Vilmos Zsigmond: Reflections on the Making of The Ghost and the Darkness

This originally appeared in Film & Video Magazine in 1996

It happened just about 40 years ago, when the outcome of the Cold War was still undecided. Russian tanks and troops poured into Budapest, Hungary, where they quickly crushed a revolt against the puppet communist government. Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC, was a student at the national film school in Hungary, He and another student, Laszlo Kovacs, ASC, hid a 16 mm camera in a shopping bag and walked through the street of the city, documenting the bravery and despair of civilians fighting tanks and soldiers with their bare hands and homemade weapons. The outcome was predictable. Zsigmond and Kovacs decided that it was important to get their film and themselves out of Hungary. They carried and dragged some 10,000 feet of film stowed in laundry bags though the forest, heading for the Austrian border. They followed their dreams to Hollywood, where both eventually became influential cinematographers. Zsigmond earned an Oscar for his work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind and other nominations for The River and The Deer Hunter (which went on to win the British Academy Award). He also won an Emmy for filming Stalin. His body of work includes Deliverance, The Rose, Heaven’s Gate, Witches of Eastwick, The Crossing Guard and Maverick.

Zsigmond’s latest effort is The Ghost and The Darkness, produced by A. Kittman Ho and Gale Ann Hurd. The movie is based on a best-selling novel, written by John Patterson, about an incident that happened on the Tsavo River in Kenya in 1896. The incident occurred when a British company was building a railroad bridge spanning the river, and invading the territory of a couple of cantankerous lions. The lions killed 130 people, mainly natives who were drafted to build the bridge. Following are excerpts of a conversation with Zsigmond:

QUESTION: What appealed to you about making this film?

ZSIGMOND: Africa is beautiful. It's a paradise for cinematographers. I also really liked the script by William Goldman. He’s a fabulous writer. But I decided I wanted to shoot this movie after I met (the director) Stephen Hopkins (Nightmare on Elm Street, Predator 2, Blown Away, etc.). I like working with directors who have fresh ideas and are enthusiastic about the visuals. The pacing in this film is very fast. Even though we shot it in anamorphic format, the camera was moving on practically every shot. I think Stephen has the potential to become a great director. A lot of young directors are influenced by television commercials and music videos, but Stephen thinks more like David Lean. He understands how to use scope on the big screen.

QUESTION: How do you make the audience feel the terror the lions created?

ZSIGMOND: You have to give some of the credit to Tim McGovern and Stuart Robinson, who supervised visual effects (for Sony Imageworks). We made some use of animatrons (computerized lions), but mainly we filmed real lions. In one scene we filmed a lion lunging at the wife of one of the hunters. We couldn’t actually stage a scene with a real lion attacking a real actress. That would have been far too dangerous. Instead, there is a bluescreen shot of the lion lunging at a trainer who was wearing the same white dress as the actress. We also filmed the actress against a blue background screen. The digital effects people created a split-screen shot with the lion on one side and the actress on the other, and they morphed the frames where the actress is substituted for the trainer. It was composited with two background plates.

QUESTION: But is it believable on the screen?

ZSIGMOND: It’s a horrifying dream sequence. People in focus groups who saw early screenings actually thought we filmed a lion attacking the actress.

QUESTION: What was it like shooting in South Africa?

ZSIGMOND: It reminded me of Heaven’s Gate (which he filmed in Montana), because of the vast exteriors. But the weather was incredible. It was sunny in the morning. Then it rained. Then it was sunny again. I loved it. There was hardly ever a boring blue sky. The sky was almost always beautiful with gorgeous clouds.

QUESTION: Was most of this story shot during daylight hours?

ZSIGMOND: There was a lot of night shooting. There are scary scenes where the lions are hunted at night. It was extremely difficult to light, because our main exterior set was almost a mile long. We built that set from scratch, beginning with an empty grassy area by a river. We replanted hundreds of dead trees and built a bridge in stages while we were shooting. That meant our motivation for light at night came from lanterns, fires and the moon. We were shooting in anamorphic format with slow lenses, and that made lighting more difficult. We brought in a few Wendys (from the Movie Camera Company, in Johannesburg), and also improvised by using construction cranes as lighting platforms.

QUESTION: Did you research the period and the place?

ZSIGMOND: I didn't have time to do much research except for reading the book and script, but the production designer (Stuart Wurtzel) did an incredible job.

QUESTION: How do you establish rapport with a new director?

ZSIGMOND: You have to learn about their expectations. Stephen was meticulous about designing his shots. All the important scenes were storyboarded. It can be intimidating for a cinematographer to discover that the director made up his mind about almost everything six months before you met him. I try to get along by being his right hand man, so he can accomplish what he wants.

