Transcript of Live Chat

with John Schwartzman

June 7, 2003

Note: This chat was conducted at the CineGear Expo 2003 on Universal Studios’ backlot. In addition to our normal Moderator, Bob Fisher helped lead this two-part Q & A session. In the second half of the chat, Key Grip Les Tomita joined John to discuss their most recent collaboration, Seabiscuit. Questions were accepted throughout the chat from both our online guests and the assembled audience. CineGear Audience indicates that a question was submitted from one of our guests on-site.

Moderator (Jun 7, 2003 1:53:13 PM)
Welcome everyone. We’re chatting live at CineGear Expo 2003 on the Universal Studios backlot.

George Spiro Dibie (Jun 7, 2003 1:53:43 PM)
I want to welcome John Schwartzman. John, thank you very much for coming here. I also want to thank Bob Fisher, who is the best friend that cinematographers have. He writes more about cinematographers than anybody else in the world; it’s a fact. For the last 30 years. So we want to thank you. We actually have two functions here today. This one and one at 3:00, where we have 10 cinematographers joining us to talk about Point of View. They will be here, we’ll show their clips, and they will talk. So we’d love to see you again. Anyway, Bob, it’s all yours.

Bob Fisher (Jun 7, 2003 1:54:45 PM)
So, for those of you who don’t believe the future’s all technology – we’re online now and we going to do the chat with John in two parts. During the first part, we’re going to cover his career leading up to Seabiscuit and then Les Tomita will join us to talk about Seabiscuit. Okay?

Moderator (June 7, 2003 1:55:31 PM)

For our online audience, this chat will be a little different than our ordinary chats. Bob Fisher will get us started and he will guide the conversation as we take questions from our online audience and those who have assembled with us here at CineGear. As Bob mentioned, you’ll also have a chance to talk with John’s key grip, Les Tomita, later in this session.

Bob Fisher (Jun 7, 2003 1:55:22 PM)

I’m going to give you a first question, John, while our online audience filters in. You started shooting music videos, right?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 1:55:20 PM)
No, actually, I started shooting low budget features. Music videos were certainly the area where I think my career developed the most. But when I got out of school, I actually started shooting press kits. And then worked into low budget features.

Bob Fisher (Jun 7, 2003 1:56:02 PM)
Press kits?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 1:56:24 PM)
I mean, what you used to see between movies on HBO. You know, Keenan Winn sitting in a chair talking about his character in Goonies.

Bob Fisher (Jun 7, 2003 1:57:12 PM)
Did you learn anything doing that?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 1:57:43 PM)
Yes, I did actually, because I got to spend a lot of time on sets. Because it was an opportunity to watch other people work, which certainly – cinematographers know that you work in a fairly closed environment. You don't get to see how other people do things.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 1:58:43 PM)

One of the nice things about doing press kits was I could sit around and watch other people light. I could watch Laszlo or Vilmos, or whoever’s set I happened to be visiting for a couple of days – and it would be generally the days that you would go do these press kits were days that they had big sets. Because in addition to interviewing actors, we would shoot B roll behind the scenes. So, it was a great opportunity to sort of go, oh, that’s how you do that, or that’s how you light a set that big. And you just sort of make a mental image and you put it away for another time.

Gino (Jun 7, 2003 1:59:27 PM)
How did you get your first low budget movie and what was it?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:00:04 PM)
I was expelled from USC film school in 1985 and at the same time I won an award called the Focus Award, which was sort of the equivalent of a student academy award for cinematography at the time. And they ran the movie at the Academy, which they do every year for USC films. And the director was a young director named Phil Joanou, who’s gone on to have a very big career. So here I was, I had been expelled from USC film school, but I had this award. And generally this evening attracts a lot of people from the industry, and after the screening, a writer from Columbia Pictures came up to me and said, look, I really want to direct but the studio’s not going to give me an opportunity. So I’m going to save – I’ve got $30,000, I’ve got some friends that are actors. I’m going to write a short film, and would you shoot this for me. I can’t pay you, but would you do it, you know, gratis? And I thought – absolutely. I mean, this is what I want to do. It was an opportunity to tell a story again. So we did a little short, called Video Valentino, in five days. And I had all my friends from USC – it was the summer – who weren’t working, and put together a crew and we made this little movie. And at the end of it, it turned out really well. And he said, look, if I ever get a feature film, I'm going to call you to shoot it. And I thought, yeah, sure you are. I’m sure that’s been said to a lot of young cinematographers.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:02:14 PM)

But sure enough, a year later, I got a call to shoot this picture called You Can't Hurry Love, which was an expansion of this movie Video Valentino that we had done. And it was – it was a unique time. Because home video companies were now getting into producing their own movies. So companies like Vestron Video, rather than buying a horror movie from Paramount for $3 million, decided they could make their own for $500,000, and the profit was good for them. And Video Valentino or what became You Can't Hurry Love was one of those pictures. I believe this was – I got kicked out of school in ’85, and I think we made this movie in '87. So there was two years in between. It took about a year from when we finished the short till when he raised the financing to expand it into a feature.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:03:29 PM)

And in between that time I worked as an electrician on Nightmare on Elm Street; I did a lot of press kits. I just – I was living very inexpensively. So I could afford to work a couple days a month and I knew my dream was to be a cinematographer. I was fortunate in that my uncle was Conrad Hall’s doctor, and Conrad had been sick for about ten years in the ‘80s. He couldn’t work; he had some kind of weird tropical disease that had been misdiagnosed. So my uncle actually cured him of this illness. So Conrad was very indebted to my uncle and my uncle said, hey, do you want to go meet Conrad Hall? And I thought, oh my God, Conrad Hall. He was certainly in my top five of the greatest cinematographers of all time. So I went and met this kind of scraggly-looking guy at the bar at Musso & Frank’s one night, and we started talking. And I told him about who I was and what I was doing. And I said, you know, should I become an assistant or what should I do? And he said, you know, you’re already a cinematographer, why do you want to become an assistant? Just stick it out. Find a way to survive the lean times. You already know what it’s like to shoot a movie. There’s nothing wrong with being an assistant, but it’s not going to put you closer to where you want to be, because you’re already there now. And that was probably the best advice that anybody ever gave me.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:04:42 PM)

So in the intervening two years, I did as much work as I could to pay the bills. I did anything. And PA’d on Roger Korman movies. It didn’t matter. I mean, it was all a case of getting to spend time on set and watching people work. And then Video Valentino happened, and shortly after that a friend of mine who I’d grown up with, a director named Michael Bay, was going to Art Center College of Design and Art Center, their program is such that directors there are allowed to use whoever they want outside of school. At USC we weren’t allowed to use outside help. You had to pull all your crew from within the student body. At Art Center it was the opposite. It was – if you could get Conrad Hall to shoot your student projects – that was fine. It didn’t matter. So I was the only cinematographer that Michael knew, so I started shooting. Michael and I did all these spec commercials, throughout like 1988. And then he took his spec reel when he graduated from Art Center and immediately got signed to Propaganda Films. And it was very sort of lucky timing on my part, because it was right when music videos were really starting to explode. There was no grand design here.

Bob Fisher (Jun 7, 2003 2:06:14 PM)
John, tell them what Propaganda Films was at that time.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:06:31 PM)
It was a very young, upstart production company that had a couple of really interesting directors. It had David Fincher, Dominick Senna, a guy named Greg Gold, and Michael Bay. It was very small and they had a real sort of outlaw kind of view of themselves. They were smart, they were cutting edge, and it was also at a time when record companies were making music videos, but they didn’t really understand the filmmaking process. So it was almost like you had guys giving you money that had no idea what it was that you were doing. So you could make a mistake and no one really knew if it was a mistake or not.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:07:13 PM)

And it was a great – Michael and I – very early on we had a lot of success in music videos. And for probably two years, we did a video every week. And it was a great place to learn. I certainly was not an accomplished cinematographer. I think I had a good eye. I think I had a sense of how I wanted things to look, but I didn’t necessarily know how to get there. The nice thing was nobody else did either. So it wasn’t like I was being judged. When you do a feature film and somebody goes, why is it taking so long to light this set? You suddenly wonder, okay, when is the other shoe going to drop? In music videos, nobody knew. I mean, you could shoot film through the base and they wouldn’t know the difference. They thought it looked cool. So it was a time also when the budgets were getting bigger, so I was able to go out and hire crew people that had a lot more experience than I did. And that was something I always did. I always went out and thought, I’m going to get the best people I possibly can to work with me because I don’t know everything. And it was like going to college all over again, and getting paid for it.

Kristy (Jun 7, 2003 2:08:34 PM)

Did anybody at USC ever call and say, hey, maybe we made a mistake, you can be a cinematographer after all?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:08:59 PM)
Well now, they love me. And I go back speak to the school, and I tell them of course the story that I failed cinematography and was expelled, which has given me a nice story to tell. No, I’ve got my honorary master’s degree now from USC, sort of like Dr. Jerry Buss.

