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ASC
Lifetime Achievement Winner, By Bob Fisher This article was written for American Cinematographer
"A gypsy (fortuneteller) told me I was destined to sail on a ship across a great ocean to a big city, where I'd become an important artist," Zsigmond recalls. It was a tantalizing concept, because fortunetellers were taken seriously in Szeged. But, it puzzled Zsigmond who had no experience with freedom. He couldn't visit the next village without permission from the commissars, so Zsigmond didn't understand how he could sail across a great ocean and become an important artist. Within a half a dozen years, Zsigmond crossed the Atlantic Ocean and eventually made his way to Los Angeles, where he overcame seemingly impossible odds to become a uniquely influential cinematographer in the evolving art of filmmaking. His body of work consists of nearly 60 features, including such landmark films as McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Deliverance, Cinderella Liberty, The Long Goodbye, The Sugarland Express, The Rose, The Witches of Eastwick, Maverick and The Ghost and the Darkness. Zsigmond earned a 1977 Oscar® for Close Encounters of the Third Kind and other nominations for The Deerhunter (1978) and The River (1984). The Deerhunter also earned Zsigmond a BAFTA Film Award, which is the British version of the Oscars. The Ghost and the Darkness (1996) was also nominated for an ASC Award. Zsigmond also earned an Emmy® nomination and an ASC Outstanding Achievement Award in 1992 for his extraordinary camerawork on the HBO miniseries Stalin. Zsigmond has frequently abandoned conventional thinking in favor of exploring unmapped territory. In McCabe & Mrs. Miller, he "pre-flashed" the camera film to alter the contrast ratio, inventing a widely emulated period look. While filming Deliverance, Zsigmond and director John Boorman discussed whether they should shoot an important scene when the villains arrive in a canoe with a static or mobile camera. They decided that a camera on a tripod with a long lens made the tension more tactile. Zsigmond put a fluid head on the tripod. He covered the camera with a plastic bag. The lens was only three or four inches above water level. It recorded the scene from a chillingly subjective perspective. The images provoked a premonition of primal terror. No dialogue was needed to say danger was approaching. When Zsigmond was filming The Sugarland Express with Steven Spielberg, he convinced Panavision founder Robert Gottshalk to personally deliver the first Panaflex camera to him on location in Texas. Zsigmond immediately put the camera on his shoulder and got into the back seat of a car. He pulled the audience deep into the story by showing them breathtaking action from the perspective of a passenger. "Steven wanted to direct sound in conjunction with the images," Zsigmond says. "I needed a portable sound camera with reflex viewing that I could put on my shoulder." The River opens with a nearly four minute scene, which starts with a drop of rain that turns into a sprinkle and finally a torrent. The camera discovers the Garvey family in a desperate struggle to save their farm and ultimately their lives. The audience gains deep insights into the main characters before a word of dialogue is spoken. "I was lucky," Zsigmond says. "I was working with a visually-oriented director (Mark Rydell) who believed in telling stories with images and light and shadows. Dialogue should be like music. You should be able to follow the story even if it is turned down." There is a powerful scene where an ominous shadow crawls across the floor of a barn where Mae Garvey (Sissy Spacek) is desperately nursing a dying calf. The shadow is motivated by rays of light from the setting sun poking through space in the wall. The moving shadow defines the mood and is like a silent witness to a harsh reality. Zsigmond describes The Rose, directed by Rydell, as "basically a light show. We wanted to recreate an era of rock and roll concerts. It looked like documentaries of Janis Joplin concerts. We wanted the audience to see everything. That's how we made it intimate. Nothing was hidden. She [Bette Midler] was vulnerable. That's why the audience loved her." In The Witches of Eastwick, Zsigmond used colors to create a romantic and slightly surrealistic look. Jack Nicholson is cast as the devil who takes up housekeeping with three witches. Zsigmond manipulated color temperatures with the use of gels to bath the devil in reddish tones, which were always motivated by identifiable sources. That contrasted with the cool blue light, which provided a visual signature for the witches. In The Deer Hunter, Zsigmond mixed hot, red light motivated by steel mill furnaces with smoke to create a hazy environment that