporation to pay for the costs. It was a keynote or theme film for the seminar using some computer images. The film that I designed had jump ropers filmed at 360 frames per second ultra-slow motion with a PhotoSonics camera. Then, there were very early computerized special effects with the jumpers followed by trailing colored after-images. I had this concept that all the technology would be eclipsed by something of soul at the end… it became a poignant image of a little girl’s face. Jump Rope was a seven-minute film that won a bunch of awards, including a Cine Golden Eagle. I made around a half a dozen or so of those types of short films. All of my art films were set to music and always with abstract visual storytelling. I also made some documentaries, including one about Arthur Ashe, the tennis player. I worked on a few films with the Maysles brothers, including Give Me Shelter. I was an admirer of their work. I also worked on a film about TheGrateful Dead’s last concert. I did a lot of camera work for other people as well as being a filmmaker. Eventually, Theo was able to quit teaching and devote her full time to her piano.

ICG: How did those experiences influence you as a narrative filmmaker?

PRIMES: I became a great fan of cinema verite in my documentary work. I also had written into my contract that my clients couldn’t change my interpretation of the subject unless I materially lied. So, I had artist’s rights, which has remained a lifelong passion. I made a film for the San Jose School District where I indicated they could give school dropouts better support than they were. They didn’t order very many prints, but they couldn’t turn the film they commissioned into a puff propaganda piece. Usually, I would direct and edit as well as shoot. By the mid-1970s, I was working in 35 mm and was using Chapman cranes and I had built a small optical printer in my basement work room. I think all of those experiences come into play when I am working on narrative projects.

ICG: So, you are essentially self-taught?   

PRIMES: I wasn’t lucky enough to have had mentors. I learned from movies. In high school, I remember looking at the nose shadows and trying to figure out where the lights were. I learned a lot by looking at movies. I also did a lot of experimenting. Once I made an industrial film for FMC corp. The company gave me a lot of crappy footage of machines. They wanted me to make a film out of it. Some of it was poorly shot. The lighting was terrible. None of it matched. I decided I would make a high-contrast, black and white internegative and interpositive of all the footage. I’d print the positive with one strong color setting and the negative another. Essentially, I was doing poor man’s solarization to make the footage interesting and stylistically unified. I then studied the products made with the machines. One of the machines squeezed oranges. I photographed an orange hanging and slowly spinning in black space and by combining a substantial dolly with a 10:1 zoom I made the orange move from a tiny speck in space into a huge macro close-up of the pores in the orange’s rind. I commissioned a very spacey electronic score and had the narrator boom, “The problem is an Orange.” After a few shots like that of different product “problems” we had a montage of ultra fast cut shots of people working in the plant that represented the “process” and that was followed by the solarized machine footage that represented the “solution”. The whole film was on that level of abstraction.  Now that was fun!

ICG: Were you thinking then that someday you would make narrative films?

PRIMES: Not originally. I was interested in making films that were a combination of abstract images and liquid music. I was doing pretty interesting abstract homemade films. What happened eventually, was that I’d go to Los Angeles for mixing and for color timing sessions, and I’d look at the work being done in feature films and in television. I started to yearn to do that type of work so badly that I moved to Los Angeles. I brought my reel around, and got an audience with Chris Peterson of the Peterson Company. He hired me as a TV commercial director-cameraman. That was in 1975. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough experience working with clients and ad agency folks and still had a lot to learn about Hollywood working methods. After six months, they didn’t renew my contract. I had visited big movie sets, including watching John Alonzo shoot Black Sunday, and I thought if I went back to San Francisco I’d be frustrated the rest of my life.

ICG: How did you take the next step?

PRIMES: We didn’t sell our house in San Francisco when I took the commercial job. I rented an apartment and commuted on weekends. After my six-month contract was up, I had seen a glimpse of where I wanted to go, so we moved to Los Angeles. Theo was extremely kind. She had a great life in San Francisco. She sacrificed a lot so I could chase my dream. I am eternally grateful for that. I started freelancing. I was enormously unsuccessfully at first. It was very depressing: cold calling, trying to get people to look at my reel. Nobody was really anxious to meet this guy who was a filmmaker in San Francisco and who wanted to show his reel. I hated doing it, and I hated the rejection. I would do almost anything to avoid calling someone and trying to sell myself. Those were some of the worst years of my life, not making much of a living and feeling a little frozen out. In 1977, I shot a documentary about a faith healer in Peru. It was a three-month hiatus from Los Angeles. I came back home having done a very meaningful documentary with lots of silhouettes against sunsets and visual textures and the sense of order and simplicity that comes from shooting in a natural environment. It helped restore my sanity and confidence in myself. When I returned to Los Angeles, which seemed totally bizarre after having adapted to Peru, I started getting opportunities to shoot low-budget features.