CineGear Audience (Jun 7, 2003 2:09:35 PM)
In the early days of music videos, did you get experience with the telecine?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:10:03 PM)
Yes, absolutely. The nice thing about music videos was that it was right at the sort of cutting edge of a lot of new technology. So I remember going in and transferring on our Ranks and Tell Flying Spot scanner. And they hadn’t been around that long. So it was funny, it’s come full circle. Because I’m getting ready to start timing a picture that I worked on this fall called Seabiscuit, and we’re going to do a digital intermediate on that movie. Which essentially is like going into a telecine suite – you have all the same controls. Going back when I color-timed Pearl Harbor or The Rock or Armageddon or The Rookie, I kept thinking, God, how antiquated is this sort of photochemical process of color timing a movie versus what I’m used to in terms of the power of the tools that you have in a telecine suite. And certainly, I’ve spent a lot of time at the lab. But I’ve spent five times as much time at Company 3, Complete Post, what used to be 525. All these places around town.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:11:42 PM)

And it was a great place to learn because also we didn’t have Standards & Practices looking over our shoulder. So we could say to the colorist, turn that knob all the way to the left. And it could be off the scale. The guy would go, well, it’s off the scope. And we’d go, well, we don’t care, it looks cool. This is how we want to transfer it. No one said, oh you can’t have the whites too high or the blacks too low. It was sort of like, this is what we were looking for and they let us do it.

CineGear Audience (Jun 7, 2003 2:12:24 PM)
So in the early days of music videos, the cinematographer was in the suite for telecine?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:13:32 PM)
Absolutely, I telecine’d everything. It’s changed. Even in commercials in the early days, I would go in and supervise all the telecines. Commercials have changed as well. Because now advertising agencies just want to take the film back to wherever they’re based out of, which is usually New York, and they want to cut and color it themselves. Which I find quite amazing actually. I directed some spots for the U.S. Army, and I said to the agency, you know, I’d like to telecine this stuff. And they said, no, no, no, don’t worry about it. And I said, no disrespect, but I consider myself a pretty good cinematographer, and I’m probably better at telecine-ing this stuff than you guys are. And their attitude, I think, was, no, no, no, we want to retain control over it. So it’s rarer now as a cinematographer that you get to supervise your final telecine in commercials. I still think in music videos you have more control. Music videos are inherently more artistic.

Bob Fisher (Jun 7, 2003 2:14:43 PM)
We’re going to come back to that when we’re talking about Seabiscuit and the ramifications of that. How did you get your first mainstream feature and what was it?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:15:04 PM)
My first mainstream feature was a picture called Benny and Joon, and that came out of this music video world. I was doing music videos at Propaganda, and Propaganda’s sort of look for music videos became embraced by the advertising industry. It was as if everybody in the advertising business thought, we’ve got to get this look. So I started doing Nike spots, “Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood”. They were really hot stuff. You saw them on TV; they were cool. And I was doing a lot of work with David Fincher and Michael Bay, and we suddenly we were moving from Channel 68 to Channel 7. We were out of the cable world and now we were on network television. Now that I was starting to get seen, more sort of tried and true, established commercial directors started calling me to shoot for them. Because for about two years, I only worked at Propaganda Films.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:16:20 PM)

And a guy named Jeremiah Chechik, who had been around for a long time directing commercials, who had done a movie called National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, his career had kind of taken a downturn, and his production company said why don't you shoot some stuff for Jeremiah. And I think part of it was trying to reinvent his look a little bit. You know, bring that Propaganda look to us.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:17:07 PM)

And Jeremiah and I, we got along great. And we worked together for about nine months on commercials and we just had a wonderful time. One day he said he'd been developing a script for three years, and that Julia Roberts was interested in doing it, and he said, if it happens, do you want to shoot it? And I said let me read it; I wasn’t going to say no. And it was a wonderful script. It was this great little picture called Benny and Joon. And ten weeks later we were in Spokane, Washington, making a movie. Albeit not with Julia Roberts but with Johnny Depp and Mary Stuart Masterson and Aidan Quinn. And it was still, in some ways, the best experience I ever had in making a movie. It was just fantastic.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:18:29 PM)

In talking to some people outside who were young, just getting out of school, and the one thing I can tell you is you can never tell where you next job is going to come from. And it usually comes from places you never anticipated it. I didn’t have a grand design, like, hey, I’m going to do this because this is going to take me to here. I just did it because I enjoyed doing it. And the things that I never thought would pan out where the ones that did. And if you want to be a cinematographer, the best thing to do is to just shoot. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re getting paid or not. Obviously, you’ve got to pay the bills, you’ve got to find a job. I was fortunate I wasn’t married at the time; I didn’t have children; my overhead was low. On purpose. I didn’t drive a fancy car. I lived in a cheap apartment. I mean, if I could make $1,200 a month I was fine. It wasn’t that hard, you could work as an electrician on a non-union movie and make $250 a day, so in a week your nut was covered.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:19:41 PM)

And that gave me a lot of time to go see movies, read books, you know keep myself going. My grandfather was a film composer. He used to say it's more important to figure out what you're going to do with your non-working time than it is with your working time. And I always thought, what on earth is he talking about? But he's right because when you’re not working, that's the time when you can really grow and learn a lot of stuff that you can bring to the game next time out when you get a chance.

CineGear Audience (Jun 7, 2003 2:20:16 PM)
I hear you’re directing more and you have a reputation for being really good with your crew, a very easy-to-get-along with soul as opposed to some cinematographers.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:20:58 PM)
Les Tomita, my key grip, is sitting in the back, I would hope he would agree. I mean, part of it is I spend as much time with my crew, the people I work with, as I do with my family. I was fortunate in that I took six months off and I apprenticed with Vittorio Storaro, who had the same crew of people with him for 25 years. And he said, look, these are my family. Why would I treat these people badly? We’re all trying to do a job together.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:21:35 PM)

I get to pick my crew. Some people on my crew have been with me for 11 years. Les and I have been together going on seven years now. These are people I trust. They’re people I work with because I enjoy them first and foremost as people. Secondly, because I think they do their job really well. And I'm not a yeller and screamer anyway, it’s just not my personality.

Bob Fisher (Jun 7, 2003 2:22:12 PM)
You worked with Vittorio on what?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:22:41 PM)
I was Vittorio's apprentice on Tucker – which was a wonderful experience.

Bob Fisher (Jun 7, 2003 2:22:57 PM)
What did you learn from working there?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:23:09 PM)
Just to trust my instincts. He used to really berate me whenever I took a light meter out to like spot meter his set, and I used to make little notes, oh, this is how he’s doing. Now, I know Vittorio Storaro’s secret. And he'd say, no, no, no, that’s not what’s important. What's important is what you feel in here. And he's right; it really is just trusting your instincts. And I think that part of being a cinematographer is you ultimately are in charge and you have to take the responsibility if something goes wrong. But at the same time, if you’ve picked good crew around you, you listen to what they have to say as well.  And that’s really how it works. I can only tell you how I work, so Les and I have done a lot of work together, and his opinion is as important as my opinion. I'm not going to tell him how to do his job. Well, I might try, but ultimately, he’s there because he knows the best way to do it. And you want to let people do their jobs because it keeps them inspired and it keeps them working.

CineGear Audience (Jun 7, 2003 2:23:56)

Do you do any directing? What impact does it have on your cinematography?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:24:11 PM)

I enjoy directing. It’s a tough job. It makes me a better cinematographer for other people now that I’ve directed commercials. Because when I direct, I also shoot. I miss having that dialogue with the director. I think that if I was a bigger director and I had bigger budgets, I would hire a cinematographer. Only for the reason that I think sometimes I miss having somebody to bounce ideas off of, somebody who can walk in and go, you know, what about over here? Because part of being a director is dealing with the agency, clients, etc. And you sort of get one-tracked in your thought – okay, the camera’s over here, 27mm, let’s go – 18K through the window, through a light grid, etc. Because you see it in your head. And sometimes there’s a better idea out there. But when you're a cinematographer you have the ability to look at it. Then you can walk around the back and maybe look at it from a different angle. When you're doing both jobs, you don't have as much time to do that. It’s a little overwhelming.

