Dean Cundey

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REALITY BYTES: Cinematographer DEAN CUNDEY at the Sydney Film Festival by Lindsay Amos

Cundey with Panavision camera

American cinematographer Dean Cundey has a favourite expression: "In the old days — about a year ago..." It cropped up often in his two-night Frame-by-Frame seminar at the 1996 Sydney Film Festival. Previous guests (and their films) include Robby Müller (Paris, Texas), Stuart Dryburgh (The Piano) and Russell Boyd (White Men Can't Jump) — all tough acts to follow in what is one of the Festival's sell-out events.

Cundey, however, rather than show and work through only one film, as has been the format on past occasions, used excerpts from five films, all of which relied to a large extent on visual effects at a particular stage of their evolution: These included a showreel from his own TV movie, Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves!, and highlights from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Jurassic Park, Apollo 13 and Casper.

The two three-hour sessions provided a fascinating insight into the work of a cinematographer who is pre-eminent in the application of digital computer technology to motion pictures today. There was also the constant reminder of the irony in Cundey's comment about "the old days," as the speed at which this technology developed became evident.

Like so many of his contemporaries, after graduation from (UCLA) film school, Cundey spent years working in various areas of filmmaking on non-union films, including some for Roger Corman. In order to increase his marketability as a cinematographer, Cundey outfitted a van with camera and grip equipment — then included himself — in what was a complete filmmaking package. "It became my foot-in-the-door on a lot of low-budget films. I was able to provide a complete package of equipment and also myself to a producer. Having my own equipment meant that I could do a better job. So it was a win-win situation," says Cundey.

In the late 1970s Cundey and the director John Carpenter made the seminal horror film Halloween, becoming part of was a relatively small group of emerging filmmakers who defined and popularised a new genre of reality-based suspense films. Cundey used smoke to spread sparse amounts of light, and re-discovered the technique of subtracting light to create images which evoke powerful emotions. Halloween, The Fog and Escape From New York are prime examples of this style.

It was 1982 when director Richard Franklin (who'd also studied at UCLA) worked together on Psycho 2. Franklin recalls, "Dean at that time had not done a major studio picture. I'd seen Halloween (I, II and III) and liked the look of them. I thought that he could work fast and give us the expression-istic look we needed."

Cundey progressed to the action adventure Romancing the Stone for Robert Zemeckis, followed by the benchmark visual effects film Back to the Future, plus two sequels, all with Zemeckis.

In the Back to the Future trilogy, Death Becomes Her (also Zemeckis) and Hook (Steven Spielberg), the boundaries separating reality and fantasy were erased. But Cundey's most famous collaboration with Spielberg, Jurassic Park, represent-ing another generation of already highly sophisticated visual effects, is based on what Cundey likes to call "heightened reality."

Occasionally at the seminar it was difficult for the uninitiated to keep up with Cundey. After being reprimanded by one member of the audience for getting too technical for the average viewer, Cundey would impishly preface some of his answers with : "That sounds like one of those technical questions..." It's not enough to be simply a cinematographer today. You have to be a computer expert, teacher, showman and diplomat. Cundey put it another way: "One of the things I found was that as I worked as a cinematographer I never limited myself to just `how am I going to light the scene?' or, `where should the camera go?' but always the consideration of, `what's the best place to put the camera to tell the story? What's the best place to put the actors for this particular sequence?' A lot of this shows the reflexes of a director."

And a friendly warning to directors: "A director should be able to think on his feet. If you rely too heavily on storyboards you can cut yourself out of a lot of creative moments that you can take advantage of. It's always important to leave those options open. Some guys I've worked with will use storyboards as a crutch because they aren't as proficient at thinking on their feet, so you have to be able to guide them on an optional path."

Like all good lecturers, Cundey sprinkled his session with anecdotes. He recalled a problem with NASA, during the planning of Apollo 13. NASA would not let the crew shoot in the aircraft which created weightless conditions for training astronauts. Cundey recalled, "Ron Howard (the director) called his friend Steven Spielberg, who called his friend Bill Clinton..." NASA, finally convinced it was going to be a PR plus, let them borrow the aircraft.

Cundey's directorial debut, Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves! was digitally composited on three Apple Macs (with After Image and Ultimate software) at Cundey's home before being sent to the effects company Dream Quest Images for "finessing".

INTERVIEW:

Richard Franklin chose you to shoot what must have been a particularly tricky assignment — a sequel to one of the great suspense films, Hitchcock's Psycho.