ICG: When and how did you become a member of the Camera Guild?

PRIMES: I got into the Camera Guild in San Francisco when I was directing and shooting a documentary about Arthur Ashe. I was working with seven cameras on a tennis match and hired operators who were active in the Guild. The Guild let it be known that I would be welcome. But, that didn’t give me any seniority to work in Los Angeles. When Peterson hired me to shoot commercials, they got me into the Guild and onto the seniority roster.

ICG: So, you never apprenticed with anyone as an assistant or operator?

PRIMES: I worked one day of my life as a camera assistant on The Godfather. Caleb Deschanel (ASC) was doing pick-up shots in San Francisco and I had a local union card. I had never pulled focus and I had never seen anyone pull focus with a tape measure. Caleb asked if I had ever loaded Cameflex magazines before. I told him I had learned the night before. He said, ‘that’s all right, I’ll do it.’ We were shooting in the basement of the City Hall, and Caleb was dollying back. We were shooting with a Nikon 50 mm f1.1 lens wide open, and I knew enough to know there wasn’t much depth of field. Caleb was saying, ‘soft, soft, soft,’ and I was thinking, what does he expect? I don’t know how to do this. We did another take, and at the end he went off to do something else. That was my day of focus pulling. Twenty-five years later, Garrett Smith (at Paramount) invited a bunch of us in to look at a new print of The Godfather. Caleb was there, and I asked him if he remembered my one day of assisting him. When the shot came up, he said, “there it is” and it was sharp.  

ICG: What was your most memorable experience shooting low budget films?

PRIMES: I shot a non-union spoof on Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde with Oliver reed called Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype (1980). We used pure colors rather freely, much like Dick Tracy. It was very expressionistic. I had deep green gels on the headlights of the police cars and we had lots of fun. It was much like a comic book cartoon. Someone called the union and Jerry Smith, who ran the camera union, came over and scared me into leaving the film. He told me he was “saving my career” and I was gullible enough to believe him. I left the film and my gaffer took over. I’ve never been so depressed or emotionally hurt in my life.         

ICG: What else were you doing during the early 1980s?

PRIMES: I drifted into commercials and had a good, healthy clientele. I worked fairly regularly with Bob Abel and others but of course, as soon as you work in commercials, you want to do narrative films. Commercials are a good lifestyle, they pay well and you can experiment, but ultimately you’re not touching and moving people, teaching them about life or enlightening them.

ICG: How did you get back to narrative filmmaking?

PRIMES: I was shooting a McDonald’s commercial that was to segue into footage from E.T. Stu Berg, the director had worked a lot with Allen Daviau (ASC), and he suggested that I call him to ensure we could match the style of his footage. He said Allen was very approachable. I called and of course he was very generous with his knowledge. We spoke for about an hour and a half. I told him I had an idea for doing something different with a background matte. Instead of matting against a red, green or blue, I was going to use black velvet to create a much deeper black matte with the darkest tones in the subject. Well, Allen thought that was pretty cool and the next day I got a call from Scott Winant who was one of the producers of a new TV show called The Insiders. Allen had recommended me. They wanted some unusually saturated colors. I was one of three cinematographers they hired to rotate on the show and the only one foolish enough to actually give them the bizarre colors they wanted. Unfortunately, I hadn’t won over the lighting crew who thought I was nuts to request the big, heavy lights needed for the pure colors. They sabotaged me and I soon became history. But Scott Winant liked me and that ultimately turned out to be a good thing.

ICG: What else did you do during that period?

PRIMES: I shot a lot of commercials and filmed the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles for 16 Days of Glory. I also did additional photography and time lapse on Rumblefish, a Francis Ford Coppola black and white film shot by Steve Burum (ASC) and some miscellaneous things including several low budget features. Around 1987, Scott Winant recommended me to shoot thirysomething, a new TV series that he was working on. Marshall Herkovitz and Ed Zwick were the producers. They gave me the opportunity to break a lot of rules. TV shows at that time were usually shot with a grid of pipes and 2Ks, but I lit dark day interiors through windows creating shafts of bright light and high contrast.