Starks (Jun 7, 2003 2:25:09 PM)
After Benny and Joon, did you get into mainstream films? How did that happen?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:25:38 PM)
I guess. Mainstream being that I started working for studios. I got into the Union on  Benny and Joon. I couldn’t get into Local 600 before Benny and Joon, but the picture was organized and that got me into the union. And then after Benny and Joon I went back and did commercials again and music videos. Because I really enjoyed it. It was fun. It's fun to do something for a week or two weeks because if it’s not good, you know it’s going to be over. There’s something about the intensity of those kind of jobs.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:26:22 PM)

And then one of my friends from college, from USC, called me and said, I’m directing this movie, do you want to shoot it? It’s got Bill Murray and John Cusack, and I said, hey, that sounds great. And I read the script and I liked it. And then by the time we went and made the movie it had Brendan Fraser and Joe Mantegna, and it wasn’t as good a movie. But it was still an experience. It was a movie called Airheads. Not what you would say would be the perfect follow up to Benny and Joon. But I didn’t look at my career that way. I thought, I like Michael Lehmann, he’s a really bright guy, he’s a good friend of mine, and this is going to be an enjoyable experience. Because part of it is, life is going on in the midst of all this. You’ve got to remember that you’re working and you’re living. So you've got to enjoy what you're doing. And from then on that’s all I did.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:27:06 PM)

And then after I did Pearl Harbor, which was a huge movie, and a huge amount of work, and a huge logistical thing, I really wanted to get back to just simple filmmaking again, which was why I did this little movie, The Rookie, which was like $10 million below the line.

Bob Fisher (Jun 7, 2003 2:27:27 PM)
You did a movie called EdTV, which was pretty much prescient about what was going to happen to television.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:27:42 PM)
Yes, I feel like EdTV was five years ahead of its time. The fun of that was we shot film and video at the same time. Imagine bringing a film camera into MTV’s The Real World. We never stopped tape to take the film cameras out of the way. That was the deal with Ron Howard, let’s do it all at the same time. It was the story about a guy who basically, his life is on reality TV for 24 hours a day. And I thought, if we do the reality TV part of it, and I light for that, and then I take that out and we do the film part of it, it’s going to be a long process, and where’s the real challenge in that. The real fun of this is going to be make it work for everything at the same time. So we were clever. It didn’t allow me to light in the same way that I would like for Michael Bay, which was very strong, kind of stylized images. With Michael, it’s all about the image. You’re bringing stuff right to the edge of frame; you’re going for these really strong graphic images. This had a more raw feel. I think I said this to you, Bob, I wish now that I look back on it, that I had gone with an even more kind of raw look at the time. But I wasn’t ready yet to do that as a cinematographer, because I had just come off of Armageddon, which was kind of this super glossy, slick-looking movie. I think today I’d have a different approach.

Bob Fisher (Jun 7, 2003 2:29:04 PM)
Tell us about The Rookie.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:29:54 PM)
The Rookie was like finding your way again in the world. Pearl Harbor was a picture that obviously got blasted by the critics. It’s not a well conceived script. I thought it was a beautiful-looking movie. In many ways, maybe the look of the movie detracted from the power of the movie, although I still think that really the acting and the writing probably did us in a little bit. But I was very proud of the way it looked. And Les can attest to this. It was such an arduous process. We were under – even though it was $140 million movie, we were under incredible budget constraints. And we were constantly having to justify every move we made on that movie. It was like the military; it was so full of red tape. It was the antithesis of putting a camera out and saying, okay, let’s see what the actors are going to do. It was really all about logistics. It was moving huge amounts of gear and huge amounts of people every day. Arduous conditions. Dangerous conditions. Airplanes with spinning propellers. Working very quickly. Lots of explosions. I mean, we were staying at a really nice hotel in Hawaii, and we’d all come back to the hotel at the end of the day, and we looked like coal miners covered in black soot. And there was everybody on the elevator who had saved all their money for their vacation, and they’d get in the elevator and look at us. And it was like How Green Was My Valley. With the exception of where your respirator was, you were covered in black. And I just thought, God, I never thought of myself as a big event movie guy, never what I wanted to be. I just want to get back to telling a story. The movies that I like, like Hud and Last Picture Show. They’re just about stories and about characters. And it’s not about flash and trickery and all that.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:31:08 PM)

And a friend of mine, his best friend was this guy who was going to direct this picture, The Rookie. And he sent me the script, and I read it, and I thought, oh, this is such a beautiful story. It’s inspirational. It’s a movie I can actually take my kids to go see. And they asked me to do it, and I said, I’d love to. And I talked to Les Tomita, my key grip. I always talk to my crew about, hey, do you want to do this movie, because I never make these decisions completely on my own, because it affects everybody’s life. And I said, look, there’s not a lot of money here, it’s a $10 million movie. It’s low budget. If you don’t want to do it, just say so. But I really feel like I need to do this. I’ve got to find myself again. Because I really felt sort of lost after Pearl Harbor. And certainly after Pearl Harbor the kind of movies that I was getting offered were not the kind of movies that I wanted to do. Things like Time Machine – they were big, action, effects, complicated movies where you’ve got huge green screens, and I just thought, I want to do a movie where it’s like My Dinner with Andre, Part II. And The Rookie was that kind of movie. And we all went to Austin, Texas, and shot this picture in ten weeks. And I can only speak for myself, but I think everybody else who did it, we just had the best time. And it was really a case of going out there with a truckful of lights and a truckful of grip equipment and a truckful of camera gear, and we made a movie. And it was about the acting and the director was amazing. He brought so much to the party.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:33:16 PM)

The reason why that movie turned out so good was just because the director did an amazing job. And it was just putting the camera out on sticks on a baseball field and said, okay, let’s block the scene. Okay, let’s put the camera over here, let’s do this and this. And it got back to simple storytelling. It got back to what I liked about movies that I’d go see. Because I’m not the guy first in line to go see The Matrix. I mean, I’ll go see Whalerider before I go see something else. I like small movies, independent movies, and I like foreign films. I guess when you work in the sausage factory, you know how they make the sausages, you don’t really want to see them that much. So the big, spectacular movies – I’m not dying to see The Hulk. Even though I was a huge comic book collector. It’s not high on my list.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:34:16 PM)
So, with The Rookie, we were focused on the simple storytelling that was so prominent in other Texas films like The Last Picture Show and Hud. The thing that was really pervasive about movies was that you really felt that these movies were shot in Texas. And it was a major part of the story. A lot of movies nowadays they shoot Toronto for New York, which means ultimately it doesn’t really matter where the movie’s being shot. It’s a location that’s someplace that’s cheap. This was a case where the location was a major character in the movie. So that really was our approach. We didn't look at any baseball movies. We knew that we didn’t want it to look like The Natural, because if it had looked like The Natural, the point was, why would anybody ever have wanted to leave this little crappy town of Big Lake, Texas?

Bob Fisher (Jun 7, 2003 2:35:01 PM)
So there were a lot of nuances in that.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:35:21 PM)
Yes, but I mean, they’re obvious. You read the script. You don’t have to be a genius to figure it out. One of the things we figured out very early on was we weren’t going to shoot baseball at magic hour because it would look too pretty. And I said, to John, let’s start shooting. It was summer in Texas, so at eight in the morning, it’s 100 degrees and the sun is right overhead, and it stays that way until about six o’clock at night. So the idea that the shadows were really dark under the brims of their hats was a positive, not a negative. It was embracing this kind of washed-out Texas landscape, which is what it looked like. We shot in a two stoplight town that had nothing going on. And that was kind of the idea, that the coach was trying to inspire the kids to look beyond where they were. And if where they were living was in some way romanticized, it was going to work against the story. Beautiful cinematography isn't always pretty pictures. Beautiful cinematography is cinematography that helps tell the picture. I think. And I can say that having made a bunch of movies that I think have beautiful images in them that don’t necessarily help tell the story any better.

Bob Fisher (Jun 7, 2003 2:36:36 PM)
So that’s important stuff, though. A couple of weeks ago, there front page story on the Los Angeles Times by P. J. Huffstutter talking about how a Landmark Theatre is putting in these barcode video projectors. It didn’t matter. The screens are small, the audience didn’t care about the pictures.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:36:51 PM)
Oh, I think they do. I think the audience doesn't have a say is pretty much the problem. I mean, the economics of exhibition right now are not good, so I can’t speak for the exhibitors. I can say this. I saw a test of a new TI projector that's a 2.6K video projector. There’s a digital cinema laboratory we have set up in Hollywood that tests the highest-end stuff. And I went there to look at it. And we ran Chicago both on film and on this digital projector and I must say I thought it looked really good. There’s no question that there’s bad projection all over this country. But nothing’s better than good projection. I would disagree with them. I don’t think those projectors are as good as film projectors are. But there’s no question that film projectors haven't changed in 75 years. They haven’t gotten any better. And these digital projectors are only going to get better. I think the secret is not succumbing to something that’s not as good as it could be. Which is why I really took issue with George Lucas and the whole Star Wars thing, because I think that that camera is not any good. This is going to sound like a slight, but it looks like Unavision; it looks like Mexican television to me.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:37:56 PM)

