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| At a screening of Paris, Texas. Sydney |
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| Film Festival, 1993 Photo: Robert I Bruce |
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| Cinematographer Robby Muller's name is inextricably linked with Wim Wenders; they worked together on Wenders' first feature Summer In The City and continued the relationship with a series of visually striking films including Alice in the Cities, Kings of the Road, The American Friend and Paris, Texas. But there are other strands to Muller's career. His first feature was Jonathan (1969) for Hans Geissendorfer, with whom he subsequently worked on eight features and TV movies. Muller's other work has been on mainstream American productions and maverick independent films, including, most recently Sally Potter's The Tango Lesson, Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark, Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man and Ghost Dog and on digital video, Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People. |
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| Q: Let's talk about Hans Giessendorfer. You shot his first feature, Jonathan, before Wenders' Summer in the City, correct? |
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| RM: Yeah. It was his first cinema feature. But the very first film of his was actually a TV film about a Bavarian poet. |
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| Q: You've worked with Giessendorfer on eight or nine films - more than with Wenders in fact, but you left mid-way through the production of the last one. Did you have a disagreement? |
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| RM: Yes, it was eight or nine...the last one was The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann. It was a series for TV. I had an argument with the producer - not Giessendorfer. The guy hated me anyway and when there was a mishap in the lab he blamed me. By that time I was fed up with the production anyway. But Giessendorfer is very different from Wenders. He is a very powerful person, very strong, enormous endurance - he really gets things done. He's a very strong person. I lost contact with him, but now he is rather famous in Germany because he makes a series that's on every Sunday - 52 episodes a year - it's called Lindenstrasse. It's written very shortly before shooting so it's very...contemporary. It's done with rather simple set-ups. Always the same house, the same set, the same actors. |
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| Q: Speaking of TV series, The Second Heimat is currently screening here and I noticed that one of your old associates has shot some episodes. What was he like as a teacher? |
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| RM: Well, I assisted him. He took me from Holland to Germany. He is a Dutchman too. At the time I met him he was quite famous in Germany. He took me with him and I assisted him for five years until I met Giessendorfer and Wenders. |
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| Q: The third strand to your career would be the films you made in America, I suppose? |
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| RM: Yeah. Wim and I became well known after The American Friend and I made features in Holland, Germany, France and a few - not many - in America. |
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| Q: The first film you shot in America (as opposed to an American production made off-shore like Saint Jack) would have been Honeysuckle Rose. Is this your only film in 'Scope, and the only one where you were required to use an operator? It looks like an American film! |
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| RM: Yeah. Well when you're working there, there's not much room for improvisation and low budget shooting. It's all well planned in advance. It's all machinery...so at first you are overwhelmed by it and your work stars looking maybe American - I don't know. |
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| Q: Actually, it's a beautiful looking film, but your individual touch isn't obvious. |
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| RM: That could be...yeah. After my first film in Hollywood, I could have been booked out for a year, maintained myself there, got a Green Card, joined the union. But it's not really my world. |
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| Paris, Texas |
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| Q: Getting back to the Frame-by-Frame seminar with Paris, Texas. Many in the audience couldn't get their head around the idea that there's no magic technical formula to achieve the look on that film. It's more of a philosophical approach isn't it? |
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| RM: Yes, it's a personal thing. Like individuals are different - that's it. |
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| Q: You emphasise that you prefer basic equipment: Arriflex cameras, prime Cooke and Zeiss lenses, natural lighting, no fancy gadgets such as video assist. Yet you don't like all your films to look the same? |
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| RM: Well, even if you wanted that I think you won't manage. You are growing all the time. You get new ideas; you try them out. And all the stories are different so that brings out a different mood, a different way of shooting, another way of handling the photography. Not maybe big differences, but still it will always be different, yes. |
