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A Conversation with Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC By Bob Fisher Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC was born and raised in Szeged, Hungary. He was barely in his teens when World War II ended, and communist politician backed by the military might of the Soviet Union, grabbed control of the country and cut it off from the West. Zsigmond was denied an opportunity to enroll in a state university to pursue a career in engineering because his parents were bourgeois. Instead, he was required to work in a rope manufacturing factory in Szeged. Inspired by a book written by Eugene Dulovits, Zsigmond became a self-taught still photographer. That led him to an opportunity to study cinematography at the state film university. The year after he graduated, Zsigmond was working as a camera operator on a feature film in Hungary, when the populace spontaneously revolved against the communist regime in October 1956. Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs, ASC — who was a student at the film school — documented the revolt on 35 mm film. When the Russian army crushed the revolution, Zsigmond and Kovacs carried their film across the border into Austria so “the world could see the truth.” They made their way to the United States as political refugees the following year, and subsequently followed their dreams to Hollywood. It was a long and often discouraging journey. Zsigmond worked in still film labs and other odd jobs, while he gradually learned to speak the English language. He began shooting 16 mm film for UCLA students and eventually that led him to an opportunity to work on industrial films and documentaries for $2.50 an hour. One of his first breakthroughs was an opportunity to work as a staff cinematographer on low budget commercials at Film Fair, a Los Angeles production company. During the mid-to-late 1960s, Zsigmond compiled a series of credits on ultra-low budget films with titles like The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombiesand The Nasty Rabbit. In 1971, Zsigmond shot The Hired Hand for a new director named Peter Fonda, and later that year he collaborated with Robert Altman on McCabe and Mrs. Miller. John Boorman recruited Zsigmond to work with him on Deliverance the following year, and he encored with Cinderella Liberty, The Long Goodbye and The Sugarland Express. Twenty years after arriving in the United States, Zsigmond earned an Oscar for his work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There were other nominations for The Deer Hunter and The River. Zsigmond also collected an Emmy for Stalin, a TV miniseries filmed in Moscow and Hungary. His incomparable body of work also includes such classics as The Rose, The Last Waltz, The Witches of Eastwick, Sliver and The Ghost and the Darkness. Zsigmond received the Camerimage Career Achievement award in 1997, and the American Society of Cinematographers Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999. His recent projects include Life As A House and an artful rendering of a film version of Bank Ban, a classic Hungarian opera. Following are excerpts of a conversation with Zsigmond: ICG: Where were you born and raised? ZSIGMOND: I was born in Szeged, Hungary. It’s a small city of about 100,000. As I remember, it was a very nice life. We played soccer on the streets. My father wanted me to play the violin. He wasn’t an artist. He was a soccer player. I don’t know where he got this idea. I hated it. I was seven years old when he brought me this wonderful violin. A teacher came to our house twice a week. Instead of staying home and waiting for the teacher, I was playing soccer. The teacher had to find me and bring me back. I was sweaty and dirty. It didn’t last long. Maybe a year until my father realized I wasn’t interested. Much later, when I was around 18, I began regretting that I didn’t learn music. I visited a conservatory and told them I wanted to learn to play the piano. They told me I was about seven years to late. They didn’t teach people to learn to play the piano as a hobby. Unless you were training to be a concert pianist, you didn’t have a right to learn to play. ICG: Did your father play soccer for a team or was it a hobby? ZSIGMOND: He was actually an excellent professional athlete. He started playing soccer in Szeged, but they found out how good he was as a goalkeeper. When he was 19 years old, he left the country and went to Czechoslovakia where he became part of a professional team that had German, Spanish and Russian athletes. They beat the best teams in Europe, and he was said to be the best goalkeeper in Europe. When I was 18, my father went to Morocco to coach a soccer team. ICG: What happened to you? ZSIGMOND: I was left in Szeged. I had good grades in school and my father wanted me to become an engineer at that point. That was around the time the communists took over the government. When I applied to go to the university to become an engineer, they said no. They said it was because of my grades in mathematics, but the real reason was that my parents were bourgeois. I was so was good at playing ping-pong that I got a good paying job to play on a team. I worked for a factory in Szeged, and also studied stenography, shorthand and typing. ICG: What was that about? ZSIGMOND: Some people with those skills could get high paying jobs in the parliament. There were no recording devices, so they used shorthand to keep records of what the politicians said. That went on for a year until I found out it wasn’t really my field. I was good but not excellent, and my father always told me, it’s not worth being second rate at anything. If you are not first-rate then you should give it up. Whatever you do, you have to be first. His advice was a very big influence on my life. After that, I concentrated on playing table tennis and working in the factory. ICG: What kind of factory was it? ZSIGMOND: It was a rope factory. ICG: When and how you got interested in photography? ZSIGMOND: When I was 17 years old, I was sick for three months and had to stay in bed lying flat on my back because I had a kidney infection. I had an uncle who was an enthusiastic amateur photographer. He gave me a book by Eugene Dulovits, which was masterfully written with gorgeous pictures, all taken in black and white. I remember beautifully backlit photographs of women’s hair and landscapes with shadows. That’s when I fell in love with photography as a hobby. I studied with a local portrait photographer who was really more interested in becoming a conductor of an orchestra. That was really a lucky break for me, because he practically let me run his studio. I took many