How I See It

My grandmother didn't know that chandeliers were made of lots of individual pieces of glass and light until she was twelve years old. That's when she got her first pair of eyeglasses.  She said it was like seeing for the first time.

I think that's pretty inspiring because your eyes are the most valuable tool you have as a cinematographer. You've got to treat them that way too. What do you show them? How do you train them? How can you look at the world in a different ways?

Here are some things that I like show my eyeballs

1. See my first post - I've been on a big kick with those movies lately, but I don't want to keep going on and on about them. You may have noticed but some of those movies seem to hang together visually and maybe the reason that I've connected with them so deeply is because they are films I hope to emulate

Here are some film clips I find pretty inspiring

Wally Phister's work on Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight"
What a great representation of the Joker as pure anarchy


One of my favorite scenes from John Hillcoats film "The Proposition"


A commercial spot John Hillcoat did for Levi's. It's amazing how underutilized commercials are as an art form. 

2. Highway Houses  - I couldn't find a reference for this one so stay with me. Have you ever been driving late at night on one of those unbelievable dark nights? I'll often drive long stretches of highway without passing anything for miles and miles at a time. Then you see it - a tiny little ramshackle house on the side of the road resting under the electric glow of an orange sodium streetlight or green flourescent wall fixture.You pass by so quickly that you normally only see part of the house and surrounding patch of crab grass before it falls back into darkness. It's like a nite lite in the middle of all that blackness. It reminds you that the absense of light can be as beautiful as anything. Reminds me of Hopper, which leads me to...

3. Edward Hopper - It's not just his light, but everything about his paintings is incredible to me. His colors and compositions are so provocative.  I feel like so many of the things I gravitate towards visually all come out of this early - mid 20th century period. Andrew Wyeth, Norman Rockwell, Arthur Rothstein and other FSA photographers - all of this stuff still feels so geniune, and a lot of art is missing that

This is actually kind of the same lighting I

 was talking about the highway houses.

The incredible thing about Hopper is that I feel like I can see elements of his paintings (real or imagined) in so many of my favorite films.

these hills makes me think of the opening shots in "No County for Old Men"

reminds me of Malick's "Days of Heaven"

and a little bit more overt, but Conrad Hall's work

on "Road to Perdition" was practically a moving

Hopper painting. Great stuff

Andrew Wyeth's painting, "Christina's World"

 4. Tracey Snelling - If filmmaking is about creating worlds and environments, everyone should be able to draw a little inspiration from her work. I don't know too much about her other that she spends a lot of time creating worlds that examine the dark side of Americana, particularly motel life. That's all pretty cool in my book.

link to her site - http://traceysnelling.com/home.html

5. Robert Bechtle - hyper realist painter. Pretty awesome

 

6. Details - The story's in the details..or not. Who knows? I tend to think it is, but a lot of people don't.  It seems that cinematography is reflecting this. As the field continues to boom with cheaper tools available, the growing trend for cinematographers is to zoom in, open that aperature all the way up, and say "the Hell with it".

Everyone's a cinematographer now. It's a double edged sword. Everything's getting cheaper, and particularly with the DSLR revolution, very powerful filmmaking tools are there for the taking. The problem is that a lot of people aren't ever really stopping to sit and think about their images because the camera will "make it pretty". Usually this attitude manifests itself by people disregarding  compositon, color, and all of those other considerations that make a shot special and simply blowing the background out on any given shot so that we're basically looking at a pair of super crisp, sharp eyeballs floating on a blurry mound of flesh. I get it. Shallow DoF does have that "wow" factor sometimes. Its the kind of shot that makes people that don't know anything about film say "how did you do that?"

But if you take the time to really sit and think about what you want and what your shot will be about, do you really want to lose all of those carefully considered details in a sea of blurry crap? I don't. I know I'm guilty of it all the time though. I've been in that spot so many times where I felt like I just could not frame a shot interestingly so instead I just said screw it and blew the DoF out as a crutch. But I don't ever want that to become my default measure to "fix" a shot. It takes hard work to make everything in your shots interesting. That's the challenge though and the rewards can be so much higher when you capture your images in ways that are so richly detailed and considered. 

Okay, I'm done with the rant. I feel like a pretensious butthole now so I'll clear a few things up. I'm not saying deep focus shots are the be all, end all of cinematography. I'm not even saying that one is inherently better than the other. They both have their place. I'm just tired of laziness and the way people abuse extremely shallow DoF as a crutch to hide other problems with a shot. The End.

My top 10 Films of the Moment

Here are some of the films I've been thinking about a lot lately...

1) No Country for Old Men - Four of my ten were from 2007 (1, 2, 8, 9). Three are photographic masterpieces (1, 2, 9). Two are masterpieces across the board (1, 2). And one is without a doubt my favorite movie of all time. So call it Friendo.

2) There Will be Blood - Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick had a baby and named him Daniel Plainview...oh yeah, and then Johnny Greenwood scored the whole thing

3) The Proposition - It's violent, desolate, and hard to swallow just like every good Western should be. Almost all of the films on my list are really beautifully shot movies (3 of them by Roger Deakins), but something about the rawness of the cinematography here really draws me in. It's the kind of thing I'd like to shoot one day. Nick Cave's score and John Hurt's role are big bonuses.

4) Fargo - So many memorable scenes, lines, and characters wound into a powerful, unsettling and/or hilarious film about the worst and ocassionally best in people by the Coens Brothers and company.

5) Memento - There are so many reasons to come back to this movie again and again.

6) An American Werewolf in London - John Landis wrote his first draft of this at age 19. I wrote a little picture called The Dinner Guest...ever heard of it?

7) House of the Devil - There are so many things to admire in Ti West's throwback to 70's occult horror. Plus, it will scare the Hell out of you.

8) Superbad - Hilarious, dirty, dumb, and slightly homoerotic. Sounds like high school to me.

9) The Assasination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - Roger Deakins doing his thing in Andrew Domink's Malick-esque meditation on the fame monster. It wanders for a long time, maybe too long, but the last hour of this film is incredible.

10) Troll 2 - This movie will change your life.