Owen Roizman, ASC: Focusing on the Future of Cinematography

This article originally appeared in International Photographer
in 1995.

Is Owen Roizman, ASC, a chip off the old block or what? His father Sol was a cameraman. His uncle Morris was a film editor. Roizman followed in their footsteps and earned an Oscar nomination in 1971 for The French Connection.

It was only his second feature, and it marked Roizman, who was only in his early 30s, as a rising star. He has subsequently earned other Oscar nominations for The Exorcist, Network, Tootsie and Wyatt Earp. That puts him in a very exclusive club of contemporary cinematographers with five nominations. The others include Vittorio Storaro, AIC, ASC, Haskell Wexler, ASC, Bill Fraker, ASC, Conrad Hall, ASC and Allen Daviau, ASC.

But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Believe it or not, Roizman has fewer than 30 feature credits. That makes his five nominations an even more awesome accomplishment. It makes you wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t taken a long hiatus from shooting features during the peak of his career.

A little history: Roizman was red hot during the 1970s, when he added Three Days of the Condor, The Return of a Man Named Horse, The Taking of Pelham, One, Two, Three, The Heartbreak Kid, Play It Again, Sam, The Stepford Wives, Straight Times, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Electric Horseman to an increasingly impressive body of work. He shot five additional features between 1980 and 1982, including The Black Marble, Absence of Malice, Taps and True Confessions.

He pulled the plug after filming Tootsie in 1982.

From 1983 to 1988, Roizman directed and/or shot literally hundreds of commercials. His only feature during that period was Vision Quest.

Why? He had the best reason in the world.

“It was an important time for me to be closer to my family,” he explains.

Larry Kasdan lured Roizman back to features in 1988 with I Love You to Death. Roizman has subsequently been selective, shooting an average of around one film a year, including Havana, The Addams Family, Grand Canyon, Wyatt Earp and recently, French Kiss.

Getting back to the question about being a chip off the old block, Roizman gives a wistful reply. He says that during his formative years, he never planned to follow in his father’s or uncle’s footsteps. He dreamed about becoming a major league pitcher.

Millions of American boys have shared that dream. For Roizman, it could have come true. He has a vivid memory of visiting Ebbetts Field in Brooklyn, with his father, who was a newsreel photographer for Fox Movietone News.

“Because of my father, I was allowed in the dugout, where I spoke with Pee Wee Reese, Pete Reiser and other Brooklyn Dodgers. I was in heaven,” he says.

Roizman lived in Brooklyn and later on Long Island, but he was an avid Yankee fan. He followed them on the radio, and rode the subway alone to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx when he was only 10. Roizman started playing baseball during his early teens. He wanted to be a first baseman, but a bout with polio slowed him down. That’s when he decided to pitch. Roizman spent hours throwing a ball against a wall to strengthen his arm.

Pitching: He thrived on the one on one competition. It was just him and the batter, and he loved the competition. Roizman was an all-star pitcher on a championship team in high school. He injured his arm while pitching a no hitter in his last game. It was the end of the dream. He studied physics and math at Gettysburg College, in Pennsylvania 

During summer breaks, Roizman worked at a camera rental house. By then, television had killed the newsreel business, and his father was working as a camera operator with TV commercial crews. After interviewing for engineering-type corporate jobs during his senior year, Roizman decided it would be more rewarding to work as an assistant cameraman. He apprenticed with a cinematographer named Akos Farkas for a while. Roizman also crewed with Gerald Hirschfeld, ASC. His father Sol was the operator.

In 1961, after Roizman’s father died, Gordon Willis, ASC, became Hirschfeld’s camera operator. That was a crew for the ages. When Willis moved up to director of photography, Hirschfeld promoted Roizman to operator when he was only 27.

Within two years, Roizman was shooting for MPO, a top commercial production house in New York. In 1970, a director named Bill Gunn recruited him to shoot a feature called Stop. It was a slick piece of glossy camerawork filmed in Puerto Rico. Stop was never released, but Billy Friedkin saw some of the reels, and tapped Roizman to shoot The French Connection.

“I’ve told this story a million times,” says Roizman. ”This is exactly the way it happened. Billy said, ‘You’ve shot some nice commercials. It’s pretty stuff. All high key. But I want The French Connection to be a gritty, realistic, down and dirty, documentary-style film.’ He used adjectives like that, and asked, ‘Do you think you can do it?’”

“I said, ‘Why not? I’m a cinematographer. You tell me what you want, and I should be able to get it on film.’ I think he liked my spunk, and the rest is history.”

Roizman read the script, and he started thinking about some of the lighting challenges... the things he had never done before like shooting low-key scenes in a moving car at night. You didn’t shoot things like that in commercials in those days. He wanted it to be very realistic, so he recruited his wife to stand in for Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider. They went into the garage and blacked out the windows, so it was totally dark. She sat in the car, and he practiced lighting with just a few lamps.