ICG: How did you know how to light a breakthrough show like that?

PRIMES: Some of it came from documentaries. I believe you learn to light naturally by looking at natural light. I believe that discovery is just as creative as design, because it requires an open mind. I found the style for thirtysomething partially out of ignorance, because I didn’t know how to light a TV show in what was at that time, the conventional manner. I also thought most shows of that time looked unnatural. The exception was Hill Street Blues, but I wanted something less gritty and more pictorial than Hill Street. The only directive from Ed Zwick and Marshal Herskowitz was to keep it contrasty, and they didn’t want a perfect look with top light. We went really dark on that show. They weren’t the kind of producers who said, ‘Bob, we’ve got to see the faces.’ They encouraged me to go deeper and bolder. It was a tremendously lucky break for me. I quit thirtysomething after the first year for a ridiculously idealistic, politically disastrous reason. I felt I had done everything I knew how to do on those sets. What was the point of doing it for another year? Shouldn’t I move on to new challenges and have someone else come in to thirtysomething with fresh ideas? How was I to know you were supposed to stick around to show your loyalty? I regretted leaving many times because I would have loved to work with that idealistic, creative team on their subsequent projects.          

ICG: What did you do after thirtysomething?

PRIMES: I’ll immodestly state that I was pretty hot after thirtysomething. I had seven job interviews and got seven job offers. I shot Bird On A Wire with Mel Gibson and Goldie Hawn in 1989. It was my first big feature film. The director was John Badham. I was of course totally jazzed to be shooting a big feature. It was like I had found the Holy Grail, but I was actually still pretty green, especially about politics. We were going to shoot and then blow up this huge gas station. It had a large red and green neon sign as the apparent principal light source. I had half red/half green gels put in front of all of our lights to try to emulate the funky strange color cast of the neon. It was taking some time.  The UPM asked, “How much longer is it going to be?”  I said, I’m trying an experiment. If it works, it’ll be pretty soon. If not, I’ll have to figure out how to do it another way. Boy, he just hated that. I think I also frustrated Badham. He expected me to be fast because I had come from television. I expected to take more time because it was a big feature and should really look terrific. Afterwards, Badham and I shot some commercials together and he hired me for another big feature, The Hard Way. Unfortunately he fired me about half way through because he still didn’t think I was fast enough.

ICG: How did you handle that?

PRIMES: Well, I was really hurt. Any artist is fiercely dedicated to their work, and being fired not only separates you from that work and jeopardizes future employment, but also sows the poisonous seeds of self-doubt. Firing is terribly harmful thing to do to a person. I didn’t fully recover until a year or so later when I shot the last season of the TV series Quantum Leap. It was a completely new time and place every episode. We did some bold and pretty work and we did it on a tight schedule. It helped redeem both my reputation and my self-esteem.

ICG: I heard that you also did some music videos. Is that true?

PRIMES: Okay, the music video thing… First of all, I’m a dyed in the wool classical music lover, and I don’t always understand or like rock and roll. I shot some Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks videos, the original Twisted Sister stuff and a fair number of others, but I don’t remember the artists names because I don’t follow popular music.  

ICG: What was your impression or feelings about that work?

PRIMES: It was incredibly interesting because they weren’t reality based and you weren’t dealing with continuity where you had to match lighting, etc. We were really going for the idea, which was sometimes pure fantasy and usually very expressionistic. You could really let it all out… kind of the primal scream of cinematography. There was almost nothing that was too extreme or too radical, so it was really fun. It brought me into places where I wouldn’t be otherwise. My director would say, "I want rock ‘n’ roll lighting”. I had no idea what rock ‘n’ roll lighting was, but I’d try to give them something crazy. It was an opening up process for me. I think every artist, every cinematographer has a comfort zone, where they know how to do stuff, and then there’s a gray area, which is riskier. Finally, there’s an unknown area, where you almost always are at risk. The thing about music videos was that you could do something way out there: over-exposed, over-filtered, whatever. It might be brilliant or it might be terrible… either way, you are on that edge between insanity and genius, between brilliant style and technical failure. It’s a very thin line. It’s not easy to get out there at the edge. If you’re in a car race, and you take the curve one mile an hour too fast, you’ll spin out and risk your life. Go one mile an hour too slow and you’ll be passed and lose the race. If you can get into that groove where everything is flowing and your confidence is solid … where you’ve got the guts to get out there on that edge and say, shine that 10K backlight right into the lens. No, don’t flag it off because you want the massive lens flare to be your diffusion instead of fill light. I believe you can either go for greatness or you can avoid mistakes. You can’t do both at the same time. If you’re going for greatness, every neuron in your system is focused and the throttles are wide open.

