Conversation
with By Bob Fisher
John Schwartzman, ASC was born and raised in Los Angeles where his father was an entertainment law attorney representing an array of famous directors and producers. Schwartzman majored in economics and nurtured an interest in still photography, painting and sketching in undergraduate school. He continued his education at University of Southern California, where his focus shifted to cinematography. Schwartzman’s early credits include an eclectic mix of music videos, commercials and about a half a dozen horror flicks. He earned his first mainstream narrative credit with Benny and Joon in 1993. His subsequent credits include The Rock, Conspiracy Theory, Armageddon, Edtv, Pearl Harbor, The Rookie and Seabiscuit, which is slated for release in July. Schwartzman estimates that he has filmed some 150 music videos and several hundred TV commercials. He is directing as well as shooting ad spots. The following is the edited transcript of a conversation:
QUESTION: Is it true that you are one of those rare Los Angeles natives?
SCHWARTZMAN: I was born in west Los Angeles. My father was a lawyer who specialized in the entertainment industry. He represented directors and producers, including Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, John Schlesinger and Stanley Kubrick.
QUESTION: So, you literally grew up in the industry?
SCHWARTZMAN: I grew up in the industry in the sense that on a Saturday, Hal Ashby would be at our house. But, you’ve got to remember I was eight years old. I was in my late teens when I realized I was surrounded by some of the most talented film auteurs of the generation. I think the ‘70s was maybe the best time in American film in terms of stories and originality, but I didn’t spend time on sets, since my dad wasn’t a filmmaker.
QUESTION: Did you think you were going to work in the industry?
SCHWARTZMAN: I was interested in photography as a kid. I was also very good at painting. A painting I did in elementary school hung in the San Francisco Museum of Art’s children’s art collection. I had an aptitude towards the visual arts, but I also came from a family of doctors and lawyers. My parents had very high expectations for academics. I thought I would probably be a veterinarian. I did very well in school, and the truth is that I felt the arts were something for other people. My dad sort of discouraged me from working in film, because he felt like it was a recipe for a lifestyle of heartbreak and insecurity. In 1980, I sailed around the world and took a lot of pictures. Around that time, I really started to discover some great still photographers. In those days my favorite was a guy named Ernst Haas, a great German still photographer who later became a naturalized American. His work was very impressionistic. His bullfight pictures were shot at a quarter of a second shutter speed. They were kind of a swirl of color that captured the energy and the emotion of bull fighting in a way that wasn’t done before. I also loved going to see movies, but I thought my father would disapprove if I said I wanted to get into the film business.
QUESTION: Let’s go back… What do you mean, you sailed around the world?
SCHWARTZMAN: It was a program called Semester at Sea. I took a semester off and sailed around the world. I took pictures of everything. It was the first time I started to understand the camera and lenses and how to expose film. I wasn’t just taking snapshots. I was making photographs. There’s a big distinction between the two. I think with the emergence of point and shoot cameras people are taking more pictures, but they are making fewer great photographs. That experience really got me to stop and see the picture in my mind’s eye and use the camera as a tool to capture that vision on film.
QUESTION: So, that was a seminal experience?
SCHWARTZMAN: I believe to this day in the importance of in seeing the image in your head first. That’s why I’m a huge lover of Leica Rangefinder Cameras. It forces you to see the image before you take the picture. It’s become very easy to put our eye to the eyepiece and press the button and hammer away six shots. Most of them are probably going to be garbage. If you thought about what you were doing you could take one picture that was beautiful.
QUESTION: I heard that you spent some time at racetracks, too.
SCHWARTZMAN: My father owned racehorses. When I was a kid, he would pick me up in the afternoon after school and take me to the track at Santa Anita. I also spent almost every weekend from ages 12 to 16, at Santa Anita, Hollywood Park or Del Mar racetracks. Horses are beautiful, and it was something I did to bond with my father.
QUESTION: When did you decide you wanted to go into the film industry?