QUESTION: Why did you need animatrons?

ZSIGMOND: We couldn’t film scenes with the actors and lions together. It was even a problem with the crew. The lions were contained in a compound behind fences. The fences were camouflaged, so it looked like the lions were roaming freely. When we were filming them, we were usually behind bars in kind of a cage. Gabriel Beristain shot the second unit work with the lions. We didn’t use a frame of stock footage. Jack Couffer went to Kenya to shoot some original footage for us.

QUESTION: How open was Hopkins to your suggestions about angles of photography, camera movement and things like that?

ZSIGMOND: He never said, this is absolutely where I want to put the camera. Stephen values the contributions that cinematographers can make. It didn’t offend me if he said, this is exactly where the camera goes, and this is the height of the camera. I understood what he wanted, and I helped him get the look he wanted. When he was busy with the actors, story and second unit, I set up and moved the cameras to give him the point of view he wanted. He was open to ideas, but he knew what he wanted.

QUESTION: What influenced the decision to shoot in anamorphic format?

ZSIGMOND: The studio wanted us to shoot in Super 35 format. I think that’s because some people believe it costs more to shoot with anamorphic lenses.

QUESTION: Why do they believe that?

ZSIGMOND: They think you can save money in lighting, because there is almost a two-stop difference if you shoot in anamorphic format with the old C type Panavision lenses. That means you need more lighting equipment.

QUESTION: So the biggest cost difference is lighting at night, presuming that you are using the older anamorphic lenses instead of the PRIMOS?

ZSIGMOND: That's the only cost difference. The new generation of anamorphic lenses are as sharp and fast as the best spherical zoom lenses.

QUESTION: What is the advantage of anamorphic compared to Super 35?

ZSIGMOND: You begin with a larger image area, so you inevitably end up with sharper and clearer pictures. That's important on a picture like this, where we are trying to capture the ambiance of Africa. It's also important to have as little grain as possible on the screen, because that feels more realistic. Whether the audience recognizes why they feel that way isn’t important.

QUESTION: Did you have any trouble renting anamorphic lenses?

ZSIGMOND: I was only able to get one set of PRIMO zooms, so I also used Type C lenses. I actually prefer them in some situations. They are more forgiving when you are filming people's faces, especially in close-ups, and that eliminates the need for diffusion. It's subtle, like using a Tiffen Soft Effects half, at the most.

QUESTION: Was the sun different in Africa in terms of quality of light?

ZSIGMOND: It took awhile to get used to the idea that the sun travels from right to left in the Northern hemisphere. The direct sunlight was harsh, but the clouds made the difference. I used graduated and polarizing filters to bring out the clouds. My biggest problem was shooting long shots in bright sunlight, and matching them to close-up and medium shots filmed with an overcast sky. When we filmed close-ups and medium shots, we used 12K and 18K HMIs to match the quality of sunlight in the long shots. We had to be careful, because the sun is usually warmer than the rest of the sky. After a while, you know what the color temperature of the sun is at 8 a.m. on a sunny day at a particular location. The color temperature of the sun was usually between 4500 degrees Kelvin to 5500 Kelvin degrees. We used little warming filters and a warming gel on the HMI lamps, and that made it look like sunshine. The ambient fill light from the overcast skies is usually cool. So we compensated when we needed to match scenes.

QUESTION: You had limited source light to work with.

ZSIGMOND: The sources are candles, lanterns and fires, and the moon and sun. We had the luxury of being able to set a lot of fires, because the natives believed they kept the lions away. Firelight was our primary source at night. Mostly, we used butane instead of building real fires, because there were concerns about starting uncontrolled fires in open areas. There was also a problem with sound. The cracking noise of burning wood drives the sound people crazy.

QUESTION: How did you create the flickering that makes the fires look real?

ZSIGMOND: We used flicker generators. We have been doing that for about 10 years. I don't like overdoing the flickering effect, because it looks contrived, so I also augmented fires with some stationary lights to create a more natural look. The fire itself would never give you enough light to look natural. I used small lights hidden behind the fires with the flicker generator, because it comes from the right direction.

QUESTION: Did you use Wendys to create moonlight?

ZSIGMOND: Actually, we didn’t, because they carry tungsten lights, so we would have to gel them, and that would reduce too much of the intensity. One exception was that we used the Wendy in one sequence, where the hunters start a fire to drive the lions out of the tall grass. It (the Wendy) provides backlight that seemed to be coming from the fires. Most of the moonlight came from a couple of big construction cranes. We had them 100 to 150 feet high, and we put 12K and 18K HMI units on them. I didn't want the moonlight too blue, so we used some sepia gels and kept the color temperature under 5000 Kelvin.

