Allen Daviau

moviexpress

INTERVIEW WITH ALLEN DAVIAU by Lindsay Amos

Daviau in Sydney, 1993 Photo: Lindsay Amos

"Film just keeps getting better all the time," enthuses Allen Daviau, speaking at the International Cinematographers' Forum at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. "It's not a stationary target, it keeps on improving and I think that the gambles that we can take, because creativity is based on gambles and how certain things happen. By knowing the filmstock and knowing what it can handle and how much you can 'beat it up' as we say, you get confidence in being able to express a lot more emotional tones in the scene of a film, to squeeze that emulsion in such a way that you're letting the shadows go just as dark as you possibly can and a moment later there'll be an intense highlight. You're letting the colour temperatures clash; you're doing things that allow you to create a great variety of images."

Daviau, whose credits include E.T. The Extra Terrestrial and Empire of the Sun for Steven Spielberg as well as George Miller's episode of Twilight Zone: The Movie - Terror at 20,000 Ft, Barry Levinson's Avalon and Bugsy and Peter Weir's Fearless proved to be an articulate, dynamic and amusing speaker, with total recall of the smallest details of his work.

ET: The Extra-terrestrial

On the studio floor, during the student Masterclass sessions, the dapper, stocky, bearded Daviau (photo, top of page) passed on the tricks of the trade in a mixture of demonstration, commentary and instruction. The following is a compilation of Daviau's thoughts incorporating his lecture and personal interview.

** On Amblin' and meeting Steven Spielberg:

It was July 4, 1968. It's a funny story about that film. When Steve made that he was looking for a film that would get him taken seriously. Universal Studios had sort of made him their mascot of young talent programming - you know, future director type of person, but they wouldn't give him any work! He was doing short films and taking them in and showing them. They were 16mm films and they would look at them and they'd say, "Oh, you're talented...someday".

But someday wasn't now, and he was getting very frustrated with this and I think he knew he had to do a film in 35mm to be taken seriously. He said something like, "I realised there was this little image in the centre of the wide screen and until I filled up the screen they wouldn't take me seriously." In 1968 he found a guy called Dennis Hoffman who was one of the owners of an optical house called Cinefex. Dennis was a young man and was very interested to see how he would do as a producer, so he decided as a test he would finance a short film. He put out the word that he was looking for talented directors who wanted to make one. Steven had no idea of a short film (subject) but he came up with one on the spot and it was one of those moments where Dennis said you had to be impressed with the intention - the idea.

One of the sidelights was: Dennis's intention had been to have the film shot in 16mm and then blown up to 35 on his company's new 16-35 blow-up printer, so he could write off part of the cost as a demonstration of the capabilities of this printer. Well, the first thing Steven did was to persuade Dennis to let Steven shoot it in 35 and when I was brought into the project by Steve I did the same thing. Eventually we wore Dennis down and we actually made it in 35mm, so it was one of those things were we got the financing - very handsome financing, I must say, I think the film cost $15,000 in 1968, which is a lot of money and of course shooting in 35, shooting in 1.85:1, it was a great adventure, a great experience. We shot for 10 days straight, then Steven edited the film.

Amblin'

I've always been proud of myself for being able to keep up with a 20-year-old Steven Spielberg for 10 straight days because we shot the sunrise every morning and the sunset every night - it was a very intense experience. I don't know how to describe the film, I've always called it an "idyll". There's no dialogue, it's strictly music and effects, you have to remember this is '68, the height of the hippy era, and it's about a young man and young woman hitch-hiking through the desert, going in separate directions, then they join forces. They proceed to travel together, have a love affair, then they reach the coast and he runs down to the ocean; she smiles and turns and walks away and that's the end of the film! Steven I think felt it was a bit calculated - it is made to be shown to studio executives and while it was dealing with contemporary themes it was also very much an old-fashioned motion picture. There was quite a buzz that this (then) 21-year-old had been signed by Universal, and Steven went into Universal with it. He tried to bring me along with him and Universal even tried to sign me some sort of deal but the union at that time said "Forget It". You know, no way are you getting in, so I said "Don't worry, Steven, I've got this 35mm film to show and I'll get into commercials and I'll be able to do work for you," and I did - it just took 11 years! Because it was so involved with union politics, lawsuits and so on. Finally, I didn't get into the union until 1978.