SCHWARTZMAN: My parents were divorced, and my father married an actress named Talia Shire who was Francis Ford Coppola’s sister. I became a member of a family that was looming very large in the film industry. That was around the time of Apocalypse Now. Francis was a larger than life figure to me. He encouraged me to pursue a career in the arts. During my senior year at the University of Colorado, I was earning a degree in economics and trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. I decided I wanted to go to film school, but at that time it was harder to get into the film school at USC than Harvard Medical School. I had very good grades, but no extracurricular activities that in any way that suggested I was a good candidate to get into film school. I asked Francis if he would write a letter of recommendation. He said it would be too nepotistic. I was at his house on Thanksgiving. George Lucas was there. At 11 p.m., we began playing this board game called Risk. I bet them I would win, and the price was letters of recommendation to the USC film school. They didn’t think I had a chance, but I played a lot of Risk at school. That was my entry to USC.
QUESTION: What was the film school experience like?
SCHWARTZMAN: I think the beauty of USC was an incredible amount of support from other students. A lot of them have gone on to great careers. So much of this industry is luck and timing. I was at the right place at the right time.
SCHWARTZMAN: In Colorado, I minored in fine arts. I took a painting or drawing classes every year. It was my aptitude. There was a lot of emphasis at USC on writing and directing. I think there were 50 students, and we all had to submit scripts. I had a talent for cinematography. Robert Brinkman and I shot most of the films. We got to pick the best scripts every year. I won the Focus Award for a film that I did with Phil Joanou called The Last Chance Dance, but we broke a lot of the school rules, so I was asked to leave before I actually fulfilled my masters degree requirements. I guess you can say that I failed cinematography.
QUESTION: What did you do?
SCHWARTZMAN: USC had a really good network of graduates in the industry. Les Mayfield and George Zaloom were a few years ahead me. They formed a company called ZM Productions that was doing behind-the-scenes films for Steven Spielberg’s movies. They were shot in 16 mm format. When I was a student I did some camera operating for them. I didn’t need to make a lot of money after USC, because I didn’t have any responsibilities. I mainly shot documentary style behind-the-scenes films for Les and George. There was also a plethora of bad low budget horror movies being made for home video and a shortage of qualified people to shoot them. I wasn’t necessarily qualified, but I shot a film that had won an award and I knew how to light and expose film. I was contacted by a writer who had seen some of my USC films. He told me he really wanted to become a director. We made this little picture called Video Valentino in five days. He promised that if he ever got a feature, he’d ask me to shoot it. Nine months later I got the phone call, and he said he was going to expand Video Valentino into a feature with a 25-day schedule. It was released under the title You Can’t Hurry Love. That was my first feature film in 1988.
QUESTION: What happened after that?
SCHWARTZMAN: That got me into the network of the Roger Corman films, and friends, including Peter Collister, who was a few years ahead of me at USC, helped me. I shot some second unit and pickup shots for $350 a day. If I worked three days a month, I could cover my expenses. My uncle, who is a physician, introduced me to Conrad Hall (ASC). He gave me some great advice when I asked him about becoming an assistant cameraman. He said, ‘you’re already a cinematographer. Figure out how you can keep shooting. There’s nothing wrong with being an assistant, but it’s not going to get you closer to where you want to be because you are already there.’
QUESTION: Weren’t you also shooting music videos and commercials?
SCHWARTZMAN: I had grown up with Michael Bay. We have known each other since we were 10 years old. When he was a student at the Art Center his film class was small, so they were encouraged to go outside to find cinematographers. Michael and I probably made a half a dozen spec commercials, which ultimately launched his career, and he kind of dragged me in tow. Literally a week after Michael graduated from Art Center, he was shooting music videos for Propaganda Films. I was suddenly shooting music videos for $1,200 a day. It was typically three days shoots with cool stuff and beautiful women. I started thinking; I can make a living doing this. One day I got a call from David Fincher, who happened to see my dailies. He asked me to shoot a Paula Abdul video with him. David really helped me understand what cinematography is about. I didn’t realize how much I was learning from him at the time. That was also true of Michael. Music videos looks were quickly embraced by the advertising agencies.
QUESTION: What was that an experimental time in videos and commercials?
SCHWARTZMAN: I think we were pushing the limits of aesthetic taste at the time. We were shooting from our gut and breaking the rules. Sometimes we had backlight that was seven stops overexposed. We relied on our subconscious more than our intellect. I think it’s very important for cinematographers to listen to what their gut tells them. It’s very easy to intellectualize yourself out of a risky choice. The other thing was that we were making commercials for people at record companies who had no idea what we were doing, so we had complete freedom to do what we thought looked cool.
QUESTION: Who were some of the performers you worked with?