QUESTION: Do decisions like that come down to a matter of personal taste?

ZSIGMOND: Yes. To me, when moonlight gets too blue, it seems theatrical and stagy. That look might be good for certain stories, but I thought this picture should look realistic; otherwise, you take the audience in the wrong direction.

QUESTION: Does the audience see this film from the visual perspective of spectators or participants?

ZSIGMOND: When a movie is shot right, the audience should feel like they are there where the story is happening. It's not like sitting in a theater with the actors on a stage. You want them to temporarily forget they are watching a movie and become part of the story. Their visual perspective is seen through the eye of the camera. In a sense, the camera becomes a character, or different characters. There are times when we show the audience a scene from a lion’s point of view.

QUESTION: What was it like, filming the lions?

ZSIGMOND: There are real limits in training lions. They can learn little tricks, but it isn’t like working with a dog. They are never really tame. The best thing you can say is they are controlled. You can’t look into their eyes, because they are always moving and blinking. That’s why we used animatrons for some shots.

QUESTION: Can you give me an example?

ZSIGMOND: You can do things that you can’t make a real lion do, like turning its head from left to right, opening its mouth and growling. A real lion won’t do that on demand. We controlled at least a hundred different movements. One of my favorite shots is one where a real lion opens his big mouth and roars. We cut to a shadow of the animatron doing the same thing. I guarantee that the shadow is more dramatic than a shot of the robot itself.

QUESTION: How do you want the audience to feel about the lions? Am I going to hate them, or will I feel sorry for them?

ZSIGMOND: I don't think you will sympathize with them, however some people turned down the opportunity to work on this movie because they sympathized with the lions. Someone even suggested that the lions should win at the end, but that wouldn’t be a realistic way for this conflict to end. The truth is that if you were there building that bridge in 1892, you wouldn’t feel sympathy for the lions. You would be terrified that one of them was going to jump out of the shadows and devour you.

QUESTION: You haven’t mentioned the actors; only the lions.

ZSIGMOND: Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer portray hunters, who are trying to kill the lions. Douglas is an American. Kilmer is Irish. At first, there is some animosity, but there is interesting character development between the two of them as they develop a friendship. Even though this is a scope movie, with big vistas, there are intimate scenes between them and others. There are some very interesting scenes around campfires, where people are just talking about their lives and thoughts.

QUESTION: How did you use the anamorphic frame in intimate scenes?

ZSIGMOND: It is perfect for composing intimate scenes, because you can have two or three characters in the same shot, and all of them are close-ups. One of them can dominate the foreground and the others can be in the background. The wider format forces you to be more creative in your thinking about composition.

QUESTION: Does that mean there aren’t long moving shots?

ZSIGMOND: There are longer moving shots that you would expect to see on a 4:3 television screen, or in a fast-paced rock video. We had shots that ran for six seconds. I’ve done shots in other films that lasted for two to three minutes.

QUESTION: You said the camera was almost always moving.

ZSIGMOND: Moving shots are more interesting than fast cuts because it pulls the audience deeper into the story. If you make the shot visually interesting by changing the angle or size during the shot, you can hold the audience’s attention without making as many cuts. There are a lot of Steadicam shots, where we occasionally worked with 75, 80 and even 100 mm lenses. If we wanted to use a longer lens on a moving shot, the camera had to be on a dolly track.

QUESTION: Was the camera always at ground level?

ZSIGMOND: We used a Giraffe crane. For example, there’s a scene in the railroad station. The audience realizes that a lion is stalking someone from the roof of a building. It is very suspenseful. You want to scream at the actors: Watch out! There’s a lion up there stalking you. That’s the only way you can get a shot like that.

QUESTION: How did you light the night scenes and keep it looking natural?

ZSIGMOND: We made certain there weren’t any artificial lights in view of the lens that couldn’t be accounted for in the story. We wanted the audience to feel the darkness. That was important, because it amplified how much they relied on fires to light the night. Any shadow could conceal a lion. The overhead lights were on a crane. We used flags to make certain there weren’t flares from those lights intruding into the scene. The camera is moving, so that can get a little tricky. In one scene, we hid Wendy lights behind the structure of the bridge. In that case, we had to build something to cover the flags on the Wendy.

QUESTION: What about colors? I picture Africa being green and lush.