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| Q: When I think of the favourite scenes of the films you've done the characters are always travelling. Either by car, train, even flying...it's so romantic. |
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| RM: Well I think Wenders and I stay together because I seem to be able to translate a lot of Wim's dreams and the travelling shots are because his stories are a lot about travelling, communication, distances, trains, telephone poles with cables and all kinds of means of travel - a lot of his stories play that way, so we end up trying to get something moving. But very early on when I shot his first film, Summer in the City - his end exam film from the film school in Munich - we shot that in five or six days. We would shoot in the cab going to the airport. We would shoot in the plane to Berlin; getting out I filmed. That was really on a shoestring. |
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| Q: The process of making the film becomes part of the film. You did the same thing in Alice in the Cities. |
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| RM: Yes we really filmed in the plane, yeah. [On the New York - Amsterdam commercial flight] We worked for most of the time while we were flying - six or seven hours. I was astonished when we landed - the time went so quickly. |
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| Q: I can think of only one American film where you get real aircraft interiors during a flight - Manhunter. [Michael Mann's 1986 Hannibal Lecter film] otherwise it's always a mock-up. |
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| RM: Well, if you look out of the porthole and the clouds are moving, then you're flying. Of course we had real flying sequences in Till The End Of The World too. |
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| Q: How did you shoot those scenes of the plane with its engine stopped? |
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| RM: We figured out how long it could glide before they had to start it up again, because it lost height very quickly and filmed it from the camera plane. |
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| Q: Getting back to trains, I read that looking for a different way to indicate an approaching train you suggested shooting the grass near the track being flattened by the rush of air pushed by the train. This was on The Left-Handed Woman? |
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| RM: No, that was from the author and director, Peter Handke himself. It was his observation because he took that subway very often to Paris - it was in a suburb of Paris. It's something that you write down in a book too; your observation, so it was really a suggestion of his. |
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| Q: But it's a way of showing motion without being too obvious especially in a film with little conventional action. |
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| RM: Yes, those are observations that many people overlook, because in a sense they are not astonished by it; very often they don't take it in as something interesting that's happening. |
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| Q: We know that Wenders is very keen on Vermeer as a visual influence. What about you? |
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| RM: Yes, Vermeer of course. Then later we were also very interested in Edward Hopper in preparation for Hammett which I never got to shoot. The West Coast union forbade me to work on that film. |
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| Q: Let's get to a favourite film of mine, To Live And Die In L.A. (photo, above) How did you come to work for William Friedkin? |
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| RM: I think it was because he saw Paris, Texas and he was interested in another 'look'. I think it all fitted together because he was also working with unknown actors. It was also an independent film, which meant he had no connection with the unions. It was a non-union film. He told me at the time it was for them, cheaper. |
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| Q: You mentioned at the Frame-by-Frame seminar that you liked the look of Blade Runner. To Live And Die In L.A. is not identical of course, but it is a nightmarish contemporary view of Los Angeles. I can't think of any recent depiction of L.A. which is so striking. |
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| RM: Yeah, well we went to the real places! A few of the locations I had already shot in a previous film, Repo Man, with Alex Cox. |
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| Q: O.K., I'll ask. How did you get that ominous look? Just wait for the light? |
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| RM: Yeah, that was the really nice thing about it. Friedkin was ready to wait foir the light. He was really very open to suggestions because he understood that you cannot fake a sunrise or a sunset or a dusk. So he agreed to wait for that. He'd wait for the exact moment and shoot; say for instance in a dusk scene you don't have too many possibilities - you must do it within those twenty minutes when there's a real dusk atmosphere. Before it's day, after it's night. We would rehearse, then shoot at the right moment. He (Friedkin) went all the way with me on that film. There was no going back to the old Hollywood system. We had no studio time; it was all real locations. |
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| Q: Alice in The Cities was shot on 16mm? |