I've played around with the Canon Eos digital still camera, and it can makes images that are better than a 35mm still camera. So there's no question the technology is there. It’s a case of just not settling for something inferior to what we already have. Super 16 looks better than HD. HD is still compressed video with 1900 lines of resolution. There's no question though that the money is being spent there. Panavision is not spending any money making their film cameras any better. They’re adding follow focus things and digital this, but essentially a film camera is a box that film runs through and there’s a lens on the front of it. I'd be a fool to say I'd never do anything digital. All I’m saying is I don’t want to work with a digital format that’s not as good as a film format, if I’m being asked to do the same job. Having said that I shot a commercial on a Canon XL1S that I thought was amazing. But it was a case of picking the right tool for the style of what the commercial was. It’s not what’s better than the other; they're just different paintbrushes.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:38:45 PM)

And I think where Star Wars is trying to present itself to look like a film, that’s the mistake. I think you can't compare an HD camera to a film camera if film is your standard. But at the same time, if you’re trying to do something different with an HD camera, I think it's wonderful. I mean, God knows, you can go out at night with very low light levels and get some incredible images. Billy Roe who is the cinematographer who shot the X-Files did a show called Robbery Homicide for Michael Mann in HD. He shot second unit for me on Seabiscuit and I asked him about how was it working in HD? And he said, it certainly wasn’t any faster. And it wasn’t like I had to light less. He said, it was just different. It was apples and oranges, not this apple is better than that apple.

CineGear Audience (Jun 7, 2003 2:39:28 PM)
I head Bill Roe say that the worst part about shooting HD was that the monitor was there and every producer thought he was a cinematographer. Would you agree?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:39:54 PM)
Yes, well, that’s true. I’m sure. I mean, there’s still a little bit of alchemy that goes on in cinematography with respect to film. Everybody who comes to the set who is the assistant to the head of the studio, stands behind the director and says, God, I could do this scene better than that. Or in his mind you can see the wheels turning, like, oh, I wouldn’t have them say the line like that. But when Les says to me, I’m going to just float a little light right here, just to take the neck down. It’s like, they don’t have a clue as to what’s going on. So, there’s a little bit of turning lead into gold with cinematography, the photochemical aspect of it. It’s nice. No one would ever say to me, why are you using light grid there, why don’t you use 216? You know?

Bob Fisher (Jun 7, 2003 2:40:54 PM)
I think we’re going to move forward and start talking about Seabiscuit, so do you want to have Les join us?

John Schwartzman (June 7, 2003 2:41:09 PM)
Yes, why don’t you come down, Les. This is Les Tomita, who has been my partner in crime for about ten years.

Bob Fisher (June 7, 2003 2:41:34 PM
Are there any questions before we go on to Seabiscuit?

CineGear Audience (June 7, 2003 2:42:00 PM)
A lot of people like myself, I’ve learned storyboarding for my projects – I’ve fooled a lot of people by using a filter system. They think I’m using a 26 or a 35, and I’ve got some really interesting images going into post production. I’m wondering what you think of the Canon cameras.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:42:27 PM)
The editors on the spot I did thought it was shot on film. I think that when you use that camera, you just have to realize what the parameters of the camera are. Where it looks and where it looks bad. We did a spot for Canon video cameras. And the idea was, let’s shoot the whole damn thing, because it’s about a dad editing all this different vacation stuff, his kid playing Little League. So, it made perfect sense, in terms of stylistically, that that was the right tool to use. Within that, we then picked locations that played to the strengths of the camera versus the weaknesses. I mean that camera’s not going to look as good at the Bonneville salt flats in the middle of the day as a film camera does, because it doesn't have the dynamic range of a film camera. At the same time, a father sitting at a laptop in a den at night, lit by one little practical lamp and maybe a little china ball off camera for fill, with a half or a quarter black pro mist in front, shot at a two stop – you know, all the way in on the zoom – it's spectacular. It’s gorgeous. It's like anything else, you've got to know the tools you're using. That’s all that it comes down to. I was so enamored with that camera, that I was very fortunate – Canon sent me one as a gift. I think the thing is amazing. It's a great tool.

CineGear Audience (Jun 7, 2003 2:43:19 PM)
I’ve noticed in working with 35, not too many people have the chance to actually use a 35 and practice with it, because it’s a half million dollar camera system.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:43:51 PM)
But the approach is still the same, which is that cinematography is cinematography, whether it's an 8mm camera or an IMAX camera. Granted, within that you have to know the parameters of the tool that you’re using. But good lighting and good framing -- doesn't pay attention to the capture device. That’s really the bottom line. I approached the XL1S like a film camera, the only difference I made was we tried to pick times of days for locations with a little more of a critical eye, knowing that, boy, if this sky is too backlit, I’m going to have to bring in a lot of fill for the faces. But beyond that, I didn’t do anything different with that camera than I would with a film camera.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:44:16 PM)

It was treated with the same respect. Just because it weights four pounds doesn’t mean that you run around like you’re shooting your kids opening their Christmas presents. I mean, the one thing I will say on set was it didn’t command quite the same amount of respect when it sat on a Fisher dolly as a Panaflex. But beyond that, we still treated it that way. We put the dolly on track; we put it on a Connor 25-75 head. Again, it was just a case of treating the tool like it’s an instrument to record high-quality images. And then you’re able to.

DP_2_Be (Jun 7, 2003 2:44:41 PM)
You mentioned about apprenticing and how that was really important to you. You know, all the things that people tell you, kind of filtering all that out and finding what you want to do. I'm in that position and that’s what I want to do. I want to find someone who I respect and look up to. And there’s a few guys. I don’t know how to go about that.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:45:09 PM)
The ASC and ICG have mentorship programs. Contact Patty at the ASC. Talk to George Dibie at ICG, Local 600. Kodak also has something.

Lenser (Jun 7, 2003 2:45:16 PM)
What was your first music video? How did that come about?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:45:48 PM)
My first music video was for Kenny Rogers Jr. Michael Bay got the job based on his reel out of Art Center. And it was the first music video we did at Propaganda; it was super low budget. I think Kenny Rogers Sr. probably financed. We had no money. We had Kenny Rogers and a couple of Laker cheerleaders, it was off season. It was one of those where you used every favor you could get. And it showed on MTV. Remember, back in the mid to late ‘80s, MTV was starved for product. Nowadays, MTV doesn’t even play music videos, right? It’s all reality-based programming. But if you think back in the '80s they basically ran music videos 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And they needed stuff to put on there. As the network got bigger and bigger, they started having the Top 10, and then TRL and all that other stuff. So I can’t speak for music videos right now. I think it's a lot different. I think a lot of music videos get produced but don’t end up on MTV. I know there are other outlets, like Much Music and a few other places.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:46:28 PM)

We were just fortunate in our timing. There was no grand plan. It was just that we were coming of age at a time when there was a new outlet to have your work seen, and there was a new source of funding to do it. And they weren't like movie studios that were beholden to bankers or insurance companies. You didn't have to have your resume approved, you didn’t have to go meet with the head of production. You just had to go shoot it. We primarily shot on 16mm. It wasn’t until later, when you started to do a Madonna video that you actually shot on 35. But it didn’t matter. It was telecine, a 16mm still was better resolution than television. So it was great.

Young (Jun 7, 2003 2:47:20 PM)
What do you look for in an apprentice? How should they deal with you?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:47:31 PM)
Well, first of all, it only works when you're on a movie. Right now I'm just doing commercials and color timing Seabiscuit, so it’s not a good time. Generally, to be honest with you, it works through my crew.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:48:03 PM)

You know, part of it is the issues are different now. This is now the age of digital cameras. It used to be easier to get on a film set because you weren’t worried about somebody seeing something and it ending up on the Internet. Pearl Harbor was the first time when I read on a call sheet No Cameras Allowed. They're worried about people putting stuff on the Internet. Every movie now you’ve got a thing with a magnetic card on it. We never used to have this stuff. It’s more difficult, not from my standpoint as much, but the studios are making it more difficult, the producers are making it more difficult. And it’s not as easy to even be allowed to have an apprentice. Just the political rigmarole. I'm hoping the ICG, ASC and Kodak can help with a little bit of muscle to maybe do this. Certainly it was a great experience for me. I happened to have an in on the movie, which is how I got to do it. Also, I was hired originally to shoot the video press kit for Tucker. And I said to them, well, can I just say the rest of the time? And I volunteered to stay for free. Because it was so exciting, and Vittorio Storaro was my favorite cinematographer. I had only watched Apocalypse Now like 250 times. So it was an opportunity. Here’s a guy who never is in America, who as far as I was concerned was the greatest cameraman who ever lived. It was worth it to me to stick around. But I didn’t get on as an apprentice, I got on as the video press kit guy, and I got to know everybody. And once everybody sort of became comfortable with me, it was easy. But again, in those days digital cameras didn’t exist. It’s a different issue now. It’s a little more politically challenging. That’s not to discourage anybody, but …

George Spiro Dibie (Jun 7, 2003 2:49:27 PM)
John, it's an insurance problem more than anything. The Guild, we have a contract with the studios. We do that through labor relations, that’s how we make things happen for our members.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:50:02 PM)
Okay. When I went to USC I spent a week with Ted Voitlander on one of those Michael Landon series. That was part of what you did at USC Film School is you went out for a week apprenticing. I wasn’t apprenticing with necessarily the cinematographer who I would have picked on the top of my list. But nonetheless, I learned a lot from watching Ted Voitlander, who had been around for 50 years working. I didn't necessarily like his style of lighting, but I still learned a lot from him. Just because you like what somebody does or don’t like what somebody does, doesn’t mean you can’t learn either way.