SCHWARTZMAN: Madonna, Paula Abdul, Aerosmith... Propaganda was the place. Even on my days off, I hung out at Propaganda, because great cinematographers, including Mark Plummer, were working there. There was an incredible sharing of knowledge. You’d experiment with overexposing five stops through the base, and then everyone wanted to talk about it. We were typically shooting a video a week. You’d prep, scout on Tuesday and shoot on Saturday and Sunday to cut equipment rental costs.
QUESTION: Did you ever figure out how many music videos you shot?
SCHWARTZMAN: Something like 300. The reality was sometimes your mistakes were the most innovative thing you did. We felt like we had the freedom to explore the boundaries of what cinematography was all about. We moved the camera aggressively. We played with the shutter angles. If someone at Panavision said ‘you don’t want to touch that knob,’ you couldn’t wait to take the camera out that weekend and turn the knob all the way to the right and see what happened. Once I experimented with leaving the lens loose in the mount and jiggling it. Most of the people shooting music videos had never shot a feature, so they had never seen print dailies or answer prints. By the time I was at Propaganda, I had probably shot five low budget films, taking them all the way through to release, so I wasn’t just winging it. When I got into the telecine bay for the first time it was very exciting to discover the amount of control we had. We started with the original Rank Cintel telecine and advanced to the URSA. The color correction software got better and better and we could do more and more.
QUESTION: So, it was a great learning process?
SCHWARTZMAN: It was incredibly exciting, but the ability to manipulate images doesn’t preclude the fact that you have to shoot good film. You can’t take bad film and make it good in a telecine suite. But, you can take good film and create nuances.
QUESTION: When and how did you get back into shooting features?
SCHWARTZMAN: I was shooting a lot of commercials and was working with a director named Jeremiah Chechik. He was developing a little, odd sort of quirky movie called Benny and Joon. We were on a 30-day shoot for an AT&T spot in Napa Valley and San Francisco. We were shooting at sunrise and sunset. Julia Roberts got hold of the script and expressed interest. Suddenly, the movie got fast tracked by MGM. Jeremiah literally turned to me one day and asked, do you want to do this movie with me? We’re going to start in about 12 weeks. I said absolutely. The next hurdle was convincing MGM to allow me to shoot it. I had an outstanding commercial reel, but the last picture that I had shot was Red Surf, starring an unknown actor by the name of George Clooney. I was very fortunate that the line producer of Benny and Joon felt that my commercial experience was an advantage. I still think it’s one of the best jobs of cinematography that I’ve done. It was a subtle, wonderful story that we shot in 10 weeks in Spokane.
QUESTION: That was in 1993. How did that film change your life?
SCHWARTZMAN: It was the first time anybody heard of me. That picture got me into the union. We had a pretty big cast, including Johnny Depp who had just starred in Edward Scissorhands. After that I started getting a lot of scripts, but decided I wanted to balance my feature work with commercials. I had a viable commercial career, which allowed me to say no to projects I didn’t want to do. The following year I did a picture called Airheads. It was kind of a rock and roll version of Dog Day Afternoon. Itwas actually a very funny script, but not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination. After that, I went back to doing commercials and music videos.
QUESTION: What about The Rock which you shot in 1996?
SCHWARTZMAN: That was with Michael Bay. It was an
$80 million budget and a Jerry Bruckheimer film. Michael and I together
weren’t as old as our lead actor. We decided to try to knock everybody’s
socks off by pushing the limits and breaking the rules. The idea was
that we wanted people to leave the theater exhausted, viscerally wrung
out. We took a lot of what we did in music videos using blue backlight
and very graphic images. We used lenses in very self-conscious ways
by letting the actors walk right into the frame, and shooting close-ups
with a 17 mm lens. We had Ed Harris 12 inches away from the 17.5 mm
Primo lens. It put the audience right into the action. We shot most
of that film with either 17 or 300 mm lenses. Short focal length lenses
coupled with extreme camera movement create very fluid, dynamic action.
We did it in commercials and videos, and felt there was no reason not
to do it in that film. QUESTION: How about Conspiracy Theory which you shot in 1997?