portraits of women, men and families while he was conducting an orchestra. I took pictures of everything I saw that was beautifully lit. It was all about lighting for me and that is still true today. There are no good movies without artistic lighting. ICG: Was there a movie theater in town? ZSIGMOND: There were three movie theaters in Szeged. In fact, they are still there. ICG: Were you a movie fan? ZSIGMOND: I was, but we didn’t go to the movie theater too often, because we had a pub that was owned by my stepmother. I was a waiter from the age of 10 years old helping out the family. Many times I ran the place by myself until I was 14 years old. That was during the war. Many people came there because they liked me. In fact, I actually grew up in the pub. Many times, people ask me why my voice is so bad. I spent eight years practically living in a place that was filled with cigarette and pipe smoke all the time. I think that had something to do with it. ICG: Did you ever wonder what the rest of the world was like? ZSIGMOND: I actually knew a little bit about that. My mother was Czech. She married my father while he was actually a soccer coach and goalie in that country. He wanted me to be born as a Hungarian, so he packed up my mother and they went back to Hungary. It was the same thing with my sister who was born in Szeged four years earlier. When I was seven years old, my father got a job in Casablanca, Morocco as a coach. He took me with him, so for two years, I studied at a French school in Morocco, and also we also traveled to other countries. ICG: What work did you do in the rope factory? ZSIGMOND: They gave me a stopwatch, and I was responsible for timing the work done by other people. There was a norm for how many pieces a worker had to finish every hour. I actually became an exploiter, because I was pushing these poor people to work harder and harder. ICG: How did you get to go to film school? ICG: What was the film school like? ZSIGMOND: I loved the film school from day one. I fell in love with the idea of studying photography and seeing and analyzing movies. We got to learn all kind of arts. We had to paint, and we had to draw. We went to a museum once a week. We had a wonderful art teacher, who had traveled all around the world. She knew everything about the history of the art. ICG: So, the school wasn’t closed to non- communist cultures? ZSIGMOND: That’s an interesting question because the communists ran the film school, but for some reason when you were inside you didn’t feel the oppression of life on the outside. We were sort of art students and the communists wanted to get us on their side. Lenin said that the most important art is film, so the communist government in Hungary was helping future filmmakers, because they felt they could depend on them for help. In those days, all the films made in Hungary were propaganda. They were about the glory of being factory workers and peasants. ICG: Did you actually see films from around the world? ZSIGMOND: Basically, they were pushing Russian and other communist propaganda films down our throats, but some of them were actually great works. We saw films by Eisenstein and other great filmmakers, and we learned a lot from them. Occasionally, we could see some of the so-called progressive films of the West. Chaplin was okay to see, especially, The Dictator. We saw Hamlet and other films that were politically correct. We saw some American films that were meant to show us how terrible life was there. They were trying to be smart about it, but they were not smart enough, because we saw through what they were doing. We saw the Italian Neo-Realist films, because they were about socialistic thinking in Italy. After the war, Italy had incredible filmmakers. We loved those films and they were a big influence on us. ICG: Were there people at the film school who influenced you? ZSIGMOND: We had about six professors who were active cinematographers. They were the best in Hungary, and some of them were as talented as anyone working in Europe. It was a unique situation. We had working cinematographers who spent a day or two per week teaching us at the film school. When they didn’t have time to come to class, they invited us to go to the film studio where they were shooting movies, and we could watch them light. It was an open door for us to learn everything we had to know about how to shoot a movie. Our schedule was incredible. We started at eight o’clock in the morning. We had art classes in the mornings mostly. Of course, we also had to learn politics, including Marxism and Leninism, and we had to learn the Russian language. We had a Russian teacher who was an old woman who was scared that she was going to lose her job. We didn’t want to learn Russian, because we didn’t want to become part of Russia. One day she said, do me a favor. Can we make a pact? Every hour, we are going to spend five minutes where you will learn the answers to the questions that I will ask on the examination. The rest of the time we will learn any language that you want. We decided we would learn French, and it just happened that she was a good French teacher. We learned the answers for the examination at the end of the year. We learned a little bit of French, which everybody loved and she kept her job. ICG: What did you do when you graduate from film school? ZSIGMOND: In 1955, four of the original 25 students who started with me graduated. Two of us went to work at the studio that made feature films. One went into TV and the other went to documentary films. I was lucky. I ended up where I always wanted to be. The studio was in Budapest. I was an assistant cameraman and then an operator. One of my former professors was still teaching me. I was very happy because in Hungary directors of photography usually didn’t have an operator. It was a very nice gesture. He had to give up something he loved, but he wanted me to have that experience. I only worked for one year in Hungary, and then the revolution began in October 1956. I was actually in the middle of a film. I went to the film school and borrowed an old 35 mm ARRIFLEX camera. I ran into Laszlo (Kovacs, ASC) on the street in Budapest. He was still a student. For the next several weeks we shot film of the revolution. We processed the film except for the last three days when the Russians arrived with tanks. That’s when the revolution failed. We had a meeting at the studio and agreed that somehow our film had to get out of Hungary, so the rest of the world could see what happened. I volunteered to take it out. Then, I ran into Laszlo again. It was like fate had brought us together. I told him I was going to the West, and he said he was also thinking about it. I said, let’s