Haskell Wexler Waxes on the
Evolving Art of Lighting
By Bob Fisher

Originally appeard in International Photographer in 1994.

Inevitably, conversations about the art of lighting focus on things like faster films and lenses, miniaturized lamps and specialized accessories and other types of techno magic. Listen to Haskell Wexler, ASC, talk about lighting and you understand that at least for him lighting and the absence of light is a way of expressing emotions and ideas. In his world, lighting is as pliable as clay:

Matewan — "The setting was in the 1920s, when miner's worked in utter darkness except for the glow from graphite flame lamps on their hats. I've worked in the mines, so I know that when you are digging coal, everyone has a black face. I lit faces in the mine by bouncing light from the flame lamps off of reflective aluminum cards. I also sprinkled aluminum glitter from Christmas decoration packages on the walls. It looked like drops of water glimmering in the darkness."

Medium Cool —"Movies are a voyeuristic experience. You have to make the audience feel like they are peeking through a keyhole. My lighting was entirely based on practicals augmented with very small lamps. The biggest unit I used for exteriors was 750 watts. That was in 1968, so I was using a 100 speed film. The lab pushed it one stop."

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? —"Richard Burton didn't want me to shoot Virginia Woolf. Because of my documentary background, he was concerned that my lighting wouldn't be kind to his face. But Elizabeth went to bat for me. I used very soft single source bounce light from white umbrellas. Every light was on a dimmer."

In the Heat of the Night —"I stretched silks over the tops of the sets and pounded 10Ks into their centers. I also used umbrella lights. The desaturated colors visually established the setting and set the tone for the story."

Blaze —"We did a lot of shooting in nightclubs with colored lights. The strippers had brightly colored costumes. I didn't use the brightest colors early in Blaze's career. But, as she got to work in better clubs, I saturated colors by using more gels on lights. (Director) Ron Shelton wanted the audience to see Paul's (Newman) blue eyes. Instead of an eyelight, I used a very small unit right over the lens with cloth diffusion. Usually, this kind of light is used with a photo enlarger. It is softer and lasts longer than a photo floodlight. Instead of looking round, it looks square like a window when it is reflected in someone's eyes. This type of light (Chinese lanterns) has great wrap around potential. If you can wrap light around a subject or object, you don't need fill."

An another film —"My gaffer and I were looking at an actress who was at least 20 yards away in an enclosed glass booth. I was trying to figure out how I was going to light her face. It had very flat features, and the lighting was flat. The next day, she confronted me, and asked if I thought she had a flat face? I was furious with the gaffer, because I knew I wasn't the one who told her. It turned out that she knew how to read lips."

Wexler was recently one of three cinematographers invited by Kodak to participate in testing a new type of film. Asking Wexler if he's interested in testing a new film is like asking a bird if he likes flying, or a fish if he wants to go for a swim. It's a natural instinct.

Eastman EXR color negative film 5287/7287 is rated for an exposure index of 200 in 3200 K light, and 125 in daylight. Wexler discusses his reactions to the new film in the following conversation about the art and craft of lighting:

QUESTION: I remember you telling me about doing early industrial films and documentaries. You said you began to see what light really looks like in real situations. Isn't that something that you've tried to replicate throughout your life and career?

WEXLER: In most contemporary films, you try to replicate reality. If someone is sitting by a window, you want to show the window light coming through. If you're in an office, which naturally would be lit by fluorescent lights, you have somewhat of an obligation to want to make the office look that way. The more you work with photography, the more you try to take those things beyond literal reality, and beyond the source of light, if it enhances the dramatic aspects of the story. But a beginning point is looking at reality, because when you look at reality, you realize the variety of ways that light can come into a room. I remember reading about Sven Nykvist and Ingmar Bergman spending eight or nine hours sitting inside a church in Sweden and watching where the light went at certain times of day. They were studying the differences in quality of light at different times of day, and analyzing how it would affect the particular scene that they were going to shoot in that church. Not necessarily to use the actual light that they saw, but to be able to replicate it in a dramatic way.

QUESTION: In that type of situation, how do you pre visualize lighting?

WEXLER: I think about lighting in relation to the frame, because what we try to do as directors of photography is to literally direct the eye. Sometimes we direct the eye subtly or strongly. This could be by focusing, composition, the choice of lenses, and lighting. All of those things have to work in combination. If composition emphasizes one idea, and lighting another, you have confusion. Of course, that can also make a dramatic point.

QUESTION: Is the trend today realism in lighting?

WEXLER: There are a lot of trends, and that's one. The counter side of that is some directors think the actors should go wherever they want to go, and the camera will follow the action like a football game. It depreciates the potential artistic influence of the director of photography. We're not there with an instrument which is supposed to capture whether the pass was completed or not. We're not there to put the football right in the middle of the frame on the crosshair and make sure that there is some kind of exposure so that you see what's happening. Lighting and framing, and the choice of lenses are about directing the eye to something in the frame which you want the audience to discover. In fact, that enhances interaction with the picture and that is what involves us with the film. In the theater, the audience is relatively captive. They pay their money, and they are sitting there with other people in the darkened room. The obligation of the image is to develop an interaction, so people in the audience become engaged with the story.