But Amblin' inspired a whole bunch of people with the idea of the "calling card film". When you see it today you can see touches of Spielberg's style, there's no question about it.

** On Schindler's List, the B&W film Daviau didn't get to shoot:

It was shot by a Polish cameraman named Janusz Kaminsky. I've not worked with Steve since Empire of the Sun, but this Polish camerman's supposed to be fabulous and not only had he'd worked in B&W before and he knew about this - the film is being processed in this lab in East Germany which is supposed to be one of the best kept secrets going.

Steven's going to do a neat thing. He told me just before he left to shoot it in Poland that he found these guys in New York - apparently they're doing some variation on the old stencil process from the 20s where they're going to be able to stamp colour onto a B&W print, in the selected areas, like the stars on the Jews at the railway station will have pale yellow, and the flags will have a pale red. Not on colour stock. On a B&W print! Really nice. There'll only be about 25 prints for the whole world so I hope Australia gets one.

** On George Miller and Terror At 20,000 Ft.:

I remember when George Miller came over in '82 to do Twilight Zone, he said , "I don't think I've ever shot on a sound stage before." Well, I think we filmed Terror at 20,000 Feet in 12 days. We had one night at Van Nuys airport and the rest was all done on the stage at Warner Bros. What was interesting, I got this initially because Steven Spielberg, when he went to produce that film wanted to have four different directors and he was going to have me photograph all four. At the time I was up for a big feature and then when I was able to say, "Whoops, I'm not going to get this picture," I came back to it. John Landis had gone ahead and gotten another cinematographer for his segment and I said, you know, the Joe Dante segment should be done by John Hora, whose an old friend of mine. So, as it turned out I was going to do the George Miller and Spielberg segments.

When I met George, I said, "I feel a little strange, being assigned to you, but I've seen your films (both the Mad Max films at that point) and I'm anxious to work with you." He said, "Don't worry about it, we'll have a great time." George's attitude was just so wonderful. Basically we were going to go in, deal with this thing of the airplane in the storm, and his watchwords were: "Be Bold! Let's do something as crazy as we can to make this really memorable, really scary. Allen, I'll only be half as mad at you if you blow something through being too daring than I'll be if you blow it for playing it too safe. The worst thing that could happen is that we'll have to go back next morning and reshoot it, because we'll be on the same plane set!" Although, boy, that plane really got trashed by the end of 12 days!

Jim Bissell, the same designer who did E.T. didn't have the budget to make it - a comparison was the submarine in Das Boot which had all kinds of gimbals and shakers and everything - and we couldn't do that. The best Jim could do was put some two-by-fours under the middle of the thing and shake it. We were fortunate in that we were allowed to build a plane set. Warner Bros wanted us to go and shoot it on one of the available airplane mock-ups which are just a joke.

My gaffer Pat Kirkwood and I set about building the light into the plane, so we could shoot in any direction, any which way, so that the lights would hit the people in the seat; they would actually be like light fixtures in the little pods above the seats. So all of that was designed in as to how to do it and the little bit of indirect lighting above, but the goal was that George wanted a lot of freedom. The other thing was that I had done a TV movie just prior to this where I'd met Garrett Brown who'd been involved with the Steadicam on that and I said to him, "I know you've worked all these years to make the camera as steady as possible, but could you make it the UNsteadicam?" So I had the best of both worlds, the man who invented the Steadicam on Steadicam and John Toll, the greatest hand-held operator going.

I think there's only six or eight cuts in the entire segment that are done on a dolly in a standard way but basically the movement in the plane comes from the camera other than the little 'jigging' which we could do, the actors are having to do their own movement and the cameras are doing all of the movement.

The built-in lighting was predicated on the new high speed stock at the time, 5293, which nobody was really sure how fast it was, so we put in all the lights and shot a test, and we found out I had to expose it at between 2 and 2.8 and thank heavens there was enough light because that's all there was! We bet the farm that we could make it work with the low voltage lamps but that was in the spirit of what George had encouraged. He brought incredible discipline to it; he storyboarded the whole episode - he'd never seen video assist before - we had video assist for the Steadicam and he asked to have it for the hand-held camera too, and George would sit down at a desk where he had a video monitor, the storyboards and he could observe whatever was going on in the case of whichever camera was shooting and he just energised the whole thing.

