A Conversation with Brian J. Reynolds
By Bob Fisher

Following are excerpts of a conversation:

ICG: Where were you born and raised?

REYNOLDS: I was sort of a beach boy. I was born in Inglewood, California, but lived in Manhattan Beach. That’s where I grew up.

ICG: Were you a photographer or film buff?

REYNOLDS: It seems like I never wanted to be anything else but a cameraman. I used to run around the house with a make believe TV camera that I made out a shoebox with toilet paper tube lenses when I was two or three years old. I started really young. I got my first 8 mm camera at a garage sale when I was five. It was a Kodak Brownie wind-up, and I started making movies with my friends.

ICG: Do you remember why?

REYNOLDS: I was fascinated with television; maybe it was the power of the medium at the time. I was always a little bit of a ham, and I was also the technical guy behind the scenes. As I said, I use to make movies with my buddies. We were very influenced by whatever television show was on at the time. When Man from U.N.C.L.E was on television, we would make pretend episodes in Super 8. I still have those movies. I’ve been meaning to get them transferred to video.

ICG: What roles did you play when you made those movies?

REYNOLDS: I directed, shot lit and edited them. Afterwards, we got together and showed them to our friends. When I got into school, I was able to make movies instead of writing reports in English class. My teachers would encourage me to do that. We’d make a movie and tell a little story. Of course, they were silent movies. I’d edit them and put them to music and have a showing for the class. That was always a really cool thing to do. In school, I was always the kid who knew how to run the projector, so I was the AV technician. That was great because I got special privileges. I got to leave class early to set the projector up for assemblies. The natural progression was that I was the one who ran the follow spot. When I got into high school, I started doing stage lighting, and tried to do more creative work as opposed to just illuminating the actors onstage.

ICG: Did you keep making films in high school?

REYNOLDS: I used to film the football games in high school with a Bolex 16 mm. It had 400-foot mags and a zoom lens. That was really a big coup for me. They gave me the camera to take care of during the week. I’d climb a light tower and shoot the games every Friday night. During the week and over the rest of the weekend, I’d get my buddies together and then we’d make 16mm films. We did quite a few of those. I edited the films and put them together.

ICG: Nobody in your family had this inclination?

REYNOLDS: Nobody in my family was a photographer or cinematographer. My parents worked in the aerospace industry.

ICG: Were there any other influences?

REYNOLDS: My drama teacher in high school heard about a summer television workshop that USC was doing for high school students. I was really excited. The school paid my tuition. I think it was $150 or something like that. It was an eye-opening experience. This would have been around 1970. USC had these old Marconi Mark IV image orthicon cameras with rack-over lenses. It was old, black-and-white equipment. They had us produce a sitcom like the old-style television shows. I was the only one in the class who knew anything about lighting, so I ended up being the lighting designer. It was interesting lighting for the image orthicon cameras, because you really had to be careful with highlights. The cameras didn’t have very much range, and were really susceptible to highlight flares. During high school, I was also a still photographer. I shot pictures for the yearbook and the newspaper. Sometimes I spent my evenings until three and four in the morning locked in the darkroom at school developing pictures and printing. My hands were always yellow from being in the chemicals, but it was a great time. I was basically kind of the media nerd of the high school.

ICG: What did you do after high school? Did you go to film school?

REYNOLDS: I took a couple classes in photography at junior college, and I had a job selling cameras at Two Guys, which was a discount retailer. My store manager got a job at Mattel Toys as a communications analyst. They were looking for a still photographer, but I didn’t have a portfolio. He told me what they wanted, so I assigned myself a shot list. I went out and shot pictures, like photos of kids and toys, and printed them in color. I got the job. Mattel was really my college. I learned how to shoot 4x5 and 8x10 transparencies, and how to light sets in miniature for catalogs. Pretty soon, I was shooting promotional films that they used as presentations. The guys on the sixth floor started asking how come my stuff looked better than what they were getting from the ad agency? They offered me an opportunity to shoot some commercials for Mattel. I had met a guy who worked in the recording studio at Mattel. He mainly produced voices for toys. We decided to freelance, and opened up a studio. I did the still photography and shot commercials. I had  the opportunity to shoot in Bangkok, Sri Lanka, Rome, London and the Arctic Circle, for the Tim Hansen soda campaign. In addition to shooting, I was the editor, using a KEM flatbed, and the old standard Movieola. So, I attended the learn-by-doing school. Sometime during the late ‘70s, I heard about a lighting seminar taught by Michel Hugo (ASC). It was a three-day seminar where he spoke about the nuts and bolts and what it took to be on a set. He was shooting a TV movie and allowed me to visit him on the set. It was really a great experience. That’s when I decided I was going to try to get into this business. I couldn’t get into the union at the time, but I was shooting commercials, and I knew sooner or later there’d be an opportunity.

