This article originally appeared in
International Photographer Magazine in 2001

If dreams always came true, Owen Roizman, ASC would have been the next Joe DiMaggio or Mickey Mantle. He would have been the centerfielder for the New York Yankees. His father, Sol, was a newsreel cameraman for Fox Movietone News for 22 years before he switched to shooting documentaries and TV commercials. His uncle Morris was a film editor.

“The truth is that I never thought about following in my father’s or uncle’s footsteps,” Roizman says. “I wanted to be a professional baseball player. That was my dream. I still treasure the memory of visiting Ebbets Field and watching the Dodgers play in Brooklyn. They let me in the dugout because of my father’s job. I got to talk with Pee Wee Reese, Pete Reiser and other Dodgers.”

Roizman had both natural athletic ability and a fierce competitive spirit. There is no way of telling what might have happened if a bout with polio hadn’t slowed him. Roizman didn’t give up. He switched to pitching, and spent endless hours strengthening his arm and perfecting his control by throwing a ball against a wall.

His hard work and determination paid off. Roizman was an all-star pitcher on a championship high school team in New York City, but he hurt his arm during his last game. After thinking about his future, Roizman decided to become an engineer. He studied math and physics at Gettysburg College, in Pennsylvania, and spent his summer vacations working at a camera rental house.

After graduation, Roizman interviewed for corporate jobs as an engineer, but the offers didn’t feel right. Akos Farkas, a Hungarian expatriate who specialized in shooting TV commercials, offered Roizman a job as an assistant cameraman.

“He treated me as though I was an apprentice,” Roizman recalls. “I learned a lot from him about both life and film. If he wanted a filter, he would always explain why. I tried to learn how to think like him, so I could anticipate his needs.”

Roizman was sorting through his memories before leaving for Lodz, Poland where he received the 2001 Lifetime Achievement Award at Camerimage – The International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography during the first week of December. It was a singular tribute. Roizman is only the ninth recipient. Previous winners include Sven Nykvist, ASC, Vittorio Storaro, AIC, ASC, Conrad Hall, ASC, Haskell Wexler, ASC, Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC, Laszlo Kovacs, ASC, Giuseppe Rotunno, AIC, ASC and Billy Williams, BSC.

Roizman has been lionized before. In 1997, his peers in the American Society of Cinematographers presented him with the coveted ASC Lifetime Achievement Award. He is also one of only five contemporary cinematographers who have earned five Oscar nominations. His first nomination came in 1970 for The French Connection. The others were for The Exorcist (1973), Network (1976), Tootsie (1982) and Wyatt Earp (1994). Some of his other milestone films are The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, The Return of a Man Called Horse, Three Days of the Condor, The Electric Horseman, Absence of Malice, True Confessions, Havana and Grand Canyon. He also earned an Emmy nomination for Liza With a Z, his only narrative TV credit.

“Filmmakers every place in the world have been influenced by Owen Roizman’s work,” observes Camerimage festival director Marek Zydowicz. Many cinematographers and other filmmakers who were directly or indirectly influenced by Roizman have voiced these same thoughts.

“All of us have a certain movie we hold closer to our heart than any other,” says Richard Crudo, ASC. “For me, it's The French Connection. I was born and raised in New York City, and I've never been able to think of home without recalling this movie's light and textures. Noir-ish, rough-hewn, documentary-like…call it what you will. Owen managed to render a truth in a carefully modulated fashion that only a fellow cinematographer would recognize. The key is the unobtrusiveness of his technique. You almost have to look beyond his photography to find its genius. I first saw The French Connection as a freshman in high school and though I wouldn't know it for a couple of years, it planted the seed that led to my becoming a cinematographer.”

Crudo explains that in retrospect he came to realize that Roizman’s work on The French Connection made him aware that lighting didn't just happen on its own. Someone had to create it.

Serendipity led Roizman on the path to shooting The French Connection. In the mid 1960s, in addition to shooting documentaries and commercials, Sol Roizman was working at MPO Videotronics, Inc. whenever its top cinematographer Gerald Hirschfeld, ASC needed an operator. After his first assistant was killed in a car crash, Hirschfeld offered that job to Owen Roizman.