But that was it, basically working at very low light levels in a way that the images - we were not lighting each scene per se - we could move very quickly from set-up to set-up. The two cameras in motion, the Steadicam and the hand-held were good for different things, could choreograph any way they wanted - they never saw a light, which was part of the game, or if they saw the little 'pop' lights - fine. I walked around with a fluorescent tube in my hand, being able to move around the cameras. George just created this atmosphere of freedom and I just have to say that it was one of the most enjoyable experiences in filmmaking. I consider myself very lucky. I'm the only American cinematographer to have worked with both George Miller and Peter Weir and it was just a delight to work with both of them - I look forward to working with them again!

** On operators and operating:

Well, I feel it's just much more efficient - maybe in terms of the kind of things I've had to light. I know years ago when I was doing educationals and commercials that the day would come when I would get into feature production and I would have to use an operator and I wanted to prepare myself for it because, believe me, it's the most difficult thing in the world to tear yourself away from that eyepiece.

Spielberg basically hogs the camera himself in blocking a scene. He's the most magical person in blocking people to the camera that I've ever seen, but it takes time to do it. I generally, because I've worked with him for so long, got to know which direction he would be headed and we'd talk general parameters and I'd start lighting as soon as he started blocking. Sometimes I'd have to start over again but it was the only way to work fast enough to be ready on time, because, "boom", once the shot's done, let's start shooting; he wants to be there.

The other secret is to find an operator who is better than you are! It's not that easy to find really good operators but I've been very fortunate. I have a system in which people tend to suggest operators to me but the most important part I think is that I'm aware of the shot, with the video assist of course I'm always able to check just what's going on but I'm free of the camera during the scene and always you run into things where even the best, most precise actors come back from the time you've taken to light and things change.

Working beside the camera you can make things happen more quickly, get things into place, alter the lighting a little bit, maybe float an additional flag, put a litle bit of shade someplace that didn't have it before and I just find that it's easier to do than if I were also intent on the operating, because somebody said to me, "a great operator looks at the corners and feels the centre," and I should be looking at the centre. I'm there to look at the people, to look at the light falling on them, that's my feeling.

** On Avalon and working with Barry Levinson:

One of the thrills, when a cinematographer is assigned to a film and meets with the director, is that you have the whole history that you can go back and evaluate to see which elements will lend something to the story which you're about to tell and while we have all these modern techniques, sometimes if we can look back and study what the past masters of the medium have done it can give us inspiration, and I think of all the films that was most satisfying for me to do in recent years was Avalon, for Barry Levinson.

We had never met before - I read the script, it was like "this is what I've been waiting for." I remember thinking, how could we make this film special in a visual way. I felt that the film spoke to everyone who had ever known a first generation arrival in a foreign country.

Elijah Wood and Armin Mueller-Stahl in Avalon

In searching for a device to give a visual distancing I realised that the age of silent film was framing many of the flashbacks in this story and that we could provide a cinematic context perhaps by giving some inkling of what was being done in silent films, and one of the things I had not seen explained in narrative films in some time was perhaps more of the use of motion. We decided on the technique of stretch printing where we shot at 16 fps and printed every second frame twice. In some people's minds it makes it just like 24. Of course, it doesn't. Information is missing and it's being manufactured in a certain way to re-insert it and I think it changes the nature of the movement on the screen and it was one of the things I wanted to test.

When I ran the test for Barry he understood right away what I was trying to say about the nature of motion. I said to him, "Barry, you've seen this many times in restored silent films and documentaries; the difference is, you've never seen it in colour." He immediately accepted it and backed me completely - the one question he had was, "How would it work with fireworks?" We did a test for that and we found out some interesting things - the motion across the screen would be more dramatic in terms of exaggerating the judder that you get from inserting the missing information. He incorporated this into a lot of his ideas for shots and it bacame the basis for the framing flashbacks in this film.

You get an idea, you test it, and the director looks at it and you work from there and it sets a motif for how the whole film is going to be made. The filmstock was the new 5296 which had just been introduced and the extraordinary speed of it definitely changed the way we approached doing this film. It's the kind of thing that helps get more realism into a picture when we go into real locations. Avalon is a film that was most definitely influenced by where it was shot. The director had been carrying many of these locations around in his head his entire life - he was telling his own family story and he wanted to get so much of his city into it. Baltimore's a fantastic city in that regard. It has something I've seen in Sydney just in the brief glimpses I've had of it - it's got the soul of a city where people actually live in the city.