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| RM: Yes, with an Arri BL. The problem is, there are many films made today where the colour is not really necessary, but you don't have a choice because the distributor wants colour so he can sell it. But I always have a kind of "thinking exercise" with the director, "Why not in B&W?" or "Why not in colour?" So if we explain it to ourselves we know where we have to pay attention because if you make the kind of films I generally make colour could give you too much information. Alice In The Cities, for instance, would have been very bad in colour. The same with Down By Law. You would have had so much information around you that it would distract you from what you are telling. |
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| Rudiger Vogler & Yella Rottlander with Polaroid camera: Alice in the Cities |
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| Q: I had the impression, seeing Alice In The Cities again, that the American sequences were a kind of rehearsal for the similar scenes in Paris, Texas. |
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| RM: Well there we must wait for the biography of Wenders. I don't know whether he had that in mind. But coming back to B&W, Alice was originally planned for colour. We even had a sponsor, Polaroid, who was bringing out that same year the SX-70 [a compact, reflex-viewing camera for Polaroid film] on a trial market in Florida and they agreed to sponsor us. But when Wim and I discussed the it I said this will be no good in colour; this little girl will be totally lost in this loud, exotic New York. Polaroid later agreed but they didn't withdraw their sponsorship. |
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| Q: Peter Bogdanovich is a real film student. He must have known quite a bit about you when her hired you for Saint Jack? |
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| RM: No, no. I don't know how much he knew about me. I was actually recommended by a French production manager. Bogdanovich had to shoot this film in Singapore, very low budget and this French guy said why no try Robby Muller and his crew? They're cheap, fast and it's just what you need here in Singapore. So he phoned Cybill Shepherd in America and asked her to look at The American Friend to see what I was like and she liked it! She looked at a copy in Memphis and obviously told him I was alright. |
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| Q: It's a long time since I've seen Saint Jack, but I prefer the second film you made with Bogdanovich, They All Laughed. The other day you talked about your non-glamorous treatment of Faye Dunaway in Barfly, but in They All Laughed you had plenty of opportunities for lighting which was quite the opposite, with actors like Dorothy Stratten, Patti Hansen and Audrey Hepburn. You also had some famous New York locations - the Algonquin Hotel for example. Did they mind having a film crew in the lobby? |
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| RM: No, they arranged it! I didn't want to destroy the atmosphere, so I followed the lighting [in the lounge] that they had over the years. It was, of course, very low light, but I stuck to that. I wanted it to look like the Algonquin. |
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| Q: There were also lots of night scenes. Would you ever shoot day-for-night? |
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| RM: Well, no. In a city it's practically impossible. You're missing the street lamps. Maybe in a desert it might work. You can only get a really black sky in B&W but you need an absolutely blue sky to begin with. |
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| Q: Tell me about the film you made with Andrzej Wadja - Korczak - another B&W film. It's had very limited release in Australia. |
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| RM: That was made in Warsaw. It is set in '42 or '43 in the Warsaw ghetto. One of the reasons it was done in B&W was that Wadja wanted to cut in old gestapo documentary shots, so it had to be B&W to match that material. I had to light it in a certain way so we could cut it in...yeah. The thing is - I've never seen the film! The newsreels I saw. It was very disturbing - some of them had not been previously shown. People would (have) run out of the cinema. But I had to start Till The End Of The World and they never called me to do the timing. My assistant did that - so I never saw the (completed) film. But I got an award for it so it must be OK! |
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| Q: One school of thought is that you made Down By Law, Jim Jarmusch's next film after Strangers In Paradise, look too good. Would you argue with that? |
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| RM: Well, one should not forget that Strangers In Paradise was really done on a shoestring - rather like the way I worked with Wenders; even less money than we had for Alice In The Cities. That will influence the look very much. But you get an obvious jump when you have more time and money, so I don't think it looks too good - it was a jump to something else. |
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| Q: You've worked in America with several American directors, Wenders of course, and British directors Alex Cox and John Schlesinger. What's it like for a cameraman to work with so many different directors in quick succession? |
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| RM: Very often you meet only once - when you are preparing. During the shoot some directors change quite a lot. |
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| Q: For the worse? |