made the characters seem heroic. He explains that director Michael Cimino wanted them to seem both manly and believable. "You can see in the close-ups that it was hard, hot work, but it wasn't a dehumanizing environment," he says. "If Michael improvised in staging, I picked it up and took his ideas a little bit further. Ideas bounced back and forth between us. It was like playing jazz music together. I love working with directors who see things visually and tell stories with images. I don't want to discount literary values. That's important, but first I think the visual part has to be there. If you want dialogue you should read a book." Zsigmond traces his interest in photography to a childhood illness. When he was 17-years-old, Zsigmond was confined to bed for three months. He read a book called The Art of Light written by Eugene Dulovits. Zsigmond was fascinated by the concepts it presented, particularly the use of diffusion to alter the quality of light. That was the first step on a long journey, but it wasn't apparent at the time. Zsigmond wanted to study engineering, but he was denied that opportunity because his family was considered bourgeois. His mother had operated a pub, and people who owned anything were considered exploiters in communist Hungary. His father coached a soccer team. Zsigmond was disappointed, but not defeated. Zsigmond saved enough money to buy a still camera, and he taught myself how to take pictures. Afterwards, he organized a camera club and taught other workers how to take pictures. That impressed local authorities, who decided to send Zsigmond to the Academy for Theater and Film Art in Budapest to study cinematography. "The understanding was that after graduation, I would return to the factory to teach the other workers how to make movies," he recalls. Zsigmond spent four years at film school, consisting of many six-day
weeks, and 14-hour days. While he deplored living under the tyranny
of the communist government, he learned some great truths from George
Illes, head of the department, and other faculty. The school was very competitive. Thirty-two students were in his class, and only four of them graduated. After completing his formal education, Zsigmond spent the year between 1955 and 1956 working as an assistant cameraman and operator at the state's film studio in Budapest. In 1956, a popular uprising swept through the streets of the city. For a while, it looked liked the reformers would succeed in installing a more democratic government. Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs, ASC, also a student at the film school, witnessed the conflict and decided it wasn't right to be bystanders. They borrowed a motion picture camera and a generous supply of film from the school. They hid the camera in a shopping bag and documented acts of bravery and desperation, including civilians attacking tanks with their bare hands and homemade weapons. When the Russian Army crushed the revolt, Kovacs and Zsigmond holed up in an apartment waiting to see what would happen. Within a couple of days, close friends warned them that intellectuals were being arrested. Zsigmond and Kovacs decided it was time to leave. "The Russians were saying that the revolt was influenced by foreigners
and staged by counter revolutionaries," Zsigmond says. "We
wanted the truth to come out." Zsigmond and Kovacs decided that the danger of being found by the soldiers was too great. So, they hid the film in a stack of corn in a field, and walked into the village, pretending to be local peasants. No one in the village gave their true identities away. The Russian soldiers were searching and questioning everyone. The young men from Budapest were facing a wall with their hands stretched high above them, waiting for a colonel, who was doing the questioning and searching. That's when Kovacs remembered he had hidden still pictures of the uprising in his boot. To this day, Zsigmond and Kovacs don't know if the soldier missed seeing the photographs or simply decided to let them go. Later than night, they retrieved the film from the field, and a Hungarian border guard rowed them across the river to Austria. A lab in Vienna processed their film, but none of the Western TV networks were interested. The revolution was old news as far as they were concerned. They sold the film for enough money to pay the lab bill. Later, they heard their film was re-sold to CBS Television for $100,000. It aired for the first time five years later in a famous documentary narrated by Walter Cronkite, and it has subsequently played many times. Zsigmond migrated to the United States in January 1957 as a political refugee. He spent a month in a refugee camp in New York, and then moved to Chicago where he was sponsored by the Lutheran church. "The weather was brutally cold, and one