ICG: Were you doing your own operating on non-union films?

PRIMES: I shot almost a dozen low budget features and I would usually operate, though a lot of times I needed an extra operator. I brought in friends like Paul Ryan (ASC), and John Toll (ASC), but I’d always be manning a camera. It was like playing an instrument. At a certain point, I started using operators. Maybe it was on my first union films. I remember the late Garth Wilson. I would rehearse with the camera and tell him exactly what I wanted. One day he took me aside and said, “You’re micro-managing me and not giving me any room for creativity.”  His candor actually did me a huge favor because that led me to understand that you could use another person’s whole creativity by communicating a vision of your intentions, then and letting their genius shine. It’s foolish to just use someone’s hands when you could have their mind and soul. I think part of the transition to being a director of photography is learning how to work with a crew. I soon learned to work with operators who were far better than I was. It was an epiphany when I realized that being a part of a greater work could be more satisfying than anything I could create on my own.

ICG: I want to ask a few questions about specific projects. Can you share an anecdote about Harrison: Cry of the City, a 1996 MOW that got you an Emmy nomination?

PRIMES: What comes to mind is that we did some gutsy lighting. The story had both a romantic comedic aspect and also a very gritty aspect. Jim Frawley was the director. He liked the fact that I was doing a lot of shots without conventional movie lights. We shot at places where the only light came from sources in the scene. We had this interrogation scene around a table in a very big room. There was only a row of slitty, little windows fairly high in the room. I papered them up and brought this flaring light through the windows right into your eyes. There wasn’t anything else. We just relied on the latitude of the emulsion to pick everything up. We also shot a wedding in a large hall in a castle with nothing but real hard sunlight coming through windows and a little pro-mist on the lens. We steadicamed all over and spun 360°. When that hard sun backlit Elizabeth Hurley in her white wedding dress it was orgasmic.

ICG: How about Felicity, a 1999 show that got you an Emmy?

PRIMES: Felicity had great producers who really wanted a visually dramatic show. We used huge, soft, unfilled light sources. We tried to emulate the textures of a Rembrandt or Vermeer painting. We had extraordinary camera, lighting and grip teams and wonderful morale. We used chimeras for softness and the honeycomb metal grids on them for control.

ICG: How about A Murder of Crows, a 1997 film?

PRIMES: It was my first show with Marshall Adams as gaffer. He has since become a superb cinematographer. A Murder of Crows was a, dark, mysterious thriller and moral tale starring Cuba Gooding, Jr. and shot in Key West, Florida, New Orleans and L.A. Rowdy Harrington was the director. It was a very dark movie with a black protagonist. I used almost no fill light. Despite my pleas we never saw a frame of film dailies until the day after shooting wrapped. When I saw the first frames of printed film I almost had a heart attack. The shadows were consistently darker than I had intended. Kodak had made a manufacturing change in 5279 stock that unexpectedly caused a 7% increase in contrast in the shadows. I was already about at the limit so that 7% change was dramatic to say the least. We timed the show satisfactorily but that sure is a powerful argument for printed dailies throughout a show.

ICG: How about My Antonia, a MOW that got you another Emmy in 1995?

PRIMES: My Antonia was from the Willa Cather novel about immigration to the Midwest, Nebraska in particular. It was set in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries with a great cast including Jason Robards and Eva Marie Saint. Joe Sargent was the director. It began before there were electric lights, so I felt daytime interiors should be very dark unless we were near a window. We would just go off into blackness in places. I was very faithful to the light sources, which were mainly lanterns, the sun and moonlight. There were night exterior scenes at a train station motivated just by moonlight and lanterns. The (Eastman EXR 500T) 5298 stock was brand new at that time. I asked one of my operators how does it look? How is the focus? He said it was too dark for him to tell. Later, I called the timer at the lab, and he said, it’s beautiful, but it’s right there on the edge. You couldn’t have made it any darker. All four camera assistants on that show were women. Everyone thought I was trying to prove a point. I was just hiring the best people I knew.