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| RM: For the worse or unexpected. But then it's too late and you have to go through with it! |
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| Q: Tell me about When Pigs Fly. |
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| RM: That's my most recent one, for Sara Driver, a friend of Jim Jarmusch. I've known Sara since I've known Jarmusch. It's a Dutch/German/American co-production. It's not out yet, but I think Sara will go with it to Locarno. It's a very nice, lovely, entertaining film, with Marianne Faithfull in the main part and a nice bunch of actors. We had to do a few special effects in the sense that I had to create ghosts, which we did via mirrors, opticals, a process like that used in the old days. |
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| Q: Like the Schufftan process? |
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| RM: I think so...I'm not sure if it's exactly the same, but he did stuff with mirrors and big depth of focus to include other objects in the shot. It's a very old fashioned process and the advantage is that you have your original negative, you don't have to go through an optical. However, there is a lot of time involved. With an optical you can shoot and move on - there's not the complicated set-up with the mirror, measuring, double lighting and all that. |
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| Q: In Paris, Texas, the lens favoured by you and Wenders was the 28mm? |
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| RM: Yeah, because with the 1.85 format you are generally on a bit wider lens than with 1.66 or Academy (1.33) because whe you have this letter-box format to get the same height you need a wider lens. On Kings Of The Road, for example, we worked a lot with the 40mm, but in effect (due to the different ratios) you get the same feeling. |
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| Q: Did you know that Bogdanovich shot all of The Last Picture Show on a 28? That would require a particular kind of discipline wouldn't it? |
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| RM: Yes it all depends on the way a director directs his people. Some prefer a lot of shots; some prefer more like ensemble work wher you have all the time more than one person and you like to have the whole scene where something is taking place - you could call it editing in the camera - where the people come closer and then go again. It's closer to Citizen Kane, where that is done also. |
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| Q: Isn't that one of the things Bogdanovich likes to do, edit in the camera. Is it true he doesn't generally shoot masters, then close-ups, then other shots? |
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| RM: He mainly doesn't like to do more than is absolutely necessary. At the time he was cutting Saint Jack in Singapore he was very proud of having very little on the editing room floor. And that's a very nice way of working, because to cover yourself means really "covering your arse". And you are being very much more efficient, because otherwise all the time you are using to cover yourself you can use to film the film! |
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| Q: OK, but from what I know about William Friedkin, I understand he likes to shoot everything from several angles and work it out later during editing. |
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| RM: Well, we didn't do that on To Live And Die In L.A., except for the stunts. That's logical because a few of those stunts cost a whole car - the car would be a total loss. Then you have to cover it - that's not cowardice - you absolutely need it. So we had several cameras running. |
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| Q: During the sequence where the car was driving up the freeway against the traffic... |
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| RM: The production was lucky there, because the highway was brand new and almost ready to be opened to normal traffic, but we could use it before they officially opened it, with our own cars. At one stage we had all the stunt drivers in Hollywood. That was an expensive scene, but much of the rest of the film was not. We didn't build interiors in rented studios; we didn't have superstars that asked millions - in that sense it was much cheaper than you would expect. |
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| Q: But you have worked with superstars. Robert De Niro in Mad Dog And Glory, for example. |
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| RM: I'm not too happy about that one. I think in this film the power of the stars was too big for us to work efficiently. I don't say that they did it on purpose, but they cost a lot of money and you lose a lot of time which shouldn't be lost. So it was not a happy experience I must say. When you are pre-judging Hollywood, this is the extreme! |
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| Q: It's another example of your work where it looks like another American film - no individuality. I guess you've seen John McNaughton's other film? |
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| RM: Yeah, Henry. It was a very good film. That was one of the reasons I wanted to do it (Mad Dog). Also out of my stupid naivete I thought it would be a great mix to have famous actors with an unknown director and I really thought they would drop the star system - but it really is more important than the film. |
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| Robby Muller was interviewed in Sydney, Australia in June, 1993
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