One of the great experiences on working on Avalon was getting to work again with a production designer named Norman Reynolds. We worked together on Empire of the Sun. The collaboration of the cinematographer and designer is the most important after the collaboration with the director. If it's not in front of the camera it's not there to shoot - particularly when you're dealing with a period film. I can't tell you how much it means to have attention to detail that's put there.

Because of Levinson's preference for shooting with two cameras, in Avalon I had to try and use natural sources as much as I could so that it played. I wasn't going to be able to do a specific kind of lighting on close-ups. I had big dinner table scenes and so on - we had to use a lot of small, hard units which is not my favourite thing to do but I found that it was the only way I could make the close-ups survivable and have the highlights in the eyes and the shape of the face - the look of it.

** On lighting techniques:

When you shoot on location, one thing I find is that it gives an instant inspiration to you; you find things in a location that speak to you and encourage you to use authenticity in the lighting and compositions. The interesting thing was the re-discovery of the sound stage probably around the late 70s when people suddenly discovered it was a really excellent idea to have these things around.

One thing I do whether it's a real location or a studio - if we go into an interior, if it's a day interior, I say, "Before we have the rehearsal, let me get some light coming through the windows." If it's a night interior, this is true stage or location - just let me get the practical lamps turned on, and I found out and I really think it's true, that when you present the motivations for the light sources in a scene before the rehearsal starts, people tend to block the scene with the light in mind. They tend to block around the light; they make the light an organic part of the scene; actors tend to play toward the light.

Sometimes I find that when you start the lighting in an organic manner like that, somehow you get a feeling that's very real, even when you have moments that are theatrical - that you want to be theatrical, it's not just motivating sources - it encourages movement of the actors and I swear with all kinds of directors this works as a system: have light that means something. I also find as a matter of philosophy that the fewer lamps you use, the simpler you keep it, the better it is. Every light you turn on is going to create it's own set of problems and when you get too fussy - when I look at films and when I look back at images that I've done - the ones that drive me crazy are the ones that get too fussy. I find that my tendency is to be a soft lighter. I come from soft light and I like it very much but hard light is far more controllable and a cinematographer to be versatile has to be able to use both. Both occur in real life and both occurr at the same time. You spend as a cinematographer a lot of your time looking at light and looking at situations - you study light, particularly where you have an emotional response to something. You tend to remember light for that reason.

Sometimes I find that when you start the lighting in an organic manner like that, somehow you get a feeling that's very real, even when you have moments that are theatrical - that you want to be theatrical, it's not just motivating sources - it encourages movement of the actors and I swear with all kinds of directors this works as a system: have light that means something. I also find as a matter of philosophy that the fewer lamps you use, the simpler you keep it, the better it is. Every light you turn on is going to create it's own set of problems and when you get too fussy - when I look at films and when I look back at images that I've done - the ones that drive me crazy are the ones that get too fussy. I find that my tendency is to be a soft lighter. I come from soft light and I like it very much but hard light is far more controllable and a cinematographer to be versatile has to be able to use both. Both occur in real life and both occurr at the same time. You spend as a cinemaytographer a lot of your time looking at light and looking at situations - you study light, particularly where you have an emotional response to something. You tend to remember light for that reason.

I notice writers - somebody like Nabakov - who always describes the light in a situation and you're left with images because the man obviously went through his life noticing light and knowing how to describe it eloquently and what we're trying to do is interpret light in dramatic terms, in poetic terms. It's not just a visual phenomenon, it's light and emotion and I think you can't do that until you have the confidence in everything that you're doing; it's like a musician looking for certain notes.

** On incorporating new ideas:

Empire of the Sun was the movie where I really started to do f-stop changes. It just became part of the vocabulary because cinematographers will appreciate what I mean - it just seems like something you don't want to do - adjust the f-stop during a take because if you mess it up somebody's going to see it. In Empire Of The Sun, there was no choice because ther were huge shots. No way could I have lit up the area to balance one side of the pan with the other side, so the secret was to adjust the f-stop during the pan. I got into the habit of doing it with a remote f-stop changer and it just opened up a whole new world.