of the other refugees, Joseph Zsuffa, a documentarian and novelist, was working on a script for a short film," he recalls. "Joseph spoke and wrote English. I moved to Los Angeles with him in 1958, certain that I would shoot his film. I always believed I would become a cinematographer in Hollywood." Zsigmond got a job in a laboratory where he processed color film and made black and white prints for professional still photographers. He learned to speak English "one word at a time." Zsigmond worked weekends and nights for producers who were making educational films for schools, and training films for businesses. It took him about five years to find work in the fiction film industry. His first projects were "B" films for drive-ins. They were usually filmed in 35 mm Techniscope format and blown up to 35 mm prints in wide-screen CinemaScope format. "I owned a 35 mm ARRIFLEX camera and lenses, which I modified for Techniscope," Zsigmond recalls. "I also owned lights. Everything fit into a station wagon. For $100 a day, you got my equipment and my services as a cinematographer." By the early 1960s, Zsigmond found a niche in the TV commercial industry with Gus Jekel, a cutting-edge director who owned a company called Film Fair. His timing could not have been better, because TV commercials were transitioning from hard to soft-sell, and talented cinematographers were generally given time and gear to craft "looks." They included such future famous names as Haskell Wexler, ASC, Conrad Hall, ASC, and Bill Fraker, ASC, who popularized a more interpretative form of filmmaking, using soft light, long lenses and combinations of filters. Zsigmond discovered that small nuances could make a big difference in the emotional impact of a TV commercial. "I think it was really the return of an old look," Zsigmond says. "Chaplin's cinematographer used soft light until the studios went to a more stylized hard light. The commercial directors wanted a more natural, softer look. Kodak helped because around that time, they were coming out with more sensitive films." "Haskell (Wexler, ASC) was the first 'Hollywood' cameraman who noticed my work," Zsigmond says. "I shot a movie called Futz! (in 1969), and it got terrible reviews. The audiences hated it, but after Haskell saw it, he contacted me and told me the photography was good. He was very encouraging, and that was important to me." A few years later, Zsigmond got another type of support from Harry Wolf, who served several terms as ASC president. "Harry took an interest in me, and gave me honest advice," Zsigmond says. "He told me my work was too slick on one film. I really appreciated that. Everyone needs somebody who is willing to tell them the truth. Otherwise, you never get better. Cinematographers are interesting people because there generally are no secrets or jealousies. I think it is the same with musicians and painters." Zsigmond shot The Hired Hand, his first mainstream Hollywood feature, for Peter Fonda in 1971. That same year, Robert Altman was interested in having Zsigmond shoot McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Altman asked to see some of Zsigmond's work. He showed him Prelude, a short film, which he shot for actor-director John Astin. Fortunately, Altman liked what he saw, because Zsigmond had nothing else to show him. The Hired Hand wasn't cut yet, and he was still shooting Red Sky at Morning, which he considered his two best films at that stage. "He (Altman) created an incredible mood," Zsigmond recalls, "and a big part of it was that he surrounded himself with great actors. Beside Julia Christy and Warren Beatty, there were many of them were big name stars at that time. We had extras living in houses and in teepees we built as sets. They did their own cooking, and used the bathhouse we built for the movie to bath in. There was a still which was a prop in the movie. They used it to make real moonshine." After McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Zsgimond worked on Deliverance, Scarecrow and Cinderella Liberty. Zsigmond then graduated to shooting medium-budget movies. "We shot Obsession for $800,000," he says. "I did it for a percentage of the profits, and that's the only movie where I ever made money when my salary was based on profits. It was really fun making those movies in the 1970s, because it was very experimental and the directors had tremendous freedom. It was their movie." Zsigmond still remembers that it felt like electricity was shooting through his body when he heard his name called at the 1977 Academy Award ceremonies where he won his Oscar for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which he shot for Spielberg. "It was like a dream," he says, "I still remember walking
up those steps, knowing that 80 million people were watching on television.