“I thought of the situations I would be shooting, like close-ups of Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider in the car at night,” Roizman says. “I placed the lights and lit the scene to get a feeling for the mood. I didn’t shoot film. I just wanted to feel what it would be like.”

In a way, it was no different than spending those endless hours throwing a ball against a wall to develop his strength and skill as a pitcher.

Roizman recently agreed to take over as co-chair of the ASC Outstanding Achievement Awards Committee along with “Bud” Stone, the former president of DeLuxe Laboratories. It was a reunion of sorts. The first time their paths crossed, Stone was starting his career at a New York lab, while Roizman was an assistant cameraman at MPO.

Roizman is taking over for the venerable Phil Lathrop, ASC, the long-term co-chair of the awards committee who recently died. The volunteer committee organizes and stages the annual ASC Outstanding Achievement Awards event, which has become a major platform for fostering an appreciation for the art of cinematography, and for encouraging a quest for excellence. The 10th Annual ASC Outstanding Achievement Awards will be held on February 25 at the Century Plaza Hotel.

“I think it's important for cinematographers to recognize artistic achievements by their peers,” he says. “With the Oscar and Emmy awards, cinematographers who are peers are responsible for the nominations, but everyone who belongs to the Academies votes for the winners. The ASC awards are different. The selections are made by peers who recognize the difference between cinematography and scenery. That’s important for us.”

Roizman believes that the awards ceremony is also important, because it brings cinematographers and their crews together in one room, one night a year.

“There's a wonderful camaraderie,” he says. “One night a year, there's electricity in the air. We don’t often have that opportunity. That makes it a special night.”

Roizman says that the role played by the cinematographer is difficult for him to define in words.

“We all face the same thing. I don’t care how experienced or good you are,” he says. “You walk on the set and look around. You try to figure out what you're going to do to try to light something or to create some shot. There are times when all of us are dumbfounded. You ask yourself, ‘What l am I going to do now?’ Then you rely on your experience and instincts, and it starts happening. You try different tricks and techniques.

Roizman believes the role of the cinematographer is changing with the evolution of digital technology blurring the traditional line between production and postproduction. Witness his work on French Kiss, filmed in France with Kasdan. For that film, a train ride through the French countryside was actually filmed on a sound stage. Background film plates were digitally composited into the spaces where the windows were. It’s a seamless illusion. It looks and feels like the train is moving through the countryside.

‘It’s not black magic,” he says. “It’s like any other new tool. You have to understand its possibilities and how to use it. It gives you a lot of freedom on the set, because you don ‘t have to lock the camera down when you’re shooting the live-action elements of the composited scene. This alone adds a new dimension to your thinking. You can let your imagination run wild, and do things you never thought about doing before.”

Roizman explains that motion tracking software is used by the digital postproduction facility to adjust the compositing of background elements to match the angle of photography and camera movement in the foreground footage. At the computer workstation, colors, contrast and other image characteristics can be digitally manipulated to ensure that the visual consistency of composited images is seamless.

There’s the rub: “You can’t just delegate this to the visual effects facility, and hope they get it right,” Roizman says. “It’s part of the creative process. If you are going to be one of the authors of the film, with responsibility for creative lighting, you have to supervise digital post, or at least approve the results.”

Roizman recounts his first experience with digital filmmaking: “Originally, we were going to shoot on a train traveling through the countryside. We would have had to take over a train, and ride it back and forth through the countryside. That didn't make a lot of economic sense. I spoke with a traditional optical house, because I’ve shot a lot of blue screen composites in the past. I thought that might be a solution. They suggested using rear projection instead, because with optical blue screen, we’d have to lock the camera down while shooting foreground elements. It would look static and unnatural. Rear projection would allow us to move the camera within limitations. The other advantage is that I would be seeing what I was shooting, and it would probably cost less in the long run.”

But that suggestion didn’t prove to be feasible. One of the problems was finding a sound stage in Paris large enough to shoot rear projection scenes. Roizman points out that the projection screen would have to be a fair distance from the windows for the images to look realistic. Also, it probably would have required flying someone to Paris from the United States who was familiar with setting up and operating a rear projection system.

Roizman heard that Richard Yuricich, ASC, had shot a digital film test for a similar situation which occurs on a train in Under Siege 2: In Dark Territory. Yuricich shot the background plates in Colorado. He used the bus from Speed for the live action footage. The digital compositing was done at the Cinesite digital film center in Los Angeles.

After seeing that test, and conferring with Brad Kuehn and others at Cinesite, Roizman called Kasdan, and said that he had found the solution. In addition to the train sequence, there was a similar scene on an airplane. Both interiors were filmed on sets on a sound stage in France. Green screens were placed outside the windows of the train and airplane sets. The background plates were digitally composited.

Roizman suggested using two different effects houses to accommodate an extremely tight postproduction schedule. One handled the train sequence, and the other was responsible for the airplane scene.