“I got to work with my father and Gerry (Hirschfeld) for about a year,” Roizman recalls. “Then, my father died, and Gordon Willis (ASC) joined the crew.”

Within a year, Willis moved up to cinematographer. Hirschfeld tried several other operators before agreeing to give Roizman the job on trial.

“I was Gerry’s operator for about two years until MPO made me a staff cinematographer. I shot a lot of commercials during the next several years, and then Bill Gunn, a writer, asked me to shoot a movie he was going to direct."

They shot Stop in Puerto Rico, mainly in soft light with long lenses. The film was still in postproduction when Dick DiBona, one of the owners of General Camera, recommended Roizman to a young director named Billy Friedkin.

“After looking at my commercial reel and Stop, Billy said he liked my work, but he was going to shoot a gritty, down-and-dirty, realistic documentary-style film,” Roizman recalls. “He asked if I could work that way. I told him I was a cinematographer and could shoot in any style he wanted.”

While they were scouting locations for The French Connection, Roizman decided it was important to record images at those sites the way they looked to his naked eye. That meant he had to augment the light. Roizman knew the lighting inside the car was the key to establishing the setting and accentuating the drama. He experimented with lighting that scene in his own car parked in the family garage. All of the garage windows were blacked out so it was totally dark. His wife Mona alternately sat in the seats that Roy Scheider and Gene Hackman would occupy in the movie, while Roizman experimented with lighting her face and the interior with just a few small lamps.

“I wanted to feel the mood,” he says. “That’s my approach to lighting. I’m fascinated by light. Anytime I go anywhere, day or night, I’m looking at how the light falls, the brightness and the shadows, the colors reflecting off objects and reflecting on faces.”

The famous chase scene was precisely storyboarded and broken up into small parts. Roizman decided to use longer lenses that compressed the distance between the speeding car and pedestrians, objects and other vehicles to amplify the feeling of an imminent deadly crash. Roizman also utilized wider angles lenses in certain instances to accentuate the speed of the vehicle.

“It was the first time I tried to make a film look like reality,” Roizman says. “That’s when I became aware of how you can use source lighting to pull audiences into stories even if you augment it. I’d walk into a room on location, and maybe I’d change the bulbs in a lamp to make them brighter, and then use something to shade the walls down, so you could shape and model the light and still make it feel real. You can change the mood of a whole scene by simply changing the angle of light coming from a lamp. You are trying to create a feeling.”

The French Connection won five Oscars, including best picture, best director and best script. It was only Roizman’s second film, and the first one that was released, but he was already on the way to establishing himself as one of the defining cinematographers of contemporary times.

“I photographed a picture called Bullitt that was directed by Peter Yates in 1968,” recalls William A. Fraker, ASC. “We had a very exciting car chase scene that went up and down hills on the streets of San Francisco. It was very dramatic. A few years later, Owen photographed The French Connection. They also had a car chase scene, but it was on the flat streets of New York under an elevated train track. It was equally exciting, and that was a pure tribute to Owen’s talent. I remembered seeing The French Connection and being awed by his talent.”

Roizman compiled another 17 narrative credits during the next 11 years. It seemed like every director he met after The French Connection wanted to talk about emulating a realistic, documentary-style look. He remembers thinking he should also do some more stylized work, but even when he had license to explore other possibilities, his taste gravitated towards realism.

Roizman was never complacent or totally satisfied. He quickly discovered that cinematography was a game of inches. In 1972, while Roizman was shooting a night scene for his third feature film, Play It Again Sam, he noticed that a light behind an actress was coming directly into the lens. Her body was blocking the light, creating kind of a halo effect. He thought about using smoke to soften or diffuse the light, but decided to let it burn around the edges of her back. His operator told him that he thought it was going to flare out and blow everything out. Roizman watched a couple of takes to see how it played. He decided that the few times she moved in a way that let the light flare, it actually helped the scene. “I knew from experience that while the human eye couldn’t handle that bright light, the film could and would see it differently. I thanked the operator for his suggestion and told him to let it play,” says Roizman