ICG: You’ve had some experiences shooting HD, including a performance piece with your wife (Theo Plays Chopin), Forgotten Valor, a drama about a Japanese-American regiment during World War II, The Quantum Project, a fantasy with John Cleese, and MDs, a recent Disney TV series. What were your impressions?

PRIMES: The decisions to shoot in HD over film have usually been cost-driven. But I believe the success of MDs in winning the ASC award for 2002 series cinematography proves that the digital medium is capable of superb quality work that can compete head to head with film in quality. Frankly, they are, at the present state of development, different media that require different approaches from the cinematographer. I believe that studio execs and those primarily involved with budgeting will probably make some costly mistakes by being unaware of some of the production challenges in shooting high quality digital. The cinematographers are largely up to speed on the pros and cons of digital and they are probably the best ones to consult on the choice of medium because they should have the fullest grasp of production challenges for their specific show. MDs was a natural for HD because we had large stages, plenty of room and everything on centrally controlled dimmer circuits so exact control of lighting was quick and easy. It was also more economical because we could use measurably less light primarily because of faster zoom lenses but also, in the case of 16mm, because the new Eastman 7218 high speed low grain film stock hadn’t been introduced when we shot MDs. Compared to 16mm film, we could shoot digital in a quarter to a fifth as much light.  The lighting budget can be significant when your main set includes nine full-size patient rooms, two large operating rooms, a scrub room, two nurses’ stations, a complete ER suite leading outside to an ambulance entry, a morgue, a CT scan room, a locker room, showers, offices and 9 corridors that were up to 250 feet long. They were connected like a real hospital, so we could do continuous moving shots.

ICG: It was one stage all connected?

PRIMES: Yes, and most of the walls were glass. We would be shooting in a patient’s room with two solid walls and two glass ones that you could see through into corridors, nurses’ stations, etc.. There were trans-lights of San Francisco skylines and green screens to matte in San Francisco street scenes, so we had real depth. There were soft ceilings everywhere, almost no wild walls and essentially no lighting grid. It was a very beautiful set because of all the rows of reflecting glass. It was also a very difficult set because of all the rows of reflecting glass. Real hospitals use overhead fluorescent lights and they’re lit evenly so they’re very, very flat. There are few dark corners in real hospitals. We wanted the hospital to look far more dramatic.  We lit from the floor rather than an overhead grid. We brought sunlight through Venetian blinds, creating patterns of light and shadows and bounced hard sunlight off the linoleum floors.  Sometimes we made the hospital far darker than a real hospital would be, but I believe an audience will believe what you show them as long as it fits the mood of the scene and that you as an artist are strong in your conviction.

ICG: Were there other factors that affected your choice of HD over 16mm?

PRIMES: Because you have so much less exposure and printing latitude with today’s digital systems, and because my eye hadn’t learned to see the way digital sees highlights, I elected to consistently use the big 23” 160 lb. Hi-Def monitor. I alternately referred to it as Mother or God.  I had absolute quality control at all times. The downside of this is that it is cumbersome, it must be calibrated and kept in a very dark environment and is attached to the camera with a thick cable. The upside is that you can see exactly what you are getting and you can therefore be bolder and more experimental. You can also share your precise vision with the director, your crew and your timer. We shot a scene with two black people coming around a corner into an absolutely dark corridor. We had put some light through the Venetian blinds at the end of the corridor, and these two people were talking in absolute silhouette against a lit room and the reflection from the shiny floor. When we went in for coverage, I still kept them in almost total silhouette. The only way I dared light their whole scene so dark is because both the director and myself could see exactly what it was going to look like . We thought it was beautiful and we went for it. I believe the short feedback loop, instant learning curve and precise visual communication of what you see is what you getis a real boon to creativity and is, for me, the best aspect of digital cinematography.

ICG: Are there any other observations?

PRIMES: There is something about the digital tonal range that still isn’t quite as smooth as film. State-of-the-art digital looks so good though that I didn’t notice this until I saw some very beautiful film vs. digital tests shot by Allen Daviau. The camera is also still long and cumbersome. It’s really a broadcast news camera that has been modified. The next generation of cameras will undoubtedly be more compact, adaptable, modular and designed for making movies. There is also a major problem with the inability to see outside the frame lines. You can’t see microphones until they’re already in the shot and the shot is ruined. The same is true with being able to anticipate actors’ entrances, etc. But the main limits of HD are in portability and in situations where you need high exposure latitude with details in bright and dark areas. I believe all of this will improve soon.