QUESTION: Do you think television has influenced the way people photograph movies?

WEXLER: You see super close-ups and unmotivated moves. The director of photography's job is to interpret the story in as subtle a way as they can without bringing attention to the camera. You are there to serve the story. Lighting is part of the total image. I can think of great shots where the person is in the background, and you don't see their face. Their back is to you completely. By withholding that image, and just having them silhouetted against a venetian blind, you may enhance the drama. A good example of that is in Forrest Gump when he leaves the house because his girlfriend rejected him. You see him through the screen door, and he puts his hands on his hips. On TV, it probably would have been a close up on his face. He might even have had a line, telling you what he was going to do. But in a movie, that one shot says everything. It's also well lit and the timing is perfect.

QUESTION: Let's get back to lighting.

WEXLER: There are certain practical things you have to know about your tools. You have to know what is available. You have to be able to adapt your tools. You have to know that there are little quartz lights that you can put on tracks when you go to a practical location and there's no place to put regular units. These are lights which you would normally use in homes. We aren't limited to using conventional movie lights. You have to know how to direct light and how to use dimmers to control intensity. You also have to understand the more theoretical aspects of lighting, such as what's dark, what's light, what's cool, what recedes, and what comes forward in the frame. Audiences see movies on a two dimensional screen. We want them to perceive a third dimension in their minds. That's done with framing, focal length and lighting. I've never been taught to say that warm colors come forward and blue colors are in the back of the frame. But, I have looked at the mountains outside of Santa Barbara, for example, and have seen that as things recede in the background, they become less sharp and less contrasty. Actually, I learned a lot of that shooting black-and-white films, and I still use those ideas in color.

QUESTION: Do you think that somebody is born to be a cinematographer? Is it a natural talent?

WEXLER: I think people are born with certain proclivities. You usually discover yourself when you find out what gives you pleasure. Sometimes that idea of being born with talent goes too far. Someone feels that they are a painter, and they see things and they want to paint. They have all these ideas, but somehow they have to get a palette, a canvas and paints. They have to experiment. If they're lucky, they'll have someone teach them a few things. We cannot forget that there are practical aspects of learning how to express yourself. There are some people in this business who believe that if you shuffle the deck, creativity will come. I suppose it might, but it's not likely. Discipline and creativity are both necessary. People say let's Steadicam it, as if it is a verb. A Steadicam is a tool for disciplined framing and movement. You can do marvelous things with it if you know what you are doing.

QUESTION: What about interpretive lighting? Are you seeing more of that today?

WEXLER: Well, I think that means giving one's own conception to a film, and that is exactly what we strive to do. Even today, we hear people ask, "Do you have enough light?" Certainly today, new films, lighting equipment, lenses and cameras, and postproduction technology all extend the range of our creative potential. However, even with the current technological obsession, the interpretive instincts and artistry of the individual are vital to the core of creativity.

QUESTION: How about the way that someone like Vittorio Storaro adds color to light for psychological impact?

WEXLER: Let's face it. In many ways, he is in a league of his own. He is unique in being able to give us poetic words for visual elegance. Also, he has had the good fortune to work with directors who appreciate and encourage his daring. All of us have had parts of some pictures where we tried something special, something different, a little far out. Vittorio has done whole pictures that way. The man enjoys himself so much that it's almost a shame. We are artists, and as artists we interpret reality. This has always been done. It used to be that our obligation was to make the lead actress look beautiful. We used backlight, hairlight, eyelight and diffusion. In black and white, we used to have a little Inky Dinky with a magenta color filter on it. It didn't really make any difference in the black-and-white film, but it made the actress feel better. Using color gels with light for dramatic purposes is just as legitimate, as long as it serves a purpose.

QUESTION: Do you think the hierarchy in Hollywood puts the same value on dramatic lighting as you do?

WEXLER: The Hollywood hierarchy, at its highest level, mainly cares about one thing. Money is the bottom line. It is near and dear to their hearts. If you can see the actor's faces, and hear most of what they say, that's enough. If you are on schedule, even if it means working 18 hours a day, that's good. All of this has to do with what they think the audience is buying. They do not understand, and therefore minimize, the importance of the image. I remember on [Who's Afraid Of] Virginia Woolf?, they were going to fire me because the lab said that some exterior night scenes were too dark. We shot them outside of Elizabeth Taylor's house in a big open area where there were trees. They were seriously thinking about replacing me. It turned out okay, and in the end, I won an Oscar that year. The truth is that it was very tough to light big exteriors with trees and grass in those days because the film was relatively slow, and you had to create the illusion that the light was moonlight. But, what I was saying was that it just depends on who is doing it. Jimmie Howe, for example, did a lot of daring things in black and white, and I never heard anyone complain about his films being too dark. That's because they perceived that he had a value at the box-office.