ICG: What else were you doing during that early period in your career?

REYNOLDS: I shot a lot of industrial films. I also went to Rome to shoot a 16 mm TV movie that was for a Catholic Church network. There were four people: myself, the director, a monk who was the soundman, and another monk who was the camera assistant. We picked up the rest of the crew in Italy. None of them spoke English, but they were people who had worked for Fellini. It was a period film, about the life of a saint in Rome circa 1860. It was a remarkably, fabulous experience.

ICG: How did you get involved with music videos?

REYNOLDS: I shot the Hansen’s (soft drink) commercials, and then I did some music videos with the same producer and Stevie Wonder. It was one of Stevie’s early music videos.

ICG: It sounds like you got off to a pretty fast start?

REYNOLDS: It’s all about the Demo Reel in this business. When you’re a cinematographer, your reel is so important. Somebody sees something they like, and they say, ‘hey I’m doing this little music video, can you come shoot it for me?’ I didn’t do a ton of music videos, I probably shot under 10. They were great fun and a terrific learning experience. You had to move quickly and make the best out of lighting set-ups so you can make several shots with them.

ICG: How did you take the next step?

REYNOLDS: When I was shooting still photographs of Barbie dolls, I always did something extra to make the lighting look a little better than they expected. Maybe I put a slash of color or something else behind her, so instead of looking at a flat transparency, they’re seeing something that’s got some sparkle. I did the same thing with the little promotional films I shot for Mattel. We put them together on a shoestring budget for a couple thousand dollars, but I made them look better than the commercials they were getting. So, they had me shoot the commercials. My whole career has been that way. I once worked with a director (Sid Galanty) on a job for a jean company, called Clipper Jeans. He and I really hit it off. He liked my work. One day, he said he was doing this little video and it was probably not going to be a big deal, but it was with an actress who has written a book about exercising. He asked if I would like to shoot it? I said, sure, who’s the actress? It was Jane Fonda. He said he didn’t want it to look like video. He wanted the lighting to look like film. They offered me a percentage if I shot for a lower fee, but I was broke, so I said, just pay me a couple hundred bucks a day and I’ll do it. Losing a percentage in the video was a big mistake, but that was my first big project, and it got me in the union. Being in the union has opened more doors for me then any other single thing I have done in my career.

ICG: When was that?

REYNOLDS: It was sometime in the early ‘80s. At that point I pretty much took every opportunity that came along, and I got my friends to help me on the crew. We’d light and shoot every little project like it was a big feature. There were a couple films I did for free for college students who wanted to be directors. Panavision was loaning them 35 mm cameras. I shot one of these shorts Face to Face (directed by Ron Rapiel) in downtown Los Angeles. I went with really gritty lighting. Bob Butler, a director who had just done the pilot for Sisters at Lorimar, was impressed with my commercial work. He liked the naturalistic lighting in the short. He called and asked if I had any interest in doing a TV series? I had just gotten into the union, so I was in the right place at the right time. But it wasn’t just good timing. I believe everything you do deserves to look great. I think that’s how you get ahead. That’s how painters get ahead. They get a job to do a poster for a play and it ends up being in the Museum of Modern Art 10 years later.

ICG: What do you remember about the Sisters series?

REYNOLDS: I don’t know if you remember the show, but at the opening of each episode, there was a steam room scene with the women in towels. It was creating havoc. It was very controversial. I mean, you look at it now and laugh because it’s no big deal. The girls literally were wrapped in towels, which was considered risqué at that time. That was my first show. I remember when I was lining up a crane shot on the backlot and I was on a Titan crane, just kind of looking through the lens. I remember having a chill go down my spine. I was up there looking around, and realized here I am at Warner Bros. on the back lot. I looked over to my assistant, and said, you know what? THIS is what it’s about. This is what it means to finally “make it”. I’ve never lost that feeling.