SCHWARTZMAN: We wanted a film noir look in color that allows the audience to really feel New York City. I remember doing an interview with someone from the New York Times who thought I was born and raised in New York. He was stunned when I told him I grew up on the beach in Los Angeles. It was also the first movie I’d ever shot in anamorphic format. The Rock was Super 35. I was excited about working with Dick Donner. He gave me a great sense of confidence. The first day I was doing a big scene with Mel Gibson. I put a rim light on him with almost no lighting. Dick said, ‘go for it.’ If we don’t like it we’ll come back tomorrow and shoot again.
QUESTION: So, you were inclined to take chances early in your career?
SCHWARTZMAN: I honestly believe that if you don’t take chances, you’re never going to do your best work. If you play it safe, you’re going to do mediocre work.
QUESTION: Are there cinematographers who have influenced you?
SCHWARTZMAN: A lot of them. I spent six months sort of apprenticing with Vittorio Storaro (AIC, ASC) on Tucker. There isn’t a cinematographer in the world who hasn’t been influenced by his work starting with The Conformist. You can say the same about Gordon Willis (ASC) and Conrad Hall (ASC). I think Harris Savides (ASC) is one of the most gifted cameramen ever to walk the face of the earth. Mark Plummer is another guy who you may not know from features, but I get inspired by his work. Emanuel Lubezki (ASC) and Bob Richardson (ASC) are also amazingly talented.
QUESTION: How about Armageddon which you shot in 1998?
SCHWARTZMAN: Armageddon was The Rock with more equipment and shot in anamorphic. It was an exercise in trying to make the slickest movie we could with big, bold colors, broad strokes of guys in orange astronaut suits, long lenses, backlight, kind of like a 12-year-old’s fantasy of space. It was so rich that it exploded off the screen. I did that with Michael (Bay). The Rock was a little bit gritty as compared to Armageddon.
QUESTION: Your next film, Edtv was very different?
SCHWARTZMAN: I did that right after Armageddon. I’ve always admired Ron Howard, so when I got the opportunity to work with him, I grabbed it. It was a story about a cable television station following this guy around for a month, 24 hours a day 7 days a week. There are TV monitors in every shot. You’d see the actor, the video camera and monitor all in the same shot. There were some interesting, practical challenges shooting both film and video, basically covering 350 to 360 degrees. We were lighting a movie where one of our actors was carrying a Betacam on his shoulder. It was like a 2 foot by 3 foot flag. When I look at that picture now, my only regret was that it should have been even grittier and even bolder, but I don’t think the world was ready for that look. If I were shooting Edtv today, I would light it bolder. I think it came out six years too early. It would be a bigger hit today, because of all the reality TV.
QUESTION: Then you went back and did Pearl Harbor with Michael Bay.
SCHWARTZMAN: It was a great opportunity, because they don’t make a lot of big epic pictures today. Michael is not a big CG guy, so I knew it was going to be a chance to paint on the biggest canvas that I would probably ever get in my life. He had Jerry Bruckheimer behind him, and we had the full cooperation of the Navy.
QUESTION: How many films have you done with Bruckheimer?
SCHWARTZMAN: I’ve done three that Jerry produced.
He’s an incredibly supportive, hands- off producer, who is always offering
encouragement. He also understands cinematography because he was a
professional advertising still photographer. He takes a lot of stills
on the set, and knows good lighting from bad lighting. QUESTION: You went from Pearl Harbor to a totally different movie…
SCHWARTZMAN: When a studio is spending $150 million making a movie you’ve got to appeal to a very wide audience. The Rookie gave me a chance to get back to my roots and do another film like Benny and Joon. It was an opportunity to shoot a very small picture with no money and no time. But, it was a wonderful script with a wonderful first time director. My grip, electric and camera budget for Armageddon was more than the entire budget of this movie.
QUESTION: How did you prepare for that?
SCHWARTZMAN: In one of my first conversations with (director) John Lee Hancock, I suggested shooting the exteriors in the middle of the day with the light straight overhead. It would be top-lit with very harsh shadows and a broad range of contrast between the darkest and brightest things in the frame. You end up with people having dark circles under their eyes. I said that’s the point. If this looks like The Natural, why would the high school players ever want to leave this town? I said we’ve got to trust the audience to understand that this movie has got to look this way. That freed us to tell the story. I think it’s some of the best work that I’ve done. We didn’t watch any baseball movies. John and I looked at movies about Texas, which was like a character in this movie. We used The Last Picture Show and Hud for inspiration.
QUESTION: That brings us up to Seabiscuit.