Bob Fisher (Jun 7, 2003 2:50:58 PM)
How did you first hear about Seabiscuit?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:51:15 PM)
I read the book, like probably 1 in 20 Americans. It was on the New York Times Best Seller list for a year. It's incredible -- I recommend the book. One of the best books I've read in ten years, and I do like to read a lot. It was amazing. The writer of The Rookie, which was a sports movie, had recommended that I read Seabiscuit while we were on location making The Rookie. And I read it and I turned to the director and I said, man, I’ve got your next movie. You’ve got to get the rights. And he went to try to get the rights and it turned out it had already been nabbed by Gary Ross over at Universal. Gary Ross was a director who I happened to have gone to high school with. So it was just serendipitous later. I was not on the map to shoot that movie. Nor did they even have a start date. It was, oh, Gary Ross owns the rights, he’s writing a screenplay. We did The Rookie, it came out, and I went back to doing commercials.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:52:08 PM)

And it was the summer. And I got a call saying Gary Ross wants to meet you about this movie. And I had said to my agent, I don’t want to do a movie for a while, I just want to do commercials for like a year, spend some time with my family. And he called and I think you’re going to want to have a meeting on this one, because I know how much you loved this book. So I met Gary to do Seabiscuit, and he says, look, normally I never would have thought of you for a movie like this, because you’re a guy who does those big Jerry Bruckheimer movies. But he said, my son took me to see this baseball movie called The Rookie, and I realized the aesthetic approach you guys had to that movie was something I needed for Seabiscuit. You guys understood that it wasn’t always about making pretty pictures, that it was about telling a story. So the reasons why I did The Rookie came back to me and paid off. And I met with Gary and we talked about the movie. I literally had a meeting at two o’clock in the afternoon on Thursday and left that meeting and called my agent and said, you’re going to get a phone call in five minutes, they’re going to want to make a deal. And five minutes later, it was like boom. I went to Les and said, hey, we’re doing Seabiscuit. And that was in June and we started in October.

Bob Fisher (Jun 7, 2003 2:53:17 PM)
Did you know Gary Ross in high school?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:53:35 PM)
I went to a little school here in the Valley called Oakwood. So I knew Gary, he’s three years older than I am. I knew him because the whole school had 250 people in it, there were 30 people in each grade. But I didn't hang out with Gary Ross, I just knew of him. And I knew him as a writer, and I knew him as the director-writer of Pleasantville. I hadn't seen him except at a school picnic four years earlier. It wasn’t like, oh hey, Gary, how you doing?

Moderator (Jun 7, 2003 2:54:04 PM)
You did know something about horseracing, though?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:54:28 PM)
I did. I happened to have grown up in a family that owned racehorses. Horse racing was something I was familiar with. I knew the terminology. I knew the jockeys. I knew what it was all about. Not that you wouldn’t have gotten that movie within a week of prep on the movie. It gave Gary a sense of easy that I could talk to him about, oh, that was a good work, 59 and change or whatever, or three wide from the rail, or the 5/16^th pole, or those kind of things. Or you’ve got to rate him down the back stretch. In this business, we all are thrust into jobs that we know nothing of. And by the time Armageddon was done, half the crew felt like they could launch the space shuttle into orbit. You spend that much time at NASA and you’re an expert. Just ask us.

Bob Fisher (Jun 7, 2003 2:54:46 PM)
How did you prepare?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:55:25 PM)
The first thing we did, Gary and I talked, and said one of the stories in Seabiscuit is of this jockey Red Pollard. And you really get an insight into what it’s like to be a jockey. Jockeys are not just passengers on horses, they are truly athletes. They’re gifted. They're running on 800 calories a day. And they throw up every day. They eat lunch and throw it up. It would be like Lenox Lewis trying to defend his title having vomited his lunch and dinner every day for five years and going in to fight with 800 calories. These guys are all on the edge of collapse every day. They’re not at their best. They are fighting to make the weight. And that's a major part of the book. And the other part is how physically brutal horseracing is. There’s a lot of contact. These horses are truly insane; they’re wild animals. I asked somebody to describe it, he said, it's like going down the Grapevine without brakes. You just hope you make it to the bottom without crashing into something.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 2:56:34 PM)

So we knew we had to get right in there. I spoke to Caleb Deschanel and Stephen Burum who did Black Stallion. One of the advantages they had was that they weren’t actually using thoroughbreds. They used these horses called Randalls and they only go about 25 mph. Thoroughbred go 40-42 mph. We had to figure out we were going to photograph these horses at speed. That's where Les and I said, we've used a lot of gear on all these Michael Bay movies, let's figure out what the best stuff is. And we’ll take it out to the racetrack and we’ll do a test. We had like an equipment bakeoff with Techno cranes, insert cars, etc. We borrowed five racehorses for an afternoon, and we ran some tests. Les could probably tell you more.

Les Tomita (Jun 7, 2003 2:57:30 PM)
Hi, everybody. Initially, as any technician is concerned, our first issue was safety. Being born and raised in Hawaii, I could tell you anything about surfing, but I had no idea what a horse could or could not do. So the day out at the ranch, these were the requests I was given by John and Gary Ross – hey, we'd like to be at speed, be inside and outside, and on the horses. We’d like to have cameras on the jockeys on the horses, around the horses. And we want to be inside the race. Now, thoroughly depressed, I decided it was going to be a challenge for me. Outside of just standard moviemaking, we had a challenge to accomplish.

Les Tomita (Jun 7, 2003 2:58:27 PM)

We started originally at a ranch just watching horses move. To figure out the movement of a horse. The horse wrangler, Rusty Hendrickson, said – you know, I’ve been doing this for a long time, and everybody says they’re going to come in and figure out a way to mount a camera on a horse. I’ve been doing it for 30 years, and no one's ever done it. And don’t expect you guys are going to be the first one that’s going to find the golden potion to do it.

Les Tomita (Jun 7, 2003 2:59:06 PM)

We in fact were able to do it, and it came out of pure desperation of trying to make sure John gets what he wants. And also Gary got what he wanted as well. We started originally with 35mm or an an Aton camera, and two of the missions were to get a jockey to have a 35mm camera on his back and also have a camera underneath the belly of a horse. After we learned the anatomy of how horses ran, we realized that was not going to be an easy task.

Les Tomita (Jun 7, 2003 2:59:49 PM)

Fortunately, through the expertise of some of the people that we consulted with, we were able to come up with a prosthetic piece we put on a jockey. Unlike anything else currently offered in the market of body harnesses and doggie cams and anything that Geo Film Groups had to offer, jockeys do not sit vertical and upright. He sits almost in a 90-degree position, using his legs as basically shock absorbers. The biggest issue we had was stabilization.

Les Tomita (Jun 7, 2003 3:00:24 PM)

We found a horse goes through three different transitions when they run, and they go from 0 to 40 mph in less than three strides. Right out of the gate. You never realize how fast these horses are and how athletic these jockeys have to be just to even stay on it. And they’re on their reins with maybe about a quarter of an inch of their toes on these little metal stirrups.

Les Tomita (Jun 7, 2003 3:00:49 PM)

Now they said, let's put a 35mm camera on one of these guys. I consulted with a family relative actually who specializes in prosthetic pieces, because they allow people missing limbs to make movement and to take out some of the motion we were concerned about. And through the help of George Nolan over at Geo Film Groups we actually came up with a body harness that we were successful in mounting a 35mm camera on. And we were also successful in making a little saddle rig for under the belly of a horse. So those were some of the transitions. I’ll let John get into the digital video aspects that we had to look at as well. That was really exciting for us. As well as having horses and insert cars, which we can get into a little bit later, of how we could get from 0 to 40 mph in less than three strides, which is virtually impossible. And coming up with the rigs and the vehicles we had to come up with, with actually a relatively limited budget, in addition to time restraints of what we had to do.

The Biscuit (Jun 7, 2003 3:01:43 PM)
What was the total weight of the gear that was on the jockey and that was on the horse?