ICG: What did you do after Sisters?

REYNOLDS: I was hired to do a show called Civil Wars for Steven Bochco. People never got the title. I used to say I did Civil Wars, and they’d say they saw those great soldier scenes with all the people riding over the hill. I’d have to tell them, no it’s a New York lawyer show mainly filmed on a courtroom set at 20^th Century Fox. We broke a lot of rules with lighting. There were a lot of shows with very soft, “Safe” lighting at the time. I went for much more of a gritty, realistic look. I got my first ASC nomination from the pilot of that show. Boy! Was I thrilled! At the ceremony and pre party I got to meet my ”hero” Directors of Photography like Vilmos Zigmond, Conrad Hall, Owen Roizman and many others. It was really an honor being in the company of such greats.  Sometime during the second season of the show, I got a call from a director, Hugh Wilson, who had been channel surfing and landed on Civil Wars. He was doing this movie with Shirley MacLaine and Nicholas Cage called Guarding Tess. He wanted me to shoot it. It was a 45-day schedule. He said he wanted somebody who was “fast and good.” That was my first big feature break. I was able to bring my gaffer and my key grip.

ICG: From there, you went on to NYPD Blue. How did that happen?

REYNOLDS: Greg Hoblit was the show runner on Civil Wars. He went on to NYPD Blue. I came on after the sixth episode basically with no prep. I literally saw one episode, and started shooting with pretty much the same crew I used in Civil Wars. Greg wanted a new look with two cameras. It was lit in a very ballsy manner. He also didn’t want to spend time on set-ups. Greg envisioned a realistic, kind of semi-documentary look. Leslie Dekter, a commercial director, came up with something Greg called it the “Dekter-cam” look, with the camera kind of roving from the actor’s hands to their face, telling a story in one shot. After about three or four shows, everybody loved the content, but people were complaining because the combination of camera movement and editing made it hard to watch that for an hour. When I took over the show, one of the things we talked about was how to keep the visual style only let it settle down a little. We started doing more overs and singles. There was nothing conventional about that show. We did a lot of shots where we’d be on say David Caruso or Dennis Franz, and he would walk toward the camera into a big close-up, and then he walked behind someone sitting at a table. The camera would drop to the person at the table, and he’d have a piece of dialogue. Then they would walk back in behind the guy and we’d take him back. There was a wonderful atmosphere that came from Stephen Bochco. It was a hands-off approach. They let us do our job. They never told me that my lighting was too dark or too light or too this or too that.

ICG: That was before darkness was fashionable in television.

REYNOLDS: They never told me to how to light, which at that time was very unusual in television. I felt insulated from pressure about the look. The one thing I learned very early on, in fact from the very beginning, maybe even shooting Barbie dolls, was to take care of the ladies. We kind of combined a rough-edged look, but when we had a close-up of an actress, I’d sneak a filter in, use a little fill and soften the light a bit. On Sisters, I had a little thing worked out with Sela Ward. If she wasn’t happy with a take, she would give me a little wink, and I’d tell the assistant to find a hair in the gate or something like that, and I’d ask the director for another take. Don’t get me wrong…you have to take care of your male actors, as well. A lot of them expect star treatment. On an episodic series, there’s a new director every week, so you’re sort of the actors’ escape valve.

ICG: Do you like episodic TV?

REYNOLDS. It’s a fun job, but with a lot of responsibility to keep everything going. Maybe someone’s rewriting the script, and you are losing time but you’re still the one who has to make up the difference. You usually get the blame if things go badly, so sometimes you’re the sacrificial lamb. Before video taps no one really knew exactly what you were doing. You’d look at the operator and he’d wink back and you’d say, okay, let’s move on. Now, sometimes you have all the producers on the stage looking at the monitors and telling the poor director how to direct. The quality of video taps is also getting better. In the old days, they would flicker, and it was black and white. Now, they’re flicker-free, and the color video taps look pretty awesome. That technology is sometimes a double-edged sword because you lose a certain amount of control. People start to question, gee, does he look a little dark there? Is his coat too red?

ICG: What do you personally use a video tap for?