Roizman collaborated with Friedkin again in 1973. This time the film was The Exorcist, based on William Blatty’s book by the same name. “Before the film was in pre-production, Billy Friedkin gave me a tape of an actual exorcism of an eight year old boy in Italy,” Roizman says. “It was in Italian, so I couldn’t understand the words, but the sounds coming out of the boy’s mouth were terrifying. William Blatty also arranged for me to read a copy of the exorcism his book was based on. I was totally entrenched in the story and believed in it wholeheartedly. Billy and I agreed that The Exorcist shouldn’t look like a horror film. We wanted the audience to believe the character is real and possessed by a demon. That’s what makes it scary.”

“Last summer, I saw the re-release of The Exorcist,” says James Chressanthis. “The audience responded as though it was a completely contemporary film. It was as frightening today as it was 30 years ago. The cinematography is really remarkable. The lighting is so natural that it is transparent to the audience. It was a really terrific achievement to light a very dark film like The Exorcist that long ago. He was probably working with a 50-speed film, slow lenses and big lights, and yet he made it seem so natural and frightening. If The Exorcist was a new film today it would be considered a great artistic achievement.”

In 1974, Roizman collaborated with director Joe Sergeant on the making of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. During the early days of preparation, Roizman’s research included spending time on a subway platform and watching trains coming into and out of the station. He also spent time riding subway trains in order to get a feeling for how the light was falling.

“We wanted this film to be as realistic and believable as possible, so the audience is sharing the experience,” he says. “I rode the cars to get a feeling for the ambience. I had this feeling that with the shape of the subway cars, where most of the story takes place, the anamorphic frame would give us the width at the edges of the frame that could be used to heighten feelings of tension. Joe (Sergeant) and the producer were planning to shoot in 1.85:1. They thought I was crazy when I suggested shooting in anamorphic. The cars were more vertical than horizontal, and the spherical lenses were much faster; but they agreed to let me shoot some tests and make comparisons. When we screened the tests, everyone was amazed at the difference the anamorphic frame made. I trusted my instincts.”

The following year, Roizman shot Three Days of the Condor in anamorphic format. It was his first film with Sydney Pollack. “We both liked the idea of longer lenses,” he recalls. “Sydney particularly liked a 360 degree anamorphic shot. The first scene was in a practical location, where these guys come in and kill everybody. Sydney wanted to use a 30 mm anamorphic lens. I said, ‘what happened to all the discussion about long lenses?’ He said ‘this set that (production designer) Stephen Grimes did is so interesting that I want to see it all.’ After that, we approached every shot on its own merit.”

The visual style was designed to create a tactile feeling of tension. Roizman notes that the use of longer lenses used in many scenes gave the audience a voyeuristic sense that they were watching the story unfold, as though they were spying on the characters through a telescope. The lens compressed the action, which allowed him to isolate people and objects.

Tom Priestley, Jr., ASC, remembers what it was like working with Roizman during those formative days of his own career. “In the late 60s. I was a camera assistant and Owen had just become a director of photography. We were doing commercials. Later we worked together on seven films, including The French Connection, The Exorcist, and Three Days of the Condor. Owen was certainly from a different mold. He was college educated, which was unusual. He brought a very serious approach to filmmaking in New York. Owen was involved in not just the lighting, but in designing the entire look of the film. He was an innovator who took advantage of lighter equipment, faster films and lenses, and other advances to help create a new kind of filmmaking. Techniques that Owen took a chance on back then are now taken for granted as part of film grammar. Owen raised the standards in every way. He made me a better cameraman.”

That’s just one example of how Roizman touched people’s lives and careers, sometimes in inexplicable ways. “I was in Miami in 1981 when I found out that I had just gotten my first feature assignment,” recalls Steven Poster, ASC. “Owen was in Miami shooting Absence of Malice. He called and invited me out to celebrate. I felt a million miles tall. Here was one of the great filmmakers of all time, and he was accepting me as a colleague.