SCHWARTZMAN: I was shooting The Rookie in Austin, Texas. We were shooting five-day weeks, and if I didn’t fly home on the weekend, I would read. There’s a great bookstore in Austin, Texas called Book People. I became very good friends with Mike Rich, who wrote the script for The Rookie. He said, ‘you’ve got to go read this book called Seabiscuit’. I said, who wants to read a book about a racehorse in the 1930s? How can it be interesting? He said, ‘trust me.’ This is one of the best books you’ll ever read. I went to Book People at 10 in the morning on a Saturday, got back to my apartment, made some lunch, cracked open a beer, kicked my feet up and started reading. I read straight through 400 pages and finished at three in the morning. It’s a beautifully written story. If you haven’t read the book, I implore you to read it. It is just a magnificent piece of work. I said to (director) John Lee Hancock, who is also a top scriptwriter; you have to acquire the rights to the book. I could shoot it, because I know about horse racing. He read the book and loved it, but his agent found out the rights had been bought three years earlier by Gary Ross, when it first appeared as a magazine article in American Heritage. After I finished The Rookie, I was shooting and directing commercials. I told my agent, I didn’t want to do a feature for a while, because my commercial directing career was taking off.
QUESTION: How did you get to direct commercials?
SCHWARTZMAN: Agency people made that suggestion. They felt I had the temperament. I linked up with RSA, Ridley Scott’s company, which has a history of doing interesting work. Being a commercial director has allowed me to be more selective about my feature projects. I learned that from Vittorio (Storaro). He once told me, “it is more important to say no than it is to say yes.’ When you’re a struggling young cinematographer, you don’t want to hear that, but every film you shoot helps define you as a cinematographer.
QUESTION: Do you shoot your own commercials when you direct?
SCHWARTZMAN: I usually do though I have brought in a cameraman from time to time, because I miss not having somebody to bounce ideas off. It’s very lonely doing both jobs. I’ve realized how important it is for the cinematographer to sometimes be the contrarian and ask questions. As a director you’ve got so many things you’re dealing with that sometimes you can’t look around the corner and say, hey, wouldn’t it be better to try something different? Mitch Amundsen has shot some of my commercials. We’ve worked together for years. He was my operator, so I don’t have to bring him up to speed on the way I like to work and he knows my tastes.
QUESTION: How does directing affect your thinking as a cinematographer?
SCHWARTZMAN: I certainly have more respect for the job directors do. I think it’s made me a better cinematographer. I ask more questions and I’m making more suggestions like, what if we paint the wall yellow or use a different color tie, or put the camera here instead of there? I think it’s made me a more complete cinematographer.
QUESTION: Do you know why Gary Ross asked you to shoot Seabiscuit?
SCHWARTZMAN: The Rookie came out in April and about three weeks later I got a call from my agent saying Gary Ross wanted to talk to me. We went to the same high school. Gary is three years older than me, but it was a very small school where everybody kind of knew each other. I hadn’t seen him in maybe 25 years. At our first meeting, he explained that his seven-year-old son saw The Rookie and told him to hire the cinematographer. Gary took him to see the movie again, and decided it was the aesthetic approach he wanted for Seabiscuit. The images weren’t always pretty, but they were correct for the dramatic thrust of the scenes. We hit it off right away. Before I left our first meeting, he asked if I wanted to shoot the movie?
QUESTION: How did you and Gary prepare for Seabiscuit?
SCHWARTZMAN: Gary is a fantastic screenwriter. His script for Seabiscuit is a beautiful adaptation of the book. It’s very emotional without being overly sentimental. We spent 12 weeks together, eight hours a day talking about the script and making shot lists. Our shot list was a 250 page book of descriptions of how we wanted the scenes to look, and notes about the emotions we felt when we were discussing the shot. In one shot, it’s so cold outside that there is condensation on the inside of the window. Our notes described what that feels like. We had every one of Seabiscuit’s races on film, in black and white, newsreels, every single one. We found them in the UCLA archives. The match race between Seabiscuit and War Admiral in 1939 got more press than President Roosevelt, the Pope or Hitler. He was the biggest news story of the year.
QUESTION: How did the days you spent at the racetrack with your dad help?
QUESTION: Can you talk about the digital mastering tests you did?
