Conclusions by John Boorman

Author:John Boorman [John Boorman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571353811
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2019-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

CAMERAMEN

The unsung heroes of movie-making are the cameramen. They come from different backgrounds and nationalities but share the language of light.

Vilmos Zsigmond, the cameraman on Deliverance, was a film student in Budapest in 1956, when Russian tanks crushed the freedom movement in Hungary. Vilmos and his fellow student, László Kovács, grabbed cameras and filmed it all – young men clambering onto the tanks with Molotov cocktails, protesters being gunned down in the streets. Dodging bullets, they fled to the Austrian border with the film. Theirs was the only footage of the brutal Russian repression, and it was eagerly sought after by TV news. Money was pressed upon them. They said, ‘We don’t want money, we want to be cameramen in America.’

Promises were made and broken, and the two boys eventually found jobs doing the night shift in film labs. The cameramen’s guild would not accept them as members, so they worked on lowbudget, non-union movies. It was obvious that Vilmos was a great talent, and I was able to employ him because we shot Deliverance in a non-union state. As a non-member, his remarkable work on the picture was not rewarded by the members of the American Society of Cinematographers, but it did persuade Steven Spielberg to hire him for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for which he won an Oscar.

Vilmos was one of the first cameramen to come out of a film school. Traditionally, cameramen serve an apprenticeship. They start out as clapper-loaders, doing exactly that – operating the clapperboard that records the scene numbers and synchronises sound and picture. They load the film into the camera, can and tape up the exposed film, and send it to the laboratory for processing. They gather experience and eventually move up to focuspuller – the skilled job of keeping the action in focus, working closely with the operator. The next step up is to camera operator, where they watch the director of photography at close quarters, finally aspiring to his or her role.

This apprentice system means that cameramen are in a direct line to the very beginnings of film-making. Skills and knowledge are learnt and, like a baton, passed on.

I prefer a DP who also operates, which makes the collaboration more intimate, but sometimes, when heavy lighting is required, it is necessary to split the jobs. A DP will also have on his team a gaffer, who is in charge of setting the lamps, and a key grip, who lays down the tracks and figures out how to manipulate the camera into the movements the director requires.

The DP is at the centre of the process, and I have learnt so much from the ones with whom I have worked. Phil Lathrop, the DP on Point Blank, had been a great operator on movies like Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. Right at the beginning Phil said, ‘Whatever shot you want, John, I’ll make it work.’ The more difficult the set-up, the more he was stimulated. He was dapper and neat and always wore a jacket and tie.

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