QUESTION: Tell me more about lighting.

WEXLER: Lighting is part of the total picture. It has to do with where you direct the eye, what the colors are, and what the depth of field is.

QUESTION: You talk about getting to know the tools, when you yourself have invented some of the tools yourself.

WEXLER: Most of the things that I've been accused of inventing, I found out later someone else did first. I think I might have been the first one to use a crane to create artificial moonlight. It was basically an industrial crane that we modified. I was never happy with how we lit night scenes out in the open. In urban scenes, it was okay because we had source light. But out in the open in the grass and trees and hillsides, day for night was actually the best way to do night scenes. I kept thinking, there must be some way to get a high soft source light that would be like moonlight. I made a frame out of lightweight aluminum and put 10K bulbs in it. We used silk or some kind of spun fabric around it. We put it on the crane about 100 feet in the air. There were reports of flying saucers. We had people coming to see what was happening, and the police came to the location. I guess that was inventing a way to light, but it's not really an invention.

QUESTION: Where did you get the idea for using umbrellas for single source bounce light in Virginia Woolf?

WEXLER: The umbrella idea I got from still photographers. They were using umbrellas for a long time. When I started using the umbrellas, most people were still using hard light. I think that Sven Nykvist had the biggest individual influence on bounce light on cards. I remember seeing big white cards set up over the sets and he bounced light off them. Some of the French black and white New Wave photographers would just stretch a piece of silk over the set, hit some lights down through the middle of the silk so there was overall ambiance. That's the same effect as still photographers using bounce light on a white ceiling.

QUESTION: Is there a downside to soft light?

WEXLER: Everything has a downside. A lot of us started taking HMIs or PARs and just whacked them through the middle of the set like an uncontrolled sun streak. That's one way to make soft light look more interesting, and it is still more flattering than hard light in most cases. Bob Richardson is very creative with soft light. You can see it in all of his work. I remember one film where these guys are walking down the hall, the tops of their heads and faces seem to explode. He's hitting them with top light, and they are five stops overexposed. Then, they walk out of the top light, and it's back to normal. That does two things. First, it amplifies the illusion of rapid movement, because of the light changes. It also engages the audience and focuses their attention on the brightest part of the screen.

QUESTION: Let's talk about this test that you shot. What do you look for when you test a new film?

WEXLER: Kodak said they had a new film which was fast (200T), which had good grain characteristics, and was less contrasty. Now, we have various tools for reducing contrast, including lighting, low contrast filters, lenses, and our knowledge of how to move the imaging characteristics of a film stock to the places where we would like it to go. This film is less contrasty and the colors are softer and less saturated. At least from my experience, you can, with no loss at all, overexpose quite a few stops, and it will still hold a great deal of detail. When I shot my test footage, I rated it some of the time much faster than they suggested. I wanted to see if there was any degradation in the image, and there wasn't. In fact, I thought it really looked good.

Since the purpose of it was to test the film, I didn't use any diffusion. I wanted to use a little bit of smoke, but I didn't.

QUESTION: You said that you underexposed the film. How much did you push the latitude?

WEXLER: On the exterior scenes, I ignored the fact that I had an 85 filter on the lens. Instead of an exposure index of 125, I rated it at 200. In one scene, we had a model in a green pasture or field. It was very sharp. With a more contrasty film, darker greens would register even darker and harsher. It seems to hold in well on the greens. Later in the afternoon, light is leaking through a little so you see the warmth of the sun. We shot another interesting scene at night on a porch. There's a porch light on and a little bounce light coming on the rug in the background. It was too dim to even get a reading on the meter. Gradually, the model steps into the keylight, which was just an Obie light on the camera. The film has a pastel, softer, less harsh look. There was a good range of tones with good blacks, and you can see the details in the shadow areas.

QUESTION: What's your overall impression?

WEXLER: The film is a distinct improvement. I honestly think you can get this type of look with the 5293 stock with proper filtration, lighting and knowledge of what the film can do. But, I also think the new film has a very pleasing look. I think it will be particularly useful for shooting at magic hour, when the sun is setting, and other low key situations where you need the underexposure latitude to pull a deeper stop for depth of field.

QUESTION: Kodak alone now offers a choice of nine different color negative films. Is that confusing?

WEXLER: Every cinematographer will give you a different answer to that question. I shot a movie in Ireland recently, and I decided just automatically that I was only going to use two stocks. I didn't want to get involved in ordering different quantities of a lot of different types of film. I used (Eastman EXR color negative) 5245 film for exteriors except when the light was impossible. I used 5293 for darker conditions and interiors. The interiors were very low key. I couldn't build up the level of light because it was a period film, and the main light came from candles and fires. I just pushed 5293 one stop, and it held up very well. I just used a Super 16 version of that film for a BBC documentary that I shot in Mexico. It's a good all around film. I think that the 16 mm version of the new film (7287) will also be useful for TV documentaries. The underexposure latitude will be useful for shooting in available light, and television can only carry a relatively limited range of contrast anyway.