Les Tomita (Jun 7, 2003 3:02:07 PM)
We estimated about 30 pounds of gear. Believe it or not, the camera almost ended up being the lightest thing that we put on their back. After we weighted the jockey down with batteries, intercom systems, video cables, we estimated we had about 30 pounds of weight on his back. Which may not sound like a lot but when it's cantilevered weight, it's a dynamic weight.

Les Tomita (Jun 7, 2003 3:02:37 PM)

Fortunately for us, what we found was the difference between a jog, a canter, and a gallop were three complete different movements of the camera. Once they got up to speed, it was like a ski boat planing on water. They smoothed out and it was perfect. But just the transitional speed and, if you can imagine, the force and inertia that it takes, it will either throw the jockey off, and the weight distribution was very difficult on the jockey itself. So we had to try to make sure we were doing safe and more gradual starts. So that he just didn’t bolt out of it.

Les Tomita (Jun 7, 2003 3:03:44 PM)

The other concern was because we were planning on having cameras running with other horses, if something were to happen, or if a horse were to throw the rider, or the rider were to fall because one of our pieces of equipment. That was also a huge concern of making sure that their backs would not break, their necks would not break, or God forbid get trampled by another horse. So we had other issues of making sure that the cameras would break away should that having.

Les Tomita (Jun 7, 2003 3:04:46 PM)

And having maximum adjustability. Because when the jockeys got up on the horse, it’s hard to explain, and we got some great videos and shots of us trying to do this. Because somebody was the horse, and then we had somebody as the rider and someone behind trying to mount the camera. If you just close your eyes and imagine this picture, it was quite interesting. When a jockey rides, he rides out relatively vertical before he gets out of the get. But once he gets in position, his body becomes like 90 degrees. So the camera had to be adjusted in very minute. But it was not adjustable, it was just very small and very compact and very light. Now John says, hey, we need to be able to pan and tilt the camera. And the jockey’s saying, come on, guys, let’s hurry up. And put on the batteries and try to get all the weight on and everything. So that was really a difficult task to actually accomplish. So we made miniature ball mounts. George over at Geo Film Groups was very instrumental in fabricating a lot of the little lightweight aluminum pieces that we needed.

CineGear Audience(Jun 7, 2003 3:05:47 PM)
John, at what point did you and Gary Ross discuss formats and aspect ratios, and what were the issues?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:05:59 PM)
Well, it was obvious, I think, if you look at a horse that we were going to shoot this widescreen. Also, I haven’t not shot a movie widescreen in like six years. I’ve always shot scope. This movie we shot Super 35 because the nature of the amount of takes we were going to get in horseracing. The flexibility of the zoom lenses spherically versus anomorphic were greater, and also the sense of speed you get from the shorter focal length lenses was going to make the racing feel more dynamic. The 21 was going to be more exciting than the 40.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:06:45 PM)

There was a point we when we were prepping this movie when I thought, we’ll shoot the dialogue in anomorphic and we’ll shoot the horseracing in Super 35. I think everybody in the camera department was like, oh God, I hope we don’t do that. But ultimately, my judgment got better. And part of it was over the summer I did a digital intermediate and doing the blow up from flat to anormorphic, which is what you have to do in Super 35 to be able to release print it. And I did a test at E-Films, Cineside, and Technique, and they all did a beautiful job of doing an anomorphic blow-up in the computer. So I felt like, okay, with that done, I can now go back and shoot this movie Super 35.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:07:34 PM)

Getting back to what Les said, we used the jockey-cam a little bit. And then one of the issues was really, if something were to come off, we were using an SL cine, if something were to come off in the midst of a horserace and a horse were to step on it, it could be detrimental. Let me just preface this, horse racing is the most dangerous sport there is. It has more fatalities than any other sport. Literally I think, ten times more fatalities than auto racing. Even without a camera there, horseracing is incredibly dangerous. Lafitte Pincay broke his neck this year at the track. Every meet jockeys get thrown, they fall. So we did not want to be the cause in any way of ratcheting up the danger level of making this movie.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:08:23 PM)

We had to figure out a way to do this and get this dynamic footage without actually making it anymore dangerous than it already was. As we were doing this I remembered reading an article in American Cinematographer that Mike McAllister and Chivo Lubezki had built for Ali, which was essentially, two lipstick video cameras, stitched together so the right camera was the left part of the screen and the left camera was the right part of the screen. Because television’s a 1:3:3, essentially a square almost? So if you take those two images and put them together, you can extract a 2:4:0 image out of that.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:09:09 PM)

And as we were going through this process, I kept saying to less, God, I keep thinking that we’re fighting an uphill battle here, because no matter what we’re dealing with a lot of weight. And we even tested the A-Minima, which is Super 16 camera, which gave us beautiful images, but the problem was still inherently there, which is that if for some reason this camera comes off, it’s like a hand grenade in the middle of the track. It’s a magnesium camera that if somebody hits or somebody runs into, it’s going to be catastrophic. So I started researching and ran into Alan Gitland at Panavision, in charge of what we’ll call the Palcam for Ali. And we talked about what worked and what didn't work. And we were fortunate to have enough lead time that we essentially got together with a company called AVS, Aero Video Systems. They do a lot of in-car camera, ex-game kind of stuff. They're used to putting camera in hard to get places. And I went to them and I asked them if they could help us build this.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:10:01 PM)

Together, sort of Alan-Shepherding it, we built these little lipstick Palcams that essentially were smaller than a deck of cards. Anywhere that something half this size could go, I could put a camera. If I could put velcro on it, I could put stick a camera on it. And the beauty was if something like this flies off in a race, it wouldn’t cause injury to either jockey or horse. Now, granted, Pal 625 lines is not the same resolution as Super 16 or as 35mm film. But given that these cameras were about dynamic point of view shots, in the midst of action, dirt flying at the lens – the actual image quality was not as big an issue because the audience would be able to overlook that because of where it was, where the camera was. The image, when we filmed it out, looked acceptable enough. Is it a film image? No, absolutely not. But at the same time, when you put a film camera there, it was getting so much dirt and stuff knocked in it, that its image was knocked down as well. So ultimately, we forewent the film version as Pal cam came into reality, because we were able to set it, the jockeys could wear a vest with two mini-DVD recorders in them. They could carry an hour's worth of tape. We could sort of press play and record and forget about it. And it was easy to adjust the camera because literally it was just a little piece of velcro. And we could go, okay, tilt it down, great, we’re ready to go.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:12:14 PM)

I think from all of our standpoint, it was really the feeling of like in a worst case scenario this camera is not adding any more peril to the filmmaking process. Nor is setting its up taking any time. Because part of the issue was when the jockey was upright with the camera cantilevered on his back it was incredibly strenuous for him. When he was actually in the riding position it was fine. But if you figure it would take us ten minutes to get the horses out on the track, in the position to get ready to go. And the actual riding part of the shot lasted 35 seconds, it meant that the bulk of the time they were sitting in an uncomfortable position.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:12:48 PM)

The beauty with Palcam was it didn’t have that affect on them. They didn’t even notice they were wearing it. It was sort of put it on and forget it. And it was very easy to disguise. I didn’t have to paint it out. We literally put a little bit of fabric over the camera and it disappeared.

Op-Ed (Jun 7, 2003 3:13:12 PM)
After you did the digital intermediate test it became okay to shoot in Super 35, you didn't explain why.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:13:28 PM)
Well, the last picture I had done Super 35 was The Rock. Traditionally in 35mm you're shooting a flat image that’s widescreen. You’re shooting into the soundtrack area, and you’re masking the top and the bottom. So you’re throwing away a lot of film on top and a lot of film on bottom. Theatres need the soundtrack area because that's where the Dolby Digital and the SDDS and DTS, all the soundtrack information runs on the edge of the film.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:14:05 PM)

So the only way to project a film in the theater is to then take this 2:4:0 image and make it into an anomorphic image. So that means you’re going to make copy of the negative on an optical printer, and you’re going to squeeze it and blow it up. In that process, you lose a lot of image quality. And I really felt like the final version of The Rock didn't look the way I wanted it to look. I thought it was not a bad looking movie, but if you had seen the answer print that was flat, it had a lot more snap and a lot more punch to it. So I thought I'm never going to do this again. If I'm going to shoot widescreen, I’m going to shoot anomorphic, twice the negative area, it’s beautiful, there’s no downside to it.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:14:55 PM)

On Seabiscuit the downside was the cameras were going to be put in situations in which they were going to have a lot of vibration; they were going to take a lot of abuse, a lot of pounding, because we were driving at 40 mph on a real racetrack with a camera at the end of a crane. They were going to be subject to a lot of intensity. It’s not like you’re just putting the camera on a dolly and shooting.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:15:25 PM)

And anamorphic lenses have more moving parts, more things to go wrong.  So I thought, I think we’re going to be better off here if we go spherical. And we were also shooting day exteriors, so I knew I could shoot with slower film and be able to extract a better dupe out of it. But then the idea of a digital intermediate came about. And also our director had done Pleasantville, which was the first movie to ever do a digital intermediate. Essentially, they invented the digital intermediate on Pleasantville. So I was working with a director who was very facile in that world. And who was very pro going to a digital intermediate. So we did a test. The day that Les and I went out there to Santa Anita to test these insert cars, we took that film, we cut it together into a minute and a half little racing piece; we showed it on film to the studio; and then I made a digital intermediate to see what the blow up would look like. And it looked really good.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:16:17 PM)

I also did an optical blow-up, and I compared the two. And I thought, wow, this digital intermediate looks better. And even the guys at the lab said, yes, the digital does look better. So I suddenly felt like, okay, I can now feel comfortable shooting Super 35, and that was the reason why.