ICG: What about the media hype about digital cameras being so easy to use that any director is going to be able to put a camera on their shoulder and make their own movies?

PRIMES: There’s a dimensional difference between recording a story and interpreting a story. Cinematography is about creating a mood and a sense of reality of place and time with visual images. It is about knowing when and how to focus the viewer’s attention on the elements that tell the story most compellingly. It’s about stirring people’s curiosity and emotions by mastering and utilizing a tremendous range of tools including choice of lenses, camera angles, movement, placement relative to other elements in the framed, lighting, filtration, processing and printing textures, color, and a thousand other things. It’s an art form that takes decades to learn, not months. Most people are entirely oblivious to the fact that they are affected by it. An analogy might be that most people leaving a symphony may remember a tune but not the orchestration. Yet the tune alone has little if any emotional effect. It is only when the tune is orchestrated that it becomes a moving experience. A film without beautiful and appropriate cinematography loses a great deal of its emotional power.

ICG: How about the people who claim that you can now fix images in post?

PRIMES: It’s true that you can tweak the contrast, colors, density and saturation and even modify selected portions of the image. In fact, with Oh Brother, Where art Thou? as a quintessential example, you can make marvelous improvements and reinterpretations of material that is already excellent to begin with. However, I’m extremely skeptical about turning a badly lit or composed image into anything other than a restyled bad shot. I believe the advances in post are best used to polish an image, rather than save it. I also believe it is as important for cinematographers to become facile with post tools as they are with camera and lighting. If we’ve visualized and created an image, we should certainly protect and perfect that image. To be able to do that, we must be as efficient in post as we are in production. I’ve had postproduction supervisors and producers who didn’t want me in color-timing sessions. They wanted to bring in the director or producer or editor or post supervisor instead because they thought it might be faster.

ICG: What do you do in that situation?

PRIMES: I look them in the eye and tell them that if they bring in a committee it will be slower, more expensive and ultimately compromise the images they hired me to create. If they have three days budgeted to time an MOW, I’ll tell them that because I know the language, know the show and know what I want it to look like, I’m faster than anyone else. I ask them to give me two days alone with the timer and we’ll present our interpretation to the director or anyone else on the morning of the third day with plenty of time to make any corrections they may request. Invariably they’ll come in on the third day, love our work and maybe request less than a half dozen changes.. In other words, cinematographers must earn the right to complete their work by learning to do it efficiently and then standing up for what should be our right to complete our work.  

ICG: Do you think it is important for film schools to teach those skills?

PRIMES: Absolutely! They should teach that image manipulation in postproduction is an essential part of modern day cinematography. Cinematography does not end when production wraps. I urge film school faculty and students to take this very seriously. If cinematographers lose control of our images in post, it will ultimately lead to the loss of our authorship and the erosion of our art form. The authorship of the images created by cinematographers must continue through postproduction.

ICG: What is your advice for film camera and emulsion vendors?

PRIMES: Take digital seriously. Two of our most respected camera houses, Panavision and Clairmont do. They’re both making huge investments and believe digital and film will work side by side for some time to come. I would have lobbied for a fast film stock fine grained enough for 16mm work but Kodak has just announced 7218 that should accomplish that. The new ARRICAM system has raised the bar in camera design. We will need to continue to improve the quality of the videotape because we will soon expect film camera taps to rival the superb images available on digital sets. But what we really need are improvements in camera focusing technology. We have a tremendous range of tools today for designing more sophisticated shots including Steadicams, remote heads and long, wide aperture lenses. The problem is that this technology allows us to design shots beyond the eye-hand coordination ability of most human beings. I hope that we can create new tools for focus pullers, so they can better utilize their talent, skill and judgment.

ICG: You have been on the boards of directors of both ICG and ASC, and are very active in both organizations. What roles do you envision for ICG and ASC in the future?

PRIMES: I have two major concerns: First, that business entities like studios may believe that technology can replace cinematography, and second, that these same business entities believe that audiences don’t notice and therefore don’t care about the quality of the images so that all that is important are schedules and budgets. I believe that the Guild and the ASC both need to play a large role in educating policy makers in our industry, journalists and the general public about how important this art form is to our culture, our economy and most of all to our spirit.