REYNOLDS: When I started using the black and white CCD taps from Panavision during the earlier years, it was almost like a Polaroid camera. I trained my eye to be able to troubleshoot lighting problems with the tap. I didn’t necessarily light to the tap, but I could tell if I saw something that looked funky. Now, with the good color taps, you can almost see a preview of what the film's going to look like. It's a little flatter, but it's a really nice tool for cinematographers. I think it’s up to the director and the assistant director to control the number of looky-loos in the video village. Ideally, they establish early on that it’s a tool for the cinematographer, script supervisor and director.

ICG: How did the success of NYPD Blue influence your career?

REYNOLDS: I’ve gotten a lot of work off of it, but I’ve also lost some work because of the shaky cam stuff we did. I lost a feature because someone at the studio was afraid I was going to wiggle the camera too much. You know, ‘Oh, he’s the guy from NYPD Blue. He’s going to wiggle the camera too much.’ That’s ridiculous, because it’s a style that the producer and director wanted. A good cinematographer should be able to do anything. I felt I better move on after four seasons, because I didn’t want to get stuck in that genre. It’s like an actor who does too much comedy.

ICG: What came next?

REYNOLDS: I’ve shot a bunch of TV movies, including The Beach Boys miniseries, Papa’s Angels, and also some feature films. It’s been a very good experience but, I’m ready to go back to episodic for now, mostly I want to stay in town with my family. You go to Canada to do a TV movie and you’re gone for six or eight weeks.

ICG:  Is there an answer to runaway production? What do you think?

REYNOLDS: I think the answer to runaway production is the same answer that faced the garment industry and the car industry. I think we need to demonstrate that U.S. films and television programs produced in the United States are the best, including content, look and everything else. Canada is offering producers a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and there’s a certain amount of greed in the industry. At the same time, other costs are rising; the stars are getting paid more; visual effects is expensive; the producers have to pay for HD and NTSC master, and so on. I think what has to happen is that our government has to compete by offering tax cuts and incentives. We also need some help from DGA and SAG. Something has got to happen, because it’s unfair competition right now, and it is damaging our film industry.

ICG: How are advances in telecine technology affecting cinematographers?

REYNOLDS: The technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in five to 10 years. I remember my first telecine experience was when I was shooting Hansen’s commercials early in my career, and we were using a Rank-Cintel telecine to transfer the 35 mm negative to 2-inch high band tape. It was amazing, because you could transfer right from the negative. The new telecine machines have quadrupled our ability to control images. The new color correctors are amazing. You can take a little window, and if you want someone’s face to be brighter in a particular scene, you can lighten up just their face and you can track it as the person walks. I can change the color of someone’s dress. If it’s a red dress, and I want it to be green, I can just change it. I can make the skies darker or lighter. One of the really exciting things that is happening in cinematography is the new HD telecines. You can shoot 35 mm or Super 16 film, transfer it on a Spirit high-definition machine, color correct it in 2K format, and you are seeing a new kind of depth and details you never saw before. I don’t think anyone knows the true resolution of film today—maybe it’s 5K or 6K per frame. Typically, we’ve been transferring to 525 lines NTSC. It doesn’t have a tremendous amount of resolution and there are artifacts. In the old days, you’d shoot a car and the grill and the chrome would kind of scream. Today, with the Spirit, the depth and the detail that film is capable of recording is finally getting translated to video. People are transferring old movies to high definition, and they’re seeing things in the blacks and highlights they never saw on video before.

ICG: In your experience, has this been an extension of the role of the cinematographer or a usurping of that role since anyone can alter images so dramatically?

REYNOLDS: I think it is the cinematographer’s responsibility to control the images from the time that the first nail gets hammered on a set. I try to meet with the production designer very early on and look at the plans and talk to them about the sets and locations. That’s your best opportunity to say, ‘Hey, if you put a little nook and cranny here, I can hide a light.’ I also try to be available to be in the telecine suite when the colorist is working with my film. In episodic, it’s particularly important to find a colorist you trust who has a great eye who you can write notes to: Print this scene warm; make this guy look cool; and print this for late afternoon or early afternoon. Usually, they understand. You also need to have a relationship with the postproduction coordinator on a TV show. That’s the person you try to take out to dinner, or do whatever it takes to get them to get on the same page with you...maybe have a meeting with the coordinator and director and try to share the vision that you’re trying to put onto film. It doesn’t do any good to have a great colorist if a show has a coordinator who says, ‘Gee, it looks dark. Can you brighten it up?’