“He told me, ‘Don’t ever let them make you shoot something you don’t want to see on the screen.’ Over the years that has been a great piece of advice.”

Roizman earned his third Oscar nomination for Network, a totally different type of character-driven film with memorable performances by Peter Finch and Ned Beatty. One scene was staged around a conference table. It is night and the room is dark. Beatty’s character is pontificating and berating Finch’s character. He stands up and walks down the length of the table. It’s a long dolly shot.

“I loved the way Sydney staged that scene, and I was very happy with the lighting in the dark room motivated by little green lamps on the table,” Roizman says. “It was the right mood for a scene that set up the rest of the story. In that last shot of Ned Beatty, I had a really strong backlight on his hair so it seems to be glowing. It made him seem God-like. There is just a little light on his face, so you can barely see his features. We wanted it to look ethereal without anyone realizing we lit him.”

Roizman earned his fourth Oscar nomination for Tootsie. One of the obvious keys to the story was making Dustin Hoffman look enough like a woman for the audience to believe he was fooling the other characters. There was a lot of testing with makeup, and a lot of tension on the set.

“I was working with a new high-speed film (Eastman EXR 200T 5293) that was much grainer, and not as saturated in colors, because I wanted to use less light, so the heat didn’t melt Dustin’s make-up,” Roizman remembers. He was one of the first cinematographers to use that speed film on an entire feature. “If you aren’t willing to take risks, you are never going to learn anything new.”

Pollack offered these observations about his long relation with Roizman: “I've always been a kind of an amateur photographer. I figured that I needed enough knowledge to communicate with cinematographers because that's the vocabulary we use to speak to audiences. I still remember talking to Owen for the first time and being surprised at how young he was. He was a different breed. The first film we did together was Three Days of the Condor. He was able to make it absolutely real and not glamorized. In one scene, he transformed a normal alley into a horrifically ominous place. At the same time he took care of the actors. Condor was a thriller, Electric Horseman and Tootsie were romantic comedies, and Absence of Malice was a straightforward drama, but relationships were at the core of all of those films. I loved how hard he worked to make somebody look right without looking lit. That's a special talent. I loved working with Owen. There was never an ego contest between us. It was always a real collaboration. He was the first guy I called on every picture. Owen is like a painter who has absolute control of light and darkness, shadows and highlights. You can turn the sound off, watch his films, and you’ll still be able to follow the story and feel the emotions.”

After completing Tootsie in 1983, Roizman decided to make a radical change in his life. He opened a television commercial production company in Los Angeles and cast himself in the dual role of director-cinematographer. Roizman had just shot three pictures in a row, and had been away from home for 21 months during a two-year period. He decided it was important to spend more time at home with his family. He directed and filmed hundreds of commercials during the next five years.

“I was a film student at USC in 1988,” says Aaron Schneider, ASC. “There was a seminar program where great cinematographers would come in and set up shots from actual projects and discuss what they were doing and why. Owen Roizman recreated a shot from a commercial. It was fascinating. I think there were about 20 students there, and I wanted to get some connection to him. I asked if I could help carry a case of gels, or maybe it was filters, back to his car.

“Eight or nine years later, I was shooting Murder One, my first TV series. An actor came on to play a role in the third or fourth episode, and he said a friend of his who was a cinematographer said hello. He said his friend admired my work on the show, and he encouraged me to make sure it was entered in the American Society of Cinematographers (Outstanding Achievement Awards) competition. It was Owen Roizman.”

In 1989, a day after he decided to return to the feature film arena, Roizman happened to get the script for Larry Kasdan’s script for I Love you to Death. His other credits during the 1990s include Havana, The Addams Family, and Wyatt Earp. Roizman earned his fifth Oscar nomination for Wyatt Earp.

