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Daring to Keep it Dark: A Conversation with Gordon Willis
From: American Film Institute
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Gordon Willis |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Gordon Willis was a key innovator of cinematography styles. Best known for his work in the 1970s, Willis (right) took films, such as  Klute (1971), The Godfather (1972), The Godfather Part II (1974), The Parallax View (1974) and All the President's Men (1976) into unconventional, now-celebrated, lighting scenarios.
In Klute, for example, he didn't light from the floor. He lit from high, causing eye shadows on the actors, which were appropriate to the story but very daring at that time. The subdued warmth--almost a kind of darkness--he achieved in the Godfather trilogy has been widely imitated.
Here Willis outlines the complexity of the cinematographer's task, from conceptualizing the overall look to coordinating the lighting, framing and composition. |
 really don't believe that you can just show up and photograph a movie. You have to decide what it's supposed to look like before you make a decision on how to light it. |
I never walk into a room and say to the director, "How do you want me to light this room?" because you can light it 50 ways based on what it is you have to accomplish. So what's crucial from the director are answers about what the movie is about, what he's hoping to say, how he wants to say it--philosophical questions about the basis of the movie. |
Then it boils down to how we handle these things technically. It's crucial, though, to have the philosophy of the movie in place first. |
There's a lot of tableau photography in Godfather II, especially in the period work. Ninety percent of it is tableau. Tableau, or proscenium shooting, is where a scene will play within a frame without making a cut. But it's also a more formalized way of framing a shot. It has, in my opinion, a better period feel. |
In other places, [Francis Ford] Coppola would give us 10 shots in advance, and this is also crucial to lighting decisions. And this is the problem with directors who can only tell you one shot at a time. You establish something, and now what do you do on the next cut? Oh, boy, now you've got problems. Now you've got to hang lights from trapezes and do all sorts of other things to match your breaks. It's a luxury when a director can give you 10 shots in advance. |
On using lighting to enhance theme
I'm not a great believer that you have to see an actor all the time on the screen. I believe that the scene has to be played properly. Sometimes it's best not to see what's going on until a given point in the scene. Then you see something. The mood of the scene is more important to me than seeing the actor's face. |
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| Al Pacino plays Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II, a film renowned for its powerful use of low lighting. | |
In the beginning of Godfather II--that whole opening of Ellis Island had the feeling of being overlit, which was on purpose to get the bleached-out feeling. All of that material was shot at 2.8, and all of that material was one stop overexposed. I know that's an over-simplification, but on a mechanical level, that's what it was. |
The rest of the material--Robert De Niro's material--was not a stop overexposed. It was what I call "on key." I shot all of the period material (again, it's an over-simplification) very high. But the other material, the contemporary material, is a half stop underexposed. |
Let me give it to you from the beginning. I'm a one-light cameraman. I pick a light and a color ratio for the movie and then ask for one printer at the laboratory, and they just have to do the same thing everyday. They don't change anything; I change things back and forth. |
Godfather II was a very sophisticated movie. They jump ahead 15 years in the story, and then they jumped back in the other story. So really, if I had time in the laboratory, there were really going to be three different tones in the movie. |
I used an old lens for both Godfather and Godfather II--old Balltars--mainly because I'm hopelessly romantic, and I thought it might be a nice idea. I didn't want to use Panavision lenses because they didn't have the same feel to them. |
On low lighting
In my opinion, the low lighting worked in the case of Godfather II. I got some mail the other day. Some guy from Buffalo, New York, had seen the film, evidently in a men's room or something, because scratched out on the note it had, "Mr. Coppola, this is a beautiful movie, an epic, but it's obvious you don't know anything about photography. What did you have, a 10-dollar budget on the thing? I couldn't see anything." |
A screen and projector have to be at standard to look at a film. A 16-foot Lamberts [a luminance standard for showing motion pictures in a dark theater], that's it. And if it's not--if it's a pile of junk--you're not going to see what you're supposed to see. |
On a lot of pictures I work on, I use a standard, which is that if it's 100 ASA [speed film], and Eastman Kodak says it's supposed to be this, based on that I shoot at half a stop under what they advise. |
The only thing Coppola and I didn't really agree about was soft light. But I like soft light for period work because I think it tends to look more like period lighting. |
I used a filter for all the period work, which is touchy. A lot of the time, the answer to period work is, "Well, I'll drop in a fog filter," which is getting tired. When you pick an effect, it should fundamentally enhance the picture. The photography has to carry but not overwhelm the story. |
On lighting limitations
When you go into a big location, like the Convention Center we used in The Parallax View, the first thing you do is get the house electrician to turn on every light so you can see what's there and what you don't have to bring in. I might opt not to use filters because I like a blue kind of quality. I'll mix light a lot, like fluorescents and tungstens. I mixed a lot in Klute. In some cases, where a character walks around close to fluorescent lights, I might change them to daylight fluorescents to warm it up. |
As far as the Lake Tahoe sequences [in Godfather II] were concerned, they did have a bluer quality than is traditional. It's because the Kelvin in the interior was lower than the Kelvin on the exterior. |
I could have used more neutral-density filters to take down the blue. [A filter that is gray in color and affects all colors equally. It is used to reduce the amount of light passing through the camera lens without affecting color.] But I always elect not to do something that's going to be more complicated than is necessary. In other words, you have to take the total situation in your head. As it was, there were $20,000 worth of neutral densities that were cut for that boathouse. |
It was a lighting nightmare, actually. Whenever anybody elects to look out windows in a movie, the price goes up. I use about a three stopover from interior to exterior because at three you can still see in both planes. If you go farther, your background is sharper but the foreground starts to bleed. Now, if you want to see more detail, then you've got to start throwing stuff on the windows and bringing up the interior. |
My choices are always aesthetic, but after you make that choice, then you have to decide how you're going to spend money, what's best and what's fastest. There's always a limit. |
You do work better within a certain amount of limitation. There are some things you can't do if you're too limited, but the essence of good moviemaking is limitation. There is nothing more horrifying than an undisciplined filmmaker. Things don't just happen. So yes, I would say that you do function better in a limited environment, because you're going to use a lot more skill and a lot more brainpower to make it happen. |
In fact, some of the best things I've done photographically, I've done in a bad situation. You learn a lot. If you have everything at your disposal, it can get raunchy, actually. You've got to face up to the fact that you've got to shoot, and this is it. |
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