It was quite a lot of fun to recreate moments in a classic film. And for us to be able to experience that by virtue of looking at the old film and rebuilding the sets and talking to people who worked on the film — it was kind of a journey into film history for us. I guess you might say we wanted to be sure that while we kept a similar kind of approach to the film, as far as looking at the kinds of shots, we wanted to evoke a similar response, knowing that the contemporary audience was also used to other kinds of filmmaking techniques so it was one of those things where we thought that hopefully this is the way Hitchcock would have told his version of Psycho 2.

I guess having worked on a couple of suspense/horror films, and because John Carpenter was very influenced by Hitchcock we had developed those sensibilities. To me one of the fun things about film is finding a visual style that is appropriate for each film — sometimes appropriate for a particular sequence. We did a little bit of matte painting work (on Psycho 2) with Albert Whitlock (a former Hitchcock collaborator), so it was like continuing the tradition of Hitchcock. It would be interesting to see if we were to do the same film now, if we would be obligated to use more visual effects.

What do you consider your breakthrough film with regard to the new generation of visual effects? Would it be Back to the Future?

Yes, I would say Back to the Future really started my growth in visual effects films. I would say that Roger Rabbit was the probably the greatest step in combining visual effects in a film for that time. I guess you might say I've always been interested in applying visual effects to film; Back to the Future was one of those happy kinds of events where effects were so integral and a fun part of the film that it piqued my interest and I think that Roger Rabbit was one of the most challenging visual effects films - it really was the greatest leap for me as far as what could be done in combining visual effects in a film.

Michael J Fox in town square, Back to the Future

But it was Back to the Future (photo, above) and the films subsequent to it where the special effects relied less on the on-set use of mechanics - cables and wires, fog and rain machines and all, and they became really more enhancements of the visual image. So all of a sudden the tools were available and the interest by the filmmakers, whether it was the producer or the director was a lot more towards combining visual effects into the storytelling to the extent that instead of five or six shots in a film, you would find films that were made up of two or three hundred (effects) shots that were all part of the storytelling.

Back to the Future is one of my favourite films because it is one of the most complete audience experiences, you might say, besides the visual effects and that interesting part of it, it's also a great, fun story. It's a complete film from the standpoint of storytelling, performances, everything that makes it a great film.

The look of it was to me one of the challenging things, how do you get an audience to believe that they are watching a look back in time without being heavy-handed. I think you always have to be very subtle. A cinematographer has to be careful not to become heavy-handed, not to draw attention to the photography. Everything you do, hopefully, is relatively transparent to an audience, so they just get caught up in the story. So to create the differences in the time periods (in Back to the Future) was something that we did with a subtle combination of production design, wardrobe, little changes in lighting style, careful selection of the colours of light we used for a warmer kind of feeling. All of these things add up to draw the audience in without making them aware of how it's being done.

I was fascinated by your use of the technique which I think you pioneered on Roger Rabbit where you moved the camera during the shooting of the live action background in a way which predetermined the movement of the (subsequently added) animated characters. It was a simple idea, but surely required a flair for visualising the composite shot?

Roger Rabbit proved to us that certain techniques were successful. One of which was to analyse — again — the way in which an audience expects a film to be told, and then create that even if you're doing it after the fact or if you're using visual effects to create that illusion. So moving the camera (while shooting the background images) is something that we also used for Casper and Jurassic Park — any time we photographed something that isn't there; we realised that the technique is a valid one that really creates the illusion for the audience. On Jurassic Park, for example, we would pan the camera, tilt it — with nothing in the frame — maybe move an object, and the animators would be obligated to have the creature move to accommodate the camera's move. Sort of a reverse of what is reality, where you pan and tilt the camera to follow the creature. The result is that the audience associates the camera movement with the creature being there; believes that you had to move the camera to follow the creature.

You often talk about "heightened reality". Could you elaborate?

One of the things that visual effects does in films now is create a lot more of the illusion of reality that an audience would expect. In other words you see a film and as you watch there's something that's impossible or improbable that happens. But in order to get the audience to accept that, you have to present it to them in a way that looks to them, real. There have to be all of the visual cues they expect from a real event. The way objects react, the physics and even just the storytelling effects they've seen in film all the time. All of these provide subconscious cues to an audience as to whether they're seeing a real event photographed, or whether it's completely impossible.