SCHWARTZMAN: We knew we wanted to shoot the movie in wide screen format partially because a horse naturally fits into a 2.4:1 aspect ratio. The question was whether it should be Super 35 or anamorphic? I have sworn in print about 50 times that I would never shoot Super 35 again. Anamorphic gives you much better image quality, but I also knew we were going to be putting cameras in very aggressive positions, including shooting off of cars tracking simulated races. Horses run on dirt, and the track is not smooth, so the equipment we used when we were shooting racing scenes was going to take a fair amount of wear and tear. Anamorphic lenses have a lot more moving parts than spherical lenses, so I was concerned about whether they would to stand up to the punishment they were going to take. I also knew that the shorter focal length you get with spherical lenses would yield more dynamic horse racing shots. The racing shots were going to be more energetic with a 21 mm (spherical) lens than a 40 mm (anamorphic) lens, which is the equivalent field of view. The main idea was to see if we could shot in Super 35 and get the image quality we wanted for Seabiscuit by using a digital intermediate. We also had some other things to figure out, such as what kind of vehicle we were going to shoot off of and whether we were going to use a Technocrane.
QUESTION: We presume that you didn’t have to convince Gary Ross?
SCHWARTZMAN: Gary actually pioneered the use of digital on Pleasantville several years ago, so he thoroughly understood the possibilities and was behind us 100 percent. A lot of things have changed since Pleasantville, so we did separate two-minute tests at EFILM, Technique and Cinesite. I shot the footage in June, even though we weren’t going to start shooting Seabiscuit until October.
QUESTION: Maybe this is an obvious question, but why is there a difference in image quality rendered with a digital intermediate, and why was that so important to you?
SCHWARTZMAN: When you shoot Super 35 with a traditional lab process, there is an extra optical step. You are using spherical lenses, so the images have to be optically squeezed into anamorphic format. That adds an extra generation of film, and some degradation of the image quality. With a digital master, you are squeezing the images into wide screen format in the computer and recording directly onto the intermediate film. That was important to be, because we had an Academy Award®-nominated production designer (Jeannine Claudia Oppewall) and an Academy Award®-winning costume designer (Judianna Makovsky). I didn’t want the technology to allow this film to fall short of the mark that we were all striving to accomplish. I felt in my heart that I was going to get a better looking image in scope, but I didn’t think we could actually pull off the picture shooting with anamorphic lenses. At one point I thought about shooting the whole picture scope except for the horse racing scenes, and just do a digital blow up of the Super 35 film. When we did the tests, I also made an optical blow up at Technicolor with the same negative. All three digital blowups looked better than the optical blowup. I decided that the shortcomings of Super 35 could be overcome with a digital master. I could make one light release prints right off the negative with the digital intermediate.
SCHWARTZMAN: It wasn’t a competition between the three facilities. They all did outstanding work. I wanted to get a sense of how the process worked at each facility.
QUESTION: Did the studio commit to making a digital master upfront, and how did that influence your cinematography?
SCHWARTZMAN: With Gary’s support, they agreed. The main influence on cinematography was that it allowed us to shoot in Super 35 format. But, while we were shooting, we didn’t make any compromises figuring we could fix them later on.
QUESTION: Certainly one of today’s issues is the cinematographer’s role in digital mastering. Was that a discussion?
SCHWARTZMAN: I think the best, and maybe the only way to protect yourself is to have the director behind you. Gary made it clear that I was going to be involved the same way that cinematographer do final timing at the lab. I said to everybody upfront, if you like the way the dailies look, you are going to love the way the release print looks.
QUESTION: We will come back to that issue, but first let’s talk about the design of the camera car for the racetrack shots. You mentioned that earlier.