“Each company sent a representative to consult with us while we were shooting,” he says. “They answered questions about getting the right balance of light on the background and also about camera movement. They didn’t stay the whole time. The process was pretty simple, but they approached it very differently. One effects company wanted the background to be about three-quarters of a stop under the foreground. The other advised us to expose the background up to two stops over the foreground.”

Roizman photographed the live-action elements, and a second unit crew filmed the background plates. One of the things Roizman had to do was match the interior light on the train set to what the audience could see through the window. He simulated northern light coming through the windows using soft light.

“The second unit crew was looking for bright exteriors, which were as scenic as possible,” he explains, “but there were times when there was no direct sunlight. We anticipated that could happen, and the interior scenes were lit to match that softer look.

“Unfortunately, I never saw the final composite work until it was too late. Frankly, I wasn’t thrilled with the airplane composites. I’m not blaming anyone, but everybody sees things differently. I lit to achieve a certain balance and mood. When someone else translates your work, it becomes a different image. It made me realize that the cinematographer must maintain control somehow right through to the final images, and get some kind of approval. It’s important for the cinematographer to see the images right through the final release prints. It’s no different than supervising timing or telecine transfers. It's part of the creative process, and it should be in our contract.”

In all, there was about 10 minutes of day and night scenes on the train in the final cut. Roizman also created what he called “a poor man’s process shot” to suggest that the train was moving at night. Two tracks were laid down outside the windows of the train, at different distances. There was a black background behind them. Roizman set some small lights on the tracks, and he moved them at different speeds. It created the illusion that the train itself was moving past the lights. It also created a visual sensation of depth of field.

Roizman credits a prop man on his French crew with creating the rig which made possible the illusion of the train moving at night.

“Film is a unique art form in the sense that no one person can express himself or herself alone,” he says. “You rely on a lot of unsung heroes. It's not like an artist painting a picture where it’s just him and the easel. There are 100 people I rely on.”

Roizman notes that while much attention is being focused on the digital film revolution, recent years have brought cinematographers many other new tools.

“Every new tool affects what you do,” he says. “It's like having another paintbrush, or another color to use if you're painting a picture. If you get another color gel, a different lens, or a new film that sees shadows differently or enables you to use more natural light, it enhances your creative choices if only in subtle ways. Sometimes, the art is in the subtleties. We have better tools today, but you still have to be an artist to use them.”

Roizman brought operator Rob Hahn, gaffer Tom Stern and assistant cameraman Alan Disler with him, and the rest of his crew was French. Stern and Hahn were bilingual, and a number of people on the French crew spoke English. There were no communications problems.

French Kiss was photographed in anamorphic format.

“It was an automatic decision,” says Roizman. “Larry (Kasdan) and I are in total agreement. There are people who shoot in 1.85:1 format to accommodate the home video release. We believe in shooting for the big screen. Sometimes we’ll joke that if two people are at opposite ends of the frame, only one of them will be on the video cassette, but you can’t compromise with composition if you’re shooting a movie.”

French Kiss is basically about two people in a relationship. Why does that call for a wide-screen format? Roizman believes it’s a matter of getting a lot more information on film. The wider frame also provides space for creating more interesting compositions.

“What you're doing is capturing the environment, “he says. “It’s more than scenery or landscapes. The human eye covers around a 270 degree angle when you include peripheral vision. If you have two people sitting in a room, the space between them and the size and shape of the room are all part of the story. In the anamorphic format, you can capture that area in addition to showing how close or far they are from one another. I don't care if it's an intimate picture like French Kiss or a Western. The right format helps to differentiate cinema from television. When you are in a theater, it should feel cinematic.”

He chose to shoot French Kiss with the Panavision E-series anamorphic lenses, because there are a fair number of Steadicam shots. The E-series are more compact than PRIMO anamorphic lenses, and they’re about as fast. He used them for both Steadicam and other live-action photography. This meant he only had to carry one set of lenses.

Early in the French Kiss filming, Roizman used the Eastman EXR 5293 film for daylight exteriors. But, he quickly decided to shift to the faster 5298 film, which gave him about the same look in terms of grain, contrast and color rendition, in addition to pulling a deeper stop. From that point forward, he mainly used the 5298 film, even for day-light exteriors. Why? It was a creative decision to pull deeper stops and allow us to shoot later in the day. It looked and felt right to him.

Roizman is often asked the Willy Loman question by emerging or wanna-be cinematographers. Do you remember Willy, the fading salesman in Arthur Miller’s classic story, The Death of a Salesman? Willy begged the ghost of his dead uncle to reveal the secret of his success. Roizman says that he is truly amazed by the large numbers of talented people entering the field. How do you tell them that talent alone isn’t enough? Metaphorically, you have to spend a lot of hours throwing the ball against the wall. Still, in the end, says Roizman, it requires a great deal of luck, especially getting started.

He closes the conversation with this story: “When I was nominated for an Oscar for The French Connection, I couldn’t believe it. I thought I was fooling everyone. You know, I still feel that way. In fact, when I was nominated for the fifth time for Wyatt Earp, the first thing my wife said was, ‘Well, you fooled them again.”