I like to think of the fact that visual effects now are the kind of thing that allow you to create this illusion of reality. You can take a really improbable event - say the presence of a dinosaur - and as long as you present it in a way that the audience accepts as real, the way the light hits the skin, the way it moves, the way the world reacts around it; if all of those look real to an audience, they will accept the fact that the dinosaur really appears to be there. So I think that one of the tasks of the visual effects person and the cinematographer and director, is to create this illusion, using this sort of heightened reality, using reality, but always expanded and stretched and twisted.

You also talk about "making the unbelievable believable..."

If you look at film in general, even a strictly "reality" film, as you progress you realise that it's really been staged for your benefit; you're watching actors, you're watching a situation where a camera was there photographing somebody's perception of an event. So I think that an audience's classic "willing suspension of disbelief" applies any time they go to a film. The filmmakers' obligation is to now stretch that, take them places that are completely improbable, whether it's dinosaurs or animated characters or even a flight through space, the audience has to believe that they're really seeing it so your obligation is to present it to them in a way that they buy into it.

Stanley Kubrick, when he made 2001: A Space Odyssey was careful to ensure his photographic effects were always first generation. He would add each new element directly onto the original camera negative to avoid any loss in quality. The new computer technology makes this kind of thing much easier doesn't it?

I think so. One of the good things about the computer is that besides expanding the kinds of things we can do it has definitely improved the quality that we can accomplish. We are able to create the most amazing illusions and we can do it with much better technical quality. The end result of projecting it in a theatre is that the images are cleaner; they don't have a lot of the subconscious artefacts that an audience would look at and say, "Oh, this is a trick because this shot is grainer or the colour is somehow different." We're able to overcome those kinds of things and present the stuff with much higher quality to an audience.

Audience sophistication is growing exponentially with our technology. As we give them more amazing things at higher quality, they expect that the next step of illusion is going to be even greater, so we are constantly running to keep up with ourselves.

What are some of the tricks you use to convince an audience that an interior-

exterior (studio-shot exterior) is really exterior?

When you see any kind of exterior shot in a film that's not successful, it's usually because it's too well controlled. The lighting is always well-balanced. The reality of working outside is that you are working with extremes of contrast.

There are thing that tell an audience at some subconscious level whether you are really outside.

But besides ourselves learning the techniques of how to create the illusion, I think we have to be very sensitive to all of the storytelling and image presentation that's been done to an audience. More and more you are seeing things on television that come from moments as they really occur. The news takes us places that we could never have gone, instantly. One of the things we wanted to do prior to shooting Apollo 13 was to analyse how an audience had seen the space events of the sixties. What were the techniques, what was the technology they used to view it and what were the aesthetic things that were around that they watched on news (broadcasts).

So when we decided to shoot Apollo 13, we analysed a lot of those visual, storytelling artefacts. The perception that the audience had was that they were in fact watching reality, and we wanted to recreate that feeling so that they would have the same emotional response so that the images were not the same as all the other space movies they had seen where the camera was locked off and the lighting was perfect, the colours were perfect — we wanted to create the illusion that the camera was really present in space at the moment the actors were performing. I think that as filmmakers we really have to constantly watch the way an audience is seeing a story told to them in real life.

You're usually working with very experienced directors, but as someone with so much experience yourself, you would surely be an asset to a novice director with plenty of imagination but no practical experience.

Well, Casper was directed by a young guy who had never directed a feature, never done animation or worked with visual effects! Spielberg (the producer), by surrounding him with people who had done Roger Rabbit, the Back to the Futures and Jurassic Park — not only myself, but production designers and the visual effects people, really guided him through the process. So it was the case of a film that worked successfully because so many collaborators were there to contribute.

At the illustrated lecture/seminar, Cundey screened key sequences from Jurassic Park. The "Raptors in the kitchen" scene triggered the following response from Cundey to questions from the audience:

It's the sequence I think that blended the technical with the suspense and ended up being one of the overall successful uses of everything we had tried to do. When we got to that sequence it was later in the schedule and we'd had a chance to see exactly what was going to happen with the computer-generated dinosaurs. We had a lot of confidence in our ability to rely on what the computer was going to do for us. So we wholeheartedly went into that sequence and the blend that was going to be necessary. One of the concerns at first with the computer and the physical effects being put together was how well could Industrial Light & Magic duplicate the look that we were going to get out of photographing the rubber animatronic dinosaurs.

Stan Winston had built about three or four Raptors, with different types of uses for them. There are particular shots in the film, usually the full figure shots of the Raptor which involved the guy in a full suit. Stan also built a very complicated unit which consisted of the raptor from the haunches up and that involved a very elaborate cable system which went back to ten or twelve puppeteers who gave the motion to the raptor's head, face and neck. There were about twenty-five individual movements made by pulling the cables. To get an animatronic puppet to walk — because it involves so many individual operators who have to coordinate their movements - is almost impossible, so the computer ended up being our saviour in that case and have become extremely important for that reason because you can then create a creature that walks.