SCHWARTZMAN: The unique thing was that we were shooting real thoroughbreds, which can go from zero to 40 miles an hour in three strides. They are at full speed three steps from the starting gate. We needed to have a vehicle that could travel with these horses, get close to them and at the same time not be in a situation where we endangered anybody. Horse racing is the most dangerous sport in the world. There are more fatalities in horse racing than in auto racing. We had to find a safe way to track with the horses and shoot without creating hazards. We couldn’t run the camera car directly behind the horses in case one stumbled. I thought about putting a 30-foot Technocrane on a vehicle, so the camera car could run parallel to the horses, about eight feet away. That way if there was any kind of incident we could just boom the crane up and out of the way of a horse. If a horse stumbled, we could drive right on past it like we were in lane two of the freeway and the horses were in lane four. That was literally how we designed the car. We needed a camera car that could carry two remote gyro-stabilized cameras. We needed two cameras to get the shots that told the story, and this car had to be fast enough. We went to Allen Padelford who has designed a lot of very specific insert cars. He’s an ex-race car driver and a great engineer. He designed and built the Mobile Technocrane Vehicle (MTV), which was a 28,000 pound truck which could drive 45 miles an hour around the track with a brand new Westcam XR head in front, and a Libra head and a 30 foot Technocrane off the back. In addition to that we had a camera vehicle that we could put two animatronic horses on that rode on an I-beam track. These horses could move up and down and side to side. We needed those horses with the jockeys on them at the exact same level that a real racehorse would be. That way, I could drive this platform on the inside or the outside of real race horses and shoot close-ups of the jockey. Racehorses aren’t at all bothered by a vehicle right next to them. They could care less.
QUESTION: You mentioned the production designer. How important was your relationship on this movie, and how did you work together?
SCHWARTZMAN: Jeannine (Oppewall), the production designer, is just fantastic. She worked on L.A. Confidential and Sum of All Fears. She’s very tough in the sense that she holds everyone to a very high standard. You need a talented production designer and costume designer, because you can only shoot what’s in front of you. I can’t make an un-interesting set and wardrobe compelling, so I worked very closely with them all through prep. We had a nice amount of prep time to test things like fabrics and wall colors. Although we have control over colors at the digital intermediate stage, I didn’t want to go into timing worried about fixing things.
QUESTION: At one point, you considered using some Super 16 cameras for point-of-view shots from the jockey’s perspective. Did that happen?
SCHWARTZMAN: I was impressed with the (Aaton) A-Minima (Super 16 camera), but worried about what could happen if the rig broke and it fell on the track. What if a horse stepped on it? We decided to take a different approach using a technique Emmanual (Lubezki, ASC) used on Ali. We used very small PAL lipstick cameras together in a housing that was about the same size as a package of chewing gum. We extracted a 1.33:1 image from each camera and digitally stitched the images together to make a 2.4:1 picture. The whole thing weighted less than a pound. I could put these camera packages anywhere you could put Velcro. I wasn’t too concerned about the quality of the images, because these were point-of-view shots of a horse race.
QUESTION: How hard was it to photograph the horses? Did they get spooked?
SCHWARTZMAN: I thought it was going to be an issue but it wasn’t. We shot some tests with five horses, and they didn’t get spooked even when we moved a Technocrane around and above them. The first thing we realized was that once you get the horses on the track, they don’t care about the camera or the camera car. They are used to an ambulance driving right behind them. The other thing is once they are on the track, they are bred to do one thing, which is run counter clockwise as fast as they can.
QUESTION: What about the characters in the movie?
SCHWARTZMAN: Jeff Bridges plays Charles Howard, who is the owner of Seabiscuit. Chris Cooper plays kinds of a taciturn trainer of Seabiscuit. Tobey Maguire plays Red Pollard, a much-beleaguered jockey who has had a very traumatic life. He is the one who ultimately discovered how great Seabiscuit is. The movie is about people deserving a second chance and a metaphor for what America was going through during the Great Depression. There is a line in Gary Ross’ script that says it all, ‘Just because someone is a little banged up doesn’t mean their whole life is worth throwing away.’ The owner, trainer, jockey and Seabiscuit bond in a touching way.
QUESTION: It’s a period film set in the 1930s. How did that affect the look?
SCHWARTZMAN: We kept the palette fairly muted until we got to the track. The track was the place where colors exploded. The silks worn by the jockeys were a symbol for wealth. The poor people escaped the realities of their mundane lives by going to the track. The grass was emerald green, and the reds, blues and yellows just exploded with saturation. That was built into the color palette of the movie.
QUESTION: This film can proudly wear a made in the U.S.A. label?
SCHWARTZMAN: We shot Seabiscuit where the story actually occurred. We shot at the Santa Anita racetrack where Seabiscuit competed in most of his races. His statue still sits in the saddling area. We shot it in upstate New York at Saratoga, which is absolutely the most beautiful racetrack in the country. The only place where we didn’t shoot at the authentic location was Pimlico, because it doesn’t look anything like it did in 1938 when the match race happened. We found an appropriate location.