Eff-Stop (Jun 7, 2003 3:16:41 PM)
Did you have trouble convincing the studio to do a digital intermediate?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:16:59 PM)
No, but you're dealing with a director like Gary. It was already discussed before we ever started shooting. Like I said, I'll shoot Super 35 if I can do a digital intermediate. And everybody said, okay, no problem. And Universal was doing it on a picture called Blue Crush at the time, so they were fairly proactive in that world; they weren’t afraid of it.

Bob Fisher (Jun 7, 2003 3:17:08 PM)
You did some interesting things designing a new type of camera car.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:17:16 PM)
Well, it was funny. It actually came about from CineGear last year, which was that Alan Padelford had a new big truck on the lot, and I looked at it, and I even said to him, I think I’ve got something that I could use you on. And I’m sure he heard that from about 150 people that day. It was also difficult when you put a technocrane on an insert car, because they really were never designed to have technocranes on them. Let me backtrack. When we were racing with these horses, we knew we couldn’t run the insert car directly behind the horses. Because God forbid if a horse propped, which means spooks, or a jockey fell off, there would was no way we would be able to stop the vehicle in time. We would end up running this person or this horse and this jockey over.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:17:43 PM)

Because we knew we wanted to be right in the in the middle of the action so we needed the ability to run parallel to the horses but get the camera in the middle of the pack.  So it became obvious that we needed a crane arm of some kind. Nowadays, the technocrane is the most versatile crane arm out there because it has an adjustable arm length. You can use it to telescope in and out, and in a sense it can work like a dolly. So it was obvious to me and Les, because we've put these on insert cars before that this is what we needed to do.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:18:24 PM)

The next issue was what insert car do we put it on? And it’s always been a bit of a compromise, because technocrane is a heavy crane, and insert cars were all designed before the technocrane was really around, and they weren't designed with the technocrane in mind. Cut to Alan, who built a vehicle called the mobile technocrane vehicle. Which was an insert car whose sole designed purpose was to have a technocrane on it. So he had sort of done the job for us, which was we didn’t have to find a vehicle and beef it up. He had already done that. Not only did he have that vehicle, but it was so beefy it actually allowed me to run a second crane arm off the front with a Wescam head. If you go by Alan's truck you can see pictures of how it was outfitted on Seabiscuit for some of the horseraces. We ran this truck with two remote heads on it at the same time, which was phenomenal, because the other thing was that a race horse can run two quarter-mile takes every other day.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:18:59 PM)

It’s like being a pitching coach. We had 60 horses. So two takes every other day. Now, we needed to shoot horseracing five days a week. So we had to be very clever in how many shots we got every time we ran the horses. A quarter of a mile’s not very long. It’s two furlongs. You do that twice, now you bring out a set of horses. You could go through 60 horses by lunch if you weren't careful. So we really were very specific about what the shots were. And having two crane arms allowed us to get two really dynamic shots at the same time. So that every time we ran the horses, we were getting at least two very important pieces of action that could be completely independent of each other in terms of storytelling.

AC Dan (Jun 7, 2003 3:19:27 PM)
How did you shoot close ups of the jockeys?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:19:45 PM)
Well, we did it off of this car. We literally would put this camera within 18 inches of a jockey. Clyde Bryant, one of my camera assistants somewhere back there, ran the Westcam XR with the 11:1 and the doubler on it – 550 mils up, the insert car on dirt at 40 mph. Many times I would say, I want you to start on Seabiscuit's eye sharp, and then we’re going to tilt to the jockey’s goggles. At 40 mph, at 550 mils, on the track. Hey Clyde, do your best, how’s an 8-stop sound? It was a lot of that. These guys did an amazing job.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:20:18 PM)

It became like a dance. We were well rehearsed on the ground. We were very well organized. It was very, very difficult. Fortunately, I didn't have to pull focus, so it wasn’t difficult for me. But the shots were incredibly dynamic. And the camera was in a place I don't think it's every been before in horse racing. And we had seven horseraces to do. So this equipment gave us the ability to have a variety of different styles as well.

Les Tomita (Jun 7, 2003 3:20:51 PM)
Just to mention it, as far as the MTB is concerned, Geo and Alan Padelford have a joint venture of some sort with their techno crane arms. If you can imagine, this technocrane arm has gone through steroid conditioning. It’s much stronger, it’s a much more stable arm, which we needed for the Lederhead, which I guess at a 125 mm we got out – comfortably, we were running at about 125mm, maybe a foot, two feet off a jockey's face as well. But the technocrane has a lot of modifications done to it, with the addition of a pulsating disk braking system for safety issues. Actually, we were running at 45-50, because we were usually on the outside lane as the horses were running inside.

Les Tomita (Jun 7, 2003 3:21:28 PM)

So we had these safety failproof systems built into the car for that main reason, that if we had to actually come into a sudden stop, that the arm would just basically not shear off, whether it be in the front or the back, or windmill on anyone because we had in the upwards of I believe it was 13 total technicians, plus a 30-foot technocrane arm, and what we called a poor-man’s motion control rig up in the front platform, which was operated by the XR tech while he was booming up and down, which was an air compressed driven, remote motion control rig up at the front platform.

Les Tomita (Jun 7, 2003 3:22:17 PM)

And prior to every day, and during the prep, Gary Ross and John Schwartzman came up with a shot list and a playbook. Incredible genius on their behalf, they decided since we only had so many shots at these horses, that we were going to operate just like a football team, or a sports team. And they came up a complete digital computerized playbook for every shot that was going to happen. And every morning we would have our race meetings, with Alan, all the camera people, all the grips. Anyone that was going to be involved on the car, and say, this is the shot, this is how we’re going to do it. And we had little plastic horses and we had a track. It was like playing house; it was a lot of fun.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:23:06 PM)
The playbook was like a planned view of the racetrack. So it showed you where everything was. Every horse was numbered, where the horse was going to ride. We hired a graphic artist who was good at Adobe Illustrator to come in and basically illustrate this. I'm not a believer in storyboards. I think storyboards you do for the studio. This was a playbook you could distribute to everybody. And anybody associated with the shot could look at it. On the big crowd days, when we weren’t running the insert car but we were running six cameras, each set up was there? If we went to set-up 3 you were on the E camera, you could look and it would show you, okay, I’ve got to move from the 5/16ths pole to the 3/8ths pole, and this is what I’m doing. It would have a description of what your shot was. And we taped out on the floor inside at Santa Anita a little walkthrough.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:23:40 PM)

Then imagine the insert car and ten jockeys running down the racetrack. Everybody going about four miles an hour. We would rehearse the camera move with the jockeys not on their horses. And they would run in between each other, and then we would move the camera car and the crane. And we would rehearse the shot that way. Then we would do a walking rehearsal with the horses walking. And we would do the same thing before we would roll camera. And we did that for every single shot in the movie.

Bob Fisher (Jun 7, 2003 3:24:04 PM)
The car is on the lot here for people who want to see it?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:24:15 PM)
Yes, the car is here.