In this sequence, what appears to be two Raptors stalking the kids is made up of many individual pieces chosen for what each individual puppet or technique could give us. There is a perception that all of the dinosaurs in the film are computer generated when in fact, probably two thirds of the work is puppetry - the other third is the computer. The technique selected was whatever style accomplished whatever action was necessary.

Crouching children, hidden lights - Jurassic Park

For overall lighting of the kitchen we selected a motif of a very warm, late afternoon sunlight coming through very small windows. Another difficulty was that the kitchen was entirely stainless steel which reflected literally everything in the room. Every time we put up a light it would flare all over the walls, the counters, so it took a great deal of time and effort to hide the camera and the lights. Reflections for the computer-generated dinosaurs had to be computer-generated also. For that the computer was given information about certain points in the room then it's able to interpolate the move.

The pros and cons of Storyboards:

Very often a storyboard, as complete or elaborate as it might be — you could have say 1500 drawings for a film — if you are trying to plan some very tricky sequences. But sometimes the storyboard is drawn by an artist who is working in a semi-vacuum because he doesn't really know what the location or the set will look like in advance; he's working from the script and he draws the sequence maybe based on thumbnail sketches from the director who has a specific plan that he wants to follow or certain shots he wants to include with the rest filled in by the storyboard guy.

But they will sometimes do a drawing that will look good but is in fact almost impossible to do shots with a face in the foreground in focus with somebody in deep background whose face is also in focus so you have to be careful that the storyboards don't tell the story falsely, that it doesn't actually misrepresent what you can actually do when you're making a film. In our case we elected to do an "animatic" - an actual motion storyboard, a videotape. The advantage of that is that you can have a whole series of storyboards; an ordinary drawn storyboard doesn't give you a real indication of how long a scene will play...So in order to avoid some of those things - and Steven was very intent that we complete the film on schedule, he knew it was a huge undertaking, that we were going to be dealing with a lot of unknowns that could easily get out of hand on a film that was very tightly scheduled.

Jurassic Park actually took about 70 days, about 12 days under schedule because of our planning that came out of our video storyboard. We were able to look at our "animatics" on the set and each shot that had been constructed in a computer as a 3-D bit of action and panning and zooming on drawings if they were just close-ups we were able to construct a sequence that was maybe thirty seconds or a minute long, made up of the exact shots we needed so we were able to concentrate on each shot knowing how long it had to be and as such we were very efficient in the way it came together. The "animatic" for the kitchen sequence is surprisingly like the final edited sequence in the film.

Jurassic Park was probably a case where the storyboards were followed most religiously of any film I've worked on partly because of the technical aspects of it and partly because of Steven's concern that we stayed on schedule. There are a lot of other films - Bob Zemeckis is famous for having whole sequences storyboarded and then getting to the location and saying, "You know, I was driving here this morning and I had this idea..." and he'll immediately re-stage a scene or set it in another location. The storyboards go out the window and you're winging it. But even if you throw them out the storyboards have organised your thinking.

To illustrate his work on Apollo 13, Cundey chose scenes from inside the

capsule, at Mission Control, and exteriors of the launch sequence.

The discussion that I had with Ron (Howard) beforehand was that we wanted to figure out how to create the illusion of weightlessness. We began testing all of the rigs, but to get objects to float realistically was almost impossible. We thought about doing blue-screen work on the artefacts that were inside the capsule but that was going to be quite a tedious process; we were never satisfied with all the tests.

However as part of the training prior to shooting, Ron and the main actors went through Spacecamp in Houston. Part of the course was a flight in the special aircraft, a KC135 which flies in a kind of parabola which at its peak give the passengers about 23 seconds of weightlessness. The actors took a video camera along with them to document the fun they were having and finally after viewing the result said, "There's no way to duplicate that - it's just incredible!" So Ron said, "Why don't we shoot weightless?" Initially NASA refused, and it was not until they were convinced that it was a worthy project that we were finally able to shoot inside the airplane.

I had our crew build a mock up of the fuselage as well, so we could figure out how much space we had to work with between the set and the fuselage, where we were going to put lights, how we were going to duplicate the lighting that we were going to use inside the capsule. This lighting consisted of practical lights of various sizes and shapes, fluorescent lights that were off-colour - green, sunlight that came through the window that was constantly moving. The problem was how to create that look first in the studio and then how we were going to accomplish it in the airplane. It took a while to work these things out because space was confined in the airplane, but in the studio we were going to have a great deal of flexibility.