QUESTION: Since big parts of Seabiscuit are big exteriors, how did you deal with the variability of the weather, blue skies tuning into cloudy days and so on?
SCHWARTZMAN: We shot in the winter so the light was beautiful. The sun stayed very low and made a low arc across the horizon. The other thing was there are 459 scenes in Seabiscuit. There are no three-page day exterior scenes. There are a lot scenes that are 5/8ths of a page. Fortunately, this time of year, the weather was consistent enough to allow us to get through one scene before it changed. We might start in the sun in the morning and then end up in the clouds in the afternoon. Gary and I both felt that weather was part of the production value of the film. If it started snowing in New York, we would just incorporate it into the scene. We really embraced Mother Nature. We also created rainy days on sunny afternoons and sunny days on rainy afternoons.
QUESTION: How much of the movie are actual races?
SCHWARTZMAN: There are seven races, but it is much more of a story about people’s lives and America coming out of the depression. Seabiscuit was a broken down horse without great breeding. He was tiny, had bowed legs and the aerodynamics of a duck. But, his heart was twice as big as any other horse, and he didn’t like to lose.
QUESTION: Were there any sets?
SCHWARTZMAN: We had a 10,000 square foot set that was the home of the family which owned Seabiscuit. That was important for establishing relationships.
QUESTION: Where did you decide to digitally master the film?
SCHWARTZMAN: At Technique, the Technicolor digital facility in Burbank. I want to repeat that it wasn’t a competition. They all did a great job during our testing.
QUESTION: We should mention that you haven’t begun to time the movie yet, so maybe we can add an addendum to this conversation after you complete that experience. What did you learn from shooting this movie?
SCHWARTZMAN: I have to think about the answer to that question. I’m still in the process of digesting what we did. Ask me that question again during the live chat.
QUESTION: Do you think advances in technology will inevitably change the role of the cinematographer? That seems to be the conventional wisdom.
SCHWARTZMAN: A lot of people say they don’t need cinematographers, because technology is making the job simpler. But, the job doesn’t change because you automated some function of the camera. Your job is to be the author the visual aesthetics. That’s no different than a writer choosing words and how to use them. I don’t care if we’re downloading images through somebody’s eye into some kind of bubble magnetic storage. Somebody has to say, you know what… this shot would be better on a 40 mm lens three inches closer than it will on a 50 mm lens over here. When you choose a particular film stock and decide how to light, expose and process it, you are making aesthetic decisions. There are a million places you can choose to put the camera and most of them are wrong. I can teach you everything you need to know about cameras, lighting and grip equipment in a week, but that won’t make you a cinematographer.
QUESTION: How do you know where to put the camera?
SCHWARTZMAN: I am constantly asking myself that question. You read the story, block the scene and remember the lens is punctuation for the storytelling. Gary and I would talk about there being two characters facing each other having a conversation. Should we shoot the coverage as overs or as singles? Even if the image size is the same, the emotional impact of being over someone’s shoulder versus being inside of them is completely different in terms of how an audience perceives the drama of that moment. That’s part of the relationship between a director and a cinematographer.
QUESTION: A lot of students and other younger filmmakers tune into these conversations. This is the question Willy Loman asked his uncle in The Death of A Salesman when he asked him for the secret of success. Do you have any advice to offer to the next generation of filmmakers who will be coming for your job someday?
SCHWARTZMAN: The best advice I can give is what Vittorio Storaro (ASC) told me when he saw me trying to figure how he was lighting and exposing the film on Tucker. He said, ‘the goal is not to be me. The goal is to be you. You need to find your voice as a cinematographer because there’s already a Vittorio Storaro in the world.’ The thing that makes your work interesting is what you do that makes it unique and appropriate for the movie. It’s not how good you are at copying somebody else’s work. It’s about believing in your own aesthetic taste and sticking with your goals and dreams. My other advice is to be patient. It took me ten years to become an overnight sensation. I spent years shooting behind the scenes interviews for video presskits. Don’t get discouraged. You can’t expect to come out of film school and be handed the keys to a $100 million movie the next day. My other advice is to enjoy everything you do. I had as much fun shooting a movie for $600,000 as I do for $150 million. In many ways, I had more fun shooting films for $60,000, so be careful what you wish for, because it may come true. I love what I do. I love getting up in the morning and looking forward to starting another day. |