go together. I told him about the film that we had to carry with us. It was a big problem, because we had about 10,000 feet of film in 300-foot rolls. We spoke about how we were going to get it to the border and escape from the Russians who controlled everything. A third person, an assistant cameraman, who had relatives at the Austrian border, said he was going to get us a truck, and we could put the film into a spare tire. The next morning, we were ready to leave when we found out that the communists had revoked all the permits for trucks. We put the film into potato sacks. We took the train from Budapest to a point about 20 miles from the border. The train stopped about five kilometers before we got there, and somebody announced, if you are thinking about going to Austria, you better get off the train now because at the next station you will be arrested. Hundreds of people got off the train and we all started to walk towards the border. We decided not to stay with that group, because there were too many people. My friend who was with us said he had relatives near the border. He said we could sleep at their house and get a guide to lead us to the border. This guide ran right into a Russian patrol. They took us into camp, where we started bargaining with the Russians. We gave them our watches and rings and money. We lied and said we lived in a nearby village and they decided to let us go. ICG: Did you have the film with you when they caught you? ZSIGMOND: We were afraid to get caught with the film in our hands, because they would have killed us. They shot people who were just taking stills on a street corner in Budapest. I saw two Russian soldiers with the machine gun coming towards us. Laszlo had one bag in his hands and I was carrying another bag. I saw a cornfield, so I ran over to it, like I was trying to hide from the soldiers, and I hid the bag of film in the corn stalks. The soldiers were yelling at me to get out from there or they’d shoot all of us. Laszlo didn’t make that run, so I told him to just drop the film and keep walking towards the Russians. He hid it behind a little bush. The Russians probably saw this but they were a little bit scared because we had about 15 people with us, and there were only two of them. They could have shot all of us, but decided that they would take us into the camp. They questioned us and decided to let us go. At late dusk, we went back to the cornfield and found the film. We were lucky that we didn’t run into more Russians. We got to the border a couple of hours later. ICG: What was actually on the film? ZSIGMOND: It was basically the story of the revolution. The revolution started on October 23 with demonstrations on the streets. At first, the Russian soldiers sided with us because they were overpowered. There were 100,000 people on the streets, and these Russians didn’t want to shoot at us, because they had been stationed in Hungary and they loved the people. They also had a better life in Hungary. They put the Hungarian flag on their tanks, and everybody was happy for about a week. We elected a new government. Everything was happening so fast that it was just unbelievable. Ninety-nine percent of the people were for the revolution. We had film of people destroying Russian monuments. We missed the violence that happened on November 4 when the Russians came in with their tanks and shot everything up. They were fighting against people who had rifles and handguns who were trying to hold out until the Western countries came to save us from the Russians. They never came. We had a lot of interesting footage about how the peasants helped people in Budapest who were starving. All the stores were closed and there was no food. The peasants were bringing food into the city and giving it away. ICG: How’d you get to Austria? ZSIGMOND: We got to a river where a Hungarian border guard rowed us across to Austria. ICG: What happened to the film? ZSIGMOND: We were disappointed that the American TV networks didn’t want it. We finally found a producer in Germany who was collecting film material about the revolution. He made a 90-minute film of the revolution. We were paid $9,000, which we mainly used to pay the lab bill in Austria for developing and printing the film that we shot during the last three days. We also had to pay our hotel bill. When we arrived in the United States, if I remember correctly, I had $1,200 and Laszlo had $1,200, which went so fast it was unbelievable. ICG: How did you get to the United States? ZSIGMOND: We had to apply for visas. I think there were about 200,000 Hungarians who left the country. All the Western countries helped Austria find homes for these refugees. They asked you, where you wanted to go? At one point, we were thinking about going to Australia, because it was the furthest away from the communists. My father came from Morocco, and he told me that America was the only place for me, because it was the new world. He had always wanted to go to America himself. Laszlo and I signed up to go to United States. They put Laszlo on a plane, but I came by boat with my new bride—my girlfriend from Hungary who I had married in Vienna. It was the middle of a winter and very stormy for all seven days of the trip. Everybody on the boat was sick when we finally saw the Statue of Liberty and knew we had arrived. They took us to Camp Kilmer, in New Jersey, where they gathered all of the refugees. They asked me where I would like to go, and I chose Hollywood. They said, no problem. We can send you to Hollywood. There are filmmakers there, and you are a filmmaker, so sure. They put me on a train with my wife and we ended up in Chicago, where they said, this is your final destination. You needed a sponsor, and mine was very nice. They took us to Evanston and found a home for us. A Lutheran priest took us into a supermarket and shopped for us for a whole week. They helped me find a job in a film laboratory printing snapshots. I had never seen anything like that in my life. It was an automatic printer that they showed me how to use. I was very cold in Evanston, and I was desperately looking for my friends who came with me from Hungary. I knew where Laszlo was, but I was looking for my friend Josef Zsuffa, who I made movies with in film school. He was the director and I was the cinematographer. I found out that he was in New York through the Red Cross. I immediately traveled to New York by bus. He was in a good position by then because the Rockefeller Foundation gave him a fellowship to support himself and he could speak English. I got a job in New York, again in a laboratory and I worked there for a whole year. By then, my friend put things together for us to move to California to