ICG: Didn’t you have an early high definition video experience?

REYNOLDS: When the first high definition cameras were introduced at NAB, I tried to get as much hands-on experience as I could. I’ve always stayed up with video technology. I did a lot of political commercials in video, because they needed to turn them around quickly. We usually shot DigiBeta, so I learned how to keep images from those cameras looking as good as possible. We also shot the Jane Fonda exercise tapes in video. I’ve made it a point to keep up with video technology, and also try to light and shoot video to look as much like film as possible.

ICG: Didn’t you do an HD project recently?

REYNOLDS: I did some testing and then I shot Crazy Jones, a high definition movie last summer. We shot it in 12 days, believe it or not, using the new Sony 900 Cine Alta cameras.

ICG: Was it the Panavized version?

REYNOLDS: No, it wasn’t, but Panavision has been fabulous to me over my entire career. I did a small feature film this year in Brooklyn on a very low budget. It was around $800,000. I very much wanted to shoot anomorphic. I called Panavision and they gave me a set of Primo anomorphic lenses. The film was called Wannabees. In fact, I just saw the answer print the other day and it looks pretty amazing.

ICG: So, why did you shoot Crazy Jones in HD?

REYNOLDS: It was a really low budget. They had about $80,000 to do a feature. Originally they had wanted to do it in DV cam. I told them I wasn’t interested in doing the movie if it was going to be a DV cam, but I thought I could get them a deal for HD gear.

ICG: So, it was a video movie because of the budget, not the look?

REYNOLDS: It was totally a money issue. It didn’t have anything to do with the look. The mission in high def, at least all the projects I’ve worked on, is to make the video or digital image look as close to film as possible. I think every project that I’ve worked on, if they could afford to have shoot film, they would have shot film. So, I said, let’s shoot HD cam and make it look as much like film as possible. I’m very happy with the way it came out. It’s not film, but it’s not bad.

ICG: What’s the difference?

REYNOLDS: It’s hard to explain the differences in words. It’s kind of like a painter who paints with oils and another guy uses pastels and another guy that uses watercolors. How do you compare them? High definition is another palette. It can look something like film when it is transferred to film, but high definition digital is a different animal. It has it’s own look, and can look really interesting, especially if it’s lit and exposed right.

ICG: Does it reduce your lighting cost or is that just hype?

REYNOLDS: You have to light HD for it to look good. You actually have to be more careful in some instances. I think you end up using more grip equipment, more overheads, more butterflies than on a film shoot, because high def still doesn’t have the latitude that film does. It isn’t as forgiving as film. If you overexpose film, you put it on the telecine or you print it down, and it’s no big deal. If you overexpose HD, it ain’t there. It’s gone; so you have to be more careful. Also, underexposed HD is not very pretty. It gets muddy and grainy real fast. You have to be much more careful about exposure.

ICG: What about the claim it’s easier to use, so HD shows ought to be done under the “blue book” video contract with smaller crews who are paid less.

REYNOLDS: That’s like saying anybody can fly the space shuttle, because you just have to push a few buttons. It takes training and experience just like film—getting back to the look—do I think high definition will replace film? No. High definition has a niche. It’s instant. There’s less guesswork. You turn the camera on, set an exposure, and pretty much what you see on the monitor is what your final daily is going to look like, and you can manipulate it later in tape-to-tape.

ICG: How did you manage access to the monitor on Crazy Jones?

REYNOLDS: The guy who was the producer, writer, and director was also acting in every scene, so he was very heavily relying on me. We only had 12 days, so we couldn’t afford to playback everything…in fact, there’s a danger in playing back your master tape anyway. We did play a few things back, but basically there was a lot of trust involved. I’d set up the shot, and we’d do a rehearsal. I’d tweek the lighting if I felt it was needed. We’d shoot two, three or four takes and, in most instances we’d move on. Once in a while I picked a take and showed it to the director.

ICG: What about differences in the crew?