When we worked this out, the set was shipped down to Houston and the second unit guys set about actually shooting that stuff. They shot about 12 days' worth which was very impressive. What you see on the screen is a mixture of weightless, a lot of trickery in the studio with guys sitting on teeter-totters, hanging guys upside down while turning the camera upside down so they always appear to be floating. With the camera always moving, the idea was to come up with sequences that kept the audience guessing which way was up and how they were floating.

We simulated the sun by taking a theatrical light, like those moving lights you see at rock 'n' roll concerts and in the theatre - we put that on the end of an arm and by programming it so that it always aimed in through the (capsule) window an operator could move the "sunlight" up and down and keep it aimed through the window. Then we would plan the sequence so that the light would hit certain parts of the interior at the right moment. One of the benefits was the fact that they wore these white suits, they were very reflective and the sunlight would hit that and bounce around so it was always lighting the faces and the inside of the capsule so we could create the sense of movement, the sense of bright sunlight without ever losing the detail of the faces.

One of the concepts that we wanted to go for was keeping the camera close to the actors, as if we were inside the capsule, keeping that claustrophobic feeling. At the same time we always employed scenes with a lot of times three guys seated on couches. We were concerned with having a wide enough aspect ratio frame to be able to keep all that action in without having to back the camera up so that the audience thought they were outside the fourth wall. We always wanted the feeling of being present in the capsule with them. As we characterised it, it was the story of "three guys in a VW."

Anamorphic lenses that allow you to do that have problems with how close you can focus; the depth of field makes it very difficult to shoot that kind of aspect ratio and keep everything in focus. Super-35 (enlargement of the Academy frame to include the soundtrack area) allows you to use conventional spherical lenses which give you that greater depth of field and by cropping the image to that aspect ratio we would have the best of both worlds. The difficulty is that you are blowing up your image because you are using a smaller part of the negative, so there are limiting factors that come into it, like grain, so you have to juggle those technical factors when you make the decision.

In the Mission Control set most of the (overhead) lighting was in place and this gave us the ability to move rapidly. But I had them put the little gooseneck practical light on all of the desks and we used boosted light in them so there was always an opportunity to put a little backlight, to bounce light off the desks so we never had to worry about a situation where faces were not lit or we couldn't add a little bit of modelling so that the faces would become too flat. It gives you the ability to create a little more dramatic look on particular faces if you need to. We could put a backlight on somebody, we could cut down the light from overhead and use it just as light that bounces off the desk which kept the mission control room from looking too much the same for every shot.

The cinematographer and the computer:

It used to be that my involvement ended on the last day of shooting until I went back to time the colour and density of the answer print to make sure it looks as we had intended. But I'm finding that more and more that on films like Apollo 13 and particularly Jurassic Park and Casper, where there is so much work that's done by the visual effects people that affects the image, that I'm staying involved during that period, a lot of the time just looking at and approving the visual effects as they are done to know that they are going to all match into the rest of the film. For example, real shadows have a special quality that is very difficult to create with a computer. But sometimes on Jurassic Park it wasn't possible to create a real shadow because of the position and angle of light.

Now the computer gives you the ability to alter the image a great deal more than has been possible in the past. Now with the computer you can alter the contrast, just selected parts of a scene, you can bring up just the shadow areas or change the highlights and the temptation sometimes is for the computer guys at the console to try to "fix" something you've done and they can do that in a way that is way past what is adjustable when you do the answer print so you'll end up with the shot that is done by them looking completely different and not being able to be blended into the rest of the scene. So it now behoves the cinematographer and the production to keep that communication open so that I'm able to look at and evaluate the work that is being done.

It's interesting to me that the computer and the people who run it are able to do a lot of the image-making that you formerly might say was the work of the cinematographer and that more and more they are called upon to perform some kind of task that would be the domain of the cinematographer, like lighting virtual sets. I'm crusading for a common language; the ability for me to explain in a way that they understand how I would light something and for them to understand the lighting process that I would go through so that what we can do is duplicate the look that we want using common language and technique. As this point there is no common vocabulary for expressing how we would create a particular lighting effect. I think it's important that everybody understands not necessarily the exact procedures that are used but the aesthetic intent.

Originally published in Cinema Papers (Australia) Feb, 1997

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