shoot a short film. He got the idea from a Hungarian short novel about a homeless kid who is trying to find the real blue of the sky, which is a metaphor basically for happiness. He’s a lonely kid who only has a cat for company. Josef wrote a screenplay and put together a $5,000 budget. I had saved enough money to buy a used car. I packed my family in an old Pontiac. We traveled across the country and didn’t take the shortest route. We went to South Dakota and Yellowstone Park. It took two weeks traveling across America, seeing how big and how beautiful this country is. ICG: Were you still thinking some day you were going to work in Hollywood? ZSIGMOND: I always believed that someday we were going to work in Hollywood. I thought we had good educations and with our knowledge and experience, it was going to be easy to find jobs in Hollywood. It turned out it was not that easy. It wasn’t easy for Americans to get jobs in movies, and we came from another country and didn’t speak the language. There were organizations that tried to help. They contacted all Hungarian professionals in the movie industry, but everyone turned us down. ICG: When did you reconnect with Laszlo? ZSIGMOND: I contacted Laszlo and told him I needed an assistant to work with us in California. He left his job at a film lab in Seattle and met us there. It was a very low budget short film. I remember our breakfasts in Westwood at a place where we could get a cup of coffee, toast and all the jam that we wanted for 17 cents. We shot for about three weeks and traveled all around California. We sent the film to Cannes, but unfortunately, we didn’t win. We wanted to submit it to the Academy (for the short film Oscar competition), but it wasn’t accepted. ICG: Does that film still exist? ZSIGMOND: We recently made a telecine transfer of the last print at Sunset Post. ICG: So, now you were in Los Angeles. What did you do? ZSIGMOND: We had to find work, especially me because by then we had two children, and I didn’t know enough English language for most jobs. I found work in a photo color laboratory and I also did home portrait photography. Every day, I had 20 assignments to shoot pictures of children and families in people’s homes, and then a salesman would try to sell them prints. It was a very hard job, because I had to deal with kids without speaking English. Later, I worked in a microfilm laboratory connected with an insurance company. That was a night job. So, I had three jobs. I could not even think much about being a cinematographer in those days. I went to school at night and on weekends to learn English. Once I got familiar with the language and could express myself, everything started to open up. I found students at UCLA who needed help for their thesis films. Somehow they knew about us two crazy Hungarians who shot their 16 mm films for nothing. I also started working on educational films with Bob Aller who had graduated from UCLA. That’s how I started to learn 16 mm and color photography, which was new for us. A short time later, I worked on documentary films for television at Wolper Productions. ICG: How did you get connected with Wolper? ZSIGMOND: Through Bob Aller, who was the nephew of Herb Aller, the business agent for the International Cinematographers Guild in Los Angeles. My price in those days was $2.50 an hour to shoot films, because that was what I was paid to print pictures in a professional black-and-white laboratory. I did a documentary film for him about a blind student called The Story of Larry. It was a wonderful little documentary. Bob got a job at Wolper Productions making television shows for a series called The Story of…. I worked on many of these shows. Mel Stuart, a CBS researcher who turned down our footage in Vienna after we got out of Hungary, was the general manager at Wolper. CBS ended up buying about 10 minutes of it for $50,000 for a film they made for the fifth anniversary of the revolution. Bob Aller was trying to get me on staff. I showed them footage from the beginning of Larry, which I thought was beautiful photography, but after about 10 minutes they told me to stop and asked if I had anything interesting. I never became a staff member at Wolper. ICG: What did you do then? ZSIGMOND: I kept doing whatever non-union work I could get. In those days, there were a lot of low-budget filmmakers who did those terrible movies for very little money. They sold them to drive-in theater owners. I started to shoot those terrible movies under the name William Zsigmond. My big break came when Ray Dennis Steckler met me while he was directing a movie called Wild Guitar. I was the operator, and the cinematographer was Joel Mascelli, who wrote the five C’s of Cinematography (and the ASC Manual). He knew right away that I was also doing the lighting. Both Joe and I worked on Incredible Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Crazy, Mixed-Up Zombies. That was how I got into NABET. That made it possible for me to do other films and commercials under a NABET agreement. ICG: Where did the idea of calling yourself William come from? ZSIGMOND: The immigration officers told Laszlo and I that our names were too difficult to pronounce. They said nobody would learn them. They said at least one of our names should be something they can remember. ICG: Did any of the established cinematographers support you? ZSIGMOND: Haskell Wexler (ASC) was the first Hollywood cameraman who noticed my work. I shot a movie called Futz! (1969). It got terrible reviews, but after Haskell saw it, he contacted me and told me the photography was good. He was very encouraging, and that was very important to me. A few years later, Harry Wolf (ASC) told me that my photography on a particular film was too slick. The film didn’t call for that look. I really appreciated that. Everybody needs somebody who is willing to tell you the truth. Otherwise, you can never get better. Most people won’t do that. Cinematographers are interesting people, because they generally do not have secrets or jealousies. I think it is the same with painters and musicians. I have read a lot about painters in the impressionist era. They knew and admired each other, and they worked together. ICG: Who were you working with on commercials?