Empire of the Sun - a whole new world

And this was something that has been going on since Billy Bitzer, probably, and the birth of film. Rather than pouring light in to fill a shadow area and bringing it up to the same intensity of the sunlit areas, it looked much better if I - like the human eye does panning from sun to shade - I just opened up, and I found it to be a much more natural procedure. Now it's become such a part of the language and I found on Bugsy that I did it just in interiors, I call it changing the exposure base. We were shooting in some extremely small rooms and I found that if people moved from one part of the room to another, particularly if they moved through a shadow, I could reset the exposure base as they moved, for the other side of the room.

** On Fearless and Peter Weir:

A producer named Paula Weinstein, found this property by marvellous young novelist, Rafael Yglesias. She's known him and his family for some years. She read it and like great producers do she knew exactly who should do it - it was Peter Weir. She'd met Peter I think and always wanted to work with him and she sent him Rafael's novel and it worked out that Rafael also did the screenplay - he and Peter worked on it together. Peter just loved the idea of the film and committed to it, and it was not a large budget film by Hollywood standards.

It's a Warner Bros studio movie. It was done in San Francisco, started last fall. It was the kind of thing where I think he came to me - he had never worked with anyone but Australian cinematographers before - but he told me later that if he was going to continue making films in America he should occassionally try an American cameraman and I know Paula brought up my name. Peter told me he had really enjoyed Avalon in particular and that was the impetus of him wanting to meet me. I remember my agent called and said "Peter Weir wants to meet you," and I said, I don't care what he's doing. This is somebody I want to meet."

Peter Weir is the kind of filmmaker that has impressed me - I've been seing his films for so long, from the Australian films through and I found every one of his films to be so gratifying, so he's the kind of filmmaker you say, "I don't care what he's doing, I want to be there!" I mean the chance to work with him is absolutely the kind of experience where you say, "This is why I got into film - to work with somebody like Peter Weir," because not only is he a great artist, he's a great gentleman and he is somebody who enjoys sharing the moment of creation and he allows everyone who works with him to share that kind of joy.

Actors in particular just gravitate to him - I mean you say Peter Weir and every actor wants to come and meet him and I would say it would certainly be true of cinematographers and designers and so on, and it was the kind of thing where I met a lot of new people - the designer John Stoddart and Paula Weinstein and her late husband Mark Rosenberg and the company they set up has a philosophy of making the most wonderful quality films.

I love to be involved in things that don't concern the cinematographer at all - I just like to be there to see a scoring session and I like to see some portions of the dub. I find it an incredible ticket to ride that I get to sit in and watch Peter Weir and Maurice Jarre in a tiny studio not much bigger than this, with five musicologists who all have different forms of synthesiser. This is the fifth film they've all done together; they run a scene and Maurice goes over the the music with the people and they each audition their intrument - what they would do - then Maurice and Peter pick the parts that each of them are to play. It is the most unusual and directly creative system of recording a soundtrack that I've ever seen and here's Maurice - "the man who did Lawrence of Arabia" and he is just, again, a very nice quiet person. You see the people Peter surrounds himself with and it's all on this thing of enjoying creating together - I just can't say enough.

Fearless touches on so many things that are unusual and impossible to summarize in a few sentences but it is one of those films where I would say for something that sounds so quiet, is utterly dynamic and moves like...lightning from one thing to the other! People cannot believe the film is over - it's got such quiet power to it and Jeff Bridges' performance is something else. There is Isabella Rossellini, Rosie Perez, primarily known for comedy, in a serious role, Tom Hulce, John Turturro - it's just a fantastic film!

What we were looking for, I think is - "This is a man looking at the world in a different way." We wanted to get images that read quickly, that were very clear. At the same time it's very different photographically - it's a study of faces. I mean there are some pyrotechnics, some effects and some things like that but it is a study of faces more than anything else and as such doesn't sound as if it was so exciting to do but it absolutely was, particularly when you see the circumstances in which some of the meetings of the people take place.

The word 'straightforward' springs to mind but wasn't the way it was achieved. We tried to get images that would state what the characters' feeling was at the time. I think the thing is - images of clarity, studies of faces that would help us understand the transformation of all the characters, because every major character in the film has a transformation.

[Originally published in Cinema Papers magazine]

top