REYNOLDS: That’s determined by the budget not the medium. With video, there isn’t a magazine physically to load, but you still have to keep track of all those tapes. You still have to log them in and do all the paperwork that they normally do, so there’s still a second assistant. You still need a focus puller because it’s a smaller capture image, and it uses wider angle lenses… you try to shoot everything almost wide open, so that you get limited depth of field. One of the things that makes high definition look like video is if you shoot it at (stop) T-5, 6, or an 8 or 11, because you have a teeny capture area. You know, the chip is like a 16 mm frame, even smaller than 16 mm. You are effectively using a wider-angle lens for the same field of view. In 35, if I was shooting a close-up of you now, I would use a 75 mm lens. In order to get the same shot with HD, I’d have to use a 35 mm lens. A 35 mm lens gives you a lot more depth of field, because you’re basically pulling a chunk out of the center of the lens, as opposed to filling the whole frame. The long and short of it is one of the complaints with high def, is that there’s an awful lot of depth of field. If you don’t take care of that, either in production design, or by trying to shoot with as little depth of field as possible, it starts to look like the nightly news. It’s also challenging from an assistant’s standpoint, because a lot of the non-Panavision lenses are kind of up-resed ENG lenses.    

ICG: How much training does it take for somebody who’s an assistant cameraman or an operator on a film crew to work with an HD camera?

REYNOLDS: Bexel, the company I used for Crazy Jones, has a stage with lights and a dimmer board. They’ve got cameras sitting on a Chapman dolly every day. You can shoot tests, and they have a high definition screening room. Call them on a day you’re not working and have an engineer go through the camera set-ups. There’s a lot of different set-ups that you can do on the camera to change the look. Some of that’s still a mystery to me, but I understand the concept, so I can sit with an engineer and I can get them to set up the camera the way I want it. All of your settings can be put on a little memory stick. You just pop it in and go to setting one, and that’s the look you’ll get. If you are a good focus puller or operator with a film camera, a video camera isn’t a mystery.

ICG: Do you see the role of the cinematographer changing?

REYNOLDS: I think the role of cinematographers has been constantly changing during the past 50 years. In the old days cinematographers were sort of magicians. They showed up on the set, and there was a lot of mystery about what they did. They had their private box of special filters that they kept secret from everyone. No one really quite knew what they did to create looks. There was a little hocus pocus going on in the lab because they had special processes, or they knew a cinematographer wanted his film printed a certain way. I think cinematographers today are much more willing to share their knowledge about technology. But, cinematography isn’t about the tools you use. It’s about knowing which ones to use and when to use them, and having all that information parked in your brain. I’m not worried about my job, because we’re storytellers. The good ones are going to shine, not because they have a bag of tricks or because they know how to use a high def camera. It is because they know how to tell a story with images and lighting and with heart. It isn’t about technical stuff as much as it’s about an artistic understanding of how to light actors to tell a story. I’m not trying to give you sound bites. If you cut to the chase, the talent lies in being able to interpret the mood that a dramatic moment needs and knowing how to execute it.

ICG: What are your thoughts about this being a collaborative process, especially the relationship between cinematographers and their crew?

REYNOLDS: I think the cinematographer is comparable in a way to the head mechanic in a pit crew for a racecar. You count on your crew. You need people who understand what you want, what your vision is and that your vision is an extension of the director’s vision, because that’s why he hired you. I think a good crew listens and they facilitate as quickly as possible. I think we all need to remember how fortunate we are to be working in this industry. There’s a lot more than lighting and shooting going on the set. We’re also expected to keep the production on schedule. We’re helping directors who might not be visually acute. We’re helping the actor who drank too much the night before, or who has bags under his eyes because he spent the night at a party. I surround myself with people who understand these things and want to be part of the team.

ICG: If you could choose an actor or a director who’s no longer working, or no longer with us, to make a film with, who would you pick?

REYNOLDS: There are a couple actors I can think of. I always wanted to work with Jimmy Stewart. That was like my big dream…and Walter Matthau. For a director, Orson Wells would be really interesting, or John Cassavetes or Stanley Kubrick.

ICG: What are you working on now?

REYNOLDS: A new series called American Family on PBS. It’s Gregory Nava’s show (El Norte, My Family, Selena)…he’s the show runner and director. It’s being shot in and around East Los Angeles and on a stage at the old KTTV studios, which I understand is now owned by the school district. It has a great cast including Sonia Braga, Raquel Welch and Edward James Olmos. Gregory is a remarkable director and of course, he’s in charge of all the scripts. He has great ideas. I’m looking forward to this project.”