ICG: How did you start doing mainstream features? ZSIGMOND: I did a short film with John Astin, an actor who wanted to direct. Prelude was a nice little story that we shot on weekends; because that’s the only time I could do it. The picture was very successful. It was nominated for an Academy Award and got a lot of attention. Right after that Peter Fonda hired me for The Hired Hand (in 1971), which he directed. It was for Universal Studios. While we were shooting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Universal hired me to shoot Red Sky at Morning—also in Santa Fe. ICG: When did you stop calling yourself William? ZSIGMOND: I was William Zsigmond until Peter Fonda looked at me and said I ‘didn’t look like a William. What was your name in Hungary?’ I said ‘Vilmos.’ He said, ‘What a beautiful name. I’m going to call you Vilmos from now on. In fact, I’m going to give you a credit on my movie under that name.’ So that was my break and it was how I got my name back. ICG: Didn’t they just recently restore The Hired Hand? ZSIGMOND: It is a beautifully restored print made by Universal. It was shown at the Venice Film Festival and they invited me to go there last year. It was a great audience and a wonderful reception. ICG: When and how did you get into the Camera Guild? ZSIGMOND: I am not actually sure. I will have to look up the year. It was very difficult (for everyone) to get into the Guild at that time. Laszlo and I went to the Guild office sometime after we got to Los Angeles and they told us to learn how to speak English. We also visited the American Society of Cinematographers clubhouse, and they told us to leave as quickly as possible. You had to get a certain number of hours on union movies in to order to join the Guild, but you couldn’t get those hours if you weren’t in the union. Later on, Herb Aller, who was the business manager, became an agent, and I think I was the first cinematographer he represented. I remember that he also represented Bill Fraker (ASC), Laszlo and some other younger cinematographers. ICG: How did The Hired Hand affect your career? ZSIGMOND: I started Red Sky Morning immediately afterwards and while shooting it, Robert Altman was preparing to do McCabe & Mrs. Miller. He had already done a movie with Laszlo called That Cold Day In The Park. He loved Laszlo, but he wasn’t available. Laszlo recommended me to Altman. Altman liked my photography on Prelude, which mainly took place under minimal circumstances in a supermarket. ICG: Where did the idea for flashing McCabe & Mrs. Miller come from? ZSIGMOND: When I was talking to Altman on the phone before I met him, he told me a little bit about the story and said that he wanted to make it look like old faded pictures. I had read an article about flashing film and had made some tests for a commercial to get that kind of a look. ICG: What happens when you pre-flash film? ZSIGMOND: You pre-expose the film in a controlled way and alter the contrast to get a softer look. I immediately said, ‘Robert, I think I have the answer for you. Flashing.’ I explained it to him, but the strange thing was that I couldn’t do any testing, because I was shooting Red Sky in the Morning. Altman got me in touch with the Vancouver standby cinematographer, who became our operator. I explained on the phone how to do the test with five, 10, 15, 20 and 25 percent flashing. When I got to Vancouver, the tests were already shot. All I had to do was look at what the lab was doing and we decided, it would be 15 percent or something close to that. I didn’t invent that technique. ICG: I seem to remember you got the idea from a Freddie Young (BSC) film. ZSIGMOND: Freddy Young used flashing in The Deadly Affair. I read about it in “American Cinematographer” magazine. ICG: How did Altman deal with the studio when they didn’t like the look? ZSIGMOND: While I was shooting McCabe & Mrs. Miller, executives at the studio were watching dailies in Los Angeles. They hated the way the movie looked because we flashed the film and pushed it so it was grainy. For them it was terrible. For us, it was art. Robert knew that if he admitted what we were doing, they would shut us down and probably re-shoot everything we had done, so he lied to them. He said, don’t worry about the negative. It’s perfect. This lab up here doesn’t know how to make dailies, and they believed him. It was my really first big movie, but I felt very at home even though I had never done anything like it before. One day, John Boorman accidentally wandered into the projection room at the lab, and he was intrigued by the look. He contacted me about working with him on a film called Deliverance. It was a totally different kind of a movie. But we did desaturate the film. We decided this film needed more contrast and a little bit of a black and whitish look. Since we were working with Technicolor, we used the dye transfer technique. They made three color matrices and then a fourth black-and-white one. That gave us more control over the blacks and whites. We decided certain scenes would have 10, 15 or 20 percent more black and white, and we were able to manipulate the look and mood of the movie that way. ICG: You did some interesting things with the way the camera moved in that film. ZSIGMOND: John Boorman is a wonderful director who was very prepared, and luckily, we had something like four weeks of preparation so we could test everything and figure out what worked and what didn’t work like when the canoe was going through the rapids. We didn’t know what was going to give us the best results, whether we should shoot the boats from the shore, or from boat to boat, or have a motorboat sort of follow them or be in front of the canoe. We finally decided that the simplest method worked best. We put the tripod into the water and covered the fluid head with plastic so it wouldn’t get ruined. The lens was just four or five inches above the water. It looked like we were traveling with the canoe, because we were panning across the water. It recorded the scene from a chilling perspective, and created a feeling of fear. You didn’t need any dialogue for the audience to feel that danger was approaching. They could feel it in the images. ICG: The next year you did The Long Goodbye and Cinderella Liberty. ZSIGMOND: The Long Goodbye was my third picture with Altman. After Deliverance, we did Images in Ireland with Susannah York. That was also a marvelous movie with a totally different look. The Long Goodbye followed. We had already tested the look while we were shooting Images. There was a sequence that was like a dream sequence, where we decided we would move the camera on a crab dolly from right to left, left to right, up and down, and we also zoomed in and out. In Images it didn’t matter because it was a dream sequence, but I told Altman I wasn’t sure that was going to work in The Long Goodbye. He said, trust me. It’s going to be interesting. I said, yeah, it’s going to be interesting, but will it work? I usually don’t like gimmickry. I think the camera should be unobtrusive. You should never really feel like the camera is there in the scene, but it worked for The Long Goodbye. We did the photography in that