It was the first time I felt I belonged." Some of Zsigmond's best work has passed relatively unnoticed. In March 1989, he filmed a series of interviews with Vietnam War veterans, which were the heart and soul of an episode of China Beach, an ABC television series. It was quintessential proof that the soul lives behind the eyes. There were heartbreaks on Heaven's Gate, a 1980 Michael Cimino film, and The Bonfire of the Vanities, directed by Brian De Palma in 1990. Both films flopped at the box-office, but it is worth renting or buying the laser disks or videocassettes to see Zsigmond's camerawork. If necessary, turn the sound off. During the 1990s, Zsigmond has lensed a number of larger films with blue chip directors, including Maverick and Assassins with Richard Donner, and Intersection with Rydell, along with several much lower budget features, The Crossing Guard, directed by Sean Penn, and Playing by Heart with writer-director Willard Carroll. "My rule is that if a movie doesn't say something of value for the audience, I don't think it's worth making," Zsigmond says. "Maybe 75 percent of the time you can tell when you read the script. I turn those scripts down, because you only have time to make so many pictures in your life. But I've been fooled. There were times when I thought something was going to be a good movie, but it didn't turn out that way. There are so many things that have to come together, the actors, the director, the script." Zsigmond earned an ASC Outstanding Achievement Award nomination in 1996 for The Ghost and the Darkness, which included multiple digital composite scenes coupling separate blue screen elements of a lion with actors in appropriate backgrounds. He considers the evolution of digital technology as an important extension
of the craft, which enables directors and writers to tell stories that
weren't possible or practical within the limitations of optical compositing.
In The Ghost and the Darkness, for example, digital compositing
significantly heightens the feeling of extreme danger. Thinking back to earlier times, Zsigmond shot Red Sky at Morning with vintage Mitchell BNC cameras. "It took two people to carry it, and it had parallax problems," he says, "but we still managed to record some pretty good images. The most important thing about cinematography is lighting. That's how you create the mood that matches the story. The ability to light artistically is a gift from the gods. If you have the ability, you shouldn't waste it. You should always be looking for ways to improve and grow." Zsigmond has received an ample share of recognition, including a Lifetime Achievement at CamerImage '97, the International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography, in Turon, Poland. In December, he was featured in a commercial produced by the Los Angeles Times newspaper. That's how far his fame has spread. However, without hesitation, Zsigmond says that the ASC Lifetime Achievement Award is the pinnacle of his career, because the tribute comes from his peers and it recognizes his body of work. Maybe that gypsy fortuneteller who predicted Zsigmond would sail across an ocean and become a great artist was prescient. Maybe it was destiny. But, the reality is that Zsigmond and his lifelong friend Kovacs took their fate into their own hands and they both succeeded because they had the talent and the will to make it happen. "When I was student in Hungary, we saw a Western movie with a scene in a Howard Johnson restaurant located by a freeway," Zsigmond recalls. "A teacher said such places don't exist. They must have built a set for the movie. Years later, I was driving on a thruway between New York City and Buffalo and every 20 miles there was another Howard Johnson restaurant. That's when I realized how big the lies were." The first decade after Zsigmond left Hungary, the only way he could stay in touch with his former teachers and friends was by writing them letters. During the early 1970s, Illes was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar. Zsigmond met him at the airport in Los Angeles. The first words out of Illes mouth were "Why aren't you coming home to visit?" Zsigmond subsequently arranged regular visits to Budapest and the film school. "It was still a pretty closed country until around 1991," he says. "We couldn't send the students videocassettes of our movies. The government thought it was propaganda, because they showed how people live in the West." Zsigmond has subsequently organized an annual two-week summer seminar at the film school in Budapest. The faculty includes top cinematographers from many countries. Students now come from every part of Europe. "I encourage students who are interested in cinematography to
study sculpture, paintings, music, writing and other arts," he
says. "If you think about it, filmmaking consists of all the arts
combined. I think you can learn from experience, but it helps if you
are born with a talent for this work. I think there is also an element
of luck. Film students are always asking me for advice. I tell them,
you have to be enthusiastic, because it's hard work. You are on your
feet all day. You don't have a minute when you can relax because there
is always something else to do. It's interesting work, but the only
way to enjoy it is to be totally immersed. Forget about yourself. Forget
about the time, and about how physically tiring it is. If you don't
get involved on that level, I think it could be a very miserable job.
I only have one regret about my career. I'm really sorry that we are
not making silent movies any more. That was the purest art form I can
imagine." |
A
fine art gallery in Los Angeles recently featured an extraordinary display
of still photographs taken by Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC. They include a compelling
self-portrait taken nearly 50 years ago in an empty field near Szeged,
Hungary, where Zsigmond was born and raised during the Nazi and Russian
occupations. He explains his pensive stare.