ZSIGMOND: We began shooting before the rainy season began, so everything was dry and brown. We had to be careful. Once it began raining, the foliage turned lush green, and it was that way most of the time. We are using a warm, slightly sepia tone in the release prints. We added that tone in the lab (Technicolor, in Los Angeles) rather using filters on the camera lenses while we were shooting. That’s my preference, because it gives me more control for fine tuning the images.

QUESTION: What influenced your choice of film stocks?

ZSIGMOND: We used Eastman EXR 5298 film for night exteriors and interiors, because it gave us an edge in our ability to capture the feeling of night. It's faster than its advertised 500-speed, and I took advantage of that when we were shooting vistas at night. I squeezed an extra stop out of the film without the blacks going milky.

QUESTION: How about daylight scenes?

ZSIGMOND: Basically, we used the EXR 5293 film. I like the look. It’s a sunny feeling with a beautiful range of contrast. The sunlight really sparkles on faces and the landscape has the textures, tonality and colors of Africa.

QUESTION: Did you actually shoot the bluescreen elements?

ZSIGMOND: Whenever Stephen was directing the actors, I was the cinematographer. Usually, we worked with the same Panaflex camera that we used for production. Occasionally, a VistaVision camera was used to photograph visual effects elements, when they were just going to use part of the frame. They did that in some scenes to make the lions look bigger. There was also a visual effects crew. They generally worked with the second unit on background plates and blue screen scenes with the lions.

QUESTION: You also had to deal with a lot of skin tones.

ZSIGMOND: There were Europeans, and people with brown skin tones from India, and the native Africans were black. There is no prototype skin tone for races. Val Kilmer’s face is very white, and John Kirby's (a local actor who played the role of a village chief) is extremely dark. Some skins reflect light, and others absorb it, so we had to record a wide range of skin tones. It comes down to how to use light, and the ability of the film to capture a wide range of tones at the highest and lowest ends of the curve without losing details in the middle. Generally, dark skinned people need more light. I like to use light as though it's coming from sources. During the daylight hours that meant the sun or reflected sunlight. That affected the angle, color and intensity of light. We also had to be aware of the need to separate dark faces from dark.

QUESTION: The moving camera isn’t a new invention. In Deliverance, you took the camera off the tripod and waded into the river with it on your shoulder. In Sugarland Express, you were also the first cinematographer to use a Panaflex camera, when you were shooting from the back seat of a moving car.

ZSIGMOND: What is changing is that there are new tools, which give us more freedom. We can do things with a Steadicam that we couldn’t do with dolly tracking, but that doesn’t mean you are never going to use a dolly track again. The art comes from knowing when and how to use the right tools.

QUESTION: Is this work still fun for you?

ZSIGMOND: It's fun to do a picture like this, because the art and craft of cinematography keeps advancing. The most important thing about cinematography is lighting. That’s how you create the mood that matches the story. You can do everything else right, and still make a bad movie if the lighting isn’t right. The ability to light artistically is a gift from the gods. If you have that ability, you shouldn’t waste it. You should always be looking for ways to improve and grow. I remember, years ago when we were discovering how to use the film noir look for story-telling; now, people are talking about color noir as a form of visual expression; but that’s a different story.

QUESTION: Do the new tools available today make your job easier?

ZSIGMOND: In some ways. It other ways it is more difficult, because there is a lot of pressure to move faster, and to get three times as many shots in a day. Look at all of the movies being shot with multiple cameras. That doesn’t make it easier. It makes the lighting more complex, and you have to be more careful about orchestrating camera moves. There are action scenes in The Ghost and the Darkness where we used six or seven cameras. That was mainly done to cover big action scenes from different angles and viewpoints, so you don’t have to set them up again. It also gives the editor more to work with, which is important on a fast-paced film like this. But we also used a second camera on dialog scenes for close-ups. It is hard on the sound people, who have to figure out where to put their boom mike. But it enables you to record some wonderful reactions at the moment of photography which are never quite the same if you shoot them later. There is a spontaneity that is difficult to repeat.

QUESTION: It must also help to keep the pace gong, since you don’t have to stop to set up and take a reverse shot.

ZSIGMOND: That’s true. You just have to be careful with the lighting. The audience has seen the master shot, so they have a sense about where the light is coming from, and how it falls on the actor’s faces. If you cut away to a close-up, it has to match the lighting they have just seen in the master shot.

QUESTION: After all of these years, are you still as optimistic and enthusiastic as you were when you started your journey to Hollywood? Are you still having fun?

ZSIGMOND: Oh definitely, and I'm very optimistic. I'm sure that there will be movies, whether they are seen on cinema or advanced TV screens, and it will still be a collaborative art with the cinematographer responsible for using light and darkness, moving the camera and composing images in ways that help the director tell a story.