kind of a style, but the editing was conservative. ICG: How did you happen to do The Sugarland Express with Steven Spielberg? ZSIGMOND: He saw one of my films and decided that he wanted to work with me. I’m not sure whether it was McCabe, Deliverance, or if it was all of them together because he watched movies all the time. He called and we met. He showed me his movie Duel. I loved that film. We talked for about a half hour about other movies, styles, lighting and immediately felt we could work together. He was very educated about movies, considering that he didn’t have that much experience. Certain things I suggested, like the drive-in scene. That was an interesting problem because the characters are actually at a drive-in theater seeing the movie in the back of a camper through a window glass, and they are reacting to it. The question was whether we should shoot it that way or superimpose images on the glass. We were going to try to shoot at a real drive-in with a reflection in the window. The problem was that we couldn’t find a drive-in theater exactly where we wanted to be, and also the image wouldn’t be bright enough to photograph. I suggested building a miniature screen maybe 10 feet wide and projecting an image on it. We shot a test and that was all the proof Spielberg needed. ICG: Didn’t you have one of the first Panaflex cameras in that movie? ZSIGMOND: Yes. Robert Gottschalk (Panavision founder) actually brought it to Texas, where we were shooting. We had some scenes inside of a police car that Spielberg wanted to shoot with sync sound. We knew about this camera Panavision was building. I begged them. Finally, they delivered the camera, and we shot inside of the police car with a 360-degree move. It was quite an accomplishment in those days to be able to do that. ICG: What do you remember about Scarecrow? ZSIGMOND: I thought Scarecrow was a great film. It was shot with a handful of crewmembers. I remember I had one assistant, one gaffer, one best boy, one key grip, and one dolly man. Everybody pitched in. I remember it was scheduled for something like 11 weeks and we actually came in two weeks ahead of schedule. We had great actors, Al Pacino and Gene Hackman. ICG: What about Close Encounters of the Third Kind? ZSIGMOND: We really believed in Close Encounters. It’s a great story. It was intriguing thinking about aliens and UFOs, and what they’d look like. The studio kept bugging us about how much money was being spent. It started as a low-budget movie, but Spielberg came up with new ideas everyday They budgeted, for example, to shoot the final scene with very little equipment, but. I needed more lighting equipment and electricians to give Steven the look he wanted. ICG: Tell us about that scene. It was very emotional. ZSIGMOND: They were looking all over the United States to find a big enough interior place to build our space craft set and make it look like we are shooting outside. At one point there was a place in Oregon, where we could have shot in a big hangar, but it was too noisy. They found another hangar in Mobile, Alabama, and extended it another 200 feet with tenting. That was a good choice because we could shoot day for night, but it wasn’t easy. We had to always worry about storms because it was hurricane season. We worked under miserable conditions, because there was no air conditioning it was the middle of the summer. Sometimes it was 125 degrees in the hangar, and the poor electricians were up in the catwalks. Many of them left and went back home. The joke was that it seemed like there were days when we had more electricians flying from Los Angeles to Mobile and from Mobile to Los Angeles than we had in the hangar. ICG: You won an Oscar for that film just about 20 years after arriving in the U.S. Do you recall your feelings? ZSIGMOND: It was like a dream I still remember walking up those steps, knowing that 80 million people were watching on television. I thanked George Illes and the other teachers in Hungary who taught me how to think about film as art. It was the first time I felt I belonged. ICG: What about The Deer Hunter? I loved that film ZSIGMOND: I think The Deer Hunter was probably my best work; but everybody’s work was excellent. The actors were an unbelievable group of people. We were lucky to get them together in one movie, and they did it for very little money. Michael Cimino was a really wonderful director who was at the beginning of his career. He wanted the characters to be manly and real. You can see in the close-ups that it (working in the mill) was hard, hot work, but it wasn’t a dehumanizing environment. He (Cimino) said we were just like jazz musicians. We were improvising. Ideas bounced back and forth between us. Shooting that film with him was like playing jazz music together. His approach to that movie was right on. It was really wonderful to see a director who would give freedom to all the actors to add something to the movie and the same thing with me. He wanted the best work that I could do, and he gave me the freedom to light and move the camera. I had my doubts many times about certain parts of the movie, and I brought them up with Michael. I told him I didn’t see how he could get away with the ending scene with people singing “God Bless America.” I asked him, isn’t that corny? He said, ‘just wait and watch the actors. They are going to change your mind.’ I did change my mind after I saw the first rehearsal. I don’t think you can see that scene without crying. I still remember scenes like when Christopher Walken’s character dies in Robert DeNiro character’s arms. You seldom see that kind of acting. It was like real life. We broke a lot of rules. The wedding scene is probably 35 minutes long. It’s just two bleak people getting married. The studio didn’t believe in that scene. They were trying to cut it down. In fact, they hired an editor who secretly was cutting a shorter version of the movie. When Cimino found out about that, he immediately fired the editor. ICG: The next year you did a totally different movie, The Rose. ZSIGMOND: That is also a favorite film of mine. It was Mark Rydell at his best. He’s a good actor’s director, and Bette Midler is a great singer who delivered a memorable performance as Janis Joplin. It was just one of those films where everything clicked. Her performance was marvelous and the concert scenes were great. We decided, with Mark, that for the concert scenes we would have some big-name cinematographers operating the cameras. I thought that by asking Owen Roizman, Haskell Wexler, and Laszlo Kovacs to operate, we’d get some great film. We had a little discussion beforehand where I said, ‘okay this camera should mostly be doing long shots and that camera mostly should do two shots, and that camera maybe singles. Owen, you are on your own.’ He picked a nice low angle shooting against the lights. Some of those shots were running 25 seconds to one minute on his camera. Everybody was happy that they could contribute. ICG: The River was another great movie. What do you remember about that? ZSIGMOND: It was another Mark Rydell movie and I think it was one of Mel Gibson’s first movies in America. The first five minutes has no dialogue at all. You see a little boy going up into a creek to catch a fish, and the rain starts falling. You see drops falling into the water, and then the rain gets heavier. We see him running home, and from that point on we just see more and more water. We see the creeks filling up with water; and then we see it becomes a big river. We had music under the images and they fit very well together. You don’t have to say anything. The pictures tell the story. ICG: You went back to Hungary and Russia to film the miniseries Stalin? ZSIGMOND: I lived in the Stalinist era in Hungary and the feeling of oppression was tremendous. People could not sleep at night without thinking that they could be arrested and transported to Siberia. When we went to Moscow in 1991, the KGB was still there, and they still had power even if they didn’t rule anymore. We needed their help to get permission to shoot in the Kremlin. We also shot at locations where Stalin lived. For example, we needed the lights to come on in the streets of the Kremlin earlier than usual. If we didn’t have their help, we would be standing there for hours not able to shoot, because they would not let us go into the Kremlin, saying that Gorbachev is in a meeting now. We went to Stalin’s dacha, which was around 30 miles out of Moscow. It was some kind of experience to shoot there where all these big shot communists had their meetings. There was a spot marked on the floor where Stalin actually died when he had a heart attack and fell. We finished that film on December 21, the same day Stalin died. While we were there, the news came that the Soviet Union was disbanded. We were in the middle of history there and they let us shoot, which was amazing. I don’t think they let anybody shoot in the Kremlin now. We were probably the first ones, and maybe the last ones. Working with Ivan Passer was a great experience. ICG: didn’t you shoot part of that in Hungary? ZSIGMOND: We shot in Hungary for three weeks, and in Moscow we shot six weeks. ICG: Was that the first time you worked in Hungary since you left? ZSIGMOND: That was actually the first time I went back and shot a movie in Hungary. That’s when I met Bela “Richy” Romwalter, who was my gaffer on Stalin. Under the communists there was no money to keep up with Western technology. It didn’t exist in Hungary. There weren’t even modern stands when we were preparing to shoot Stalin, so it took two minutes to set a flag. Richy told me that no one was willing to invest in bringing modern equipment to Hungary because they didn’t believe the film industry was going to come back. I thought about that and asked, ‘what if I would help them get money for buying lighting equipment?’ That’s how we got started. We organized an equipment rental company called Sparks, in Budapest, with all the modern tools. Today, we can supply equipment for two features at a time, or one feature and five or six commercials. We have ARRI cameras, generators, trucks, and dollies from Chapman. We also have William F. White LTD as a partner. ICG: Have you also stayed in touch with people at The Academy of Theatre and Film Arts, the school where you prepared for your career? ZSIGMOND: I have remained very good friends with people who were my teachers. I also stayed in touch with my classmates even during the bad times in Hungary when it was dangerous for them to correspond with me. Every other summer, the film school hosts a two week Master Class for students and other young filmmakers from around the world. I was there the first year with Haskell Wexler (ASC) and have gone back many times. Billy Williams (BSC) and Laszlo have also taught the Master Class. It is a very successful program. ICG: You finally got to shoot a movie in Hungary. Tell us about it. ZSIGMOND: Bánk Bán is a Hungarian opera that was composed by Ferenc Erkel about 150 years ago when the country was part of the Hapsburg Empire. The cast includes many great opera singers. (director) Csaba Kael is a graduate of the same film school in Budapest. It has been his dream to make this film for years. He was my A.D. when I directed The Long Shadow in Hungary, and he directed many commercials. Every Hungarian knows the story of Bánk Bán. I remember seeing it as a drama when I was a boy. We also read it in school. It’s a patriotic statement that deals with oppression when the Hapsburgs occupied Hungary. The writer and composer had to deal with the topic as an allegory set in the 1300s. It is a wonderful story and a musical masterpiece. My hope is that people will see this film with subtitles, and I hope they will get an idea about the history, culture and music of Hungary. ICG: What are the big issues facing cinematographers today? ZSIGMOND: The most challenging issue for us is to try to maintain the level of artistic quality that we have established in cinematography. Think back to the great black-and-white movies from the past that we still admire and enjoy today. A lot of that had to do with the way they were lit and shot. When color came in, the great cinematographers tried to maintain that same quality in lighting, camera moves and visual storytelling, but I think it took a long time for color movies to get to the place where black-and-white movies used to be. It was the same thing when sound replaced silent movies. It took a while to get back to that same level of artistry that the old silent movies had. Today, we have evolution coming at us from different directions. It started with lightweight cameras and less heavy lighting equipment. That gave us a lot of freedom, which we had to learn how to use. Now, we have a digital revolution beginning to happen. The problem is that many producers today don’t understand the importance of the artistry of cinematographers. For them, digital technology is a business decision. They see it as a way to save money. We have to find ways to satisfy them and not lose our artistry. If we don’t show them the importance of high quality images, no one will. I am not talking about every producer. Last year, I worked with Irwin Winkler, a wonderful producer who also directed Life As a House. He understands that cinematography is an important part of telling the story and that films are not just a product to