“Every film is different,” he says, “so every time you read a script you have to invent a new approach to telling the story. You borrow ideas from other films, and rely on your experience to get it done in a practical and believable way. But the vision for the story comes from inside, and it is something that is unique to each cinematographer. We shot Wyatt Earp in big country, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We mainly used normal and wider-angle lenses that enabled us to use more of the background, and show the audience the characters in that immense Western setting. That’s what the story is really about—a fight for this seemingly endless land “

“You look at his films and no two are the same, but his lighting is always perfect for the story,” says Laszlo Kovacs, ASC. “Two of my favorites are Grand Canyon and Wyatt Earp. Owen Roizman is truly a master of light. I don’t think there is a cinematographer working today who hasn’t been influenced by Owen whether they realize it or not. “

Through all of these years, Roizman has persisted in keeping the spirit of Farkas alive in his outreach to other cinematographers. "I was very fortunate to be Owen Roizman's film loader on my first job in the industry, and was thrilled and honored when I heard from him 15 years later when he asked me to be his camera operator on Wyatt Earp,” recalls Bill Roe, ASC. “It wasn't until I became a cinematographer that I truly understood the full value of my filming experience with Owen. He encouraged me to participate in every aspect and at all levels of being a cinematographer while shooting Wyatt Earp."

“By watching Owen work, I learned how important it is to be true to yourself, to know the value of your work and experience, and to stand by your judgments,” says James Glennon, ASC. “I learned that a crew runs on your courage. If you protect them, they will do anything for you. He taught me that if you want to know where to put the keylight, read the script. When I think of Owen, I think of his quiet intensity, thoughtfulness, watchfulness and humor. I think of his creation of emotions with light and camerawork. I think of Owen challenging us all to be better, and showing us all how to do it by example.”

In 1995, Roizman shot French Kiss. It was his fourth film with Kasdan, and it presaged what would emerge as a crucial issue for cinematographers by the end of the decade. The story was filmed in France with much of it taking place during a train ride through the countryside. The original plan called for those scenes to be filmed on a moving train. Roizman investigated the possibilities of filming those scenes on a sound stage. The initial option was using rear projection to create backgrounds, but the available stage wasn’t big enough.

The alternative was compositing B-roll footage of the exterior scenery into the window spaces. There was a similar scene on an airplane, when one of the characters, played by Meg Ryan, is flying to Paris. After testing, he and Kasdan decided to shoot the train and airplane scenes on sets and digitally composite the exteriors into the windows. Advances in motion tracking technology gave them the freedom to move the camera freely on the sets.

“I lit the interior on the train like there was very early morning sunlight streaming through the windows,” Roizman says. “That was consistent with the script and the mood Larry wanted. Unfortunately, when the final composite was done, I wasn’t called in for consultation and by the time I saw it, it was too late to change it. The problem was that the angle, color and quality of the interior and exterior light didn’t mesh, and it wasn’t consistent with the mood that Larry and the actors established for those scenes.”

The differences were relatively subtle, but Roizman felt they were sufficient to give the audience a subliminal clue that something wasn’t right. It didn’t feel realistic.

“I don’t think the audience was laughing at an obvious mistake,” he says. “There was much more nuance. It's something they feel rather than see. The scenes don’t pack the emotional punch they deserve. That made me realize how important it is for us to maintain control, to be there in the digital suite. It should be part of our contract.”

We asked Roizman how he thought new technology was changing the art form.

“You can do things with available light today that you wouldn’t have dreamed about doing in the past,” he says. “You can shoot in places that are pretty dark and reserve the use of light to make dramatic statements. There are also amazing advances in lenses and the way the camera can be moved. The sum of these things is that you can work a little quicker and be more spontaneous when the opportunity arises. Some people have interpreted that the wrong way. They think anyone can become a cinematographer, but someone still has to create lighting for artistic expression, choose the right lens and composition, pick the angles of photography, know the strengths and weaknesses of the faces of the actors, and when necessary whisper advice in the director’s ear. Unfortunately, most people don’t understand that the craft we have mastered is what allows us to express ourselves as artists. Part of the problem is that the art of cinematography is supposed to be invisible. We don’t want the audience to be aware that we are creating illusion, because that would distract them from the story.”

If you consider the sum of Roizman’s career, the moral is that even the wildest of dreams can come true. It turns out that Roizman is Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle wrapped up in one package, only his sport is the art and craft of filmmaking.