CineGear Audience (Jun 7, 2003 3:24:24 PM)
What was the budget on the movie?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:24:35 PM)
$87 million. Which is a lot of money, but I’ll tell you what. When you’re doing a horseracing movie – Universal was the second largest owner of racehorses at one point in Southern California, with 60 some odd horses. So it never seemed like we were swimming in excess money, let’s put it that way. It was enough to do the movie, but it wasn’t like we were sitting around waiting for the light We were shooting. Part of the issue was we didn't own these racetracks. Bob Baffrert, who’s got $100 million of racehorses at Santa Anita, is going to train his horses every morning whether we film or not.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:25:14 PM)

So generally, we would take control of the track at nine o’clock in the morning, and we would go until about three o’clock in the afternoon. Because we were shooting in the winter and that’s when we would lose the light. And generally, we would do between 5 and 6 setups on the track in that time. We were usually good for a setup an hour. Sometimes we'd do 2 or 3 takes in the same set-up. Make slight adjustments.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:25:41 PM)

But it worked very well. I knew we were going to have to do some poor man’s process, so Les and I got together with Mike Lantieri, who was our special effects guy, and I said, look, I need two fake horses that can move up and down on track, that can bash into each other, move 20 feet relative to each other, look like real horses I can put jockeys on. Plus when the jockeys are on these horses, they need to be the exact same height as racehorses. Then I said to Les and Alan, I need a vehicle that I can shoot 360 degrees on. I need a float from the rose parade without any float on it. I need a 28-foot flat thing that can go 50 mph around a racetrack with a crew on it and these horses. And you have two and a half weeks to build it.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:26:08 PM)

So there’s another vehicle Alan built called the SS Seabiscuit – which isn’t here. And the beauty of it was I could put Toby Maguire on an animatronic horse, right next to a pack of real racehorses. There were times when the racehorses were so close to the Biscuit that you could reach out and touch them. One of the interesting things was, the horses didn't care about the vehicle. Once they started running, that’s all they really cared about was the running. They weren't distracted by us at all. It really was not an issue. So I could put Gary Stevens and Toby Maguire having a conversation about going to a whorehouse that night with real horses running right past them. And that gave the director the ability to direct the actors with respect to dialogue. Because if we had just set them lose on horses, it would have been, okay, we’ll see how it turned out tomorrow when we go to dailies. This was the ability to repeat it over and over again. And be able to talk to the actors.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:26:57 PM)

On this vehicle, we had a machine that shot dirt in their faces. You could run a steadicam on it. You could put a dolly on it; you could go handheld. It was great. It was a big platform. We put a technocrane on it. We just drove around the track with it; it was great. So essentially what we would do is we'd go all day until our horses were done. Then we'd get on the SS Seabiscuit and we’d do some of that until we lost the light. And then we’d go light the grandstands at night to look like day. Every day.

CineGear Audience (Jun 7, 2003 3:27:12 PM)
It sounds like you got a lot of your stuff in camera, did you do anything in post?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:27:27 PM)
The only digital stuff was taking out non-period buildings in the background. You do your best when you scout locations to say, okay, we’re not going to look that way. But obviously horse racing is dynamic you're going around a lot of turns. And Santa Anita is fairly period, but there's a shopping mall in one area and there’s an office building at the back of the backstretch. And the easiest thing was to say, we’re not even going to worry about it; we’re going to paint it out later. We're just going to cut and paste those backgrounds out. With respect to foreground, there’s no digital work done there. It was all just, okay, how do we make the parts of Arcadia that don't look like 1938 look like 1938 again? That was really all we did. There was a jumbo-tron TV that had to get painted out, and there were a couple of satellite dishes. We tried to avoid it as much as possible, but one of the nice things about the CGI world is that you can use it to just cut and paste. To help yourself with some set extensions on period sets. There's no digital horses in the movie. It’s all real horses.

CineGear Audience (Jun 7, 2003 3:28:34 PM)
Can you tell us about the RF System you guys used?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:28:50 PM)
One thing we realized was – I used to wear a pedometer and averaged 7 to 11 miles a day walking. Cameras were all over this racetrack. It's a mile and an eighth around the track. One of the things we needed was the ability to see video on all the cameras. So one of the things this company AVS did was to use these omni-directional microwave transmitters to build me a little handheld 7" LCD monitor with a little button. And every time I hit the button it gave me another channel, which was either the A camera, the B camera, the C camera, or the D camera. So I never had to go look at the cameras. I could say, okay, Michael Stone on the C camera, let me see what you’ve got? And I could look at his frame, and I could say, okay, that’s good, or why don’t you move the camera six feet to the left and tighten up a little bit.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:29:38 PM)

Because sometimes video village was a quarter mile away.  This way, wherever we were, we could see what was going on. Because there were some promo days when there were 4,000 – 5,000 free extras show up? And I was running cameras around to get as many big shots as I could. And if I had had to run to each camera, I would have spent half my day in transit. This allowed me, via walkie-talkie, to look at what everybody did. And it was flawless. As I used to say, we were bigger than Al Jazeera at Santa Anita. These guys did an amazing job.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:30:16 PM)

There's a bunch of technology in the television world like the duplex walkie talkie systems that has never made its way into the feature film world, which is really a shame. Because there’s a lot of great technology there. All these reality TV shows that don’t have huge budgets use this technology every day, but for some reason we can't seem to find it in our budgets to bring them into the film world. And Seabiscuit was a case in which the director said, look, I need to be able to see what each camera’s doing without going to each camera. And it allowed us to have the money to have these people there and it made our lives phenomenal. It just saved so much time every day.

CineGear Audience (Jun 7, 2003 3:30:45 PM)
How about the computer system with the jockeys?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:30:53 PM)
Well, that was the other thing. The jockeys wore little IFPs in their ear and walkie talkies, so we could talk to them as we were racing.

Gino (Jun 7, 2003 3:31:08 PM)
What did you discover as a filmmaker and a storyteller? Because like you said, you tried to make this controlled environment, there were so many new things you were doing, and there was so much uncontrolled environment with the horses and all that.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:31:15 PM)
The horses weren't as uncontrolled as I thought they would be. They were very difficult when they weren’t on the track. As I said to somebody, it's like tying a boat to a pier with just a bow line. They kind of move everywhere. But part of what we found ourselves doing in this movie was we did a lot of stuff kind of handheld, and I didn't want the style of the movie to get in the way of the storytelling. It was a big movie shot in a very simple way.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:31:55 PM)

The irony was that the horseracing was probably, in many respects, the most controlled place we had. They were very predictable. Granted, take two, we might have been a little ahead of where we wanted to be on the insert car than take one, but after about the first three days there weren't a lot of surprises with the racehorses. They’re very single-minded when you get them on the track. When you’re trying to light a scene with three actors and a big brown horse, it's like having an 8x8 solid that moves around in front of your light.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:32:33 PM)

So very simply, you have to simplify your lighting. Because you go, oh my God, if that horse moves two feet, he’s going to shadow all my actors. So you start figuring, okay, if the horse is on that side, I’m going to key from the other side. Basic stuff. It really was.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:32:49 PM)

The other thing we had going for us was this was a movie with 459 scenes. So most of the scenes were 3-5/8 of a page long, a lot of scenes played in 1 or 2 shots. Weather was actually an advantage. Because if I had rain during the day, it meant that I could shoot scene 71 in the rain and scene 96 in the sun and scene 183 in the clouds. It wasn’t like a traditional movie where you're doing a day exterior for three days and you’ve got to maintain consistent lighting. I could literally in two hours do the whole scene and then we were moving somewhere else. So that was wonderful.

Bob Fisher (June 7, 2003 3:33:09 PM)

The folks are CineGear are telling us that we’ve only got time for one more question.

CineGear Audience (Jun 7, 2003 3:33:17 PM)
What were you saying about not liking storyboards?

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:33:29 PM)
I am not a big believer in storyboarding. I have 1000 pages of beautiful storyboards from Pearl Harbor. And I would guarantee you that if you had those storyboards, you would not find one image that’s in that movie. I think they require a lot of time.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:33:46 PM)

We started to storyboard on Seabiscuit, but I didn’t have the time to go and direct a storyboard artist exactly how I wanted it. So Gary Ross and I made a shot list, 200 pages long. And it’s a description of every single shot in the movie. But it was something he and I could do with without someone else interpreting it. And it also had things that inspired us when we were reading the scene, like it would say, there's condensation on the windows, it’s a cold morning — it was something we would have for ourselves to remind us what we saw in our mind's eyes when we read the script. And we spent six weeks in a room with the script supervisor and we’d pitch each other ideas, like here’s how I see how we should do the scene. And he’d say, no, no, like this.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:34:27 PM)

And the beauty of it was for me the description was better than a storyboards. Because unless storyboards are perfect, they can do more damage than good, I think. Having done The Rock, Armageddon and Pearl Harbor – all movies in which I have got the best graphic novel version of this movie you’ve ever seen. Probably my storyboards are better than the movies. Not one of those images in the movie. I think it’s something people do sometimes to get the studios off their back. There was no point in storyboarding the horseracing. More important to describe what the action was.

John Schwartzman (Jun 7, 2003 3:35:12 PM)

Maybe if you’re doing a movie where you’ve got to then turn the material over to someone like ILM.

John Schwartzman (June 7, 2003 3:35:39 PM)

On behalf of Les and myself, I want to thank everyone for listening today. We enjoyed talking with all of you.

Moderator (Jun 7, 2003 3:36:03 PM)
Unfortunately, we’ve run out of time for this session. We thank all of our online guests for joining us and we also thank everyone who sat with us here at CineGear. Special thanks for Bob Fisher and George Spiro Dibie for assisting us with this chat. And a very special thanks to John and Les for sharing their time and energy with us.