make money…it can be an art form. I wish that we had more producers like him. Another example is the Coen brothers. Roger Deakins (ASC, BSC) loves working with them, and they respect him. All of their pictures are good. ICG: A magazine editor recently ask me if cinematographers still needed to light because he heard that it isn’t necessary with “fast” films and digital cameras. ZSIGMOND: Those perceptions are actually interesting, because it is true. You don’t need to light. You can shoot in available light. The only question is whether it is going to be good enough to tell the story. Lighting is an art. I don’t need a digital camera to shoot without light. I can use an old-fashioned film camera that was made 50 years ago. When people ask if we need to light, the question to ask them is, what kind of movies do we want to make? That is a question every future filmmaker is going to have to answer. It is our job to help them understand why we light. ICG: Some people think George Lucas is defining the future with the new Star Wars. ZSIGMOND: I think he shot that film digitally because he was going to manipulate all of the images digitally, but that isn’t going to be the right thing to do for every film. Some producers have this dream that they won’t have to use cinematographers in the future, because they can change anything in postproduction, even the lighting. It is true that you can make a movie that way, but it won’t be the same as film. There are things we can do with film today which aren’t possible with digital technology. Maybe 10 years from now we’ll have a digital camera with 4K resolution that will come close to what film does today. But who knows what we will be able to do with film 10 years from now. I think the ideal situation today is to shoot on film and do your postproduction and optical digitally. I would love to shoot a film and scan it digitally and do all kind of things that aren’t possible optically. Day-for-night photography is ideal for digital. You can turn a daylight sky into night. On the other hand, there are certain things you can’t do as well with digital. In Life as a House, the ocean was filled with reflections. It was about eight stops over the exposure of the house. If I tried to photograph that with a digital camera, we would have blown out the ocean in the background in order to keep the details in the foreground. That would have changed the look and feeling. ICG: Do you think the audience notices those differences? Does it affect them? ZSIGMOND: Maybe some people don’t notice or care. They eat their popcorn, watch and listen to the actors talking. I always try to shoot my films for the rest of the audience that appreciates the visual quality of the images…lighting, composition, camera moves and the rest. It is like some people look at a painting and they are affected by it, and others just see a picture. We are not making movies for those people. We are making movies for the people who love film as art. I think it is important for cinematographers to work very hard to educate people about cinematography as an art form. I just wish that future producers would learn more about why the art of cinematography is important to the art of the movie making. They used to know that in the past. They were great producers because they knew that film was art. ICG: Are there directors who are gone who you wish you had worked with? ZSIGMOND: I am sorry I never worked with Ingmar Bergman, Fellini and Antonioni. I would have loved to shoot a picture with Laurence Olivier…even as a director, but it would have been fun to work with him as an actor. There are so many of them. There are so many good directors today who I may never work with because there are not enough good movies being made. ICG: Are there types of films you want to shoot? ZSIGMOND: That’s a hard question to answer. My rule is that if a movie doesn’t have something of value for the audience, I don’t think it is worth making. Maybe 75 percent of the time you can tell that when you read the script, but I have been fooled. There are so many things that have to come together, the script, the actors and director. I am not especially fond of shooting movies where special effects are dominant like car crashes and buildings exploding just for the sake of the effect. For me, that’s kid’s stuff. If the visual effects are justified by the story, then that’s okay. I feel the same way about violent movies. I have shot films with violent scenes, but it was always to serve the story. ICG: Many classic films are being restored and re-mastered for release as DVDs. Are you normally asked to supervise timing when one of your films is restored or re-mastered? ZSIGMOND: I wish that would happen all the time, but quite often they forget to call me. The other day I was interviewed for the DVD of The Long Goodbye, and I told them that I don’t remember being called to supervise the transfer. They said they would see what they could do because the DVD was coming out pretty soon. They showed me the transfer, and it was absolutely terrible. They didn’t know that The Long Goodbye was flashed, so they took all the flashing out of the movie, and made it very contrasty and dark like some movies are today. I volunteered to supervise a new transfer. I must say the people involved did everything necessary to produce the best possible transfer. This is a very important issue for all of us. ICG: A lot of students visit this site. What advice do you have for somebody who is at film school now and wants to be a cinematographer in the future? ZSIGMOND: If you are writing a novel, you are going to tell stories with dialogue and the reader will see the images in their minds. If it is a movie, you need to know the story; you need music and sound, and you also need to know how to tell stories with light and images. Study all forms of art and shoot as much as possible. Shoot with a DV camera. Shoot with a High 8 camera. Shoot with any camera. Try to tell stories visually. ICG: What about a student who wants to be a writer or a director? What should they look for in cinematographers? ZSIGMOND: They should learn how to look at how the cinematographer expresses ideas with images in their films. They should also be looking for a partner. The best work always happens when a director and cinematographer are working together. The cinematographer should also be involved in production design from the very beginning. They can help the production designer by suggesting where to place windows and lamps on sets in order to play to the moods that the director wants to achieve. Some less experienced directors might not have the experience to pre-visualize scenes so they need a cinematographer who can help. |
